[jerf]

"Basic income mean huge changes"

I have to admit this alone is enough to give me pause. The logic goes something like: "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. We can therefore take this to change our current social system and distribute the wealth more widely. Hooray, we fixed things!"

But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system. We have no guarantees that the next social system will produce the same amounts of wealth. This is a silent assumption that most advocates seem to make, and it is completely unjustified. Despite the vigorous handwaving, it doesn't take much Econ 101 to guess there's a darned good chance it will produce less. But, if it produces less, now we're distributing less wealth. Whatever social effects may occur when that happens, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to be happy puppies and rainbows.

If one could assume a steady-state and that the effects of the first year will be the only effects ever, it's all fun and games. But the second and third order effects seem unlikely to produce a happy society, or even necessarily one that is still generating wealth at anything like our current pace.

The most popular handwave seems to be "Well, we can just pay people more to do the things we need done... and look, now they're getting paid more to do these things, so it's a win! Hooray!" but, well, follow that through to its logical conclusion... a society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society. Poorer in the same wealth that we're trying to redistribute. And given that the price has risen, it's also a society that is getting less of its critical needs.

Sure, the first year of basic income is fun and games. But what does the twentieth look like? Or the year that you have to claw it back because the society no longer has the wealth to provide it? What does it look like when 78% of the culture votes for a larger "basic income" every year? Basic income is probably incompatible with democracy in the long term; what are we going to do about that? Basic income, democracy, and unrestricted immigration from poorer places are definitely incompatible with each other, what are we going to do about that? (Given that we already see plenty of politicians with incentives to legalize immigrants so they can have their votes, this is a huge concern.) What does it look like when a natural disaster strikes New York and society is out billions or trillions of dollars? You have to think about more than the first year, and you have to think about what real people will do in reaction, and what real people will do in reaction to those reactions, and so on and so on. Yes, clearly, Star Trek people do great on something probably quite like Basic Income, but that doesn't prove much.

And I'm quite concerned that this is something that from a societal point of view is not something we'd ever be able to remove if it did become infeasible; I suspect that the populace would happily ride it into straight-up social collapse before giving it up. We may be disturbingly close to that scenario even before we try "basic income".

This logic goes flying out the window if we can make robots that "just work" and can provide for us... but we're not talking about waiting that long right now, are we? We may have no practical choice but to suck it up until then. (And ye gods is there probably a thin line between a robot economy smart enough to provide for us without us doing much, and a robot economy smart enough to simply dispense with us entirely.)

[stefantalpalaru]

> "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. [...]"

In Europe the main problem in agriculture is overproduction so farmers sometimes get payed to leave some land uncultivated and hard limits are imposed on the production of milk and on the import of bovine meat. This is not a place where we'll starve because everybody will start painting and sculpting all of a sudden.

[zhemao]

Of course we won't starve, but just having enough food to go around is a pretty low bar for a society in which people can live comfortably. The working classes in the developing world today generally don't starve, but no one would say they have particularly comfortable living conditions. What jerf is saying that, in the absence of full robot automation, a society in which we have guaranteed basic income will make us poorer. The question is "how much poorer"?

[infinite8s]

There are a large number of people in the 'working' class (at least in the US) who are struggling daily to make enough money to be able to feed a family. They aren't starving as yet, but it just takes a small unfortunate incident to push them over the edge into spiraling poverty.

[conanbatt]

BI requires lots of experimentation, cant go from 0 to BI nationwide in one day.

The "wealth creation" argument is flimsy, but recognizing that the consequences of BI are unknown is not.

Also, i found this phrase really upsetting: "A society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society"

It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery. I can assure you that all low-end jobs like serving burguers, cleaning up toilets, and the sort are not doing by people choosing what they want to do from assorted options and incentives. They have no other choices, its doing that or starving. If you are not cleaning toilets, then you have all the incentives to go against BI, becuase you are way more likely to have to do your own sandwiches, clean your own office, serve and cook your own food, etc.

I find it dignified that people can choose that they want to do, and very much like the slave owner sucked up his loss of stature, middle-class and upper-class should suck up to not having wage slaves cleaning up after them.

[jerf]

"It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery."

It would have been wrong, though; slavery is an abuse of power to force people who could otherwise be very productive members of society to do relatively low-value tasks. I'm pretty sure most historians agree that slavery was either not a net economic win, or on its way to not being an economic win, by the time it was abolished.

You then sort of prove my point, by describing an economy in which apparently nobody runs any restaurants at all, and apparently you're going to do your own cooking, cleaning, etc. Yes, that's a gloriously hippie paradise... it's also a poorer economy. You've just celebrated that basic income will produce a poorer economy. And that's not my problem. That's your choice. We all have different values. The question is, where is the wealth for basic income going to come from if the economy just got poorer than it is today?

There's no free lunch. A great deal of the "wage slave" jobs are also where a lot of the basic value of the economy is coming from. Indeed, isn't this half the point of the people on this page, complaining that the "real" value creators aren't getting properly compensated for it? If we tear into those, where is the stuff going to come from that we're supposed to be giving out to people as part of their basic income? It does no good to hand people a "living wage" if there's no longer anything to purchase with it. I'm not sure basic income advocates have deeply internalized the idea that for any economic transaction, there has to be two sides, and there's no Infinite Magical Grocery Store that will always be there, regardless of what we do to the economy. Replacing all the scut work with musicians and painters is a very sweet sounding goal, but where does their poop go?

It would be supreme (and probably very, very deadly) irony if we institute a "basic income" because we're "so rich", only to destroy the very wealth we thought we had in the process. This may not be what happens, but I'd like to see a lot more careful analysis based on real psychology and a few very careful trial runs (yes, I know about the tiny ones that have been done) before I'd even remotely support it. The risks are gigantic, and there's probably easier and less risky ways to mitigate the problems than this.

[conanbatt]

I dont see the distinction you make between slavery and wage slavery. Why is it so clear to you that the first one was detrimental to the economy , and the second one isnt?

People flipping burguers could be doing something a lot more producting than flipping burguers as well.

Also in terms of poorer economy, I think we dont see eye to eye on the definition of it, because if you consider the loss of wage slavery work as a poorer economy, you should also see that for old fashioned slavery. The colliseums closed after there were no slave-gladiators, so abolishing slaves did contribute to a poorer economy.

Continuing on that, this is why I found that phrase upsetting: "A great deal of the 'wage slave' jobs are also where a lot of the basic value of the economy is coming from"

If we admit to ourselves collectively that our economy functions thanks to people that have little or no options, there is a very small difference than running a place with slaves.

In the form of a question, if you had a cotton farm that could only work because you had slaves you could work to death, and slaves are taken away from you and you go broke, what is your feeling about that business?

And if you have a burguer joint and it only works because you have people that are very cheap to hire to cook the burguers and clean the place up, and once they want higher salaries you would go broke, what is your feeling about that business?

[bausson]

The objective of basic income is not to increase everyone's wealth, but to increase overall quality of life.

Restaurants wouldn't disappear, but it would be a bit more expensive. Also, I suppose restaurants which treat their personal badly would quickly disappear. (You can say that's wishful thinking, but the lever effect would be quite effective against those).

If you really love your job, and that's everything for you, ok, not much of a change, you may even get a bit less money. Chance is that you work with people who enjoy it too, and basic income wouldn't be much of a change for you.

But if you have a side project you want to launch, it could be what makes the difference, even if it wouldn't be possible in the current economy. Or you could take a few years off to raise your children (or help them go through a difficult period, I heard it can happen).

"Established" company have a lot to loose in that proposal, mainly those we depend on cheap labor. But it would also create a lot of opportunities on the market, so the economical aspect wouldn't be that bad.

What kind of opportunities? Let's say, if people have a bit more free time, child education through fab-lab would be pretty neat (complement or replacement of school, IDK). This is just one "on the spot" idea, it could be done today... if people took the time, or could take it.

[jerf]

I'm not saying the point is to make people more wealthy... I'm saying, the society must be wealthy enough to afford it. The food comes from somewhere. The clean water comes from somewhere. Wealth must exist to be redistributed.

Frankly, "look at all the wonderful things that people will do when they're freed from having to do the things they are doing today" is the scariest thing about it. I'm a programmer. A pretty decent one. The exact sort of surplus-generator that this scheme is predicated on. I go to work and I enjoy my job, but let's be honest, if I could choose how I spent my time, it is not what I would do. I would do something fun and personally interesting, like my outliner (read: "yet another f'ing text editor"), or one of my video game ideas.

This is MURDER to the basic income idea. It only works if enough of us choose to keep working away on things we don't really want to do, and there's a real tension between "a living wage"... that is, by definition enough to "live" on without a job... and something less than that, which is hardly basic income.

How many people are advocating for a basic income because they really think it's just, and how many people are just itching to use it as a way of not having to work anymore (but use the high-minded wealth redistribution as a cover for advocacy)? Even on HN, I rather suspect there's more of the former than we'd like, more people dreaming about how they could easily live frugally if they could not work at all... and we're the workaholics of the world if ever there were any, we crazy programmers. If this is put to a vote, how many millions of people would be just voting to never have to work again? We're not that rich that we can take that yet.

The exact reason why we can't all just do what we want, today, is that "what we want" doesn't add enough value to society on its own for us to be able to afford it. If we could live in a glorious wonderland where we just did what we wanted and we all came out collectively wealthy in the end, we wouldn't have to try to create some "basic income" idea, we could just do it right now... but we can't. Our desires don't overlap the needs of the world well enough. That's true even here in the programming world, and if anything in the entire spectrum of work would work like that, it's our world, with open source and feasible free collaboration between thousands on single products. I can't see how to make the numbers add up... and that is what we have to do if we're going to make this work, not rhapsodize about how wonderful it all could be in Utopia if only we got together and wished hard enough.

[infinite8s]

The whole reason for the recent resurgence in BI is the realization that automation is fast removing that bottom rung of scut jobs. Obviously, BI won't work if nothing replaces the unpleasant jobs that no one would be incentivized to do anymore.

[attenuator]

>But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system.

Social systems have been rewritten for a very long time. Colonialism, manifest destiny and whatever else springs to mind.... all of these things rewrite social systems. The new script is the purview of powerful.