Moving Forward on Basic Income
There&#x27;s a lot of skepticism about basic income, especially when it comes to how does it save money? The top comment as of this writing is questioning it:<p>&gt; But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can&#x27;t afford rent and&#x2F;or food? Do you tell them &quot;tough shit, you&#x27;ve exhausted all your social safety nets&quot; or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe&#x27;s twelfth &quot;my car broke down&quot; case of the year?<p>Allow me to digress for a moment, I&#x27;ve recently been reading &quot;The Expanse&quot; series, and they have a throwaway snippet in the second book (i.e., not a spoiler) where a Martian Marine is walking the streets of a city on Earth. There&#x27;s a girl who sells her a hot dog. The girl says that she&#x27;s doing it for work credits. After she accumulates one year worth of work credits, she can attend university and get a real job and make money. Otherwise, she&#x27;d have to be &quot;on basic.&quot;<p>Like I said, it&#x27;s a throwaway scene, so there&#x27;s not a lot of detail, and even in the later books when they talk about being &quot;on basic&quot;, it&#x27;s not a detailed description. But the girl in the story distinctly mentions &quot;money&quot; after &quot;getting a job&quot; which came after &quot;university.&quot; That implies to me that, on some level, money doesn&#x27;t exist for those &quot;on basic.&quot; (And to be clear, in this not-terribly-futuristic Earth, everyone&#x27;s on basic.)<p>In other words, the term &quot;on basic&quot; implied to me that you get food, shelter, clothing, access to public transportation, K-12 education, healthcare, and basic internet automatically. But if that&#x27;s the case, why would anyone want money? Well, the implication here is that the food is minimal: ramen noodles and vegetables and beef. Shelter are studio apartments. Clothing are Wal-mart quality. Basic internet is more like 56K than broadband.<p>In the Expanse Earth, if you want more than that minimum (and most of us would), then you have to spend a year working to prove your willingness to contribute to society, and then you can go to university for free, then get a job and make money. That money can buy you things like a house with a yard, a car, surf and turf, and vacations to the moon.<p>If we were to somehow (and that&#x27;s a big if) go with the definition of &quot;basic&quot; from The Expanse, it&#x27;s almost impossible to squander it. You aren&#x27;t handing Joe $500 and saying &quot;This is your money for the month. Don&#x27;t blow it.&quot; The food and clothing are free. (Presumably with demonstrable need, but in a post-scarcity society, perhaps T-shirts cost virtually nothing compared to the previous welfare systems and you might as well just hand them out on demand).<p>I&#x27;m not an economist, and I don&#x27;t know the ins and outs of basic income, but that one throwaway page in The Expanse made me think a lot about what I think basic income should look like... and I don&#x27;t think it should look like a monthly check.