I'm generally against the notion of a basic income, as I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything, but I am certainly not against the idea of trying it in small experiments and seeing what happens.
And as for these experiments, I wonder how many of the test subjects were low-income prior to the introduction of basic income?
The fear isn't that people with a so-called 'Protestant' work ethic will stop working, is it? The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working.
If you want to get better data, and more specifically, if you want to alleviate the concerns that most people have with a basic income, give a poor black or latino community a basic income and monitor what happens. If the experiment turns out to be a success, do it a couple more times, each time in different locales across the country. That's the data you need if you really want to make a basic income a political possibility. Everything else is just half-measures.
Well we currently have welfare, and we know that there are cases where that prevents someone from taking a job because it will be mean a net loss. Basic income will be an improvement in this regard at least because there is much less disincentive to work if it doesn't mean losing something.
You see that? That right there - that's tantamount to reliance on a half-measure, and people aren't going to buy those weak arguments.
If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data. This is something which can be tested at small scales, and relatively cheaply. We should definitely do that, scaling the test size up as we go. Hell, a private organization could do this. Where's George Soros when you need him?
You don't need to jump down my throat with your obsession with data. You won't get data until someone decides it's worth trying, and the broken-ness of the welfare system is an pretty good basis to justify such an experiment. I'm sure if you dig up the data on welfare it can be used somehow to satisfy your statistical justification requirements, but keep in mind that public opinion is not as easily swayed by a good dataset as engineers are.
I'm not suggesting the necessity of small-scale experimentation solely for the purpose of convincing the public that this is a good idea, I'm also suggesting it for the purpose of convincing myself that this is a good idea.
As I said, I'm skeptical that this idea will work. It would however be fairly trivial (and cheap!) to carry out an experiment which could convince me otherwise.
Frankly, anyone who objects to the notion that we should spend $50 million or so to test the idea before implementing it on a large scale is a complete fool.
"If you want to make basic income a political possibility, you need data"
I think you overestimate the importance of data to most people. It might swing some intellectuals, but generally people are very good at finding reasons to discount data they don't agree with.
Data would be nice so we can evaluate if a basic income is a good idea or not. But is largely irrelevant to actually making it a political possibility.
Actually the data is available. The city of Newark for example has implemented several small-scale social innovations during the past few years, and they focused very much on data gathering and statistics. We don't see that in the media because it does not fit their narrative, and it does not fare well for opinion-makers to stand-up for that either. But the data is out there
Google "Cory Booker". He is a politician, so any link I include here will create controversy, but his model was to implement small-scale experiments, collect data, and use that data to gather additional funding from external sources.
> I believe that if you remove the incentive to work to survive, vast swaths of people will simply choose not to do anything
Three-quarters of adult recipients of the Brazilian basic income system do work [1].
Like the parent commenter said, "without solid evidence, statements like that are little more than expressions of ideological preference, both on the left and on the right."
Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.
If you want to do this, you need the data which proves that it can work in the USA.
This entire "lazy" argument misses the biggest point: your definition of "work" is worthless. Someone reading interesting books and having meaningful discussions with friends and being there for their families and loved ones… people healthy and happy enough add good to the world without doing bullshit labor. A huge portion of "work" today has no need to be done at all.
Your argument amounts to: But, with a guaranteed income, people might refuse to do wage labor and would just live in the world going about their day following their interests instead of mindlessly processing meaningless bureaucratic forms in some office!
Indeed they might! There's a lot of work happening that need not happen. There's a TON of value coming from things you do not call "work." And your suggestion that having health and food and shelter should be dependent upon doing some miserable useless "work" is fundamentally corrupt perspective.
My definition of work is most certainly NOT worthless! "Work" is what produces the interesting books, the couches they sit on, the lights and heat which keep them warm, the houses, and everything else they depend on, ad infinitum.
If less people work, there are less things being produced, period. If less things are being produced, there are less things to go around. If there are less things to go around, we are ALL less wealthy.
Is this decrease in wealth trumped by the increase in mental, emotional, and physical health which would supposedly occur under a basic income economy?
I don't know, and neither do you. It would, however, be relatively trivial to do some experiments, gather the data, and analyze that data.
It would certainly be preferable to do this than to dive headlong into a basic income scheme, only to find out that your posterior-derived claims are entirely false.
This seems like a case of "Is the cup half full or half empty?"
In any case, methinks your obsession with unemployment rate is one of the things that we must seriously reconsider if we really want to be objective about the merits (or lack thereof) of basic income (BI).
Let's get a bit philosophical here. One of the fundamental premises of BI is that it's OK for a substantial portion of a future society not to do anything that is traditionally considered "work". And one of the reasons we need to experiment with BI is to see whether or not this seemingly outrageous premise turns out to be correct after all.
Including the unemployment rate in your definition of "it can work in the U.S." is inherently biased against BI because it already assumes the opposite of one of the premises of BI. It's like trying to decide between theism and atheism using the Bible as your measuring stick. Regardless of what conclusion you draw at the end of the day, that competition ain't fair.
In order to make a fair decision, we'll need to go a little meta and ask, for example, about the total productivity of the society, the physical and mental well-being of its citizens, or something like that.
In any given economic system at any given time, there is a finite level of wealth to be shared by everyone participating in that system. (note: by 'wealth,' I mean things, not currency.) When people work, they produce things (and services), and this increases the total level of wealth within that system. When they do not work, they do not produce things, but they are still consuming things. Thus, people who do not work yet still consume in a given system reduces the overall level of wealth within that system, which reduces the level of wealth that everyone within that system can enjoy.
Thus, from a wealth standpoint, a system with less unemployment is preferable to one with more.
Proponents of basic income usually claim that when people are freed from the drudgery of working a normal job, they will be free to be creative, to take risks, to start businesses, and that this new productivity will compensate for the loss of productivity in the traditional system.
But that's all that is: a claim. It's completely worthless without some kind of data backing it up. It's akin to a preacher saying that God exists because he said that God exists. It simply has no merit.
So would the loss of productivity be compensated for by the increase in physical and mental well-being? I have no clue, nor do you, nor does anyone, because we lack data.
There is plenty of "work" that happens outside of the labor market. Some days I pay a babysitter to take care of my daughter; other days my wife has off instead and does the same job.
Once, my battery died and a paid a tow truck for a jumpstart. Another time, I was able to call a friend to get a jump instead. Both times the same service was provided.
The last time I moved, I paid movers to haul boxes. The time before that, my brother and I did the work.
Money in exchange for labor isn't the only way useful work gets done and counted. Some things will still get done even when people aren't paid to do them.
Do you consider advertising to be work? As in, people who work for Pepsi or Coke, convincing consumers to purchase their brand of sugary water over their competitors'. Is that producing wealth? Is society as a whole enjoying a higher level of wealth as a result of their work?
Or would our collective wealth (more broadly defined) be higher if those same people were creating works of art with their skills?
If you did a quick Google on the real unemployment rate you would see estimates on the unemployment rate of 11% to 30%.
But that figure from Brazil is not the same as the unemployment rate so stop comparing apples and oranges. The figure from Brazil is going to include people on disability and old age pensions, etc.
> Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.
Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.
What about those who are in school? or retired? or home-makers?
Edited to add:
Per the CIA World Factbook, our workforce is 155 million, including the unemployed. Our population is 316 million, of which about 20% are under 14, and less than 35% are under 25. If we assume everyone under 25 is too young to work (which is crazy, but will give conservative numbers here) then we have 100% * (1 - 155/(316 * .65)) = 24.5% adults who aren't working or seeking work, which is right about the 25% in Brazil. If we assume everyone above 14 should be working (obviously overly aggressive, but for reference) we get 100% * (1 - 155/(316 * .8)) = 38.6%.
I think your math might be a little off. The idea isn't to give basic income to everyone. The idea would be basically give it to anyone who can't afford basic living expenses. Not to everyone. It's not 25% of the entire population that isn't working, but only 25% of the poorest people being provided income and who probably weren't working anyways
Have you read they article? They gave notoriously homeless people in London 3000 pounds each, and most of the homeless used it quite effectively to get their lives back in order.
The very idea that there's a lazy underclass that needs to be forced to work against their will is a really big part of the problem here. If there's anything that keeps the poor from being productive, it's their lack of money. The constant worry about basic survival drains their energy and attention and keeps them from getting their lives back on track. Give them some leeway, and they may surprise you, as this and many other experiments keep showing.
This is a just a nice rhetoric, but unimplementable in practice due to existence of cheaters and free riders. It is the same as "easy credit" solution - people just won't pay back, even if they imagine they would.
The answer is, ironically, equivalent to investing in a talent, exactly what YC does, and also unimplementable, because east majority of "applicants" would be worthless.
Actually even now nothing blocks talented people from rising out of slums or even homelessness. Look at places like India, they really do.
> The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working.
That's ridiculously racist. Poverty being tied to race doesn't necessarily have to do with innate work ethic.
At first I thought he was being unfairly racist too, but after a second reading I think he has a strong point. His point being that in order to make it politically achievable we need data that proves it works with the type of people that bigots believe it will fail with. People might be publicly politically correct, but they vote they way they truly believe. Prove without a doubt that it works with poor minorities in America, and you prove without a doubt that it works.
Precisely. If it is a workable system, the experiment will be a success, a community will have benefited, and you will have your political ammunition to have it scaled up.
If it is a failure, well, it would be much preferable to know this before implementing it on a large scale, for obvious reasons.
Let's not politicize something which can be easily and cheaply tested with scientific rigor. If it works, it works. If not, then okay.
You're right about the second statement, and quite wrong about the first.
Poverty is tied to race because race is tied to subculture. Work ethic is no more a racial quality than is the propensity to dance like a fool (edit: by this, I mean white people dancing like fools) or to enjoy eating burritos. But it is well known that the so-called 'Protestant work ethic' is a strong component of white American subculture, whereas it exists less strongly in the black subculture. Other races (such as Asians and Jews) have similar cultural values which encourage a strong work ethic. The American black subculture, on the other hand, does not seem to instill nearly as high a value on hard work in its children as do the others. On the contrary, the system is perceived as being a white construct, and black children who are perceived as trying to join that system are often shunned for 'acting white.' That is not a racial issue, it's a cultural issue, but its genesis has no bearing on the final result where basic income is concerned, at least not in the short run. I do think that the black subculture is beginning to appreciate the value of hard work more, but according to the data, it still has a ways to go.
Latino subculture as it exists in the USA is similar, but perhaps to a lesser extent.
If you think that's a racist statement, I suggest you look up the definition of racist, remove your emotions and preconceived biases from the issue, google some things ('acting white', 'black work ethic', etc) focus on what I actually said rather than reading between the lines, so to speak, and reevaluate accordingly.
> But it is well known that the so-called 'Protestant work ethic' is a strong component of white American subculture, whereas it exists less strongly in the black subculture.
To the extent that this popular belief reflects reality (which is much less, I think, than you imply), I suspect it is not so much a durable, independent artifact of different culture so much as a difference in experienced utility of work that is reinforced through continuous experience in each generation.
You're saying a black person who grows up in a white subculture then is less at risk of poverty? I call bullshit on that.
It doesn't matter what subculture you grew up in or are exposed to. It is what other people perceive of you that influences the likelihood of you falling into poverty. Skin color has a lot to do with that. Maybe the reason black people don't appreciate the idea of hard work is because no matter how hard they work, they don't come up ahead?
By subscribing to the idea of these subcultures being responsible for work ethic, you're still placing work ethic innate to the race - and that's flat out racist.
And for the matter of preconceived biases, I'm not the person coming into this suggesting that certain cultures have work ethic issues.
Allow me to give you a little insight into my insight. I live in the ghetto, in a place that is 75% black, in the deep South. I grew up here, I still live here, and I know the people. They're typically good people, but as a whole, they don't have the same mindset about work, about frugality, about financial success that your typical middle class white guy does. And the reason isn't that they're black per se - it has nothing to do with their skin color, with their race. It does, however, have everything do with their culture, and it's not racist in the slightest to acknowledge that! If you don't acknowledge a problem, how can you ever hope to fix it?
Allow me to enlighten you a little bit. A people are brought to a foreign land and forced to work. Their culture that they knew is destroyed, so they build another one, but as any people who've been subjugated will do, they develop a strong resentment towards those who subjugate them and they integrate that sentiment into their new culture. They see the entire establishment as the creation of their oppressors, of their enemy, and for a long time, they were right! Post-slavery, racism was rampant, and it was damn hard to be a black person in America. I don't blame them one bit for initially thumbing their noses at the system that 'whitey' built, for telling us to fuck off, for generally believing deep down in their soul that white people were their arch enemies.
But times have changed. Yes, racism still exists (it exists everywhere, and is arguably the mildest in the USA, believe it or not), but post the civil rights movement and affirmative action, there is really no excuse for anyone - man, woman, white, black, whatever - to decide to be a leech on society. Well, outside of permanent disability, of course. Opportunity exists for everyone, and if you're a black person, it exists even more so for you. There are a plethora of excellent black-only schools which take low-income black kids who show a willingness to work hard to succeed. MIT absolutely loves to give free rides to the underprivileged minorities, as it improves their diversity figures, and the same goes for just about every college. We have a black guy as our President, for pete's sake. The difference was that his parents raised him to embrace the establishment, not to rebel against it. They taught him to follow the rules, to work hard, to join 'our' system and to change it from the inside, if he so pleased. And he did. A black guy.
Finally, acknowledging that a subculture is different from your own isn't racist. You're just a dumbass.
And as for these experiments, I wonder how many of the test subjects were low-income prior to the introduction of basic income?
The fear isn't that people with a so-called 'Protestant' work ethic will stop working, is it? The fear is that if we implement a basic income in the USA, that, well, to put it bluntly, blacks and latinos, and, to a lesser extent, whites will simply stop working.
If you want to get better data, and more specifically, if you want to alleviate the concerns that most people have with a basic income, give a poor black or latino community a basic income and monitor what happens. If the experiment turns out to be a success, do it a couple more times, each time in different locales across the country. That's the data you need if you really want to make a basic income a political possibility. Everything else is just half-measures.