10 ms·

I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "

• jiggy2011 13y ago
  I'm not convinced that Basic income would necessarily deal with edge cases all that much better. A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want. But there are problems in that not everyone can live off the same amount of money. This is especially true with disabled or very ill people who are the most likely to be unable to obtain employment. They also require more money to maintain the same living standard, often much more in the case of people who require full time care etc.
  • jgj 13y ago
    In the mystical future world where a GBI has been implemented charity still exists, and much of the capital once dedicated to assisting those in poverty-absent-illness can now be directed to those who need help in addition to the GBI.
    • jiggy2011 13y ago
      But if charity were reliable enough to rely on for livelihood wouldn't it make sense to remove any form of welfare or basic income?
      • jgj 13y ago
        I think the reliability of charity in this case would increase as the number of people who need it decrease. I don't think we can rely on charity to solve everyone's financial woes, else said woes would already be solved. But when the percentage of people in need of charity grows smaller, the impact of the same pool of charity increases for those left in need.
        • jiggy2011 13y ago
          But isn't the point of BI that everyone has enough for their basic needs? It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).
          • jgj 13y ago
            > It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point). This is already the status quo. Less people being reliant on charity is a good thing.
          • bryanlarsen 13y ago
            There are plenty of people whose basic needs are substantially larger than the average citizen. For instance, many people need expensive motorized wheel chairs, which would be difficult to purchase on BI. Currently, the state provides motorized wheel chairs to many, but there are many stories of this program being abused. It's quite possible that a charity could step in here to supplement BI to make chairs affordable, and could do better and more efficient needs testing than the state.
      • wycx 13y ago
        And how many philanthropists practice charity by giving away money no questions asked?
  • cbhl 13y ago
    I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools. For the particular example of disabled or very ill people, universal government-sponsored health care might help, although that has its own side-effects that are perhaps undesirable. (I believe that people are more incentivized to do medical research in the US than in Canada, in part because Canada's nationalized health care encourages people to stick with existing, inexpensive treatments in most cases.)
    • JoshTriplett 13y ago
      > I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools. There's a local "maximum" in the policy evolution process here, due to the difficulty of changing umpteen things at once. I always vote against any new policy proposal that says "we're going to add this tax and remove this other one" unless both happen in the same bill, because otherwise the removal tends to not happen. (For instance, "replacing" an income tax with a sales tax in two steps can easily fail at step 2 and end up with both.)
  • stormbrew 13y ago
    The government assistance for these situations is often not enough to live on as it is (at least where I live), so I'm not sure how moving to this would be a negative. Also consider how difficult it is for someone with a chronic illness to actually find and access the myriad of services that provide the support they need, and at the end of they day it's still usually not enough. It would be a shame to not move to something better for those people simply because it isn't perfect.
  • kaliblack 13y ago
    > A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want. I haven't seen the reduction in services implied anywhere. It may, however, be a reality when implemented, but the intention isn't simply to change how government funds are spent on the poor. Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.
    • ahoy 13y ago
      I have only ever heard basic income proposed as the former implementation, never the latter.
      • bryanlarsen 13y ago
        The two formulations are similar. If you just print money to give to everybody, you cause inflation, which is a tax on liquid wealth. The wealthy have ways to hedge against inflation, so it's basically a tax on the middle class.
        • msellout 13y ago
          What are these magical ways to hedge against inflation that wealthy have access to and middle class don't? By definition, inflation equates to higher salaries for the middle class.
          • bcheung 13y ago
            Commodities, stocks, options, derivatives, and real estate are the most common. But I think they aren't limited to the wealthy per say. The wealthy just know much more about them and have higher percentages of their net worth in these types of things. You can make money if the market goes up, you can make money if the market goes down, and you can make money if the market doesn't go anywhere.
            • msellout 13y ago
  • dojomouse 13y ago
    Basic income doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can supplement with targeted aid. Just should be able to get away with a lot less effort since you only need to cover the obvious extreme cases.
  • growupkids 12y ago
    Additionally, the cost of living varies widely, for example, in the US. Between climate differences (it costs more to stay warm in Alaska in the winter than it does in Florida), logistical differences (fuel costs more in Hawaii than it does in Texas), to real estate costs (housing is more expensive in SF, CA than in Norfolk, VA), to transportation costs (parking in NY is more expensive than in Jacksonville, FL), etc. So the amount of income necessary to survive is going to vary by location, sometimes substantially. So a universal income wouldn't be tenable either, as one dollar doesn't buy the same things everywhere. How would you calculate what that should be without market forces?
    • Houshalter 12y ago
      Well so what? If you are going to consume more of the economy's resources to choose to live in a more expensive place, then you should have to pay for it. Conversely, why should we give less to people who live in more affordable places?
      • aarkling 12y ago
        I think the difference is it may be more expensive to live in a city but may still make sense because of the availability of jobs and higher income. With basic income the income aspect of choosing a place to live is weakened.
• saraid216 13y ago
  > So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy? Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.
  • JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold. It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.) You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in question (and it would be horribly unjust if you could). So you're talking about paying for a basic income within a city by adding a substantial tax to the residents of that city. That would result in a substantial motivation for any mobile business or person to relocate (and higher-income people are often more mobile), and for any new business to set up shop elsewhere. Cities are small enough that it's entirely possible to relocate if your local government becomes too obtrusive. A policy like this only "works" if you have a scale large enough that the majority of people opposed to the policy are nonetheless forced into it by virtue of finding it less awful than moving. The burden of moving to a new country is high enough to deter it for all but the most egregious issues; the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a country is far higher than the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a city or even a state. As a result, the average person will likely find themselves far less aligned with the policies of their country than their city or state.
    • TheLegace 13y ago
      But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast). I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years. The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.
• RoboTeddy 13y ago
  > ...is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy? I don't know, but technology like http://ethereum.org http://ethereum.org may make it possible to move some things from the realm of states into software. For example, given data feeds of births/deaths/retirements, it might be possible to implement a software contract for voluntary social security that pays contributing participants an annuity from retirement until death.
  • TaulantRamabaja 12y ago
    This would need an extremely robust real world identity system. If this was left to governments somehow, then the identity system itself would become the single point of failure and the main way to game the system through corruption. This is already the case in developing countries where deaths are purposely not recorded in order for the relatives to collect pensions and other contributions. Building such an identity system algorithmically on top of a social network also doesn't seem to make sense because this can be cheated too. One solution that might work would be to prove that you are a conscious person to a system like ethereum through a "Ghost Key" like in Ghost in the Shell. Assuming that there is a way to "fingerprint" each person's ghost, such as creating a hash of something that doesn't change, that could be like e key to such funds. I highly doubt that there is something constant in the human connectome though.
• intortus 13y ago
  Something like this could work: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm Actually, it couldn't, except maybe for a small population. The trick is convincing a local government with major poverty issues to take a risk it probably doesn't think it can afford.
• damonpace 13y ago
  This basic premise(MVP) exists on American Indian reservations, quasi-sovereign states. The BIA and the Tribe distributes an equal share of funds from either the government or gaming to each tribal member. As long as you can prove you are a tribe member, you get the funds. Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live. I grew up surrounded by them in Arizona and went to school with many Native Americans in both primary & high school. It's not a great way to live and the reason so many are leaving the reservations.
  • mistermann 13y ago
    I suspect that situation has more variables involved than simply a minimum basic income.
    • disc 13y ago
      In fairness, don't most situations in life?
      • msellout 13y ago
        Most situations do not involve genocide.
  • gwern 12y ago
    > Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live. And is this squalor & dysfunctionality entirely absent in reservations without significant revenue to distribute?
• damonpace 13y ago
  This basic premise(MVP) exists on American Indian reservations, quasi-sovereign states. The BIA and the Tribe distributes an equal share of funds from either the government or gaming to each tribal member. As long as you can prove you are a tribe member, you get the funds. Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live. I grew up surrounded by them in Arizona and went to school with many Native Americans in both primary & high school. It's not a great way to live and the reason so many are leaving the reservations.
• yummyfajitas 13y ago
  ...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,... Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone. Consider a BI paying 300M people $20k. Cost is $6 trillion. Consider a targeted program paying 50M people $20k, no overhead. Cost is $1 trillion. You need an overhead cost of 500% of benefits for a basic income to be cost competitive. Can any BI proponents provide even a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how BI could possibly be competitive?
  • ArkyBeagle 13y ago
    What does "competitive" mean? Against what? More realistically, figure $20k to 15 million - much less trouble. A mere $0.3T :) But it'll go close to 100% to the Metric Formerly Known as M3 and dissipate. My framework and Maslow-hammer is the PPST framework from Tyler Cowan by way of Arnold Kling - Patterns of Sustainable Substitution and Trade. In this, the bulls get bigger and the china shops get smaller; people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now. I think (from interviewing) there's a strong element of laziness, narcissism and incredulous cognitive dissonance to this, but whatever. If we hire and they're good, then the story we told ourselves about how special we were fails. The U6 gap since 2007 is real now for seven years. It harder every day to call it a blip. If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive, the money flows back through the economy and doesn't harm anyone. The accounting, however, is horrendous. I don't have an answer for that.
    • yummyfajitas 13y ago
      "Competitive" means "against alternate policy proposals". For example, Basic Job/Employer of last resort, or the current welfare state. ...people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now. People don't have jobs because they are unwilling to work at low wages. This is pretty well established empirically, is the foundation of Keynesian economics, and is even accepted by both Cowen and Kling. Further evidence for this: US companies are still outsourcing and expanding overseas. If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive... The little data we have about BI suggests it reduces productive work hours by about 10%. For comparison, the great recession resulted in a 1% drop. As usual in articles on this topic, original sources uncited. https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00 https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
• stcredzero 13y ago
  So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Generally, any communal institution either develops rules and mechanisms to prevent freeloading, or has an authority who acts to prevent such. Almost all of them succumb to a "Tragedy of the Commons" dynamic in terms of some aspect of quality of life. That said, there are some institutions that are identified as being communal that last and even prosper somehow. Many also cite things like the Cabrini Green projects as an example of how removing the stake someone has in society by guaranteeing their rent/income is somehow inherently dehumanizing. To fully address such a hypothesis, one would have to control for factors such as social class and social stigma attached to such benefits.
  • bcheung 13y ago
    The Sea Steading Institute aims to lower the barrier of entry to creating your own sovereign nation. One of the core ideas is that if we have lots of small nations people can do these experiments and find out.
    • herokusaki 12y ago
      How close are they to a "demo version"?
• tw268 13y ago
  This seems like a good way to destroy all the virtue and competence that our species has accumulated over the last half million years. What is the purpose of keeping around millions of incompetents as unlovely human pets belonging to the state?
• zavi 13y ago
  > So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Seasteading might be an answer to your question.
• jes5199 13y ago
  okay, I have a pitch for an MVP. It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be bigger. That's the whole algorithm. I think it's self-balancing - if I, as a software developer, have the opportunity to withdraw a small sum, I won't bother - I don't need an extra $5 or $50 or $500, really. But to someone in a lower income bracket, that might be a significant amount of money.
  • incomethax 13y ago
    This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.
  • growupkids 12y ago
    I like this idea, it certainly makes it fair. If you support the idea, you pay for it. I suspect this would likely fail though, if you didn't have some disincentive for withdrawals then it only takes a tipping point of free loaders to bankrupt the system. Still, I love the idea of making it's voluntary. It certainly would allow the BI proponents to put their money where the mouth is. I suspect what makes BI unlikely to succeed is when it's proposed as mandatory wealth redistribution, since it's never as far as I know been done successfully and the consequences of failure are potentially massive, the risks would seem to outweigh the hypothetical rewards. Would a voluntary pay in system, you could prove it works or doesn't work without forcing anyone else to take the risk. I wonder if a local community could do this for it's residents?
  • TaulantRamabaja 12y ago
    incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance. Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before. To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be one centralized social network such as Facebook, simply because the cost of centralization is lower than that OF decentralization (think diaspora). However, the cost of switching to another service doesn't make sense to a single user, hence rent seeking becomes possible. Telcos are another good example. To change this paradime the cost of decentralization has to be significantly lower than the cost of centralization, even to each individual user. So the real problem isn't that all people are not paying into such an insurance contract, rather that the rent seekers are able to seek out rent at increasing scale while contributing ever less to society. Any BI fund would logically need to be funded by taxing the rent seekers rather than normal people who's productivity gains normally don;t lead to rent seeking due to more liquid markets for employees. Taxing land, monopolies, money (through demurrage rather than inflation) and adding all of those funds to BI would make a lot more sense. Think Norway Sovereign Fund or the Alaska Fund.
• yetanotherphd 13y ago
  In Australia we have a single system, where the test for qualifying for welfare is almost entirely based on (1) total assets and (2) income. This disproves the theory that excessive complexity is inherent in welfare systems.
• _Robbie 13y ago
  Is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? My proposal is an e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee pay outs would be equivalent to a basic income. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments. Why would businesses accept such a currency? In the future wealth inequality will probably cause economic demand to shrink. By accepting these types of currencies, businesses could grow while remaining profitable.
  • otoburb 12y ago
    There's an altcoin based on time-based demurrage fee called Freicoin[1]. [1] http://freico.in/ http://freico.in/
    • _Robbie 12y ago
      I did see this. However, with Freicoin the demurrage fee is only used to pay the miners. In my proposal the fees would be paid back to all consumers.
• pgeorgi 13y ago
  some MVPs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome in Canada http://www.socialjustice.ie/content/basic-income-schemes-28-countries-sub-saharan-africa-evaluated-world-bank http://www.socialjustice.ie/content/basic-income-schemes-28-... report on all kinds of experiments in Africa
• hyp0 12y ago
  > a sovereign state to experiment with? some scandinavian countries are close to this, in some respects. some oil countries too some native peoples, within nations, also (tho other issues complicate it)
• bertil 12y ago
  The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims (outside of records associated to a constantly used unique identifier) and the entitlements are significant. It works rather well there, but it generally comes with a pre-existing massive social pressure that prevents any abuse; Finland might be the exception to that social monitor (people really do anything and no one would care) but still has an administration with strong ‘socialist’ or equalitarian concerns. I’m embroiled myself in a weird administration imbroglio, and they have shined so far, but I’ll let you know. More important than an isolated case in a jar, what you need to care about is immigration: any Southern European nationalist will decry your policy as a potential tsunami from Africa. The lack of tension between the oil-money-infused Norway and its neighbours are striking when you compare that to Irak and Kuwait; at best, they associate the higher-priced-better-quality Statoil gas station with Norwegian snobism (I didn’t notice any snobism). The significant economic success of Finland seems to favor the model. It helps that their chosen field of specialty, video games, is a complex, creative endeavour where success is fleeting and hard to reproduce, revenues are spectacularly unbalanced and business models a constant struggle. This means that most of the ‘idle’ youngsters are actually creating something: playing and learning what makes games cool, or starting their own fan-art, mods, league, reprise… the stepping stones of creativity. Same thing in more Southern countries: it seems to cost roughly the same to pay someone to stay at home and grow their garden rather than to pay an industrial conglomerate to stay and keep on hiring them. Job insurance is regularly described as the largest Angel fund. The closest to an MVP you’ll get might be a small state, say Iceland, that has something similar already. The real issue is not product, but interoperability: what happens when you have migrants, double-nationals, and is it safe to end up with a generation that grew up not knowing anyone who works at all? You might consider a different form of it, with some voluntary civil service to teach basic skills (say, open to elderly and handicapped, substitutable with pregnancy or child-rearing) and make that life revenue a retirement from service, or stipend.
  • contingencies 12y ago
    The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims Late last year I was in Denmark, where ATMs are rare and plastic is king. I was reliably informed that the government didn't like people using cash and that as a business owner if you used more than a few thousand kroner per year you were audited. Furthermore, when you put in tax returns the government would cross-reference it routinely with your mobile phone location .. without a warrant. The upshot is this: sure, you can have a nanny-state utopia, but it means totalitarianism.
• patja 12y ago
  I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated work to navigate your way through the application process (I exaggerate, but not by much) I also agree that we are decades away from sufficient public outrage to fuel the political machine to make these changes. Much like the flat tax, it makes sense to most people but will never happen due to the strong motivation of current rent-seekers to maintain the status quo. While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"
  • andrewfong 12y ago
    > While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need" You could grant basic income only to people who are employed, similar to how the EITC is administered. This kills some of the administrative overhead advantages, but not all of it, as verification of employment is still less of an overhead than need verification (it's basically built into the income tax system by default). It's also more likely to fly politically. Incidentally, this also suggests a feasible political path forward for implementing true basic income -- start with EITC expansion, then slowly roll back the employment verification.
• sitkack 12y ago
  We could start be removing the complexity that is payouts and incentives from the government from taxation. The IRS should only be in charge of collecting taxes. Some other office, the Office of Government Payments would handle all monetary disbursements from the GOV. Getting money back for painting your garage white? Bought a solar powered riding lawn mower? All that stuff from the person to the biggest corporation would have to file the proper paperwork outlining why they deserve or qualify for a disbursement. As it currently stands taxation and disbursements / incentivization is conflated and thus hidden from view its breadth and complexity.