The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves).
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Like you say, these stunted people already exist. They already do everything in their power to minimize their work time, including trying for disability or welfare. UBI won't create more of them, and it won't end the ones we have, but it may add stability to the working poor.
How do you know that UBI won't create more of them? It's a common refrain, like with legalization ("anyone who wants to smoke weed is already doing it"), and I know several people who didn't smoke before it became legal, and are now smoking regularly. It seems reasonable to think that UBI would enable some class of people who would otherwise exert themselves, to no longer bother.
Because there's already social safety nets those people can use. And yes, absolutely, there are probably going to be groups of people who are barely working now that will stop, but given there's already means to not work, I can't see this being a huge group, and really, this is an optimist / pessimist face-off, which is sad, because that's how we probably see the possible outcomes too. The only way we can know if it'll work or not is for someone to try it - which, thankfully, YC is.
Not sure if you've ever used those social safety nets, but they are not easy to qualify for and/or sign up for, so only the stubborn and/or desperate actually take advantage of them. There are also disincentives, like misinformation, run-arounds, and social shaming. From what I've heard, these reasons are exactly why UBI is a better strategy than those social safety nets--and why we can expect more people to take advantage of them.
The modern welfare state (post-1930) did create a huge number of these stunted people. UBI will create many more, and it'll be a generational compounding effect, as the stunting increases through generations and we develop familities where no ancestor has worked for 3+ generations.
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
If there were no stunted people, why did the welfare state get created? And do you have any evidence of this increase, or did it just codify the problem that already existed?
>>All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
My uncle is a perpetual slacker and alcoholic. Last winter he got frost bite on his feet so bad that they ended up amputating both of them. He couldn't be bothered to get up and stoke the fire.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
Basic income solves the problem of how to get spending money to consumers. This is an important problem. If consumers don't have spending money, then the economy won't function properly.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
I also have a hard time buying that. Wouldn’t that mean that high tax countries with more welfare would be more probable to have big drug problems? E.g. Sweden does not have a bigger problem with drugs then the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale... (and of course you are not saying that social welfare is the only parameter)
I think it can be balanced by the amount of UBI. UBI should just be enough to make sure no one goes hungry or has to sleep out in the cold. That, in addition to public health care and education and access to libraries and opportunities for self-growth. Anything more can and will be misused. Anything less makes it too risky for people to experiment and fail. At least that's the theory I have in my head. How exactly to determine this amount fairly? I don't know.
Even assuming you had any facts to base your assumption, why is that a bad thing? There is nothing holy about work, especially work for the enrichment of others.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
It will probably do both. "There are people who will take risks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to with a basic income" and "there are people who will do nothing of value to anyone besides themselves if they have a choice in the matter" are not mutually exclusive.
I don't know why I couldn't upvote you but this absolutely. Also in India where there was universal basic income one of the positive side effect was that it reduced domestic violence as it gave financial freedom to women.
What most people don't understand is that UBI is not about giving free money. It's about giving the poorest of the poor a fighting chance to survive and shine in this unequal world.
Sure a certain percentage of the crowd will take advantage and be a "dole bludger" but these are persistent even in unemployment benefits schemes.
I know there's a lot of people for whom BI would help them do great things: I think this is a small minority that we in HN community are familiar with.
But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.
> Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).
Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.
For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Is there a way to build character and the grit to succeed without forcing people into extreme poverty?
Or a broader question is what do we want out of people? What values do we want them to have? What's the most efficient way to teach them those values? Poverty is pretty expensive. Is poverty so important to our society that it's worth paying the price?
"For example, sugar tastes sweet because we evolved in a world where calories were extremely scarce. Sex feels good because children are the continuation of humanity. Work seems important because, throughout much of history, we benefited from having more labor. But in modern times, we have artificial sweeteners, birth control, and hobbies."
How can we hack human society to take advantage of what we evolved to feel good about?
I can appreciate your intention, but unless you really believe that 10,000 monkeys can type the complete works of Shakespeare, the "big swings" you envision have to be informed by some level of education, morality, and social sensibility. Basic income alone is not the solution.
A basic income will only cause inflation if the amount is too high.
The problem is that the economy won't produce what consumers don't have the money to buy. So we need a way of getting sufficient spending money to consumers to activate the economy's full sustainable productive potential.
A properly calibrated basic income is exactly the amount that would get us there. It allows consumers to receive the full potential benefit of what the economy can provide for them.
Inflation occurs when the level of consumer spending outstrips production. If you set your basic income too high, then you'll get inflation until the level of consumer purchasing power falls back in line with the economy's productive capacity.
But the full benefits of the basic income are still there. The fact that we underwent a period of inflation doesn't change the fact that the economy would now be producing at its full potential for consumers.
The general price level in the economy is arbitrary. In the end, any price level is just a redenomination of any other price level. What's disruptive to the markets is when the price level changes. So the challenge is to figure out the level of basic income that's consistent with our current price level. This will allow us to transition into the smoothly.
We can't know the optimal amount of basic income ahead of time. It's also true that the economy's productive potential changes over time. So the only sensible way of determining the appropriate level of basic income is to continuously calibrate it algorithmically. You can know you've reached your optimal level of basic income when you get to a point where the central bank won't be able to keep prices stable if you increased it any further. In other words, we reach the limits of monetary tightening.
Depends where it comes from. If it's just printed by the government, yes. If it's taxed and redistributed then in theory no, but accounting for all the incentives that taxes create on both sides of the transaction is tricky and the result in most cases is "unintended consequences."
The idea that a tax will prevent inflation is an intuition that a lot of people have, but it's not correct. If your basic income is going to cause inflation, then a tax is not going to help. What matters is the level of consumer spending and the level of production that the consumer spending is chasing.
If you're curious, I've written a few blog posts about this:
I have to admit, I was going to post this - but it's probably a very polarized opinion.
The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit.
When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful.
Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class.
I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network.
I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds.
Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.
For sure - you have connections to money which can help fund your startup.
The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process.
I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking.
I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job.
Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly.
So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!
>I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time...
This is what really gets to me. Those companies will go bankrupt, the investors will lose out, the employees will get laid off, and the founder will have paid himself $300k/yr for those 5 years of fiddling around with nonsense and playing with other people's money, as he goes off to the next venture and spouts platitudes of success. There's absolutely no connection anymore between actual business success. Gaining "funding" is seen as the end all be all goal, and anything after that is just whatever.
And I think the reason you see less diversity here comes down to a class divide in moral values. No working class person can possibly even comprehend thinking like that. It comes off as completely sociopathic. Yet there is a class of people who are perfectly comfortable doing it, and we just let them for whatever reason. It starts to make you understand where class based revolutions have come from in the past.
Don't get hung up on the investors, aside from the f&f's class (who should know better to never lend money you can't afford to lose). Most investors know the risks, spread it appropriately and get tax advantages so that a loss results in a financial hit equal to small proportion of that loss. If anyone feel sorry for the tax payer, but then again you're paying for job creation, so swings and roundabouts.
A far from incidental detail. But is there sourced information available about his parents' actual income level?
We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling:
For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
The New Yorker interview said his mother was a dermatologist, so I would tentatively assume his background is upper-middle-class. That's obviously an advantage, but then, most children of such families don't become rich and famous either.
It definitely takes years. I went back to school 6 years ago and graduated 3.5 years ago, I optimized for financial security (went to community college followed by the cheapest 4-year available, worked 40+ hours a week throughout, went into a high-paying field), and I've only recently gotten to the point where I'd consider myself financially secure enough to easily take risks. 4-5 years is probably a reasonable lower bound in those cases - you could maybe get there a bit faster if you somehow land a job at a FAANG out of school, but good luck with that.
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success?
it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples.
and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success?
No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
The movie Gattaca covers this concept quite directly - I think ironically because it frames the problem as one the individuals involved had no original say in.
Am I the only one who finds the concept of privilege resentful?
It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.
It just plays into the classic class warfare theory that seems to be common these days.
It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
In the end though it only hurts those who believe in it because those who believe in it also believe that it is a waste of time to work hard, be innovative etc because it will only lead to failure. So they never try. People also use it as a way to justify why they are poor or unsuccessful...not their fault...it is the privileged that made them poor! Their other political views will mainly focus on "economic justice" like more regulations on successful businesses, higher taxes for the rich, welfare programs for the poor (basic income basically a dream come true in their eyes) and so on.
Seems to be a very popular view these days among young people.
> It basically boils down to essentially being if you are successful then it directly because of your privileged class...not from your hard work or skill. If you are unsuccessful or poor then it is because the privileged class is holding you down and preventing you from being successful.
This is a completely incorrect idea of what people are arguing privilege means.
Privilege is a step up on the ladder. It doesn't get you the whole way, and someone without that bonus step can still get up the ladder, but it changes the difficulty somewhat.
The idea is not to "feel bad about" being male, or white, or having four functional limbs. The idea is to recognize that these characteristics - which others can't "strive" towards - may give us advantages that aren't earned.
If I suddenly became black, and nothing else about me changed, studies have shown I'd likely be treated differently by police, potential employers, medical facilities, etc.
Recognizing that fact may make it easier to combat. Perhaps the next time I interview a woman I might be more conscious of the fact that what I'd perhaps have seen as "assertiveness" or "confidence" in a male candidate is being noted as "pushy" or "bitchy" in the female one, and back off from that assessment somewhat.
Yeah, I really would too. It always irks me when some highly successful businessman gives a talk about "do what you love and you will find success". As if billions of people before him that weren't particularly successful hadn't already tried that.
Sure but just being wealthy is more than enough and if you can get VC money that kinds of covers your base.
Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire..
Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"
