In defense of a Basic Income (Response to McArdle)

[quote=“phyllo”]
“No problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it.” -Einstein

BIG is the same old thinking. Throw money at a problem.

K: ok, so, we should throw batteries at it, whip cream, old socks, cats, I open to
what the answer is, however in this case money is exactly what is needed.

P: There has to be a shift to teaching people how to use their own money effectively and how to use other people’s money effectively(debt). Without that education, the majority will not be able to climb out of the hole that they are in."

K: education by whom? and who decides what method of education is being used?
See almost every answer creates its own questions.

Kropotkin

I just told you the answer : people need to be educated on how to use money effectively. That way, they will be able to use the money that they are given - either through BIG or another program - to improve their lives. If you just give them money without education, then a large portion will be mismanaged and they will remain dependent on handouts.

Seriously?
It’s not rocket science.
Avoiding service fees and high interest rates. Consolidating debt. Using debt to make purchases which move you a chosen direction. Managing business based on services or products.

It should be common knowledge but it’s not because the education system is designed to create dependent hourly labor. The educational system has to teach people to be independent.

If the BIG’s amount wasn’t mandated by the Constitution, people on it would just vote to increase it- perpetually, with no regard for the strain it puts on the system. So it’s just a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Free basic income increases the value of labor to the laborer without increasing the value of what’s produced by the labor. I.e., if people can make 6k a year sitting around doing nothing, that’s a disincentive to get a part time job flipping burgers. You can say ‘but whatever people earn from a job would be on top of the BIG’ all you want, but if I can survive (in a household) without that part-time job, that’s a huge disincentive for many people to get it. A disincentive to work results in one of two things- increased wages being offered, or less work getting done. Increased wages OR less work getting done both result in the same thing- increase cost of whatever is produced by that labor. Free money does this too, by the way. If you give everybody an extra 6k a year that isn’t tied to any labor they did, rich people will not change their habits at all. But poor people will suddenly have more to spend on the things that take up the bulk of a poor person’s budget- utilities and basics goods. If everybody suddenly has more money to spend on something, and this money doesn’t represent an increase in production, prices go up. This becomes an inflation generating machine- everything poor people spend money on becomes more expensive thanks to the BIG, lefties argue the BIG has to be increased to keep up with inflation, etc. Notice that this effect is far far worse than minimum wage laws, as at least with those you are getting labor out of the people you are paying.

As far as the immigration thing is concerned, there is no mystery as to whether or not immigrants are good for a nation or not. If you have an excess of workable land an exploitable resources, then more immigrants to develop that land and exploit those resources is good for your economy. If you are exploiting all the resources you are able/willing to exploit (i.e., running out of land or environmental regulations protect remaining natural land) then immigrants provide nothing. Simply put, immigration is good for a country if you can point to the shortage of something in that country that the immigrants will provide for. It should be fairly obvious that the time for that in the U.S. has passed.

And yes, bringing in other cultures is bad for the natives when the same people that advocate for loose/mass immigration are the people ‘embracing diversity’, pushing multi-culturalism as a virtue, and discouraging integration in general.

Besides, the whole thing is moot- an immigrant that’s just here to collect a BIG from the state is a drain on the economy by definition. The size of the BIG will either be limited by the number of people who collect it without working (i.e., the fewer people taking from the system without paying in, the more we can all have) or it won’t be limited at all and is just a fast track to economic collapse.

And before anyone says it, no Alaska does not have a BIG. They have a dividend tied to the profits made by a specific industry. This ensures that the entitlement is actually funded.

All sorts of lefty fantasies become feasible if you first create an absolute limit in the Constitution to the % of the GDP that can be taken in taxes. Once you do that, every entitlement or proposed program competes for a slice of a pie that only gets bigger if the economy grows. Every increase in taxes is a shift of the burden from one group to another and has to be justified as such. People who promise 'everybody gets free everything!" for votes or internet back-pats have to actually explain what isn’t getting funded to pay for tuition, BIGs, etc.

I think in general when considering broad distribution schemes, people need to look at issues of the vastness of corporate welfare which makes complaining about non-corprate welfare look absurd. For example… I remember about 8 years ago, that Chase was given 70 billion to pay back on all that predatory lending, this is your hard earned money here, your taxes… what did chase do? It opened up hundreds of branches on the west coast to which it previously didn’t have a market, and didn’t pay anyone back. It reminds me of Bush Jr. using taxpayer money to buy and build a stadium for the rangers and then selling it all for hundreds of millions of dollars… he used taxpayer money to give him free hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s corporate welfare. Much larger problem than the average person calculations.

I don’t mean to criticize you for this, and if I have I acknowledge that it was unfair. Indeed, it is in large part my morality, which values agency as a social good in itself, that motivates my support for a BIG.

I don’t think this is an accurate description. I am proposing that we use the money we already take from people differently. We’re already taking money from people, I’m proposing this in a world where that’s already the case, so I don’t need to justify taxation generally in order to justify my proposed spending. Taxation is a given. My burden here is just to argue that a BIG is better than alternative spending proposals, such as welfare, food stamps, in-kind aid, etc.

GiveWell, an organization dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness of charity, suggests that the track record for microlending isn’t actually that good. They find no good evidence of poverty reduction as a result of lending programs. The reason they hypothesize is one I mentioned earlier: interest rates on mircrolending programs are high, and need to be high to make them “relatively cheap”. Loans with high interest rates can have significant negative impact, and that negative impact balances out the positive impact the loans have. However, it’s worth noting that part of the reason GiveWell favors cash transfers over microlending is that microlending is already well funded, and additional donations into microlending won’t improve much, while direct cash transfers have effectively infinite “room for additional funding”.

There is a floor to how cheap the programs can be. Ultimately, microloans are risky. They are loans being made to people about whom no good information exists about their credit worthiness, and into societies that are unstable and unpredictable. A significant number of the loans will default. So either the rates have to be high to make the loans either break-even or profitable, or the programs need significant charitable contributions to support. That is to say, they must either have high rates or not be cheap, and that’s the nature of the endeavor and not mainly a result of failures in the banking system.

I think these are a good idea, but they are not inconsistent with a BIG. Indeed, teaching people how to manage money and start a business is useless without them actually having access to money or the realistic opportunity to start a business, both of which a BIG would provide.

And yet you yourself have pointed out that it’s never been tried, that the best evidence we have is small studies. How could it be the “same old thinking” when it is a radical and vilified departure from the current status quo in programs to address poverty?

While I don’t have a problem with a constitutional cap, pegged either to GDP or tax revenue, I don’t think this actually that big a problem with the BIG. Most of the people in a given society won’t see a net payout from the BIG. For any realistic BIG, most people will pay more in taxes than they are given by the government. Every one of those voters would have reason to vote to decrease the BIG and the taxes that fund it, rather than to increase it perpetually.

Furthermore, if the BIG were a program which, once in place, everyone would support increasing indefinitely, why would there be so much resistance to creating the program in the first place? Wouldn’t anyone who would want an exorbitant BIG want to see the program put in place now? The fact that few support it now suggests that few would support it one it’s in place (though of course I must acknowledge the political reality that programs create constituencies, c.f. Social Security and Medicare).

There are a lot of good points to respond to in this paragraph, and I appreciate the move towards macro-economic aspects of the program. I agree with your point that the price of certain classes of goods would rise as a result. However, this point conflicts with (or at least tempers) your claim that there would be a net disincentive to work. If the price of goods increases, people need more money, and must work more to get it. And that counteracts the increase in the cost of labor.

Though, I think these countervailing effects are only partial, and we can agree that 1) prices will increase, 2) the incentive to work will decrease, and 3) the cost of labor will increase. However, we should also note that consumption of certain goods will increase, and combined with the increase in price will make those industries more profitable, and increase labor demand in those industries, even at the new, higher price for labor. And the spending will be on much more socially valuable goods: the marginal dollar spent by a poor person is worth more than the marginal dollar spent by a rich person, because the rich person is likely to be spending it on something they value less (since they’ve presumably already purchased all their most-valued goods or services).

I would also suggest (and this is speculative, I don’t know of any studies that back this up) that industries that cater to the rich tend to employ the rich to a greater degree than the industries that cater to the poor. Grocery stores and gas stations tend to employ less wealthy individuals to stock shelves and pump gas, and people who grow up in poverty are competitive in these jobs. Luxury industries often seek those with experience in the luxuries they sell (think boats, skiing, cars, vacations, etc.), and also who convey a certain social signaling of wealth and appropriate cultural capital (employees who speak with right inflection, look and dress like wealth, and know the wealthy-class norms). I hypothesize that shifting spending towards goods valued by the poor would make more jobs available that the poor actually have a chance of getting.

This undervalues humans as a resource. Large, diverse societies are more innovative, both producing better ideas and responding more quickly to social changes. Niche-seeking immigrants adapt to new opportunities faster. They increase labor competition and decrease prices. Immigrants are generally less prone to criminality and more productive than their native counterparts, and those traits are valuable to society as a whole. The odds that an immigrant is “here just to collect a BIG” and be a drain on society is significantly lower, so if decreasing the rate of labor participation is a concern, immigration would alleviate that problem.

I do think this is effectively the same as a BIG. The distinction that it’s pegged to revenue from a state industry doesn’t change that it’s an unconditional income paid to every citizen. The money the state takes in could be spent on social programs or means-tested welfare instead of dividend distributions to all residents. And the effect is the same as a BIG would be: if a BIG disincentivizes labor, so does the Alaska program; if it increases prices, so does the Alaska program; if it implicates immigration, so does the Alaska program.

It does more resemble your proposal that any BIG be pegged to GDP, but that is still a BIG.

Spending on corporate welfare is between 100 and 200 billion. Spending on welfare is around 700 billion. While we can and should reduce corporate welfare, non-corporate welfare spending is significantly greater.

First of all, 40-something percent of Americans pay zero federal taxes right now, so unless the BIG is funded by sales or income tax, there is no connection for those people between the BIG and the taxes that fund it: their BIG is coming from taxes that other people pay. Second, even for the people who are paying in, entitlements have never worked the way you describe. Every politician who advocates raising taxes will have to explain how they will do it without cutting the BIG or Democrats will just make commercials of them pushing people in wheelchairs off cliffs. There is no connection between these taxes and this entitlement. Even if specific tax increases are often justified through reference to a specific expenditure, a politician will always be free to promise to increase one without decreasing the other.

There’s a huge difference between proposing a new entitlement, and proposing a change to an entitlement that people are already getting and feel, well, entitled to.

Two counter points here.

1.) If the choice is between people working and their wages paying for their needs, and the people working and their wages+BIG paying for their needs, I’m not seeing the purpose of the BIG. Justifying it on the grounds that it won’t be enough to sustain anybody just tells me it won’t be replacing other welfare programs.

2.) The price of goods increasing will be the primary thing that justifies people to vote to increase the BIG, which will in turn push prices higher, etc.

I don’t follow this. Higher consumption, higher price and higher labor costs doesn’t necessary equal more profits. If the higher price is just to match inflation then higher labor costs and higher consumption may just mean shortages.

That’s true. I just think it’s up in the air whether spending increases, labor cost increases, and increased need for production are going to add up to any sort of net good. Even if things reach some sort of equilibrium, what was gained other than giving the State more control over the economy?

In the United States that’s true. What seems to me to be the case (equally speculative) is that industries to that cater to the rich employ the poor in other countries.

Only if the diverse people you’re admitting into that society are chosen because they have those traits. I don’t see why just letting random whoevers into the nation like we do now contibutes anything. If anything, you’re undervaluing native Americans if you’re prefering an unknown elment from abroad.

Not in a society in which they’re paid six thousand dollars for breathing, and another six thousand for every child they pop out, they don’t. The niche-seeking immigrants making their way in the U.S. that contributed so much that the left likes to romanticize found those niches and make their contributions because they were facing starvation if they didn’t.

They only decrease prices if they work and aren’t on the dole. And why the hell would people currently living in the U.S. (or any country, really) want increased labor competition?

In the United States they make up a disprorportionately high percentage of the prison population. Anyway, this is either irrelevant or trivially false. There’s a couple obvious controls to consider:

1.) If the nation in question is only allowing immigrants who are very unlikely to commit crimes then what you’re saying makes a whole lot of sense. That’s not the situation in the U.S.
2.) Why are these people leaving their native-born country to begin with? War criminals fleeing prosecution probably have a different incarceration rate than families fleeing genocide.

To imply that an immigrant is a ‘kind of person’ that we can rely on to behave a certain way is just silly. The immigration and emmigration processes of the countries in question will determine that.

Nah. We don’t have a nation with a BIG that allows immigrants to collect it as soon as they show up, so there’s no possible way you can make a statement like that. I can say as a function of basic human nature if that if you incentivize people to come into a country by offering them a free income, that many people will do it. You seem to be relying on ‘immigrants’ as being a sort of magical better man than the rest of us independant of the policies in the host nation that draws them.

That’s a huge change. The fact that it’s funded, and it’s amount fluctuates according to the economy is specifically what makes it viable. If you proposed a BIG like that for the U.S., I wouldn’t be against it.

In 2012, the Alaska program payout was 878 dollars. In 2015 it was 2072 dollars, the highest it has ever been. So no, I don’t think it really has that effect.

This is absolutely fucking hilarious.

This is only true if you don’t treat payroll taxes, which I don’t know why we’d do. According to the ever helpful Wikipedia, the lowest quintile pay about 2% of their income in taxes (roughly $368), the next quintile pays 9.% ($3868), and the next pays 12.7% ($8192). If those numbers are right, if the BIG is set at the number I suggested ($3000), somewhere between 60% and 80% of the population would pay more in taxes than they get from the BIG. If we set it at the level you suggested ($6000), it’s still likely that more than half of the population would pay more in taxes than they get from the BIG.

This may be beside the point, because I think your next point is stronger, but accuracy is always worthwhile.

Entitlements do create perverse incentives, and there is some reason to think that the BIG as an entitlement would have the same problem that Social Security has. However, part of the beauty of a BIG is that is pays out equally to everyone. That kind of payout probably won’t have the same level of perverse outcome as Social Security. Social Security creates a benefit paid to a specific group who coalesce around ensuring that that benefit keeps coming. It creates one of the ‘factions’ that Madison describes in Federalist X. By contrast, there is less of a coalescence around a policy that benefits everyone, because the faction tends to fracture into competing sub-factions based on other policy interests.

That is, of course, speculative, and poorly explained, but suffice it to say that it might not be possible to map from our experience with targeted entitlements directly onto a non-targeted, universal benefit. The political economy of the BIG is likely to be somewhat different from that of Social Security.

Similar to what I said earlier about taxes, for the purposes of this discussion I’d rather assume that welfare already exists, and just argue that it would be better in the form of a BIG than in the form it takes today (various vouchers and in-kind benefits). As such, the choice isn’t between paying with wages and paying with wages+BIG, but between paying with wages+various vouchers+in-kind benefits and paying with wages+BIG. I’m not trying to lift a BIG off the ground, and if you oppose all welfare, you’re unlikely to accept the BIG. But we already have welfare, we already spend a lot of money giving people things for free that they didn’t earn. The purpose of the BIG is to give them money instead and let them decide what they need the most.

In the short term, that might be true, but in a market economy shortages don’t last. Prices will change, allocations of resources will change, and a new equilibrium will be found. And really, that’s the whole point: find an equilibrium that better includes meeting the needs of the very poor. Give the very poor money, give them purchasing power, thereby raise the demand for goods and services that serve them, and thus change the shape of the market in response.

First, I think it must be said emphatically that this policy gives the State less control over the economy. The State is already taking money from the top to help out the bottom. The difference is that currently, the State makes the spending decisions: if the state decides that e.g. corn is a nutritious food, then corn is covered by food stamps. The State is picking winners and losers based on lobbying pressure from interest groups. If instead the State just gives the poor money, individuals make the spending decisions. The poor, rather than the State, are getting more control over the economy.

Why that’s a good thing depends on values. I think there are a few reasons to support that (increased equality of opportunity, increased agency, decrease suffering), but I’m not sure how far down that hole we should go. Perhaps the best justification is that it achieves the ostensible goals of the current welfare state better than the current welfare state (though one unstated goal of the current welfare state is to benefit e.g. producers of certain foods, and that goal is not as well achieved).

This may be true, but cheap goods are frequently made overseas as well, I’m not ready to concede that industries that cater to the rich tend to send more money over seas (or rather, that a BIG would decrease net cash outflows; the rich are currently probably responsible for more cash outflows). If it is true, it would be a problem, and again, I’d like to see a global BIG.

I think you make other good points on this issue, but like with the tax issue above, I’d just like to clarify what the situation is now so that we can start from the facts and speculate how they would change under a BIG.

My understanding, which is based on the findings in the paper, is that immigrants are less likely to be criminals than their native born counterparts. They are less likely to be incarcerated, and rising immigrant populations have been paired with falling crime rates nationally (hardly enough to draw the causal connection, but enough to question the idea that more immigrants = more crime). Here are some excerpts:

I think what’s happening is that, though immigrants aren’t magically better, they’re not “random whoevers” either. Immigration, supplanting oneself and one’s family into a new, foreign society in order to seek a better life, is a daunting prospect. The people that end up here will tend to be smarter, more driven, more capable, etc. than the ones who stay home. The population is self-selecting for entrepreneurship and ability (and possibly means, since getting here is not cheap). Once here, our policies probably help to keep them in line, since a slip up could mean screwing things up for one’s whole family.

So, while immigrants aren’t a ‘kind of person’, there are trends that can be explained in terms of who immigrants tend to be and why they tend to come to the US. And of course, as noted, policy matters, but it isn’t the whole story. We can reason that, if the people who tend to come here are less criminal and harder working than their native counterparts, and the reason for that is that they are the ones who have the gumption to make the journey, while adding a $3000 or $6000 BIG will decrease their drive and will move the trend more towards the lazy immigrant stereotype, it is likely to move the trend less than it moves the trend for natives, who include everyone an not just those who would leave for greener pastures.

And a BIG will provide a new incentive towards lawfulness (so that one isn’t thrown out of the land of free money), and it will making tracking immigrants much easier, since they have to check in regularly to pick up their dole. Given how much tracking immigrants costs now, that feature alone may pay for itself, especially in freeing up enforcement resources to pursue people who are here to do bad things and so don’t come in for the dole.

Again, I think a BIG is worthwhile at about $3000, enough to get a day’s worth of calories every day* in most place in the US. I don’t think the difference in size is that significant, and Alaska hasn’t had the perverse effects you describe, though, as you point out, the payout is fixed, which solves most of the problem you describe right there.

To the latter point, my concern with fixing it is this: as I’ve been arguing elsewhere, I think that unemployment will increase going forward. I’m also certain that automation is already creating large gains for society. A BIG that can grow as employment levels fall can prevent costly unrest we already see as a result of rising in equality, and it more fairly distributes the benefits of the labor of robots. Perhaps a schedule where the BIG can only move a certain amount relative to GDP, or pegging the payout to an ‘automation tax’ (although that seems like a very perverse incentive to me!), but part of the benefit of a BIG is that it can grow, and easily, without changing the size of the Administrative State.

*edited to clarify that $3000/year is equivalent to enough money per day to get a day’s worth of calories.

There would be some semblance of a basic income for all if the west wasn’t so damn deindustrialized.

Until we talk about the deindustrialized nature of western nations for at least here in the west nothing would ever be solved.

Came across a study today that I thought was relevant to this discussion, as it found that welfare programs in general, including Basic Income programs, do not significantly decrease work (here’s a summary of the study and other related material from the flagrantly-neoliberal-but-still-reputable Vox). Here’s the punchline:

I do think that a BIG will change the landscape of labor in the US (indeed, that’s part of the point), but it probably won’t do that through increasing laziness.

This will be interesting.

news.nationalpost.com/news/finla … yment-rate

Yes, I too am very interested to see what happens. Finland is a very different society from the US (as evidenced by the fact that this is even politically feasible there), but it will still provide real world data about how a basic income will change labor.

A couple things to note:

  • Not sure how volatile the exchange rate is, but right now Google says 800 euros is more like $870.
  • Finland has a much larger welfare state than the US does, so they have more programs that they can cut, and thus more savings that can offset the payouts.
  • Finland’s larger welfare state means more of their unemployment (which is quite high) is directly attributable to the structure of their welfare state.
  • It isn’t finalized yet, so we don’t know how much of the welfare state will be cut, and that question could drastically affect the value of the program.

Still, exciting times. This also illustrates the value of some degree of local decision making: Finland can experiment, and other states can watch and change their behavior based on the outcome.

The article came from a Canadian newspaper, so the conversion was into Canadian dollars.

Most people who are really paying shit tons of taxes aren’t earning their money in the sense that we normally think of when we think of what we mean when we say “earn”.

If I have a huge tax bill because my company made a shit ton of cash, but then my company only made that shit ton of cash by hiring 1000 people and paying them 7 bucks an hour for their work…then…I mean…you can go ahead and put 2 and 2 together yourself.

No one’s asking the coal miners and the lumberjacks and the restaurant and retail employees who work 50 hours a week to pick up the tab for welfare.

Hello there,

I dont think money will ever mean anything when robotics and mega computers will fully replace man, from the surgeon, the factory worker to the cubicle job. Money and knowledge become kinda incompatible at some point. More knowledge eventually turns the quest for materialism into a mirage.

Money isn’t only about materialism, it’s also about exchange: trading a good for a dollar tells us something about the value of the good relative to other goods. And because it’s about exchange, it creates a system that quickly and efficiently aggregates information about the preference of everyone participating in the exchanges. It’s a form of voting, and will remain useful even in a post-scarcity economy, though I think something like a Basic Income would be necessary to be just and to maximize participation.

Actually and perhaps interestingly, machines are already “trading with” and “employing” each other based upon money. They don’t call it “money”. They call it “statistical usefulness”. Machines choose which other machines to employ based upon their “credit history” (historical success ratio). More advanced systems choose “who to work for” or which other machine to respond to, based upon the machines own assessed needs. Your PC is already doing that to a degree right now.

Turd/Omar, I agree that Bama should not have said that; however I am sure I dont know that it was an actual mistake. Backtracking; A lot has changed in Lybias financial word (extremely wealthy nation) that is literally never talked about officially, same goes for all Nato politics. Basically I dont tend to take things as much at face value, especially not in geostrategy. ISIS represents a couple of things for Nato interests, most of all a handy powervacuum. It cant have eluded you that the group never mentions Israel. Why is that? Im on the side of Israel so I wont divulge any strategies I perceive but on the surface we can be pretty clear that if they were to harm an Israeli publically, they would find themselves under burning skies in a matter of hours at gigantic civilian cost. Isis being openly backed by a bunch of powerful ‘friendly’ sunni states I should not have to mention either, is programmed to avoid causing WW3. Israel wont hesitate to set it off if triggered. It would likely play to their advantage in the end. They are one of the very few nations in this theatre that play by the ruthless ancient calculations and dont have to worry about public consensus. All its enemies know this. For example Iran is much more modern in its calculations as it has a delicate electoral balance to keep. The country is divided 50 50 between backward and secularized types. If war were to loom the regime might fall. In Israel the reverse is the case.

Russia would love to carpet raid the group but is modern as well in its political strategies, mwaning again respecting a fickle popular basis, and can not interfere too much, it is playing the European game, having just won the Ukraine standoff it knows to abide its time and not to risk what it does not absolutely need to risk (such as over Crimea, integral part of its military architecture). It also knows that it doesnt know precisely and for a country this big with this much border and so many powerful bordering ootential enemies (EU, Turkey, Iran, Paki-Afghanistan, China, US (Alaska) It will always choose the small underground game. It counts on surviving this by clever situation-by-situation play and not lose too much economic range -that is the bit I agree with.

Whatever very clearly ‘doesnt make sense’ in light of thenassumed will to bring stability to the region is part of a dtrategy to cause chaos and make the muslim world into a plasmic state ready for total transformation. The aim I see is very simple, I leave it up to you to either or not dare to think it as I sure as hell wont speak it, (it is precisely what is never mentioned, it is very naive yo think any strategist would even so much as suggest his true aim) and Russia is trying to figure out a way to benefit from that aim rather than get isolated.

Finally, what Obamas motivations are is truly beyond me as I am not at all sure how the alliances within Nato run, it is only clear that that is the sort of stuff I dont want to know - the sort of knowledge that is the opposite of power.

Im just watching it unfold now. In any case we now all know that WWI never ended.

hey there, I do get what you mean and am very well versed in economics. I am not looking at what money is or is not, but if the current trends are any indication, we can rightfully assess that corporations will always seek to optimize returns and end up robotizing and computerizing as much as they can. Eventually there will be no jobs out there and it is a mere 20 years or so ahead. I am even not mentioning AI that will replace politicians and decision makers.

Maybe it is time to consider abandoning the concept of money and give more attention to our passions?

Okay I admit that I am precisely writing about the topic and expect to have my thesis ready by next March and which is about a Money Free Society,

I agree with your description of the problem, I made similar a prediction here:

I don’t agree, however, with your solution. Because of the information-aggregating nature of money, it will remain a vital part of a society even when automation takes over production. Humans will still need to collectively define what is valuable: should we set the machines to building a colony on Mars, or just more and better virtual reality systems on earth? In my view, a Basic Income solves the problem long term: whatever percentage of GDP is attributable to robots, pay that out as Basic Income and let people indicate their values through their spending decisions.

As I understand money-free societies, the effect would be similar, but it would retain a valuable tool that humanity has developed. The market will probably always be the largest, most parallel computer we can build, and even automated governance could be fed by the data it crunches.

I will be interested to see your thesis when it’s done. Have you read any of the discussion of the Star Trek economy that was percolating in the econ blogosphere not too long ago? It got into very interesting ruminations about the operation of a post-scarcity economy. Such an economy often looks money-free, but I think the case is compelling that there’s still a place for money.