Comment by grkvlt

I've given a place to stay, a place to stow belongings, and paid work to homeless drug addicts. I am more familiar with their problems than most on HN (incl. the ones that are vocal about the contrast between the tech environment and the homeless in San Francisco).

Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.

In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.

> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.

a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.

b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.

c. There exist right now entire classes of businesses which survive on exploiting poverty, and UBI might make them go extinct, and that would certainly be a net good for society. For one example: http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the...; for another: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee... (and before all the supply-side armchair economists appear to tell me that UBI just means that impound costs and court costs will rise to exactly match: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/econo...)

d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."

e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.

f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.

g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.

h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?