Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The problem here is what will happen if basic income means that costs for things like garbage collection start to explode.

People think that company profits on a per-employee basis are something like a factor 10. In practice, for the best companies in existence (think google) it's a factor of 3 or so. For most companies it's much lower 10% would be a lot (hiring is already very expensive, just try it). This number is called efficiency of the economy and it's an upper bound on how much more money you can give any significant group of people (assuming labor costs dominate, which is currently true). Of course you could give them more by law, but it would simply result in massive price hikes for everything until we're back in the current situation.




> The problem here is what will happen if basic income means that costs for things like garbage collection start to explode.

Or, as I think will soon be happening, robots will do it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: