Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com) 1052
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator will give 100 randomly-selected families in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 each month as a test, continuing the payments for between six months and a year. And The Guardian reports that Finland and The Netherlands also are preparing pilot programs to test Universal Basic Income, while Switzerland will vote on a similar program this week. One Australian site is now also asking whether the program could work in Australia, noting that currently the country spends around $3 billion on their Centrelink welfare system, "so simplification can offer huge potential savings."
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
What I think? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that universal basic income is inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.
Simple fact of the matter is, that you're not going to be training an average 45-year-old factory worker in how to write the AI for the robot that took his job. And even if you did, after the AI's in place, he might not have much work. While some people have cited that every technological revolution has ended up producing jobs to replace the ones lost to the automation, they are increasingly other jobs, for other people, and "other people" will often include people who are not in a position to acquire the necessary skills.
I'm pretty certain that there would be very negative consequences for society overall if the population is left to starve because of increasing automation. As such, basic income will be required just to keep the country stable and productive.
NOTE: I am generally conservative in my views on a lot of things. and I am definitely not a socialist. But this is how I see things playing out, and I can see that there may be some very negative consequences that accompany it. But still, at this point it seems inevitable.
Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
(...) I'm pretty certain that there would be very negative consequences for society overall if the population is left to starve because of increasing automation.
I'm definitly not accurate on History things, but at some point in the past there was an event in Britain's history called the Luddite's revolution, featuring a (finally failed) anti-machinism attempt...
Maybe we could gain something by looking at what happened at the time, although I fear the relative dimension of the event was different from now (a much smaller population among others)
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics took a turn which the luddites did not anticipate. They thought that greatly increasing the productivity of an individual worker would allow the demand for labor to be satisfied with a fraction of the number of workers. Instead the increased productivity lead to a decline in the price of goods that greatly increased consumption - it lead to the consumer age, where many people lived lives that would be the envy of any pre-industrial king. The mass purchasing of wanted-but-not-needed tat fueled the new economy.
There's no assurance it would happen again: People can only want so much stuff. The environmental consequences of a society where everything is disposable are also quite bad enough as things are.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no assurance it would happen again: People can only want so much stuff. The environmental consequences of a society where everything is disposable are also quite bad enough as things are.
Take a look at rich people, their mansions and vacations and other extravaganza. I very much doubt there's any real upper bound on what people want. The environmental consequences are another matter, but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first and becoming "greener" second, a hundred billion people will pollute more than one billion.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll just have to adapt, like the rest of us. Because there ARE bounds, upper and lower, and we need to start paying more attention to raising the lower bound and lowering the upper bound, even just a little.
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Tell that to the guys that built the Tower of Babylon.
Of course there should be upper bounds on people's greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
You could have checked this before posting:
Leonardo Da Vinci was born poor and died poor. Whereas church leaders and royalty that he worked for had limitless greed and didn't do a goddamn thing for anyone. Yet, whose contributions to society are remembered
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Population growth is determined solely by the amount of resources available to a species (Food, Water, Waste disposal, and amount of usable Land).
Japan has plenty of food and water, yet their population is declining. Niger is the poorest country in the world, does not have enough food, and is rapidly losing land to desertification. They also have the highest birthrate in the world. Your assertion that population is bounded "solely" by resources is nonsense, and is the exact opposite of what is actually happening in the real world. Population is growing fastest in the poorest countries, and has stopped growing (or soon will) in most rich countries.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Informative)
It also generally slows down *drastically* if you improve women's education, women's rights and general sex education.
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Ahh yes, the "selfish cunt" theory. How do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you write like that?
The "selfish cunt" theory is unsupported by evidence. The "selfish dick" theory correlates much better. Birth rates are declining fastest in countries where men are least involved in raising children, and do the least to help out domestically, such as Japan, Italy and Spain. In countries where men are more involved and helpful (Scandinavia, France, America) birth rates are holding up much better.
Countries with strong patriarchal societies have historically had the highest birth rates, but once women in t
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan's population is declining because so many of them live to work instead of working to live.
If you spend all your time in the office and on business trips, what's the point of having children? So other people can raise them? Too expensive, salarymen can't afford that.
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Also its in decline in France where they work to live.
Actually, it isn't. France has one of the highest birth rates in the EU.
Re:Birth rate !== growth rate (Score:4, Informative)
Birth rate !== growth rate... just saying,
In the modern world, high birth rates equal high growth rates. Childhood mortality has drastically declined everywhere, even in very poor countries. Niger has a lower overall death rate than most rich countries, because of their very young population. If you look at a list of countries by population growth rate [wikipedia.org], all of those at the top are very poor except for a few small countries with very high rates of immigration.
Re:Luddites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Population growth in poor countries is for three or four reasons: ... sometimes just custom, sometimes religious
a) children are supposed to care for parents and grantparents, as 'pensions' don't exist there
b) contraception is not available, either literally, or it is to expensive
c) distraction is not available. Believe it or not, the biggest decline in birth all over the world came when the TV was introduced
d) children are considered a sign of luck
As soon as people have helthcare, rents, available contraception, no one is having absurd amounts of children. Actually meanwhile so many couples decide to have none at all, that pensions in countries like Germany are facing troubles.
Food (availability) is not dictating birth rates. Poverty, as in the opposite of being rich, is!
If you have not learned such simple stuff in school, perhaps you should at least start reading books?
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"Population growth is determined solely by the amount of resources available to a species."
And predation, disease, factors like that. None of which applies to humans, because they have invented culture - that means they don't have to play by the same rules. They even went so far as finding ways to mate without reproducing.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that but a consumer driven economy needs consumers. And those consumers need money. It does not matter whether what you want to sell is priced at 100 or at 10 if your potential consumer has nothing to buy with, and those that could buy already have bought.
For a consumer driven economy you cannot accumulate the whole capital in the hands of a few, that does not work out. The net result is what we experience today, lots of capital available for investment and nothing to invest in because there is no viable business you could open, lacking the ability to sell to anyone because nobody who would buy can, lacking the funds. This leads to the currently observable insanely low interest rates which in turn leads to low inflation which leads to people clinging to their assets, which in turn grinds the economy to a halt.
Producing makes you poor, only selling makes you rich. And to sell, you need someone willing AND ABLE to buy.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
Money is irrelevant to the equation. In fact if you try to route a UBI through money, it's doomed to fail. All you'll do is inflate prices to where stuff becomes unaffordable despite everyone getting a UBI, just like the widespread availability of student loans has inflated the price of college tuitions to where you can't afford if despite the loans. When you increase people's ability to pay (demand-side economic fix), prices just rise to compensate. It's like trying to climb out of quicksand by pulling one foot up, then putting your weight on that foot to pull your other foot up. Then someone says "let me help you" and pulls one foot up even further. The net effect is no change in your position, except you and the person trying to help did a lot more work for the exact same results.
Money is not wealth. Money is a bookkeeping tool we've invented to represent wealth. Actual wealth is productivity - the goods and services which are actually produced by the labor we do (or the labor the machines we operate do). As a representation of productivity, its value fluctuates to equalize the cost (in productivity) to produce something, and the value (how much productivity someone is willing to swap in exchange for it). If people you give people money for free (no productivity needed), then that decreases the value of money, leading to increased prices, but the wages of people doing productive things (working) rises in lockstep with those prices. So even though prices go up, wages go up the same amount, and the affordability of stuff remains the same if you're working.
Not so if you're receiving a basic income - since the amount of money you receive (for free) is fixed by some government decision, the amount of stuff you can buy decreases against this inflation. The market is literally adjusting prices and wages to represent the true amount of productivity that went into the money you're receiving. People who receive a UBI are affected because they aren't doing productive work, and the market adjusts prices to reflect that. People who do productive work and receive wages are unaffected because they're being productive, and the market adjusts their wages to offset the higher prices.
To make UBI work, you must decouple it from your market currency. Make it a supply-side fix, instead of a demand-side one like with student loans. You can allocate rations (government buys a bunch of food, gives everyone a card each month which entitles them to pick up x pounds of it from a distribution center). Or you can create a parallel currency which trades in only UBI goods (no steak and lobster dinners for sale). There will be leakage - some people will sell their UBI food ration for cash, or convert the parallel currency into the primary currency. But it won't be anywhere near as bad as if you just distribute UBI in your primary currency.
That's not what happens. Since money is just the representation of wealth, if it becomes so concentrated that it actually impedes people's productivity, it doesn't stall the economy. What happens is the market sees that inefficiency and attempts to correct it - by creating a new form a money to add fluidity to trade. A black market pops up. At first it'll start with bartering and I scratch your back, you scratch mine
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Money is irrelevant to the equation. In fact if you try to route a UBI through money, it's doomed to fail. All you'll do is inflate prices to where stuff becomes unaffordable despite everyone getting a UBI, just like the widespread availability of student loans has inflated the price of college tuitions to where you can't afford if despite the loans.
UBI is not comparable to student loans. Tuition inflation happens because students are not paying with some finite amount of income, they are paying with a virtually unlimited amount of credit, because student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. There is no downward pressure on the price, because credit is treated as an unlimited resource (in practice it is of course limited -- the limit is lifelong indentured servitude).
When you increase people's ability to pay (demand-side economic fix), prices just rise to compensate. It's like trying to climb out of quicksand by pulling one foot up, then putting your weight on that foot to pull your other foot up. Then someone says "let me help you" and pulls one foot up even further. The net effect is no change in your position, except you and the person trying to help did a lot more work for the exact same results.
You're making a vague, qualitative statement about a quantitative question, the Deepak Chopra of economic arguments. The question isn't whether UBI would increase prices, the question is how much and of what. If what you say was true, there'd ultimately basically be no point in any welfare program from food stamps to medicare. UBI is wealth distribution. Translating dollars into "percent ownership of total existing wealth", what UBI does is take some percent from everyone above a certain threshold of wealth and gives it to everyone below that threshold. Would that cause some amount of price increases in some goods? Yeah, of course. But prices are still dictated by the market. Since we don't currently have people starving in the streets in developed nations (quite the opposite, in fact), one can safely assume that the consumption of, for example, staple foods like bread and milk would not change with UBI, at least not much. There's only so much milk you can drink. Whatever price increases happened would be 1) as a result of overall decreased productivity due to people choosing not to work (which is an unknown quantity, but there are arguments why it would be a manageable amount), and 2) to price out UBI dependents out of goods that are currently near the threshold of what the poorest people can afford. Neither of these are anywhere near as catastrophic as what you claim. A lot of people seem to miss the "basic" part of "universal basic income." This isn't an amount of money that's supposed to be enough to live like Kanye West. It's supposed to be enough to not be homeless and not starve.
Am I certain that UBI is a good idea and won't result in catastrophe? Hell no I'm not. What I am certain of, however, is that if your handwavy little argument was enough to prove UBI so obviously unworkable, there wouldn't be any real-life, grownup economists willing to consider it, but there are.
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UBI as generally described is not increasing the real money supply, but instead reallocating the existing money supply. That leaves plenty of scope for lack of inflation of things that aren't currently production limited. Prices will rise on some things (housing, for instance, is at a shortage and UBI would add demand without any immediate ability to increase the supply to meet it), and not on others (we generally have food surpluses on basic staples in developed countries, there is not reason to expect gen
Re:Luddites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Producing first and foremost makes you poorer. You have to spend time, money, effort and raw materials and so on to produce something. Unless you can somehow monetize this product by selling it to someone, you're out money, time, effort and material and gained nothing.
Only when you manage to sell your product you will recover your investment. Hopefully with profit. If you cannot sell your product, your company will perish.
If producing made you rich, we'd have no problem finding worthwhile investment opportunities. It's trivial in this economy to produce something. Selling it is the hard part today.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Consuming is trivial if you have the means to consume. If you do not, it's not trivial or hard, it's impossible. The question is also not whether something is easy or hard, but whether it has any value. I'm fairly sure reciting the Gilgamesh epos by heart is nontrivial, but I do question the value of such a feat.
And no, producing only produces a good or service that you might sell. And only then, only when you can somehow sell it, you will get wealthy. Until you can sell your product, you have nothing. Actually depending on the product, you have worse than nothing because you have to store it, your product depreciates due to age, it might deteriorate or perish, it might go out of fashion and style, it might get surpassed by technological development, and even if it is non-perishable, never goes out of style and can't be surpassed by technology, you have to dedicate real estate for storage. If and only if you manage to sell your product you actually have a chance to recover your investment. Until then it's dead capital that can only decrease in value.
But if your view is the prevailing one I somehow understand how the great depression could happen. And why we're in this one.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people are tired of owning crap. You can go to WalMart and fill your house floor to ceiling with crap for modest prices (I've seen children's bedrooms stacked 4 feet deep in plastic toys). If you're in the upper 50% of income and lower 50% of U.S. real-estate markets, you can afford a new 4000 square foot home in the 'burbs with rooms that serve no other purpose than to store stuff (and I've known stay-at-home moms who spend years of their life managing empires of junk this way.)
At some point, many people mature and get over it. Especially those who have had it all and discovered how little "all" really does for them.
I hope that children of parents who have matured past the accumulation of junk stages can get over it at a younger age.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, my suggestions will change the shape of the economy and employment, but the status quo isn't making us that happy either.
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You need to get out more. Altruism is quite common.
Re:Luddites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, free money. But not much of it. Enough to tide you over, enough to get by on, and if you're happy being a couch potatoe and spend your time watching court TV and Jerry Springer (is he still on? I honestly don't know), that should be doable on that "income". Your value for society would probably be that you're a pair of eyeballs watching the commercials.
If that's all you want, more power to you. Some people want more than that. A car. A vacation. Seeing places and people. Experiencing something. Not sitting there when they're 70, thinking they wasted their life.
Hey, freedom of choice, remember? What the Reps always claim they're about. Oddly they're usually not the ones that would give you that.
Re: (Score:3)
While I'm partially convinced an UBI will happen sooner or later (well, actually later) when automation (robotics and AI) kicks in even more, it's still hard to see how it could be introduced in our own neo-liberal capitalist free-market system. Which, contrary to what many lefties claim, is still one of the better out there. Communism certainly wasn't better.
The whole idea of 'but some people will still work and be creative' is all good and well, but it doesn't explain where the money is going to come from
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, work force would probably get cheaper for the companies as well because the minimum wage could easily be lowered accordingly. There is no reason for a 15 bucks and hour minimum wage anymore if a basic income is guaranteed already.
Re:Luddites? (Score:4, Insightful)
40 hours work each week to add 20-30% to your purchasing power isn't worth the loss of time.
Low pay employees will need a higher cash incentive to do the shitty jobs.
Re: Luddites? (Score:4, Interesting)
If jobs are about fulfilling a purpose in life then creating jobs is about making people feel productive. It doesn't matter that they actually are productive.
Somehow I feel like education is the better alternative than fake jobs. Clearly it can make people feel productive. if everyone is educating themselves clearly the competitiveness of our educational system has to change and appeal to a nation with huge educational gaps.
I was just watching the other day that video of a girl being ask "if you're going 80 miles per hour, how long does it take to go 80 miles?" and I don't think her response was as atypical as you might think. There should be a school for everyone and an incentive for those falling through the cracks well into adulthood to use them. I know similar systems have been tried, but never with the overabundance of production that extreme automation provides.
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Not everyone has someone who can/will take them in. Unless we want them to starve, we have to have a public safety net. That means we need a minimum wage to keep employers from turning public assistance into a subsidy for their payroll.
Re:Luddites? (Score:4, Interesting)
And UBI inevitable? It may be, but only if automation and AI have become so dominant that there simple aren't any jobs left that a human would do better. But in that case, 'having another job gets you more' will not apply anymore neither.
Ah yes, the 'creative' jobs. Well, unfortunately, not everyone can be a creative genius, even if all tried. Even artists have to compete, and there is no way that 8 billion people can become 8 billion successful artists or 'creativists'. Even now, only one in the ten-thousand can earn money with it, mostly those with either talent or best 'network' (connections), or sheer luck. If everyone had a try on being an artist, it simply would mean it would become one in a million.
The problem is... until such a world comes true, and our current neo-capitalist free-market system has to be put in the bin because there simply is no work anymore for humans, an UBI, on a national scale, can never work.
the main problem with this idea is: someone has to pay for it. And it will ALWAYS costs loads more than currnt wellfare-systems, since, inherently to an UBI, the working force ALSO gets it. That means a huge augmentation of the costs, at least tripling it, and possibly even making tenfold out of the costs, depending on the country and its respective wellfare-system.
One question I never see answered is: who is going to pay for it? And I mean, specifically, with detailed numbers and calculations. Even among the scientific papers not one goes into this. The most of an answer you ever get is 'take it from the rich' or 'it will have economic beneficial ripple effects'. Which is, respectively, too ideological naive and to vague to be of any use.
Currently, taxes are used for the wellfare system. If you're going to introduce a system that will cost triple or quadruple the amount, then you need to raise your taxes threefold or more too, or you'll have to find another realistic and sustainable revenue to cater and provide for an nation-wide UBI system.
Incentive does not go away, you say. For some, it won't. But for most, when the basic needs are dealt with, they'll be content. This follows naturally from human psyche (even the ancient romans were already aware of this with their 'panem et circenses') and it's also a baic tenet of Maslows hierarchy of needs.
So it doesn't matter if 'some' will seek more - as you undoubtedly will have - if 'enough' people DO NOT seek it and stop working, the whole system collapses. Even with out current wellfare systems in the EU, it's beginning to be top-heavy and unsustainable: there are just too many to provide for, to many who use (and misuse) the system. Now, expand this system to *everyone*. It's easy to see that even more will stop working. Which means, the others will have to pay for it all. Which means higher taxes. Which means less incentive for those others to work - no-one is going to work to earn 'a little bit extra', if that extra is taxed for 80%, now are they?
The problem I have with people being a proponent of an UBI is, thus, that they never explain in detail how, within our current system, one is going to pay for the huge extra cost in a sustainable manner, without letting the system crash on itself. The only things I heard thusfar, are either vague 'economic ripple effect will occur' (that will pay for everything, we're assured by proponents), or ideologically coloured and naive ('take it from the rich'). It's just not convincing.
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Informative)
That's a fairly retarded attempt at building a strawman.
First, the income tax rate on personal income in Switzerland is 40%. You're suggesting that it will suddenly be 96%. Nobody has proposed that and your paranoid ravings aren't based on anything factual.
Second, the guy making 2600/month also gets the 2500/month universal basic income. That's what universal means, after all... everyone gets it. He's now getting 5100/month, or 4060 after taxes. This is not a pay cut.
Third, not working is a 1560 pay cut, not 100. Some people will be willing to give up their jobs and assume a subsistence lifestyle, but most won't give up a third or more of their income.
Fourth, having people who don't work is actually the point of all this. As automation takes more and more jobs out of the market, there aren't enough to go around. Right now the only other options are mass executions, imprisonment or hoping that they starve to death quietly and don't riot or resort to crime as their new career (which leads back to improsonment).
If you have better ideas for how to deal with masses of unemployed people, feel free to suggest them.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not making it up: "Those with a job could still work but would have the monthly income deducted from their salary. " [rt.com].
So if the people who work also get the "universal income" where exactly do you think the money will be coming from?
Re: (Score:3)
You aren't making that up, but the article you linked is. The referendum that's actually on the ballot doesn't have details on exactly how the universal basic income would be implemented. The article linked in the summary says The wording on the ballot paper is vague â" it calls for the countryâ(TM)s constitution to be changed to âoeguarantee the introduction of an unconditional basic incomeâ that guarantees âoea humane existence and participation in public life for the whole popu
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I'm pretty sure commanding real armies is much more intresting than playing with plastic toysoldiers with neighbour, or nowadays owning computer and trying to dominate others virtually :D
Speak for yourself. Strategy war games are one of my favorite genres, but I have zero interest in the real thing. I'd prefer to live in a world where holding the viewpoint you suggest is enough to get you a DSM classification.
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At the time, brawn was automated, people shifted to exploiting brains for profit. Now brains are being replaced. What are we going to shift to exploiting this time?
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Funny)
Precious bodily fluids! And uhh our brains produce electricity, or something? I heard it from a documentary once...
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading this and assuming it correct, the only logical explanation is that I am not human.
There was a time when I was not working. I did not "fall apart". I enjoyed it. Tremendously. Could have continued it for the rest of my lifetime. Sadly at some point the money was gone and I was forced to reenter the treadmill.
A real pity. How many countless hours I wasted at jobs that I could have spent sensibly...
Re:Luddites? (Score:5, Insightful)
I certainly had no problem finding something to do with my life. I learned a lot about electrical engineering in that time, and I started building my own hardware. Far from what's currently cutting edge, mind you, but I built a few tools and gadgets that made my life easier or at least more fun. It was satisfying and inspiring.
It was at least ten times more meaningful, stimulating and interesting than most of what is considered "work" today. And, bluntly, even if Joe Lowlife is lying on the couch, stuffing his face with chips and watching reruns of soaps and reality TV all day, I could hardly say that this is any more meaningless than the "you want fries with that" job he now holds down.
Re:What I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO it has nothing to do with robots or anything like that. Barring a full-fledged singularity where robots become better than humans at everything, humans will always end up moving into whatever fields robots are worse at. It's happened with every wave of automation throughout history.
Universal basic income is simply about efficiency. Human societies have by and large, for right or for wrong, decided that they don't like the idea of people starving and dying in the streets. And so have built these mishmash patchworks of programs all with the goal of preventing one or more aspects of this for one or more specified groups of people. Often with disincentives to people bettering themselves because then they could end up off one system or another, and almost always with huge bureaucratic overhead costs.
It's much simpler just to accept the basic premise, pay for it, and be done with it. That premise being "Okay, we don't want people starving and dying on the streets, but we don't want people freeloading either, so we're going to give some minimal support to everyone - but if you want a better life than that, you have to work for it." The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away, there are no gaps for unfortunate people to fall through... everybody wins.
You probably don't want a single, fixed payment for every adult - you probably want something extra for each dependent a family has, maybe more for people who are disabled and can't work to better their lives, maybe some variation based on local costs of living, etc. But overall you end up with a vastly simpler system. And you simplify the political debates vastly, down to conservatives saying that the minimal standard of life is too generous vs. liberals saying that it's too austere - just a simple fight over the numbers.
It shouldn't even be that terribly difficult to implement. You can start rolling it in without cutting anyone's benefits, but at the same time make any benefits they receive from Basic Income automatically be deducted from their potential aid from all existing welfare programs, at all levels of government. They get their basic income payment, but all of their other payment are automatically reduced or eliminated by a net corresponding amount. Including big-ticket items like national pension programs (Social Security, etc). So many smaller programs quickly end up in a situation where the vast majority of their enrollees no longer collect anything - and with scaleup, the big-ticket ones as well. With the right policies in place, anyone who doesn't collect anything for several years gets automatically booted from the rolls. As the rolls shrink, the overhead costs drop. When a welfare program gets small enough, it gets killed altogether, with the eventual goal of only Basic Income remaining.
The extra costs for the universal basic income program (aka, the new people who are getting support, which wouldn't be fully paid for by the reduction in welfare-program overheads) are paid for by new corporate taxes. In turn, however, in addition to corporations not having to separately pay for pensions/social security and the like (since it's now rolled into universal basic income), minimum wages would also classified a government-required benefit (because they are), and what minimum a company has to pay a person is reduced by the individual's basic income. Wages would get to reflect the actual supply/demand for a given field. Just like all other welfare programs, minimum wages would eventually be eliminated altogether. Bookkeeping for companies would become simpler as well.
Re:What I think? (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO it has nothing to do with robots or anything like that. Barring a full-fledged singularity where robots become better than humans at everything, humans will always end up moving into whatever fields robots are worse at. It's happened with every wave of automation throughout history.
You would think, but this time is different...
Humans Need Not Apply:
https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU [youtu.be]
Well worth your time to watch...
---
Note: Don't react emotionally or with what you "think" you know, watch it and pay attention to the numbers. Numbers and math don't lie.
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You think corporations don't want to get rid of minimum wages and numerous individual worker tax mandates? The service industry in particular would be hugely into the concept, being able to ditch the economically distorting influence of these costs without penalizing their workers.
Of course with any change there are winners and losers. But the net result for society is a very large win. G
Re:What I think? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I think a relatively stable population is a better choice than trying to force a decline.
If everyone gets "one birth credit" which is a child that they get full benefits for, then a "traditional" married couple would get benefits for 2 children - replacement. Beyond that, you're on your own - no additional economic assistance for additional children. It would give Catholic charities something to do...
Re:What I think? (Score:4, Insightful)
Today Robin Hood is evil. Under a supposed equality under law, Robin Hood is evil. Is Robin Hood evil under slavery (inequality of people under law), that is an interesting question.
Wage slavery is certainly better than 1800s Southern US slavery, but it still amounts to a similar fate. While wage slaves can choose their master, the free market is not making the masters treat them any better, and never has. Today's masters give their wage slaves so little compensation (30 hours a week of minimum wage) that they end up on government assistance programs for housing and nutrition - they get to spend their hard earned dollars on clothes from WalMart. I'd rather give the people a more simply (fairly) distributed UBI and take away minimum wage guarantees, that would put "masters" like WalMart in competition with churches, schools, and many other places where people might rather volunteer their time.
Re: (Score:3)
Just a heads up.... but money is, by definition, something that gets exchanged for goods and services.
Where something is more efficiently run en-masse (education for example), sure, no problem keeping it as a service. But otherwise, and where individuals may differ about the ideal form it should take (food, shelter, etc), money is the optimal distribution means.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm confused on this point. What are the huge bureaucratic overhead costs associated with someone leaving the unemployment/welfare system? Honestly, I don't know. It seems simpler to me in terms of overhead for someone to simply take up a job and stop the requests for welfare payments. The overhead would seem to be in their continuing to submit requests for payments at ever renewal stage, providing documentation that they've been out looking, etc., etc.
Overhead 1, you've picked out already: Fraud. People claim the benefit when they're not entitled to it.
Overhead 2: Employing people to sit in an office pushing paper, accepting "I want to sign on" and "I want to sign off" forms.
Overhead 3: Employing people to audit who's signed on, to try to minimise overhead 1.
Overhead 4: Employing people to audit the more complex tax forms that are necessary because of all the possible ways that you can get income, and all the different ways they can be correlated
Overhea
Re:What I think? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they made/make shitty life choices.
That's a very strange assumption to make. Do you have evidence to back it up?
I'd contest that the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they were born into poor environments, and that being born into poor environments have well known socio-economic effects that result in people incapable of making good life choices.
You have the right correlation, but the causation is backwards.
Re: (Score:3)
So, I basically agree about UBI and echo the point that many have made: between welfare, food stamps and progressive income tax we're most of the way toward UBI already. What the current systems usually require is that you "demonstrate need" for some of the benefits to kick in - basically forcing people to become demonstratively unproductive in order to get the check. Seems like a make-work program for the people checking to make sure the recipients are unproductive, and a real productivity killer for the
Re:What I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Since unemployment will be common and permanent, people won't have cash for a roof and food, so they can go starve. Well, when this happens, and people have nothing to lose, revolts happen, blood runs in the streets, and a government either exists like Syria, propped up by a superpower, or it collapses, winding up belonging to the most brutal faction. A more civilized nation can hire mercs for shooting at civilians, blockade cities so people starve (as a way to "pacify" an area), or just lob a few Sarin gas canisters at gathering places. However, this is a costly affair, and it requires a lot of tanks, soldiers, POGs, weaponry, people to maintain that, prisons, and many other resources.
Throughout human history, you've been correct...
You may be wrong this time...
Atlas, The Next Generation
https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY [youtu.be]
Take that, advance it another 20 years, then give it a gun. Then build 1 million of them. Then the rich and powerful will have a heartless 100% loyal robot army.
No, I don't think they'll go all Terminator on us, rather I think they will be what keeps the powerful... powerful...
Re: (Score:3)
Parent won't be wrong.
Humans excel at a couple things that will never, and can never, be accounted for: endurance, and imagination.
It doesn't matter how much effort these army-covered rich people put towards defending their hoards. Someone will always figure out a novel way that no one had anticipated before.
9/11 demonstrated that quite clearly.
Inflation, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end the benefits from the basic income will disappear through inflation and in the process the existing incomes and savings lose in value.
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of Basic Income schemes also propose a flat tax and/or a VAT (for simplicity, the UBI itself isn't taxed as income). The regressiveness of those taxes is offset by the UBI.
The UBI offers a good way of managing the money supply. You're putting money directly into the economy, then adjusting the tax rate to control the inflation/deflation rate.
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
My bet would still be on inflation. Let's stay with the rent example. Today, there are some rich people who could afford to pay more for rent but as they are few this does not increase rent prices for everyone. If everyone has more money there is no reason why rents should not increase overall.
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
The benefits are reduced costs to administer support services, eliminating negative incentives to work (UBI doesn't decrease when you work), increased mobility, improved economy. People can take more risks starting businesses or going to school or trying something new.
Maybe rents go down because people can move to less crowded places, which increases building and new business elsewhere.
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It has a long history, you might try reading about its conservative roots.
Re: (Score:3)
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It isn't about "fair", it is about "will this solve the problem you're trying to solve".
If you give everyone $1,000 a month, but average rents go to $2,000 a month, what have you solved?
If you then raise the monthly payment to $2,000 a month and then rents rise to $3,000 a month, again, what have you solved?
Re: (Score:3)
Paying people not to work...so we get more people not working....sitting around idle. Now, do they use their new found freedom to educate themselves, by essential things they haven't been, or start new businesses? Or do they sit at home and watch TV, buy toys they do not need, or start new drug habits?
If it is the latter, with 5 years of that lifestyle, they are unemployable. So if you are wrong about human nature, you have just signed on for their keep for the rest of their lives.
So could you please regist
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
You're a slave to that toxic meme "Protestant Work Ethic".
People like to be social, and people like to be involved, and people like to accomplish things. That has nothing to do with "having a job". In many cases, "having a job" interferes with all of that. It's only this increasingly outdated idea that unless you suffer and work hard, you don't deserve anything, that perpetuates the system we have.
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The protestant work ethic is responsible for the current wealth of our nation. Don't knock it too casually.
Re: (Score:3)
No, as UBI is phased in, minimum wage is phased out.
One way is to reduce minimum wage by $0.60 for each $100/month of UBI until it's at zero.
Minimum wage is to prevent people from being exploited because they need a job or they and their family die. If they no longer have to worry about survival, then you can have a much more fair free market setting wages.
If many people quit minimum wage jobs, those jobs will start to pay more.
Re:Inflation, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Change that to "income from capital" rather than "capital itself" and you have the real solution. Tax rent and interest income increasingly until it is impossible to actually profit just from owning things, and watch those worthless investment properties be sold off for cheap to whoever actually needs them for their intrinsic usefulness, and bam, you have a society of all owners.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
That's the universal argument against ever paying people more, and for the last hundred years it hasn't been born out once. Hell minimum wage used to be over $10 an hour in today's money and a middle class life was vastly more affordable than today. It's time that tired old corporate socialist myth was put to bed, it's little more than a scare tactic to convince people to continue socializing corporations' losses and low wages while allowing them to privatize profits.
Re: (Score:3)
new taxes on corporations
What, you mean like the current taxes on corporations that they don't pay?
The US has a 35% corporate tax rate. Remind me how many companies pay that rate?
You'll end up with no companies if you raise it, you actually need to lower it. Corporations don't pay taxes, people do. 100% of the tax that a company pays has to be collected from its customers. If it isn't, the company goes out of business.
Re: (Score:3)
"you assume that companies will just accept a lower level of profit."
Freely? Of course not freely. Of course they fight nail and teeth for that not to happen. What I say is that they *can* absorb it, so they can't do it is not an argument. And they certainly do, or else you'd see corporations closing doors instead of corporations reporting increased profits quarter after quarter.
"a net profit margin of only 5.5%, which isn't very interesting to investors."
Given that bonds are below 5.5%, such a profit ma
Re: (Score:3)
"Unless you're suggesting we go all Soviet and have government run housing?"
Except it is not Soviet the only ones that had government running housing: it was also Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Finland... just as they used to run telcos, healthcare, education, basic industries... and it didn't end up so bad as that was how they went out of the WW2 disaster in just two/three decades.
Re: (Score:3)
A few landlords owning all apartments and keeping supply artificially low must be made illegal. And the items must have price controls.
Price controls just mean I'm not going to bother building new apartments.
Sure, you have them in New York City, where all the land is built on, but you won't get anything new built with those rules.
Apartments in Texas are much cheaper, and we have no price controls. If the price of rent starts rising compared to costs, more quickly get built. However, a UBI distorts this because now everyone has more money, increasing demand. Sure, people will build apartments to meet that demand, to a point, until the bu
Unlikely prospect (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former academic (i.e., from a system where money was handed out based on `membership in a club', at least theoretically), I find it highly doubtful that this is going to happen on a large scale. I do think that it would be a great experiment-- the benefits of being able to eliminate toxic elements of the workforce without having to worry about their livelihoods alone might more than pay for this, from the perspective of improving the world we live in, and I also believe that we need a new economic model to deal with a world in which either technological progress outpaces the learning abilities of the average human, or otherwise the capabilities of `artificial intelligence', divided by cost, exceed those of the intelligence of a substantial subset of humans in economically important areas.
However, my impression is that the majority of people in power do not model the world in this fashion, but instead on ideas of power dynamics: who can decide what for whom. The prestige that comes with power is important to many members of that class, and (abstractly speaking) it needs to be reflected somewhere to satisfy their needs.
Universal basic income now has the problem that it substantially reduces the power inherent in today's real-life hierarchies. For technology people and artists, this sounds great, but for managers, politicians, and other "power people", this is worrisome, if not downright terrifying, as it reduces their leverage and prestige. Thus, I rather expect that anti-universal basic income propaganda will start reasonably soon if the idea is ever adopted on a larger scale (Finland and the Netherlands seemingly being the most likely candidates for that, at present, since the Swiss proposal seems a bit too ambitious to pass the voters' filter).
Hmm.. (Score:3)
10 PRINT "Hello world!"
20 GOTO 10
I thought that already worked anywhere.
Simplification or More Bureaucracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simplification or More Bureaucracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens if someone spends their money poorly, such as blowing it on drugs or gambling, and then they have nothing left at the end of the month to eat or pay their rent.
The same thing that happens currently when someone blows their welfare payment. The answer to your next part is yes, idiots make themselves homeless over this.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"What happens if someone spends their money poorly?"
Honest question.
What would you do to, say, your children? Would you give them, say, $1K/month and then say, "there: buy your food, rent a room, etc. and come next month for more" or would you provide them food, shelter, education and healthcare for free and then, maybe some pocket money on top of that for they to expend as they see fit?
Why shouldn't be exactly the same case for the population in general?
Experiments (Score:5, Insightful)
continuing the payments for between six months and a year
How is that an experiment on basic income? Nobody is going to really change anything in their lives for getting $1000 for six months. You would have to provide a lifetime commitment for it to be comparable to the basic income situation. Even then, you would need to make it a couple of generations, to see the effect in children that grow up with the knowledge that they won't really need to work, ever.
There was, if I remember correctly, a coffee company that offered a lifetime "salary" to the winners of a raffle. That was a long time ago. Surely there are more people in this situations, with some kind of unalienable lifetime stipends of one kind or another. Finding these people and asking them about the changes in their lives would be easier and more productive, in my opinion.
The UBI spiral (Score:4, Interesting)
In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income
Nations, i.e. governments only get their "wealth" from 2 sources: taxation or selling government bonds.
Any nation that doesn't want to get into hyper-inflation would never fund a day-to-day cost by borrowing, so this UBI would have to be paid for from the tax take.
However, the amount of tax: income, corporate, sales, that a government extracts from its citizens depends to a very large extent on them earning salaries and then spending their pay on the non-essential items that attract sales taxes. Also, corporation taxes are levied on the profits that companies make, generally from selling their goods and services. Once you have a population that chooses not to work, not to produce stuff and doesn't have the discretionary income from UBI to buy "luxuries", your corporate tax income takes a dive, too.
I doubt that a 1-year study is long enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. Certainly it wouldn't attract a representative enough group of subjects to be able to say how an entire country's populace would react. I'm just glad that this experiment is being tried somewhere else. Personally, I think that the money would be better used to ensure everyone had a job - that way they'd also feel like they had some worth to society, rather than just accepting handouts.
Start Trek or Elysium? (Score:5, Insightful)
The pessimist (realist?) sees the future as it was depicted in the 2013 movie 'Elysium', where the ultra-rich have just about everything, are completely corrupt & nearly completely useless, and walled off from the majority of the population. Meanwhile, 99.999% of the population lives in squalor. Sound familiar?
It's possible we'll have both realities, but unfortunately we'll need to get through the 'Elysium' economy before arriving at the 'Star Trek' economy. TBH, I don't think anything resembling a Star Trek economy is possible because of human nature... As bad as this sounds, I'd put my money on 'Elysium'...
What will really happen (Score:3)
Remember when we were going to eliminate the horrors of the mental health warehouses by shutting them down and opening up smaller, local homes for the mentally ill? We shut down the hospitals, then never opened the local homes. Those who needed help ended up on the streets with the homeless population.
Now we propose to taper off our hodgepodge of social safety nets and eventually replace them with a basic universal income. What I forsee happening is the taper, as that is politically viable, but then they never get fully replaced with an equivalent cash income, as that is politically too easy to oppose.
Re:What a fucking brain-dead idea. (Score:5, Informative)
That's the idea.
The UBI is a response to a feared future where there just aren't enough jobs to go around due to increasing automation. Fast food places are already introducing automated ordering systems so they don't need to hire cashiers, and just think how many drivers will be put out of work once self-driving vehicles are introduced on a large scale. If there aren't enough jobs, then some people by necessity will have to sit around doing fuck-all. The options are either to shame them with welfare payments and demands that they go apply for some jobs along with the thousand other candidates, or not pay them and see them forced into crime to keep food on the table, or try some sort of universal basic income scheme.
Re: (Score:3)
"Low-paying jobs will disappear unless UBI is set really low..."
If it's very low, then UBI it is not. But then, compare to the current situation where one can not stand a basic living standard out of a full time minimal wages job.
"People will probably stay unemployed for a longer time between jobs while trying to find the best one out there."
Probably yes. Given Maslow's pyramid, once I have basic needs covered I won't go looking for shitty jobs to cover my basic needs, right?
"Wages .. If someone has a "fr
Re:What a fucking brain-dead idea. (Score:5, Informative)
Except that only happens in a very small portion of cases. Basic income is just that. Basic. Just because I can "live" without working, doesn't mean I want such an incredibly shit-house "life".
Appeal to authority: I'm actually already in that position. I could quit my job tomorrow and be just fine from various investment income, but just fine doesn't get me to Vienna to visit my sister in July, or to the tip of Norway for a hiking trip like I'm doing in September. Fine doesn't let me go out to a wonderful Brazilian steakhouse for dinner. Fine won't upgrade my shitty video card which is struggling under the weight of Fallout 4, assuming that fine even pays for Fallout 4.
Yes there are bottomfeeding leeches in the world content with poverty and blowing all their welfare on booze while watching their shitty all TVs on a couch that smells of beer, sweat and vomit. But they are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Now a question for you: Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
Re: (Score:3)
Now a question for you: Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
I could live pretty well on that if it weren't taxed. I'd stay busy, have stuff, enjoy myself. I mean, with the two of us, and after taxes and whatnot, I don't make much more anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
I could live pretty well on that if it weren't taxed.
You could. Yet even if it were tax free that wouldn't cover the rent for many people living in many cities. $20000 / yr is close to break even point for me. The problem with any arguments on a fixed basic income is that some people may even be better off (the poverty line is something like $12000 in the USA and 10-20% of Americans live below it), while others that kind of money wouldn't even cover their yearly rent.
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Good, there will be a need for people who don't want a job, as there won't be enough of them for everyone.
Most people I know always want more, nicer stuff, nicer experiences, better food, nice clothes. If they can do some work to get that, they'll do it, even if their basic needs are met.
Re:An old Soviet joke ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Marxism was about the state owning the means of production and the complete abolition of private property. A Universal Basic Income is nothing more than shortcutting complicated welfare schemes by just paying eveyone a minimal survivable wage by default, something which the richest and most powerful nations on earth can easily afford, and which they will inevitably have to do now that there are permanently more people than jobs.
Either you create a permanent underclass of eternally unemployed people, annihilate the middle class and return to the ways of the Gilded Age where workers were paid pennies and lived dozens to a house while still starving, or you finally let go of the sickening darwinian idea that people must toil to earn their right to live even well into the age of automation and artificial intelligence.
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Even if it's not true now, it soon will be with automation and A.I.
Not really. For every 1000 jobs eliminated, only a few dozens will be created.
Re: (Score:3)
>For every 1000 jobs eliminated, only a few dozens will be created.
Kinda like how everyone involves in stables, horse shoes, and buggy driving are all out of work begging on the streets now that we have cars?
Seriously, that tired old argument gets drug out with every advance in technology.
Things change, people change jobs. The sky is not (and never will) be falling.
Re: (Score:3)
If you live somewhere nice enough that McDonalds and Grocery Stores can't maintain a functional staff, then what they are willing to pay is not in line with what it costs to live and work in your area. Actually, UBI might help them hire more easily.
However, in 20 years each McDonalds store will only have one or two employees. All of the jobs that you're talking about are GOING AWAY. The people who have those jobs now are completely fucked. UBI isn't about right now, it's
Re: (Score:3)
While what you say is true, the alternative is not really any more viable either...
Companies want to reduce their costs and one of the main ways to do this is to automate and reduce the number and cost of their workers, in the short term and in isolation this increases profits but think long term... If only very few people have jobs because most things are automated, then who's going to buy your products? Eventually the current system will collapse, UBI clearly isn't an ideal solution but then what is?
Re: (Score:3)
"Would you like to eat food produced by the Government?"
Why not? Bad food kills you. Letting a rabid enemy through your frontiers also kills you. Still you think a standing army is a worthy effort for your government but providing basic food and shelter is not?
On the other hand, please pay attention to that funny word I wrote: "basic". You still are free to buy from free market anything you want and can afford. What I'm saying is for government to provide potatoes, not for the government to forbide any
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70% is what high income earners would have to give in order to finance this. Taxes on the middle class would also have to rise sharply.
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Well, then you end up with 70% taxes on high income earners, QED.
With current tax brackets plus a 25% flat tax it would be impossible for someone even making infinite money to be taxed even at 65%. Even someone in the 99th percentile would still only be taxed around 44%. The vast majority of people even in the top 25% who actually pay something would see less than an additional 10% on their taxes.
The "super rich" don't have "ridiculously high incomes", they often don't have incomes at all, they simply are rich.
Only if you discount unearned income from incomes (which apparently you do), when if anything you should be counting that more. (In the long term, I would rather see only income
Re:Will be a bloodbath. Very evil idea. (Score:5, Informative)
They ran an experiment many years ago in Canada, called Mincome. Some of the results:
"Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school."
http://motherboard.vice.com/re... [vice.com]
Yes, a slight decrease in people in the workforce, but that were the young generation that attended school longer and mothers that stayed home longer to take better care of the children.
If those are be the results on a largest scale we've tried it so far then I don't see the problem (yet).
Re: (Score:3)
What do you mean by skimming? Everyone gets the same amount. The only fraud would be people who aren't supposed to get it (non-citizens or whatever) or people collecting on non-existent or dead people. Much easier than the current systems.
There's much less incentive to commit crimes. Your basic income is cut off while you're incarcerated.
Re:Y Combinator experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
What part of "experiment" was unclear? You might think you know what's going to happen, based on your jaundiced, deterministic model of human nature, but in a world of network effects and unintended consequences, we don't actually know.
One caveat I do have, personally, is that people should not get extra money just for having children. We don't want to encourage procreation for the sake of money. The world is overpopulated world, people should not hve children unless they can cover the cost.
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If there are 150M American adults eligible for this, and you pay them each $2000/month, that's $300B per month. Over a year, that's $3.6T.
No, its not going to cost that much because if you introduce UBI you raise income taxes so that, above a certain income threshold, what you gain in UBI you lose in tax. Preferably, you integrate UBI with the tax system so that most of UBI money never changes hands. The trick is tuning the tax system so that people in the transition from 100% UBI to 100% wages always have an incentive to earn more. But then (a) most countries already have a sophisticated redistributive tax system with various rates and th
Re: (Score:3)
On top of that, there are already lotteries where the prize is life-time annuity, or who have a stable unearned income from a trust, so the experiment is already being done. It's just a matter of tracking the participants down.
And also the real questions about a universal income are about the long-term impacts. If I quit my job, and in five years decide I'm no longer happy with the minimal standard of living and want to return to the workforce, what will potential employers feel about five years of idlene
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some one has to fix the robots and kiosks when they break. Some one has to write the base program, someone has to key in the inventory and set the prices, someone has to debug and QA test it to make sure it does not give out free stuff. The problem you have is that none of those are unskilled minimum wage labor. I guess you dont think that people can better themselves, or learn new skills that will be in demand.
The Car eliminated the horse as transportation, thus eliminating the blacksmith, farrier, and may
Re: The Swiss are way smarter than the Swedes (Score:3, Insightful)
The concern is not that there will be zero jobs or that people cannot improve themselves. The concern is that there will be too few jobs period.