Y Combinator: Basic Income
January 27th, 2016Something like a basic income could emerge, but it will probably only be enough to survive in a setting akin to a favela. The purpose of the basic income will be to prevent a disorderly societal collapse as machine labor really takes off.
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Any objective observer can see that so-called “Advanced” economies are in collapse now. My guess is that tech elites will come to view the basic income as the least painful option to keep the band playing on.
Once the machines hit the driving jobs, however, there better be a plan.
You no longer have a “recession” or whatever the media is calling chronic unemployment and underemployment.
You’ve got a national security problem.
Via: Y Combinator:
We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work.
It’s true that we have systems in place to give people resources, but the bureaucracy and qualification requirements make it a very imperfect approximation of what most people mean when talking about a basic income. We have some examples of something close to a basic income in other countries, but we’d like to see how it would work in the US.
I think it’s good to start studying this early. I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.
So it would be good to answer some of the theoretical questions now.
More: A Universal Basic Income Is The Bipartisan Solution To Poverty We’ve Been Waiting For
