I think basic income solves one of two important problems. The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work. The exact definition of work would have to be determined along with a way of measuring/enforcing it. This might not be easy. There is always more work that can be done. One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.
> The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time.
How is this a problem? Don't people solve that individually, by doing what has the most utility for themselves?
> I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work.
Either (1) you don't need this, because everyone will have work available that pays something that they are willing to accept for their time, or (2) such a requirement is mandated involuntary servitude.
In neither case does the requirement seem desirable.
> One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.
If basic income is conditioned on doing qualifying work, its fundamentally different from the unconditional basic income generally proposed, and instantly avoids the advantages flowing from the unconditional part of the proposal.
«The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time.»
What would you do with your time if you weren't required to work for your living? I'd spend more time writing fiction and videogames, personally. Others want to act, write poetry, create art, perform music, romance, raise kids, the list extends out to so many extremes of human expression and desire.
I'd probably read more books and play more videogames and attend more concerts, too. There would certainly be a lot more Netflix binging, in general. But the problem here is that people see such culture (leisure) as sinful/wasteful, rather than a goal, a possibly better human existence. If more people have leisure time, so what?
At some point we have to admit to ourselves (as this is deep in the American DNA at this point) that the Puritans were wrong and backbreaking labor is not the end all/be all of human experience. It's not a more "pure" life to work ourselves to death and it's not "guilty" or "irrational" or "wasteful" to balance some pleasure and leisure into one's life. People should not have to "earn" a right to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy: they should have food, shelter, safety, health. Why should "work" be an entry bar to claiming one's basic rights as a human being in a caring society?
The concept of "basic income" is that everyone gets it, regardless of qualification. If people want to earn income over and above that, they are welcome to: there will still be startups and companies and projects that will (need to) pay for labor. If people want to live on the bare minimum that "basic income" provides for them and spend the rest of their life in relative leisure, then let them. What harm does that do to society? If companies have such a great need for that extra labor they would be missing they can pay the value that that loss of leisure is actually worth and lure the "lazy" out of leisure through enough incentive.
If someone tries to leave beyond their means and uses "basic income" as a crutch they'll quickly find themselves dealing with the same disincentives that poor people already face: bad credit, collections agency, the prison-industrial complex.
Already productivity statistics are telling us that there are fewer jobs needed than people that exist in this country, and with increasing automation this trend will only get worse. We can't enforce 100% employment, and why should we? Instead, we need a solution for a (much) less than 100% employment world and punishing people with crippling poverty and debt seems like a far less useful solution than whining that maybe some people might find a way to take their basic income, find some shelter and a lifestyle that is sustainable under it, and binge watch Netflix for the rest of their lives without ever "working a job".
What you perceive as a problem here is a failed assumption: the Puritan belief that people only live meaningful (sinless) lives if they devote themselves to some hateful job and work to earn their way to a better life (heaven for the Puritans; a leisure-full retirement if they are lucky after putting their nose to the grindstone, in the case of the classic American middle class propaganda).
Sorry for the long rant here, but it's just something that I think we have a hard time talking about in America precisely because we've got a bundle of culturally foundational DNA that makes it tough to talk about without first attacking those foundational assumptions. Hopefully, maybe this helps explain what you are missing in the concept?
I also would have no problem figuring out what to do with my time. I would pretty much do the same thing I do today, both at work and for my hobbies. My hobbies of the last several years have ranged from triathlons, auto racing, ballroom dancing, yoga and cooking. But not everyone is like you or I. There are people who would choose to do something less constructive. The problem comes when people choose to do something destructive. This is potentially a real problem. I wish I had references related to this topic but I don't.
I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not contributing to society. I don't worry that everyone would be lazy. I agree we would still have startups and companies and advancement of knowledge.
The idea of basic income sounds good but would it really work in practice? This is what needs to be discussed. I am try to raise a potential problem as to why it might not work. (I am not the only one who has suggested this problem.)
From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.
I am in agreement with you about wanting people to have a fulfilling life outside of work. The definition of "work" would have to allow for people to live a fulfilling life and not be slaves.
> There are people who would choose to do something less constructive. The problem comes when people choose to do something destructive.
We have systems in society for dealing with people choosing to do something destructive; the idea that this is a problem that needs solved with BI needs, I think, more elaboration.
> The idea of basic income sounds good but would it really work in practice?
That question gets asked a lot, but no one really seems clear what the mean by "work".
> I am try to raise a potential problem as to why it might not work.
What, specifically, is the problem you are trying to raise?
> From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted.
The public process of deliberating on the features of a system that can work is the same process of building the foundation for it to be adopted.
> The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.
Many of the proponents of UBI are from the conservative half of the country, and "workfare" addresses none of the things that UBI proposes to improve compared to the current system.
«The problem comes when people choose to do something destructive.»
That's what we have disincentives such as the debt enforcement and the legal system already in place for. If someone spends all of their basic income on drugs rather than shelter/food, they likely commit a dumb sort of suicide or wind up in the prison system.
The point of basic income is that you should have (as with any income) the opportunity to make mistakes like that. For one reason, I don't want to stop someone from using all their basic income on alcohol, because maybe I'll have a nice job with good wages that meets my basic needs and the basic income goes straight into my budget line item that reads "Top shelf bourbon"... More importantly, basic income works best when it is unqualified and unmonitored and real money: it can have the most economic impact if yes, some of it is sometimes going to even the sketchiest of corner liquor stores. That corner store is still going to have a local economic impact.
Adding a work requirement doesn't stop someone from doing something personally destructive. (In some cases it is likely to incentivize personal destruction; a bad job can cause suicidal thoughts or more inclination to do drugs.)
Of course, there's the question of larger scale societal destruction beyond personal destruction: how you stop someone from spending all their basic income on gas to burn and pollute? Ultimately that's a larger failure in the way we operate our economy that maybe we should fix at the sources (we need a better gas tax; we need carbon cap and trade).
«I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not contributing to society.»
Then why would you need to bother micromanaging if any or all of them participate in any sort of "work"? Basic income says we don't necessarily need to redefine "work": we need to stop caring about it, stop policing it, stop letting the labor market enslave people and telling people that fail in the labor market (for any reason) that they are bad people and deserve the poor lot in life that bad luck or poor circumstance handed them.
A great prospective thing about basic income is that it increases liquidity in the labor market, making it actually a market where both sides (labor and employers) can participate as equals and bargain with some amount of fairness. If people don't need to work for a living, it means employers have to actually compete for their labor. If people have a fallback plan (I'll just live on my basic income for a while) they can more easily and more freely change jobs as they see fit.
Redefining "work" and "requiring" it loses some of the nice qualities of that potentially wonderful liquidity in the labor market.
«From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.»
I certainly wish we had more answers here. Basic income has been removed from American political discussions several times now, by painting it with the use of "Socialism" as a bad word.
We've already managed to get (and have a heck of a time defending every other election cycle) basic income for two particularly innocent and defenseless (used to be) minorities: the elderly and the disabled. We call it "Social Security" and it mostly works rather well, when we aren't cutting or gouging it. But the every eight years or so fights to even keep it in existence keeps us from even mentioning the opposite possibility: expanding it.
"Workfare" isn't the answer here for a compromise because we've also already got it, as a convoluted Frankenstein's monster of compromises: minimum wage, unemployment insurance, EBT/"food stamps", welfare. These are already "workfare" they all already requ...
We may disagree on whether to get people either money or money and something to do with their time as soon as we as a society no longer need it from them. On the other hand, I am firmly in agreement with you on wanting to see the the liberals/socialist and libertarians get together and work out a mutually agreeable solution to the problem. If only that could happen...
Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person. I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston.
I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.
I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I just don't know where to start.
The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how the elderly today are already coping with such issues.
Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name "Modern Monetary Theory":
> One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment
Mincome was not an unconditional basic income, which is what the recent "basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit program (though with perhaps lighter administrative overhead, since it was a strictly cash-benefit program with only outside income affecting grant eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social benefit programs.)
Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the unconditional aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each $1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has less reduction in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income).
> The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly)
Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to Social Security tax.)
Thanks for some technical distinctions. It's useful here to compare the boring reality with the ideal vision, which is again why these are useful directions to look.
Basic income probably couldn't be adjusted for cost of living differences or else a bunch of perverse incentives would be introduced. One of the things I like about a flat nation-wide basic income is that it would instead incentivize people to move to cheap areas and revitalize them. You could imagine a lot of rural areas and small towns being revitalized with a surge of young people experimenting with co-ops and semi communal living.
> Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person.
One problem is that are two versions: the conservative version[1] in which all social security programs are abolished and the current social security budget is simply divided among all adult citizens, and the socialist version[2] in which a "living wage" is financed by high taxes (and sometimes by printing money, although I'm not sure how seriously this is proposed).
The conservative version is revenue neutral, but the socialist version has serious inflationary problems that are rarely discussed and quickly turn into discussions of the merits of various price fixing schemes when they aren't outright dismissed.
> Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person.
There are many different proposals which tend to roughly share long-term goals but differ in short-term approaches.
> I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston.
What do you mean, "wouldn't fly"? UBI aims to ultimately replace most [0] other social safety net programs with a single cash-payment system which doesn't get reduced when people find outside income and isn't constrained in what you can spend it on, so that people that have basic support but can supplement with work without being penalized.
Most proponents do not see it as guaranteeing the ability to live comfortably on UBI alone in the most expensive places in the country to live.
> I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.
I'm not sure what you think the cities current per capita income has to do with either the cost or justification of UBI.
[0] Or possibly all, details will vary between different versions of the idea.
16 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadYou could just as easily say that about any major change.
How is this a problem? Don't people solve that individually, by doing what has the most utility for themselves?
> I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work.
Either (1) you don't need this, because everyone will have work available that pays something that they are willing to accept for their time, or (2) such a requirement is mandated involuntary servitude.
In neither case does the requirement seem desirable.
> One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.
If basic income is conditioned on doing qualifying work, its fundamentally different from the unconditional basic income generally proposed, and instantly avoids the advantages flowing from the unconditional part of the proposal.
What would you do with your time if you weren't required to work for your living? I'd spend more time writing fiction and videogames, personally. Others want to act, write poetry, create art, perform music, romance, raise kids, the list extends out to so many extremes of human expression and desire.
I'd probably read more books and play more videogames and attend more concerts, too. There would certainly be a lot more Netflix binging, in general. But the problem here is that people see such culture (leisure) as sinful/wasteful, rather than a goal, a possibly better human existence. If more people have leisure time, so what?
At some point we have to admit to ourselves (as this is deep in the American DNA at this point) that the Puritans were wrong and backbreaking labor is not the end all/be all of human experience. It's not a more "pure" life to work ourselves to death and it's not "guilty" or "irrational" or "wasteful" to balance some pleasure and leisure into one's life. People should not have to "earn" a right to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy: they should have food, shelter, safety, health. Why should "work" be an entry bar to claiming one's basic rights as a human being in a caring society?
The concept of "basic income" is that everyone gets it, regardless of qualification. If people want to earn income over and above that, they are welcome to: there will still be startups and companies and projects that will (need to) pay for labor. If people want to live on the bare minimum that "basic income" provides for them and spend the rest of their life in relative leisure, then let them. What harm does that do to society? If companies have such a great need for that extra labor they would be missing they can pay the value that that loss of leisure is actually worth and lure the "lazy" out of leisure through enough incentive.
If someone tries to leave beyond their means and uses "basic income" as a crutch they'll quickly find themselves dealing with the same disincentives that poor people already face: bad credit, collections agency, the prison-industrial complex.
Already productivity statistics are telling us that there are fewer jobs needed than people that exist in this country, and with increasing automation this trend will only get worse. We can't enforce 100% employment, and why should we? Instead, we need a solution for a (much) less than 100% employment world and punishing people with crippling poverty and debt seems like a far less useful solution than whining that maybe some people might find a way to take their basic income, find some shelter and a lifestyle that is sustainable under it, and binge watch Netflix for the rest of their lives without ever "working a job".
What you perceive as a problem here is a failed assumption: the Puritan belief that people only live meaningful (sinless) lives if they devote themselves to some hateful job and work to earn their way to a better life (heaven for the Puritans; a leisure-full retirement if they are lucky after putting their nose to the grindstone, in the case of the classic American middle class propaganda).
Sorry for the long rant here, but it's just something that I think we have a hard time talking about in America precisely because we've got a bundle of culturally foundational DNA that makes it tough to talk about without first attacking those foundational assumptions. Hopefully, maybe this helps explain what you are missing in the concept?
I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not contributing to society. I don't worry that everyone would be lazy. I agree we would still have startups and companies and advancement of knowledge.
The idea of basic income sounds good but would it really work in practice? This is what needs to be discussed. I am try to raise a potential problem as to why it might not work. (I am not the only one who has suggested this problem.)
From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.
I am in agreement with you about wanting people to have a fulfilling life outside of work. The definition of "work" would have to allow for people to live a fulfilling life and not be slaves.
We have systems in society for dealing with people choosing to do something destructive; the idea that this is a problem that needs solved with BI needs, I think, more elaboration.
> The idea of basic income sounds good but would it really work in practice?
That question gets asked a lot, but no one really seems clear what the mean by "work".
> I am try to raise a potential problem as to why it might not work.
What, specifically, is the problem you are trying to raise?
> From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted.
The public process of deliberating on the features of a system that can work is the same process of building the foundation for it to be adopted.
> The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.
Many of the proponents of UBI are from the conservative half of the country, and "workfare" addresses none of the things that UBI proposes to improve compared to the current system.
That's what we have disincentives such as the debt enforcement and the legal system already in place for. If someone spends all of their basic income on drugs rather than shelter/food, they likely commit a dumb sort of suicide or wind up in the prison system.
The point of basic income is that you should have (as with any income) the opportunity to make mistakes like that. For one reason, I don't want to stop someone from using all their basic income on alcohol, because maybe I'll have a nice job with good wages that meets my basic needs and the basic income goes straight into my budget line item that reads "Top shelf bourbon"... More importantly, basic income works best when it is unqualified and unmonitored and real money: it can have the most economic impact if yes, some of it is sometimes going to even the sketchiest of corner liquor stores. That corner store is still going to have a local economic impact.
Adding a work requirement doesn't stop someone from doing something personally destructive. (In some cases it is likely to incentivize personal destruction; a bad job can cause suicidal thoughts or more inclination to do drugs.)
Of course, there's the question of larger scale societal destruction beyond personal destruction: how you stop someone from spending all their basic income on gas to burn and pollute? Ultimately that's a larger failure in the way we operate our economy that maybe we should fix at the sources (we need a better gas tax; we need carbon cap and trade).
«I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not contributing to society.»
Then why would you need to bother micromanaging if any or all of them participate in any sort of "work"? Basic income says we don't necessarily need to redefine "work": we need to stop caring about it, stop policing it, stop letting the labor market enslave people and telling people that fail in the labor market (for any reason) that they are bad people and deserve the poor lot in life that bad luck or poor circumstance handed them.
A great prospective thing about basic income is that it increases liquidity in the labor market, making it actually a market where both sides (labor and employers) can participate as equals and bargain with some amount of fairness. If people don't need to work for a living, it means employers have to actually compete for their labor. If people have a fallback plan (I'll just live on my basic income for a while) they can more easily and more freely change jobs as they see fit.
Redefining "work" and "requiring" it loses some of the nice qualities of that potentially wonderful liquidity in the labor market.
«From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.»
I certainly wish we had more answers here. Basic income has been removed from American political discussions several times now, by painting it with the use of "Socialism" as a bad word.
We've already managed to get (and have a heck of a time defending every other election cycle) basic income for two particularly innocent and defenseless (used to be) minorities: the elderly and the disabled. We call it "Social Security" and it mostly works rather well, when we aren't cutting or gouging it. But the every eight years or so fights to even keep it in existence keeps us from even mentioning the opposite possibility: expanding it.
"Workfare" isn't the answer here for a compromise because we've also already got it, as a convoluted Frankenstein's monster of compromises: minimum wage, unemployment insurance, EBT/"food stamps", welfare. These are already "workfare" they all already requ...
I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.
I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I just don't know where to start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME
The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how the elderly today are already coping with such issues.
Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name "Modern Monetary Theory":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
Mincome was not an unconditional basic income, which is what the recent "basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit program (though with perhaps lighter administrative overhead, since it was a strictly cash-benefit program with only outside income affecting grant eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social benefit programs.)
Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the unconditional aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each $1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has less reduction in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income).
> The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly)
Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to Social Security tax.)
One problem is that are two versions: the conservative version[1] in which all social security programs are abolished and the current social security budget is simply divided among all adult citizens, and the socialist version[2] in which a "living wage" is financed by high taxes (and sometimes by printing money, although I'm not sure how seriously this is proposed).
The conservative version is revenue neutral, but the socialist version has serious inflationary problems that are rarely discussed and quickly turn into discussions of the merits of various price fixing schemes when they aren't outright dismissed.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-aren...
[2] https://www.popularresistance.org/the-case-for-universal-bas...
There are many different proposals which tend to roughly share long-term goals but differ in short-term approaches.
> I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston.
What do you mean, "wouldn't fly"? UBI aims to ultimately replace most [0] other social safety net programs with a single cash-payment system which doesn't get reduced when people find outside income and isn't constrained in what you can spend it on, so that people that have basic support but can supplement with work without being penalized.
Most proponents do not see it as guaranteeing the ability to live comfortably on UBI alone in the most expensive places in the country to live.
> I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.
I'm not sure what you think the cities current per capita income has to do with either the cost or justification of UBI.
[0] Or possibly all, details will vary between different versions of the idea.