> Contrary to popular belief fear of death by being poor is not the only thing that motivates people.

That's not very charitable. I rather doubt that anybody here considers "Dickensian Nightmare" as a desirable world-state.

Maybe the best way to showcase the concern is to talk about some relatives of mine, who work just enough to pursue their two great life passions: (a) smoking weed; and (b) playing video games.

Now, either of these things is fine! Both of them together are fine are fine! And should you have the means, I have no problem if this is the sum total of your existence.

But I have zero interest in funding those life-choices via taxes.

With no-strings-attached UBI, that's exactly what we are talking about.

Moreover, there is a massive danger in decoupling "value contributed to the tribe" (work) from "value received from the tribe" (income).

What I think would make sense is to require that people receiving UBI still need to do some kind of work.

It can be painting, or cleaning parks, or making horrible music, or greeting people at Wal-Mart, but you are required to spend at least four full-time days per week (32 hours) contributing to society.

I am unsure how to appropriately enforce this.

On the one hand, you want to prevent bad actors; on the other hand, it would be stupid for the cost of enforcement to significantly exceed the cost of those bad actors -- like when the state of Florida blew through an extra $2 million to save $80k of welfare fraud.

This is likely more of a moral than an economic thing - it's pretty much definitely going to be cheaper to just give people the money than maintain infrastructure to verify that people are doing something the Government sees as work, define what the Government sees as work (if you're not getting paid for it, why does smoking weed with your friends not count but making shitty music in your basement for an audience of 1 count?), claw back money from people who shouldn't have got it, implement an appeals process, pay for lawyers when that appeals process fails, and so on and so forth. And then people are still going to fall through the cracks, which is the entire thing we don't want.

The other thing is that we've already massively decoupled value contributed to the tribe from value received from the tribe - many people's wages have absolutely nothing to do with how much they personally produce value. Generally speaking, employed people receive less than the value they create, and capital owners/employers receive more.

To quote H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a solution which is clear, simple... and wrong."

"Solving" poverty will be a complex thing no matter what we do.

We want to keep people out of utter privation. Off the streets, as it were. A chicken in every chicken and pot in every pot... or something like that.

At the same time, our resources are not infinite, and being valuable to your tribe -- e.g. "work" -- is a critical part of maintaining a healthy psychology.

The thing we absolutely, positively, must avoid at all costs is what we do now: paying people to not work, and punishing them when they do.

Paying people not to work is fine by me, because everyone I know who doesn't work (defined here as exchanging cash for labour - I'd love to see a definition which includes the contributions of these people comprehensively and remains worth enforcing) contributes to a better society in a variety of ways. This has been my experience in "rough" areas and otherwise.

Even the weed smokers and the people playing video games are often maintaining a social glue with others and improving the lives of people around them - we might imagine that if these people didn't exist, multiplayer game creators might pay people to play video games and be friendly when the servers aren't particularly full, as a service to their paying players. We might actually see interactive platforms like Twitch as providing this in a roundabout sort of way - you can strike up a conversation with someone over a shared interest in video games for just a few cents. Japan has a small rent-a-friend economy, and there's a global cat cafe industry - people appear to be willing to pay for their social lives if they can't get it for free, suggesting that what many of these people do is in fact unpaid work.

Punishing people for working is really the problem; if some work (paid or unpaid) needs to be done, and somebody wants to do it, they shouldn't feel that doing that work might affect their livelihood.

> we might imagine that if these people didn't exist, multiplayer game creators might pay people to play video games and be friendly when the servers aren't particularly full, as a service to their paying players

This is very far-reaching. We might also imagine, that, if only we sacrificed any and all redheads once they reach the age of eight to the volcano god, the world would be blessed by everlasting peace, wealth and bliss. But let's not do it just because we can imagine something.

> suggesting that what many of these people do is in fact unpaid work

No, it's really not. They accidentally do something that other people in other contexts will pay others for. It's not that you'd have to pay someone to play video games with you if some stoner wasn't online. You'd play video games with ... all the other people who want to play video games.

> This is very far-reaching. We might also imagine, that, if only we sacrificed any and all redheads once they reach the age of eight to the volcano god, the world would be blessed by everlasting peace, wealth and bliss.

Sounds reasonable.

> But let's not do it just because we can imagine something.

Does this mean I need to take down that ad on Craigslist?

I accidentally wound up managing a cafe about 25 hours a week for free, was that not work? What's the definition of accidental here?

> I accidentally wound up managing a cafe about 25 hours a week for free, was that not work?

As long as the cafe pays taxes, follows the law like any other business, and claims you as an employee, sounds like work to me.

You could also be part of a nonprofit that holds mini-concerts in nursing homes, provided that all the appropriate tax paperwork gets filed.

I worked as a volunteer, not an employee. I also could've been volunteering looking after plants, or sitting around doing nothing in particular except chatting with people, and the organisation would've likely signed off on it. I also could've been volunteering as the one person who knew how to manage the sound system and turned up for two hours a week but was the reason we had any customers at all. There's no reason some random company is trustworthy, or some arbitrary amount of time is valued specifically.

Would self-employed work not count under your system? What if I was doing something with the hope that it will make money in future? What if it's not, in fact, intended to make money at all, but would be non-profit work? If I set up a company that would sign off on me and my friends, would that change anything?

Managing a cafe for free because you want to help the owners or you want to keep the place around but now it won't be able to sustain an employee etc: free work.

Managing a cafe in Cafe Simulator 3000 because you want entertainment: not work (but these games often do a good job emulating the monotony of work in the long run).

The lines get blurry when you're managing an actual cafe because you're bored and want entertainment.

Hanging around a cafe because your friend works there: not work, even though some people sometimes pay other people just to hang around in a cafe.

So how do you define "work" in a way that covers one but not the other in a way that reliably can't be gamed on a country-level scale without spending utterly ridiculous amounts of money on it?

I strongly suspect this is one of those situations where the costs of enforcement would dwarf the benefits. For the number of people involved, it's literally not worth bothering.

Maybe?

If we're talking about national-level UBI, that's a lot of people involved, and a lot of money for the taking by those who are high in enterprise but rather deficient in moral fiber.

There are likely a lot of options on the enforcement front, and that smart enforcement with appropriate penalties would keep bad behavior to a minimum.

The goal of enforcement is not to stop every bad actor -- just to make the risk and hassle high enough to deter a significant portion of them.

Consider how Taiwan cheaply enforces sales tax: when you get a receipt for anything, it has a lottery code on it. Winners turn their receipts in for prizes, and the government then goes and checks those specific transactions for tax compliance. Penalties for tax violations are severe, and compliance is high, at minimal cost to the state.

Truly random checks (low probability of being caught) with severe penalties (massive pain if you are caught), and maybe even a reward for compliance, seems to be the way to go in this case.

Honestly, as someone who blackrides (being defined here as using public transport without paying for it, which has a low probability of being caught + massive pain if I am caught, up to and including prosecution and a criminal record in some cases), this isn't really a deterrent. There's also studies on this subject - raising the penalty of being caught isn't what stops people from doing things, it's the certainty of being caught.

Really, the main problem is that landlords will raise rent to match the new income levels of their tenants and everybody will be left in more-or-less the same place, except with a wider gap, not a narrower one.

> There's also studies on this subject - raising the penalty of being caught isn't what stops people from doing things, it's the certainty of being caught.

Yes and no. There's a balance between "severity of punishment" and "certainty of punishment". And also proportional to the damage caused.

Also, the goal is not to prevent all bad actors! Merely to keep enough people on the honest path to prevent systemic collapse.

If you are certain of being caught, the punishment only needs to be high enough to be undesirable.

Imagine that you had a 100% chance of being caught shoplifting, in which case, a reasonable punishment would be to have to compensate the store owner an additional 50% for the stolen goods.

If you only have a 10% chance of being caught, then the punishment needs to be (financially) severe enough to make that dice-roll very, very unappealing.

There's likely minimum and maximum thresholds for both; e.g., beyond some severity, punishment stops being meaningful, and below some certainty of capture, rolling the dice "feels" safe.

Not sure what those numbers are.

Also, regarding punishment, we really need more options, and I'm not a fan of criminal records -- debts to society should not be infinite.

Proportional punishment is one tool -- a $200 fine means something very different to "a kid from the projects" than it does to "Jeff Bezos".

Of course, what's the cost of getting to, let's say, a 30% chance of catching anyone.

> "Moreover, there is a massive danger in decoupling "value contributed to the tribe" (work) from "value received from the tribe" (income). What I think would make sense is to require that people receiving UBI still need to do some kind of work."

Yep, instead of UBI, I'd be fine with Universal Basic Employment. It needn't even be something onerous (e.g. keeping the sidewalk clean or visiting the elderly to cheer them up) if the individual has physical or health limitations as long as it's contributing to the well being of society.

I wonder if they smoke weed and play games because they feel that the systems of living in this society are so broken that no amount of effort, hard work or creativity will help them. Essentially they've decided to stop playing an infinite game that excluded them.

Follow-up: Had a bee in my bonnet, and think I have some ideas as how this might need to work.

First, the "prebate" is the right idea. Every adult citizen or permanent resident gets it, no need to do anything special. Direct to your bank account, every month. Adjust tax brackets as appropriate.

Enforcement for the "must work" provision would run through the tax system as well.

You need to be able to show yourself as working for an organization which has a tax ID, which should include nonprofits, churches, government agencies, co-ops, startups, private companies, global megacorps, all of them. That organization also (already) has to report you as an employee, so no major change there.

And while groups of people could form co-ops and nonprofits that claim to "employ" each other, that's probably fine. If you're willing to go through all the work to handle the tax filings and related compliance, and do so without committing fraud, I don't see a problem there.

Basically, hippie communes are fine as long as you do all the relevant tax paperwork and meet the legal requirements for being a non-profit/startup/what-have-you. To me, that sounds like a lot of work to do nothing, and probably just easier to work for the city government, cleaning up trash in the park.

Allow a decent amount of time to change jobs on an annual basis -- maybe a month?

Work requirements are waived if you are disabled, elderly, or a student (university, trade school, etc.), although the latter comes with a hard time limit (this is similar to how things work in Germany right now, by the way).

You can also elect to stop or restart UBI payments at any time, and the above work obligations are suspended when not receiving UBI.

Paying for this is a question -- would need to run the numbers on corporate tax receipts, but I suspect a combination of corporate income taxes, tariffs, and the savings from no longer needing to run a large chunk of economic aid programs (social security, etc.) would cover it. Not sure, though.

VATs tend to be regressive, so I'd be pretty strongly opposed to one of those. We'd also need to get rid of minimum wage laws (covered by the UBI), and public-sector unions likely also need to go into the fire -- they'd fight tooth-and-nail against UBI-paid "volunteers" doing work for the government, because those people wouldn't be paying union dues.

Modulo the numbers working out, and that there are plenty of special-interest groups that would rather maintain the status quo, I think this would probably work...