The formulation of the question frames Social Security and Medicare as being mutually exclusive with a UBI.
UBI ought to replace things like food stamps and welfare. Not healthcare or retirement benefits!
I am a huge fan of UBI, and I would have voted "disagree" the way that question was framed.
A better formulation would be to frame UBI as an "automation dividend". Where we dip into increased efficiencies produced by automating labor to fund a basic income.
A flater tax rate would make up a large chunk of the difference. Basicly, at 50k you still get UBI, but it's offset by new taxes to leave your after tax income more or less the same.
At 25k, you pay a lot more in taxes, but get a UBI for a net gain.
At 0k you just get UBI, not food stamps ect.
There would probably be a net cost increase, but as SS counts as regular income it's not going to be huge for most retires. At some UBI levels it's actually less than our current system.
Programs to be removed, food stamps, HUD, welfare, unemployment insurance, Medical disability part of SS, and all the overhead associated with them.
PS: The economic gain from social mobility would likely be huge as long as you don't adjust UBI for locations. Why be poor in NY when you can live well in a cheap part of Florida.
> How do you reconcile the massive increase in spending this would cause?
If you're giving each person $13k/yr, does that not imply that you must then collect $13k/yr/person in taxes? Unless you're thinking it is all going to come from corporate taxes, then at least some of it must come from a citizen's taxes, no? (and if you do think this should come from corporations, do you not think that would have an effect on what gets passed to an employee? Why not pay a person $13k/yr less? — or more, since some people won't/can't work and we must cover them too?)
I have no idea if UBI is a good idea or not … but if people want to do it, I expect to know how it will be paid for.
That's still a transfer from productive people to unproductive people. It just takes the specific form of hyperinflation.
There is no difference between taxing everyone 20% of their holdings, and printing yourself 25% of everyone else's holdings. Either way you end up with a fifth of the wealth, and everyone's purchasing power goes down so yours can go up.
Yeah, I get that. It still has economic impact. But you don't have to explicitly account for the payouts with receipts, which the post I replied to seemed to think was necessary.
I keep asking the same question; and all I get, basically, is that the money will just appear from somewhere.
What will happen to all the non-profits and government departments that are built around providing "services" to the poor, homeless, etc.? It's a huge industry, and it's not going down without a fight. In the meantime, you have added a few trillion dollars in annual spending to the budget.
> It's a huge industry, and it's not going down without a fight.
It's not just that it's 'not going down without a fight' - these services are essential for people in need.
These services provide them with more than just financial assistance. Given them money (and doing away with the services) only solves the problem if you assume that lack of money is the only problem. Which it's not - it's one aspect of the problem, but not the only issue for people in need.
Depends on the costs. If automation can push down food costs to minuscule levels (like a solar powered, robot-run, indoor greenhouse), you won't need to take as much in taxes. Granted, housing is often much more expensive relative to income - especially to the poor and working class - but that doesn't mean there can't be mass-produced, high density housing units.
UBI really could work, but right now I don't think the costs of completely sustaining societies are low enough to keep the tax increases from chafing people enough to support a repeal
Isn't Social Security just age restricted basic income? It seems strange to have UBI and then give citizens another check after they hit retirement age.
The retirement part of Social Security is conditional. The amount of the benefit is determined based on working salary and there is a (fairly minimal) amount of working years that must be recorded to receive it.
It looks like I don't fully understand the system. I suspect there is a need based system that supplements Social Security benefits if the recipient is below the poverty line?
> What? No. People worked for that money. It's more like a mandated savings account or mandatory old age insurance or something like that.
Well, if you take an insurance model to Social Security, the only real 'risk' is the question of how long you'll live. And depending on how much you make, it's very possible to pay in more to Social Security before the age of 65 than you can expect to receive in benefits even for a reasonably long lifespan, making it a redistribution rather than a mandatory savings account.
Put another way, even if you assume that Social Security will be around in 40 years[0], if you get a high-paying job straight out of college and keep getting paid at that rate (adjusted for inflation), Social Security is basically guaranteed to pay you less money than you would have if you just kept the withholdings yourself and stuck it in a regular savings account.
Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's very clearly a redistribution and not an insurance.
[0] and also ignore the fact that the benefits being paid in 40 years will be based on the taxpayers 40 years from now, not the taxpayers today
The reason it does so is that it's the only viable way to fund it.
235,715,590 people 21+ in the US. At $13k/year that's just over $3 trillion dollars per year. Social Security spending was $888b in 2015, Medicare spending was $546b in 2015, and other welfare spending was $1.031b. If you cut all SS, Medicare, and other welfare spending and redirected it into a $13k/yr UBI, you'd still be about 20% short of your necessary funding. Total federal revenues for 2015 were about $3.25t.
If you leave Medicare and SS in place? You could only fund 46% of the UBI requirement with existing welfare spending. Good luck passing the massive tax increases needed to fund that. And that's ignoring the fact that the SSA indicates that the long-term ability to meet SS obligations is already in danger.
Every thread about UBI is full of people doing this same math. Anyone who thought that you could have UBI without taxes to zero it out for most of the population has long since been convinced. Who are you writing this for?
Totally agree, the question was framed poorly. Most liberal economists would disagree with this because it strips the existing social safety net (Social Security and Medicare being the big ones) and replaces it with only 13k. Heck, try buying private health insurance for someone who is 70 on 13k a year. :) Most conservative economists disagree because you didn't "earn" that money (whatever that means) and it would raise taxes. I suspect it was framed in a way to generate the most amount of disagreement as possible.
I don't know a better way to put this. The whole UBI idea that shows up here a lot (e.g. https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/) is just naive. And now we have a nice poll of the experts to justify that judgement. UBI of $13k has the same support from experts as does denying climate change.
UBI, is one of those things I just cannot logically compute. I am completely in support of the end goals of UBI. Just cannot fathom how UBI can even theoretically works.
It seems to ignore Economics, Game Theory, and Human Nature. I just dont understand how it could rationally be viewed as a workable solution.
I'm no "apalmer", but have a similar perspective...
From a simple supply and demand standpoint, how does the extra income introduced not simply cause the cost of basic* goods to rise accordingly such that you end up with your UBI increasingly falling behind what is needed to support a minimum standard of living?
* Added "basic" for clarity, I don't imagine this would affect the cost of luxury, or recreational goods to a large extent, but an extra $1000+/month per person would, I expect, have a drastic effect on housing rental rates amidst the lower to middle class residential areas
In a closed system, it would. But if a US citizen can move to a location where not everyone gets the US basic income, then their basic income will be worth something.
It works by not applying to everyone. If it were actually universal, it would send the value of the UBI to 0, since it's the amount you get by not doing anything. But restricted to, say, US citizens, it's a tax on US citizens who have economic worth to let those who don't buy things from outside the US.
Society is a group of people whose collaborative efforts are able to accomplish more than any one individual and more than simply a sum of individuals. That means 'work', which is another word for 'doing something for someone else'. It is selfish to believe that one can belong to a group of people and obtain the benefits without contributing to it.
That is a viewpoint that ignores the level at which humans, especially in the US, live at. The amount of work and people that goes into having convenient access to food, transportation and clean water is incredible. And those are just basic needs that we take for granted. Your employer creates good and services that people consume, therefore, the work enriches society. If your short-sightedness only extends to the point where you are evaluating who is making the bigger paycheck, I'd say that is a shortcoming of your self-awareness, not of society.
The level most people in the US live at is called "poverty". The amount of work that goes into food, transportation and clean water is incredibly small, compared to the amount of people it supports, and it could be made immensely more efficient if we weren't using technology that is 100 years old. The only thing a market creates is blind demand for more useless crap, while destroying the very firmament on which it operates. This libertarian "belief" in the benefits of markets is utterly contradicted by scientific evidence which shows that capitalism is the force that is destroying our environment, while extenuating the inequality between the rent-seeking and the rent-paying.
I'm sure your dad taught you to "work hard", but we don't live in the forest anymore. It's time for you to educate yourself about what would be beneficial for society as a whole, rather than believing in adages that (shockingly) uphold and entrench the advantages you have inherited from your birthplace and skin color.
Why do you get to define what society is? Sure, if you take the definition that "society is the group of people who are working", then you get the conclusion that you are required to work to be in society.
I'm going to present a different definition of society:
> A society is a group of people involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations
(Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society)
> an organized group of persons associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes.
(Dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/browse/society?s=t)
It seems the definition that you're providing for "Society" doesn't line up with the common definition of the word. It doesn't mean "work". It can, as the parent comment states, mean "Volunteer" or "Interacting with people socially".
You don't get to exclude people from society by using convenient definitions.
Well, you can go make your society where the only thing that matters is that people believe the same thing. And then I'll live in current society, where people put forth an effort to support that society's needs. And then we can figure out which one gets to define society based on which one survives long enough to write down the definition. (Also, wouldn't a society imply exclusion by its very definition?)
I'll point out that if you're arguing that the surviving society gets to make the definition, then the definitions I presented are backed by society (Wikipedia, Google, Dictionary.com), whereas the definition you have proposed is your own.
I think perhaps you're being somewhat broad by defining work as doing anything for anyone else. Or maybe I'm being overly narrow by assuming they mean "have a job" by "work", something paid and typically contractual.
Would you class volunteering your time as work? How about developing open source software, or writing interesting short stories for fun? Painting? Being a parent? If you help a friend move house do you say you're "going to work"?
If you include everything that provides some value as "work" then sure. But I feel that there are a huge range of things that provide value to society that may not be paid for or done as a typical job.
I agree. If I'm unemployed I'm not part of society? What if I still get out of the house? Volunteer? Attend social gatherings? What if I'm retired? Am I not part of society? Who defines what is "work" in the future anyway?
> Lots of conflicting incentives that can discourage work in the existing rules.
Its sad to see this sentiment echoed. Especially considering how some jobs are just useless/white collar welfare (some middle management at large organizations I've been a part of in the past come to mind) or how some jobs will continue to be automated in the future. Work shouldn't be the most important thing that defines ones worth as an adult in our society!
I think you need to look at it from bigger picture. It's only matter of time when machines will take most of non creative jobs (we all see how ML is going forward) because they will be cheaper and more efficient than humans. Tell me then what you will do with hundreds of millions of people without work? In my opinion basic income is the answer to this problem.
I don't think that's necessarily true. It's true for some people, mostly those that are rich because of their past work.
But I don't think it's true for people that didn't earn their money through work like those that inherited it or won the lottery. Society can be pretty dismissive of people in these categories.
I even think that we differentiate between people who are rich from work. Some people are seen has "having really earned it" while others "just got lucky." Shades of grey for sure, and people might disagree here but I think this is a real phenomenon that those who are seen as having done more valuable work are held in higher esteem.
Agreed. While I think a basic income is a good idea, the people I think it will make better off don't actually want it. They want jobs. Perhaps we should be considering a new Works Progress Administration instead.
A portion of those people will make their own jobs. Most of that portion are some form of artist - I know dancers, leatherworkers, acrobats, and event planners that would readily go after UBI - although what's interesting is that al those people already DO have jobs, just not the ones they want, or that pay the bills well enough.
Underpaid people who are pursing their passions will be fine with a UBI. People who lose their jobs to machines will have to rebuild their idea of why their life has value from scratch, and a UBI makes it clear that other people are still creating lots of value in the world—enough to fund checks for you.
Lots of people don't have productive passions. They were focused on being valuable to their family and community instead. What now for them?
They are speaking for themselves. They want protectionism that will make us all less wealthy, and won't address the reality that automation is the real competitor. Someone has to come up with a good solution that makes everyone happier, or we'll get popular "solutions" that are harmful.
In the US, two popular anti-establishment candidates campaigned against free trade. Protectionism is popular. It's not a stereotype.
I get that UBI doesn't prevent people from getting jobs. I support it. It's just not a solution for people who's jobs have been automated away because lots of people were never looking for the freedom to accept a job that pays less the way UBI allows. It's like shortening Everest to improve mountain climbers' quality of life.
That's not a political issue, although it somehow has been made out to be. Society is a group of people whose contributions - however large or small - are beneficial to the rest of that group. Those contributions are called 'work'. There are many benefits to being a part of a society. Receiving those benefits without contributing to the rest of the society is selfish.
This doesn't have much to do with Trump or gut-reactions. This has to do with some folks feeling entitled to the benefits created by hundreds of millions of people's effort because they were born in a certain place and time. Those benefits should be reserved for people who contribute to society.
The good thing is none of this will ever happen, as most people are good-hearted folks that want to contribute to society. A better discussion would be figuring out society can help facilitate that, instead of placating those who currently don't have a good way of contributing.
The "work culture" is built upon the very narrow understanding of 'work' that is prevalent in American culture: that of making money in a self-beneficial way. You don't have this kind of work culture when you're looking at people in the abstract and measuring their ability to benefit society.
If you believe that the only reason people work is to selfishly make money, then OK, there's not much convincing I can do here. It reminds me of the argument that supporting Brexit can only be accounted for by xenophobia or racism. Is it really true that that many people are bigots? Or maybe there is another explanation that isn't being accounted for? Either way, earning money is not a selfish thing - it requires another party to agree. Taking money is selfish. There is a big distinction.
Is it really true that that many people are bigots?
I think it's pretty clear that xenophobic resistance to Remain was whipped up by various politicians. Are the people that voted based on this bigots? Many of them, yes, but some are just exhibiting fear of "them" (taking jobs, etc).
I agree that earning money isn't selfish, but I think it's undeniable that America is a work culture. It's essentially viewed as morally bad to not have a job, even if you opt to live the kind of life that doesn't require a car, or thousands of dollars of furniture, etc. In my opinion the amount of money the average American spends on stupid shit is mindblowing, especially when you consider that almost everyone works a 40 hour week until age 60 or later.
Well, of course. I would argue, however, that most spend far more on food than they need to, and likewise for shelter - maybe not so much poor Americans, but in my experience middle class, upper-middle class and above Americans spend absolutely ridiculous amounts of money on their houses (together with lots of fallacies like thinking that renting is "throwing away money" and such). Healthcare is unavoidable, that's going to be a major expense for basically anyone.
At least looking around at other adults, I've noticed many spend really, really appalling amounts of money on things that don't really improve their lives in any way - and furthermore, that they seem to do so solely because it's what their parents did, or what they think is appropriate in society. Moreover, most consider it essentially an ironclad mandate that they work a 40 hour week until they're too old to work any longer.
Is there anything particularly Trump-esque about, "Work = being part of society?" Is your logic that anything Trump likes is automatically wrong? Or is that an entirely subjective appeal?
My personal experience with periods of time where I was under-employed, is that "Work = being part of society." People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth.
>People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth.
I find this interesting, because it's a great example of some of the values implicit in American society.
Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that's a very narrow-minded way of looking at it.
In my opinion American society is really, really good at all things economic, but really, really bad at actually enjoying/finding value in the things that go on outside the office.
Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job.
Note the way I expressed it, the emphasis is on contributing. Your particular spin strikes me as an eagerness to oppose a particular POV, then you go on to project that POV onto me. I don't thrive as well when contributing as a volunteer, which I did when under employed, as when I have a full time job. Keep in mind the efficient market hypothesis. Most of the jobs constituting valuable contributions are going to be paid. There are going to be exceptions, of course, but not all of those roles are going to be suitable for everybody.
"Most of the jobs constituting valuable contributions are going to be paid"
This is not the way things are. This sounds more like something a politician told you to believe. The most valuable workers in our economy are underpaid (farm workers, waitresses, teachers, etc.), if they aren't totally voluntary already. (parents and caregivers)
In truth, when everyone has to make an income to survive, it instills a type of desperation in a society just to produce enough value to pay that next installment. This type of motivation is what leads impoverished South Americans to destroy the largest rainforest on Earth, or African children to work in gold mines exposed to toxic mercury, dragline fisherman to deplete great oceans full of life, the list is endless. This is all the stupidity of "growing" the economy, while bankers and politicians end up being the only one's "enriched" while the planet is irreplacably decimated.
The most valuable workers in our economy are underpaid (farm workers, waitresses, teachers, etc.), if they aren't totally voluntary already. (parents and caregivers)
Your analysis is fatally flawed from this point. Teachers are valuable, and I feel they should be full-on professionals paid like we pay coders. Farm Workers and Wait Staff could be valuable, depending on what level of skill, diligence, and expertise they bring. Those two categories cover a very broad range of levels of expertise.
Parents and caregivers didn't start out as a part of the economic system. They also don't necessarily have to be paid. It has been noted that paying people to do what they'd do for free often has well known pathologies associated with it.
This type of motivation is what leads impoverished South Americans to destroy the largest rainforest on Earth, or African children to work in gold mines exposed to toxic mercury, dragline fisherman to deplete great oceans full of life, the list is endless.
This only shows that our world has incentives that are sometimes way out of whack. It doesn't then follow that the answer is basic income. Other societies have tried "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" with following drops in productivity.
Certain part of a society are definitely different than other parts.
For instance, children are definitely a part of the society, and a very important part, but they differ from grown-ups in many regards. For one thing, they are dependent on their parents / guardians.
Other people, even totally grown up, may be considered so dependent on e.g. the government that they are not even allowed to vote due to the conflict of interest. E.g. US troops were not allowed to vote for most of the US history.
Were UBI enacted, I'm sure people who choose to live entirely off it, and people who choose to work (and thus provide the means for the UBI, among other things), will inevitably be seen differently, and you can't help it. Consider it when thinking about equality, integration of the society, etc.
Maybe prejudices will develop, but choosing to work or choosing to subsist on UBI are entirely choices. It's racist to prejudice someone because of their skin color, skin color isn't a choice. It's mean to prejudice someone because of their hair style, hair style is a choice.
We already make similar prejudices now, for a number of reasons.
Yet being part of society is something that people desire deeply, so it's possible that they'll just make their own work. I found Tim O'Reilly's musing on Econtalk last year (link - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/10/tim_oreilly_on.html) to be persuasive - he posited that in a potential future where a min income is necessary, humans will spend a lot more time entertaining each other. Hey, Harry Potter was written while JK Rowling was "on the dole" and a lot of my favorite Twitch streamers (who have raised Street Fighter to both art and science) also seem to be awfully unoccupied Brits... I actually wrote an album during a brief unemployed period - see moneyhousegold.bandcamp.com - so I tend to imagine a society without need of work as a potential creative Golden Age in the making.
Then there is no safe way to fail. It would discourage innovation. You would have to stay with what works; even if you don't like it, it's getting harder to iterate, or there is a solid wall in the near future that you know you can't cross.
Well now you've significantly lowered the benefit of a UBI in our fully automated future. Before it was "if we don't do this then 90% of people will literally have no money and won't be able to live." You've changed it to "innovation among entertainers will be discouraged."
I think you might be able to get people on board to support the first justification. The second one is going to be a lot harder to sell.
I don't think it's a cultural issue. I think it's deeper than that: it's about identity and self-worth.
The reason I say this is because a lot of people base who they are on what they do for a living and how well they do it. The feeling of being needed by other people is what gives a lot of people their sense of self-worth. IMO the biggest risk with a UBI program is that it will cause huge gaps in this equation as a lot of people realize they no longer have to work to feed and clothe themselves. So, when we finally come around to rolling out UBI nationally (I see it as simply inevitable), it needs to be accompanied by lots and lots of social programming that aims to decouple people's sense of self-worth from their perceived worth to society.
I envision a future where traditional introductions go from:
"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I'm an electrician."
to:
"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I spend my time tending to my garden and teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to grow plants."
One of the main problems with the existing social net is that it comes with "economic cliffs" where making a little more is not to your economic advantage. And then people who make the rational decision are seen as "lazy".
For a real example, my niece had to turn down a job because it paid her $0.20 too much to stay on food stamps. And she couldn't be paid less because it would have broken union rules. So she did the rational thing and turned down the better job. Which meant that her skills and education went underutilized.
One of the big arguments for UBI is that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Would the better job been the first in a series of steps to even better jobs/promotions in the future? Did that job have the same pay from now until retirement? Would a year of hard work in this job yield a raise that offset the loss to food stamps? If any of these are true, her's wasn't the rational decision, it was the most convenient, least risky decision.
You're talking about the "rational decision" as if there's only one value to optimize. If their "utility function" is described by more than just how much money they have/make, then it could be perfectly rational to turn down the job.
That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps.
> That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps.
If you can manage to hold your life together well enough to continue to do the job, with fewer resources available.
Also your conclusion about "rational decision" is clearly wrong. Taking risks is not necessarily rational. Doubly not when you are a single mother with 3 kids and a deadbeat ex.
Taking the job guaranteed losing her money. If she kept the job for a couple of years, she would have started to break even, but it would be quite a few years until she was ahead of where she was. Instead she continued to look for a job that either paid just little enough to keep food stamps, or offered a prospect of paying enough to offset losing food stamps.
Your reasoning is based on the theory that your best way up is to take the best job you can and then work your way up. That was how things worked when I was a kid. But today people tend to improve their job by switching jobs, not by being promoted in their current one. Therefore staying underpaid is often a better route up than switching to a job you don't want in the hope of maybe being promoted some day.
If any of these are true, her's wasn't the rational decision, it was the most convenient, least risky decision.
It shouldn't take far-seeing, risk taking, and great inconvenience to get out of poverty. If our society wants to bring people out of poverty, it should make the choices leading to that obvious, low risk, and convenient.
If the context was game development, this wouldn't even be an issue. People do what they're incentivized to do.
Why are economists being polled? Is it because economics is such a dismal science it requires populism to claim the moral high ground? Does this mean I can officially be smug to those pesky UBI supporters?
Not surprising there are so many negative responses, the question was poorly worded. No way that you can kill medicare and replace it with a $13k yearly income.
Cristopher Udry, Yale: The simplicity is attractive, but deceptive. Coupled with universal health care & tax reform it could work. but we are far from that.
The key is tax reform. UBI is just an interesting and controversial new name for a more boring (and conventional) idea: wealth redistribution through tax reform.
Nobody wants to talk about tax reform because it's boring, opaque, and gridlocked at a political level, whereas anyone can have an opinion on the new hot topic of UBI. Hopefully UBI will bring about a fruitful discussion of more fundamental issues, such as tax reform, in the near future.
The data is misleading; many of comments reject the context of the question not UBI itself. Take Thaler's response: "This is a dumb question. We are not going to eliminate Social Security and Medicare etc." The survey is not an expert review of UBI, but rather a specific implementation of UBI.
"Raising taxes is costly and so redistribution should be targeted to those who need help most." - Oliver Hart
So what if most people are out of a job in 50 years due to automation? What if "targeted to those who need help most" is 90% of all adults. Yeah raising taxes is costly, but considering owners of capital will most likely see most of the benefits from productivity gains in the future I'm sure they can afford it.
More from Mr Hart
"Bill Gates would get 13K, which is crazy."
Um yeah, Bill Gates also will get social security and medicare (and he should). That's the whole point of a benefit. I wonder if Mr Hart is an advocate for means testings of these programs? How lovely is it that "experts" like this have the ears of our policy makers.
How could you get rid of Medicare and Medicaid just by giving everyone $13k per year? What happens when someone with no other income needs life-saving medical treatment that costs more than $13k?
The problem is the math don't add up. To give 13k per adult(242M) you need 3.2T. The total us Budget in 2015 was 3.8T so you need to increase taxes by 81%. If you subtract out all the welfare benefits you(615B(16%)) you still need to raise taxes buy 65%.
Stop paying retail prices for everything. In a market based economy, we need everyone shopping, every week. But, in a resource based economy, we would build things to last longer, and design things that are more efficient. The cost is not the issue, it is the design of the product that is so wasteful. We need waste in this system, it is profitable. I'm sure you"ll ignore me as some quack. Too bad (for you and me), because this is the main problem with our society. Try reading the book "The Best That Money Can't Buy", if you don't understand what I am talking about.
Scrolling through the participants list, I'm so glad they asked black people and other minorities their opinion on the matter (if you're not familiar with sarcasm, let me rephrase - this is a long list of nearly 100% white people).
I don't begin to pretend to understand the delusions that people are citing as reasons for supporting a "work" culture. Are the people who believe this rhetoric blind to the destruction that is being caused to the Earth by billions of people needing to "make money to live"?
Poachers do not poach because they are too stupid to understand the value of the life they are taking. They are poaching because that's the only way to provide the resources their family needs to survive. The same is true with every type of destructive behavior humanity is practicing in response to economic pressures. Children in mines and sweatshops, farmers burning down rainforests, or fishermen exhausting the endless ocean's bounty.
People need access to basic resources in order to survive and prosper. They need food, water, shelter, healthcare and education. Our monetary economic system CANNOT provide this to everyone, it is built on the scarcity of money, and it distributes this scarcity efficiently through the demand/market system. Until society steps up to the plate and implements a system where these needs are met, we are effectively living in middle age serfdom!
"Civilization" is a society where we recognize the needs of that society, and implement systems to meet those needs. What we have today is a free-market slavery system. You are enslaved to the bank that issues your currency against the "work" you will provide in the future. Your National ID number is your bond number, and your countries credit-worthiness is dependant on your productivity, en masse. Your money is a debt note, owed to those banks, issued to you by your financial reserve system.
Most of the beneficial work performed by the participants of society goes unpaid. Parenting, teaching, volunteering, caring about and helping your friends and neighbors, not vandalizing public spaces, reporting crimes, speaking out about abuses of power and educating your family and friends about social issues.
These things are the best things we do, and they are priceless.
The jobs you get paid to do, are because no one would do them unless they needed the money to survive. Maybe they are the things that didn't need doing in the first place.
I want to suggest that people who believe in this imaginary money system remove their head from their anus and find out what a resource-based economic system looks like, and why it is superior to any type of system that could ever be built through coercion.
125 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadUBI ought to replace things like food stamps and welfare. Not healthcare or retirement benefits!
I am a huge fan of UBI, and I would have voted "disagree" the way that question was framed.
A better formulation would be to frame UBI as an "automation dividend". Where we dip into increased efficiencies produced by automating labor to fund a basic income.
At 25k, you pay a lot more in taxes, but get a UBI for a net gain.
At 0k you just get UBI, not food stamps ect.
There would probably be a net cost increase, but as SS counts as regular income it's not going to be huge for most retires. At some UBI levels it's actually less than our current system.
Programs to be removed, food stamps, HUD, welfare, unemployment insurance, Medical disability part of SS, and all the overhead associated with them.
PS: The economic gain from social mobility would likely be huge as long as you don't adjust UBI for locations. Why be poor in NY when you can live well in a cheap part of Florida.
> How do you reconcile the massive increase in spending this would cause?
If you're giving each person $13k/yr, does that not imply that you must then collect $13k/yr/person in taxes? Unless you're thinking it is all going to come from corporate taxes, then at least some of it must come from a citizen's taxes, no? (and if you do think this should come from corporations, do you not think that would have an effect on what gets passed to an employee? Why not pay a person $13k/yr less? — or more, since some people won't/can't work and we must cover them too?)
I have no idea if UBI is a good idea or not … but if people want to do it, I expect to know how it will be paid for.
It probably isn't a good idea, but it's possible.
There is no difference between taxing everyone 20% of their holdings, and printing yourself 25% of everyone else's holdings. Either way you end up with a fifth of the wealth, and everyone's purchasing power goes down so yours can go up.
Lots of people propose a negative income tax as a way to implement a UBI.
At least in the US, oil states for example have a somewhat independent income stream.
What will happen to all the non-profits and government departments that are built around providing "services" to the poor, homeless, etc.? It's a huge industry, and it's not going down without a fight. In the meantime, you have added a few trillion dollars in annual spending to the budget.
It's not just that it's 'not going down without a fight' - these services are essential for people in need.
These services provide them with more than just financial assistance. Given them money (and doing away with the services) only solves the problem if you assume that lack of money is the only problem. Which it's not - it's one aspect of the problem, but not the only issue for people in need.
UBI really could work, but right now I don't think the costs of completely sustaining societies are low enough to keep the tax increases from chafing people enough to support a repeal
Also, Social Security is effectively a UBI for old people. Why would you keep it around?
https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10070.pdf
The disability system is different (but also obviously conditional).
Well, if you take an insurance model to Social Security, the only real 'risk' is the question of how long you'll live. And depending on how much you make, it's very possible to pay in more to Social Security before the age of 65 than you can expect to receive in benefits even for a reasonably long lifespan, making it a redistribution rather than a mandatory savings account.
Put another way, even if you assume that Social Security will be around in 40 years[0], if you get a high-paying job straight out of college and keep getting paid at that rate (adjusted for inflation), Social Security is basically guaranteed to pay you less money than you would have if you just kept the withholdings yourself and stuck it in a regular savings account.
Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's very clearly a redistribution and not an insurance.
[0] and also ignore the fact that the benefits being paid in 40 years will be based on the taxpayers 40 years from now, not the taxpayers today
Why would you receive extra retirement payments on top of UBI? That would defeat the entire purpose of UBI.
The tricky question is whether we can do that. For instance, does new medical technology do much to lower lifetime spending?
Not in general. New technologies/medicines/etc. tend to increase healthcare costs.
I'm 32 have little doubt that my private retirement accounts will be seized through taxes by the time I retire, but that's a different issue.
235,715,590 people 21+ in the US. At $13k/year that's just over $3 trillion dollars per year. Social Security spending was $888b in 2015, Medicare spending was $546b in 2015, and other welfare spending was $1.031b. If you cut all SS, Medicare, and other welfare spending and redirected it into a $13k/yr UBI, you'd still be about 20% short of your necessary funding. Total federal revenues for 2015 were about $3.25t.
If you leave Medicare and SS in place? You could only fund 46% of the UBI requirement with existing welfare spending. Good luck passing the massive tax increases needed to fund that. And that's ignoring the fact that the SSA indicates that the long-term ability to meet SS obligations is already in danger.
Counting that as a dismissal of all UBI proposals seems incorrect.
It seems to ignore Economics, Game Theory, and Human Nature. I just dont understand how it could rationally be viewed as a workable solution.
Now imagine the tribe is really big and named the USA.
Human nature is both social and competitive. UBI is a social gesture, it doesn't take away or prevent competitiveness.
From a simple supply and demand standpoint, how does the extra income introduced not simply cause the cost of basic* goods to rise accordingly such that you end up with your UBI increasingly falling behind what is needed to support a minimum standard of living?
* Added "basic" for clarity, I don't imagine this would affect the cost of luxury, or recreational goods to a large extent, but an extra $1000+/month per person would, I expect, have a drastic effect on housing rental rates amidst the lower to middle class residential areas
That's a sad state of affairs.
I'm going to present a different definition of society:
> A society is a group of people involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society)
> the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community. (Google [https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+society&oq=def...)
> an organized group of persons associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. (Dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/browse/society?s=t)
It seems the definition that you're providing for "Society" doesn't line up with the common definition of the word. It doesn't mean "work". It can, as the parent comment states, mean "Volunteer" or "Interacting with people socially".
You don't get to exclude people from society by using convenient definitions.
Would you class volunteering your time as work? How about developing open source software, or writing interesting short stories for fun? Painting? Being a parent? If you help a friend move house do you say you're "going to work"?
If you include everything that provides some value as "work" then sure. But I feel that there are a huge range of things that provide value to society that may not be paid for or done as a typical job.
> Lots of conflicting incentives that can discourage work in the existing rules.
Its sad to see this sentiment echoed. Especially considering how some jobs are just useless/white collar welfare (some middle management at large organizations I've been a part of in the past come to mind) or how some jobs will continue to be automated in the future. Work shouldn't be the most important thing that defines ones worth as an adult in our society!
I love how simply Markus arrived at the fundamental political issue with Basic Income in the USA: American culture and society is a "work culture".
If you're not working you're not part of society.
That's a very plain and powerful statement that is central to many of the gut-reaction trump-esque disparaging arguments vs. UBI.
(1) http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/partici...
But I don't think it's true for people that didn't earn their money through work like those that inherited it or won the lottery. Society can be pretty dismissive of people in these categories.
I even think that we differentiate between people who are rich from work. Some people are seen has "having really earned it" while others "just got lucky." Shades of grey for sure, and people might disagree here but I think this is a real phenomenon that those who are seen as having done more valuable work are held in higher esteem.
Lots of people don't have productive passions. They were focused on being valuable to their family and community instead. What now for them?
Adaptation, classification, a change in how people define themselves?
You point out what I think would end up being a rough patch, but one worth going through.
More importantly, UBI doesn't prevent people who want jobs from getting jobs, so that seems a completely irrelevant thing to bring up anyway.
I get that UBI doesn't prevent people from getting jobs. I support it. It's just not a solution for people who's jobs have been automated away because lots of people were never looking for the freedom to accept a job that pays less the way UBI allows. It's like shortening Everest to improve mountain climbers' quality of life.
This doesn't have much to do with Trump or gut-reactions. This has to do with some folks feeling entitled to the benefits created by hundreds of millions of people's effort because they were born in a certain place and time. Those benefits should be reserved for people who contribute to society.
The good thing is none of this will ever happen, as most people are good-hearted folks that want to contribute to society. A better discussion would be figuring out society can help facilitate that, instead of placating those who currently don't have a good way of contributing.
I think it's pretty clear that xenophobic resistance to Remain was whipped up by various politicians. Are the people that voted based on this bigots? Many of them, yes, but some are just exhibiting fear of "them" (taking jobs, etc).
And at least 2 of those are only as high because of greed and deliberately exclusionary policies.
At least looking around at other adults, I've noticed many spend really, really appalling amounts of money on things that don't really improve their lives in any way - and furthermore, that they seem to do so solely because it's what their parents did, or what they think is appropriate in society. Moreover, most consider it essentially an ironclad mandate that they work a 40 hour week until they're too old to work any longer.
My personal experience with periods of time where I was under-employed, is that "Work = being part of society." People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth.
I am resolutely apolitical, but very much ADMIRE Trump's ability to state & capture - in a tweet - the underlying fears / motivations of voters.
And, to get completely off topic, there's a lovely article quantifying Trump's approach - based on the gunning-fog index - vs clinton / sanders.
(1) http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-tweets-lower-reading-lev...
I find this interesting, because it's a great example of some of the values implicit in American society.
Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that's a very narrow-minded way of looking at it.
In my opinion American society is really, really good at all things economic, but really, really bad at actually enjoying/finding value in the things that go on outside the office.
Note the way I expressed it, the emphasis is on contributing. Your particular spin strikes me as an eagerness to oppose a particular POV, then you go on to project that POV onto me. I don't thrive as well when contributing as a volunteer, which I did when under employed, as when I have a full time job. Keep in mind the efficient market hypothesis. Most of the jobs constituting valuable contributions are going to be paid. There are going to be exceptions, of course, but not all of those roles are going to be suitable for everybody.
Your analysis is fatally flawed from this point. Teachers are valuable, and I feel they should be full-on professionals paid like we pay coders. Farm Workers and Wait Staff could be valuable, depending on what level of skill, diligence, and expertise they bring. Those two categories cover a very broad range of levels of expertise.
Parents and caregivers didn't start out as a part of the economic system. They also don't necessarily have to be paid. It has been noted that paying people to do what they'd do for free often has well known pathologies associated with it.
This type of motivation is what leads impoverished South Americans to destroy the largest rainforest on Earth, or African children to work in gold mines exposed to toxic mercury, dragline fisherman to deplete great oceans full of life, the list is endless.
This only shows that our world has incentives that are sometimes way out of whack. It doesn't then follow that the answer is basic income. Other societies have tried "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" with following drops in productivity.
For instance, children are definitely a part of the society, and a very important part, but they differ from grown-ups in many regards. For one thing, they are dependent on their parents / guardians.
Other people, even totally grown up, may be considered so dependent on e.g. the government that they are not even allowed to vote due to the conflict of interest. E.g. US troops were not allowed to vote for most of the US history.
Were UBI enacted, I'm sure people who choose to live entirely off it, and people who choose to work (and thus provide the means for the UBI, among other things), will inevitably be seen differently, and you can't help it. Consider it when thinking about equality, integration of the society, etc.
We already make similar prejudices now, for a number of reasons.
I think you might be able to get people on board to support the first justification. The second one is going to be a lot harder to sell.
Both justifications exists, along with an multitude more justifications.
The reason I say this is because a lot of people base who they are on what they do for a living and how well they do it. The feeling of being needed by other people is what gives a lot of people their sense of self-worth. IMO the biggest risk with a UBI program is that it will cause huge gaps in this equation as a lot of people realize they no longer have to work to feed and clothe themselves. So, when we finally come around to rolling out UBI nationally (I see it as simply inevitable), it needs to be accompanied by lots and lots of social programming that aims to decouple people's sense of self-worth from their perceived worth to society.
I envision a future where traditional introductions go from:
"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I'm an electrician."
to:
"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I spend my time tending to my garden and teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to grow plants."
One of the main problems with the existing social net is that it comes with "economic cliffs" where making a little more is not to your economic advantage. And then people who make the rational decision are seen as "lazy".
For a real example, my niece had to turn down a job because it paid her $0.20 too much to stay on food stamps. And she couldn't be paid less because it would have broken union rules. So she did the rational thing and turned down the better job. Which meant that her skills and education went underutilized.
One of the big arguments for UBI is that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps.
If you can manage to hold your life together well enough to continue to do the job, with fewer resources available.
Also your conclusion about "rational decision" is clearly wrong. Taking risks is not necessarily rational. Doubly not when you are a single mother with 3 kids and a deadbeat ex.
Taking the job guaranteed losing her money. If she kept the job for a couple of years, she would have started to break even, but it would be quite a few years until she was ahead of where she was. Instead she continued to look for a job that either paid just little enough to keep food stamps, or offered a prospect of paying enough to offset losing food stamps.
Your reasoning is based on the theory that your best way up is to take the best job you can and then work your way up. That was how things worked when I was a kid. But today people tend to improve their job by switching jobs, not by being promoted in their current one. Therefore staying underpaid is often a better route up than switching to a job you don't want in the hope of maybe being promoted some day.
It shouldn't take far-seeing, risk taking, and great inconvenience to get out of poverty. If our society wants to bring people out of poverty, it should make the choices leading to that obvious, low risk, and convenient.
If the context was game development, this wouldn't even be an issue. People do what they're incentivized to do.
> -- Richard Thaler
Yes, you're not alone in that thought.
The key is tax reform. UBI is just an interesting and controversial new name for a more boring (and conventional) idea: wealth redistribution through tax reform.
Nobody wants to talk about tax reform because it's boring, opaque, and gridlocked at a political level, whereas anyone can have an opinion on the new hot topic of UBI. Hopefully UBI will bring about a fruitful discussion of more fundamental issues, such as tax reform, in the near future.
So what if most people are out of a job in 50 years due to automation? What if "targeted to those who need help most" is 90% of all adults. Yeah raising taxes is costly, but considering owners of capital will most likely see most of the benefits from productivity gains in the future I'm sure they can afford it.
More from Mr Hart "Bill Gates would get 13K, which is crazy."
Um yeah, Bill Gates also will get social security and medicare (and he should). That's the whole point of a benefit. I wonder if Mr Hart is an advocate for means testings of these programs? How lovely is it that "experts" like this have the ears of our policy makers.