Free Money (Sarah Perry on Basic Income)
Experiments limited in time (and in too small a space too) are no good to determine what would really happen if universal perpetual income was established.<p>The two predictions made in this 5-year experiment are indeed obvious.<p>But there&#x27;s a big difference between a 5-year subsidies, and a life-time guarantee.<p>As there is a big difference between universal perpetual living income and any variant.  Any tampering changes completely the nature of the psychological effects obtained.<p>Imposing any condition distorts the results because now people can make choices about fulfilling those conditions or not, in order to obtain the income or not, depending on what&#x27;s best for their own situation (and not what&#x27;s best for the society at large).<p>Imposing time or &quot;space&quot; restrictions obviously distorts the results.  To the limit, I&#x27;ll give you a universal living income just for you and just for one day.  Will you change anything to your life choices?  No way.  At most, if you&#x27;re already not enslaved (by an employer, by customers, whatever), you might take a day off, but nothing will change.  Limited to 5 years won&#x27;t change your long term prospects (as getting a well paid job that will not last won&#x27;t change your long term prospects either). For &quot;space&quot; restrictions, what is actually meant, is the set of people who would receive this &quot;universal&quot; income.  That is, if it is not universal.  If you restrict to one person, (even if you make it perpetual and otherwise unconditional, and a living income or even better), then it won&#x27;t change anything for the society at large. Actually it may even be deleterious for the single person, as we can witness with numerous &quot;experiments&quot; of lotery winners, or even, inherited fortunes (but perhaps here the problem is more in the &quot;way beyond&quot; living income).  Limiting it to the people in a village is problematic, because again, there&#x27;s the question of choice given to people to come into that village, or get out for something else.  At the level of a country it might be more feasible.  But not in the European Union, and not in the USA, since they are basically sets of borderless countries, that cannot prevent anybody to come in and get this &quot;universal&quot; income.  Again, altering the notion with a condition that allows for a choice to fulfill this condition or not to benefit from it or not changes completely the outcome.  At least, with real countries meaning with real borders, if people are prevented to migrate in great distabilising numbers, then this could be arranged.  But eventually, it would need to be really universal.<p>And of course, amongst the tampering a lot of people would want to apply on the notion to break it and to discredit it, would be to make it not a living income, that is, not an income enough to live with dignity, and not just to survive.  That means that beyond food, clothes, house, it should be enough to provide a minimum of cultural and social access.  Thankfully, nowadays with tools such as the Internet, television and telephone, which are rather cheap, it can be afforded by everybody. (Don&#x27;t expect to buy the latest top-notch iPhone each year, but you can get the equivalent culture and social access thru devices 20 or 30 times cheaper).<p>This is when you enact this full, untampered, _universal_ (at least coutry-wide with borders with strict migration controls), perpetual, living income, that you switch to a different situation where a different living psychology and life choices can be realized.<p>Basically, my prediction with the untampered universal perpetual living income will be something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU</a> big time. (You can see the importance of cultural and social access).<p>It looks to me rather silly to ask oneself whether people will stop working, become enterpreneur, or other questions like that, because they&#x27;re about current categories.  UUPLI would actually change radically those categories.<p>The important questions to ask would be whether that would make for a stable system, whether people would be happier, and how a system establised based on UUPLI would react to intents of tampering and altering it.<p>For example, one direct effect UUPLI would have is that it would change the balance in the current employer-employee negociation, notably in the lowest salary categories.  I would consider it a good thing for the society and for the concerned people (even indirectly concerned), that cheap jobs be harder to fill.  Either the cheap job is useful and needed socially, and then it should be better retributed, or automatized (notably for dangerous or slog work), or it should not be done.  But one small category may not be happy about it: the 0.1% who are profiting from those jobs.  They may try to negociate even lower salaries, but this can work only if they have a leverage in this negociation, like if the basic income is insufficient for a decent human life, and therefore if people are forced to accept such a job for even less pay! (Hence the living income must not be tampered and must be enough (or slightly more than enough) to have a descent life.<p>Others would want to impose conditions (eg. having a working condition, where they would force you to have a working activity to get the income).  Given the current conditions of unemployment, this would basically be forced labor for the unfortunate, (and I&#x27;m wondering what they&#x27;ll make them work at, if they cannot find the jobs on the free market already, will they have them dig holes to fill them back???)<p>So beside the only relevant questions worth studying are how to prevent the perversion of the project by the immediate tampering attempts from the obvious &quot;enemies&quot; of the project, and once established, how to ensure the stability of the system and how to have it react against attempts to pervert it later.