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A basic income for everyone
It's been tried, and the results are interesting.
From the articleReading through the final report, some striking figures come up: Household poverty was halved in one year, child malnutrition was cut from 42% to 10% and school dropouts fell from 40% to zero. The overall crime rate fell by 42% and lifestock ownership increased. At the same time, the rate of those engaged in income generating activities rose by 10% - refuting the claim that a basic income would make people lazy.Of course proponents of BIG have long been arguing the benefits of this idea, personally I think the biggest obstacle to implementing this sort of scheme in Europe or the USA is not the disputation between the sides arguing beneficial or harmfull outcomes of this idea, but rather the fact that in western developed nations no-one wants to admit that there may be a part of the population that genuinely needs this sort of support; it is hard to admit to yourself that in a nation as great as your own there are people who are relatively as badly off as people in Namibia (or if there are, then it certainly is their own damn fault and they deserve it).
Comments
This experiment was done in Dauphin Manitoba 35 years ago and had similar results.
Note that I'm not necessarily against, however, a degree of "make work" projects from the government, designed to basically put shit on resumes of the working class. In an job market where experience is all employers care about, it would be a massive service to have short-term job programs available that essentially act as job training; stocking shit, basic paperwork, whateverthefuck, so people can actually say "Yes, I have a year of experience in X" and don't just get their applications filtered out immediately.
Capitalism and socialism are the peaceful redistribution of wealth and power. When either of these fail, then the violent redistribution of wealth and power occurs. I think this might be self-evident.
This reminds me of a recent episode of Freakonomics that described an experiment conducted in an incredibly poor province in China, where two economists provided some vision impaired grade school students with glasses while, unfortunately, having to use some students as a control group. The students with the cheap glasses, which cost less that $20 to produce, lead to significant grade improvements. Whereas the effects of this experiment were clear (food prices won't rise because a kid got glasses), throwing money at Omitara was a bit more hasty, and I'd love to see more results of the experiment.
Let's say you have a software company. They have ten customers at $1000 each. If that software is replaced by something free and open source, those ten customers keep their $1000. There is no guarantee the open source software will be more efficient than the $1000 software, but it will be at least as good if the customers all switched.
While you might think that those companies keeping their $1000 just moves the benefit from the software company to those other companies, it's not true. The health of the economy is all about the velocity of money. Those dollars sitting still instead of moving around is not good. Also, even though the short term will have lots of job opportunities at high pay, when the companies actually start to go out of business, the situation will flip. Once it flips there's a catastrophe. Before people were taking the free money out of choice. Now their are no jobs left, so they have to take it out of need. Even worse, there aren't enough employed people anymore to tax to pay for the unemployed people. And then it's all over.
edit: Basically, this would not work so hot in our current capitalist economy, but if the goal of the economy was to make stuff, rather than moving money around, this would be good. Guaranteed income does not jive with the capitalist way of doing things.
Art is an example of something that never really fit within this structure very well. We manage to make it fit into a market economy, or we make a patron system where people with money jobs support people with creative jobs, but capitalism and artistic expression have never been best friends. This different type of economy changes that, and is more geared toward creation for creation's sake.
Everyone wants to be an artist or creative. Great! Go at it!
But nobody wants to be a cleaner or refuse collector. And they don't have to be! They can avoid that job. So to get people to do the menial jobs you have to PAY MORE. A cleaning job will be a sweet gig!
Market forces will then readjust (in theory), so that for anyone who wants to be only an artist, and completely freeloading off the basic income, they won't be able to afford it. They'll have to do some kind of work to supplement their income. Because working a menial job will be well paid, they could do just one or two days work to get enough money.
The outcome is that more people will be doing supplemental part time work, and hopefully contributing to society and culture and technology and the economy in general with their far more ample free time.
Personally in such a system, I don't see my own situation changing much. I would still expect to get paid the same money for my job, as the demand is already way above the current supply, and I'm turning down more work than I accept. For any high level job the same would hold true. Just because you get enough money to LIVE doesn't mean you LIVE WELL. It means you meet a basic minimum level. That's not enough to afford to go to PAX or have a nice apartment in New York or to buy cars, even if you might have more time to pursue those hobbies if you set your mind to it.
Personally I'm not convinced by the entire argument, but I have a friend who goes on about it constantly, and attends conferences promoting the idea, and sometimes I wish he'd shut the fuck up.
The funding of this is supposed to come from income tax above a high level (so in effect you don't get the money if you pay more tax than the income) as well as massive sales taxes.The idea of this being if you can afford to spend money, you must have money. Also land taxes rather than building taxes, so it encourages development of property, rather than impeding new buildings. There are a LOT of issues built into the theory, and I think it's a good one.
Sanitation work is very nasty, but brainless. Just about anyone is able to do it. Emegency Room doctor is also unpleasant, but requires much more skill , so it pays more.
Why is it that janitorial work is considered brainless? These are the people that we pay to ensure that our environment is sanitary. These people keep our hospitals clean, they keep our food production facilities clean, and they keep our streets clean. Sanitation is a science, and ensuring proper sanitation isn't really all that brainless. If it was so brainless, why did we live in filth for so long? Why did it take really smart people to say, "Hey, maybe we should shit downstream from the place where we drink?"
The only reason we think maintenance and janitorial work is brainless is because we don't care about our infrastructure. Americans don't see adequate maintenance as a worthwhile thing, and so we pay the janitors so little that the only ones willing to do it are the ones who can't handle anything too complicated.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Raise the bar a bit and I bet janitorial work would suddenly become a desirable job.
Sanitation management is far from brainless. Those people are paid a lot of money. They have to do things like planning routes for the trucks to managing methane levels at the landfill, to logistics of putting trash on boats. These people aren't the ones who get their hands dirty. The actual labor is done by hand, and only requires following simple instructions. Drive the truck down these streets stopping whenever you see trash. Hold onto this truck. Whenever it stops, grab the trash and throw it in the truck.
The other problem is, sadly, unions. I read a story about a NYC sanitation worker in Brooklyn some years ago. He was a garbage collector, and really passionate about it. A garbage collecting geek, if I might say so. He tried very hard to optimize his route, and succeeded. He managed to finish his route in less than half the time of anyone else. Rather than being rewarded, he was scolded. He was forced to do the job less efficiently because he was putting union jobs, hours, and pay at risk.
The culture of labor in the US most of the time is extremely harsh on anyone who applies skill or discretion in a position of unskilled labor. You follow the instructions from the superiors to a T, and that's it. Whether you rock the boat for better or for worse, it can only bring negative consequences unless you are lucky and work for awesome people. If you are that lucky, you probably won't be in such a low position as to rock the boat for very long.
Think of the sanitation manager like the general giving orders. The troops (janitors) need to carry out those orders. But the general isn't on the field, and even if he was, he can't be everywhere at the same time. He needs competent and useful reports from his ground troops in order to effectively manage those decisions.
The guys driving around see to the day-to-day implementation of the plan; they're the ones who have to figure out how to work around sudden changes and unexpected variables. It pays to have competent staff who can tell you when something could be a problem that requires addressing. The whole system functions much more smoothly if the guys reporting back to you actually know how to phrase a problem.
I do agree that US union culture often has a lot to do with it, but it's not the only problem. Within a given union, there can be a lot of discretion, but you may have to pay for that flexibility.
Also, a system like this could still boost economic performance in a society like ours by alleviating risk. Suppose you are working a menial, office job to supplement your $100 a week, but you really want to open a restaurant or start a small business. Knowing that you'll still have a source of income could make such a dream more realistic. I have a feeling that is what happened in this experiment. Someone could take a risk buying a cow, building up their home, or escaping from the criminal cycle because the knew that even if they were inactive for a few weeks, they would still be able to sustain themselves.
I just see a lot of union stuff because I'm riding my bike around NYC every day. Saw some Con Edison guys sleeping in a van.
Starting Salary for teachers 45,000k for a BS.