Basic Income As A Tool for Population Control

I am a huge fan of Basic Income, and I am going to write about it a lot, as it has the potential to cushion the blow to capitalism that will occur from the dramatic amount of automation that is going to occur incredibly rapidly in a number of vulnerable sectors of the economy. With that said, however, such a policy will have societal impacts, and could be used by governments to control populations. I intend to outline how different methods of basic income distribution would allow for a government to control populations and population density.

The first way that a government can use the tool of basic income to adjust populations would be to adjust the amount given for ages. By giving a family basic income for children, you can encourage population growth, as it would allow for people to more  easily care for children, and by increasing the amount that a family gets per child, you can further increase the amount of encouraged population growth, as the need to provide additional income per child to support the family becomes less necessary. Inversely, by not providing credit for children under 18, it will change the incentive structure for individuals, making it more economically preferable to share an apartment, or a house with other adults in a communal situation, discouraging people from having children in favor of adding the basic incomes of other adults together to create a more comfortable living situation for those involved.

Let’s put some numbers to it to make it a little more clear. Say each person 18-64 was provided with $1000 a month for basic income. A 2-bedroom apartment in my current city of Denver can cost anywhere from $1100 a month to around $1600 a month, though there are extreme cases outside of that range. 2 individuals could live in a place together, cheaply, and with part-time income outside of that. With a child credit, that bedroom could feasibly be used for a baby, even on a low income and be provided for comfortably. Without this incentives for children though, the much more likely option is that 4 adults would pool their resources, providing a household basic income of $4000 a month, and leaving over $2000 each month in unused basic income for covering other costs, or to use to spend, save or invest, to say nothing for each individual’s other sources of income. Even if each individual in the household earns the current poverty line in income, around $12,700 a year, this would still translate into a household income of around $96,000.

It’s easy to see how some people would use the ability to live on their own barely scraping by, but having the space and privacy to themselves, but how others who value privacy a little less would be attracted to the reduced costs of communal living, and with more extreme examples, such as with a 3 or even 4 bedroom living quarters creating very-high density population areas, where you could have up to $8000 in basic income a month, with rent amounts much lower proportionally.

There are ways to adjust this a little, if a government wants to adjust the locations of its population centers or to encourage migration from one part of the country to another. Basic income allows for greater freedom of movement, but additionally, allows the government to shift people in a more desirable way.

Say there is an area where growth has been stymied and the governing body wants to increase the growth rate. By increasing the basic income amount for the area, say up to $1100 a month, that small increase should attract people from other areas, where the amount is lower. An area that has experienced too much growth on the other hand, where perhaps living conditions have worsened, perhaps too high of a population density, too much pollution or smog, or simply not enough room to continue growing at its current rate, can be counteracted by this same method. Either the funding for the surrounding countryside can be increased to encourage people to move to more sparse regions, or in more extreme cases, the amount of income could simply be reduced in that area, even only a small amount lower, such as $900 a month, though this would likely be met with some discontent.

This potential for control is an important factor to keep in mind when considering policy decisions around basic income, as well as its potential for abuse in more controlling regimes. Basic income has the potential to radically free up resources in an economy, to drive innovation, and buffer society against the impacts of technology, but will come with its own set of dangers and potential pitfalls if not considered carefully.

A Blockchain Government: Voting

Blockchain technology has the possibility to secure information, to create transparent government, and to reduce bureaucratic overhead. One of the ways this can happen is by assigning blockchain identities to citizens, giving them a unique fingerprint, like a social security number, but more secure. This would act somewhat like a cryptowallet, specifically one with tokenization capabilities. This would allow for tokens to be created for a large variety of different kinds of projects. It could be used to distribute specific categories of welfare that could only be used for those goods or services, such as a housing token that could only be used for paying rents, or a food stamp-like token that could only be used for the purchase of food goods, etc.

It could also though, be used for voting.

There are a number of ways that you could design the system, depending on how transparent or secretive the ballot process is decided to be. Of course, the more secretive methods could be used by authoritarian states to theoretically rig elections, though that level of control could be made difficult.

One way that such a voting system could work would be that citizens were given “vote tokens”, an amount of tokens representing the number of categories to vote for, or could be used in a ranked-choice voting system. The citizens would then vote for their desired choices of candidates or policy decisions, and those tokens would be transferred to the appropriate “vote wallet”. Simply, between the vote wallets, the options with the most tokens win.

Now, how the votes are verified could be done a number of ways, and on different levels, depending on the level of ballot secrecy required. The transaction records could be encrypted, but the token totals available for view, with the system itself verifying the transactions on the network behind the scenes, which has the benefit of an attacker required to hijack the whole network to make any changes to the transaction records, though if this did occur, there would be no way to verify it until after the fact. Another way this could be done is by allowing the transaction records to be seen, which would allow individuals to verify their own vote records on the blockchain, though this has the drawback of making it possible for other people to potentially see another person’s voting record given the right set of information. Lastly, you could just open up the whole system, so that you can see the ID numbers of every person who voted for what category and at what rank. This has the advantage of total vote transparency. A discrepancy between someone’s vote and their record of that vote would be readily available, though this does provide lists of people who might have voted for the wrong person in the case of a more oppressive regime.

So it matters how these technologies are implemented greatly, if we want to leverage the power of technology in government, but this one example  shows the ways that such a technology could be used to both make democracy transparent, or to create an all-knowing techno-fascist state.