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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

> There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people.

Could you clarify which people specifically you're talking about? I'm not trying to disagree with you. It's just that the main examples I'm thinking of are retired folks receiving social security and people with disabilities.

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That's a lot of people, and they shouldn't be left out of the discussion. Retired people and the disabled accomplish a lot of things. It's just that these are personal accomplishments.

Paying someone to not have to participate in the economic system, seems to me to force them to forever remain outside of it, unless they have a rare kind of motivation, that kind of motivation would mean they didn't need the basic income to succeed in the first place.

People still like to have more money. A job might well look more attractive if your basic needs are already covered and so you can afford to only work part time, for example. And it will certainly look more attractive if there's no monetary threshold you can cross that will yank your government benefits.

I'm not opposed to basic income, and I do agree that the dynamics you're presenting might actually happen, in some cases for some people.

I think though, that it's going to wind up being Just Another Government Program, if it were to be implemented in the US.

There's just not enough money around to give everyone an income of more than maybe a thousand dollars a month. You'd need to really change how government finance works in order to be more generous.

I don't understand what you mean by "wind up being Just Another Government Program."

$1,000/month seems like a highly reasonable amount. It's more than Finland is proposing.

I may have been too generous. By an order of magnitude.

The US has 320 million people living in it. $1000/month * 320 million is $3.8 trillion/year.

That, weirdly enough, is the size of the entire US budget for 2016.

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-republicans-pass-3-8-trill...

You'd want to look at state budgets too, since a lot of social programs happen there. Basic income is supposed to replace social security, unemployment, food stamps, and more. That's not a huge change to the number, but it's decent.

There's no doubt taxes would need to increase to fund such a program, of course.

> There's no doubt taxes would need to increase to fund such a program, of course.

Who would pay them?

Workers? It's not like everybody would stop working. The number of people content with $1,000/month is going to be pretty low.

I fail to see how that could possibly fly, politically. Everybody who works has to pay for everybody who doesn't want to work to just fuck around.

It's not qualitatively different than what we have now.

Also, everyone gets the checks. Some workers' parents will be living off them. Their kids in college. Their cousin who was crippled in a car wreck. It's not like they won't know people benefiting who aren't exactly lazy freeloaders.

The magnitude is different, and you shouldn't be ignorant to that detail.

Doesn't answer the question. Politics doesn't truck to reason.

I never said anyone should be left out of the discussion. I didn't even disagree with you (as I explicitly said). But I do think your position is vastly more complex to defend if these are the only two sample sets you have to base it on.

Part of the problem with things like disability pay is that it introduces a complex calculus about whether it's worth it to keep getting it or not. A basic income is designed to alleviate that. There are many situations where someone on disability is presently encouraged by the system to not be overly productive (even if they could be or might like to be).

"Paying someone to not have to participate in the economic system"

No, again, basic income is about the government providing an income to meet basic needs without any strings attached. The government isn't paying you not to participate, they are saying you may participate and how much is up to you without fear of starving.

I disagree with your second part. A good counter example is that if I had a basic income, I'd be much more likely to pursue a career in scientific research, particularly in the area of Marine Biology. I love software development but I also love biology. The big choice for me is that software pays very well and makes it much easier to support a family which is also important to me. Given an opportunity to have a baseline to supplement my income, I'd be vastly more likely to choice a career that allowed me to not only do right by my family but had a net positive impact on the world as a whole.

Devil's advocate. Doesn't that mean that you would stop doing something that people value and start doing something people don't value as much? I'm for BI but this makes it sound like you would do something that people don't want and that you might be worse at doing than your current job.

I don't think so, I'd say a different sort of people value the current work I do. People who are interested in making money over other pursuits. The people who really care about ecology/biology and advancing human knowledge there would put making money as second to the science. Therefore they tend to not have as much money. It's less about the volume of people that value something and more about the kind of people that value something IMO.

Many people are on physical disability who could still be doing most of the things that basic income is supposed to enable. To the extent that it limits them in some specific ways, if the basic income elevator pitch is correct, one would think that it would make what they can do even more likely to come out.

This is a very interesting point I hadn't thought of, worthy of some thought. (And that's all I'm saying. I haven't had the thought time yet.)

I think this might be part of the issue though - I saw another article about this plan that said people often _don't_ try to contribute because their welfare benefits are subject to them not doing certain things.

For instance - you get $X from welfare, you could make $Y doing some work despite your disability, but $Y < $X, and if you make $Y, the government won't give you $X - therefore there is no reason to pursue $Y.

Even if you don't have money, often if you're on disability anything that might show you aren't "so disabled" can stop it. Therefore even if you want to, there is really a strong reason not to try to do things.

That is what basic income is meant to really alleviate - there becomes no reason not to do other stuff, because it's unconditional - those already on welfare no longer have all those requirements.

I'm not saying it would be perfect, but I do think it would address at least part of this problem. I wish I had an actual study on the numbers of people that don't try to get jobs/be productive while on welfare because of the risk of losing the primary income stream they get from welfare, but I can't find anything. I have known several people in this situation though, and watching the system treat them that way was kind of heartbreaking.

"I saw another article about this plan that said people often _don't_ try to contribute because their welfare benefits are subject to them not doing certain things."

A good point.

But basic income is generally sold as an arts and hobby thing, where they're not going to make any money anyhow. Basic income participants who are going to take the money but not do a "real job" aren't going to go out and dig ditches or something.

Since this isn't a binary thing, we should expect to be able to find an effect if this is going to happen, even if disability isn't evenly distributed and even if certain categories are impaired due to welfare rules. Who's on disability making art or music or something who would otherwise be stuck in a job? Alternatively, show me a work of art or something from the cases of basic income that were tried that couldn't have been done without it.

(We'd really like to see a sufficiently strong pattern before we run this sort of experiment at scale, and we'd really like it to be somehow some appreciated work, but I'll start with asking just for one instance.)

If doing a little of this sort of thing does not produce a little of the desired result at this scale, there is no rational reason to believe that doing more is going to produce the desired result either. (Italicized words very important. It could indeed be the case that doing more would in fact produce the desired result, but there's no data to lead you to that belief rationally.) The rational belief becomes to discard the idea that basic income is going to be used for arts and music and stuff, because we can stop speculating about what people do under those circumstances and just look.

Because if basic income really is paying people to do nothing, it won't work at scale. We can't afford to pay everybody to do nothing. The economics would simply adjust such that the basic income is not a livable wage anymore via inflation mechanisms. (Which is basically one of my great fears; basic income combined with voting creates a one-way ratchet, and so far, I've heard no mechanism to even slow down the ratchet, let alone reverse it.)

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