promethea.incorporated

theunitofcaring:

sadoeconomist:

theunitofcaring:

GiveDirectly’s launching a test of universal basic income!!!!!!!!! They’re doing it properly, giving money to everyone in the selected communities and committing to do that for 10-15 years. And they’re good at rigorous data collection. And if this works, we can scale it up.

10-15 years isn’t ‘for life,’ though, even in Africa - and the difference is actually important, the basic income experiment they did in Canada suggested that people didn’t change their work behavior because the program was set to exist for a limited time and if they had stopped working it would have left them without the ability to support themselves after the program had concluded

Guaranteed lifetime basic income would be much more damaging to the incentive to work than any limited experiment would show and could easily result in permanent dependence rather than development

Yeah ideally they’d test indefinitely. I assume they’re constrained there by money? Most charities can’t commit to what they’ll be doing in 30 years. If we want to raise another $10million for them I’m sure we can encourage them to do an even longer-term study.

Under the current system, lots of people live on benefits - and by law, they’re not allowed to work even part-time, or live with a partner who works, lest they lose the benefits. They’d be less dependent under this system! It’d be hard to design a system that created as awful incentives to work as the current welfare system.

But more than that, I think “dependence” is the wrong way to think about the outcome of guaranteed lifetime basic income. People in the U.S. are dependent on access to inexpensive drinking water and electricity, to the point where you can just get them free in public; this isn’t morally bad or an outcome to avoid. If someone who is currently leaving her 3-year-old with her 10-year-old so she can work two jobs quits the jobs and raises her kids, she’s now ‘dependent’ and a former Employed Productive Member of Society is now not doing anything that counts towards GDP. Also, everyone involved is better off. 

If a train conductor quits his job to volunteer at a library reading to kids, and we automate the train, we’ve again lost a Productive Employed Member of Society - perhaps permanently, since he doesn’t have any other jobs skills - but everyone involved is better off.

I can imagine a good world where lots of current minimum-wage jobs are automated, but because we have basic income more families can have a stay-home parent (which has always been an upper-middle-class luxury), volunteer in their kids’ schools, and do other stuff that creates value but that no one is willing to pay them for. That’s a world where people are dependent, and that’s fine.

It would be bad if basic income interfered with our ability to produce enough stuff for everyone. But not because of dependence. 

Alternatively, basically this.