[nkoren]

It's not about the immediate cost. It's about the fact that conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

Listen to this investigation into Disability benefits.[1] Listen to how the people who receive these benefits genuinely need the stable income that they provide, but are then prohibited from working part-time, tutoring, even volunteering for their community, for fear of losing the only available form of security. Listen to how trapped they become by the system. For them, being trapped by a conditional benefits program is better than the alternative -- anything is better than starvation -- but it is still a dehumanising and self-perpetuating institution.

The flipside to making benefits conditional is that we require employers to provide social support (eg., via minimum wage, etc). By setting an expensive threshold below which employers cannot create jobs, we impose enormous costs on industry and minimize job creation. A basic income should go hand-in-hand with the elimination of minimum wage. By removing the requirement that jobs must provide base-level income support, we would enable the creation of more jobs.

Between eliminating the steep marginal tax rates on the poor, and removing the steep threshold to job creation due to minimum wage, we would eliminate the two biggest factors in chronic poverty traps. So if you want to do a real calculation on the costs of our current policies, be sure to include the cost to industry of the minimum wage, as well as the Net Present Value of the future costs of letting the current poverty-trap system continue to grow.

1: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...

[yummyfajitas]

...conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

There are cheaper policies than BI which don't do this. One example is Basic Job - if you need a job real bad the government gives you a really bad job.

This has no poverty traps, and (unlike BI) has no disincentive for work. You also get to avoid spending money on people who don't need it, and additionally society can derive some marginal benefit from the work people do (e.g. public spaces can be cleaner).

[nkoren]

Of course it has poverty traps. I live in the UK, where I get to see how the "workfare" programme creates poverty traps all the time.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by getting more education and practicing skills that are valuable to employers. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by taking part-time and piecemeal work to build up your experience. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

A government study of workfare programmes in the UK, Canada, and US[1] concluded that: "There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers."

Oftentimes the poor are those who most need to spend time taking care of children or the elderly -- types of work which are tremendously valuable to society despite not being part of the wage labour system. A basic job conflicts with that.

Furthermore, Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes. What you consistently miss in your argument against Basic Income is that it is something which everybody receives. Most people contribute to it, but all people receive a benefit from it. The "cost" is not the total cost of the programme, but the difference between what you pay and what you receive.

1: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130128102031/htt...

[yummyfajitas]

I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes.

Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Incidentally, your study merely shows there is very little evidence of anything due to workfare being poorly implemented and rapidly abandoned. For example, NYC had only 2800 people on workfare in 2003. Additionally, it claims that about half of people on workfare don't actually work and merely loaf about the work site (but presumably continue receiving benefits).

Obviously a BJ won't work if you turn it into a de-facto BI or welfare system.

[nkoren]

> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.

How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?

> Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.

So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.

  Job description   $/year   No. of people   Total cost
  Basic Jobber      20k      45,973,453      919.5B
  Supervisor        30k      3,831,121       114.9B
  Line Manager      40k      191,556         7.7B
  District Manager  60k      3,831           0.2B
  Regional Manager  100k     383             -

...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.

[yummyfajitas]

Going with your numbers, if a basic jobber costs $7.25/hour and they produce $0.30 worth of value, the Basic Job pays for it's own overhead. And of course, $1T < $6T.

I must commend you on actually thinking things through carefully and checking if, numerically, a policy is remotely plausible. It's so rare to see on threads like this.

[nkoren]

> of course, $1T < $6T

Your $6T number is false. Even in your strawman, the cost of the Basic Income would be $1T: $6T less $5T as a "cash-back rebate", due to the fact that every single person paying for the BI is also receiving the BI. This has been explained to you many times on this thread, but you keep ignoring it.

> if a basic jobber costs $7.25/hour and they produce $0.30 worth of value, the Basic Job pays for it's own overhead.

But a Basic Income would have $0/hr worth of overhead -- and it can be assumed that a person who is able to seek work and education will produce more than $0.30/hr of value anyway.

> I must commend you on actually thinking things through carefully and checking if, numerically, a policy is remotely plausible.

Thank you. I have an MBA from Oxford and run two businesses. I am very comfortable with numbers.

[nitrogen]

You don't actually need all $6T, because most people will be paying taxes that equal or exceed what they receive from BI.

You mentioned earlier that BI disincentivizes work. How so? It seems to me that it would not, because the basic income doesn't disappear the instant you start working even a little bit.

[timdierks]

Where's the calculation for how much it costs to give the $20K/person to the employed? Unless unemployment is above 96%, it will be more than the 4.2% overhead you hypothesize here.

[ThomPete]

You cant live from a job that the government doesnt already consider worhthy of paying a salary for.

It doesnt work and never have. Denmark tried this too it does nothing cause it doesnt solve the basic problem.

There is not enough jobs for all of us and will increasingly be so.

BI is the best solution we know of and we should try it.

[scotchmi_st]

Basic Job will likely leave you little time to train in an area where you could be more productive for society. Basic Pay is designed to provide you the time to do that. Sure there has to be a bit of trust that you're going to not just sit on your arse, but very few people actually want to do that (despite what a lot of people think), and it's psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life.

A lot of the comments here also ignore a lot of the factors that Basic Pay would provide which aren't directly measurable- increases to areas such as science and the arts which, while not tied to anything concrete like GDP or a country's economy, are indisputedly important to society.

[eanzenberg]

False.

BI would not provide increases to science nor art. It would dilute them. I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! There's a reason why only a tiny fraction of actors, musicians, and artists earn a living. That living is what society thinks of their art.

Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Note: A few years ago I was a graduate student (24k/yr living) in Boston who made time to play drums. You can express your art (or science) without a handout.

[llamataboot]

Funny, that $24k a year that allowed you to play drums (along side your graduate studies) is about in the range of what people generally propose for a basic income

[dllthomas]

Indeed, it's quite a bit more than I'd propose for a basic income.

[JoeAltmaier]

But the reality is that we don't NEED everybody to work, or soon won't. The comforts of life will become a civil right. What then? Old Puritan work ethic becomes obsolete. Any thoughts on 'right behavior' in a post-work economy?

[eanzenberg]

We're not anywhere close to this. For this to even happen we need everyone who can work, to work, right now. Implementing BI will delay your utopia.

[JoeAltmaier]

Close in America. Its rapidly becoming obvious that big business doesn't want/need even a fraction of the available workers. Folks resort to entropic work, where they sort out fad and fashion for one another while producing no useful product. A way to keep everybody busy in pursuit of the fantasy of 'full employment'.

[tripzilch]

> Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Trust me when I say that the truly deserving individuals with true disabilities do not want to sit on their asses, deservedly or not.

The part where it's "psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life" holds just as much for them as for everybody (and it's arguably even more important for them). It doesn't take a very long time of sitting on your ass to realize this, either.

[tripzilch]

Addition, it's too late to edit now, but reading back my comment, there should be scare quotes around the words "truly" and "true". I very clearly don't want to mean to imply I have the position to decide who is "truly deserving" or "truly disabled".

Just wanted to point out that a lot of people who can't work, generally want to, very badly.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition!

If you can't differentiate between capitalism and scientific peer-review as separate processes for separating wheat and chaff, why should I take your word on the ethics underlying fundamental economics, ie: that "he who does not work deserves not to eat"?

[eanzenberg]

Competition underlies capitalism.

Why do you think scientists want to publish in the best journals like science and nature? There is a healthy amount of competition in science too. It's what drives people to get into the academy, or get awards like the Nobel. It's what creates great science, but it also creates politics in research.

There's a number of parallels between capitalism and academic research.

[stcredzero]

So there has to be a requisite degree of suffering on the bottom-end to motivate the population to compete to better their station? Is that the society-scale version of "The beatings will continue until morale improves?"

Well, on a more serious note, it would be, "The subtle resource starvation will continue until you become more valuable and productive."

Would the "lower classes" in academia lacking health care result in more academic productivity? Actually, no one really disagrees about these things in an absolute sense. It's more where people want to draw the lines.

[ja30278]

Exactly so.

I don't understand why the 'Basic Job' idea doesn't get more traction. For all of the talk about a 'post work' world, I still see plenty of work that needs doing, every day.

[chongli]

Excellent! Give everyone a shovel. Half the people can dig the hole, the other half will fill it in again!

Seriously, make-work is a horrible idea and a gigantic waste of resources. Basic income frees people to live their lives and contribute to society in ways that are undervalued by the labour market such as writing, creating art and music or caring for children, the elderly or chronically ill.

How many people might choose to start a small business if they have the security of a basic income? It seems to me like a potentially staggering number of people.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. There's a fundamental conceptual problem with it:

Imagine I, for whatever reason, accept a Basic Job from the government. The job is, by design, bad. I'd rather not do it. So my dream scenario is that I officially hold a Basic Job and draw its meager salary, but instead of doing whatever work it supposedly entails I sit at home and watch TV.

This scenario isn't just an improvement in my life -- it's also an improvement for everyone handling me! The work doesn't need to get done; it's only there as a penalty for me, to encourage me not to draw the Basic Salary if I don't really, truly need it. So when I save myself some effort by not showing up for work, I also save my handlers effort that might have gone into overseeing me. Just as it's easier for me to stay home, it's easier for them to pretend I didn't than to track whether or not I did anything. So overseeing Basic Job is conceptually pretty difficult.

I don't claim that this is more or less difficult to deal with than the problems of any other welfare system, but it is an obvious and fundamental flaw in the concept, and might help explain why it's hard for Basic Job to get traction. On a shallower level, the concept of "pay someone to dig a hole today and fill it in tomorrow" (a.k.a. The Basic Job Concept), has been the go-to example for exactly what we don't want government to do for a long, long time. That can also make it difficult to get traction.

[yummyfajitas]

Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. BJ is work that is not worth doing at current market prices. I.e., picking up garbage in the park might be worth $4/hour, but minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If we spend $7.25 more and get $4.00 worth of value out of it, we lost $3.25.

If we are already spending $7.25 on welfare/BI and getting nothing in return, we are losing $7.25. If we demand that recipients work for their money we lose only $3.25. As long as the BJ workers are not destructive, we lose less money than we otherwise would with welfare or a BI.

Also, the jobs need not be "dig a hole and fill it in" - they can also be "walk around town and find potholes to fill tomorrow" or "there is garbage on the streets, go clean it up". It's not as if we have a shortage of things that would be beneficial if we did them. They just might not be worth doing at current prices.

[thaumasiotes]

This raises a pretty interesting question. Suppose I apply for a Basic Job at your institution, where all the work is sort of worthwhile, but not worthwhile enough to happen unsubsidized. What job do you assign to me? How do you choose it? I assume you're not choosing the "most worthwhile" of the jobs, because how would you know?

If the work is digging holes one day and undigging them the next, overhead here is low. If there's some other system behind what the jobs are and how they get filled, potential for corruption seems extremely high. Say I'm a Denny's and I'd rather not pay so much for my kitchen staff. Can I list all the positions with Basic Job and kick back to the administrator when he sends me someone?

Germany has no minimum wage and extremely low unemployment. What would their Basic Jobs be?

[drblast]

And how is that different than eliminating a minimum wage and providing a basic income, other that the basic job is much more complex?

[ycaspirant]

I think the idea is that if you already have a basic income, then you probably would not be motivated to work for such low wages.

[thaumasiotes]

The basic income goes towards making sure the worthless jobs don't get done anyway. It's more like eliminating the minimum wage and then using the existing welfare state mechanisms to float everyone's consumption up to a floor of $20k / year as long as they have a job.

[dllthomas]

"Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing."

Not at all. There are things that provide economic value that is hard to capture. Determining what those things are and how to value them is going to be messy, though.

[this_user]

This has been done in the German Democratic Republic. They had a "right to work" article in their constitution that was basically fully implemented. Almost everyone who could work except for older pupils and university students had a job. In fact, not working despite being able to do so was an offence punishable with up to two years in prison.

Arguably the only good thing that came of this was that equal pay for men and women was also assured by their constitution.

[3pt14159]

Basic Job is stupid because it leads to silliness like building bridges with hand labor instead of machines.

[yummyfajitas]

If labor is abundant and machines are scarce, why is this stupid?

[nkoren]

Because it would be cheaper to use a machine to build the bridge, give the money you save to the people, and then let them add value to society in some other way.

[fishy929]

But the economy doesn't want them, or is unable to utilize them under present conditions. Eating what you have in front of you is still more filling than waiting (or letting someone wait) for that next, bigger meal.

Of course, that also doesn't mean we shouldn't eliminate the incentives that contribute to inefficiencies being preferable. There are plenty of scenarios where people are employed to dig a proverbial hole and others are paid to fill it (patents and copyright enforcing intellectual poverty; interest on public debt, etc), even if each side spares no expense and might use the best tools available. If we were actually solving problems, prices would be going down and people would be happily unemployed (because there were less problems to resolve and less to need money to buy) at the same time as quality of life were going up. That is not what is happening.

[moggflunkies]

Exactly and better yet - don't take the money you ultimately "save" from the people in the first place.

[yummyfajitas]

So direct them to do that other thing for their Basic Job and use the machine for the bridge.

[Houshalter]

Because people would rather pay a small fraction of their wages to buy a machine to do their job for them. And they should. Basic income basically allows that to happen - you're employer gets the extra profit from automating you away, but the money is taxed and given back.

[dllthomas]

Because it means it's harder for me to get a job building those machines, which is how we make genuine progress.

[Tycho]

I think it's a sort of taboo idea because of Victorian work houses.

[jiggy2011]

Can you be fired from your basic job? What happens then?

[TrainedMonkey]

You are basically out of a job.