Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I&#x27;d be very interested to hear thoughts from the HN community about what we could be doing here.Edit: please respond in the main thread so we don&#x27;t get an unbalanced comment tree. I&#x27;ll be in the discussion here for a couple hours, but if it feels like there&#x27;s momentum in the ideas we might do a proper Ask HN about it next week.

&gt; the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflationI don&#x27;t think any respectable economist actually agrees with you on that. The increase in the monetary base during QE was paired with a collapse in the money multiplier. Most of that cash stayed in reserve at banks (see &#x27;Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not &quot;Lend Out&quot; Reserves&#x27;). Price inflation is nowhere in sight; inflation is below historic levels and even slightly below the Fed&#x27;s inflation target.As for the original question, the general idea seems to be eliminating most other forms of government welfare programs (TANF, SNAP, social security, etc.) since basic income will replace them, along with redistributive increases in income&#x2F;capital gains&#x2F;wealth taxes.

In the USA, if Basic Income were to be implemented, where would the money come from? Currently the rate of monetary inflation is quite high- we&#x27;ve gone from $11T to $18T in the monetary system during the Obama administration. If we were to start printing even more money to pay people a basic income, this monetary inflation would cause prices to rise to wipe out the benefit of the program, most likely.In fact, the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflation (Which has been high going back to the Reagan era, so it&#x27;s the fault of both parties. This is not a partisan issue- it&#x27;s an economics one. And the problem is that politicians get elected by promising stuff, but to produce the stuff, they can&#x27;t raise taxes, so they do the equivalent by printing money.)

this is actually a really good read about it. Perhaps a lot of comments on HN is skewed towards the young tech worker who sees himself as victimized in a souless wage slavery, but we don&#x27;t hear any opinions on UBI from the truly needy - the homeless, the chronic unemployed etc.

Or New Zealand&#x27;s research into the feasibility of implementing UBI:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;igps.victoria.ac.nz&#x2F;WelfareWorkingGroup&#x2F;Downloads&#x2F;Working%20papers&#x2F;Treasury-A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;igps.victoria.ac.nz&#x2F;WelfareWorkingGroup&#x2F;Downloads&#x2F;Wor...</a>Key takeaways:&quot;An income of $300 per week is just over the average (mean) benefit income – therefore a plausible
minimum income. However, paying a guaranteed income of $300 per week to every New Zealander
aged 16 years and over, excluding superannuitants, comes at considerable fiscal cost. The fiscal cost
of the GMI proposed in the first model (Model 1) is $44.5 billion (including the cost of all social
transfers – in particular, New Zealand Superannuation payments, would cost $55.5 billion), requiring
a flat personal tax rate of approximately 45.4%. Note that this tax rate and the others considered
below are cost-neutral – not fiscally neutral – as personal taxes currently raise approximately $6
billion in excess of current social assistance costs.&quot;&quot;Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models, many beneficiaries (including the disabled,
carers and sole parents) currently receive more than $300 per week and would be made financially
worse off under a GMI scheme. Therefore the GMIs considered could distribute money away from
those most in need of government assistance and toward those who have choices and opportunities
but choose not to work.&quot;

Here&#x27;s another link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;the-mincome-experiment-dauphin" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;the-mincome-experiment-daup...</a>

It&#x27;s worth reading about the Canadian experiments with basic income in the 1970s:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mincome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mincome</a>
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.nationalpost.com&#x2F;full-comment&#x2F;colby-cosh-what-the-poverty-advocates-forget-about-canadas-flirtation-with-a-basic-income" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.nationalpost.com&#x2F;full-comment&#x2F;colby-cosh-what-th...</a>The experiment allowed households to opt out, and after a while most did. However this result is convoluted by the fact that the income was not inflation indexed, and inflation rates in Canada in the 1970s got quite high.The main conclusion from this is, basic income is going to have to be VERY carefully implemented to work at all.

Or, in more relevant terms, 3.2T is about 1&#x2F;5th of US GPD (~17Y).

Yes. Since you brought it up I can provide those numbers too:<pre><code> Total US population ~= 319M
 Under 18 population ~= 73M
 Over 65 population ~= 46M
 ---------------------------
 Remainder ~= 200M
</code></pre>
No data on volunteering not to receive, though I don&#x27;t know many people who pay more taxes than they&#x27;re required to so I&#x27;m guessing that number would be pretty small.

Does your &quot;US population&quot; number include people &lt;18yrs old, people receiving social security, and people who volunteer to not receive their basic income payment? They should be exempt from your calculation...

Basic income is generally designed to be revenue neutral on the middle class.   In other words, you send them a cheque for $10,000 and increase their taxes by ~$10,000.   So your cost is off by about an order of magnitude.   That you get from increasing taxes on the rich and from cost savings for social security and other welfare benefits.

What will stop people from having multiple kids, just to get the $10K&#x2F;child windfall?

How much would that $10k grow in 18 years? Bank of America&#x27;s &quot;Platinum Honors&quot; interest rate is 0.06%[1], and over 18 years of compounding interest that&#x27;s only $10,108.55 unless I&#x27;ve messed up my math.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankofamerica.com&#x2F;deposits&#x2F;bank-account-interest-rates.go" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankofamerica.com&#x2F;deposits&#x2F;bank-account-interest...</a>

I love your idea. It&#x27;s like a perpetual motion machine of money.

&quot;Down on your luck? No problem. We understand that terrible things happen to people just like you all the time.  But did you know there is a way out?  Just sign right here and we&#x27;ll provide an annuity based on your child&#x27;s &#x27;right to help&#x27; income.  After all, what&#x27;s good for you is good for them too!&quot;

I don&#x27;t like the interest part of the formula. There is too much financial &quot;imprisonment&quot; because of interest.But what you are really saying is put aside $10k and grow it through investments. Then withdraw the gains only, and make the $10k a withdraw-but-pay-back option.No gains :(!

But that number is misleading. I have a spouse and three children. Does that mean we all will get 10K&#x2F;yr?I have had a different thought on this in the past; Every child born should have $10K put into an account in their name on the day they are born. It will gain interest and grow until they are 18, then they get the money. And as an adult after 21, they are taxed at some rate to pay back the initial 10K that will then be deposited into the account of some other new baby.

Probably the federal poverty level will be higher than $15,930 in 20 years. For reference, it grew by 59% in the last 20 years.

Federal poverty level is 15930 for a two people family unit, that gives 8000 USD&#x2F;person&#x2F;year (slightly below 10k), * 300 mln is 2.4trln. Total income from social security tax (assuming you&#x27;re replacing all social security with flat just-out-of-poverty basic income) comes to 1.1trln. So definitely short, but assuming 4% annual growth (figure reverse engineered from budget predictions in the futute), that gives us 20 years when in real terms we would be able to fund it entirely from social security tax.Sources: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usgovernmentrevenue.com&#x2F;federal_budget_detail" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usgovernmentrevenue.com&#x2F;federal_budget_detail</a>

It&#x27;s still quite a lot of money, but I think the basic assumption with a guaranteed income is that it would be accompanied by a tax increase such that net income is neutral for some percentage of the population.Taking the extreme example where no one&#x27;s net income is decreased and people below median get the full $10k net, you&#x27;ve already halved that number. I think most formulations of actually paying for such a guaranteed income would include some degree of reduction as you approach median and increased taxes at the high end of the income spectrum, further reducing the cost. As mentioned exhaustively, you also can subtract the cost of many of the pre-existing social programs because they get replaced by the guaranteed income.

Indeed you are correct! I was just tossing that out as a starting point so that people keep in mind the magnitude of the question.

Note that the about 23% of the population is under 18 (possibly zero or reduced BI), and 14.5% is 65 or older (possibly offset by SS).Also, since the census is tasked with counting all people in the united states, it also includes non-citizen long-term visitors and illegal (or undocumented) immigrants.So it&#x27;s not quite as simple as latest census count * 10k. It&#x27;s still quite a lot though.

Except almost all of that money will be immediately spent by the recipients, greatly accelerating economic activity. It should provide quite a boon to local entities and the federal government through taxes. Not to mention the various businesses who will suddenly have more customers with money to spend.Economics is not a zero-sum game and trying to treat it as one will always lead you astray.P.S. If total US household income was 13 trillion and we assume that the top 1% took home half of that we can just tax the uber-super-mega rich at 50% and pay for a basic income for every man, woman, and child in the US.I&#x27;m also willing to bet that those rich people will end up better off as the resulting economic spending boom circulates through the economy and ends up back in their pockets.If current trends of automation continue there simply won&#x27;t be many jobs (Foxconn is deploying a million robots right now to replace &quot;cheap&quot; Chinese workers). How long do you think society will last under those circumstances? Makes a 50% tax look like a bargain.

$10,000 * US_POPULATION ~= $3.2T ~= The total annual tax revenue of the US federal government.Something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.

Will this be possible to simulate if the participants know they are taking part in a study?

There are long term studies of unemployed in multiple countries that have social safety nets that would be worth reviewing (for example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;1nosUtx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;1nosUtx</a> Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty published by Amsterdam University press in 2006) For many the impact of unemployment (for instance following closure of UK coal mining and steel industries) its not just the loss of job in the economic sense, but the disconnect from the workplace, community, changes in sense of self-worth for individuals and long term cultural and regional impact. There are proven strategies that work and lots of examples that failed. Learning from these and seeing which opportunities map to actions that start-ups can effect through mobile, social and learning technologies might be a useful starting point.

I think this is one of the most important components to study.

Based on what happens in remote communities here in Australia the result is not pretty. We basically have a basic income here in Australia via our welfare system. What we have found when everyone is jobless is there are huge levels of drug use, domestic violence, child abuse and general criminality. Other than this it works quite well.

What happens now if everybody is jobless, does the jobless still feel bad about it?

The reduced sense of self-worth is likely a result of the cultural stigma against joblessness.Hopefully, merely collecting a universal&#x2F;basic income will not be similarly stigmatized.

There&#x27;s not going to be an answer, of course.I think a good source of data could be the population of retired people. I&#x27;m pretty sure if I could afford to be retired, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life.

People value money they earn more highly than money they are given (, about twice as much from what I&#x27;ve read).  In addition to that, many people get a sense of purpose from their work, as they feel they are contributing to something, and through a sense of fellow-feeling with their fellow workers, even though they may find it stressful and&#x2F;or tedious.

Plenty of people voluntarily leave work. I did it last year for eight months to travel. It didn&#x27;t hurt my self worth, nor those of my friends who&#x27;ve done the same. But if I had wanted a job and not been able to get one, I think that would hurt my self-worth even if I didn&#x27;t need the money.

I&#x27;ve always wondered if its actually the joblessness that degrades people&#x27;s self worth or the job search that must not be going to well and thus keeps them jobless. Would a person without a job but with a basic income and thus not feeling pressure to get a job experience the same hit to their self worth?

Being unemployed isn&#x27;t the same as feeling unemployable.

I have a standing offer to buy a beer for anyone who visits me here in Bend with the entire 10&#x27;s of cents I get every month with those links.  But hey, at least it&#x27;s a free beer for someone, rather than Jeff Bezos.

Affiliate tag free link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00D97HPQI&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00D97HPQI&#x2F;</a>

Way to miss the point. If you don&#x27;t have a job, even if you have some kind of meaningful work or hobby on the side, your self-worth will still suffers from that.

We have to clearly start differentiating between &quot;work&quot;, and a &quot;job&quot;.You can work hard at something which provides immense satisfaction and personal value (perhaps even value to others). But a job is strictly something you do in exchange for money.A job doesn&#x27;t necessarily contribute to your self-worth. Meaningful work, does.

Aaand, it is not currently the imperative of gov&#x27;t to provide people with a sense of self-worth. That may be a worthy thing to shoot for, but it isn&#x27;t currently a purpose of government. Even if one accepts uncritically the self-worth imbue-ing power of labor it&#x27;s not necessarily the only way to impart a sense of self-worth to the individual.

This assumes people on basic income without jobs are idle. What about stay-at-home spouses and parents? What about community volunteers? What about people who take care of sick friends and relatives?Furthermore, what is the economic benefit of the activities listed above? What would be lost if those activities were either abandoned or required to be paid at a fair market price? I know, charging grandma by the hour is a silly idea, but I say so to illustrate the benefits to society by activities not reflected in GDP, and to invite discussion about whether society would be better served by individuals living on basic income alone who spend their time helping others, without having to worry about making next month&#x27;s rent.

So, pair a basic income with abolishing the minimum wage.

The suggestion in the book is a negative income tax: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negative_income_tax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negative_income_tax</a>

&gt; having people sit around idle probably isn&#x27;tBasic income doesn&#x27;t aim for people to sit idle, and in practice basic income doesn&#x27;t seem correlated with idleness. Some studies show an increase in work hours [0], and another showed a slight decrease in work hours among new parents and teenagers [1].Loss of self-worth need not occur when people are given the freedom to say &quot;no&quot; to unfulfilling and unproductive jobs, the freedom to take time off to care for their own or another&#x27;s health issues, and the ability to pursue their passions -- teaching inmates, launching a startup, or becoming a world-class gamer.[0] e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552</a>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.econ.duke.edu&#x2F;~erw&#x2F;197&#x2F;forget-cea%20(2).pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.econ.duke.edu&#x2F;~erw&#x2F;197&#x2F;forget-cea%20(2).pdf</a>

I think the key here is to help people redefine who they are.    There&#x27;s not a huge material difference between people who call themselves &quot;starving artists&quot; vs those who call themselves &quot;unemployed&quot;, but it is a huge mental difference.

I don&#x27;t like it, but it&#x27;s definitely relevant.In a broad sense, the shift towards a services-based economy is a type of &quot;make-work&quot; in the shadow of heavy automation in first agriculture then manufacturing. This is very much Parkinson&#x27;s Law writ large: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parkinson%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parkinson%27s_law</a>

Related though not necessarily helpful section from Brave New World (1956):&gt; of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be 
perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or 
four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they 
wouldn&#x27;t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half 
ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was 
the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; 
that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far 
from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take 
a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for 
labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.&quot; Mustapha Mond made a 
lavish gesture. &quot;And why don&#x27;t we put them into execution? For the 
sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex- 
cessive leisure. It&#x27;s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize 
every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don&#x27;t. We prefer to keep 
a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it 
takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, 
we have our stability to think of. We don&#x27;t want to change. Every 
change is a menace to stability. That&#x27;s another reason why we&#x27;re so 
chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is 
potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a 
possible enemy. Yes, even science.&quot;

Not &quot;idle&quot; exactly, but in the Canadian Mincome experiment, teenagers and new parents decreased work hours (to focus on studies and childcare, respectively).<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.econ.duke.edu&#x2F;~erw&#x2F;197&#x2F;forget-cea%20(2).pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.econ.duke.edu&#x2F;~erw&#x2F;197&#x2F;forget-cea%20(2).pdf</a>

Is there any evidence that shows that Basic Income (that you DON&#x27;T lose if you happen to find work, as in the USA system) will cause people to sit around idle?

There will always be idle people, some of them poor and some of them rich trustafarians.Basic income can liberate a lot of people to focus on bettering their situations, rather than just trying not to drown from day to day.

Indeed, I&#x27;m skeptical of anything that promises to free people from work. I think of it as a mobility scooter for healthy people - the idea of not having to walk and be tired might sound appealing, but the actual use will leave you in much worse shape.Japan seems to have one solution to this problem. It&#x27;s a culture that highly discourages idleness, yet also aims to look after people&#x27;s welfare, so they have a very large number of (practically speaking) quite useless jobs - crossing guards on parking lot exits and streets with no traffic, platform attendants, park attendands, etc. It was quite weird seeing this at first, but once I started thinking about it as a socially acceptable form of welfare, it made a lot of sense.I don&#x27;t think their system will work here (serving people is seen quite positively there, whereas here it is often looked down upon here), but it is a good working example.

This is a huge component that should be considered when arguing for &#x2F; against basic income. Does this lack of self worth stem from actually not having a job? Or simply not putting quality time into something valuable? Did they study people who found other ways to spend their time on something productive and interesting, like volunteering or learning a hobby? Did they measure people who were jobless by choice?

The thing is, the subsidised poor already have a huge system of entitlements in most developed countries. Governments combat homelessness with social housing (net value far more than $10k per annum where I live) and direct despondent former Fortran programmers into jobs or onto retraining schemes whilst paying them enough to live on.Arguments for universal BI (as opposed to tweaks to benefit entitlement rules) are in effect a suggestion that people on those programmes should have less so that we can afford to extend subsidies to middle class stay-at-home wives and twenty-somethings on gap years, because rich people that don&#x27;t want to work obviously deserve the same as people with nothing going through a crisis. And you have the temerity to intemperately accuse anyone that questions it of being elitists.And yes, BI is something which has been chiefly advocated by privileged white men.

Oswald&#x27;s research was published on 2004. Andrew Oswald is a British economist who earnestly tried to study happiness with statistics, and government data. The study tries to corollate government data, excludes detailed information on black wages, and tries to draw conclusions based an statistics, and questionable government data.What jumped out of the paper(around page 25) was that Europeans have been just Happy! Why are first 12 members of the EU Happy over time? I&#x27;ll let you speculate.Now to entitled--usually white upper class men--who have been telling the poor what to do since biblical times. Dummy up!
I&#x27;ve had seen too many people die early because they became homeless.I think what most of these researchers fail to comprehend is the difference between poor, and poor with no safety net. No parents. No friends couch to crash on. Just the inviting, wet thicket of Scotch Broom to crawl into, and being woken by gently nudge of a police officers&#x27; latest extension of their authoritarian arm. Real poverty is homelessness. It&#x27;s ugly. I don&#x27;t know why we are even debating someting, like a minimum income, at this point in time. I have seen friends die way too early because of their homeless stints. It seems by the time they get a little help, it&#x27;s too late. They just die early?I&#x27;m not going to list off my gripes about making a living in this enviorment, but a lot of us tech workers are very succeptable to being homeless. At least half the guys I know without roofs over their heads were former Programmers. At one time they we happy, and young, banging away with Fortran.(Willie Brown is actually the first one I heard, wondering out loud, exactly what we are going to do with all the future homeless tech workers.They now sit in coffee shops fiddling with our discarded toys.Basic income at this point--yes. I actually think if some of these poor people were given a little bit of help, they might just start business, and who know where it will end. There&#x27;s only one benefit from being poor; some of you see the world a different way.We have never had a basic income in the United States. Let&#x27;s give it a shot? I look around at what&#x27;s happening in the United States, and I don&#x27;t like the trend. It was better in the past.(Yea, what if it gets worse. Go back to this wonderful system of privileged elitism. I won&#x27;t be back, so any comments--I will miss out on. Oh, yea as to sitting idle--the subsided poor I know, are busy. See the world is funny place. Even if you get the couch in the subsidized house, you are expected to do&#x2F;fix all sorts of things, including being a amature psychiatrist. The poor always pay in some way. Think about it. Did you really ever get a completely free lunch, outside of maybe grade school, or when you were young and pretty. Pretty is gender neutral.)

That&#x27;s not a basic income, that&#x27;s just a government job. The point of a basic income is that it is not contingent on services rendered.

Easily solved: Basic income is paid out to people to go and work on infrastructure projects.

Isn&#x27;t the whole concept of Basic Income that there are no strings attached?

The whole point of basic income is that you don&#x27;t have to work for it, just like you don&#x27;t have to work for access to universal health care.

So, you want communism or forced labor camps?I don&#x27;t want Basic Income only to be told where and how to work. If I have to work for it, I want to go find work my damn self that I find palatable.Which is (part of) why I don&#x27;t want Basic Income at all.(Edited for clarity)

It&#x27;s definitely an excellent point that a basic income would only solve part of the problem associated with lower need for labour. I&#x27;m sure there are many more startups that could be founded around the expected increase in numbers and breadth of retired people. There are plenty of things that people can do to be active and engaged when not working; it&#x27;s just that often they don&#x27;t. Making these activities more accessible, or accessible in different ways, surely provides some opportunities.

Personally, I think this is a big part of the reason UBI will work.Most people want to do something, and generally want to feel productive. How many stories have you heard about unhappy office drones leaving a job where they spent all their time on the internet to something more rewarding?But where will this productive energy go? Plenty of people will still have jobs, likely doing something more in line with their interests. Others will volunteer their time and participate in the community. I think lots of people would love to spend more time mentoring young people, being with their families, etc. It could be a revolution in community participation and lead to a more healthy society.Satisfying and productive work doesn&#x27;t need to be paid work.

There&#x27;s a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;1KFJ1Iu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;1KFJ1Iu</a> ) , that I just read last night:&gt; &quot;His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income; instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth.&quot;The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle probably isn&#x27;t.

Or just do what Australia does and have a different minimum for teen agers...

Removing minimum wage is a very important aspect because it allows teens to get experience early.  Nothing kills teenage employment rates better than a 20$&#x2F;hr mandate.

This is awesome. This is my favorite interpretation of a basic income and how it might fit in a capitalist society:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negative_income_tax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Negative_income_tax</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xtpgkX588nM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xtpgkX588nM</a>

With some pretty strong selection bias which will likely make generalizations difficult.

The Thiel Fellowship is a data point of basic income for 18 - 22 year olds, in lieu of continuing education in college.

and since it was put in place by the intellectual left, there are tons of papers (most in Portuguese) about it.the one I&#x27;d recommend is an actual book &quot;vozes do bolsa família&quot;.message me if you want more info on this. wife does a phd related to this topic.

A few good ones here - another really interesting, current initiative is Bolsa Família, a Brazilian assistance program that functions similarly to a basic income subsidy - the main difference is that it requires families to demonstrate up-to-date immunizations and good school attendance rates for children.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia</a>

Is five years long enough to get a real reaction? Unless somebody is on the verge of retirement, and they want to keep working after the experiment, they must consider staying in the job pool or have difficulty getting hired in five years. To see how people would react to a government-provided basic income, which would presumably be fore life, the study may have to emulate that more perfectly.Nevertheless, I&#x27;m very excited by this project and seeing what comes of it.

It&#x27;s a big reason we want to do it for 5 years -- things may look different in the longer term.

Switzerland has a lottery where you can win 4000 chf per month for 20 years.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swisslos.ch&#x2F;de&#x2F;informationen&#x2F;spiele&#x2F;lose&#x2F;sortiment&#x2F;los-win-for-life.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swisslos.ch&#x2F;de&#x2F;informationen&#x2F;spiele&#x2F;lose&#x2F;sortime...</a>

There is non-profit startup in Berlin trying to do this, they mainly fund themselves by raising the money from the crowd. It&#x27;s a lottery system where one can win 1000€ per month for one year, which in most parts of Germany gets you somewhere. They already funded 29 people analyze and blog about who won. Most people actually didn&#x27;t do dramatic life changes, which also could be because it&#x27;s just one year.Warning German: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mein-grundeinkommen.de&#x2F;start" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mein-grundeinkommen.de&#x2F;start</a>

I just had a weird thought about cell phones;I think that going forward, communications are a basic need. There was a startup in ~2008 that was attempting to provide &quot;free&quot; cellular service to its users who agreed to watch ads on their phones. If they interacted with the ads, they would get more service time...The Facebook phone was an utter flop - however, if they wanted to surveil the population, they may have done better by creating a cell service company and allow people to be spied on in exchange for a free phone....That damages my DNA saying that -- but it would be a workable model for the long tail of poor people that love facebook.

I would think that it depends on what you consider &quot;basic income&quot;. If it&#x27;s just enough money to scrape by (tiny living quarters, food and a tiny amount for clothes&#x2F;toilitries, etc) then people won&#x27;t be worried about survival, but they&#x27;ll still want to get more money for things like having a house, cell phone, vacations, etc

A basic income doesn&#x27;t remove variable rewards for work. It just sets a minimum. Very few people reading this could continue their current lifestyle on a basic income, so how is this going to make people stop working?

This is key.No one has ever said &quot;I&#x27;m going to stop making money because I have $1.&quot;

I&#x27;d go as far as saying that it is a liberal (in the sense classical liberal) idea.Basic income recognizes the idea of a labor market, but admits that this market is neither pure nor perfect: the jobs seeker are in an unstable situation that they have to get out of to pay their bills.Therefore the employer has an edge in the market.By decoupling the revenu and the employment, the job seekers can make better decision for themselves.

...given a guaranteed, fixed reward no matter how much or how little you work for it, disincentivizes work...I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is...)Wrong. Basic income lifts the floor. It does not concern itself with the ceiling. Calling it communism is utterly wrong and completely missing the point.

There&#x27;s a false equivalence between basic income and communism in your reasoning. Under failing communistic systems, that fixed income was generally the only allowed income, whereas basic income is guaranteed at a minimum level with other income allowed.The capitalistic harnessing of greed still applies in the basic income situation - i.e. the motivation of going to work to get more income is still in effect.

I don&#x27;t think this is a great argument without the data to back it up. People are operating at the gut level and, well, that&#x27;s not the right level to disabuse powerful economic ideas.

&gt; I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is - it&#x27;s paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the economy.Trouble is, isn&#x27;t some form of socialism inevitable? As automation continues to progress, more and more no-to-little-skill types are eliminated which then requires people to gain further education and experience to continue to qualify for some type of job. At some point we&#x27;re going to automate so much that you&#x27;ll essentially have to be an expert in a field to be employable.At least that&#x27;s how it looks like to me. Today socialism doesn&#x27;t work (at least to a degree; some socialism-like services I could see working today like health care) but in the future where every job but the ones with the highest skill requirements are automated, what do you do?

A negative income tax would solve that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10982391" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10982391</a>

I think one of the main arguments I&#x27;ve heard for basic income is that welfare is a pit of failure. Where you can make more on welfare then you can at a minimum wage job.However, if you have a basic income that &quot;replaces&quot; welfare then no matter what job you get you always make more money. So it&#x27;s better to have the basic income and work then to just have the basic income.Of course the problem is MUCH more complex than that, and that is also dependent on replacing welfare not adding basic on top of welfare. Hence the research but this is the basic idea I grab onto to think of how a basic income could be better then welfare.

My gut feeling is actually similar, but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s quite correct. One big difference from what you are describing is that it while reward is guaranteed, it is not fixed -- any earnings are on top of that. I can see how it might actually result in people being more productive -- or it might not, that&#x27;s why an experiment like this is a nice thing to do.Also it doesn&#x27;t imply communal ownership. It does not even imply communal consumption decisions -- unlike, for example, government-provided services: people themselves decide what to pay for and how much.

&gt; Why is this a problem?It incentivizes breeding. The more resources are freely available the more our population will grow until we reach equilibrium. Although we usually overshoot and end up with a Malthusian outcome.&quot;Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong, that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition&quot;.— Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter II.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...</a>

&gt; the market has decided that a large and growing number of people&#x27;s work is worth $0Or rather is worth less than the legal minimum wage, which is not the same thing.&gt; Why should someone be incentivized to work when their work has no value?Very few people&#x27;s work has no value, especially if they&#x27;re allowed to do what they like to do. Typically the problems arise when the value is lower than the costs involved (salary, ovehead of managing them, etc).Reducing such costs should be a pretty important part of a basic income setup.&gt; coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessaryThe interesting question is what the end game is here. If we get to a situation where 100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary, but 100% effort from _some_ people is still necessary, how do you ensure that the people who still need to work keep doing so? And how will those people feel about it and what will the try to do as a result? A worst-case-ish scenario that seems all too likely is bans on emigration of &quot;productive citizens&quot; (defined as the ones whose 100%, or even 80%, effort is in fact still needed) who would otherwise decamp for other countries with lower taxes.

&quot;100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary&quot; - could even be considered counter-productive to expect so much.

&gt;disincentivizes workWhy is this a problem? The market allocates work, the market has decided that a large and growing number of people&#x27;s work is worth $0, the market is still producing enough to keep everyone happy and fed.Why should someone be incentivized to work when their work has no value?Put another way, we have made an amazing collective achievement: 100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary or even desirable to maintain&#x2F;improve standards of living. Life has collectively gotten much easier, and coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessary.

It could be argued that there are many other aspects of human nature that would drive many (but certainly not all) people to work and earn increase their income - such as altruism, ambition, personal goals, greed, vanity, wanderlust, nest-building (e.g. wanting a bigger house), etc

I don&#x27;t think this is equivalent to socialism and communism _at all_. Socialism and communism propose an alternate _structure_ for the economy - one of state-directed planning. This has been demonstrated to fail pretty spectacularly.Basic income is an extension of the welfare state, which is itself a capitalist construct. It does not presuppose a state-planned economy or really threaten capital ownership or free exchange at all.Yes, many communist countries have attempted some kind of unconditional income. Was this what sapped people&#x27;s desire to work? Not really. What sapped their desire was a complete lack of a reward structure. A universal income doesn&#x27;t destroy the reward structure; it destroys the penalty structure. The big question is whether or not the economy survives that.On top of that, though, most communist economies imploded because decoupling production from market forces also destroyed incentives towards efficiency, innovation, and satisfying demand. Those are the biggest failures of the state economy and those are not related to universal income at all.

Why would they need an incentive when they already continue to work on their own?

What about the very rich people today? They have practically enough money to live on. Why do they continue to work?Quick! Let&#x27;s tax them at 100% so that they have an inventive to work!

Aside from all the other stuff that people are pointing out, the &#x27;human nature&#x27; and motivation argument is a bit stale at this point. We existed in communal hunter-gatherer societies for millennia before our current system emerged, and tons of research has shown that money is a cosnsitently bad motivator for creative productivity. People like pretty pictures so here&#x27;s an old RSA animate on the issue: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc</a>There are shortcomings with ideas like basic income, but I don&#x27;t think the ones you&#x27;ve mentioned are particularly valid.

When I talk with people about basic income, my gut reaction and primary argument is that it contrasts with that fundamental human nature that&#x27;s been show time and again throughout humanity - given a guaranteed, fixed reward no matter how much or how little you work for it, disincentivizes work. It follows along the same lines as why government instituted communism fails. Or why the first version of the mayflower compact failed - whatever was produced was put into a common warehouse and all the land, buildings and end product were communally owned.I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is - it&#x27;s paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the economy.

Things got fiddled a bit here with the comments, but this is my response to &quot;how can we increase prosperity for everyone?&quot;, although it&#x27;s probably more a political problem than a startup one.Maybe it&#x27;s just me that has noticed it in the past few years, but &quot;fixing housing in the US&quot; is looming large on my list of things to improve.It&#x27;s not just San Francisco - the same debates are playing out in places like Boulder, or even here in Bend.

Only works if every university does the same thing.

A cursory search leads me to believe this may actually be happening:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-07-09&#x2F;why-is-college-tuition-rising-blame-student-loans-fed-says" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-07-09&#x2F;why-is-col...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessadministrationinformation.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;study-shows-the-impact-of-student-loans-on-tuition-increases" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessadministrationinformation.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;study-...</a>

I often have the same inclination of thought with regards to university education and government-guaranteed student loans. If I&#x27;m a university executive, and I know that the average student can afford $X, and I know the average student can also receive a guaranteed $Y in student loans... Why would I not set my price at $(X+Y) and take the full rent that I can?

I continue to believe that the best way of &#x27;locking&#x27; a price is to ensure that the market remains with the correct supply to buyer ratio.As an example: to decrease the cost of rent in a city, an increase in rent-able locations and attached commercial business and non-retail jobs need to be in those locations.This is also related to suggestions that say controlling medical care could be achieved by allowing more agents at all (doctors or not) to be able to treat obvious conditions. I agree that in the short term the suggestion would be viable, were it not for regulations; however I think that artificial diagnosis neural networks will probably achieve adoption before the regulations catch up.

Inflation is the obvious issue here IMO.  If basic income is X, then X really just becomes the new zero.  We either need to provide products themselves (free food, housing, healthcare) or somehow lock the price of those things.  I suspect both of those tactics will have identical challenges in terms of implementation though.

This is exactly wrong. The cost basic goods would increase. Basic Income would immediately have an inflationary effect as the money supply for these good would be expanded drastically.The Employer would not see as much benefit as you&#x27;d think as presumably he would be amongst the class of people&#x2F;entities (including the middle class, upper class, and corporation) which would be paying for this indirectly in the form of taxes.Alternatively, if Basic income is debt finance (and not financed directly through taxes), incurring more debt also has inflationary effects.

Like Walmart paying workers less and not giving them insurance because they can still be on welfare.

I think the cost of a lot of basic goods and services would fall. Employers would only need to offer relatively modest wages because the marginal value of those wages would be so much higher. This could drive down labour costs without driving down net pay for low wage workers. Basically a worker on $1,000&#x2F;Mo now might be on $600&#x2F;mo basic income and $600 wage after (fantasy numbers). This could make low wage workers much more affordable for employers leading to more employment and cheaper goods and services, leading to lower cost of living. A win for employees, won for employers and win for customers. Of course this is an idealised scenario, it would all need to be funded from higher overall taxation.

But businesses won&#x27;t have to pay employees more. If anything, they can pay less because the UBI covers it. See @simonh&#x27;s comment [0] to parent.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10982605" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10982605</a>

Of course it does, it&#x27;s the same thing with minimum wage increases. When businesses have to pay all of their employees more, that just doesn&#x27;t come out of their pockets. Price increases across the board are passed down to customers.

What I&#x27;m curious about is what&#x27;s stopping a large portion of the population from simply quitting their jobs to live off basic income, thus decreasing the potential pool from which taxes to pay for basic income can be extracted?If it really worked out like you say it would, where people with middle or high incomes are no better off, I wonder what they would think when suddenly large swathes of the population are able to live off the dole without busting their humps.

The money for the basic income comes from taxation. Even though everyone would get it, higher tax rates on people with middle or high incomes would mean they were no better off, or worse off. This isn&#x27;t supposed to be a way to make everyone $x per month better off, it&#x27;s a way to change incentives and replace welfare.

In competitive markets - short term you&#x27;ll see inflation, long term prices come close to production costs(which are unaffected by inflation).But it may different for housing and uncomeptitive markets.

I wonder what basic income would do to cost of living? If everyone ends up with x amount of guaranteed income, does the cost of living eventually rise by the same amount across the board and basically negate it? It seems like rent-seeking behavior would come in to play here.

It&#x27;s too early to say -- we&#x27;re obviously not experts ourselves on this kind of research, so we&#x27;re going to look to the researcher who joins us to first design the study.

Where is the application to be a part of the experiment group? I&#x27;d prefer that over the control group...

Once again, the discussion about the basic income is framed as &quot;would people work or sit on their ass&quot;. This is a red herring. People receive free stuff all the time, from nature, from technology. In general, free things do not make people worse off, it&#x27;s just more widely discussed, as are instances of men biting dogs.What people end up doing on a basic income is far less relevant than what people end up not doing due to the taxation burden of funding a basic income. It&#x27;s telling that the post contains no mention whatsoever of studying the impact of the taxation.

Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn&#x27;t mean you won&#x27;t work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.

Yeah if it&#x27;s 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?

One way to fix that problem is make the experiment last the entire lifetime of the &quot;test subjects&quot;. It would be more expensive, but much more informative. They aren&#x27;t worrying about what they&#x27;ll do after the money runs out. Randomly pick X people who begin to receive their basic income at 18 years old and let them do whatever they want with it. You&#x27;d probably want to provide full health care too. Of course it&#x27;s not a perfect experiment because they&#x27;re surrounded by people who aren&#x27;t receiving a basic income, which could affect their attitudes and actions in many ways.And if you wanted to extend the experiment a bit you could create stipulations like, any literature, art, music, etc. that they produce must go into the public domain. (They could still make money off it in other ways if they want).

If I am a participant in this subject and I am told that I will be receiving Basic Income for 5 years I might act differently compared to if I was told that I am entitled to Basic Income for the rest of my life.The observation bias alone might motivate people to do work and strive to achieve something with all of their time. Or, it might even cause them to lie about the things they&#x27;re working on.It will be very interesting to see how they design the study, I think it has to be a little bit more nuanced than &quot;Here&#x27;s 2000 dollars a month for 5 years, bye.&quot;

Especially check out some of the research they have done which addresses some of the questions in this thread:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givedirectly.org&#x2F;research-at-give-directly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givedirectly.org&#x2F;research-at-give-directly</a>direct link to paper:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~joha&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Haushofer_Shapiro_UCT_2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.princeton.edu&#x2F;~joha&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Haushofer_Shapi...</a>

Might be of interest: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givedirectly.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givedirectly.org</a>

Opinions on Basic Income aside, if this were ever to become a reality in the US I&#x27;d like to see it be added to the US Constitution as an amendment because it seems like such a fundamental change to the structure and thinking of how government works.

How is giving a blanket benefit to every citizen in an area not a public good?

True, although it aligns with the Law of Rent. And the Law of Rent is what shows that, when there is no freely available land, then land value gains tend to nullify any nominal increases in wages or interest from production.The only caveat is that there are other possible &quot;rentiers&quot; that can capture the rent before it winds up in land. Such as patents, barriers to entry, etc.But exclusive use of land is the first and most basic barrier to entry.

The Henry George Theorem talks about spending on public goods.

Linked to inflation is a must, I would think.The CoL problem is currently &quot;solved&quot; in Unemployment and Social Security by tying it to past wages (which probably correlate with this). I think we do need to replicate that in some way.A similar metric might be to tie it to the minimum wage of a region, which will hopefully capture inflation and CoL.

Partially it will, but mostly it won&#x27;t, because it won&#x27;t be an aggregate change, as you will need to increase taxes to the middle and upper income thresholds in order to pay it.It also is being given people, not directly to the area, so if rents are raised in one area, people can move away from it. This isn&#x27;t the case with infrastructure improvements such as road&#x2F;rail&#x2F;schools&#x2F;electricity improvements.The likely effect will be that cheap housing will increase in price, but it will be bounded by moderate housing (i.e. for those people who don&#x27;t see a real terms change in their post-tax&#x2F;benefits income).The other point, is that that the sector most dramatically affected by this will be the homeless and unemployed.An interesting question is to what extent the basic income should be linked to inflation and differential cost of living (e.g. should it be more for people who live in San Francisco as San Francisco is expensive, or should it be equal because we don&#x27;t care where people live).

It works as long as the land isn&#x27;t effectively free.The theorem&#x27;s theoretical basis is pretty spherical-cow: a government that governs land centered on a single point with people trying to minimize distance to the space. (Which is to say, it models best to the idea of a city-state rather than a federal government.)

Won&#x27;t that only work if the land is in high demand?

If the basic tenants and studies that have called basic income into the forefront are to be believed (and the actual spectre of central state control that people are afraid of in some circumstances is real, and it is), the best way to benefit people in need is to give them cash. Most of the time, people spend it on things they need. If they don&#x27;t, they are either suffering from a mental or addiction issue and need treatment, or they made mistakes and its their own damn fault, and nobody needs to pity them.

You&#x27;ll then get an extremely inefficient black market for payment vouchers (Or the goods you can get from them.)See: Food stamps.

I think it will. To avoid it, a significant portion of Basic Income would have to be paid out as goods and services vouchers with redemption limits.Rather than getting $50 a day as cash, you might get 4 nutritionally balanced but generally unpalatable meal rations, two payment vouchers for one day in one state-owned 250 sq.ft. housing capsule, 30 kWh of metered electricity, 100 gallons of potable water, 10 Gb of network bandwidth, etc. But you put redemption limits in place so that you can&#x27;t use vouchers to pay for more than 1000 sq.ft. of capsules, 60 kWh of electricity, 200 gallons of water, or 20 Gb of electricity per day. It places limits on the amount of benefit any single person could suck out of the system at the expense of everyone else in it.The state would also have to be a major wholesale buyer for those things, and sometimes also set up and spin off new competitive suppliers, otherwise the incumbent suppliers might be able to jack up the price and capture a portion of the benefits intended for the end consumer. Taxes and subsidies have a different mechanism of action economically than the entry of a new supplier firm.

Will it cause inflation, probably.  But they don&#x27;t have to live in the most expensive areas.  They can move to a cheaper area.  There will be places above and below the inflation curve.  Housing is the largest expense so other things would not be affected as much.

What I want to know is whether Basic Income implemented with our current housing and laws about land ownership will just run afoul of the Henry George Theorem:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Henry_George_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Henry_George_theorem</a>IE, the aggregate value of public spending in an area tends to soak into the land value -- give everybody $X,000 a year and the landlords will dutifully raise annual rents by $X,000.

The researcher we choose will be fully a part of YCR &#x2F; YC. He or she will be able to bounce ideas off us at any point, and we will help out however is requested.

I am surprised that it&#x27;s for only 1 researcher though. The data on startup founders seems to encourage 2 or more people to share the burden and have someone to more explicitly bounce ideas off of. It would seem to be the case that fundamental research like this would also benefit from the cofounder type setup.

Which if you read my last point, would increase taxes on those where capital is concentrated to be spent on research I listed.

My worry about automation is less about people being left without jobs and more about that production ends up concentrated behind those with the capital to purchase automation tools.

One of the biggest fallacies of the BI movement is they suggest that when AI automates many menial jobs it will lead to mass unemployment. This assumes that the average person is incapable of more skilled labor, when history has shown time and again that people adapt to the changing workforce. Yes there can be lag but it&#x27;s not insurmountable.Another problem I have with BI is it equally distributes assistance with no prejudice to those more needy, i.e. the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, etc. So you take many funds away from people such as 70+ year olds who are on medication, SS, assisted living (which cost &gt;&gt; BI provides) and distribute available funds to able-bodied people who are &quot;discovering themselves&quot;.Further, having considerable able-bodied people leave the workforce by choice delays global human progress and achievement.Instead, I am for additional public-sector money being spent on country- and global-level goals which the private sector cannot achieve nor make profitable. These include environmental, energy, medical, transportation, and infrastructure research. By putting public money into these research fields (which is hard&#x2F;impossible to make profitable) you incentivize progress in areas which further human progress that cannot be met through private means. If you instead incentivize able-bodies to not work, not only do you take money away from needy (not much savings in admin costs) but you delay human progress.

Canada has demonstrated that (single payer) public health insurance works better than America&#x27;s current public&#x2F;private model while our taxes are comparable to living in California. Yet the US political system has yet to even be close to adopting it. Data doesn&#x27;t always translate to political persuasion unfortunately.I&#x27;d expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and contextually relevant scale.

Presumably progressive tax increases would accompany a guaranteed income such that some percentage of the population would get no net benefit, at the least. The point is that it&#x27;s much cheaper to administer than traditional safety net programs and less nannyish.

I&#x27;ve always heard it pitched as some sort of sliding scale. Basically you&#x27;d get a certain amount based on your level of current employment but it doesn&#x27;t require many of the checks Welfare has. I&#x27;ve also seen people say doing a basic income then eliminate food stamps and welfare and it ends up being a cost savings.It sounds good in theory that this very odd system of income could end up _saving_ us money, but I don&#x27;t actually know if that&#x27;s true and is probably highly dependent on whatever scale is used when deciding how much basic income a person receives.

I&#x27;m also a bit skeptical, which is why there is a need for experimentation on the topic.Aside from that:1. You&#x27;d have the freedom to quit your job without fearing homelessness or hunger. Suddenly, you&#x27;re a lot less stressed.2. We are wasting trillions on making new fighter jets or new wars we don&#x27;t need, surely we can cut those programs and then spare a few trillion for something more useful.3. An open question, I think. The guidelines for poverty would likely have to be open to change in order for a UBI to work.

it&#x27;s more or less negative tax; part of your income is already tax-free, BI is just stretching the idea the other way than it usually happens. also don&#x27;t forget to cut the cost of most welfare - BI should handle most of it. it might actually cost less if welfare administration is expensive enough!

Naively, a $3T program would increase the US budget by around 50% even if you eliminated all existing social security and unemployment benefits.I can&#x27;t see determining a politically acceptable and GDP-neutral progressive tax that finds an average of 50% extra per person as a simple problem, and that&#x27;s even before you start dealing with the backlash from equally unhappy people whose existing welfare or social security program entitlements add up to more than $10k per annum...

&quot;As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!&quot;So you raise taxes. For the people who don&#x27;t need the extra $10k... well, that&#x27;s OK, because their taxes will go up by some amount. Possibly more than $10k, possibly less. It depends on how much they earn.You do still have the problem of determining what the progressive tax looks like, but this is a simpler problem than administering a large number of social welfare programs, all with their own eligibility criteria.

Personally, I think one way to handle funding is that current tax deductions might count in some form as coming &#x27;from&#x27; basic income so if you were already making significant income, then maybe there would be no additional government expenditure.Negative income taxes (linked in other comments) is similar to this idea.

The catch is very simple; you receive $10k, but as your income is $100k+, your income tax will go up by $10k + $X.1) You getting the $10k benefits society in that we don&#x27;t add any administration on the front end - deposits go to everyone, and then the taxing back step is already being done (as you&#x27;re already filing taxes). So cheaper administration cost overall than doing a means test or whatever.2) A basic income has to be introduced with corresponding tax increases. For some people the basic income is a net positive (if you&#x27;re currently poor, broadly). For others it&#x27;s a wash (middle class, by whatever definition). For others (like you and me, most likely) taxes will go up to pay for the poor. But then there are all the savings basic income leads to - fewer administration costs, fewer costs of poverty (like homelessness and crime), etc.3) Right, don&#x27;t do that. Handle it through taxation at the back end.

&gt; Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn&#x27;t there to prove &quot;additional income support&quot;. The system could be set up so that after basic income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--people making $40k wouldn&#x27;t have $10k in free money to spend, because their taxes would go up $10k a year, for example.&gt; So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were before, but you would also receive $10k.So basically as a middle class person, I don&#x27;t benefit at all, I may even lose money, but some kid who has no income and wants to live in his parents basement gets $10k&#x2F;yr for contributing nothing to society? Am I understanding this correctly?The upper class won&#x27;t care - this is pennies to them, but this is going to bite the middle class badly and completely change their incentives to avoiding getting housing and living as cheaply as possible to minimize or eliminate work.You always have to think very carefully about the incentives you create with something like this. This seems to create very bad incentives to me, incentives which would have caused me to make very, very different decisions in life drawing me away from any sort of productivity in society.I&#x27;m not strictly against this idea, but as you&#x27;ve presented it, I can&#x27;t see a way this would ever be implemented, how would you sell it to the middle class?

It might seem more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend on bureaucratic infrastructure until you&#x27;ve realised just how many adults don&#x27;t work or pay income tax or claim welfare. The choice between raising taxes or cutting incomes for the people that do really need the welfare payments isn&#x27;t a pretty one...

1) How is this more inefficient than our existing welfare system? Seems a lot more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend $100M on bureaucratic infrastructure for verification and employment tracking.2) It benefits society because you no longer have to work to live. This affects how you make decisions about your employment. You would be more likely to change jobs when you&#x27;re unhappy, for example. This is good.3) Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn&#x27;t there to prove &quot;additional income support&quot;. The system could be set up so that after basic income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--people making $40k wouldn&#x27;t have $10k in free money to spend, because their taxes would go up $10k a year, for example. The key here is that if they choose not to work for some period of time, they can. That&#x27;s not how I think it ought to be implemented, but the principle is true.4) If government handed out $10k to everyone, they could tax everyone $10k and it would be like nothing happened. The difference in implementation would be that the additional taxes would be progressive, while the benefits are flat. So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were before, but you would also receive $10k. Without a doubt, an effective basic income would require a more progressive tax structure than what we have.5) &quot;If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc.,&quot; not familiar with this reference, but presumably a basic income would eliminate extreme poverty. Do you mean like, for example, what would someone who was physically incapable of working receive? Is the basic income enough?

&gt; Naively: $25k income you pay back $1000 of the $10k in taxes at $50k, pay back $2500, etc. That way you, making over $100k, essentially get $0 basic income by the end of the year.If I recall correctly about 50k is median income for the working population, so you&#x27;re still paying most of your population at least $5000. And that&#x27;s just the currently working population, there are so many non-working adults who will also want the free money, I can envision the divorces being had for an extra $10k right now... the incentives this creates are very bad.

1.) We&#x27;d have to implement it so that starting somewhere on the pay scale, taxes increase so that by some point you pay back to full $10k you received. Naively: $25k income you pay back $1000 of the $10k in taxes at $50k, pay back $2500, etc. That way you, making over $100k, essentially get $0 basic income by the end of the year.2.) You probably have to say &quot;everyone over 18 gets $10k, each child up to 3 per family gets $2k&quot;...or something similar. Getting $10k per child creates some crazy incentives. (2010 there was roughly 70m people under 18, so it&#x27;s only $2.38 trillion! ;)3.) You can probably remove a ton of welfare programs if you do this, but not all. You can&#x27;t completely remove the safety net, but a lot few people should have to be serviced by said net.

No non-strawman BI scheme that I have seen proposes just giving everybody the same net basic income, somehow pulling the money out of thin air. Everyone&#x27;s gross income would rise but middle to high income households would have their income taxation increase to compensate.

The point is that determining who is worthy or not is difficult and just giving it to everyone reduces administrative costs. Tax rates for high earners can be increased so above a certain point the benefit would be outweighed by additional taxes.

&gt; 1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don&#x27;t need additional income support.So give basic income only to people doing less than the basic income, and take it away once you are doing more. That&#x27;s how it&#x27;s been implemented in some countries, and I don&#x27;t see any reason not to follow this scheme.

I&#x27;m very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood.The typical basic income program I&#x27;ve seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don&#x27;t need additional income support.2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people.[a] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Basic_income</a>, &quot;all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere&quot;

Yes they would have access to all that stuff because their taxes would be paid for by YC as part of the program.

So are they no longer allowed to use public roads? How about public utilities?  Does the fire department show up at their &quot;un taxed&quot; businesses, how about the police?  Can they hire students that received their education from public schools?  The fact that there existed a group of people that posted that modern society would be even remotely possible without government is far more likely to be seen as ridiculous in 50 years.

Interesting project, but personally I would be more interested to see the funding of a study on &quot;basic financial freedom&quot;.The test is quite similar, but instead of giving them a basic income participants are still required create their own income - however, they no longer have to pay taxes on their income. They are encouraged to create businesses and those businesses are also free from tax, and those employed by said businesses are also free from tax.50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used to allow government to take our money ;)

10k&#x2F;year isn&#x27;t going to get you far with food and shelter in all but the lowest cost of living areas.

Basic Income is probably the most efficient way of giving everybody food &amp; shelter.    Giving everybody food and shelter through standard government processes would probably cost way more than $10K&#x2F;year.

The problem is the cost... If we can&#x27;t pay for people&#x27;s health care, I wonder why we think we can pay for everyone&#x27;s living expenses.Suppose one person needs $100K to survive. Is it moral to let that person die, and instead give $10K to 10 people as basic income? That&#x27;s a real resource allocation decision that has to be made.I will consider the argument that the government would be less efficient at providing food and shelter than giving people the money to do so... that could possibly be true on a large scale.

Seems like you&#x27;re mixing up two arguments. Is the problem the cost, or the particular things provided?If the latter, who gets to decide what&#x27;s essential and what&#x27;s not? I&#x27;d be pretty useless without a cell phone and a laptop.

If you try to micromanage peoples&#x27; spending, you will spend more and you will hurt them. Believing that poor people will waste their money on cell phones and XBoxes is a common justification for trying to attack them, but this sentiment is evil disguising itself as morality. For example, poor people need cell phones because it&#x27;s impossible to get a job without a stable phone number.

OK, well this is a good thing for YC to fund an experiment to test.If given basic income, do people spend money on food and shelter, and plan out a good life, or do they live day-to-day and remain a burden on society?This is why I think education, for example, comes before basic income. Without education, you can easily imagine people remaining homeless despite the income.Of course some people will succeed and some won&#x27;t -- the question is the ratio.Some rich people are scrupulous; some rich people waste their money. I don&#x27;t see any reason to believe that poor people are any different. I think we can still help those people with education, etc. without wasting taxpayer dollars. But how much would be &quot;wasted&quot; is of course an open question.

My assumption about basic income was always that at it&#x27;s core, it provides the money for food and shelter. This reduces bureaucratic overhead in terms of trying to provide people those goods, and gives them the freedom to make their own choices and not have to work to survive, and the government is no longer forced to create the infrastructure to try to find ways to provide food and shelter. This may, however, require work in terms of providing affordable housing options to everyone, but I don&#x27;t think you have to solve one problem first to solve the other.Health Care and Education are a separate (but still related and important) set of problems. Both of those require greater infrastructure on the part of the government to provide effective solutions, so again this is a problem that also requires a lot of thought and effort, but providing basic income doesn&#x27;t seem like it would preclude health care&#x2F;education reform. Nor does it seem like solving health care and education reform would change the structure or overall effects of a basic income program; they&#x27;re simply additional solutions that would certainly improve our quality of life and possibly the efficacy of the program.

My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income.That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don&#x27;t get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that.In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this, if we&#x27;re not even willing to pay for the necessities of life?People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive members of society.

I am thrilled to see that there is some private interest in exploring the possibility of BI&#x2F;UBI experimentally within the conditions of the USA. A properly executed study of this type could be definitive in the shaping of our society.I expect that some form of radical redistribution of resources is going to be the next modality of human civilization, and getting started on the colossally difficult questions (how to ease existential angst of purposelessness and how to kill the work ethic) is just as important as the very-difficult particulars of implementation (how the heck do we find what the right amount of money is, and how do we pay for it) and measurements of efficacy.I&#x27;m extremely interested in the opportunity to lead or be a part of this research group, and will be applying in the coming days.

Almost sounds like the plot for &quot;Trading places&quot;.

Super awesome research project.Definitely something we should look in to for the sake of humanity.

It can be hard to cook a proper meal for yourself when you work three jobs, don&#x27;t have a full kitchen in your home, move on a regular basis, etc.If only it were so easy.

...which requires surplus energy and sufficient free time

I am working on an app in this area which I envision as a free app available for anyone, and especially those on food assistance programs. Because these programs are administered on a state-by-state basis, the &quot;onboarding process&quot; for people joining these programs is non-uniform, but I envision the case-workers or government employees who are enrolling people in these programs can also let them know about the app and assist people in downloading and installing it. I am currently developing it on weekend free-time.The app will offer recipes geared towards cheap, healthy and delicious food. I am interested in encouraging better nutrition, budget economy, and assistive technology to people who may not have much in the way of experience or skill in selecting groceries, meal planning, or nutrition.Starting February 1st, I will be living off the amount offered by US food assistance, which comes out to $6.25 a day at max. I am interested to see if I can do this, and I intend to &quot;bootstrap&quot; from &quot;nothing: I am planning to use a portion of my food budget for the purchase of cooking implements and utensils. I have spent January buying various provisions so I can get a better gauge on what I will realistically be able to accomplish and when. For instance, the first week I will purchase staples like rice and fruits and vegetables, along with olive oil and butter and salt and pepper. Some provisions will span multiple weekly budgets while others will require weekly replenishment, like fresh fruits and vegetables or meat.My father had to go on food assistance for half a year, a few years back, so this is an issue that is near and dear to me. He is fairly educated and already owned a fully provisioned kitchen but there are many people who may not and could use some help.I plan to &quot;show HN&quot; when it&#x27;s complete.

I want to add the following idea, which I have mentioned here on HN several times:I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application;The Standard Pantry.The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu schedule.Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach people how to make a set menu from the basics. Certain components used are refilled at a regular interval as a part of the standard pantry - other ingredients will still need to be purchased, perhaps in conjunction with basic income.The goal is to help people cook, themselves, more healthy and affordable meals. and overall increase their quality of life.---When I was first learning the basics of cooking from my grandmother, she used to be able to tell me to the penny the cost of each meal we cooked. How some dishes were &quot;$1.43 per person&quot; etc...It drove home to me the value of cooking and not wasting food.Cooking is therapy as well. eating well &#x2F; better is good for every aspect of life.

I think a related question to ask is &quot;What will people do with themselves when technology has displaced a large majority of jobs, and how will that be financed?&quot; When technology has displaced all the jobs, the only thing that will be left will be research and the Arts. It seems both of those have an infinite amount of work to still be achieved, and technology will never be able to automate away those fields completely.

Why shouldn&#x27;t basic income be $100,000?Most napkin math proposal for basic income are between $10,000 and $15,000. That&#x27;s quite hard to make work but it&#x27;s maaaayyybbeee posssibly achievable. It&#x27;s at the outer limit of doable but meaningful.In the US 36k per person would account for 66% of GDP. It&#x27;d be 85% of GDP in France. These are not viable figures.

10.000$ per person in the US would cost 3.19 trillion dollars per year.36.000$ would cost the taxpayer 11.484 trillion dollars per year.The US governments actual revenue for 2015 has been 3.249 trillion dollars.

The number is arbitrary.  The net effect would be the same just differing in degrees... inflation, decrease productivity of the economy as a whole, and downward pressure on the middle class.  It would have negligible effect on the problem of inequality with the 1% and above.

Why shouldn&#x27;t basic income be $36,000?

The idea of basic income is to provide something. Enough money to ride public transport. Enough money to rent a room (location dependent, but even in my neighborhood rooms can be $300-$600&#x2F;mo). Enough to buy food.It is a lot easier to look for a job when you aren&#x27;t spending your entire day trying to stay out of the sun and scrounge up enough money to eat. It&#x27;s a lot easier to look for a job when you don&#x27;t have to choose between food and public transport.It is very difficult to scrounge up enough money to take care of the basics while job searching. It isn&#x27;t impossible but it is very, very hard.Basic income helps to prevent people from falling that low. If you were moved by a woman struggling on $10k~, try listening to the struggles of the homeless in your area. If you are fortunate not to have any in your area - go to somewhere you know they are. Just talk to them for an hour, it&#x27;ll change your perspective a bit.My biggest issue with BI is the logistics behind it. To get it to work is complicated, seemingly prone to corruption, and possibly not sustainable. But it is going to be necessary to figure it out in the coming decades, IMO.

The basic income that woman would receive is government revenue from taxes. If too many do what you propose then the governments revenue is reduced.How should the government then fund the next years basic income?

With basic income, that woman could quit her current stressful job, get a better job that only pays $9k, and be wealthier and happier with the resulting $19k income.

Bernie Sanders at the recent town hall meeting asked for someone to tell a story of their struggles. A woman in tears told of how hard it was to get by on $10k to $12k a year.It makes me wonder. How happy will people who only get basic income be? How easy or difficult will it be for them to get simple work for a little extra income?Now there is a big difference in getting $10k for free vs scraping it together from 4 different crappy jobs. But still I wonder. I came away from that story less confident in basic income that I previously was.

&gt; we just think this is important and interesting.Not trying to kiss ass here but it&#x27;s this type of thinking that sets YC well above the rest, IMO.

YCR is a non-profit; we just think this is important and interesting.  Though if it does turn out, years down the road, that basic income happens, I suspect we&#x27;d get more people starting companies and that would obviously be good for YC.

Why not use primates?They won&#x27;t game the results. There was some research done, I forget date and author, something about &#x27;origin of species&#x27;

Are you looking to study this topic from a macroeconomic, sociological or psychological point of view?

Really glad YC is pushing for research into this. This is a fascinating topic that deserves more research. There have many points in my life where many of my friends and I needed welfare just to purchase food. For all of us, we experienced unbelievable amounts of shame even considering the idea. As a result, two things happened.i) Some of us didn&#x27;t go on welfare to our detriment. Not eating = decreased ability to be a productive citizen.ii) Some of us had to &#x27;over-sell&#x27; to others and to ourselves our disabilities, out of the fear that we would be denied access to these services or be accused that we were gaming the system. The effects of overselling these disabilities were devastating on one&#x27;s mental health.Having a shame-free way of getting welfare could be a great thing.

I think about this a lot. I think privatization of wealth reallocation could be the best model. If you could directly inject capital into underprivileged communities to do social projects, you could have twice the benefit to these communities. I imagine a platform where you could see social project proposals or propose your own and have people apply to run them. You can pair them with experts, give them the funding and let them hire peers to help accomplish the goals. You then have given them a livable income as well as improved their community.I don&#x27;t think it is as pure as a basic income, but rather than just redistributing wealth, it also creates wealth specifically for underprivileged communities.

Very good point. However, I do not believe that the welfare cliff argument applies to job creation and entrepreneurship.

&gt; The key component of it is that it doesn&#x27;t phase out with higher incomeI have never seen a version proposed where everyone receives more money after tax. I thought the key component was that there is no complex means testing (simply phased out through income tax).

&quot;Doesn&#x27;t technically have a basic income&quot; is doing a whole lot of work, here.The key component of it is that it doesn&#x27;t phase out with higher income, which would otherwise cause a strong disincentive to work. How strong compared to no phase-out is a good question, but that&#x27;s exactly what research like this is good for.

This is true (although basic income is not exclusively a left-wing idea). But I was not trying to use his quote as evidence-- I was using it to explain the thesis of the book.

For the record, the Telegraph is a right wing newspaper.

Removing red tape has indeed been tried in America... but almost exclusively for the benefit of already large near monopolistic corporations. It has rarely happened to the benefit of small&#x2F;medium businesses. Especially if you&#x27;re talking about deregulation that happened in the financial industry in the 2000s.The companies that most struggle with red tape aren&#x27;t mega-corps but the smaller companies who can&#x27;t afford teams of lawyers to fight through them, or the 
lobbyists to implement them in their favour.There has been very little significant deregulation in the USA in the past two decades outside of Wall St&#x2F;big corps.Context matters, except when discussing politics it seems...

I edited the main post. I meant that there was no private sector job growth.When has lowering taxes and removing red tape not worked?

Does a 0% public sector job growth necessarily indicate a failure, in and of itself? To me, that&#x27;s not probative at all. What if Sweden had simply reached a level where everyone who was employable and wanted to have a job, had one?&quot;Removing red tape&quot; has been tried quite a bit, as a sole means of stimulating growth. Not only has it failed over and over again, but the negative consequences dwarf even the fantasies of growth by proponents. &quot;Cutting taxes&quot; has also been tried, and has failed, over and over again.

You do realize that book is ideologically motivated? There is a wave of neo-thatcherite-reagan-pinochet wannabes who want to replicate the agressive liberal policies of US and UK from 70-80:s in Scandinavia.I&#x27;m not saying they are necessarily wrong, but that their goal is not to be &#x27;right&#x27; in the scientific sense but to rather to drive policies which steepen the income inequality (which - as it is- is still quite low).

Does it matter if job growth is zero if the population is constant? If it remains positive for too long you&#x27;d have more jobs than population.Cherry picking the data slightly the IMF has the GDPs per capita as1964 Sweden 2758 USA 34232014 Sweden 58538 USA 54370so they have not done that bad

I recommend this book: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_%28book%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_...</a>From wikipedia: &quot;Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has been eroded by large welfare states over time.&quot;
(Of course, don&#x27;t take wikipedia&#x27;s word for it-- read the book yourself)My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled economic growth in Scandinavia. During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net private sector job growth was ZERO.If you want to stimulate economic activity, instead of giving everyone $10,000 per year, why don&#x27;t we just cut taxes and removed red tape.(I know that Scandinavia didn&#x27;t technically have a basic income, but I still think that this material is completely relevant and very telling).Edit: I said &quot;During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net public sector job growth was ZERO&quot;. I meant private sector. Major mistake, my apologies!

Yup, it&#x27;s expensive so generally only used in expensive projects. But it&#x27;s a way of manufacturing land (or rather, saving land that would otherwise go for garages, storage, or other facilities that don&#x27;t need windows). This makes housing cheaper because you then need to pay for less land per housing unit.

- applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate.You need to watch this: Digging down is for the 1% it would seem.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0</a>

&quot;What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?&quot;I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make.What could make a difference?- applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate.- improvements in transportation. Making transportation faster and more comfortable means more people can affordably live within commute distance of prosperous urban areas (say, the SF peninsula)- advocacy: pushing for changes to zoning rules to allow dense, livable communities, bringing more housing to our cities. For example, imagine turning a shopping center + parking lot into a pedestrian-only mixed-use urban area, modeled on the best dense cities out there (like Tokyo, Munich, Stockholm, etc). This requires a combination of property developers with a strong vision, changes to zoning laws, and a strategy for overcoming NIMBYs.

Request For Research: Basic Income