And the real guaranteed basic income will always be:
If “Y Combinator” wants people to have income, let THEM pay for it.
And the real guaranteed basic income will always be:
This is what would happen:
1. Prices would go up to compensate for the income.
2. Scams would spring up to swindle the less bright amoung us out of their new-found windfall.
3. Programs for the poor would still be there.
In the end, everyone would be worse off—especially the taxpayer.
“a possible future in which technology replaces jobs, but also drives down the cost of living....”
How about an approach to living in the actual present?
Well, unless they’re willing to give everybody $60 billion so they can be as rich as Bill Gates, I’d say that “income inequality” is a stupid, phony issue, hyped by people who really want the kind of income equality that everybody is currently enjoying in Venezuela.
Jeopardy—Guaranteed basic income: I’ll take “What is welfare?” for 40,000.
They seem to have missed the end result of socialism when ‘guaranteed’ minimum income requires ‘forced labor camps’
Basically when a robot replaces your job position, you will be guaranteed a income to sustain you...
I'm assuming you will be living off the money of new technology that generates profits with the lower labor costs of robotics...
It is a reality quickly catching up us today...
Many of the 95 million americans out of work have been simply replaced with technology of some type which makes their job no longer necessary...
As long as I'm not footing the bill for this idea...
let's see where it goes...
I'm not very optimistic it will work as planned...
though relatively little data about it exists...
Sure there is and it’s called welfare.
2015 - More than half of the nation’s immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that’s far higher than the native-born population’s
2015 - The American welfare state today transfers over 14% of the nation’s GDP to the recipients of its many programs, and over a third of the population now accepts “need-based” benefits from the government. In 1961 it was 5%.
Funny enough, but libertarian leaning Charles Murray had this same idea. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles-murray-the-welfare-state-has-denuded-our-civic-culture/
He makes an interesting argument, and I get where he is coming from. Still disagree with it..
I thought one of the points of the basic income is that it replaces existing welfare programs. I’m sure it will work for some but others, like the mentally troubled, need supervision
Y Knot-heads?...............
When you pay people to do nothing, that is exactly what you’ll get in return.
My son knows Sam Altman. He is the energizer bunny, self motivated, self driven, disciplined and very bright overflowing with good ideas that usually turn into revenue. He is surrounded by others of that ilk. He doesn’t understand people who have never held a job, or if they had one, they didn’t last because getting up in the morning and going to work is not one of their priorities. He believes that with a guaranteed income, those folks will be off the welfare rolls and will turn their energy to creative ventures. Nothing of the sort will occur. They will become clams, with their shells opening only when the check arrives. Those who don’t die of drug and alcohol abuse will die of sloth.
The war on poverty envisioned the same outcome and it never happened. Wonder why?
Guaranteed income is based on a false assumption. As long as people are free to dream of new and better goods and have the desire to own them, and there is a free market in wage rates and labor, there will always be a need for more goods and the labor to produce them. Even a service economy needs goods to function.
Guaranteed income leads one to strive for nothing and thus develop into nothing. They would have no incentive to develop and actualize their innate human potential. They would be unproductive and contribute nothing to the total of what is produced and nothing to additional capital accumulation. And with less capital accumulation there would be less economic progress and less overall prosperity. Once economic progress and gains in prosperity stop, there will no longer be enough funds to pay guaranteed incomes.
Y-Combinator is financing a what-if game here. What if giving people just enough to live on, with no strings attached, freed them to engage in activities that create more value to “society” than the amount they receive?
Might this be the best way for philanthropists to exercise their philanthropy? Y-Combinator hopes to find out.
Should there be a time limit? What if a person receiving “guaranteed” income spends five years smoking dope, or developing software to break into other people’s computers? Should he be cut off? What if, like at GE, the “worst-performing” 10% are “fired” every so often?
Whatever happened to the guy that decided to pay everyone in his company $70 thousand a year?
Did he keep his own job or did his brother kick him out of management?
Is that company even in business now?
They should check with him before doing their own little experiment.
This whole idea of a “basic income” for everyone is completely insane. It would be FAR better to just give each person in the U.S. a trillion dollar coin instead of a “basic income” coin. After all, the cost to make a “basic income” coin is the same as the cost to make a trillion dollar coin, and everyone would be RICH and not have to exist at just a subsistence level of a “basic income”. Everyone could buy anything they wanted and no one would ever have to work again.
The coins could be made from a base metal, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
For myself, I’m going to start by buying a pony and the Broncos NFL football team. And I won’t even need pony food stamps anymore to feed my pony because I’ll be so rich!
Stupid idea.
Didn’t some business owner in Seattle try this? And fail?