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The idea of giving people free money is so radical, even some recipients think it's too good to be true.
Later this year, roughly 6,000 people in Kenya will receive regular monthly payments of about a dollar a day, no strings attached, as part of a policy experiment commonly known as basic income.
People will get to use the money for whatever they want: food, clothing, shelter, gambling, alcohol — anything — all in an effort to reduce poverty.
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But instead of accepting the cash transfers with open arms, many Kenyans have recently been saying "No, thank you." It's a legitimate concern: As GiveDirectly moves into its larger basic income experiment, the last thing it wants is for people to turn down the money.
Basic Income is a concept often mentioned on SN, and this is an experiment to do exactly that. Many potential recipients of the basic income are skeptical about the goals of the experiment, though, and rumors have arisen that it's tied to a cult or devil worship.
Opponents of such wealth transfers argue they lead to indolence, while another school of thought believes they would reduce poverty and directly produce economic stimulus because the poor would immediately spend the money.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 12 2016, @12:44PM
I don't necessarily think you're wrong, and that is well written and argued, but try this analogy on for awhile, see what you think.
I've spent a large fraction of my working life in public utilities (unfortunately medical care isn't yet a public utility, but soon enough...) anyway eventually you come to accept the concept of the "franchise fee". The presence of my public utility employer means the quality of life of everyone in the city goes down a little even if you don't use our nearly universal service (there are weird rural hippies proud not to sign up, or too poor to pay, or whatever). So we're digging up flower beds and trashing road medians and parking trucks all over the place and causing traffic jams and popping open manhole covers during rush hour and running stinky diesel generators all hour of the night, lets face it, letting a public utility use the commons to sell a service means we inherently have to be kinda jerks. Now rather than every two-bit overambitious cop writing a ticket every time a truck puts cones on the road and screws up traffic, and rather than writing 100K checks to every citizen in the city which didn't scale back in 1875, we just pay a rather large franchise fee to the city, so that the city can either carrot or stick the residents. Its not our business if the city spends it all on blackjack and hookers or puts new tennis courts in every park or just lowers taxes. But "we" Fed up the city to the tune of a million bucks by our very presence, and we are sorry and here's a check for a million bucks, now hope the city does not do anything unusually illegal with it (LOL they're all crooks). Really, its the current year, we should pay the franchise fee for Fing up the city to every individual resident, take it off the bill of the 99% of the residents who subscribe to our services.
My analogy for basic income is we've got a degenerate parasitic economic system that no longer benefits most people on the planet. Its all about a hundred people owning all the money and wealth and swiping it from each other and generally being useless parasites. Now we could go all French Revolution and guillotine the parasites and frankly everyone else would be better off. However... how about a Franchise Fee? So global corporate crony corrupt as hell capitalism is a thing, and we're stuck with it unless we grow the balls to erect and use a guillotine, but I figure "they" owe me $25K/yr for generally Fing up my life. A less corrupt economy might result in a higher paying job for me. Or better living conditions. Or lower crime. Or better public services. And if you give money to the government "on my behalf" you know they're going to waste it on blackjack and hookers, you may as well just burn that money instead of giving it to our corrupt government. However advances in IT have resulted in the ability for the worlds corrupt economy (which its critical to note I'm no longer a player in and fewer people are every year) to send each human an annual franchise fee.
Think of it like the "capitalism has failed the population of the world" tax. Its cheaper and more organized and more civilized and less chaotic than the guillotine.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Monday September 12 2016, @02:34PM
Its all about a hundred people owning all the money and wealth and swiping it from each other and generally being useless parasites.
So what are you again going to do with that bunch of money and wealth, most which is in a form that is useless to you? Credit default swaps? Put options on a penny stock? Some weird energy derivative? You'd sell it to one of the "hundred" and buy something useful.
I think what makes these complaints rather pointless is the worthlessness of the money and wealth you are complaining about. There's plenty of ephemeral money and wealth out there. Yet for the cynical manipulators out there, it's still wealth inequality even when we don't value that wealth.