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Citizen's Income
Oct. 26th, 2010 01:47 amA friend and I have been discussing the failings of the benefits system today (from somewhat opposed viewpoints). One idea that does intrigue both of us is the Citizen's Income - a non-means-tested 'benefit' that everyone in the country receives.
There are a number of interesting side-effects, the clearest one probably being that it removes the current disincentive for people to do 'a little bit of work' (part time, or temporary), because under this system they don't lose all (or any) of their benefits for doing so.
There's a 16-page PDF here with a 'bullet-points and graphs' summary of the idea - I'd be interested to hear what other people think of it:
http://s.coop/CitizensIncomeIntro (PDF file)
To answer one common question/concern - there have been some actual scientific research studies done into real-world implementations of this kind of thing (in the US and Canada, in the 60s and 70s), and they found that the anticipated 'loss of labour' effect (from people deciding not to work so much) was less than you might expect (between 5% and 15% in various studies). Interestingly it seems to be balanced out (socially speaking) by gains in education scores/attendance, all the way through from primary school to adult education.
There are a number of interesting side-effects, the clearest one probably being that it removes the current disincentive for people to do 'a little bit of work' (part time, or temporary), because under this system they don't lose all (or any) of their benefits for doing so.
There's a 16-page PDF here with a 'bullet-points and graphs' summary of the idea - I'd be interested to hear what other people think of it:
http://s.coop/CitizensIncomeIntro (PDF file)
To answer one common question/concern - there have been some actual scientific research studies done into real-world implementations of this kind of thing (in the US and Canada, in the 60s and 70s), and they found that the anticipated 'loss of labour' effect (from people deciding not to work so much) was less than you might expect (between 5% and 15% in various studies). Interestingly it seems to be balanced out (socially speaking) by gains in education scores/attendance, all the way through from primary school to adult education.
