RE: Steem Basic Income - Interview with @f3nix
Thanks I really enjoyed this interview and seeing your views concerning steemit. I'm also interested in societies that have a basic income, and I know of a place in India that works kind of like that but without money altogether. I think it is possible, if everybody is willing to help out in the proces. People who just sit back and not work for their basic income could collapse the system. The main practical issue to me with a basic income in countries is that, if let's say everybody gets $1000 a month no matter what, and people are allowed to work to earn more on top of that, soon the $1000 won't enough to support yourself because most people will earn $3000 or more (the$1000+ $2000 from work). Then the whole idea of a basic income to provide a certain base for everyone doesn't work anymore. So I wonder if someone has a solution to this? Basically you would get hyperinflation for a bit,that's my main concern. (p.s. I'm not talking about steemit, merely about base incomes in actual countries).
https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effects-of-a-basic-income-supplied-by-government/
people need to be educated on what it actually means, a lot of people confuse it with a kind of wellfare, which it is ABSOLUTELY NOT pardon my caps
which in fact gives bad rep to the whole concept of ubi
for instance
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/23/finland-to-end-basic-income-trial-after-two-years
the experiment in finland actually consisted of giving a sample set of unemployed people MORE money for a while, after which they found out not many of the unemployed people who simply got more money actually started working (which is about the most silly experiment i ever heard of so far)
While ubi is for everyone, man , woman, child, employed unemployed, thing is in Utopia the already rich would decline it in favor of "the total pool" but i betcha fiver they would actually be the last to do so,
experiments like finland make it all look bad while they have actually nothing at all to do with ubi . If you do a little research you'll find plenty of examples, both real and ... well, i have no idea what those fins were thinking, maybe to discredit it or something. The true statistic is, that in a society where everyone gets a share as UBI, people will not start working LESS, some might go part time to pursue personal deployment, which frees open time for others who can fill it in , lets face it, jobs per capita havent been increasing much,
and they won't
the whole idea is to provide a base for everyone, not just for everyone who doesnt work anymore, thats WELLFARE, already have that, its a necessity to prevent more crime but UBI is something completely different because your middle manager would get it, your construction worker would get it and the guy at the train station with the styrofoam cup and the scruffy dog would get it. Not nearly enough to live a life of lambos, but enough to live
if you want more, you still have to find a way to get more, thats the core of ubi
Thanks @rudyardcatling yeah the Finnish thing was really weird haha :P I'm not so worried about people not working anymore, I'm more worried about the hyperinflation, however SBI commented about that and I haven't read that, so I'm gonna read that now :)
where would that comment be, please ?
Here: https://steemit.com/steembasicincome/@sbi5/re-markdeheide-re-steembasicincome-steem-basic-income-interview-with-f3nix-20180610t161416225z
thank you ... i'll be sure to reward you with 1% votes once i have ned and blocktrades money hahah
thanks! :)
Short-term hyperinflation driven by the basic income driving price growth. That's an interesting thought, and one that I've seen come up a few times in conversations around basic income (in fact, it's very similar to the model inflation explanations given in econ 101, especially when taught by neo-classicists).
The model suffers from extreme over-simplification, in making two key assumptions.
Basic income programs would work better (and be more sustainable) if they explicitly target a low percentage of economic activity. Instead of saying $xxx per month, you target xx% of GDP (based on a rolling three years to smooth business cycle shocks). The intention is not for it to be somebody's entire income, but to be a base that insulates them from economic shocks in their own life. (Like how car insurance means that an accident doesn't destroy your finances.)
In this way, basic income has a high impact on the people that need it most, and a much lower impact on people that don't need the money at all. In fact, at a certain point, the taxes on a person's earned income would exceed the basic income they receive, meaning that person does not receive a basic income (in net), but it would still be there if their circumstances changed and they became more dependent on it.
The 'income multiplier' in economics measures how much each marginal dollar of spending impacts economic activity. The multiplier is inversely correlated to income levels. (The more somebody earns, the less each additional dollar that person receives will boost overall economic activity.)
So a basic income that removes excess income from high earners (with low multipliers) and passes it to low earners (with high multipliers) actually increases overall economic activity. There has even been recent research positing that the slow economic growth in the current 'recovery' cycle in developed nations is a direct consequence of our extreme wealth distributions.
Essentially, I'm saying that instead of creating inflation in the goods needed by basic income recipients, it would actually increase overall economic activity; maximizing multiplier effect by increasing the incomes of the demographics with the highest multipliers.
For the record, I don't advocate command and control economies, and I see serious drawbacks to taxation-driven economics. That's why I designed SBI as a social experiment to incentivise people with high incomes (dolphins & whales) to sponsor quality content creators of their choice for a basic level of support.
The question the experiment seeks to answer is 'Can we create a meaningful basic income program that is driven by voluntary donation/investment instead of command and control?'
While there have been some criticisms about the ROI of SBI, particularly from people that do not see the social vision and think of it merely as a money-making scheme, ROI was never the main point. The main point is bringing as many people in as possible without them having to pay anything at all. This is one reason why we almost never include ROI in our updates.
Given that more than 60% of members have never paid a single steem-cent to SBI and still receive their 'basic' upvotes, I would say that it's working exactly as intended.
@sbi5 thanks for this point, I hadn't thought about the percentage of GDP. I think that indeed if it is a low percentage the results willbe amazing. I don't know about The Netherlands, they wanted to test with 2000 euro a month per person I think, and if I calculate that 17M people x 24.000 euro a year = 408 Billion Euro's. If I remember correctly our GDP was around 800B last year so that would be way too much I think. They however also wanted to get rid of welfare completely, and replace it with a basic income.
Amazed. You should have written an article by its own with this, Joseph.
I didn't know that you designed it for dolphins and whales to sponsor quality content creators into. Do you find that's the way it's working? I feel like the most active SBI folks (but maybe it's just my sphere) are folks like @freewritehouse and other contest creators, who are often minnows, trying to help themselves and other minnows out.
It does seem to have leaned a lot more heavily toward minnows. Most dolphins/whales have pretty much ignored it. Part of that is the incentives to support through upvoting and delegation have not been adequate. Those are redesigned in the automated system, which will hopefully bring some bigger fish into the picture and give us the ability to help minnows and red fish even more!
Sbi10?! Huzzah!
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