Basic income is just the beginning as Finland looks to citizen-driven governance
It&#x27;ll be really interesting to see how this basic income thing plays out over the next few decades. Basic income is most easily testable in small, high income, relatively homogeneous societies that agree on a more communal way of governing. So, the Nordic countries, see Finland.<p>What is most interesting is how many optimistic and as yet untested claims that basic income advocates make. See this article. Paragraph after paragraph about how this program will work, what the advantages will be, but we don&#x27;t really have any hard numbers, and even once we get them in a limited setting in Finland, or with random people across the US, we have studies that aren&#x27;t generalizable, and we have very few. If n=29 means anything in this context, we&#x27;ve got like 2.5 (not a rigorously considered statement, don&#x27;t hurt me).<p>The really cynical part of me notices how basic income is like the ideal political promise. &quot;Hey, we&#x27;re gonna give you money so you don&#x27;t have to work, and when we do, society is gonna transform into utopia&quot;. We&#x27;ll all be living in Truman Burbank&#x27;s world, apparently. Because of course people won&#x27;t squander their basic income (maybe on Bitcoin?) and if they do, so much for a social safety net.<p>The general populace (not those at the top) are seeing a bad economic situation, so of course their response is yes, meanwhile the people who are the biggest proponents of this as of currently are people like Altman, Zuckerberg, and Musk. The first two have political ambitions, the last is a utopian.<p>Of course when you break down the numbers, it doesn&#x27;t work. How do you make up the 3 trillion a year it would take to give everyone $12k when you almost had healthcare repealed? What programs do you decide to cut and how do you expect the two parties to have a fruitful discussion about it (lol)? These guys will never talk about any rigorous plans because they don&#x27;t have any that would make it through legislation. They also won&#x27;t talk about how crushing and depressing and difficult it is to live on 12k (they have no clue).<p>It sounds like a future where the super rich throw pennies to the peasants and at that point it&#x27;ll be a great excuse. We give you money, why can&#x27;t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps?<p>Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you&#x27;d implement BI in the US?