Ah, I guess that clears up our confusion. I wasn't aware of that distinction either and have heard the terms used interchangeably before. I will try to use them more carefully in the future.
At any rate, I definitely agree that an actual basic income would be a hard sell in the current political climate of the US. (I'm less inclined to comment on the political climate of the English-speaking world in general, due to lack of significant enough exposure to significant enough non-US parts of it that I wouldn't just be making stuff up).
I'd also argue that a guaranteed minimum income in the manner you describe is a far less interesting (and in my opinion desirable) policy, as it just simply doesn't have the game-changing properties that a basic income would. As far as I'm concerned, the primary purpose of implementing a basic income would be to eliminate the economic imperative that everyone work.
If successful, this would hopefully do a number of useful things, like making the employer/employee relationships of those who still worked more of a balanced negotiation, depoliticizing automation efforts, and generally eliminating the level of human suffering produced by being between jobs, taking time to improve one's mental health by relaxing, doing volunteer work, doing work no one will pay for, etc., in one fell swoop.
While I obviously can't claim to know that it would work perfectly or at all, I would contend that these are desirable outcomes and that there is at least a reasonably high likelihood that a successful implementation of a basic income would produce them, and therefore that attempting to implement such a policy is worthwhile. I'd argue that the current model where a job occupies a large chunk of a given human's time, is required (for the most part, with obvious caveats for the independently wealthy, etc.) to live, and where a given job can only exist if the market will pay for it, is broken, and will only get more broken as more automation exists, the population grows, and several other current trends continue.
this would hopefully do a number of useful things
Do you think there is also a list of not-useful things to go with your list of goodies? You seem to be forgetting the TANSTAAFL principle.
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.