I met another person who worked on indie game development for two years and now works for a company designs games for others for money up front. He told me he hadn't made any money in the years working for himself.
It's incredible how many young people devote their time to passion projects with the very limited social safety net of the US. Surely a basic income will increase the allure. The question is, does the world need more indie mobile game developers?
What's wrong with having more artists, be it indie developers or semi-pro bands or hobbyist sculptors, if we can, as a society, afford it?
If people were only motivated by the stick, no one would seek a raise or change jobs for a pay increase. But nonetheless, people still seek to move upwards.
Unfortunately we cannot resolve the scarcity problem, particularly when it comes to real estate, i.e. the location one chooses to reside. There is a simple physical constraint: only one thing can occupy a specific space at a time. Cities in general are popular places to live because of their proximity to "things", the Arts and that interesting stuff happens where more people can collaborate in the real world. (Consider the demand to be close to your child's school or near a dog park.)
Given this (assumption if you will), let's consider a few rounds of economic cause/effect. Round 1: if everyone were given a basic income, many more people will be able to afford to live in a city. Round 2: not all people, but some, will seek housing (rent or buy) in this city. Round 3: owners will need to choose between [1] renting/selling at current price for which there is suddenly higher demand or [2] increasing their price until there is less demand. Round 4: most owners choose option [2] and excess income begins to be sucked up by higher and higher prices.
The issue is basic income increases the demand (perhaps good for today's global economic ailments) while supply of goods/housing will take time to adjust. Of course, given the opportunity to sell apartments in a city at higher margins will cause developers to build new supply, but this takes years.
One way to deal with the supply/demand issue is having a basic income that starts low ($100 a month?) and increases to a basic living wage over the course of 5 years. This way, investments can be planned ahead of time so supply increases with demand.
Also it furthers the long-term social engineering regarding "if the gov does it (theft in this case) then it's OK".
What may work for a school leaver may not work for a guy with a family of 6/debts/drug or alcohol problems/medical needs/etc. that person may be much better off with housing benefits/family benefits/medicare etc than an equal slice of the pie.
Anyway I dont know but I am in favour of doing the experiment and hope it works, but I seriously doubt it will be as cut and dried as people think.
I guess you would have increase taxes or provide lesser services? e.g., expect that basic income will cover some parts of the medical costs and provide a lesser health care for the average person. I'm guessing an implementation will be somewhere in between.
Money has gotta come from somewhere.
Well yes and no. The issues are complex and my economic schooling is woefully limited (merely Bachelor's level), but I recall the idea of a money multiplier [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier] derived by MPC (Marginal Propensity to Consume) and MPS (Marginal Propensity to Save).
Take the following relatively contrived example. You insert a $1 into a vending machine and get a soda. The vending machine company takes that dollar and uses some to pay the soda company to replace the soda. The soda company uses the money to pay it's factory workers to make more soda. The factory workers use that money to buy other goods.
So you can see that on a whole, the $1 dollar you chose to spend actually had an impact on the economy of more than a dollar.
You can also see that depending on each what the "leakage" is at every level (or how much each entity, vending company, soda company, etc. choose to save instead of pass on) can drastically reduce the money multiplier effect leading to undesirable market outcomes (such as stagflation).
Perhaps this professor does a better job illustrating: http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_z/Z108.pdf
Bottom line (I think is), empowering the impoverished to be able to consume should drive market growth. So the initial investment of a basic income should pay for itself many times over.
Anyway there is more to this obviously, and this same interaction has implications regarding income-inequality, but I'll just leave this here as FFT.
Graduates take these jobs because the alternative is the hell that is student debt collection, but these are jobs that could easily be done by less educated people. The more educated people have the capacity to explore the kind of home-grown science, arts and social projects that brought us to discover electricity, progress to giving women the vote.
We're sitting on top of a new renaissance because of short sightedness, but the potential boon of having that much home grown R&D could dramatically increase global wealth.
[1] http://www.mlive.com/jobs/index.ssf/2011/05/40_percent_of_co... or just google that phrase, it makes for depressing reading
"we" can afford it. wall street is creating money every second. with a proper tax structure there'll be no problem. but that's politics-land and shit will happen until sheep are casting apt votes.
long story short: things will stay the way they are.
