A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing(bloombergview.com)

641 pointsby warrenmar10 tahun yang lalu809 comments

A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-05-02/a-basic-income-should-be-the-next-big-thing

809 comments

gjm1110 tahun yang lalu

This article says it's talking about a universal basic income, and makes the usual point that a completely universal, no-strings-attached income is simple to administer, doesn't have poverty traps, etc.

And then, towards the end where it starts looking at numbers, it starts saying things like

> But by excluding 45 million retirees who already receive a basic income through Social Security, the cost falls to $2.7 trillion. And if the benefit is phased out for households earning more than $100,000 (that would be 20 percent of the U.S.'s 115 million households, or about 70 million people, assuming three to a household), the cost declines to about $2 trillion. You could confine the program to adults and shrink the price tag even more, possibly to as low as $1.5 trillion.

Yes, you can reduce the amount paid out by making it not a universal basic income scheme any more. But that rather misses the point.

(The correct thing to say here is: Yes, a universal basic income sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty would be really expensive. Taxes would need to go up a lot, which would leave wealthier people less well off than they are now. If you don't want a large-scale redistribution of wealth, then you don't want a BI scheme sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty. But you might still want to consider a BI scheme that's not sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty, to simplify and to reduce poverty traps. No one would have to be much worse off then. But it wouldn't be enough for anyone to live on, and would still need supplementing by other safety nets.)

mcv10 tahun yang lalu

Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income.

The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive.

I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.

ww52010 tahun yang lalu

The Fed engineers a slow inflation every year via interest rate control and gives the benefit of the newly created money to banks, the loan borrowers, and asset holders as rates lower than keeping inflation at zero. Since the money supply increases anyway, might as well give the new money as basic income to ALL people. At least the money will be spent directly by the people for economic activities, instead of indirectly via the loans and asset inflation.

The Fed can raise interest rate to shrink the money supply for banks and borrowers while give more direct cash to expand the money supply via basic income. This can be in addition to the government's budget spending on basic income.

An interesting outcome is the deflation of the asset bubble as rate increases. The money supply expansion via direct cash counters the deflation in economy. This should reverse the trend of the great wealth transfer to the asset holders in the last 20 years.

amelius10 tahun yang lalu

I'm still wondering about one thing: if everybody has a basic income, then who will be doing the dirty jobs like collecting our waste? Will the price for waste collecting go up? And will there then be a kind of economic "inversion", where the intellectual people prefer to work on interesting stuff at the expense of money, while the "non-intellectual" (need a better word here) people will make all the money doing the dirty jobs?

aub3bhat10 tahun yang lalu

I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources. The current generation with its experience with public education, spending on unnecessary wars and other poorly run government programs no longer trusts government to effectively deliver services. Thus Basic Income seems like a natural solution. I honestly would prefer a smaller government that reallocates resources, over Bernie Sanders style big government socialism.

cmdli10 tahun yang lalu

From the $1 trillon stated in the article, spread across 300 million people, each person would get around $3000 a year. That honestly doesn't seem like it would help a lot, considering it would replace current welfare systems. The Swiss proposal of around $2600 a month, implemented in the US, would cost nearly $10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible.

I don't think the problem with basic income is an ideological one, its a numbers one. There simply isn't enough money to implement it without massively increasing taxes.

bontoJR10 tahun yang lalu

> Switzerland will hold a June 5 referendum on whether to give every adult citizen 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,600) a month.

Yeah and, for sure, it won't pass... considering how conservative we are, plus the legal side of the proposal is not so clear in where the money will come from.

MicroBerto10 tahun yang lalu

In the early 1970s, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a "mouse utopia" to see what would happen if he created the perfect world for mice, with unlimited food, starting with four males and four females, that could reach a population of 2500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

What happened next is absolutely astonishing. When the mice had nothing to do and nothing to work for, their society collapsed upon itself. Females stopped caring for their young. Betas began guarding the elite females, despite them not breeding with anyone. Fights broke out for no reason whatsoever. Mice stopped eating.

Their population peaked at 2200, and then died off extremely quickly.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/

It was a big, fat, giant mess. And it's exactly what will happen to us if we don't have something to work and live for. Hell, it's already happening.

I don't think humanity survives with basic income as planned. We fall apart when we have nothing to do. We're no better than mice - we are still just animals with a larger hierarchy.

I'd rather see unproductive humans digging and re-filling holes in the ground than getting paid to do nothing. Or something like the biking experiment in Black Mirror.

Yet we need to do something as automation grows. Society is in for some serious decisions, and no country currently has the leadership to be able to tackle them.

k-mcgrady10 tahun yang lalu

>> "But in the U.S., many liberals see it as naive and a distraction from more practical priorities, such as a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave."

I can't see how they could believe this. First of all a minimum wage becomes unimportant as you should hypothetically have enough money to support the kind of lifestyle a minimum wage job would provide without working. Secondly, as it's no longer financially critical to them, people won't be as inclined to take on minimum wage type jobs - which will force the wage up anyway so that the business can attract employees. So it should take care of itself. As for paid family leave (I presume they mean maternity/paternity leave?) you won't need that as your basic income will ensure you still have money coming in. And if the company wants to retain your services after your leave they will offer it anyway. The key point in these examples is that even if you don't get a higher minimum wage or paid family leave it's no longer going to have a big effect on you as you have your UBI to rely on.

Also, it doesn't seem to me like there is a left/right split on this elsewhere in the world. This leads me to believe that the problem is the highly partisan US political system. The right is obviously going to support UBI as it would significantly reduce government size - the left can't be seen to be agreeing with the right. I think it's a kind of childishly schoolyard thing you see a lot in US politics (he likes that so I don't).

golergka10 tahun yang lalu

That's a little surprising — with all discussions about basic income taking place, I assumed it is more of a left-wing thing. But what is even more surprising are arguments against it: social workers being laid off and other more complicated policies like minimum wage taking a back seat. With this kind of rhetoric, it's easy to believe that the real reason is the "welfare lobby" of government officials who don't want their bloated offices to close, indeed.

empressplay10 tahun yang lalu

Won't a basic income just increase inflation? Minimum-wage jobs would by necessity then need to pay more, which would then cause the costs of goods and services to go up, which would then make living more expensive, necessitating an increase in the basic income and so forth...?

For example, say I'm a landlord. If everyone all of a sudden had an additional "base" income, why wouldn't I increase my rents to absorb at least a portion of that? Then, only people who had a job would still be able to afford to rent from me, while those on the basic income would be unable to afford it. I'm not out either way.

So you would say you need to introduce legislation to stop me from doing that, but the free market would abhor that and likely accuse you of being a communist. So you can't. So I'm failing to see the point of the whole exercise?

ja3027810 tahun yang lalu

I really don't understand how a 'basic' income is supposed to work.

What if I spend my basic income on drugs and hookers? are you willing to let me starve? what about my kids? If not, then the basic income can't actually replace the existing social programs.

If nobody need to work, then if employers want employees, they have to pay more to get them, which makes prices rise, which makes your 'basic' income insufficient again.

I don't get it.

jboggan10 tahun yang lalu

'In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."'

    :Rudyard Kipling [0]

0 - http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

DanielBMarkham10 tahun yang lalu

The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math.

Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable).

Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That's another 20K or so per man, woman, and child. The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K? (I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It's to make a point.)

We're reaching the point where the average person who supports helping the poor can figure out that we could have just set up an endowment for each poor person when they were born and spent less money than this. And at the same time we would get rid of a lot of folks doing useless overhead simply because the system is so complex.

For those reasons and more I like the UBI idea.

But ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. We need about a thousand different experiments -- ran for 10 or 20 years -- before we can begin to start saying what might work or not work. When I look at other charitable causes (aid to Africa comes to mind first), the rhetoric got way out ahead of the actual results for many, many decades. Tons of time, effort, and money were spent on strategies that didn't work but sounded pretty cool. We'd be idiots not to recognize that this is the danger here too.

The first question we have to ask is this: What is UBI? Is it a reliable income in place of a bunch of other services? Or is it in addition to a bunch of other services? The difference matters. Once that's defined, I sure would like to see if a majority of people doing nothing "rubs off" on ambitious, driven people. Or maybe it works the other way around. Maybe a small percentage of ambitious, driven people, in a society without external pressures, can persuade more and more folks to find meaning in helping others. Beats me. Sure will be fun to learn more.

Slogans are great. Results are better.

rbcgerard10 tahun yang lalu

I see two basic issues:

1. How do you implement this whithout border control - if you create a basic income that is higher than ~1/2 the world's income the amount of illegal immigration will be huge

2. Will we really have the will to tell people who are starving because they lost their stipend to drugs or gambling "too bad"?

WWKong10 tahun yang lalu

How does a universal basic income work from economics stand point? Let's say everyone gets $1000/mo. Currently the market knows that everyone has $10 and prices bread accordingly at $1.50. Tomorrow the market will know that everyone has $1010 and will price the bread at $100. Thus everything from food to utilities to rent gets adjusted to the new normal and the poor can't still afford the basics. Is this theory not correct?

cromulent10 tahun yang lalu

When I think about it from a business perspective, the advantage is not just smaller government but workforce flexibility. If I only have 20 extra hours of work some weeks, there is no way I am hiring another person full time. With a basic income in place, I can hire someone at market rates just for those 20 hours without all of the stress for both parties. Still not perfect, but much better.

unsigner10 tahun yang lalu

I don't see how the government can be shrunk, short of violent collapse. UBI will be introduced, and not a single government program will be dropped, not a single government official laid off; wars, bailouts and $500 toilet seats will continue, but we'll have to tax, borrow or print a few more billions (or trillions, in the case of US-sized economies - I live in a small country).

dimino10 tahun yang lalu

All of this is basically moot, because while the average person's entitlements might stay the same or increase due to a basic income to cover the things entitlements currently cover (we won't need to hand out food stamps if we have a basic income, for example), every other person's entitlements they rely on will get cut as a result, and those people (and there are at least tens of millions of them) will raise unholy hell about it.

There's the 10% for each entitlement that need the full entitlement, and there are dozens of entitlements, hundreds, so 10% of hundreds of programs will just be too many people to allow a basic blanket income to cover their entitlements.

All that said, my favorite version of this is the "negative income tax". We have something kind of like it already, but the EITC would have to be expanded significantly before it was actually something like a negative income tax, and that means cuts to other programs.

jasiek10 tahun yang lalu

Looks like this topic needs a serious longitudal study. This being a hot political topic virtually guarantees no one will conduct one.

xiphias10 tahun yang lalu

The more free money printing is going on, the more I'm incentivized to buy/use Bitcoins from my hard work's money. UBI centralizes power to the money printers even more, gives a little to those who don't work (for their votes), and takes even more money away from those who work. Still, this can go on only with central banking.

narrator10 tahun yang lalu

I think this is sort of the apotheosis of the concept that money is the universally effective solution to all problems.

Money is not the universally effective solution to health care in this country. We already spend double, as a percent of GDP ,compared to any other country.

I think we're going to run into some problems on the supply side with a universal basic income. Some prices will rise due to increased consumption. This will make capital investment (e.g Research and Development, New Factories, Upgrading Production Equipment) more costly. Eventually you'll burn the furniture to heat the house and then things will start to fall apart and get into an inflationary spiral. It does have the benefit going for it that it is less complex to administer though, while our health care system is enormously complex and grows ever more complex with the more money that gets spent on it.

aidenn010 tahun yang lalu

> And they fear that a basic income would, in the end, be less than what many people get when all the federal government's cash and social-service programs are combined.

Note that the poor will obviously get fewer benefits if BI is only funded from cuts to programs the benefit the poor.

Example: lets say we eliminate program X that currently has a means test limiting it to the poorest 20% of the population. If we, as the article suggests, use that money to fond some fraction of BI for the poorest 80% of the population, then one can trivially see that we have distributed 3/4 of the money for program X away from the poorest 20%.

Now there are significant savings from reducing overhead, but unless program X is 75% overhead, it's still a net loss in realized benefits for the poor.

In order to make BI palatable to the US left, you will need to fund it at least partly through raising taxes.

dilemma10 tahun yang lalu

The basic problem that makes universal basic income impossible is that it's simply not possibly to set the level of it. Have a try:

1. What should UBI be in San Francisco? 2. What should UBI be in Detroit? 3. Should they be the same? 4. What happens if they're not the same? 5. What happens if they're the same?

alexvoda10 tahun yang lalu

I think the issue with BI is that no matter how many things are automated and how many items become abundent there are still things that will remain scarce: land, minerals. Land will remain a scarce resource and all things that depend primarily on land will remain scarce (housing, agriculture, etc.).

And in this situation there is nothing stopping land owners from absorbing the basic income. This means that revenue generated by land owning (not necessarily land owning itself) would have to be heavily taxed. Maybe even taxed progressively to avoid economies of scale in land owning and prevent a very few from owning all the land.

Or we could terraform celestial bodies in the Solar system.

It is important to note that land itself is limited, not housing. As long as we can continue building even higher and deeper housing is not actually limited.

kempe10 tahun yang lalu

You could look at Sweden here for a reference. Everyone does not get a fixed sum of money but everyone can get social services to help out if you are unemployed thou the amount of money vary from situation to situation. This and other things like everyone has a right to schools, universities and health care does not come for free however. 25% tax on products, salary tax 30-55% on different salary ranges + ~15% on top for pension plan and state tax that the employee never sees that the company pays. So sure it can work but it's not cheap and it builds on that everyone should get a job. If people lost interest in that and unemployment would raise more, that would be bad...

ComteDeLaFere10 tahun yang lalu

A basic income fails on the same point as increasing the minimum wage - neither provides much additional opportunity in life, both simply make being poor and disenfranchised more palatable.

Animats10 tahun yang lalu

The next big thing, after the $15 minimum wage, should be the 8 hour day and the 40 hour week. Everybody gets overtime, unless you're in the 1%.

The whole "exempt" thing needs to go.

a_imho10 tahun yang lalu

Why is that ubi is considered the next big thing, while people on welfare are usually looked down upon? In the current (optimistic) horizon it might seem like a good idea, but a recession could easily spin this the wrong way imho. If you don't contribute by working and paying taxes on your income, there can be a problem when a stressed actor comes asking to justify your ubi. OTOH, if you do need to work either way, why not tweak the current distribution system and include ubi money in wages.

lackingcaffeine10 tahun yang lalu

I think the idea of a basic income is really interesting though one aspect of it troubles me and I would be interested to hear HN's solutions to it. The trouble lies in the creative and economic relationship. If a substantial number of people reduce or stop their usual working hours and live off the income to pursue entirely creative activities, such as making a website or art, they are exempt from the usual capitalist status quo which forces a venture to be good, popular and eventually profitable (there is no standard of quality necessary as long as its overheads are not too high). This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business.

One counter-argument is that by freeing up people to pursue their interests, there will be more good businesses opened as well, which will be profitable in the long run. The other is that a person would not pursue a project that is not well-received for a long period of time due to negative feedback.

Neither of these fully answers the problem though of what the system would do to stop people falling off the economic grid and the impact on GDP/taxable income this would have. Any thoughts?