[spacehome]

I haven't really made up my mind about Basic Income, but one thing I never heard advocates of Basic Income talk about is that incentives matter to human behavior. BI will tax people who work more and give handouts to those who don't. This disincentivizes working and incentivizes not working. For example, the increasing numbers of people on Social Security Disability Insurance seems like a similar phenomenon and is not a good omen. [1]

[1] - http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends/...

[learnstats2]

We don't know for sure how Basic Income will incentivise people, but I believe that it takes away a lot of negative incentives.

People at the moment are influenced by the need for enough income to support themselves securely. Poor people spend all of their mental energy on this problem, and middle class people spend some of their mental energy ensuring they don't drop into the poor category.

This has all sorts of negative implications - people rationalising work they do that is bad for society; people making sure they meet the criteria to receive SSDI.

If you give everyone Basic Income, there will presumably still be people who seek to play the system, but you remove a lot of those automatic negative incentives.

If people can see work as a way of earning luxuries, rather than as something they are dependent on for personal security, there may be some people who choose not to work. It may be that non-prestige jobs (such as cleaning) have to be paid higher.

But, I feel 100% comfortable with that. I think non-prestige jobs are woefully unfairly paid, as it is.

On the other side, people who want to work on something transformative will have more opportunity to do so, if they don't have to take the risk of not being able to provide for their basic needs.

[ebiester]

1. A basic income doesn't mean that you have enough to fulfil all dreams. There will still be reasons to earn more income, especially with those who are capable of delivering value.

2. There is a fundamental assumption that we are at a technological stage where work can be automated. If there are not enough jobs that someone a standard deviation below average intelligence can fulfil, we could be coming upon a societal disaster.

If instead, we incentivize automation by saying, "no job is a superior alternative to an easily automatable, low value job where people are treated as disposable," there is no significant conflict. If people with low skill do not choose to work, and their skills are automatable, it is only our moral qualms that get in the way.

As it is now, significant portions of the population cannot provide enough value to ensure their subsistence, minimum wage or otherwise. Is it only our morals that require some work from them?

3. Incentivizing not working also means incentivizing spending a year on an idea that could advance society, or works of art and literature. Harry Potter was written by someone who decided not to work. There might be major value to society that we're losing because we don't have a basic income.

[unclebucknasty]

What's interesting about your point 3. is that it speaks to these archetypes we have defined for people.

We have so ingrained in our minds that a person's value to society is defined by his/her economic contribution in the traditional sense (i.e. via a job or business ownership), that we assume that a person who does not work has no value by definition. In fact, they are even morally deficient. So, how can they possibly be of a quality/character as to contribute anything to society via arts, ideas, or otherwise?

It's a sneaky bit of circular logic that, for many, argues against a BI.

[ebiester]

There's even more to it -- it's that the only thing of value to society is that which can be traded for money.

[unclebucknasty]

Indeed. When companies that otherwise have the wherewithal choose not to pursue cures or vaccines because there isn't enough profit in it, larger society barely pauses to register the true awfulness of such a calculus.

But, this is the type of stucture that we've engineered to allocate the world's resources--one where human value is malleable and always somewhere along the economic continuum. It's the same structure that precipitates the need for a BI and, sadly, also produces the minds that resist it.

[dagw]

This disincentivizes working and incentivizes not working.

Some might see that as a good thing. Being forced to do something you hate for fear of not being able to feed your family is probably not healthy for anyone involved. Imagine if that person could quit their job and spend time with their kids instead.

Imagine the passionate painter or musician being able to paint or make music full time without worrying about having to pay rent next month.

Imagine the corporate programmer being able to quit his job and work 6 month on that open source project he always wanted to do.

As someone who actively enjoys his job and looks forwards to going to work most mornings, I think it would be kind of neat if more people could feel that.

Sure some people will just use their new freedom to drink beer and watch TV all day, but perhaps those people weren't contributing too much to begin with, making the net loss minor.

The main 'down' side would be that getting people to do 'shit' jobs will get harder and more expensive, but I think that might work out to be a reasonable price to pay.

Personally I'm not really convinced the numbers add up economically to make it actually viable, but I see it as an interesting utopia.

[spacehome]

We're all "forced" to work because living requires resources. This is not an effect of civilization - wild animals work harder for their livings, and have nasty brutish lives to boot.

If the corporate programmer is willing to live a very frugal life (See Mr. Money Mustache, Jacob Lundfisker, etc.), then it won't take him or her very long at all to build up a 6-month cost-of-living fund. Perhaps it takes working three months to six months? (I know it's possible because I've done it.) And I'm not sure it's the job of society to support artists in their art independent of its value to society. At least I know I'm not interested in supporting it in my taxes. So I'm not so sure these examples are persuasive.

However, I do agree that it will become much harder to get people to do 'shit' jobs. One side effect is that it would give a serious additional kick towards automation, and so long as BI is implemented, that's good thing in terms of elevating the human condition.

[transfire]

You are right, but only because most BI supporters advocate too high an income. Keep the equivalent down around a part-time min wage job, and it would do wonders for the economy with little disincentive.

[maxerickson]

That's more or less what the 'basic' is aimed at, part of the idea is to set the income at a level that has a limited impact on the incentive to work.

Chart 3 shows quite some growth since 1980, but the per year increase is not exactly astronomical (and the page mentions that there are trends not accounted for in the data, such as the aging of the baby boomers).

It's also reasonable to expect a contingent benefit to have more impact on the incentive than an uncontingent benefit.

[ThomPete]

Basic income is not wealthy income you wont' be getting that much, just enough. Furthermore with unconditional basic income you will always be incentivized to work even if just for a month or a season (since you are not taxed on you basic income)

[ribeh]

We do have some evidence:

http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/6335682

[ZeroGravitas]

One of the key planks of basic income (and the similar negative income tax) is to better align incentives so that working more always pays more (which it often doesn't today for the poorest due to poorly designed schemes that phase out benefit too quickly).