I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from the HN community about what we could be doing here.
Edit: please respond in the main thread so we don't get an unbalanced comment tree. I'll be in the discussion here for a couple hours, but if it feels like there's momentum in the ideas we might do a proper Ask HN about it next week.
* Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.
* Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals.
* Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive.
* Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.
* Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education.
* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.
* Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services.
* Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election.
* Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets".
* Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments.
Later: I added some things
I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make.
What could make a difference?
- applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate.
- improvements in transportation. Making transportation faster and more comfortable means more people can affordably live within commute distance of prosperous urban areas (say, the SF peninsula)
- advocacy: pushing for changes to zoning rules to allow dense, livable communities, bringing more housing to our cities. For example, imagine turning a shopping center + parking lot into a pedestrian-only mixed-use urban area, modeled on the best dense cities out there (like Tokyo, Munich, Stockholm, etc). This requires a combination of property developers with a strong vision, changes to zoning laws, and a strategy for overcoming NIMBYs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-th...
The experiment allowed households to opt out, and after a while most did. However this result is convoluted by the fact that the income was not inflation indexed, and inflation rates in Canada in the 1970s got quite high.
The main conclusion from this is, basic income is going to have to be VERY carefully implemented to work at all.
> "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income; instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth."
The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle probably isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem
IE, the aggregate value of public spending in an area tends to soak into the land value -- give everybody $X,000 a year and the landlords will dutifully raise annual rents by $X,000.
From wikipedia: "Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has been eroded by large welfare states over time." (Of course, don't take wikipedia's word for it-- read the book yourself)
My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled economic growth in Scandinavia. During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net private sector job growth was ZERO.
If you want to stimulate economic activity, instead of giving everyone $10,000 per year, why don't we just cut taxes and removed red tape.
(I know that Scandinavia didn't technically have a basic income, but I still think that this material is completely relevant and very telling).
Edit: I said "During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net public sector job growth was ZERO". I meant private sector. Major mistake, my apologies!
People who make 20k, spend to their means.
People who make 50k, spend to their means.
People who make 100k, spend to their means.
People who make 452k, spend to their means.
This is a sincere, non-snark question: people spend to their means. It's similar to packing a bag, a person has a tendency to fill the bag, regardless to if they need all the things they put into it. I'll dig up sources, but people who make 452k a year, they'll tell you they're not rich. They don't feel rich.
This. How is this resolved?
Everyone wants a vacation to an island every year, and the best things for their kids, the best food on the table, the best cable channels. How is this fixed?
For example (and for the record, I hold these people in the highest regard) how do we replace trashmen, postal workers, the guy who pumps my sewage, that dunkin donuts worker? The guy who cuts lawns, or sells firewood?
Basic income, in my opinion, is a good idea. People living without the stress of of worrying about paying rent, I really like that idea. I have siblings, and their life is upside-down because they can't pay the bills and keep food on the table (I help as much as I can) how do we fix that? Would my brother just get a nicer apartment, and eat nicer food, and still be broke? He is a welder by trade, and makes a living. Paycheck-to-paycheck, but he makes it work.
If he had an extra 15k a year, I am fully confident, he would still be living paycheck-to-paycheck. He is my brother and I love him, this is his reality.
How do we fix that?
ENABLE MORE REMOTE WORK. Why am I living in a high cost area? Because this is where the jobs are. Why are costs high? Because thousands of other engineers essentially _need_ to do the same thing.
So to answer Sam's original question with another question, in addition to merely making this a one sided "businesses must be more accommodating"; What can engineers do to increase remote worker availability for startups? (Companies in general, but inverted Sam's wording for more poetic "fit") What pain point solvers, major technologies, processes, etc are missing that would make truly distributed teams less of a risk, or more desirable? While I certainly think there are already great reasons (you get access to more talent potentially lower cost, more "diversity" out of box, more flexibility from your workforce and less overhead per employee) I'd be curious to hear how this dovetails with what the powers that be think are missing.
(In the case that one thinks there are intractable problems re: remote, I'd also be curious to hear those for the purpose of confronting this problem regardless.)
i) Some of us didn't go on welfare to our detriment. Not eating = decreased ability to be a productive citizen.
ii) Some of us had to 'over-sell' to others and to ourselves our disabilities, out of the fear that we would be denied access to these services or be accused that we were gaming the system. The effects of overselling these disabilities were devastating on one's mental health.
Having a shame-free way of getting welfare could be a great thing.
I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is - it's paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the economy.
The observation bias alone might motivate people to do work and strive to achieve something with all of their time. Or, it might even cause them to lie about the things they're working on.
It will be very interesting to see how they design the study, I think it has to be a little bit more nuanced than "Here's 2000 dollars a month for 5 years, bye."
And I'd second sama's mention of controlling cost of living. In addition to universally obvious importance of it, with minimum income there is the added possibility that prices for low end necessities could rise commensurate with the size of the minimum guaranteed income.
A third point I'd raise is to ask about medical costs which, unlike Finland or Canada, if this test is carried out in the US, would be a very significant factor. If the minimum income needs to cover this too then healthy, and generally the young may tend to have vastly more disposable income while an unexpected illness for anyone could far exceed anything the minimum income could hope to cover.
Example of the dynamic: Winston Churchill liked to give a story [1] about do-gooders who saw that a bridge's tolls were a burden on the poor, so they bought out the owner ... only to find that rents right afterward went up by the exact expense of crossing the bridge twice daily.
Considering the necessity of this crossing, that was like a sudden basic income of the cost of crossing the bridge, and got eaten up by rents. But I'd like to see something more rigorous and what can be done about that phenomenon.
[1] ctrl-f for "bridge": http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...
It is harder to conceive of a notion more beneficial to the fate of humans than the notion that all humans deserve the basic essentials of life, and that the first task of a civilized society must be to provide those essentials, without regard for any judgements of the worthiness of individuals.
It should be assumed that everyone gets to eat and have shelter.
I do not care how you arrange this research, it will not tell you what will happen under real world conditions. There is plenty of instructive data from the real world that you can look at. For example, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years.
When people get unearned money, most of them piss it away. "Easy come, easy go." I have thought long and hard about this. I don't have time to write an opus on it today, and I imagine it wouldn't be welcome anyway. Here are a couple of things I wrote previously:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried...
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-conversa...
The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]
1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support.
2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!
3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people.
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income, "all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere"
I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that point B works in any practical way.
Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum) where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think.
What do other HNers think about this?
Say you are going to give each of the 320M inhabitants of the US $10k per year (that's about the poverty threshold). That would be a cost of $3.2 Trillion per year, or about 50% the total government revenue (federal, state, & local combined). I just cannot see a future where the US raises taxes by a number that anywhere close to 50%.
I'm looking forward to this research answering the basic revenue calculus. How much of the required spending can be supported by dismantling the current welfare infrastructure? How much would general productivity need to increase (and be maintained) to make sure the tax revenue can support this? Is there any effect of this on capital investment (the lifeblood of SV)?
Maybe it's just me that has noticed it in the past few years, but "fixing housing in the US" is looming large on my list of things to improve.
It's not just San Francisco - the same debates are playing out in places like Boulder, or even here in Bend.
> Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?
good financial services for very poor people in developed countries.
the basic financial services that middle class and wealthy people have access to such as checking accounts, savings accounts, retail brokerages for purchasing investing vehicles (stocks, bonds, etfs, etc.), access to consumer credit that does not have usurious rates and predatory practices, tax filing assistance, direct deposit of paychecks, automated scheduled bill payments, access to in-network or no-fee ATMs, ability to build up good credit history and have a high FICA score, etc.
all of these things that the middle and upper classes totally take for grant as basic infrastructure necessary for modern life are things that very poor people are almost completely shut out of. this is a HUGE driver of persistent poverty in already poor communities. this is one of the things that makes climbing up out of poverty almost impossible for so many people.
a startup attempting to solve these problems would have to be willing to experiment with totally new business models that do not directly rely on exploitation of the customers to generate profits. it might be a lower margin business than, for example, commercial banking. it would be a great social good though, and it might even be possible to make a profitable business out of it too.
edit: expanding on my point
an important component of sama's query is "increase prosperity for everyone". how does providing financial services for the very poor help everyone? simple: it increases demand at the base of the economy. very poor people have almost no discretionary spending money and often end up as net drains on local economies, taking in money from government assistance programs while not contributing back to the economic growth of their communities.
if the poorest people become less poor they begin to buy things with their newly available discretionary spending money.
Find ways of destroying harmful institutions by replacing them with better ones-- a perfect example to pursue is the institution of health insurance in the USA, which is explicitly harmful to people, inefficient, inhumane, and completely entrenched in multiple other institutions. Find a way to get people cheaper and better care, and they'll flock to you.
There's other ways, of course, but the gist is that rather than focusing on relatively irrelevant problems (getting takeout easier, booking flights easier, etc), startups could choose to tackle actually difficult problems such as political corruption, exploitation of the poor, existential angst, etc. These issues aren't traditionally simple to monetize.
If "everyone" means "all US citizens" then startups can help increase transparency in government. It's much easier to figure out who to vote for when there's a clear picture of somebody's track record and who their political allies and funders are. Everybody should want this, regardless of political persuasion. If massive data gathering can't be stopped (and it looks that way) then the least we demand is real transparency. Without that there can be no accountability. Most political information people come into contact with is disinformation or shameless propaganda by some special interest. It is getting completely out of hand, but there's no obvious solution.
If "everyone" means "every person in the world", then we need startups to fight for sustainable energy and universal education. All scientific papers must be freely available to everybody in the world (few exceptions, e.g. how to manufacture anthrax can stay secret). Music and literature should be available to everybody, preferably at no cost. A single college textbook costs a month's salary in many parts of the world. That's just cruel.
There isn't much overlap between things that are super important for society and things that are profitable. The civil rights movement wouldn't work as a for-profit venture and future civil rights movements will be no exception. Often enough people who have contributed the greatest value to society never benefited from it personally. Duchesne or Flemming didn't get rich from their discovery of penicillin but the contribution to mankind is immense. In contrast the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation -- with their many billions -- struggle to make a huge impact. To really improve the quality of life across the globe a social revolution of some sort is needed.
At one point, the core purpose of monetary policy and central banking was full employment. Now, it seems to be stability and productivity. The political system is too corrupt to pivot -- but the private sector can, because untapped potential represents lost customers.
I think we need to figure out how to empower people. We have all of these underserved communities that suffer mostly from hopelessness. How do we empower a handyman in the inner city to build a sustainable business that enjoys his neighbors? How do we bring vitality to a rural community marginalized by the death of farming and mills?
Other top items would be transportation and taxes. A $10k safe and energy efficient vehicle would be a great first step.
Though it may be unpopular in some circles, the fact is taxation is one of the least efficient ways of allocating capital. You have administration costs, fraud, waste, and abuse. If we lower the cost of living for everyone, we can lower taxes as well and allow that capital to be invested more efficiently.
Warning German: https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/start
That might also provide some needed competition for lower wage/skill jobs, since they'll have to compete with scraping by on basic income. As it is now low wage employees are disposable and disrespected; "flexible" schedule means something different at Best Buy than at my current engineering job.
In order to get realistic information for how people will behave / feel with a basic income we should seriously consider dropping the '5 year period' and extending it for the remainder of their lives.
Personally, knowing that I will have to start working again in 5 years to support myself would drastically change how I choose to spend my time over the next 5 years.
Also, props to Sam / YC for this initiative.
During this time I have re-kindled my interest in mechanics and electronics, bought and changed the electronics of a CNC router, learned to use it, learned a bit of woodworking, created the control software and tool path planning system ( https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode ). I have helped a guy on the internet with a laser cutting software, I have created an easy captcha breaker, played with Cypress PSOC MCUs (it's the gateway drugs to FPGAs), started a project that uses Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals (hint: you can control the 70V stuff with the parts destined for vacuum fluorescent display). And I learned a few techniques:
- CNC cutting vinyl and using it as a stencil for painting or sandblasting
- isolation milling of PCBs
- PCB etching
- CNC made wood inlays
- using a lot of glues
- learned a bit of Ember.js, lots of Chrome APIs
- a bit of mold making
- parametric mechanical CAD design
Now, I have accepted a job offer and should start next Monday, so I guess all those projects and learnings are over, but that was a good ride.
Something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.
A simplified version of the argument is as follows: "In a free market, if a certain subset of people start making significantly more money than they used to, the demand for things that this subset of people couldn't afford before is going to increase substantially. This increase in demand will inevitably lead to higher prices for the things that they can suddenly afford, which will essentially put them back where they started."
Can anyone briefly explain to me why this argument is wrong? On the surface, it seems fairly reasonable. For example, the ridiculous cost of education is often attributed to the creation of federal student loans. Unless that attribution is also mistaken, it seems to represent a valid example of this phenomenon.
Please note that I'm not condoning or even agreeing with this argument. Its just something I've been wondering about for a while. I figure there are plenty of smart people here that can probably explain it to me.
While I liked how refreshing Health Sherpa was to use compared to healthcare.gov of the early years, I think a more fundamental disruption of the healthcare industry is needed. All the various middlemen with their high overheads, the plethora of paper pushers, coders (what a travesty of a fine word), etc. Some examples of healthcare niches that are ripe for disruption include supplies for disabled individuals, building provider networks not beholden to the Hades of the regular insurance industry, enabling medical tourism, etc.
- talented people will not need to do consulting or daytime jobs to support their startups or side-project, which can lead to them living in a bubble
- there will always be people who spend all their income on gambling, drugs, sex, whatever - with basic income they just have more cash to waste (although this could be controlled somehow)
- low-skilled jobs aren't going anywhere soon - how do we want to motivate people to do jobs like garbage collection or road maintenance - this is already a problem in countries with exuberant social systems like France
I note decreasing the cost of living is by definition deflation. Preventing deflation is an explicit objective of central banks around the world.
I think there are gaps in our economic knowledge. There are different types of deflation, such as deflation through technology, deflation through a economy restructuring itself, deflation through cyclical unemployment. Central banks don't differentiate between them, and do all they can to prevent all of them from happening. It's like taking immune system suppressants because the white blood cell count is high, no matter the situation, even when it's high because you've got a cold.
Therefore, I think startups that can be involved in increasing our knowledge of the economics can increase prosperity for everyone, so central banks don't perform actions that prevent people from becoming prosperous.
Generate the money, just print it!
Everyone on earth will get an equal quantity of money, every month.
Now this money can be used in two different ways.
1) Buy natural resources
2) Buy services
This distinction is important:
When somebody provides a service, like fixing your bike he gets money and can keep it.
When you buy a 'natural resource', like wood, corn or oil the money must be destroyed.
What I hope to accomplish this way is several things:
- Equal chances for everyone, everybody can buy the same amount of natural resources on earth.
- Destroying the money keeps the total money amount balanced. Natural resources are limited so a limited amount of money seems fair.
- The system makes adding value to the world profitable. You are stimulated to be creative and do something for someone else!
- Perhaps the total amount of money will increase. This is not bad perse, rich people will get less rich. But everyone always has enough money to live a good life.
This is the basic idea. How this should work in practice needs lots of work, but I'm really curious how you guys think about this!
I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application;
The Standard Pantry.
The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu schedule.
Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach people how to make a set menu from the basics. Certain components used are refilled at a regular interval as a part of the standard pantry - other ingredients will still need to be purchased, perhaps in conjunction with basic income.
The goal is to help people cook, themselves, more healthy and affordable meals. and overall increase their quality of life.
---
When I was first learning the basics of cooking from my grandmother, she used to be able to tell me to the penny the cost of each meal we cooked. How some dishes were "$1.43 per person" etc...
It drove home to me the value of cooking and not wasting food.
Cooking is therapy as well. eating well / better is good for every aspect of life.
In France you get paid for two years after loosing your job. In Denmark I think it is three or four year even. Enough time to start three or four startups.
Would be interesting to look into the data of these countries.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html
You might want to look into Georgism and Geolibertarianism as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
The basic premise of all these is that land and natural resources can not be owned. If you want to use them you have to rent / buy rights to them. That rent goes into a basic fund that is then used for basic income. The basic argument is that land belongs to everyone, so everyone should get an equal share of the rent from the land.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21639547-how-cas...
I do have a few very specific, big concern though:
>We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed.
In order for this research to having meaning, we would need to see how the costs of things, especially real estate prices are impacted. One argument against basic income is that it would inflate the prices of basic goods and provide no real benefit. It would be worth spending a lot to figure that out.
Also...
> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.
I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this.
I'll bet many problems in the Bay Area would be resolved with high density housing. A selfish list: shorter commutes (--> more time with family), lower rents (--> more people willing to move here --> fewer developer "shortages"), less cars on the road, less pollution.
It sounds like a great idea to spend time and energy researching this... I just don't think the description as posted is going to hit the mark.
Give every person:
- a "capsule"-style room (2m x 1m x 1m)
- a set of merino wool clothes (washed weekly)
- a pair of shoes
- a meal a day (1500 calories, high fat, low carb)
- unlimited drinkable water
- a weekly body maintenance (shower, nail clipping, hair trimming, mouth cleaning, ...)
- a bi-annual physical exam (weight, urine analysis, blood analysis, scan, eye exam, ...)
- a portable computer / tablet / VR headset (on demand)
- access to public spaces (indoor and outdoor)
Basically, this would cost a person about $200/month (all included). You would own nothing, but also have nothing to maintain or worry about (other than your mind).
The ONLY thing that stops this from happening, is the government and its regulations.
What people end up doing on a basic income is far less relevant than what people end up not doing due to the taxation burden of funding a basic income. It's telling that the post contains no mention whatsoever of studying the impact of the taxation.
Some kind of welfare state is always going to be necessary, so the ideal proposal creates an incentive landscape that is both humane and also nudges citizens toward improving skills and working hard.
This is how we'd design a video game if we wanted to encourage socially responsible behavior. It's a silly accident of history that we haven't managed to do that in the real world.
Now, say I wanted to become an expert in programming. To the point where I was an elite 10x developer. If I quit my job and lived off my savings, I could conceivably work on programming 100 hours per week. So after ten weeks I'd have 1000 hours, and after 100 weeks I'd have my 10,000. So that's two years or so at a minumum.
But living off savings for two years would be incredibly costly. Working full time would let me squeeze in say 20 hours a week, so I'd now take 10 years to reach the golden 10,000 hours or experience. If I cut down to a part time job, it would take 20 years.
I think the latter two are unrealistic because they take so long. The 100 hour per week option is more of a possibility. With universal basic income, everyone would have the opportunity. If lots of people pulled it off, the productivity gains for society would be enormous.
Obviously there's lots of people in society who have this sort of spare time and simply do not use it. However I think there's an argument that the people most likely to achieve this 10,000 hours goal are people who are gainfully employed and wouldn't pursue it without some sort of income support.
Basic income yes, but not without progressive tax on owned real estate that could curb rent seeking behavior of large property owners.
So, you work at Company X. You and one person of your choice are now entitled to basic income. It will come as a separate check, paid for by the company. You can put your spouse, your family member, or a friend--etc. as a beneficiary of the basic income, or choose nobody at all and miss out on this "free money".
That person would have to agree to accept the money of course, and the check will be written directly to them, not you (you are not a proxy).
One main difference between this and an actual implementation of basic income is that these individuals will only receive the basic income as long as you work at Company X (unless, for some reason, the Company agrees to continue the program beyond your employment).
Another difference is that it's linked to the success and failures of this company, instead of the successes and failures of society as a whole (the latter seems less risky).
Anyway, I'm posting this more as a prompt.. What if? Do you think it's a reasonable experiment for a company to run? I know big names like Google and Facebook have some interesting perks, so why not basic income for all your employees plus 1 person of their choice, paid for by a flat % of everyone's income at the company?
I'd expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and contextually relevant scale.
Gamify budgeting. I'm on a low income (UK sort-of disability benefits) and I've got a budget set up, but I don't set aside anything. I should, and I should be able to.
I'm more than happy to describe my experiences of claiming "employment and support allowance (work related activity group)" (and the transition from Incapacity benefit to ESA-WRAG; and the difficulties of working while on this benefit.) AMAA.
Be it as the researcher, or an advisor in the truth of the real American demographics, that have next to no chance at success. Few topics ignite a passion in me as much as those surrounding this.
Other than the lifestyle truly rich, I have lived the life of the rest. From barrios then ghettos, homelessness to youth prison, day laborer to small business then tech startup success... In literally every corner of the nation as most every caste... With only an 8th grade education to begin with, a dash of 90s electronics tech school, and self taught for all the rest.
I want to help, just let me know how to explain why, away from public eyes. I make this request, to tell the not for public knowledge story of the rest. Then leave it for you, to allow us, to figure out where to go next.
1. It paints an idealistic picture of the state:
> It’s true that we have systems in place to give people > resources, but the bureaucracy and qualification > requirements make it a very imperfect approximation of what > most people mean when talking about a basic income.
I'd suggest to ask why there is this bureaucracy in the first place. I'd suggest it does its job perfectly well.
2. It paints an idealistic picture of the capitalist economy:
> I think it’s good to start studying this early. I’m fairly > confident that at some point in the future, as technology > continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new > wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of > this at a national scale.
Machines do not destroy jobs. The social purpose for which they are used - profit - makes and destroys job. Put differently, I'd suggest to ask why this economy produces mass poverty when it gets easier to produce stuff.
I recommend https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/what-wrong-free-mone...
My long-term worry about basic income is that people have a need to be needed by society and it won't go away easily. I don't know a good way to solve that completely, short of reengineering humanity. In the short term we could get away with making the government pay companies for employing people (the payment should be lower than the salary, but maybe not by much). That could be a nice supplement to basic income.
This is beyond awesome: an effort truly to explore this with an open mind, measuring whether and how it might work in the real world, and doing it in a no-nonsense, zero-pretense way.
Kudos to YC and kudos to Sam Altman.
My ideas for making a GBI possible: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-missing-piece-in-the-basic...
Short: figure out how to make essentials (food, housing, education, health care) cheap. Obvious, but thinking about how to get there is critical if for a GBI to ever happen.
Startups as a whole can do nothing -- it's like asking "what can car companies do to increase prosperity?" except that would be a little more reasonable given the amount of resources and relative free-time those companies have.
In startup land, you typically don't even have a sustainable business let alone vast amount of resources lying around to fix the world's problems. They cannot be concerned with something this vague.
What they can do is work on the correct problems that will put them in a position to make a legitimate societal impact down the road. Even better if they work on problems that is directly correlated to society's well-being.
You mentioned food. If a startup could compete with the likes of Monsanto, but wasn't run by a bunch of scumbags, they might be able to create such a rich company that it starts shipping food crates free of charge to places in need. This depends entirely upon the kind of person running the company.
Since I respect that you have to view startups in the aggregate, I would probably turn around and ask you, what can you do to fund better startups by better people with long-term Do No Harm terms? The terms might even be bullshit like "You will do everything in your power to help the world rather than just helping yourself." It wouldn't be something you hold up in court, but it would be a major internet foul to find out "Super Rich CEO" signed those terms and "Super Rich CEO" was found being immoral. With the leader's reputation at stake, you might have a chance at nurturing Good Guy CEOs.
At any rate, startups have enough to worry about. If you want to help the world, you'll find a way. If you want to make a bunch of money and fuck the world, you'll find a way to do that too. The problem is cultural and resides at the individual level.
How does the money flow, and at what point does it brake down?
You see, if we give every person basic income of $BASIC, that money must come from taxes (else we just have runaway inflation). So ultimately every dollar spent needs to be collected in taxes. That's not to say it gets taken away by the government at the first transaction. The velocity of money will play a large part in determining the tax rate required to collect all the money back to the government. But that velocity will be low if a large number of people choose to not work. It also depends on propensity to save and some other factors. I'd like to see even the most simple analysis of this to get a feel for the math and what some obvious constraints it places on the system.
Has anyone done this and published a blog?
I expect that some form of radical redistribution of resources is going to be the next modality of human civilization, and getting started on the colossally difficult questions (how to ease existential angst of purposelessness and how to kill the work ethic) is just as important as the very-difficult particulars of implementation (how the heck do we find what the right amount of money is, and how do we pay for it) and measurements of efficacy.
I'm extremely interested in the opportunity to lead or be a part of this research group, and will be applying in the coming days.
There is emergent behavior that arises in the economy as a function of the number of people given a stipend or living wage. For profit colleges are the perfect example. If grants are given to a small set of people the scale of demand necessary for such businesses to exist is insufficient. Crank up the number of people and a new market is created that allows for the existence of predatory "for profit" college businesses that take advantage of funds that would have otherwise been allocated properly.
Take a few people that would qualify for various public assistance programs (reduced housing costs, food stamps, disability, welfare) and instead just give them that money in one big annual lump sum.
My hunch is that this would be more cost effective, particularly given the much lower cost of administrating cash payouts vs restricted use programs. But it's also possible all of the money would just go to drugs and alcohol. It'd be a fascinating study.
(I realize this isn't basic income, as basic income is not means-tested -- but it'd be a great first step in that direction.)
I personally believe that you can control your costs and raise a family on $30k/yr if you are educated on the bad choices not to make...several cars on loans, larger houses than needed, etc...
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-opp...
but is currently slated for a public referendum here in Switzerland in 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016
I think it is one of really only four possible futures for human society [mincome, totalitarian, oblivion, expansion into the solar system and beyond (which will me effective status quo)].
Make it more efficient to buy food from the local farmer / farmers market than having it shipped around the world to the nearest walmart.
Make it easier to do local and smaller scale manufacturing (think 3d printing).
When your economy is local, it's efficient, green (remove the high cost of transportation out of the equation) and it feeds on itself with jobs and money.
I'm building something right now that I hope will be a step towards reaching some of those goals.
But overall I am thoroughly supportive of doing the experiment anyway, as we do desperately need more data on this important concept.
* Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free?
* Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive.
* Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments.
* Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically.
* Crowd-funding life.
----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage instead of rent?
----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive prices down?
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert...
[2] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/dauphins-great-experi...
I strongly believe that money is not the variable that has to change in the equation. I'd change the minimum amount of hours required to qualify for a full-time job (e.g. 40h / week).
Most of us aren't %100 productive from 8am to 5pm. Meaning, employers wouldn't really see much difference. If you reduce a 40hour week to a 20hour week, maintaining the same salary for each employee, people would have more free time. More time to do something awesome, etc. While maintaining the same level of income. That's what we should be aiming for and it wouldn't require a dramatic change in our society.
My 2 cents.
As a teenager, I saw this news blurb from the George Bush presidential campaign. A woman (single mother) was working three jobs to make ends meet and the audience engaged in a massive circlejerk. Couldn't help think about the incredible waste of a life - soul-sucking jobs that ensure this person doesn't move up economic classes, has no time to focus on self-improvement and gets to provide no attention to family. And then the next generation continues this cycle.
In the 21st century - we must change our approach to governance - dignity for everyone.
I'm also not sure how we'll go about defining a measurable prosperity?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_%28economist%29
"The Precariat" has some great ideas on how the relationship between the state and individual are changing. He also covers the current dynamics in welfare assistance for citizens of a state and demonstrates how basic income would be easier to administer and lessen the burden if proof needed to gain assistance. I also like how he examine s the current status of citizen vs non citizen and proposes the notion of a "denizen."
If you are an a contract programmer I recommend reading "The Precariat." All the extra work you do for work should count for something but it is sometimes not given any recognition.
Watch the youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OraivQ45ME
Standing, Guy; Jhabvala, Renana; Unni, Jeemol; Rani, Uma (2010). Social income and insecurity: a study in Gujarat. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415585743. Standing, Guy (2011). The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781849664554. Standing, Guy (2014). A Precariat Charter: from denizens to citizens. London New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781472510396.
Figuring out basic income is perhaps the most important thing we could do as a society, because it will unlock the energy and creativity we're lacking to solve every other important problem.
Trying to solve global warming, energy, crime or government without basic income is like running a marathon on one leg.
any screening you do on basic income recipients totally invalidates the point of studying basic income (and basic income itself), beyond some really basic stuff. my suggestion : pick a town / neighborhood / whatever at random (preferably relatively poor with a population between 500-1000) and give everyone living in it at the time $1k/month over the next 5 years (even if they move). i think it's safe / wise to exclude anyone who's retired or on disability since that defeats the purpose of the experiment as they already receive entitlement funds. how you handle children i have no idea. maybe parents should get a reduced amount per child?
in other words, if you have qualifications like "poor and motivated", or even just "poor", then the basic income experiment is really a grant program. it's really important philosophically that you DON'T NEED TO DO ANYTHING to get basic income. most work is NOT VALUABLE. society is better off with more people being "lazy" and doing whatever they feel like, especially as automation increases in prevalence and importance. if 50% of people on basic income decide not to work, that's fine because the other 50% will be perfectly capable of doing everything that actually needs to get done, particularly with the safety net of not having to worry about failure quite so much.
Another problem I have with BI is it equally distributes assistance with no prejudice to those more needy, i.e. the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, etc. So you take many funds away from people such as 70+ year olds who are on medication, SS, assisted living (which cost >> BI provides) and distribute available funds to able-bodied people who are "discovering themselves".
Further, having considerable able-bodied people leave the workforce by choice delays global human progress and achievement.
Instead, I am for additional public-sector money being spent on country- and global-level goals which the private sector cannot achieve nor make profitable. These include environmental, energy, medical, transportation, and infrastructure research. By putting public money into these research fields (which is hard/impossible to make profitable) you incentivize progress in areas which further human progress that cannot be met through private means. If you instead incentivize able-bodies to not work, not only do you take money away from needy (not much savings in admin costs) but you delay human progress.
Along those lines, they suggest a few types of things startups (or anyone) could do to reduce mental stress for people. For example, adult continuing education classes where it's ok to slip up or learn on your own schedule (thanks to technology). Or savings products for young people that start before they are desperate and living in a world of scarcity (and prevent them from going to a payday lender one day). Or a service that gets patients to take their meds without having to think (I think at least one startup is already attacking this).
For things that require behavioral change (like making on-time mortgage payments, or saving money), maybe social pressure can be used in productive ways....like it is in microfinance groups in the developing world (small groups borrow collectively and group members encourage one another to repay). Anyway, just a few ideas...this is a great topic.
This is a sort of French Revolution type system: the elites can keep shitting and pissing until suddenly a conspiracy forms and KABOOM a whole bunch of dead rich people in the street and NOBODY CARES because they're perverted scum ! ! !
B R I N G
B A C K
T H E
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From someone that spent 5+ years at the intersection of technology-based international development, there's a lot to learn about what works and what doesn't. Kentaro Toyama headed up Microsoft Research India's "Technology for Emerging Markets" research team and oversaw 50+ research projects spanning health, education, governance, and more. He then spent 5 years at UC Berkeley writing a book about what he learnt ("Geek Heresy", http://geekheresy.org).
I did a PhD in this general area (voice interfaces for non-literate users), and Kentaro's main thesis (technology only amplifies human capacity and intent) resonates deeply with my experience. It's all about the people, and technology is mainly an amplifier / supporter of human institutions. An "app for K-12 education" doesn't work in the traditional sense, but an app that connects awesome teachers with students, with an ecosystem that takes care of management, training, incentives, and encourages true mentorship, has a much higher chance of success.
I've actually been thinking about that for quite some time now. Here's what I think will help increase prosperity:
* Inexpensive housing: something like the Tiny House movement, but more mainstream and less expensive.
* Automated food production, such as my side project, AutoMicroFarm.
* Inexpensive electric transportation.
* Universal health insurance.
The above four items would enable anyone to have the vast majority of their needs met. I plan to expand on the above in a blog post.
Reducing or at best completely doing away with the necessity for people to travel to a place of work (both commuting and one-off business trips), i.e. solving the problem of cultural aversion to remote work that still is prevalent in most work environments, particularly - of all things - in Silicon Valley startups. Why is it that the world's brightest minds apparently still haven't solved the problem of physical location? Why do I have to be in a tremendously expensive location like San Francisco if I want to start a Silicon Valley kind of startup?
Solving the problem of commuting / requirement of being at a physical location at a particular time potentially could free up so many resources for both people and companies (which wouldn't have to pay office rent in an expensive area of town anymore) that funding a basic income would be cinch.
The problem with basic income is where does the money come from? It's either loaned, taxed or invested. Loans are bad because you are enslaving the borrower. Taxes are bad because you are stealing work/labor from the taxed. Investments are best: you probably won't make your money back, but the possibility could provide incentive to give.
On the recipients side: perhaps there is value for them to promote themselves (in a Kickstarter kind of way) for more investments. Just the exercise might give them ideas of how to increase their own value.
Have the fed become the basic investor. This means inflating the money supply, but somewhat curtailed because successful investments have some payback. This is perhaps the fairest tax-like money source- it really hurts those with large amount of parked cash the most, which may not be such a bad thing. It encourages them to do something better with their money.
Balance out the knowledge gap and consumers will be able to transact directly with producers, bringing down costs across the board.
* Standards of living are variable, and especially so between different social classes.
* Debt requires someone to earn more money than they would otherwise need to in order to meet the same standard of living as someone without debt.
* The variety of higher margin products and lower margin counterparts create inefficiency in making consistent spending choices, particularly when it comes to visibility (e.g. marketing).
* Healthcare costs can be extremely variable from person to person.
* A big question is what it takes for a person to feel contentment. E.g. I have multiple family members living hundreds to thousands of miles away from me, from each other even, that I never get to see, and I would be a much happier person today if I was able to spend more time with them. Other factors can include obtaining a sense of achievement in what you do with your time, or a sense of approval from your peers.
* People have a much smaller pool of peers to identify with if they don't go to a regular workplace or gathering of some kind.
* There are regional differences in supply and demand, especially for property, housing, water, and egress. I'd include food, too, if I didn't think you were targeting the US.
I can probably come up with more, but I'll just leave it at that for now.
Food - Basic nutritious food should be cheaper. Currently, cheap food is not nutritious or that cheap. Even Soylent costs $2.83 and many do not consider that food. A meal should cost less than $1. - 2 ways that I have been mulling * Automation for on demand food * Mass production of simple meals.
There's always strings attached, either directly or indirectly.
50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.
Considering current political trends, I find it significantly likely that in 50 years government would use fear of many different things as a tactic to "motivate" people (food among them).
- reduces cost of living (cheaper than car ownership)
- reduces number one cause of human mortality
- frees up tons of parking-lot space for additional housing
- reduces strain on roads offsetting transit maintenance costs
- reduces pollution
Focusing on optimizing and improving quality of transit rather than just having it for the sake of it makes a huge difference in the quality of life of the area. This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes, etc.
The other space I'm thinking of is a lot harder for startups to attack, but is worth thinking about anyway -- international labor mobility. This requires world-wide cooperation to work, but there are countries like Japan and Sweden with declining population but still fairly difficult immigration procedures. The world's resources would be used so much more efficiently if it were easier to redistribute people based on their skills, needs and desires with places that had the space and resources to support them and benefit from them. Technology can certainly help here, but it needs a lot more logistical ingenuity than technology.
Another one is reclaiming human resources -- prisoners and the destitute. Majority of these people are able-bodied and/or able-minded, yet it is nearly impossible to gain any value from them because of how society is structured around their status. If we had dedicated, streamlined processes to appropriately assess and reinstate these people back in society, they'd turn from a economic burden into an asset.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/comparing-us-eu-...
EDIT: So many of the comments here are obviously ideology driven. I am ideologically in favor of full automation and UBI but doing this kind of research will help us move forward in an informed and scientific way.
- I love the idea of YC sponsoring research.
- Some more information about the program itself would be helpful. 5 years is long for a research program. What does this cover? Income for the researcher, other costs, are they required to live in SV or maybe somewhere else?
- Where are the sponsored basic income people supposed to live/how will they be selected? Any plans for this already?
- (!) Important: Please make it a requirement for the research to be as open as possible. Require datasets to be made available and all publications to be made available online (if journals/conferences make sure they have Open Access). Also make the research process as open as possible.
- Consider making the application process as open as possible, too. Publish the materials/proposal that was submitted by the "winner". Possibly publish unsuccessful applications with some comments as well. I know that this isn't going to be a high priority but there's a distinct lack of feedback for unsuccessful grant proposals in science.
Will the basic income be paid in addition to standard gov't subsidies?
If yes, how do you make up for the shortfall of money? "Taxing the rich" is nice in theory but IMHO it doesn't work right now, what are you going to do to change that?
If no, it might be worth it, if you also fire the bureaucrats currently working on gov't subsidies (freeing up the money thereby) But I don't see how your study will account for this, nor do I think this is feasible because gov't tends to increase in size and has no incentive to decrease. Other beneificial aspects would be decreasing the size of the code of law and forcing "social security lawyers" to specialize in something else, reducing costs of all other lawyers. Again, it will be hard to put it in practice and difficult to account for in your study.
I suppose you also have already read some literature on the topic. From my personal viewpoint I'd recommend "Economics in one Lesson" by Hazlitt [0], it's decidedly non-mainstream and I wonder if it's taught at all in universities today but the only economic theory based on game theory (although not explicitly) and fully consistent IMHO.
I also believe that funding a multi-agent simulation is probably cheaper for a few economic models (I'd volunteer here)
Finally, I see some business value here, namely studying whether it would make sense to fund persons instead of start-ups, as e.g. Entrepreneur First does [1] (I have no affiliation)
[0] http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf [1] http://www.joinef.com/
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that taking this position is a bad idea, I'm just trying to better understand the opportunity and why YC research might be a better decision than a more run-of-the-mill PhD. I'm ever so slightly skeptical, but mostly just curious.
A lot of jobs will be lost in the future due to technological advances (as new jobs will be created as well) and Basic Income is a noble approach to replace an imperfect system and prepare the population for these changes. But for the far future I'm not convinced it won't be prone for the same difficulties and (corrupt) influences the current system has endured.
If housing, education, food, and energy were made super cheap through technology we could provide those services instead of a basic income.
Given plentiful resources what stops us from multiplying until we consume all available resources. Perhaps, if we had basic income it should only be provided once people turn 18. That way parents wouldn't keep having kids in order to get more money.
Housing: Looking to Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to have houses assembled from modular components that could be shipped. Standardization of parts would make things cheap.
Food: Robotics and biotechnology can increase yields and bring down costs. Also, aquaponics is an extremely productive system. It uses 5% of the way that traditional agriculture uses and fish consume only 1/10th the feed that cattle do. Also, duckweed (it grows like a weed) is easy to grow and feed the fish.
Education: Stop with the college model already. Technology is the answer. Look at Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. For education that needs more hands on training bring back the apprenticeship model. Let them get their education / training for free in exchange for working for free in the field for a limited time.
Infrastructure: Public transportation needs to be a priority. Cars sit idle 95% of the time. Once we have self-driving cars they should be pooled. Just schedule a time to be picked up.
For basic income, we might want to only provide it for people age 18+. Otherwise parents will just have tons of kids in order to collect checks. That will lead to overpopulation and eventually consuming all available resources.
- Basic income is usually proposed as a replacement to some or all services and income support people currently receive. I wonder if it is feasible to simulate that -- e.g. adjust it downwards for people receiving more public assistance (other than things like medicaid of course), or paying lower taxes, etc. -- this of course would depend on the funding model(s) to which results need to be applicable. Otherwise, following the study, people will surely say that what was tested is very different from what was proposed.
- Systemic effects would be relatively hard to evaluate with such a study, an example would be the change in both absolute and relative prices: e.g. I would expect that after a wide adoption, housing prices in cheap and mid-level areas might rise more than in currently expensive areas, because the added income would change the purchasing power of lower-income households by a much larger percentage -- or perhaps not. I guess it might be possible to try to account for things like this at the data analysis stage.
I think startups should focus on the second, not the first. The reason is that the second is a technical problem, or rather a lot of different technical problems, all of which are exactly the sorts of things that startups can tackle and succeed in solving.
The first problem, however, is a political problem. Startups are not the right tool to use to address political problems. That's not to say that startups can't play a role: they certainly can. But the role they play is to solve the second problem, and thereby make the first problem a non-problem. If all of the necessities of life were essentially free, because they were no longer scarce (for example, if food were as easy to obtain as air), then there would be no need for basic income because there would be no need for income. So startups can't solve the political problem in the usual sense; but they can "solve" it by making it no longer exist.
Granted advanced manufacturing is likely to stay in specialised facilities, but with open source and self replicating tools we may be able to put power back in the hands of the masses.
An obvious step along this path is 3D printing, but I'd argue that wikihow and other sites are greatly increasing the ability of people to meet their own needs. My own interest is in 3D imaging so that computers can reason about the world more readily, and not just replace jobs but replace skilled labour by augmenting our abilities.
Personally I'm more interested in a future where we use our own machines to live how we choose, rather than be given a stipend to buy the labour of machines controlled by increasingly narrow monopolies.
Could I make point related to the proposal?
In order for it to be accepted, I think it would be very useful if people could understand the modelling. Obviously this is difficult because economic modelling is pretty hard.
However, a good first step would be to make the model open - and preferably hosted on some kind of notebook-style platform so anyone can change the assumptions are try it.
I'd note that the Fed Reserve's economic models are open[1][2] and frequently updated, so there is some precedent for this.
[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/frbus/us-models-pa...
[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2005/835/revision/if...
1. How to maximize the number of prosperous people.
2. Ensure that those who will never be prosperous still aren't going to starve.
Incentives clearly matter in human behavior. Which is why I believe a negative income tax would be a better system than BI. Choose a livable stipend with free time or the alternative is digging ditches for very little difference in pay? I know what my choice would be. Conversely taking a low paying or part time job to supplement a negative income tax could eventually turn into a few years of experience on a resume to take the next step up.
- Is it an investment/bet that's expected to result in increased productivity?
- Is it a way to preserve humanity?
- Is a way to entertain the elite?
- Is it just "the right thing to do"?
To me, all of this feels like a primitive defense mechanism. People anticipate that they will become obsolete, rightfully so, and they come up with crazy strategies to preserve their relevance. Some even go as far as believing they can avoid this fate through fantasies such as "friendly AI". By letting their animal instinct take over, they miss the big picture.
Rather than slowing down progress, we should all aim to make the universe more efficient. Namely, we should aim to preserve consciousness, with as little resources as possible. Think "The Matrix". The physical world is just too rigid for the mind.
It's really interesting to read this discussion and get a sense of how deeply the work-ethic is ingrained. Many commenters can't seem to imagine that people would do anything productive if they're not paid to do it. Is this really what you believe?
Make starting a business as easy as possible: 1) Have all the legal stuff taken care of through a web form that fills out all the paperwork in a standard way. When a business becomes sophisticated enough, they get a lawyer to customize their solution if necessary.
2) Provide simple business banking at the same time.
Personally, I’m more interested in a system where costs of living are drastically lowered. Subsidies could work, but I think technology could play a large role. Imagine a clothing factory where everything is automated. Raw fabric comes in and finished clothing comes out. With minimal human interaction, variable costs should be much lower. Customers might even be able to design custom clothes with software.
Nonprofit organizations could be established to maintain the factories and equipment. Their primary goals would be to minimize cost, ensure quality, and maximize customer satisfaction.
Obviously, such a system would require a lot of capital and technological advances, but I believe it is feasible. This idea could also be applied to other areas like farming, electricity, ISPs, etc.
Probably what I'd do is look at people receiving benefits equivalent to basic income. Disability is a good proxy for some -- you would need to correct for the disability itself. 20 year military pensions are another.
For better or worse, the only way to "control" the costs would be if each of these basic necessities were led by government institutions or regulations as well as healthy competition for the production. That is a large step politically and socially but may be inevitable if we want to see a basic income succeed.
If anyone has any research or studies on related phenomena I would be very interested.
"Basic" (i.e. guaranteed, for non-esoteric treatments) health care.
My personal experience has profoundly introduced me to the principle that the rest of my well-being and performance is founded upon my health.
If basic income is too difficult or determined to be counter-productive, what about this?
In other words. If you expect ex. income taxation to be part of the way to deal with Basic Income it's doomed to fail.
One thing I've been kicking around, though I am not sure yet how it would work, is measuring potential demand for a traditional good or service -- a type of sentiment analysis to find gaps in the market.
When I'm thinking about this problem I tend to imagine market gaps in physical space -- where could people use a sandwich shop or game cafe or a heavy equipment rental, for example.
The traditional route, which seems needlessly wasteful in a world driven by data, is for someone who happens to have capital to come along and start a business either because they /feel/ there is a need, or because a similar business has been started in similar situations, or a similar business is raking in profits -- basically they guess (educated or not) at demand and spend a lot of time and money vetting that guess. Or, even more error prone, because they have a passion and decide to roll the dice. Then it either succeeds or fails to make a profit for a variety of reasons and their test is validated or not.
With kickstarter proving demand for potential goods that can be ordered and delivered, there should be a way to measure spacial demand for a good or service and move the capital required to willing and able people in that area to get it started. Perhaps even collecting information on what particular business practices might have a high likelihood of working...distributed and generalized franchising based on latent demand.
The idea seems particularly relevant in a discussion of basic income. If someone hates their job and are working only to stave off homelessness and starvation or to maintain some basic level of comfort and they are given the means to not worry about that anymore -- well, then they will likely try to figure out how best to improve their situation. What better way than starting a business with a high likelyhood of creating value for your neighbors? It answers the question: what can I do to to have the most impact in my community?
Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?
I'd also like to see things like the tax system be used to make changes to income inequality - both in terms of like for like pay as well as to some extent evening up the pay professions each sex choose to go into. i.e. if you are a woman you get tax off up to a certain amount because society screws over your pay for getting pregnant.
I'd also love to see meat taxed on a trading system where by everyone would get a meat quota that was quite small - if you want to eat shitloads of meat great - go for it - but you have to pay someone else for their meat points.
You could set the level of everyone's meat tokens for the year at a level to raise people out of poverty/or alternatively just to reflect the costs to the environment.
I'll releasing more totally unworkable economic policies soon... :-)
In the present, everything is connected. Giving someone basic income may mean that they demand higher wages for, say, working as a waiter in a restaurant. But if you only give basic income to some people, then those people still benefit from low-paid waiters (which wouldn't happen if it were on a national scale).
On top of that, it's a dynamic system. Traits like work ethic are partly cultural or passed down in families. Maybe the first generation of BI benefits more from work ethic, but it may decline in a few generations, perhaps undermining BI. That may not be apparent in a small study even of taken over a long time, because the participants will not be isolated from the surrounding culture.
Another point would be who gets to decide what a basic income is. Why stop at basic income. One thing that always troubles me able minimal wage discussions is why start minimum wage as say $15 dollars an hour. Why not $100. I actually believe that if we eliminated the minimum wage altogether the wages for various jobs would be able to find a better equilibrium then setting a artificial minimum. The argument the employers would reduce wages to $0.50 and the like would not happen because everyone would quit.
Could not disagree more. This has been the ultimate motivator for all human accomplishment, as well as the evolutionary enhancement of all living things on the planet.
- credit (specifically housing and pay-day loans) - the necessity (real or imagined) of a college degree - quality and subject matter of pre-university education - utilities (specifically electricity and internet) - housing and rent
To be clear, I'm not advocating the direct removal or destructuring of any of these things. I do, however, see these as disruptable (but largely ignored) aspects of our society and economic system that have direct, adverse effects on many groups of people.
I believe this can at least help people with their inner lives -- which can translate into benefits throughout.
Don't know where you live, but here in Pittsburgh anyway the soup kitchens won't turn you away just because you participate in a tech incubator.
I don't think it is as pure as a basic income, but rather than just redistributing wealth, it also creates wealth specifically for underprivileged communities.
The answer to this question is influenced by so many environmental factors that it would be difficult to do one study and arrive at a repeatable answer. Communities, countries, cultures, weather, and so many other things are at play.
We already know that education and training produce self sufficient people. If startups want to to give back, they should start with something they know and incorporate more training programs into the workplace. Develop growth cycles, from beginner to professional, and build a culture of renewal and community that makes people want to stick around.
We need a better system for measuring and distributing the value of our work. We lose so much collective value because of the system of inefficiencies built up around how we quantify that value. When 70% of working Americans don't give a shit about their job, we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of "productivity" wasted...
Prosperity comes from people doing meaningful work and exchanging that for an abundant lifestyle. I love the idea of basic income, and am 100% in support, but it is only a tool that will (hopefully) enable people to find their meaningful role in society by alleviating the struggles of poverty consciousness.
What people usually call basic income is different from current systems in these points:
- It's automatic, no paperwork or going to authorities.
- It's simple, everyone gets the same amount - disabled people, people with children, etc.
- The income jump from unemployment to employment is higher.
But I don't think the difference is that big. Just modify a few parameters of the current system, perhaps change the level of income redistriubution to your liking and you have basic income.
1. Financial risk is an element of prosperity. Lowering risk by improving public services and the safety net embolden more people to pursue a startup. I would spend more money if I didn't have to hoard every penny against the risk of a health crisis or period of unemployment.
2. Prosperity is the source of demand for products and services.
3. Broad based consumer demand can support infrastructure which, in turn, supports startups. An example that I can think of is the cell phone system, which really took off when "everybody" could afford a cell phone.
I don't have any research published in a related field, but I'm tempted to send in a proposal. Would the researcher have to live in San Francisco for this?
Increasing rents in particular metros (the ones where the good jobs are at) is the most obvious and solvable cost of living problem we have right now. Pretty much all we need is to just permit more housing to be built, in the form of radically loosening zoning regulations that block dense housing. There, done.
Housing in the bay area would still be somewhat expensive with more liberal guidelines on housing, but nowhere close to where it is right now.
On the other hand , you've got access to an extremely talented and large group of people, and if you steered them towards a group of sub communities all highly focused on working together to find solutions to each of the individual sub problems - than i'm sure we'll see lots of great ideas and insights.
That's all assuming it's possible to build such collaboration. But the goal is so appealing to many , so i think it's possible.
1. basic income implies that there is a fixed minimum cost for comfortable survival. Does it require organic food? Does it require clean air? Does it require etiquette training? Does it adjust for localized prices? Does it include a vehicle, video games, and gadgets?
2. a simple analogy to zoo kept animals comes to mind. The more detached from the holistic view of nature and the cosmos humans get, the worse off we become. Why? because everything IS connected.
3. Money is a flawed system because you are equating material goods to non-material concepts. It will never balance out. Not even with gold.
Anyone can live there, with some sort of local government oversight. You want to live somewhere nicer? Make money and pay more. You fall on hard times or want to cut costs while working on the next big idea? You don't have to worry about not having food on the table or roof over your head.
The first principle is that a population always outgrows its resources. As long as one create conditions to sustain a life it will start to reproduce exponentially. Rabits in Australia is a classic example.
The second principle is the scarcity principle of economics. Everything which is easily available loses its value by definition. Any amount of free money would be factored out by increasing of the prices, as if you move the zero on a scale.
The third principle is of social hierarchy. Each society forms a hierarchy to be sustainable. It is so fundamental, that we never think of it, but there is no flat societies even in animal kingdom.
Again, basic income is just moving a zero on a scale. Prostitutes will not switch to living on that income, they will merely rise the prices, because prostitution is social phenomena much more than economical. The food market will adapt accordingly, so the only food one would be able to buy will be a synthetic crap made out of cheapest substitutes - this is how markets work. Same would happen with housing. Land is a scarse asset and the most ancient status item and a source of income. Free money will change nothing there.
And, of course, there were lots of experiments since the beginning of time - all these socialist or communist utopias which failed the reality checks - they crashed and sunk down after a collision with economical and social laws, which are as unalterable as the laws of physics.
Simple models doesn't work. There is no other way of sustainable ecosystem exept self-regulation due to competition over scarcity of resources. It is very naive and dangerous assumption that human intelligence could beat laws of the Universe or evolutionary forces. The mess we are in is the best evidence.
Right now the government has basic(or really much more than basic) income . . . it can create the money it needs to do what it wants. And this trickles down from the President and the Speaker of the House to the foot soldier and the mailman.
This is a feature of the monetary system and it is only challenged in rare, extreme, or politically charged cases.
Perhaps we should think about innovating the currency to provide basic income to citizens rather than to the state.
It makes me wonder. How happy will people who only get basic income be? How easy or difficult will it be for them to get simple work for a little extra income?
Now there is a big difference in getting $10k for free vs scraping it together from 4 different crappy jobs. But still I wonder. I came away from that story less confident in basic income that I previously was.
The solution is not more laws, it's less. For example ending the war on drugs would have a immediate effect on the lower income brackets. If I didnt pay >1/3 of my income to support our $T war complex I could hire more people.
By Keynes' estimation, those who are discussing such things right now are right on schedule.
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
The combination of hiring researchers that come from poor background with the author's stated belief that a basic income would likely be a good thing makes the entire set up seem very biased.
I like the idea of promoting research into the subject but I don't think this is the right way to do economic research.
Why not basic commodities ? I mean distributing significant quantities of corn, corn-meal, flour, rice, a wide variety of beans, dried fruit, beets, onion, millet, granulated garlic, etc. The stuff that you can make a vast array of healthy foods out of.
This eliminates much of the possability of waste in the system, and at the same time it doesn't expose the individual to legal and privacy complications that come with 'income'. It translates into money in people's pockets indirectly because now their family's food budget is dramatically reduced.
I think this is a more elegant solution but the reason why it's difficult politically is because it incentivizes individuals and families to put more time and planning into home food preparation. There are billion dollar advertising campaigns aimed at conditioning the exact opposite behavior which is one reason why it's probably politically untenable at this time.
Also I'd like to raise another point which is that I find it somewhat disturbing that a major startup community leadership organization is so interested in possibly attempting to influence the national policy around financial issues in a way that is so far removed from the technology domain.
Are you guys a startup incubator or a think tank ? In other words are you busy conducting research to churn out position papers designed to influence the national debate on non-tech issues ? If so then how transparent do you plan on being with founders, past, present, and future about this entire process as it evolves going forward ?
The reason why I believe it's a bit of a stretch to consider this a tech issue is because in my view the idea that "technology is eliminating jobs" seems to be a false premise statistically speaking. To me it's a debate centered around how "free trade policy" is influencing the global job market and how that has impacted the United States economy. I believe that in the US at least the tech ecosystem has created more jobs, a whole new economy in fact which didn't exist before. It's the non-tech jobs that are gone, but they weren't eliminated by technological innovation as much as they were dispursed globally in the wake of certain regulations.
Do what startups do: create new opportunities, for both workers and customers, at competitive prices. It's what startups do.
You need bread AND circuses.
TV, movies, reddit and video games are the modern circuses, but we need to make MEANING accessible.
Startups, with lowering barriers, are part answer. But not winner-take-all unicorns; more like long-tail lifestyle businesses. So that everyone can be uniquely useful, regardless of direction or ability (Ricardo's comparative advantage).
9-5 service jobs so that people can pay rent needs to become a thing of the past, so many lives and talent gone to waste.
If you introduce basic income so that nobody has to do the shitty job, nobody will do it.
But one day there will be robots that can clean the toilets, and then there will be no shitty jobs left to do - and perhaps only then can basic income take hold.
Perhaps a good thing to do with a universal basic income is tell people they can collect it from anywhere. This is what people do with social security and such. They go live in cheap countries where they can get dental and medical work done for 1/10th the price. Cheap food, cheap rent, etc. The lowered demand for these things in the US would lower prices here. Everybody wins!
Has anybody studied the outcomes on American Indian reservations from having basic income guaranteed for generations? I'm not an expert or well-read in this field, but I think anybody advocating basic income would be interested to visit a reservation and observe the lifestyles, dreams, goals, and successes found there.
A general theme here is to identify every element of our current economy and society that we use debt to access, and find ways of disrupting that, of providing same or equivalent access without debt. Shelter, transportation, health, and education are all ripe for that kind of disruption.
That kind of ongoing feedback would be invaluable to capture the day-to-day experiences of study participants, and I'd be happy to volunteer my time to support the study...
http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away.
Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
We need new "career paths" where people are prepared for a life without work so that things do not devolve into what we have seen in remote communities here in Australia.
Sybil and fraud resistance come to mind immediately.
If I were in the top 0.01% of wealth, I'd really like to see research into basic income. It would help with deflationary spirals, social order in an automated future and increase the supply of good ideas because it would free more people to explore high risk areas.
It's sort of a long time to see a payoff but economically-speaking these are some of the most efficient education dollars people can spend (it's a time in the child's life that has high leverage).
You can read more about how we're trying to increase affordability here: www.sharedforkids.com
Ask yourself, is the additional research in extra years worth it over what can be accomplished in x years? (1-2 years in this case).
I say do what you've always done: fund disruptive ideas. In this case, research proposals with short timescales and big impact.
Increase the range of opportunities that are within an ordinary person's budget. Nowadays it's fairly simple for the average Joe to buy or sell things online, create a blog, or rent small amounts of server time.
Give people something they can do, and a way they can get paid for it.
I'm not talking about consumer debt here (though that's a problem too), I'm talking about the debts that are intrinsic to the system used to obtain a high standard of living in the US. Those debts are what keep most people shackled down.
If you want to take a sabbatical because of a series of hard knocks in a short timespan, you can't, because if you stop working, you'll lose everything you own. If someone can take everything from you when you stop giving them money, you don't own it. That's the core problem, the core reason employment is so stressful and the core reason that losing a job is a major life negative.
Want somewhere to live? You gotta pay that house payment and/or rent. Very few "home owners" in the U.S. are actually home owners, they're effectively just renting the house from the bank. Even 30 years after getting their first mortgage, most are not home owners because they've sold and rebought their homes several times over the years.
Want (need) to drive to get somewhere? For a decent car, it'll be $300/mo for 6 years (+ insurance). You might be able to go a few years without a payment, but by year 10, most cars are going to be worn down to the point where they have to be replaced, and you'll have to start making payments on a fresh one.
Want a decent job? OK, we're down with that, as long as you pay your non-dischargeable entrance fee of $50k+ student debt for the privilege. Actual skillset or competence is of little relevance for most professions.
Make all of these things so cheap that they don't require debt, or make these things available in some attainable way that doesn't require debt and allows people to actually own something, and we'll have a huge portion of the problem solved.
Of course, the powers that be really hate it when someone isn't in debt, because debt is literally free money; usury is the most effortless way to earn money in existence. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money by keeping the citizen dependent on them for big, necessary purchases.
Perhaps the government could offer 0% financing on all of these items -- homes, cars, and education. That might be a start to breaking the debt cycle. Another thing that would help is moving back to multi-generational housing and maintaining a strong culture of inheritance.
The idea is anyone earning over the maximum income[calculation] will pay almost all of the amount over the maximum wage as income tax.
Calculation: I propose that the maximum income be a hundred times the current federal minimum wage times two thousand. The assumption is that a full-time employee works two thousand hours a year. Under my proposal, we will raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour which will set the so-called maximum income at $3M a year.
Of course, we do not want to penalize people from making more money. Nobody shall go to prison for making more money. I just think that any income over the maximum income should be taxed at a higher rate which I propose should be 90% of the income over maximum income.
If/when we get a basic income system working, we can switch the so-called maximum income to a hundred times the basic income. I hope the mega rich will support this plan as unlike the estate tax, this is not a tax aimed at the eroding their assets. As long as they do not take distributions from their corporations/ trust funds/ "charitable" funds, their assets should remain safe.
I know the federalists will turn in their graves as I say this but we cannot afford to have state and local governments do as they wish. When Texas steals business from California or Kansas steals business from Missouri, the consequences are just the same as when China steals business from the US. We need to federally enforce standards that prevent some states and communities from being "business friendly" at the expense of the people.
Edit: will the downvoter please care to say a few words?
Why is it then that everyone assumes the surplus created by electric automation should be distributed using such a primitive legacy paper based information system as the dollar? That's 19th century thinking
Some examples of this include: Uber/Lyft, decreasing transportation costs and improving quality for millions, while creating tens of thousands of jobs; Airbnb, same thing for hotels; social apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc, increasing entertainment/information flow to users, creating new media careers; etc. So startups don't need to operate any differently than they do now ... Think big and make big moniez!
One thing that definitely does not work are "social enterprise" startups. Distraction from the brutal realities of market forces ultimately leads these to fail while patting themselves on the back for doing "good."
In the spirit of the question though I'll list a few areas I think have enormous potential.
Money services and lending - very difficult to innovate here due to the iron fist of Uncle Sam and banking cartels. I think what's needed is either, 1) US-caliber teams operating outside the US or 2) products that skirt the law a la Uber/Airbnb but like those products are so positive with users that going against them becomes a risk for politicians.
Health - outsourcing/telepresence, reducing the cost of basic testing. Again may need to operate outside the US.
Legal - enormous value to be unlocked by standardizing and automating this field a la Clerky but better. Difficult to get lawyers on board, they are very good at extracting rents.
Real estate - breaking regulatory capture of Realtors.
End of life services - we're all in this market. It's not sexy so not much innovation.
Education - it's so backwards that you can innovate in any dimension.
Investment - despite nominal progress on things like crowdfunding, there really hasn't been a big impact yet by startups in increasing access to capital / opportunities to invest. It's still far too difficult to raise money for new businesses. Again, may have to operate outside of the US for this and consider innovative legal structures.
Science - breaking the University stranglehold on credible scientific research through crowdsourced/funded efforts. Enormous potential to cheaply fund studies especially those that go against orthodoxy or corporate interests. Again may need to be outside US.
Work with the government to get us experimental-close-to-full authority on our laws so that we may rewrite and change them dynamically.
We pull Social Contract.
We share everything. Money is only used to transact with others outside our city limits.
Software.
I always thought rich guys - particularly American ones - are just a bunch of selfish assholes.
I'm heartened to see that there is at least one - Sam Altman - who thinks about those outside his social circle.
Definitely something we should look in to for the sake of humanity.
I could just stay and play computer games all day =) Relax and go out!
That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that.
In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this, if we're not even willing to pay for the necessities of life?
People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive members of society.
In order to implement such a system we need a reliable way for society to judge the voluntary work of its members that would justify the basic income. And a set of works with social value offered to those whose chosen work is not deemed worthy of basic income.
I'll just try to make this more clear with a possible implementation of such a system.
You are allowed to receive your basic income and do whatever you want as long as a number of randomly selected people consider your work worthy of basic income.
A way to organise this would be to present what you have done in some kind of predefined format at the end of each year. These people decide if what you have done is worthy of you getting your basic income another year. Otherwise the next year you have to work in one of the state accepted ways to get your basic income (by teaching, playing with kids, cleaning the roads or whatever thing we as a society agree it's always worthy). To maximise the accountability I'd choose these random group of people in the community of the person who receives the basic income. They will have better ways to know wether what is presented is actually being done and worthy. These 'judges' would need to be anonymous to minimise the potential for social engineering to game the system.
This is just an example, I think we can devise different versions of the control structures following the same spirit for works that do not adjust well to this kind of evaluation.
Sorry for my grammar and english. Perhaps someone can restate this in a more readable way. English is not my first language and I'm not a great writer, but I hope at least the essence of the ideas behind this proposal pass through and can contribute to the general discussion.
Surely I'm not the only one offended by this? Lost respect after reading this.
Is this really a problem in Western societies? I haven't heard of famines or people starving to death here.
I believe that most people work for social status, so they can keep up with the people surrounding them.
> I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.
Is this a good way to recruit researchers? After all you wouldn't want the researchers just to produce a paper that reinforces what you believe already.
The test is quite similar, but instead of giving them a basic income participants are still required create their own income - however, they no longer have to pay taxes on their income. They are encouraged to create businesses and those businesses are also free from tax, and those employed by said businesses are also free from tax.
50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used to allow government to take our money ;)
They won't game the results. There was some research done, I forget date and author, something about 'origin of species'
Land value tax.
I agree with the fundamental dogma that startups are the best way we know to create good technology, which in turn benefits everyone. ie. the big wealth creators are discovering new resources and creating better technology. ( The big new resources are in space, or perhaps deep sea, so your back to startups to get there.)
Extrapolating, it seems reasonable that within 15 years the cost of many manufactured items will fall dramatically and quality will go up - when 3D printing can print electronics and plastics intermingled together at good resolution, that will mean all our vacuum cleaners / iphones / laptops / TVs / cars / bikes / shoes are printed whole instead of assembling them from parts.
Aside from consumer goods, we still all need high quality and cheap solutions for : education, energy, transport and housing.
Cheap, high quality [customisable!] housing might actually be solved by 3D printing also [ but maybe you'll just end up paying more for rights to the land plot or sky space to host your dream pad ? ]
Its worth mentioning the obvious, that Startups don't exist in a vacuum, they need the backdrop of founders and staff who are highly educated [ not to mention a functioning economy with capital, infrastructure, internet ]
Personally, if someone gave me a basic income and a project budget, I would spend it on establishing Math Circles for students aged 10 to 15. ( My ideal version of math circles involves some hands-on programming in javascript, coupled with the typical tricky math problems to solve - https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-with-c... ). Id also like to see how we could scale out Math Circles by delivering them online.
Education via this Math Circle format is a very long term technology investment, but has a high bang for buck in terms of upside for the planet and our species. As a parent it seems clear to me, we cant wait around for the government or established institutions to innovate in education - it has to be done in parallel and outside of the constraints of a formal bureaucracy.
Think of each student as a startup you're funding - in that long tail there might be one or two Adas, Edisons, Einsteins or Mirzakhanis wherein almost all future 'value' lies.. but we're also making a wider pyramid of culture, diffusing out into the general milieu of artists, nurses, marketers, designers a slightly higher level of facility and intuition in math and science.
I find myself wishing that something like the process I went through could be institutionalized to a degree. For example, I had to be previously indoctrinated on the value of minimalist living. I had to be convinced that that was something that I wanted. And I had to consider all my habits and responsibilities, and what I might be willing to give up to get me to different outcomes. I had to understand how cheap it could be to exist in the city in which I live, and then cut in order to get there. I had to let friends know of my goals, and hope that we could create new traditions that sacrificed little and perhaps even strengthened our relationship. The whole time, you are altering your habits, testing them out before removing the harness. For example, when I wanted to stop requiring my bathroom space, I started going to the gym every morning to shower. Once I was used to that in my daily routine, I then started doing fitness and running while I was there. And when I didn't want to come back for food, I started putting together a minimalist meal plan that I could prepare in advance and take with me for the day. Reworking my habits and needs was almost a full-time job for a few months. Anyhow, I would never assume most people would want to take it as far as I did. Everyone's path would be different, as their responsibilities and routines differ. But that slow process of change if life-altering.
I am now living in San Francisco for perhaps $300/month, and living very happily (perhaps moreso than ever), although El Nino is a recent complicating factor :) I will likely upgrade from hammock tent to camper in the near future, as I don't want to strain relationships with my partner. But up till now, it's worked very well.
And I want to clarify that I would never see minimalism the goal, but just a means to happiness and resilience. In any process that might resemble my own journey, taking something away should always be a choice made for future benefit.
Perhaps making that benefit more concrete could be part of any institutionalized program. Pay generously at first, but then expect costs to come down, and the more they come down, the more "reward". Perhaps that could be a retirement bonus. Or access to some sort of YC investment portfolio that would essentially be retirement reward. So the cheaper you learn to live, under the guidance of the program, the more of a nest-egg you earn.
Anyhow, apologies if this is less than coherent -- lots of thoughts in my head on this topic. I am very not in the "tech solutionism camp", and am pretty self-aware that my experience would be less a prescribed path, but rather a general template :)
The greatest thing a startup can do to increase the prosperity of everyone is simply continue trying to be successful, within legal bounds. Every startup is inherently working to lower the cost of living, whether that's their stated goal or not. Even a seemingly useless app startup - if it becomes successful - will (1) add jobs to the economy, (2) give employees and their families more purpose and well-being (working brings people fulfillment and joy), and (3) contribute to lowering the cost of living[1].
Obviously, some startup industries (education, medicine, etc.) have a more direct influence on this process than others, but they all contribute in indirect ways to increased prosperity overall - even if motivated by purely "greedy", capitalistic ideals.
If basic income were somehow to be implemented by providing basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc. rather than currency) without the involvement of other people/companies providing those needs, then I believe it could work. The trouble is, even in a world full of automation (and less need for typical jobs), the resources will still be controlled by organizations, governments, and people - and not always the people who have the most need for them. In that environment (and lets face it, certain people, countries, organizations, etc. will always be better suited at doing things than others), the economy is actually zero-sum in the meta sense. No one can consume without another party producing - even if the producers at some point are just owners of machines. And in a competitive economy, things like basic income just become factored into the cost of living, so it's kind of a moot point.
From another angle, if basic income is ever implemented in terms of currency ($x per month), it will not solve poverty. I have plenty of first-hand experience to tell you that a large number of people will choose to live in poverty (or forgo what most of us consider to be basic necessities) by spending that money in foolish ways (gambling, addictions, frivolous purchases, etc). Those people will not accept responsibility for having wasted the money, and we'll be right back to where we are now: people demanding more welfare services from the government.
[1] A successful but useless (practically-speaking) app/game means that people are willing to pay for it. Paying for a good or service that otherwise would not exist contributes in indirect ways to technological progress (e.g., by gaining more adoption, the technologies powering that app will be in a better position to improve and contribute to aspects of our lives that have more practical value), including more investment into things that do improve our quality of life per dollar spent.
"
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.
Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Actually, we're all like yourself and Dr. Cochrane.
"
sama asks, "What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" It's a good question. I think one answer that is not limited to startups, but applies to everyone, is to spread the idea and ideals that embody an egalitarian, post-scarcity, society. Star Trek happens to be an entertaining depiction. It doesn't have much in the way of details when it comes down to it, but it embodies the ideas and values of an egalitarian, post-scarctiy, existence where people don't just sit around all day playing video games, but work to better themselves and the rest of humanity.
Giving people money isn't enough. We need to also promote and live a set of values that will compliment Basic Income. We need to free ourselves from the fear of survival, but we must have the proper mindset and environment to ensure a successful freedom.
So, startups, invent replicators[1] so we can move to a post-scarcity economy and everyone, spread the word that it's time for our society to evolve so we can garner the support required for instituting Basic Income.
I completely agree with sama when he says, "I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale." Thus this experiment is less about whether Basic Income is a good idea, and more about how to ensure that it is a good idea and implemented successfully. I think you really need to pay attention to perceptions and societal values which requires education (plenty of startup activity here).
1. Spread the word
2. Invent replicators [2]
3. Get the messaging, education, values, mental models, etc right
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)
[2] Half joking, but serious.
[3] I'll try to update this comment as thinking clarifies as this topic is so large it's overwhelming.
[4] My other comment about Basic Income hopefully helping to resolve poor incentives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985443
In spite of that, I have some real questions and comments about the constraints on a project like this.
1. What's the budget for this?
In order to get any generalizable data, you'd have to set up your sample plan to be geographically and demographically diverse. In an ideal world, you'd need to provide for 1,800 subjects to get genuinely usable data. Research is rarely ideal, and you can infer from smaller samples, but how many subjects are we talking about? 5? 10? 100? 500? 1,000? Also, what constitutes a sample? Individual or household? (see 2, paragraph 2 below)
2. What constitutes Basic Income?
I'd argue that Basic Income represents enough for all human needs to be fulfilled to some arbitrarily minimal extent. Unlike some other comments, I include the need for entertainment and sex among basic human needs. As well as catastrophic health care. Does that mean everyone gets a free PS 4? No. And I also don't mean paying for prostitutes. But some budget for entertainment of some kind makes sense to me, as does a budget for dating.
Anything short of that fails, in my opinion, to be a basic income. It's more like welfare for everyone, which is conceptually different, in my opinion. I also think Basic Income should be adjusted for location and household size. Although it might not be the right metric, the most convenient one we have is centuries of data about total household income vs. household size. That's how the Census Bureau defines the poverty threshold, for example.
There are a lot of different ways to think about this, and my opinions above are just that: opinions. The point I'm trying to make is that if this experiment is going to happen, what's the best possible scenario for measuring something useful?
3. How do we research what is happening without affecting the outcome?
I actually have an answer to this one. I think it's inevitable that any time a government agency is processing payments, there are at least some hoops to jump through. Welfare has its process, as does unemployment. It's reasonable to think we can design a brief questionnaire that tracks certain key variables like productivity, happiness, artistic endeavors, anxiety (bonus points for using a wearable device to track stress levels?? Maybe?) . . . whatever. I'm not sure what those should be.
But it could be structured in a way that is realistic enough that you wouldn't do any obvious damage to the study by observation. Once your location and status have been established, the benefits do not change depending on your answers. But you have to check in and request a payment on the 25th and 10 of every month (to guarantee payments on the 1st and 15th).
4. It's important to note that there will be some people who adjust to whatever income they are making and do nothing beyond that. I don't know what percentage that is, but the funders have to understand that at least some people will do nothing but sit around and drink or play video games, and that can't be a reason to cut them off, otherwise, it really biases things in a bad way.
5. If this is able to be truly representative, then you would have to expect at least some percent of the participants in the experiment to get into legal trouble.
What do we do with them?
If you set a condition that people stay out of legal trouble to get the benefits (a genuinely real scenario if we are trying to model how this might be implemented in the future), then you are tampering with your sample.
If you don't attach such a condition, you're going to draw a huge amount of criticism for paying people to be in jail, potentially funding criminal operations of various kinds, and there will be a small portion of people who choose to go to jail who have been there before and are comfortable with it and live extremely cheaply while racking up the savings. That's a tough one.
6. Going back to budget: is there enough to do control vs. group testing?
By that, I mean we have a control group that answers the same survey every two weeks, but only gets a small incentive to do so. Nothing even close to a basic income. Enough to get them to hit a website and answer a 5-minute questionnaire about their life for the last two weeks, identical to the one the BI people are required to answer for their payments.
And how many strategies can we afford to test? If we have rep sample control, then we can rep sample a variety of strategies: pro-rated based on location and household size, flat BI same for everyone, or other nuanced approaches.
I guess I've really seriously gone and buried the lede here, but Sam, what is the scope of this project? My experience in research is that there's not really an analogue to the MVP in the startup world.
Research needs to be rigorous and correct from the outset. You can't hack something together that mostly works and then see if it gets traction and find bigger funders if it does. I'm not suggesting that's your line of thinking, but this is a big project.
Getting meaningful, generalizable data about this is going to cost a lot.
The Valley, through a variety of circumstances, is now home to the highest concentration of technology companies, and is unsurprisingly one of the most expensive places to live in the world.
The are known economic forces [1] that cause clustering of similar firms in small areas, and there's no doubt that this is a net positive for both the city and the individual businesses, at least at first. The incredible concentration both of talent and wealth in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a clear testament to the power of physical proximity.
However, I urge the technology community and specifically Y Combinator to seriously reconsider the notion that all of technology must happen on a peninsula in central California.
How this decreases the cost of living is obvious. I live in Memphis TN and I pay $500 a month on my mortgage. Further, the city of Memphis and many other cities in the US are in serious need of both talented young people and economic development. The "brain drain" is a real and devastating effect of compressing the technology ecosystem onto the West Coast. Reversing the brain drain would bring leadership, talent, and dollars to areas that need it.
I'd like to specifically call out YC for this section of their FAQ:
> Can we do it without moving to where you are?
> Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest.
In every other aspect of their model, YC is open to all reasonable possibilities. They fund photo sharing apps and nuclear reactors, women and men, young and old, but NOT people who won't move to SF. This reasoning is apparently based on just a few examples. Thus, the idea that constant physical availability is a fundamentally important part funding is just conjecture.
This policy and the attitude behind it are essentially opposed to the ethos of the technologist. How does one change the world by adding incrementally to the wealth of the Bay Area? Also, it's an absurdity that I have to mention that the internet was invented so that we wouldn't have to do stuff like this anymore.
This also addresses the issue of diversity. If you want more diverse people, go to where they live. I find it an amusing contradiction that many of the people who cringe at the idea of moving to the repressive "Deep South" of Tennessee would find themselves working with people who aren't white dudes for the the first time if they ever did move.
So, I urge YC and the tech community at large to spread out from just the bay area. Reconsider the cities you came from. Be bold and try to find the opportunities that are waiting outside Silicon Valley.
Hi Sam,
I'm going to not read through 747+ comments, I'm sorry.
Right now, in the best cities in the nation, the cost of living is rising significantly. These cities have a deep job pool, they are making serious efforts on sustainability, have wide and varied culture and are generally more efficient (and often better) ways to live[0].
However, because of the cost of living is rising so steeply, it is forcing people of median income and below to spread out into the suburbs, increasing commute cost (and pollution), as well as the variety of issues suburbia causes for the environment and sustaininable living[1]. Among the contributing factors here is childrearing, which takes extra space - space which is extremely expensive to rent or purchase in a city. This is an incredibly significant issue as we iterate this game several times.
I'd like to bring to your attention several interlinked aspects that play out here:
- higher housing density is more sustainable
- highly effective transit networks decrease pollution
- dense housing suitable for long-term family residences is very hard to find.
I'm not persuaded that a start-up (a rapidly growing, high growth company) will be able to achieve success in these areas, because of the time horizon needed for these problems to be dealt with is on the 20+ year timespan. However, I'll argue that a company could make a dent in several of these areas:
- mixed use high-rises that are designed for families: offices, schools, playgrounds, etc included[2]. This would be a shift from the typical luxury condo build and, I'd argue, would find a very solid niche in the modern urbanist movement. I would argue that an affordability policy could go hand in hand with this, with certain entities eating some of the rental/purchase cost of these properties.
- Increase transit effectiveness. YC is already making a play in this area with Remix[3], but I think that doubling down on making transit costs and benefits more effective could really be a game changer. Demonstrating the very real cost of commuting would assist in the people inclined towards Green thought; figuring out how to make transit a pleasant experience would assist in getting the people not inclined to deal with the occasional horror story to support and vote for transit.
- In the same vein, platforms and tools that directly support pleasant densification will help. An example of this for someone in a dense neighborhood is Walc[4]. But, looking at policy and assisting policy becomes a major political play here.
Ultimately, what I fear the actual solution will look like here a broad-based housing price/rent control system, where everyone who isn't a multimillionaire who wants to live in a city has to be in a rent-controlled system, paid out by the local government. What we're seeing in Seattle is a bit of a tulip situation: people buying are buying at high prices because the sellers are aware they can sell at high prices, this ratchets the next unit price up; the demand is so high that it's forcing prices up very fast.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...
[1] http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/26/second-life-cyc...
[2] An arcology, yes. :-)
I don't think most people who frequent HN, no matter how well intentioned, understand the factors that cause people to be stuck in poverty, myself included. I think you would have to get close to the problem to have really useful ideas. I have ideas, but they are more like questions to be honest.
Some ideas I have thought about in the past:
* An app that helps people learn that they are in a failing school district, and helps them systematically develop a plan to get out of it. I live in St. Louis, and around the time of the This American Life episodes on the Ferguson schools, I spent a lot of time wondering how you end up sending your kids to the worst of the 550 public school districts in the state. The question in this case is: what are the characteristics of people who send their kids to bad schools, and to what extent can they help themselves if given the right tools?
* An app that helps people find others to share resources with (shared living, etc). The idea here is that poverty may be driven by the breakdown of the family, which provides first-line social insurance when working well. Kind of like match.com for poor people with kids looking to team up. The question here is: Is there some subset of improverished people who are very high-functioning, but so limited by childcare and low-wealth that they cannot lift themselves out of poverty. If so, could these people be matched and help each other by sharing resources?
* Trying to create a program that directly funnels kids from underperforming schools into computer programming and IT jobs without going to college. Perhaps to be hired by large corporations who will ultimately spring for night-school to round out their education. Here, I am thinking about a section from the book The Prize, where a bunch of Newark teachers go to insane lengths to try to get one kid with some athletic talent enough tutoring that he can achieve an ACT score of like 14 and qualify for a college scholarship. That strikes me as significantly less scalable than a program that tries to give poor kids a marketable set of skills coming out of high school. It would still be a small set of kids, but maybe larger than the number who have athletic talent (and its not clear athletic scholarships yield good outcomes anyway). The questions here: Could some non-trivial group of impoverished high school kids be funneled directly into employment with the right vocational technical skills and support from major corporations?
With all these kinds of ideas, however, I think you would have to get really close to the people you are trying to serve to have any chance of building something that would help them. And that means 'embedding' with them for a non-trivial period and really trying to figure out what will work.
None of these ideas are like startups, in the sense that I think in the best case scenario they aren't likely to scale very well. I think they are more likely to cherry pick a small number of resourceful/talented people who might otherwise have remained mired in poverty.
That's better than nothing, but my intuition is that when you get into the details of poverty that there are no highly scalable solutions. Everything is going to be messy. These stories have informed my opinions on messiness:
Netflix Rich Hill Undefeated Waiting for Superman
Audio This American Life on Ferguson Schools
Books Our Kids (Putnam) The Prize Work Hard be Nice
Articles http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...
I think it might be best to create a different thread since this is a separate and important question than the "Basic Income" debate that is also interesting and happening in the same comments. Either way, here are my thoughts:
You can take that question a few of different ways. What can all startups do within their current processes/products? What is a startup idea that will increase prosperity for everyone? What can startups do in addition to their current product to help prosperity for everyone?
I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else. I think having productive people in our society who do not need to worry about the basic needs will increase the success of our society. If you don't agree with me on that, then everything below is probably not what you are looking for.
I think that setting aside funding regularly to donate to non-affiliated non-profits would be a great start. Most startups don't have the capacity (or desire) to reinvent themselves as charitable organizations. Creating a curated list of non-profits across different factors that contribute to prosperity (education, housing, jobs) and encouraging companies to commit to donating would help. I taught a relationship skills class with my wife for people on public assistance for the past 5 years until our federal grant ended last fall. I honestly believe helping those couples be in a better relationship helps them be better parents which gives the kids a greater chance to succeed. However, when the grant ended we had to close up shop and shut down the whole organization. Funding for these types of programs is so hard to come by that adding anything to the pool would be a great first step.
As far as what sort of startups can be developed to help increase prosperity I think you can segment it again into two views: The long view or the short view. The long view is done by helping ensure the future generation's increased prosperity. Things like increased quality of education and training, family life, and access to technology.
The short view ones are things that would improve access to a basic level of housing, food, healthcare and education. Worrying about those things (and probably more) are going to make it harder for people to be successful. It isn't impossible, just more difficult. I think that gathering and analyzing data would be a great start for a startup. There is a ton of information out there. The grant I mentioned above collected surveys from thousands of couples nationwide over a period of years. I'm sure there are grants funding programs that are delivering information on all types of topics. Utilizing that information to help prioritize what is effective or whatever you can glean from it would be an interesting startup. Using that information to develop a wishlist of product ideas to fund would be interesting for a VC.
(This isn't my best writing/thinking. It is just sort of a brain dump to hopefully fuel some comments by someone.)
>(Questions about how a program like this would affect overall cost of living are beyond our scope, but obviously important.)
No, that's not just "obviously important". It's practically the ONLY thing that's important. If basic income raises the cost of living to the point where it negates the effect of having it, then basic income is meaningless.
Here's your study.
1) Bring one piece of candy into an elementary school class.
2) Ask all the kids what they'll do to get that piece of candy.
3) They'll pretty much do anything.
4) Next, bring bags of candy into another elementary school class, give one bag to each student.
5) Now brandish a piece of candy and ask what they'll do to get it.
6) They're pretty much ignoring you at this point.
Money has no value without scarcity and work has no value without ownership of it's rewards.
Basic income makes money less scarce and (to pay for basic income) steals from people who work.
When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction.
Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.
simply take the extreme case where everyone gets free resources. it is unsustainable.
natural selection is sustainable. that's how we got here.
anything else is just a deferment of the inevitable.