Comment by summerdown2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by summerdown2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> A system like this will need to be very well monitored, it can help immensely to those in need, but if done unconditionally it will certainly encourage laziness in a sector of the society.

Thought experiment: If the overall effect of basic income is to make things better overall(1), does it really matter if some people become lazy?

(1) Through whatever metric you want to measure.

... To give some background, my question is whether the existence of laziness is a sufficient critique in itself. If things get better on average, but some people are enabled to sit around all day, is that really a problem?

I'm asking this because the UK government at the moment is constantly railing against lazy people taking benefits, as if it's self-evident that should be stopped. To me, this just sounds like the politics of envy and hate (though I admit I could be wrong).

Put another way: if a utopia involves some people getting benefits they don't deserve, would that be a bad thing?

Obviously, I'm not saying basic income will produce a better society. I think it might, but needs empirical testing. My question is more whether the existence of undeserving beneficiaries is sufficient to rule it out.

This assumes a static proportion of "lazy" or unethical people. I think the counterargument is one of moral hazard: if you reward laziness, more and more people will decide to be lazy.

There is also a motivational issue -- many people (I suspect) will find it harder to work for a living if they sense that their hard-earned money is taxed and given away to freeloaders.

But why would you equate "lazy" with unethical?

That's already an assumption that could be challenged. We now don't deem someone who's unwilling to work from sun up to sun down in the rice fields as lazy or unethical, but 300 years ago that might have been the case. Why? Because now a few people grow our food so efficiently that most people can afford to be "lazy" and work 40 hours a week in an office job, or at least an air-conditioned job.

But the rest of us pay the efficient farmers for that food. That's the difference.

what is unethical is to work 20 hours a week when you are perfectly capable of 40, collect 40 hours worth of pay, and let people who work harder take up the slack. That is patently unfair to the ones who work the full week.

Fairness matters.

> if you reward laziness, more and more people will decide to be lazy.

Potentially, but I'm still interested in my thought experiment. What if

a) It gets better, using some metric of better.

     at the same time as:

b) Some people are lazy.

Even if b) is a larger number than at present, does that matter? It doesn't to me, but my intuition is that there are some people who will not tolerate others being lazy even if that's the optimum solution.

I suspect that Basic Income will be unpopular in some quarters, even if the empirical results are that it works.

you don´t need an experiment, it has happened in southern Spain. Thirty years ago it was a very poor region, land was in hands of a small group of landlords. It really was necessary to give a hand to that region. It was not a free money help, they had to work a number of days at the fields, and then they were entitled to receive a help.

Fast forward 30 years, the system has been abused by the people (cheating, not even working the necessary days) and politicians (they lock the votes with those helps, socialist party has been in power for 30 years nonstop at Andalusia, PER has been one of the tools used to achieve that democratic kind of record). The regions is no longer that poor, but has not grown that much either (I am referring to the rural Andalusia, of course the cities and the touristic parts have a competitive economy). The problem is that northern Spain is paying for those helps, and people is fed up with that, as all that money has to be diverted from local projects. For example this sensation of (real) injustice is being used as fuel by the Catalan and Vasc nationalist parties, to ask for the independence.

That´s why I really think it´s that important to monitor this helps. They are necessary to help people to leave poverty behind, but if they are taken as a right to be enjoyed no matter what, people will no longer feel the need to work and give to the community. And after all somebody will have to produce that "right" and that will be and injustice too.

This is a different issue, I think. Your point appears to be that it needs monitoring to make it work. Which may well be the case.

My question is: what's wrong with people just sitting around being lazy?

If the system produced a reasonable outcome for everyone in the country, but you could still see other people being lazy, would this spoil it for you?

You are right, it´s better to have a small number of lazy people (with this minimum wage) in order to have an overall better society. This would apply too to the problem of prisons in the USA. They treat inmates as if they were animals, and then they complain when they behave as such.

It´s better to be less trigger happy, to treat everybody as a person, even when there is always the guy who is going to profit of that. But the addition of all the wrong doing will be vastly inferior this way.

My point is that this kind of programs usually are motivated by ideologies, fixed ideals on how things should be, looking at the world as if it were a fixed photography. People is people, and they´ll adapt to their surrounding, so the system must adapt with them. The problem is that usually the system is set, it works at first (as it was a good idea), and then it´s as it was written in stone. Till it starts degrading and giving problems, then it´s scrapped and condemned as a bad idea, and the cycle starts again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com