The answer is that I have actually probably learned more about coding than I had in the 3-4 previous years when I was working a lot, since I had more time to delve in to topics in depth, rather than rush to ship.

It feels great, and I've come out the other side much more productive in the projects I have kept working on.

The bigger question is what about the gas station clerks? Or cleaning people? Or wait staff? Or any of the people working the millions of other jobs that just totally suck. Having done it in the past, I'm 100% sure nobody wakes up totally stoked to go bus tables or wash dishes.

So, maybe people who have awesome jobs will just keep doing what they're doing, but for people with shitty jobs, why not say, "F* it, I can get by with the guaranteed minimum, so why bother?"

If you asked a anthropologist, I suspect you would hear a pattern of human beings doing all kind of work in order to increase their status in society and finding a mate. Working in a low status work is not perfect but it is better than nothing and money is quite useful when it can be used on things beyond a 1-room apartment and basic food.

To be more realistic, most of the time I wouldn't even take a job programming if I had food and housing covered. I might do a contracting gig here or there to buy a new bike or skis, or pay for a big trip somewhere, but it's very unlikely I'd work all the time.

I've considered doing something like that now. I have enough savings to pull it off for a few years, so why not take a few years off and play? With a guaranteed minimum income it'd be an even longer time.

I like the idea of providing for everybody, but people need to be realistic about what could actually happen. If it's just a plan to shame and guilt trip everybody into working all the time, I'd prefer we don't do it.

Being a garbageman wouldn't help with this nearly as much as spending 4 hours in the gym and then spending 4 hours building socializing skills. Especially since the other side is now guaranteed being provided for thus reducing the already low impact that being a good provider has on mate finding.

Note that €900 (or €1300 for a family) is pretty barebones. You won't be putting much more than bread and potatoes on the table using that. And you'll probably live in a rather small house too.

You can either lowball the minimum income to the point where you can't realistically live on it for long or a lot of services get more expensive + tax hike to support it = lower standard of living for normal people (unaffected by minimum income but not rich enouh to ignore the costs)

You also miss a basic premise of basic income - everyone gets it with no means testing. It is a different concept to current benefit systems. Normal people would receive it as much as unemployed people.

And when we get to "basic shelter" well coupled with free health care I guarantee you there are people out there who have very little ambition beyond that, I know more than a few from highschool that literally said things like "all i need is enough money to play WoW" or just work enough to earn money for weed and go out with their friends and live with their parents (and these are people in late 20s early 30s).

People with ambition aren't the ones that benefit from minimum income (unless they get really unlucky, which I guess is a valid concern, but then again those same people are not the ones doing the bottom tier jobs, at least not for long).

Also that's not how I saw basic income schemes suggested, usually it's paid out to people below min income and then progressively lowered to some point otherwise the taxes would have to be insane to finance it.

Grew up with friends who had no food sometimes. My mom would give me food to bring to their house when I went to visit. The mother also had very serious medical problems which was a big reason for that.

There is a difference between not having food sometimes and starving. Minimum income doesn't fix that either - there will be people who will spend their kids food money on other things.

This is not basic income.

What you are talking about is called means tested in work benefits in my country. It is bad - for all the reasons you mentioned but it is not basic income.

Criticise basic income if you want (please do so if you are trained economist) but please do understand what it is before doing so otherwise you are merely burning a strawman.

>Negative income taxes can implement a basic income or supplement a guaranteed minimum income system.

IIRC it was proposed as a simplification of the means tested welfare. Basically NIT is the most realistic funding for Basic Income I've seen - but it's irrelevant - the incentives stay the same the only difference is that it screws over regular people a little less (depending on how it's funded, I'm unconvinced by any "tax the rich" scheme).

Anyway I was interested in this stuff in college when I took my intro econ classes I never looked in to it further but I'm 100% sure NIT is a basic income scheme.

Basic income (NB not minimum income!, not negative income tax!) is not means tested at all. No means test period. Everyone gets it. From the beggar to the millionaire. This is a totally different concept to means tested benefits. The proposal is a so called universal benefit.

Perhaps all the jobs would continue to exist but there'd be some very interesting rebalancing.

I'm curious what makes you think otherwise?

The lower class, of course, largely were servants.

The industrial revolution opened up other avenues for employment.

Edit: see, for example, http://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/the-victorian-mi...

"A middle class woman was entirely dependent on a supply of domestic servants, ranging from the untrained ‘slavey’ to a staff of several highly trained specialists."

Sure. Although technically it's not that the value of the job changes (to the employer, the value of the job is basically the same), it's that wages go up due to the decrease in the labour supply.

in this experiment they can test the latter, since the scale is too small to affect global pricing.

I wonder how far the 'unregulated' goes: could one pocket the monthly allowance and then live on a cheap city abroad while maintaining citizenship and privileges?

at the very least this should promote entrepreneurship: given social security that what I'd do. I can't risk anything now as I have no savings and live in a country that offer zero (monetary) supports to startups via neither private nor public capitals.

I read an article a while back that some types of manual labor are having a really hard time filling positions because nobody wants to do them for what they can afford to pay, and IIRC, they were already paying significantly higher than minimum wage.

As more of their jobs get automated away, this could be seen as a feature.

That'd be a good thing. People leave the bad jobs behind, which would either free up room to automate them without social consequences, or the job would have to be made more attractive in some way (shared between multiple people for less stress, better pay, etc...).

Maybe you don't but there's some people who do. I, personally, actually did enjoy my time working at food service. The first place I worked was poorly run and it sucked but the second place I worked at great management and it was generally a good job minus the pay. I enjoyed my time there.

I also know someone (with a degree) who is a restaurant manager who loves her job as well.

> why not say, "F* it, I can get by with the guaranteed minimum, so why bother?"

Because, most people want to be able to do more. Working at McDonalds might give you enough spending cash to be able to do the stuff you want to do like have a fancy car, jewelry, nights out, vacations, etc.

It has so many different sides a test sounds like a good idea.

Taking the shitty out of a Subway (sandwiches) employee's job might now sound hard. But there are so many solutions to this single situation. And these might be fairly different for many shitty jobs. Just to name a few in this case: better pay, automation, better working conditions, smaller one-person franchises, disappear altogether,...

It's nearly impossible to find the solution upfront nor generalize. I personally believe society's creativity can easily solve this.

That is one key difference between slaves and early farmers.

That said, without living particularly frugally I'm currently able to save up to a third of my monthly income. This means that without cutting costs I could spend one month jobless for each two months of saving. Truth be told there's still plenty of spending I could cut back on, although that would mean a change in lifestyle.

Time to start saving too?

I've had a lot of people asking me when I'm getting a job again, as I assume they aren't in a financial position to be able to do this so wonder how on earth I could afford it. Although I have been lucky to have some jobs that reimburse me well, I also don't have a car, house, wife (that's happening next month!) or go out drinking. The amount I have in savings is equivalent to what friends who own houses have in equity - which is about enough for me to live off for two years, so I'm definitely not retiring yet.

The plan for the business is to build something (I'm not 100% sure what yet, but I've been following the bootstrapped community for a good few years) that will bring me in a couple of thousand dollars a month with a lot less stress than a full time job, so it's pretty equivalent to a basic income. I will probably end up moving to somewhere where the cost of living is cheaper (bonus: the cheaper parts of Europe also have much better weather than the UK), and then 'work' on whatever interests me - to start with I'll probably take a break from tech and do something more creative and hands on.

I find amusing that you include "wife" with all the other expenses. You'll become DINKYs ("Dual Income, No Kids Yet") and thus you will have even more financial independence :-). By the way, congratulations!

> [..] but I've been following the bootstrapped community for a good few years)

Could you please share the name of the community?

Haha, thanks! She is currently studying, and we will probably have kids in the next coupe of years - when we do she wants to take care of them rather than working, so unfortunately not! At least being Europeans we have good social welfare.

> Could you please share the name of the community?

There isn't a HackerNews-for-bootstrappers, at least I've found nothing worthwhile. There are a lot of disparate communities depending on what area you want to get into (e.g. creating a consulting agency, building a SaaS, internet marketing, brick-and-mortar business, etc). Most of what I follow revolves around Microconf, here are a few notable podcasts:

http://bootstrapped.fm/

http://www.bootstrappedwithkids.com/

http://nightsandweekendspodcast.com/

http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

http://www.tropicalmba.com/

I'm not sure the regular spouse would agree moving in into that 1-room studio/semi-frat-house and eating canned beans 5 times a week ?