Basic income is about having enough money to eat and get shelter, without ANY need to work - and see what happens to human beings in that condition. If the same human being has to fund its own basic income, what's the point?
Basic income, to me, HAS to be funded by someone other than the recipient. Otherwise, it's no experiment at all.
To make sure we have the same premise, Universal, by definition, means everyone within a certain boundary (e.g. citizen of a country, city, state, whatever) receives the money, regardless of their income, location, etc?
To be functional, the money that is doled out needs to be collected from somewhere. It isn't that each specific person needs to fund themselves, but the set of people that receive the "Universal" basic income needs to generate the income needed to pay for it. If an outside set of people pays for it, then it's not a universal basic income, it's something else -- it's taking money from one set of people to give to another. I believe the whole idea of UBI is that everyone gets that same money.
The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people.
In what way is that meaningless? I think it's a valid question to ask.
That clearly isn't how a real UBI would work. If you literally take $100/month from everyone and then give it back to them, nothing happens. It would have zero effect.
The way UBI works in practice is that everyone gets a fixed amount of money and then everyone pays a fixed percentage in taxes, so that more of the UBI is funded by the wealthier people who pay more taxes. Which is what the experiment is doing.
In theory to make it accurate they should also impose a "tax" on the participants based on how much money they make from external sources, i.e. if one of the participants has a job paying $200/month and we want to emulate a 20% tax rate then they get a $100/month UBI but the funders take back $40 (20% of $200) as "tax" to "fund" it. Obviously that wouldn't work if someone had above average income (i.e. they made $1000/month in Kenya and would have a "tax" exceeding the UBI) because nobody would volunteer for a study that cost them money. But you could at least see what a UBI would do for poorer populations, which would seem to be the interesting question, because for richer people it just looks a lot like any other "take from the rich and give to the poor" welfare program.
Your example of people volunteering for a study that costs them money is exactly the problem that I am describing, and for a system such as this to work, that's how it would end up--taxes go up for people who this doesn't benefit, and as much fun as it is to assume that "other rich people" will pay for it, it doesn't work that way. That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
That's generally how all taxes work. The people with more money than average pay more than average and the people with less money than average pay less than average. But the people who make $1 more than average are only suffering a net loss of $.20, whereas the people who make $100,000 more than average are paying net $20,000.
> That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
In other words what you think we should do is to actually make it a law somewhere?
We need to run an experiment to identify whether redistributing tax money to everybody equally and unconditionally results in better outcomes than various other existing or proposed systems of needs-based handouts, which is a completely different scenario, not least because for a significant proportion of people in the experiment this is going to represent a reduction in their current incomes or other benefits.
Worse than the lack of civility in your response is that you've attracted people to vote for it. Thus your comment is appearing before more useful ones below, which actually show why parent's objections are counterproductive, or at best, concerns for a later time (since he wants to load too many unknowns into a single study.)
As automation replaces larger portions of previously human-held positions, it could either be taxed on behalf of or socialized for investment by the basic income receiving communities.
Granted the ideal scenario for that is a long way off, but the incentives don't have to be.
It's much simpler to make money appear out of thin air (as it effectively is when you take millions of dollars from rich folks in California) and distribute it in Africa. But if you have to take money some folks' pockets in Africa to give to their neighbors, that to me is a more 1-to-1 comparison at what happens for a UBI.
Studying the effect of large scale outside cash injections into a community is not a remotely plausible proxy for studying the economic effects of a redistribution scheme.
As to your claim of rampant poverty, it is true. However if we surrender our welfare to automation, humans will all be in poverty compared to the control exerted over us by the machines, and what we could have achieved if we remained free. If we continue to strive for personal independence, some of us will remain free. If we give in to subsistence dependence, we as a species will be enslaved.
On a larger scale, I expect that if half the population didn't/couldn't work, but was allowed to live comfortably anyway, there would be a considerable increase in experimental creativity and social functions. We'd all essentially go out and find things to do together and alone.
Not at all. The theory of UBI is that in the West we're wealthy enough that we produce way more than we need. Ergo, we can afford to give everybody the basics. Doing the same experiment in a much poorer context would produce a very different outcome.
As an aside, I think your theory of ownership is throwing your intuitions off. You seem to think of all resources as being owned entirely by some set of current individuals. That's certainly the default model in the US, but that's not the only way to look at it.
Much of the wealth in the US was created by previous generations or in large part derived from that inheritance. Instead of capriciously assigning that to current individuals based on blood ties and other luck, you can also look at that as being a joint inheritance. Thus, something like the UBI can be viewed not as taking from individual A to give to individual B, but to use our joint inheritance to make sure everybody has the minimum necessities of survival.
I hasten to add that I don't see either of these models as "right". Fitting the complexities of a modern economy into a primate's model of territoriality will never work all that well. But there's historical precedent in things like the Spanish ejido, the Aztec calpulli, and English commons.
Think about it like this, does Bill Gates live next to a poor person? Would Basic Income in his area tell you much about basic income in the US?
Why are you trying to test both the motor AND the battery at the same time?
Test one, then the other. Isolate the variables; change as little as possible at a time to test your hypothesis, which in this case is: Just giving people guaranteed money for a long time is the best way to help them.
Thing I'd be most worried about is protecting those communities from other violent people and/or mad influx of people trying to join those communities. Island cultures might be better - more isolated.
PS - I did think of an answer to "why not cash?" but it's something that's also addressable: Bulk purchasing advantage. AFAIK, it's more cost-efficient to feed 1000 people all at once than one at a time.
I prefer the idea of basic income taking the place of debt for the creation of money. This way the tax is in the form of inflation, and everyone gets to directly benefit from the creation of new money instead of just the banks and those blessed by the banks.
Alaska is doing it based on a natural resource tax. Justin Trudeau in Canada just did an experiment as well - not sure where their funda come from.
I think companies taking advantage of a public good should be taxed and the result redistributed as UBI. Personally on an unrelated note I'd try to tax non-biodegradable materials like plastic and the huge amounts of carbon being released from the ground... but that's near impossible to do politically to any great degree.
Nobody owes anybody anything for the things their great-grandparents did. Or for the things their grandparents did. Or for the things their parents did. Or for the things their siblings do. Life happens right now, not 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years ago.
The problem with worldwide UBI is the same as nationwide UBI. The cash is just a token to split up complicated market-clearing trades into a collection of simple half-trades. You still need the goods and services to be produced and distributed. If you take a million US dollars and give it to a Kenyan, that Kenyan would still have to send some of it right back to New York to fill up a cargo ship and send it to Nairobi, because the local markets aren't equipped to handle that ripple in the money supply.
Rather than taking the money, and moving it, you have to take the productivity and move it. You would have to industrialize Kenya to the same extent as the US. You would have to pave it with the same roads, wire it with the same cables, police it with the same cops (or maybe better cops), do business with the same contract law. I think the reason Kenya is still Kenya after the colonial period is because it does not wan't to be the 51st state of the US, or another member state of the EU. And it does not yet have enough robots operating there to sustain a meaningful UBI.
Worldwide UBI means worldwide industrialization and uniform business laws. You can't just screw with the money and expect it to work.
Do the Italians owe the French compensation for Julius Caesar's campaigns? This game can go on forever.
The universal basic income would be paid for by the upper and middle classes, and taken by the working class.
At least in the UK these groups are seperated enough that there's very little socialization between them, very little overlap in voting preferences, etcetera. Different cultures, within the same country.
If you are willing to work for X money a year, and you get a basic income of Y money a year, then you will be willing to work for X - Y money per year if other conditions don't change. This is will end up as tax-payers subsidizing corporations in the long run.
A more realistic test would be to take those 6,000 Kenyans, tax them in some way (e.g. take 2x from 3,000 people), then distribute the money equally. And it would have to be done in one localized area to take care of the homogeneity problem (if the money is too sparsely distributed, prices won't reflect the new money distribution).
As much as they talk about how scientifically the study must be done, and the rigorous testing, it seems that there are some holes in the experiment.