The American venture fund decided to independently test the idea of ​​unconditional income

The well-known venture capital fund Y Combinator decided to privately test the efficiency of the idea of ​​unconditional income. Investors are interested in what people will do who will no longer need to work in order to survive. The exact amount that the fund will distribute is not disclosed - it is only mentioned that it will be "sufficient for life." The experiment is designed for 5 years.

In a blog post, Sam Altman, president of the foundation, expresses his belief that this scheme has a future, especially with the gradual disappearance of traditional jobs due to technological advances.

He notes that after 50 years, the very idea of ​​motivating people to work under the threat of lack of food will seem wild. Altman is sure that it is impossible to create truly equal conditions and equal opportunities without realizing any of the options for unconditional income.

The authors of the idea are interested in knowing what the lucky people who receive money for life will do. Will they be playing video games all day or will they be creative? Will they be happier? Will they achieve more and bring more benefits to society, having lost their fear of a lack of means of subsistence? Will they create more value than they receive?

Unconditional income - a fixed amount of money allocated monthly to citizens without any conditions whatsoever. It replaces existing benefits and allowances, and theoretically, it should improve both the quality of life and the economic situation. Similar experiments were conducted in many countries on a limited scale, and were generally recognized as successful. Recently, the Finnish government has begun developing plans for the introduction of universal unconditional income, scheduled for 2017. The first results of a private experiment with unconditional income in Germany have already been announced .

Unfortunately, there are several reasonable objections to the idea of ​​unconditional income. Firstly, all experiments, no matter how successful they seemed, were carried out on a limited circle of people. And this kind of research often turns out to be unscaled - it is not known what will happen if we expand it to the entire state.

Secondly, the introduction of unconditional income in a single country can lead to results that are opposite to expected. People who receive a good allowance can do “downshifting” using an analogue of the well-known “apartment from my grandmother in Moscow” scheme and just go somewhere to a poorer country where you can live comfortably with this money. As a result, instead of economic recovery, the outflow of finance from the country will begin.

Unconditional income is one of the options for reviving a stagnant economy in a global recession. Now money tends to accumulate “above”, settling on the accounts of the rich and ceasing to feed the economy - just like circulatory disorders stop feeding live tissue. Money constantly pushed down should theoretically revive the entire system.

Another, much less pleasant option for revitalizing sluggish economies is the growing policy of negative interest rates, coupled with a tendency to ban cash.

The first OPS were introduced in Sweden , Japan followed their contagious example , and now the Fed is considering such a measure. In this case, with the requirements to banCash is favored by Norway's largest bank , Bank of England , Citigroup , and a leading German economist .

In Europe , a movement to ban 500-dollar bills is gaining momentum under the pretext of their use in drug trafficking and terrorism. Harvard experts, on the same pretext, propose banning $ 100 bills. And specialists from Morgan Stanley in their presentation directly declare that it is necessary to ban cash as soon as possible so that it is possible to introduce an OPS below -1%.