Posted on 06/01/2016 12:48:16 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Can giving people money help solve wealth inequality?
Y Combinator, a prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator program for startups, is wading into a new “world changing” project: basic income.
On Tuesday, Y Combinator said in a blog post that it would conduct a short pilot study in Oakland, Calif., “a city of great social and economic diversity” that “has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality.” The accelerator has also hired Elizabeth Rhodes, a PhD in social work and political science from the University of Michigan, where she completed research on health and education in slum communities in Nairobi.
Y Combinator defines basic income as “giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached,” and it’s an idea that has roots in both left and right-wing economic theories, though relatively little data about it exists, according to Y Combinator president Sam Altman. The accelerator hopes the study will help illuminate a possible future in which technology replaces jobs, but also drives down the cost of living....
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
The problem is even bigger than the “unskilled.” Automation is going to replace an awful lot of skilled professionals, sometimes simply by facilitating the breaking of a complex job into parts that low-skill, low-wage “technicians” can handle until they eventually get automated. Unemployment is starting to look like the future for most of humanity, leading to the question of whether the useless masses will be supported through massive redistribution or simply starved out of existence. Looks grim either way.
I've been saying that for decades.
How will George Clooney like getting $100K per movie, or Tom Brady getting $100K per season?
-PJ
25-30k per year is large amounts of money?
I am fascinated by social experiments like this. Good on a bunch of rich techies for exploring it.
Well not quite. There would be a vast new array of bureaucrats (permanent, no doubt, like TSA) to implement the scheme. And certain specially connected persons will have raked in prodigious fees for designing and implementing the scheme, cf., e.g., ObamaCare.
If a robot is going to take my job, I’m going to make sure I own the robot and still collect the income.
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?
Meanwhile, I have a very average household income for this part of Pennsylvania. Maybe they could guarantee ME a minimum equal to afford what these loafers can afford.
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!
Don’t forget the scams to swindle the folks paying out the “basic income.”
And, of course, that ‘basic income’ has to go up each year.
You’re right.
I have worked all my life. Can’t imagine not working.
But give me a guaranteed income and I’d be off doing fun stuff like fishing, biking, kayaking, shooting, or working for Friends of Library or the Historical Society...
Actually, if you give everyone $$ just for breathing, that SHOULD simplify things & eliminate a lot of bureaucracy. In theory.
But I agree that the practice would be just as you say.
For a sit-on-your-ass and get a check while living in your mom’s basement type it is........................
Stupid idea.
Didn’t some business owner in Seattle try this? And fail?
A GBI would immediately devalue the money to the point that the basic income would essentially be zero and the pressure to raise the level would be irresistible. It is one way to ignite hyperinflation from the bottom, a direct and immediate boost to the price level.
It has been tried and studied before in Canada. In the short term it works, but after a while people get comfortable in their poverty and stop working.
Well, it could be a savings to the government. Say you give each adult over 21 an amount of $40,000 per year, no strings attached. But that person can receive no other money from any level of government or charitable organization. Eliminate welfare, food stamps, WIC, section 8, earned income tax credits, etc. No extra money to be paid for children.
If you eliminate all the direct payments and subsidies of the welfare state, of course a lot of bureaucrats lose their jobs, too. Entire federal agencies would evaporate overnight.
The savings would be considerable. At least until the Rats in Congress came up with new ideas for welfare programs.
I don't usually try very hard to see whether or not the person in front of me is using an EBT card.
I do remember one incident from a couple years ago, though. There were two women with shopping carts packed and mounded over the top. They were Hispanic. There was a younger woman, maybe in her 30's, well dressed, with a well-behaved son; there was also a woman old enough to be her mother. So, they checked out, a huge order, lots of good quality food, and the EBT card the younger woman had didn't have enough on it to pay the full bill. So, without blinking an eye, she reached into her purse to pay for the balance... with an American Express card.
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