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posted by
martyb
on Thursday June 02 2016, @08:52AM
from the What-would-YOU-do-with-a-basic-income? dept.
from the What-would-YOU-do-with-a-basic-income? dept.
The highly-anticipated experiment with basic income from Silicon Valley finance firm Y Combinator appears to be making good progress. The company has chosen Elizabeth Rhodes as the project's Research Director, opting for the little-known PHD graduate over applications from tenured professors working at Oxford and Harvard universities. Oakland, California is where the basic income research will happen: the community has been chosen for its close proximity to Y Combinator's head office, and the much-reported wealth divide in the locality.
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The Basic Income Experiment by Y Combinator Draws Nearer
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:19PM
Basic income is not communism.
Communism is, what you get is only determined by your needs, not by what you are doing.
Basic income is, you get enough money to survive, but if you want more, you are free to work for it.
(Score: 2) by acp_sn on Thursday June 02 2016, @03:38PM
The problem isn't the idea but in the details.
What exactly does it meant "to survive"? Does that include 100 suits of clothes for all possible weather conditions? Does it include multiple personal vehicles? Does it include a private bathroom? How about a private swimming pool?
Someone has to make the decision about what is required to "survive" and that person will have power over everyone who receives the "basic income".
(Score: 0, Troll) by DECbot on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:26PM
In the neighborhood chosen for the study, the requirements for survival are pretty strait forward. A 40 of MGD, a fifth of malt liquor, and a colt 45. I expect to see the cost of rent go up as the area is now flood with cash just for living there.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @05:59AM
Peg it as a percentage of GDP.
Easy.
Does this mean that in times of economic shock people who could live exclusively on BI can continue to do so? No.
But it is self-correcting in that as GDP increases, people are given more.
And if there are too many people not contributing to the economy, the BI contracts.
Give me a Nobel Prize!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @02:20AM
Yes. I like to go further and not call it Basic Income but Social Dividend. If you view society as a whole as a corporation that transforms productivity into wealth and goods, society, as shareholders so to speak, are entitled to receive dividend. It isn't socialism and not at all communism. I'd say it's honest and fair capitalism. The way capitalism should be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @07:18AM
The thing is, if most people end up having just the basic income (As jobs are devoured by AI and automation as it's starting to occur already) ... where exactly will the money for the basic income come from?
If it's taxes... well... companies don't really pay proper taxes, and if you're going to depend on taxes from the people getting it, there's no way it'll sustain itself.
And if most people ARE limited to just the basic income... what money are they expected to spend to support those big companies that don't want to hire them.
Questions like these are the things pretty much everyone is avoiding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2016, @01:48AM
Huh. It's an even bigger problem for those companies if there wasn't basic income. After all McD can switch to robots but then who would have money to eat at McD? How often do the 1% eat at McD? Doubt it's often enough to keep all of it running.
So the rich and smart people see this as a possible future and are trying to avoid the pitchforks.
A lot of the stuff they enjoy is because of the 99%. Most people are social animals, it's nice to walk into a cafe, mall or amusement park and see at least a few other humans even if you're rich enough to have some of it all at home in your fortress you're probably not rich enough to have an entire bustling city full of human pets.
The concerns are genuine, if a country's GDP per capita is insufficient then a basic income would not be enough to survive. But when the robot trucks come millions of truckers and truck stop workers will start losing their jobs and you won't need that many truckers to build those robots. But it won't be overnight. People would lose their jobs, switch to worse jobs, buy less so there would be even less need for trucks to move stuff about, many companies would shrink.