I think a lot of innovation will spring from this too, and many others have said that once basic provisions like shelter, food, clean drinking water and telecoms are being met; all that's left to do is create art and innovate. Bigger budgets does not necessarily mean more innovation happens, it more often than not enfeebles somebody because they can't allocate the time to create anything. 9-5 culture is a bane for many artists who after work, have one solid hour of making art before they burn out and have to attend to other duties.
Sure, I'm sure people are gonna line up to work in a coffee shop, be a cashier in a supermarket, work at a bank customer service, man the town dump teller, etc.
Don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say that humans are lazy, far from it. I'm saying there are necessary and undesirable tasks - undesirable in essence - to be performed and I don't see people volunteering to accomplish them if there is no money incentive.
Good luck finding people to work at the DMV in a world with basic income.
> I'm saying there are necessary and undesirable tasks
This is a good point.
It's also a reason why this idea is valuable. It enables people to turn away these undesirable tasks. Today, someone might take on a poor task with a poor working condition so their children can get the nutrition they need. A basic income provides the family with what they need without anyone becoming desperate enough to take a job for a lower pay than it's actually worth.
These jobs can finally be part of the open market. If nobody will do it for $12/hr, you increase the pay. When you start to see people taking the job again, you know you've hit the right income point. (People aren't getting rich off of basic income alone. The incentive to work is to have a more expensive lifestyle.)
This is the dual to pricing discussions here on HN. If the market won't buy at X, you don't withhold food from their tables to get them to buy. You either lower the price, or you make your product have more perceived valuable. With these undesirable jobs, you either raise the pay, or improve the working conditions.
So you increase the pay of the guy working at the bank teller, now you just cut into the bank profits, guess they'll just increase their processing fees. Now clients have to pay more to perform operations at the bank (since they have to pay the poor guy at the teller $20/h instead of 12), and now they need a bigger basic income to keep up.
I'm not necessarily rejecting the idea of a basic income, but to me it seems like the biggest flaw. I do not believe people would just sit around idle (at least most of them wouldn't), but I also believe that there are hard, not rewarding jobs out there that are crucial to a working society and to me it is unthinkable that someone would volunteer to take them if they don't need to.
Sounds like bank profits are the underlying problem here (at least in this example). If they did increase their fees, people can always go to another bank that didn't. This is the beauty of a true open market. But if a teller is paid less than the job is worth, and the bank can't afford to increase fees, is withholding basic needs from the working class worth the extra cash for the much smaller group of shareholders?
So ok, I get what you're really trying to say. There are jobs that don't make sense to pay more than $X, and that are unpleasant. Take garbage pickup. (I don't know how unpleasant this job actually is, but I can't think of a better example right now.) If it's absolutely terrible at the current pay, and people don't have to do it, then it makes sense that people simply won't.
But now garbage will start to pile around people's homes, or be dumped irresponsibly. Are we all better off? Not at all, which (I think) is what you're implying. But there's more than one answer here.
- As the piles of trash grow in number, so does the value in collecting it. So the pay will increase naturally. People will be willing to put some of their income, basic or not, into garbage collection.
- Or a startup seizes the opportunity to create a better, on-demand garbage pickup service and charges a premium. That way they can afford to attract employees and still make a profit.
- Or people do volunteer and become neighborhood heros for it. In this case, the currency received is social instead of monetary.
- Or a someone automates trash collection and volunteering is no longer necessary.
Perhaps some jobs can't use any of these solutions. But I do think we can be more creative than forcing an entire class of people into desperation so they do the dirty work for us.
Nearly everyone in America has a smart phone in their pocket more powerful than the most powerful computers of just a few years ago. On that device is all of worlds information, a Google search away. What do people mostly do with this access and power - nothing - Facebook, Reddit, and other distractions. Giving people handouts will not lead to an revolution of art, culture, and businesses... It will lead to sloth, resentment, and failure.
Our society already produces enough abundance and opportunity such that any hardworking individual can EARN a life that most people in history could only dream about.
The data from past trials shows different results than your own knee-jerk conclusion.
Here are some consistent findings across multiple studies[1]:
- Fewer hospitalizations
- Fewer school dropouts
- Decrease in child labor
- Dramatically lower food poverty
- Dramatically lower crime rate
- Dramatically lower child malnutrition rate
- Increase in High School completion rates
- Increase in self-employment and the number of income sources
That last one is the most counter-intuitive. Until you think about it. People become more entrepreneurial when you remove the risk of them falling into poverty if they fail (especially because failure is the norm).
Keep in mind that if you want to live a more luxurious lifestyle, you'll still need to work to get it. This isn't an "everybody is rich" utopia. This is more about eliminating poverty and creating opportunity for everyone.
> I think a lot of innovation will spring from this too
Me too. Like new ways to spy on, enslave and control those cursed with ability and forced to create the "shelter, food, clean drinking water and telecoms" that your utopia requires.
The idea of basic income is to provide enough to not die or be a burden on society, but not enough to really enjoy life. As well we already are providing shelter, food, water, telecoms. The problem is that the bureaucracy eats up so much money in the process that it becomes even more expensive than just paying everyone in the US $720 a month and saying "youre on your own".
I was thinking more along the lines of something scalable like the hexayurt project (hexayurt.com). Having five sheets of inexpensive plywood is "cursed with ability" is it? and having a FirefoxOS smartphone phone that cost $20.00 is spy apparatus? Hardly.
