The free market seems to work pretty well for people with money. The idea of UBI is to give everyone money so it works well for everyone. Is there evidence that these alternatives will do any better?
Because systems based on pure ideology don't work well in reality. Its the whole idea behind implementing a UBI in our quasi-free-market capitalist system.
The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
> but because its much cheaper the the alternative
But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income.
You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
It's likely they are mostly students or enjoy some kind of disability benefit.
You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor. Its an invitation to join in on the modern world and an alternative to the paternal condescension which is presently favored. Without it most people will be left to become blatant wage slaves or worse. If we transition to a world where the majority are regularly humiliated and made to feel they're responsible for their own disenfranchisement I suspect I'll end up killing myself. I can't watch it anymore. I didn't succeed because I worked hard. I succeeded because I happened to be smart and I won't be made into an annecdote in support of a system that would have otherwise fucked me. Anyone with the capacity to succeed will readily pay for it via "hard work." It's the people without that capacity that are so "lazy." They literally have no way in which to better themselves. Not in this society. Capitalistic motivation is good and UBI preserves it. But eventually it's only good for a few and we need a solution for everyone else.
Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor.
While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything.
Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism.
When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed.
I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
That capitalism is unfeeling doesn't make it unworthy of our projections. Besides those aren't human traits. They're the lack of them. Ruthlessness is the lack of compassion and the unrepentantance is... Well that's obvious. My statement was that modern capitalism is unworthy of those projections. It would be much more appropriate to say that a capitalistic system with UBI was compassionate. The inclinations of a machine can be anthropomorphized without harming anyone who understands the limits of such characterizations. It can aid understanding and is useful. This whole site is way too sensitive to flame wars. Just let it burn. Quit repressing shit. Implement collapsible comments.
>it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper.
Unless you're selling to those relatively inefficient humans because they're your customers, and they have no disposable income - something that UBI won't fix.
Capitalism is like any other ideology - you can make up just-so stories about what it "should" do to be "efficient", but ultimately it's just a way of legitimising power differentials that would otherwise be considered shockingly immoral.
And so is UBI. Because while it may, if we're lucky, keep people from starving, what's needed isn't just UBI but free access to continuing education at all levels, access to useful social networks, and other kinds of social capital.
I absolutely agree with this. I see UBI as a solution to the tragedy of the commons in the Star Trek economy. Also, it communicates our collective intention not to enslave you. That is, not to subject you to one variety of shockingly immoral power differential. Once you (actually) get rid of slavery the next Big Social Problem is systematically enforced class relations. For which you have mentioned several possible solutions. The problem is that people filter so aggressively. Racism is a superficial component of this. It results from the way we measure correlates when we evaluate humans. Profiling is just too effective. Social classes emerge naturally from anything we can't obscure. If you had money in childhood for instance, you're much more likely to be educated and useful. There are various ways we encode the amount of money we had in childhood. Like straight teeth. Should we prefer to hire people with straight teeth? We need to overcome these artificial boundaries. They are shockingly immoral.
"When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient"
But for whom is it more efficient? The capital owners or the non-capital owners? What happens when the non-capital owners are of no use to the capital owners? That's the problem with trying to excuse the abuses that are permitted within capitalism. Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital. So, I'm not all that friendly towards UBI advocates unless it becomes clear the laws are going to be changed in a manner that emphasizes the working class's right to ownership of capital (via some of the means I've suggested earlier).
But for whom is it more efficient? The capital owners or the non-capital owners? What happens when the non-capital owners are of no use to the capital owners? That's the problem with trying to excuse the abuses that are permitted within capitalism.
How is capitalism exploiting workers that it doesn't employ? The history of capitalism is littered with abuses and exploitation of the working class, but that has nothing to do with UBI, and it isn't the case that UBI is some kind of make-up for capitalism's past abuses. The goal is to fix the system to avoid the abuses going forward. We can lament the past all we want, but only by acknowledging and understanding the past can we strive to fix it by making changes that will reap rewards in the present and the future; lamenting what is already done is a distraction, short of having a time machine.
Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital.
Providing a basic, consistent income to everyone isn't sharing in the fruits of capitalism, the ownership of capital? The owners of capital get to reap it's benefits. If everyone reaps its benefits, then is not everyone an owner? Distribution of the fruits of capitalism, equally to all, is effectively the same thing as communal ownership of capital.
Considering UBI to be a form of charity seems to be asking for a requirement that recipients (ie, everyone) somehow "give back" to the system, contribute in some way — that would be the only way to make it not be a form of charity. But this is short-sighted. In the classical capitalistic setup, the owners, by definition, are the only ones who can reap the fruits of capitalism, merely by being the owners, with no requirement that they contribute back to the system. Gain without contribution, no matter who is doing the gaining, sounds like charity. The point of UBI is to allow everyone to reap the fruits, which effectively makes everyone indistinguishable from owners.
That is nice to know actually. Thank you. I still think I'm right though. Many UBI opponents simply dismiss it as socialism/communism. Sorry if I jumped on you.
I vote for testing this out in Canada or Mexico first (let them have first dibs on these fantastic ideas.) Have them open their borders give everyone local and newcomer a basic income a fifteen hour workweek and if it all works out after a trial period, we can join their enviable party --they'll let us in, right?
Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").
That does not apply here. There's not an exact definition what a Scotsman is, except that he's from Scotland. Communism is actually a completely worked out ideology. It has never really been tried. In Russia for example, it was State Capitalism under the guise of Communism.
Communism has a lot of different varieties (you may be thinking of Marxism specifically), many of which have not been tried. While among Communists there might be some point in arguing over whether Leninism (and it's descendants, Stalinism and Maoism, etc.) are really forms of Communism or something else, in more general contexts it's probably better just to note the specific, rather extreme, departures from Marxism that they involve, and note that while they may have failed, those failures cannot be generalized to Communism more generally or, e.g., to Marxism specifically.
Forgive me but that's like batting aside misgivings about capitalism and saying, well that's neo-liberal capitalism or capitalism with eastern values, or government regulated capitalism, etc. When someone points out some deficiencies in capitalism. A form of not a true Scotsman argument.
It's not no true Scotsman to point out a faulty generalization (particularly, because there is no denying that the specific cases are examples of the general concept, merely that they are isolated to a particular subclass of the general type and thus are not sufficient to demonstrate a conclusion about the broad class rather than merely the subclass). But nice try invoking one fallacy falsely to protect another.
You were basically saying "None of those were TRUE Marxism -they were perverted, etc.". So in that form basically anyone with any issues with capitalism can be dismissed by saying, well, what east Asian and western economies are living under is not true "free enterprise" capitalism, so don't knock it.
However, the reality is we've tried a variety of both and they are known values and the ones we _can_ talk about and anything else is pure speculation and quite beside the point.
We tried for centuries to make both airplanes and perpetual motion machines. Eventually we succeeded with one and proved the other physically impossible.
A long series of failures only proves that those specific things didn't work. You need more than that to come to a final conclusion.
That may very well be true but such thing will not be "Marxism" or "Capitalism" it will be however a "political and economic system" Just as what we have flying now may be a flying machine or aeroplane but not an "Ornithopter".
No, actually what I said it's that it might be reasonable to argue that (since Marxism is a real thing defined by the works of Karl Marx, and Leninism and it's descendants are defined by key differences from Marx's theory, starting with abandoning the prerequisites of an advanced capitalist society from which the Marxist Communist society is built), but that it would in any case not be reasonable to do so with Communism in the place of Marxism, given the more vague boundaries of the term Communism compared to Marxism.
That being said, there probably aren't any capitalist societies today; capitalism was the dominant system of the advanced societies if the 19th century, so banned by various Socialist (including Communist, Marx in particular) critics of that system. Most advanced economies today are mixed economies which retain some features of Communism as well as substantial departures afford specifically to address the problems identified by critics of the system. While it is neither, the modern mixed economy resembles a form of socialism a much as it resembles capitalism. Actual advocates of capitalism, of which there are many on the right, seek significant changes to undo the departures from capitalism introduce offer the last century and a half or so.
We've tried capitalism and Leninism and various variations on the modern mixed economy, of those Leninism and the modern mixed economy each have some (but not the same subset) of the features that differentiate Marxism from capitalism. You could as well say we've tried Marxism and it proved better than capitalism (based on the modern mixed economy as a form of Marxism) as you could say that Marxism was tried and failed (based on Leninism as a form of Marxism.) But really, capitalism fell, evolving in a direction similar to -- but still distinctly different from -- that suggested by Marx.
This reminds me of a Soviet joke:
Q. What is the most valuable real estate in the USSR?
A. It's the state border. If you owned just a meter of it you could have made billions by letting people out.
I rephrased the one I've heard due to obscure cultural references which even Russians might not understand if they are not old enough. The original is "Кооператив "СВОБОДА" возьмет в аренду 1м государственной границы"
I've heard bribes are not unwelcome in some parts of the world.... But even so, I'm sure they'll be amenable to all the south Americans who want to join in on the fun the anti imperialists will be having.
As for open borders? Probably not going to happen until almost everyone else also has open borders and UBI (i.e. it's a chicken & egg problem). Otherwise the first nations to have both will probably face immigration overload and attract all the wrong kinds of people.
If you have UBI for citizens and green card holders but fairly open non-immigrant visa process, and no fast-track process for non- immigrant visa holders to get immigrant visas, I don't see a big immigration draw (indeed, probably less than in the current system even with restrictive visa rules, since non-immigrant visa holders with the same nominal salary as citizens or LPRs would have less total income by the amount of the UBI.)
How do supporters of the UBI deal with the real estate valuation problem? It seems that assets that are highly immobile and have elasticity that is directly proportional to income would eat up all or almost all of the transfer.
It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.
Maybe you make UBI an income guarantee rather than a right to live in a given place guarantee. In such a structure the state could incentivize moving to areas which are losing population, such as Midwestern rustbelt cities and towns in the US, or any place not the MDF in MX or the Ruhr valley in DE, etc.
Any remotely rational policy would not try to adjust subsidies to enable living in luxury locations. No, you're not going to be able to live in San Francisco. You'll be able to (barely) afford a crappy apartment in Detroit.
I don't think we should incentivize moving to such places unless we plan to also (somehow) massively increase the opportunities available in such places.
Isn't the whole idea of UBI that it's subsidizing the lack of good jobs for people who for one reason or another can't land decent jobs? I don't see why someone who isn't being overly productive also needs to live in a location where one could use more productive people.
In other words if a mill worker's site shutdown and this person now depends solely on UBI I don't see why they should feel like they should afford some place in the closest big city if they don't get a job since their active addition to productivity is nil. If they get a job then they may or may not afford a place in that city. Still, it's not "owed" anyone.
> plan to also (somehow) massively increase the opportunities available in such places.
The incentive itself does this. First, there's the "opportunity" of living on the UBI - not a great option but more than there was before. Second, there's the opportunity of meeting the needs of the other people moving to such places, as well as those who lived there before (with their increased ability to pay).
And this leaves aside the fact that an increasing number of opportunities are not inherently tied to location.
UBI, by definition, is an fixed, unconditional, income. If it's need-tested (such as scaling by a formula taking into account local cost of living) it's not a UBI, it's a conditional, needs-treated welfare program. UBI is specifically intended to dodge bureaucratic overhead by avoiding means-, needs-, and behavior-testing common in existing welfare programs.
So the "alternative" you propose is actually what a UBI is by definition.
Unnecessary complication. If you do it generally, it'll matter more and go further in depressed regions on it's own. Line drawing exercises are unnecessary and counterproductive.
That graph makes it clear that there are a whole lot of relatively low cost areas that, one would assume, don't have much of a housing shortage and a relatively small number of cities where housing costs are high to very high. Presumably people who don't have a specific, often employment-related, reason to live in one of those high-cost areas would not do so.
A fixed UBI makes moving to low cost areas very appealing. This lowers housing prices in the hot spots and raises wages in high cost areas. Net results city's become less packed and far more affordable.
There's no evidence I've seen that the supply curve for housing has the properties you describe; as I see it, the original you describe simply doesn't exist in that form.
Theoretically, if increases in the value of a site are taxed at very high marginal rates, landowners have a lot of incentive to increase the supply of housing to be able to actually gain any benefit from the increase in demand.
Also, I would like to point out that any property improvements themselves don't get factored into the land value tax itself. Properly, a land value tax is a response to the value of the land itself (where you're literally just buying a plot sans any external improvements). So, demand for land itself sets the bar for the tax. If a plot is $100 today but doubles to $200 dollars the tax should (on a curve or however it's computed) increase thusly. But if you improve the property on the land like adding better windows to your home or solar panels those improvements don't factor into the tax. Thus, it incentivizes you to keep adding to the property value without the current penalties of the property tax system we have today.
No, if increases in value of landholdings are taxed at a high rate, than landholders have a lot of incentive to invest their surplus revenues in non-land assets whose appreciation is not so highly taxed.
What are these assets? Surely not most capital, which depreciates rapidly.
The only assets that would apply would be:
* Intellectual property (patents and copyrights). This would be a problem, but only to an extent-- there isn't such an inelastic demand on the return of IP as there is on housing stock.
* Picassos, etc. This, while true, isn't especially relevant.
Is there something you're getting at that I'm missing here?
If the tax is 100% of the annualised return on the land (so perhaps around 6-7% of the land value) an increase in property values will lead to a concomitant increase in the level of UBI. Presumably there is an equilibrium point where prices settle down though it would lead to significant inflation initially.
Yes, it would be pegged to the full Economic Rent of the whole of the land stock. Essentially making it a citizen's dividend on the value of this land.
Property value escalation either means that the actual structure becomes more valuable (something that very rarely, if ever happens), or that the ground underneath becomes more valuable.
The land becoming more valuable (up to $X) is equivalent to saying that the market price on the unimproved land is now worth $X-- this is the amount of money any landowner can expect to collect on this land, given the proper amount of improvements upon it.
Since there is no marginal cost in the unimproved land, the entire return to this land is pure Economic Rent. The LVT would tax the full Economic Rent of the land (which is essentially equivalent to an annuity on $X, for land worth $X.)
Why wouldn't the landlord pass on the LVT to tenants? Competition, essentially. Land would only be desirable to be held by people well-equipped to build (and gain the return on) the proper improvements. These landowners would have an advantage over a landowner who does not make the proper improvements, and competition would drive the market rate of rent towards the marginal cost of improvements.
My understanding is that LVT is just that, a tax on the land value. In any significant urbanised setting, that's an alternative statement of "the value of the surrounding services of the property". More specifically, it excludes the improvements to the property itself.
That aside, your tax on the unimproved economic rent makes some sense.
What of increases in cost of rents or property values?
In general, increases in the cost of land rents are an important signal that more should be built on this land; it's a bummer for current residents, but it's important that this demand is satisfied.
I believe financial instruments should help: an insurance policy taken by landowners against a rise in land value should dampen the blow. (This is somewhat related to the housing markets championed by Case/Shiller)
But in general, it would probably lead to a bigger change, that is that the property with the greatest risk (land) would likely tend to be owned by those best equipped to deal with this risk. More people would prefer to be renters (what's the advantage of landownership, anyway, other than the investment potential that the LVT would relieve?)
The UBI is quite thinkable without an LVT, and if your accept the GPs description of housing supply curve, trying to solve the problem it creates by lining UBI to an LVT would just create a huge positive feedback loop and inflationary spiral.
Really, independent of the unlikely characterization of housing supply curve in this subthread, UBI makes more sense tied to a progressive income tax without preferential treatment of capital income than to an LVT.
I think any funding of the UBI cannot be distorted by the UBI itself, at any level of the UBI.
Imagine the UBI was raised to a level high enough that essentially no one wanted to work anymore; how could this possibly be funded, insofar as there IS no income to be taxed?
The LVT avoids this particular problem, in that it's driven fully by the value of land within a city. No matter how much or little people work, this land will continue to have value.
This is in the context of a discussion of a tax on land value which is presumably a function of the monetary value placed on that land--i.e. how much someone is willing to pay for it. But, sure, pay a land value tax of 10 percent of the sheep grazing on it or whatever.
Those are reasons that people become willing to give up something else for it, and, as such, reasons why it has value. The value of a thing is what someone is willing to give up in exchange for it, not the reason they are willing to do so. That's just what value is.
If people don't have to work, it becomes a lot less appealing to live in places where rents are super high. That might counterbalance some of the effect.
Personally, I worry about overal state productivity and its geopolitical ramifications. Productivity per capita would seem a big determinant in the power a nation has, though this is purely speculation on my part. :)
Productivity waxes and wanes. I've experienced hour-long periods in which I accomplished as much as a typical day or week. I suspect a shorter work week would increase the frequency of these occurrences. The perceived relationship between productivity and time needs to die. The true relation is between productivity and "energy." An internal store of productive capacity. The focus on time leads to the continual (and largely wasteful) depletion of energy and eventually to burnout. This state is far more common than you might think. It's rare that an individual experiences the alternative and realizes something is wrong. Most people, rather than complaining or quitting, simply work hard enough not to be fired.
That might be true with your line of work, but certainly doesn't hold for a plumber, teacher or an accountant. You just don't get the week worth of teaching students in an one hour burst. Most of the jobs out there have well defined expected workloads.
I disagree about teaching. Public school teachers are overworked, tired and do a crummy job. I'd rather have 7 hours of Khan Academy videos and 1 hour of solid instruction. You're right about anything involving manual labor. But even then the notion of an energy tank absolutely applies.
There's an upper bound to how efficiently say elementary school kids can learn unsupervised, and if you discard the outliers it's not very impressive. School teachers are not just doing busywork sent down by bureaucrats; much of it is still teaching in the class, checking student's progress, grading the homework and so on.
As to the working in bursts I used to think of it as a manifestation of creativity and talent in heroic stunts. Years later I see it differently: if you do one hour of actual work in a week, you are procrastinating/slacking for the other 39 hours. Even, predictable pace of work is a hallmark of professionalism. At least now I try hard to keep my progress steady and predictable.
Guess you can view it that way, although I meant that "it's a net positive". Sure makes estimation easier, and gives you higher overall productivity. Consider that if your normal, sustained rate hour only 1/20th as productive as the epic bursts one, you still end up being twice as productive throughout the 40 hour work week.
There are certain jobs that cannot be done in 15 hours a week. Especially jobs where availability is of primary importance and/or bad communication is catastrophic.
I'm thinking of certain types of R&D, medicine, and certain kinds of leadership roles.
I would imagine as time goes on and with increasing advances in automation and AI, even those jobs would require less hours, though probably not doable in 3 hour workdays. More likely, those jobs would require "checking in" 10 or 15 minutes every hour around the clock.
Open borders is interesting because I suspect the vast majority of people do not wish to leave their current vicinity. They only do so to masively improve their lives, but if they could improve their current location that would usually be far preferable. Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”? I feel we spend more time and effort making them worse (fighting wars in them, propping up dictators, bribing local official for access to resources, selling them guns, web filters and other tools of oppression etc
Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”?
The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for.
Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.
It's encouraging that people are thinking about this. We have way too much zero-sum economic effort going on. Most of Wall Street trading and most of advertising are zero-sum.
In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)
Thanks for bringing up the coexistence of zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Too many people talk about them without any real understanding. Just as a time-series can be infinite, it can also be non-infinite at any point in time. People who dismiss things as non-zero-sum don't understand this. Suffering is real - and it is immoral to dismiss it.
What I'm wondering about is what motivates extremely smart people to work on social media apps and iGadgets, when they know that most people care much more about: food, health, a fair economy, energy, and safety. Why are these smart people not working in fundamental physics, or medicine, or why aren't they thinking up new models for the economy?
That might work but only after curing another evil of our time: the concept of sovereign nation. There must be effective (i.e. not nukes) policing force which may regulate things all around the world. Also, elites must become truly international, not bearing the mentality of any nation.
Is there any historical situation where destroying this 'evil' has been successful? Getting rid of nukes is not a real world possibility at this time - they are too powerful a tool. These comments are close to being ignorant of reality.
I don't mean 'get rid of nukes'. I mean 'invent some effective (result much smaller than expenses) way of world policing that doesn't mean nuking bad guys'.
As citizen of nordic country, I would rather kill some people than accept someone taking the independence of my nation.
Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to.
If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
I mean that! That's why it is impossible! Too many people value their nationhood/independence too much. So it is a double-edged sword: if you value your independence and sovereighnity of your country and other countries, you must also accept the fact that most countries are shitty and put their subjects into conditions little short of genocide, while others (like yes Nordic countries) are well-off. It's hard to call that unfair, if you don't allow others to mess with your stuff, nobody can help you avoiding fucking things up.
If you have just one country, you have to accept that there is big likelihood that it's going to be shitty. End of the day you have fallible people in charge.
If you have less cohesion among voters, then you have less cohesion among leaders. Which leads to corruption and cronyism, as every leader thinks "fuck this country, I have to secure the benefits of my voters and myself".
I seriously think smaller is better in every respect.
"if we’re going to organise for a better world, we need to know who we’re organising against"
Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies.
Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed.
"how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?"
Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety.
The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.
b-b-but I like unions and McJobs. I just don't like them having too much power.
The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
"Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions."
Huh. I'll poll my union friends. This would surprise me.
(FWIW, apropos of nothing, union halls are temp agencies with collective bargaining.)
"The immigration fear mongers are against this..."
I assume nowadays economic immigrants mostly want to make their fortune and then go home to retire. I read a study that tracked immigration to/from Puerto Rico. Many (the majority) return home or plan to. Asking all my immigrate coworkers, I get mostly the same answers.
About the nativists: hater's are gonna hate. Just route around them.
Economic immigrants who work are completely different breed than economic immigrants who come for unemployment benefits.
Currently in Finland if you can ~800e/month from the government if you get asylum. That's not "rich", but it's lot better than most things available in Iraq right now.
The fear mongers (perussuomalaiset) won the last election and got to the government. Their performance controlling the situation has been very lackluster so far.
What a hodgepodge of ideas. This is a perfect example of Douglas Hofstadter's chocolate/excrement milkshake.
The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society.
Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.)
In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains.
So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense?
Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc.
We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors.
Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.
You start with a premise that is not universally accepted, even among proponents of the UBI: that the UBI exists to reduce government intervention in the economy (the UBI is a government intervention in the economy, and many UBI proponents support it because it's such an intervention that replaces current interventions premised on a certain labor market model with one that they see as working in a different labor market model they see as emerging with automation, or because they see it as simply more effective than existing and other alternative interventions.)
123 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI'm totally stealing that line.
The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income.
You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything.
Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism.
When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed.
I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
Unless you're selling to those relatively inefficient humans because they're your customers, and they have no disposable income - something that UBI won't fix.
Capitalism is like any other ideology - you can make up just-so stories about what it "should" do to be "efficient", but ultimately it's just a way of legitimising power differentials that would otherwise be considered shockingly immoral.
And so is UBI. Because while it may, if we're lucky, keep people from starving, what's needed isn't just UBI but free access to continuing education at all levels, access to useful social networks, and other kinds of social capital.
But for whom is it more efficient? The capital owners or the non-capital owners? What happens when the non-capital owners are of no use to the capital owners? That's the problem with trying to excuse the abuses that are permitted within capitalism. Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital. So, I'm not all that friendly towards UBI advocates unless it becomes clear the laws are going to be changed in a manner that emphasizes the working class's right to ownership of capital (via some of the means I've suggested earlier).
How is capitalism exploiting workers that it doesn't employ? The history of capitalism is littered with abuses and exploitation of the working class, but that has nothing to do with UBI, and it isn't the case that UBI is some kind of make-up for capitalism's past abuses. The goal is to fix the system to avoid the abuses going forward. We can lament the past all we want, but only by acknowledging and understanding the past can we strive to fix it by making changes that will reap rewards in the present and the future; lamenting what is already done is a distraction, short of having a time machine.
Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital.
Providing a basic, consistent income to everyone isn't sharing in the fruits of capitalism, the ownership of capital? The owners of capital get to reap it's benefits. If everyone reaps its benefits, then is not everyone an owner? Distribution of the fruits of capitalism, equally to all, is effectively the same thing as communal ownership of capital.
Considering UBI to be a form of charity seems to be asking for a requirement that recipients (ie, everyone) somehow "give back" to the system, contribute in some way — that would be the only way to make it not be a form of charity. But this is short-sighted. In the classical capitalistic setup, the owners, by definition, are the only ones who can reap the fruits of capitalism, merely by being the owners, with no requirement that they contribute back to the system. Gain without contribution, no matter who is doing the gaining, sounds like charity. The point of UBI is to allow everyone to reap the fruits, which effectively makes everyone indistinguishable from owners.
Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").
"Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse."
LOL. Sorry, but that is really beyond absurd.
- http://www.hetsa.org.au/pdf/34-A-08.pdf
- http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31567-socialism-means-abo...
A long series of failures only proves that those specific things didn't work. You need more than that to come to a final conclusion.
That being said, there probably aren't any capitalist societies today; capitalism was the dominant system of the advanced societies if the 19th century, so banned by various Socialist (including Communist, Marx in particular) critics of that system. Most advanced economies today are mixed economies which retain some features of Communism as well as substantial departures afford specifically to address the problems identified by critics of the system. While it is neither, the modern mixed economy resembles a form of socialism a much as it resembles capitalism. Actual advocates of capitalism, of which there are many on the right, seek significant changes to undo the departures from capitalism introduce offer the last century and a half or so.
We've tried capitalism and Leninism and various variations on the modern mixed economy, of those Leninism and the modern mixed economy each have some (but not the same subset) of the features that differentiate Marxism from capitalism. You could as well say we've tried Marxism and it proved better than capitalism (based on the modern mixed economy as a form of Marxism) as you could say that Marxism was tried and failed (based on Leninism as a form of Marxism.) But really, capitalism fell, evolving in a direction similar to -- but still distinctly different from -- that suggested by Marx.
There was an article awhile back, can't recall in detail, about how humor circulated in the Soviet Union.
As for open borders? Probably not going to happen until almost everyone else also has open borders and UBI (i.e. it's a chicken & egg problem). Otherwise the first nations to have both will probably face immigration overload and attract all the wrong kinds of people.
It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.
In other words if a mill worker's site shutdown and this person now depends solely on UBI I don't see why they should feel like they should afford some place in the closest big city if they don't get a job since their active addition to productivity is nil. If they get a job then they may or may not afford a place in that city. Still, it's not "owed" anyone.
The incentive itself does this. First, there's the "opportunity" of living on the UBI - not a great option but more than there was before. Second, there's the opportunity of meeting the needs of the other people moving to such places, as well as those who lived there before (with their increased ability to pay).
And this leaves aside the fact that an increasing number of opportunities are not inherently tied to location.
So the "alternative" you propose is actually what a UBI is by definition.
The only assets that would apply would be:
* Intellectual property (patents and copyrights). This would be a problem, but only to an extent-- there isn't such an inelastic demand on the return of IP as there is on housing stock. * Picassos, etc. This, while true, isn't especially relevant.
Is there something you're getting at that I'm missing here?
Property value escalation either means that the actual structure becomes more valuable (something that very rarely, if ever happens), or that the ground underneath becomes more valuable.
The land becoming more valuable (up to $X) is equivalent to saying that the market price on the unimproved land is now worth $X-- this is the amount of money any landowner can expect to collect on this land, given the proper amount of improvements upon it.
Since there is no marginal cost in the unimproved land, the entire return to this land is pure Economic Rent. The LVT would tax the full Economic Rent of the land (which is essentially equivalent to an annuity on $X, for land worth $X.)
Why wouldn't the landlord pass on the LVT to tenants? Competition, essentially. Land would only be desirable to be held by people well-equipped to build (and gain the return on) the proper improvements. These landowners would have an advantage over a landowner who does not make the proper improvements, and competition would drive the market rate of rent towards the marginal cost of improvements.
That aside, your tax on the unimproved economic rent makes some sense.
What of increases in cost of rents or property values?
In general, increases in the cost of land rents are an important signal that more should be built on this land; it's a bummer for current residents, but it's important that this demand is satisfied.
I believe financial instruments should help: an insurance policy taken by landowners against a rise in land value should dampen the blow. (This is somewhat related to the housing markets championed by Case/Shiller)
But in general, it would probably lead to a bigger change, that is that the property with the greatest risk (land) would likely tend to be owned by those best equipped to deal with this risk. More people would prefer to be renters (what's the advantage of landownership, anyway, other than the investment potential that the LVT would relieve?)
Really, independent of the unlikely characterization of housing supply curve in this subthread, UBI makes more sense tied to a progressive income tax without preferential treatment of capital income than to an LVT.
Imagine the UBI was raised to a level high enough that essentially no one wanted to work anymore; how could this possibly be funded, insofar as there IS no income to be taxed?
The LVT avoids this particular problem, in that it's driven fully by the value of land within a city. No matter how much or little people work, this land will continue to have value.
Land is valuable for its many uses:
etc and etc and etc.What do you possibly mean that it "has no value"?
It explains nothing, nor distinguishes land from any other good.
As to the working in bursts I used to think of it as a manifestation of creativity and talent in heroic stunts. Years later I see it differently: if you do one hour of actual work in a week, you are procrastinating/slacking for the other 39 hours. Even, predictable pace of work is a hallmark of professionalism. At least now I try hard to keep my progress steady and predictable.
You are making an insestuous appeal to tradition while we discuss the merits of exactly that tradition.
No point doing marathon as a series of sprints.
I'm thinking of certain types of R&D, medicine, and certain kinds of leadership roles.
The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for.
Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.
In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
Transformed me from an Eeyore into an unrepentant optimist.
https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc - "RSA Animate: Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us"
Short version: internal motivation is much stronger than external motivation.
For writing apps, you need only your computer. You don't have to interact with other people a lot.
For medicine, fundamental physics, you need a huge amount of resources, and you need to cooperate with lots of people.
It seems that smart people prefer complete independence.
Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to.
If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
If you have less cohesion among voters, then you have less cohesion among leaders. Which leads to corruption and cronyism, as every leader thinks "fuck this country, I have to secure the benefits of my voters and myself".
I seriously think smaller is better in every respect.
Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies.
Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed.
"how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?"
Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety.
The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.
By the same reasoning, you wouldn't like to see a UBI because then you couldn't bash unions or McJobs anymore.
Sometimes when people say they want to see something go away, they mean it.
The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
Huh. I'll poll my union friends. This would surprise me.
(FWIW, apropos of nothing, union halls are temp agencies with collective bargaining.)
"The immigration fear mongers are against this..."
I assume nowadays economic immigrants mostly want to make their fortune and then go home to retire. I read a study that tracked immigration to/from Puerto Rico. Many (the majority) return home or plan to. Asking all my immigrate coworkers, I get mostly the same answers.
About the nativists: hater's are gonna hate. Just route around them.
Currently in Finland if you can ~800e/month from the government if you get asylum. That's not "rich", but it's lot better than most things available in Iraq right now.
The fear mongers (perussuomalaiset) won the last election and got to the government. Their performance controlling the situation has been very lackluster so far.
The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society.
Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.)
In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains.
So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense?
Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc.
We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors.
Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.
That's not to defend the article, of course.