There are some good points in here. However, what I think the author misses is that we are within reach of a post-scarcity economy, at which point all of those historical economic references go out the window (since nearly all economic theory assumes scarcity). That possibility makes a UBI experiment very worthwhile to me.
I don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely.
I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.
There will be no post-scarcity economy, or rather, if there is one, we're already living in it.
People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere.
The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done"
It's never going to work that way.
Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again.
Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others?
The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has?
Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.
There may not be post scarcity as there will always people the desire more and thus commerce will exist. However that doesn't necessarily means that everyone needs to contribute to that economy. If we have developed the technology to allow for basic food, shelter, and healthcare then people who don't strive for anything more should be able to acquire these things without additional work and become a basic right. In my mind the idea of basic work isn't to stop people from working, it's to stop requiring it for basic livelihood.
> "People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere."
Sure, there will continue to be trade, but the need/desire to trade will be reduced.
To look at how/why, you need to look at decentralised production. Technologies like 3D printers promise to be able to produce many of the products we currently trade for, and this goes beyond the plastic trinkets people currently associate with 3D printers (there are already 3D printer devices in the fields of clothing, food, medicine, heavy machinery, etc...). So whilst there will be trade for the raw materials, why would you pay someone else to make something for you when you have access to a machine to do it for you (note that I said access, not ownership, I don't expect everyone will own a device that can create a car, for example)? It makes sense for people to cut out the middle man when the end result is just as good as they could've gotten by paying a premium.
There will still be people wishing to trade for things they can't get for low cost locally, but there will be a lot of industries disrupted by the ability of people to produce their own consumer goods.
Some may argue we are already in a post-scarcity economy.
Unfortunately virtual scarcity will persist for some time. This is because the economic system isn't organized enough to distribute all resources fairly and efficiently. As jobs decline (due to increased automation and export), the old way of distributing resources fairly fails, and virtual scarcity will increase.
UBI seems like it can fill that gap but I worry that it's an overly simplistic solution. It seems like it can cause runaway inflation without a counter-balance. What prevents rent/food/gas prices from simply going up?
Competition will continue to keep prices down. Just because people have a new source of income, doesn't mean they that will become more likely to buy overpriced goods.
That's an incomplete statement, because it doesn't quantify the effect. Will the effect be zero, or will BI be priced-in (higher prices, lower present-value of BI)?
US college tuition and housing prices increased dramatically, because of decreased consumer price discrimination driven by low-barrier loans.
> The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely.
If [over]population is a factor, then "post-scarcity" is fiction.
This makes me think BI advocates are quietly assuming constraints such as "we'll discourage reproduction somehow"--while constantly mentioning how BI will be free of constraints.
Seems easy enough to give BI to folks who are 18+ and not offer more for kids, or only offer more for the first kid, whatever. There's no reason to give a financial incentive to have more kids, and if you don't the disincentive is already built in (kids cost money).
By the way, the issue is not as much population growth as high consumption. What is worse, more people living on basic income or the billions in China and India aspiring to an American middle class lifestyle?
Absence of scarcity is not a result of BI. You have it mixed up. It's the other way around entirely. My response (quoted by you) is merely to counter the urban legend that poor people just like popping out babies to get that sweet government assistance. Alleviating extreme poverty does more to slow population growth than anything else we know so far.
Your sarcasm does not contribute to this discussion.
It's a factor now. Two generations ago, we barely had computing, and we had very little non-fossil energy. If there weren't challenges to solve, we'd be there by now, but progress continues.
Ok. But if for some bizarre reason lacking a Nobel prize, people multiply non-linearly, then BI will not be sustainable, correct? And that constraint defies the definition of post-scarcity.
What about the environmental impact of chopping down forest to make way for farmland. The impact of billions more traversing the globe and leaving their litter. What about the real scarcity of clean water on this planet, sure we can desalinate the ocean but what will be the unitended consequences of this. What about when we start running out of oxygen when we've destroyed everything else under the vanguard of a human population without scarcity.
I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that.
Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
On the contrary, I think that is exactly why post-scarcity is going to devour the economy. Think about what happens when access to medical care and housing become the scarce resources, when it becomes pointless to buy more consumer goods because you have nowhere to put them anyway. More and more of the economy becomes diverted into the pockets of those who own real estate and the medical industry. Improvements in efficiency elsewhere just make the problem worse further damage those industries. An increasing portion of our economy gets siphoned into the pockets of a rentier class with little reason to spend it.
> "deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer)"
Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system.
If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
> I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that.
From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes.
> Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.
Post-scarcity while a nice idea is something that will never be reached. All we have to do is look a Maslow's hierarchy of needs(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) there are no absolutes there only relatives. You can never fulfill relative needs for all.
Here's a very simple example. We can make a very strong argument that we've reached a very high mark on safety. We live in a society that's safer now than ever before. Yet we are constantly scared that the world will come to an end. Politicians and the media have made sure we have something to be scared of. Do all people feel safe? No, yet by all statistics we live in a very safe society.
Another one, internet access. Forty years ago, if anyone even mentioned that it needs to be a basic need they would have been laugh at with no mercy. Today, it's not such a ridiculous thought.
You say these are really wants. Yes to some but wants are so strong to some(many) that they become basic needs. How many times have you heard some one say,"I need my coffee." Really, coffee is a need?
Given this what does post-scarcity really mean?
We can define a set of basic needs now but over time they will change and they will grow.
Well, that's the question facing us, in the large: Do we create artificial scarcity to keep our bullshit going? Or do we, as a species, learn to relax and stop effing with each other?
We had to hit each other with sharp bits of metal for a long time. We don't have to do that anymore. Do we notice or not?
Bucky Fuller pointed out that, in terms of our technical ability, post-scarcity arrived in the seventies. We can call it with the invention of the microprocessor. (We don't need to postulate fusion, as there is already a serviceable fusion reactor available nearby: it's that thing in the sky that burns your eyes when you look at it.)
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasis: We are already in a post-scarcity condition.
Put another way, all our problems now are psychological. Which is kind of what you were saying, or not?
In some sense, the Internet is a basic need because it acts as a more efficient way of filling people's other needs than what preceded it: the need for social interaction, for entertainment, the need to learn more about the world...
FTA "...we have long known that technology destroys jobs..."
Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had.
I don’t have data on that but I believe it destroys more jobs than it creates, and this is a good thing. What’s the point of automating our lives if in the end people still have to work?
Just because it creates jobs doesn't mean it does not also destroy them. There are lots of jobs technology via automation has 'destroyed'. Some new ones were created however to write the software to automate those processes. The important thing is whether it is replacing jobs at the same rate that it is destroying them.
> "Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had."
For an alternative view, I like the horses example in this video...
I wrote the article so I hope you'll continue reading :-)
Technology destroys some jobs and it creates others, but those new jobs are numerous enough only if we put in place the right institutions (sustainable and inclusive). We're not there yet (and I don't see UBI as one of those).
"there’s a libertarian ideological bias in Silicon Valley that seems to turn people into ignorant morons when it comes to social state-related issues. As engineers, some don’t even get the political stakes."
"So enough already. Grow up now, study history..."
Regardless of the actual content of the article, I found the style of so many unnecessary ad hominim attacks offputing.
The actual content of the article isn't really backed up. It mostly seems to say that engineers are seduced by the elegance of Basic Income and that they should really just focus on making the existing social system have less friction. Not a bad opinion, just not really in line with the many statements that "Basic Income won't work".
Agreed - The arrogance in the article really turned me off to what might have been some valid points. I read it as: "You simpletons don't have a clue. I know the answer to all the problems". This guy is probably a real "joy" at cocktail parties.
I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I'm certainly not the first to point out that Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that?
I didn't write that basic income won't work as a solution designed to fix a problem. My point is that I don't see a political path to enacting it, and even though it was enacted, I don't see how it could survive the next round of election.
So yes maybe it's time to focus on more winnable fights such as implementing universal health insurance.
> Silicon Valley, as an ecosystem, is fundamentally uninterested in politics and history (especially social history). Would you disagree with that?
Yes, for two reasons. First, the meaning of the label 'Silicon Valley' is unclear, but whatever it means, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized. Doing that is usually just a rhetorical device, and that dilutes arguments.
Second, the people I know in Silicon Valley are acutely interested in those things, so I'd say your claim is way off base.
Thanks for replying. I'd say Silicon Valley is synonymous with tech industry here (the article effectively mentions "Silicon Valley and its satellites").
As for the second argument, I trust there is much progress in terms of tackling politics and history in SV, but many sources contributed to forming my opinion:
- In "Googled" (published in 2004), Ken Auletta of the "New Yorker" explains in great detail how clueless Google initially was in dealing with Washington, DC., a trait he claims can be linked to the naïveté of engineers who see the world as a collection of "problems" all waiting for a "solution". As an engineer myself, I really recognize that engineering bias. Yet I agree the engineering culture may be stronger at Google than at other tech companies. But it's still dominant in the tech industry.
- In his "Secret History of Silicon Valley" conference, Steve Blank constantly jokes about the fact that people in Silicon Valley are ignorant of history, to the point where even students at Stanford University don't have a clue about who was Frederick Terman.
- More recently, another "New Yorker" article told the story of Mark Zuckerberg "getting an education" in his failed attempt to transform the education system in the state of New Jersey—see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
-In Europe most of us are appalled at how clumsy SV-based tech companies are when dealing with local governments and adapting to the various cultures, institutions, and special interests => hence the many problems that Uber, Airbnb, Google, and others have here in Europe on the regulatory front (Apple being the latest to suffer that fate with the infamous €14B European tax bill).
Maybe it's a false impression. Or maybe in Silicon Valley those who are genuinely interested in geography, history, and politics are not in the executive seats and so far fail to make a difference.
But I can assure you that the tech industry's passion with basic income has a direct consequence on the ground: when you try to open up the discussion about the future of social policy, the tech people's response is always: "nevermind those complex policies from the past, basic income will solve everything". Ugh.
In most cases the reason is that they read the books by Peter Thiel and others, they read the blogposts by American Entrepreneurs and VCs, they believe the hype around basic income, and, I'm sorry to say, I think they don't have a clue about what it takes to build inclusive and sustainable social institutions.
The article fails to present a good alternative to a basic income, or if it did I missed it. While I don't believe in that concept, I also don't think that "I think it is fair to say that being unqualified is less of a risk today" is a fair statement to make today. Tell that the steel workers whose factory just shut down, and tell them they should become entrepreneurs instead. What an arrogance!
I think the alternative proposed by the article is clear: use the money to provide universal services.
The author also mention the fight for Obamacare as more pragmatic. I think his argument are mainly targeted at the US were universal services are lacking (or perceived as lacking).
> You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety.
Funny how the article zeroes in on this as a criticism of basic income, even though it describes the biggest way France's system is totally different from what basic income advocates are talking about.
> You have to fill in many papers, prove that you don’t have sufficient income or any valuable property, go through many humiliating and intrusive controls. If you want to earn (a small amount of) money without working, then you must endure it all. In most cases it is necessary to seek the help of a social worker to carry out the procedure in its entirety.
This is exactly the reason I want basic income. I want nobody to feel like someone else is cheating the system. I hear a bunch of people (even old people who are on medicare and social security!) who will talk trash about "welfare queens".
It is not like we can't afford it. There will be short term pain, of course but I think we will have greater solidarity. This is good for the 0.01% as well because if you are doing really well, you want to keep the ship steady. (Well to be cynical, you could try to keep everyone else fighting amongst themselves but any arsonist will tell you that a fire once started won't spare the people who started it.)
And what happens in the very long term? What happens when kids are raised with the attitude that they are guaranteed to survive on basic income? What happens when their number grows? What happens when that large group feels that bare survival doesn't cut it any more and want more? What happens if the numbers actually don't pan out but scared politicians doon't want to give up power and cook the books for decades? Remember that after similar initiatives short and mid-term gains were huge, but in the long-term they lead to apathy, corruption and very uncompetitive economy.
There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. You remove the incentive to grow and guess what happens next.
Or if you want to really start thinking hard, maybe you should ask yourself what happens when everybody has X in money and businesses raise their prices accordingly?
Your comment made me a bit sad because I read it as "What happens when those who struggle everyday to survive no longer have to?" - I understand your fear of entitlement etc... but I don't think things could get much worse than where we are now. For instance, "affluenza" is an acceptable excuse for killing a person in the US.
I wanted to congratulate you on your enduring politeness and civility while enduring exactly the opposite. I thank you for your tone and your contribution. While I may not agree with you, I applaud the manner in which you communicate.
It's people like you that really make HN a different place.
> What happens when kids are raised with the attitude that they are guaranteed to survive on basic income?
When kids are raised without the persistent threat of not surviving? They'll stand a better chance of flourishing and reaching their full potential, like many of us here on HN who have an affluent background.
> When kids are raised without the persistent threat of not surviving?
Having to contribute to society by keeping a job, and using the income of said job to finance your cost of living is far from being a life-risking enterprise.
You're trying to avoid the point by inventing absurd emotional examples.
You're ignoring the seemingly obvious threat of less job opportunities over time that provide a living, thriving wage. There's many people who have "a job" now who are barely getting by, enough to live but not thrive by any means. As efficiency increases over time because of tech, in combination with increasing reliance on cheap global labor and further stagnating wages locally, there will need to be some way to keep the local economy flowing beyond people just "keeping a job".
> You're ignoring the seemingly obvious threat of less job opportunities over time that provide a living, thriving wage.
That's your assumption, and a baseless one at that.
Back in reality, we're experiencing unprecedented economic development which includes the inception of a whole new economic sector.
You're essentially complaining that buggy whip artisans have less job opportunities in a world that's creating whole new jobs such as forum moderators, social media experts, and data scientists.
Today's economy even creates jobs playing video games, surfing, and talking about gourmet food.
The world's most developed economies are enjoying structural unemployment rates.
And you're here talking about "less job opportunities over time".
You need to separate facts from fiction, including your own baseless beliefs.
> What happens when kids know living for the good cause will never starve them to death?
Can you point out exactly how many people starved to death in any western country? Because I vividly remember that there isn't any universal basic income program in effect, and somehow people manage to feed themselves just fine.
You can't expect to be taken seriously if all you can come up with are absurd emotional works of fiction.
I'm all for a basic income for lower income families, but I'm not sure how routinely volatile our economy is, we really afford this long term. What happens when you put something like this in place, and then can't afford it? There's a long list of government programs already awash in waste and mismanagement. I'm not sure another program (which would have to take the place of other programs - WIC, TEFAP, HUD, etc) is really going to solve the problem.
I'm all for a basic income for lower income families
Universal basic income is a reform that satisfies both the left and right. My conservative brethren are totally on board. Not perfect, but good enough, and better than what we have now.
> Universal basic income is a reform that satisfies both the left and right. My conservative brethren are totally on board. Not perfect, but good enough, and better than what we have now.
Economists will undoubtedly turn up their noses when not so well learned people like me start explaining our position because it is clearly too stupid for them. If we have $100 available and three people: one who doesn't need any money, one who needs $20, and one who needs $50 to survive, clearly it is best to give nothing to the first person, #20 to the second person, and $50 to the third person. Look, we were economically efficient and now $30 can go towards maintaining the system! What I propose is that the $100 should be divided more like $33 each with just $1 going towards maintaining the project itself.
This came up before when talking about college education and whether the government should subsidize college education for the wealthy. My answer is yes! Of course, the government should pay for college for everyone, even if that person is Bill Gates' son. Similarly, should the government pay for Bill Gates' health care expenses under a single payer universal health care system? I say again Yes! We should not discriminate against the wealthy. Sure, it might result is less care for the poor but at the end of the day, I think it is better for everyone.
If it's just moving some bits into everyone's account monthly, entire layers of bureacracy, with their buildings, staff, forms, and fraud checking departments, can be removed. It should make it remarkably cheap to run, comparatively.
Make it lower income only and you have to bring all that back.
> It should make it remarkably cheap to run, comparatively.
You're assuming that it would be possible to simply eliminate government and state services and institutions, both politically and practically.
Instead, everyone working within an organization works to serve their own personal interests. This means that it's practically impossible for an elected official to eliminate all this state cruft, as every single person within the organization would fight tooth and nail to sabotage the project.
You're further reinforcing his point, that people in SV have no clue about politics and government. Ronald Reagan is supposed to have said that a government program is the closest thing to eternal life that we’ve ever seen on Earth. Government programs never die. Period.
The US economy is certainly looking pretty dire, but it's not for a lack of resources: there's enough food, land, etc to support everyone. That's probably part of the problem. The economy is founded on an expectation of growth forever and there's nowhere left to grow within the US. The current output is likely enough to supply everyone with all the food, water and consumer gadgets they care to consume.
Another things I noticed is how it pointed out how France's system of basic income gave people less incentive to work and thus contributed to 10% unemployment. Isn't that also another reason many people advocate for basic income since with all our technological advancement it shouldn't actually be a requirement for everyone to work? Isn't that proof that basic income is having it's desired effect despite what appears to be a very mediocre implementation?
I only read through about half of the article, but I didn't really see any real reasons why basic income would be bad. Most of the arguments boiled down to "That's not how we do things now". I ended up coming away from this article with more faith in the potential for basic income than I did going into it as none of these arguments were very compelling.
how France's system of basic income gave people less incentive to work
As a regular reader of mondaynote.com (and so therefore an expert), I have the impression that France has many other obstacles to entrepreneurship. Like their labor laws.
It seems to me that universal basic income, alongside universal health care and other reforms, would greatly reduce the need for stultifying labor laws. More simply, employers could hire and fire as needed.
Interesting, I am not familiar with the job situation in France so I was basing the sentence on this quote from the article "Second, it has often been blamed for providing an incentive to give up looking for a job". It sounds like whether or not the statement is true as you mentioned basic income still provides an overall benefit.
UBI doesn't disincentivize work. If I told you that I would give you $10k/year unconditionally, would you quit your day job? What if you were currently unemployed, would you stop looking for a job? There is no reason to as my payment to you doesn't depend on if you get a job or not.
If you give everyone $1000 a month (to round the numbers) now the work of someone who makes $1200 a month is only worth $200 (as one can make $1000 just by idling). Would this person want to work for $200 a month?
So what? If the person has no reason to work, then they shouldn't. Humans are entrepreneurial by nature. Everybody has crazy dreams that have long forgotten because they needed to eat.
I don't even want UBI so people don't starve, I'd like UBI so people can live comfortably without having to work.
Everybody should feel "rich", the same way most silicon valley kids do/are.
You made an emotional argument that seems angry at a certain group ("Silicon Valley kids").
However, the work that will not be done by those people who can do it but don't want to will still need to be done. The solution will then be to hire people at higher wages.
But since these higher wages are not a result of increased productivity, the employers won't be able to sell more. The result is that prices will go up, generating price inflation. And we know inflation is the worst of all taxes, as it affects the poorest the most.
In the long run, the money received via BI won't be able to sustain the "comfortable living" that it was supposed to.
I think what you're trying to say is something like "people won't work anymore but they will be able to stay home and take care of their elders". Which I think is a valid point, but also one that is only true for a really small minority of the population, certainly not enough to justify putting the whole population on welfare.
Consider this scenario: you're taking care of you elders and you need to go out and buy some medicine. But the drugstores have all closed, since nobody wants to work there anymore (why would they? They're at home taking care of their elders too). Do you think this is not a realistic scenario in the long run? Why not?
That's not how basic income is supposed to work. The person who worked would get $1000 basic income PLUS their $1200 wages = $2400.
Sure, above a certain level people's taxes would go up, so they pay back some of their basic income as tax. But that wouldn't kick in until people are earning rather more than $1200 a month.
Ignoring the magical thinking aspect of this (where will this money come from), this assumes that people will still want to work after receiving basic income.
This also has the inflationary consequences that I mentioned in another comment: you're effectively increasing wages without increasing productivity. This will cause prices to rise because employers will face higher taxes so that the state can support basic income, and demand will rise because people will have more money.
This will cause inflation, and in the long run purchase power will not increase, while society will be worse off with less people doing productive work.
Do you really think most people would prefer being poor to working and thus not being poor? Look at all the lengths people will go to to get money. Most people really, really, really like having money, and that doesn't stop just because they get a little bit of it.
Sure, some people won't work. But most of those would be people who either would have a hard time finding work, or who have some specific other thing they'd rather be doing.
Some people are not going to extra lengths to get more money now. Those people might be happy with their current income, however low it is. These people will prefer to stop working.
You are also confusing money with wealth. Basic income may give people more of the first, but its inflationary nature does nothing for the second.
As much as I disagree with the author, the reason why RMI is brought up is to highlight the next point of "Silicon Valley Hates / Ignores Politics". I think the difference in applicability is understood, otherwise this would be a really naively written article...
> So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. If you know politics, you can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, politics is not Silicon Valley’s strong suit.
I wrote the article. This is not my point. The French RMI was enacted in 1988 with wide bipartisan support and really resembled a UBI at the time.
Then, in the following decades, many people, notably on the right, started to hate it and, as a result, new, conservative rules made it more difficult to claim the benefit.
(Just like, for instance, Republican legislatures all around the US make it more complicated to vote, not because it's a necessary procedural evil, but because it's in the political interest of the Republican party.)
I think that the same fate awaits UBI if it were to be enacted (which I doubt, but that's another story).
Then you didn't read and understand the article. His point is that this is how the system will eventually end up. When the people see their taxes go up substantially, they'll vote the UBI supporters out, bring in a means test and you end up with this bureaucracy.
As an example: see how quickly the Democrats lost control of both the houses once Obamacare was passed. And see how the Republicans are continuously trying to kill Obamacare.
> The leading argument is that there won’t be any jobs left anyway, and that meanwhile technology will bring all the costs down.
Oh there will be many jobs left but they will all require a certain level of education, let's call that university degree for the sake of simplicity. Also people will need to have some degree of mental capacity to attain this level. It is pretty much natural to presume not everyone will have this mental capacity. Already this is showing everywhere. What will society do with those who have the physical capability but not the mental to work? BI is one of the answers. It may not be the best answer but do have a better one? We need an answer right effin' now because long range trucking will be automated away Real Soon Now(TM) and that's (at least in Canada) is one of the most populated occupation and society level answers are never reached quick.
A quick look at humanities progress, and its fairly obvious where we're headed. there will be a day where many people won't have to work to survive. There will be an extreme amount of abundance in the economy due to technology and automation. More for everyone... :)
Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.
> people from all over the world will start moving there.
I don't think immigration laws would permit that. For one, you couldn't "just move" to the US like that.
Within the EU it could become an interesting problem if some countries did this and others didn't. I suspect that if anyone were to try this there'll be some limitations at first, like you have to have citizenship, or prove legal residency for longer than "since the past few minutes".
> by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it.
Doesn't have to be. Some versions are, some aren't. Given we are talking about a system that does not exist, not sure why you say it is one thing or the other. Some versions give to minors, some do not. Some only give to citizens in good standing (no felons). Conditions can exist and should exist in my opinion.
That's not citizenship, that's residency. Those are two different things with very different implications as to your status in a country which can also vary depending on the length of residency.
Side note: are there platforms that make responding to essays easier for the writer and reader to follow the logic? It'd help for replying to pieces like the OP.
I struggled with this example on the RMI/RSA in France.
>So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers.
The author holds this example up as why UBI might fail. But the reasons listed why the RMI/RSA failed are all either driving forces for UBI or solved by UBI.
1) RMI/RSA is complicated to administer due to high burden of proof for the individual to demonstrate no income. UBI solves this by allowing everyone to have an income, not just those without a salary.
2) RMI/RSA has adverse economic effects because it disincentivizes people to seek jobs. Part of why people are thinking UBI could be a good idea is there will be fewer jobs in the future and so disincentivization to look for a job for a subset of the population is partially a good thing.
3) RMI/RSA is politically difficult. That's why people involved in the UBI movement are running private, small scale experiments. They want to prove/disprove their hypotheses to provide evidence in favor of or against UBI.
A reasonable article, albeit not capturing the full argument for UBI. One missing pro-argument is reducing the creativity monetary risk barrier.
Entrepreneurship is at about 14% working age adults in the US (1). I would say that the number of people who would be entrepreneurs is higher, but limited by risk. Entrepreneurship is very high risk. Reducing that risk would enable more people to become entrepreneurs (a good thing). Removing the risk that being an entrepreneur will make you loose the shirt off your back, will allow more people to start companies.
It is not limited to entrepreneurship. How many more amazing painters would there be? Writers? How much more creative common good would there be in the world if basic needs (via UBI) was taken care of?
None of the current social risk insurance, are directly reducing this loss to us all.
I wrote the article. Thank your for your response.
I get your point about painters and writers. But my guess is that working on affordable housing would do more good on that front—and would be more sustainable politically.
There is a lot in this article I disagree with but let me focus on the NHS argument.
>> "The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals."
The only reason this is a problem is political. We have the NHS but we also have private options - get rid of those. Then there would be more staff available for the NHS, a huge some of money would not be wasted on locum staff, and therefore more money would be available to the NHS. Some of that could be used for funding and some could be used to pay staff a fairer wage. The fiscal austerity argument is nonsense. We have plenty of money - it's just spent poorly. We don't need to spend £30bn on nuclear missiles we'll never use (and if we ever do need to use them it'll be too late anyway). We don't need to spend £30-40bn on the military. Of course defunding these things is political suicide but you can't tell me we can't afford decent healthcare when we're wasting money on missiles we don't need, a huge military we don't need, and locum staff which shouldn't be a thing in the first place when you have a public health care system.
Yes. The amount of money locum staff get is incredible. I know a doctor who exclusively does locum work - he works 3 months a year and has more than enough money to spend the rest of the time travelling. If you eliminate private health care you eliminate that cost and you are the only employer.
Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.
Interesting article, and a good mind-expanding summary of various options and history.
TL/DR:
> Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.
I live in a country that has a flat rate tax system. Not a flat tax (as in "equal amount for all taxpayers"), but a flat percentage.
The overall tax rate in my country is about double than US and the life quality is worse. Go figure :)
Fascinating that he picks Blair's Fabian speech as an example of the NHS being a thorn in government's side.
I didn't vote for Blair, or support many of his policies, but his governance utterly transformed the NHS for the better. It was adequately funded for the first time in a couple of decades, at the time of this speech, and they were now searching for ways to measurably improve care, especially in comparatively neglected areas such as mental health.
Quality goes down when governments start bringing political ideology to the fore - eg "we must bring the efficiency of the market to the NHS" neatly ignores the fact the NHS is actually pretty damn efficient, and is one of the strongest buyers on the planet getting significantly better pricing from all the drug companies. Adding managers and market aspects actually worsened this.
The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI.
I'm starting to doubt everything he's written by this point.
No, they did not start with a UBI. RMI was means tested from the start.
The RSA was a reform intended to "smooth the edges". While you would lose you're RMI as soon as you start working, now you can keep part of the RSA during a transition period.
But the problem with RSA is that it's really complex and most people still don't get it. And it's a lot of paperware for a relatively small amount of money.
I think France is actually one of the best place to start a real UBI scheme. Our system is close to UBI but probably the worst implementation possible, with a lot of edge cases.
I agree as for what Blair did for the NHS, but it was precisely his way to deal with the NHS being a thorn in the side.
What's interesting is the underlying philosophy: instead of providing citizens with money, the New Labour tried to rebuild the best system possible for rich and poor alike. A UBI is unable to achieve that goal in healthcare.
As for the French example: I agree it isn't the theoretical concept of basic income (and thought I wrote so). Rather my point is that this is how basic income would end up after 1 or 2 electoral rounds.
Basic Income (aka universal welfare) is bullshit because it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are confined like captive animals, so that the rest of the population is cowed into handing over the demanded amount.
Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit:
>There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact.
That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention.
>The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk.
This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard).
>Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it.
False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk.
This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.
>> "it is authoritarian. It depends on throwing people who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison"
If that's what you believe then any tax would meet the criteria and you would have to consider almost every government in the world authoritarian. Is that the case?
Not all taxes demand a share of the currency we receive in private trade. A split rate property tax for example does not require making such a demand. My preference is to replace all taxes with user fees for use of government services and assets (like roads), and a heavy split rate property tax, and compensate property owners for the loss of value in their real estate that this tax shift causes.
>> "replace all taxes with user fees for use of government services and assets (like roads)"
I'm guessing with this we would also have to drastically reduce the number of services the government is providing? For example there will be certain services that they few people use but cost a lot to provide so if we aren't all contributing they can't continue to offer them.
As for a split rate tax I hadn't heard of it before but after a quick glance it looks interesting.
However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
Yes, moving to the tax system as proposed would require a massive reduction in government spending.
>However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
Land, and to a lesser extent the property that's built on it, can more justifiably be taxed, because an individual has less of a natural right of ownership over it.
This is due to land being a natural resource, that derives almost all of its value from its natural form, rather than the value the party that appropriated it added to it.
> That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention.
Having a country where people fall, through no fault of their own (unless you count their genetics), to such an extent that they live in tents and sewers is enough indication that there's inadequate state protection.
Having a country where people are thrown in prison for refusing to help other people who, through no fault of the imprisoned individual's own, are in unfortunate circumstances, is a basic indication of authoritarianism.
That's every society that has taxes and social programs, which is what.. every society? Sounds like you are not happy with the compromise democracy has to offer. Not sure what to tell you, but if most people want BI then it would be authoritarian to not give it to them in a democracy.
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, no matter how many countries practice it.
>but if most people want BI then it would be authoritarian to not give it to them in a democracy.
That's not how authoritarian is defined. The majority have no right to violate the right of the minority. More to the point, I'm arguing that we should try to change the minds of the majority, because the majority held viewpoint is authoritarian.
I don't know what authoritarian means in this context. My understanding is the government has a monopoly on violence, and when I disobey laws that other people pass (through the process of democracy), I will be on the receiving end of government violence. What you call authoritarian is to me what folks call democracy. I also don't understand the distinction for private trade, in that without a functioning government to support a marketplace, such trade would not exist.
Democracy is how we determine what laws to pass. Universal rights are how we determine if a law is just. Just as we have a universal right to not be enslaved, we have a universal right to not have our private property and privacy violated, and an income or sales tax does both.
>I also don't understand the distinction for private trade, in that without a functioning government to support a marketplace, such trade would not exist.
Private trade refers to trade amongst exclusively private entities, as opposed to trade amongst several entities, one or more of which are public (government).
Your speculation that private trade wouldn't exist without services rendered by government, even if it were accurate, would not disqualify trade amongst private parties as private.
It's similar to concepts from modern monetary theory (MMT). Which I'll add isn't without its critics.
Money introduces the question of "how do you ensure that people want your currency?" A problem Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies or blockchain currencies) face.
In the case of dollars specifically, demand is derived from:
1. The obligation to pay US taxes in dollars.
2. The status of the dollar as the international reserve currency.
3. The status of the dollar as the currency for all petroleum commerce.
(Consider what would have happened to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia/USSR, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, had their national currencies been the basis of their own oil trade.)
There's also the economic output of the US itself, of course. But there's a tremendous intrinsic demand for US dollars as a consequence of this mandated trade. And yes, taxes are an element of this.
Other national currencies have other bases, though not as broad a demand foundation as the US dollar.
The French program as quoted is nothing like basic income. I've seen quite a few people just need a few bucks. The longterm risk of that and the likelihood that if they didn't get the few bucks they would need permanent safety net was sometimes pretty high.
For example, I knew a vet in college who came very close to dropping out, where a few hundred bucks the safety net never knew he needed made all the difference. I can only imagine what percent of their lifetime writeoffs come from having these condescending "shutup, we know what you need" safety net systems.
nobody talks about climate change here. That will affect us all..
he's right when pointing at lack of a political argument. But form me it's quite clear. The argument is : redistribution. I know it's a simplistic left-wing argument but wealth redistribution is what basic income is. And unfortunately it's way too simple. I'd prefer a complex system because it offers many places for negotiating redistribution.
> So enough already. Grow up now, study history, and then join the liberal politicians and union activists (and some Entrepreneurs) who, while you’re playing around with that simplistic idea, are waging political battles and trying hard to imagine a new social state for the digital age.
Read as "continue to serve the oligarchs who pretend to care, pandering their endless bullshit solutions that serve only their own interests".
This article concludes by saying the best form of state intervention is "universal [healthcare] coverage". Why not both? It is only a very small far-right minority of basic income advocates who advocate eliminating the state's role in healthcare. If the argument is simply that enacting basic income will drain the political will to defend or enhance other needed government programs, then it's not so much an argument against basic income as an argument of political priorities. I even agree that universal healthcare is a much more attainable and impactful near term target, but that doesn't mean that basic income is "bullshit".
I wrote the article, whose point is precisely that: what I called "bullshit" is the endless "problem-solution" conversation around basic income which, in my eyes, ignores politics as well as history and drains the political will to fight on other fronts, such as universal health insurance in the US (or affordable housing).
"We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program" - Roosevelt
A Basic Income program is unrepealable after enough time(say 20 years) has passed. People are terrible at making decisions: They don't save money, they run up their credit cards, they don't invest. A BI program limits the damage that their bad decisions can cause.
Even $800/month would wildly distort decision making. I don't think that a lot of people who've been receiving it their whole life are going to be in a position to function independently if you try to repeal it. There are going to be too many single mothers crying "How will I make my rent?" if you take it away. Even if they otherwise would've managed without it.
A law that's a one-way ratchet requires extraordinary evidence before you even consider it. It doesn't matter if it has a positive expected value, or the models say it will probably work; the risk that it won't deliver on its promises is too high, and we'll be stuck with it forever.
Only if I could. It's impossible to teach people though. You can only take from people, you can't give them anything. Especially when it comes to subtle things like politics.
Please don't comment like this here. Coming to this community just to diss your fellow community members adds no information and is in bad taste. If you know more than others, a good way to comment is to respectfully teach them some of what you know. If you can't or don't want to do that, it might be better not to comment; certainly not to call names.
This guy just seems upset that people are offering up a solution to tech-related job loss that isn't with traditional welfare solution proposed by the team he cheers for.
He didn't spent a lot of time offering up specific arguments against basic income, but rather on background, and the primary arguments he has are to me some of the strongest arguments for BI:
1) He worries about division and polarization. Well, BI is the only solution that I'm aware of that draws on support from both the libertarian right (strong support, mostly) and liberal left (many support, but some are suspicious like this guy). No other solution to the jobless future can boast of support from both sides of the political spectrum.
2) Oddly, the quote from Olaf Palme he offers up as a critique of basic income reads to me as strong support:
"An efficient and stable welfare state must be based on universal social programs,
such as health insurance, pensions, and child-support allowances-programs that are directed to all citizens.
Official “poverty lines” or “means-tests” would not have to define “the poor” (which would minimize the need for bureaucratic controls).
At the same time, people in difficult financial circumstances would not have to put up with the degrading classification of “poor.”"
This sounds like an extremely persuasive argument for BI and one of the reasons why I support it.
In fact, it's completely unclear to me after reading this whole damn essay why he is so strongly in opposition to the point where he wants people to stop discussing it altogether, other than it's not the favored solution of his team.
> On the right is the infamous voucher system. It has been widely experimented, often with negative results, in fields such as education. The principle is to provide individuals with money and let them find providers on a lightly regulated market. Vouchers often deliver poor performance. The money distributed contributes to inflating the prices as the price elasticity of supply is negative—if only because nobody’s sure that the vouchers will last (everything depends on the next round of elections). Those with lesser means, having only the voucher to spend, are thus trapped with the worst providers (or no provider at all, despite the voucher), while the richest pay on top of the vouchers to secure access to the best offer, contributing even more to inflating prices.
On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals.
On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options.
Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
Unlike which other entities exactly that are not made by people!? I guess you mean private companies which are always well run (how many banks had to be bailed out?), never susceptible to corruption (VW comes to mind just recently) and offer great customer service (any cable company ever)...
> Unlike which other entities exactly that are not made by people!?
You've missed the point.
The point is that the foundation of the basic income concept is that the income redistribution scheme works flawlessly and according to the people's expectations. This assumption is patently false, as the system is established and managed by people, particularly elected officials and the regime's apparatchiks, who have a long and plentiful resume of manipulating, distorting and corrupting the state to fit their own personal agendas.
I can tell you exactly what happened in my country's income redistribution scheme. It is supposed to be entirely independent of the state and self-managed. Yet' somehow the ruling regime managed to manipulate the system to finance golden parachutes to the nation's career politicians (golden pensions paid off to people who never contributed to the scheme) as well as forcing it as a cash cow to the state as a exceedingly cheap source of state loans.
And it is supposed to be a simple system where worker contributes 1/3 of their salary to finance pensions and unemployment benefits.
That's what these organizations made by people are used for, in reality, and reality always trumps fiction.
Maybe that was his point, it was absolutely not what he wrote though. I won't contest that any redistribution scheme will not work flawlessly, but nor will anything else! So if the argument is, it won't work because it's run by people, that's just silly, as any alternative will have the same 'limitation'.
Now again, the fact that there is corruption in many countries and money is used wrongly simply means there might be initial or additional work be done, but it definitely does not mean it's inherently not possible, there are plenty of government with low corruption, too.
Finally, what's the alternative? Let the market work and private companies, which I highlighted have the exact same flaws as the government, possibly just on a smaller scale!?
Just putting our heads in the sand and saying this will never work is not a way forward, unless you think of course there's no problem in the first place.
Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects. Poverty inevitably leads to violence, drug abuse, disease, overpopulation, war, and other erratic behaviors.
How much more do we spend on bureaucracy in vain attempts to mitigate these resulting effects? Prevention is far more cost effective than maintenance in this case.
The NHS overall works pretty damn well. US insurance complexity wastes at least as much as NHS management.
The NHS is also great value, costing us far less for universal healthcare than the US government spends on healthcare.
The NHS is also amazingly popular, and until the ideological austerity movement was pretty much getting better.
I'm not sure why so many people in the US think that government cannot run things effectively. The NHS is a great example. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Clearly.
Given the nature of fiat currencies, taxes are irrelevant except as a means to control inflation by removing excess circulating currency. Moreover, a certain quantity of currency in circulation leads to inflation only relative to a given capacity to produce goods and services. Given that our economic system sees only very limited inflation, and can quickly ramp up production further, your arguments seem mostly strawmen.
Removing excess currency is entirely the point - our economic system sees very little inflation because we have a tax infrastructure consuming part of the money supply. Not all services can scale infinitely, so you will always have scarcity - and you can always use FOMO and other game mechanics to introduce artificial scarcity into infinite systems. Some goods and services will always be more inelastic than others, and so inflation will start there and spiral out of control, as those producers monopolize markets.
Well many do not recognize that taxes are a mechanism for controlling inflation, so this point was not targeted at you, obviously.
I suppose that my previous comment's wording could be construed as assuming we couldexist in a post-scarcity economy. That was not intentional.
However, universal basic income does not require a post-scarcity framework to be workable, and the claim that universal basic income will cause inflation to 'spiral out of control' is left unsupported.
Money is currently created out of nothing through the banking system, and the FED controls inflation just fine through various mechanisms e.g. setting interest rates. Basic income proposals can have similar inflation controlling mechanisms e.g. tie payouts to inflation rate or changes in tax rate. In any case inflatuon caused by basic income could be offset by increasing the fed interest rate which is currently near zero.
Given the nature of fiat currencies, taxes are irrelevant except as a means to control inflation by removing excess circulating currency. Moreover, a certain quantity of currency in circulation leads to inflation only relative to a given capacity to produce goods and services. Given that our economic system sees only very limited inflation, and can quickly ramp up production further, your arguments seem mostly strawmen.
Dubious claim. Most serious proposals are largely revenue neutral and simply redistribute.
> and will require massive taxation to be sustainable.
Not anymore than already exists.
> Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
It requires no new infrastructure if given as a tax rebate. It also introduces no additional corruption than already exists via tax loopholes. Centralizing all debate and scrutiny over corruption in one location is a benefit of the proposal, not a problem.
I found your comment constructive and I don't want to start an off-topic debate, just open something up to private contemplation. You, of course, have a right to your own opinion.
Many (all?) libertarians lean left on a great many social issue and consider the social part of libertarianism as important if not more important than the right leaning economic part. I think the term "libertarian right" while not an incorrect term at face value -- there are in fact right leaning Libertarians just as some Democrats are further left than others -- is miss-leading and can potential lead to misconceptions about Libertarians as similar to Republicans. I for one share much more in common with the Democrats but I am very definitely a Libertarian.
I think many of us would prefer you just use the term Libertarian and leave off left or right.
Edit: or perhaps if you were in-deed referring to the conservative party, add some clarity and say "Republicans that lean Libertarian"
This is fair comment. I'm also a libertarian and wouldn't really consider myself to be "right". I suppose most Americans would consider me to be left on social issues and somewhat right on economic issues.
On the other hand, in my experience, libertarians are pretty far from being liberals, and even farther from being typical Democrats. Personally, I share even less with typical Democrats than with typical (non-Trump and non-Evangelical) Republicans. I do share a lot of social beliefs with people who consider themselves to be liberals first and foremost, and agree with them about some of this nation's greatest challenges. I've found typical Democrats to be against drug legalization and only with great hesitation have started supporting LGBT rights, when most libertarians were supporting gay rights 40 years ago (in the sense that gays rights mean that gays have the same rights as everyone else, because what people do in the privacy of their homes is not the government's business).
Anyway, I think it's fair to say that there's support for BI from two different parts, if not sides, of the political spectrum.
But fair point about there being left libertarians and right libertarians, I don't really disagree. I mean, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian, but is definitely "of the left" (and I happen to disagree with him on a lot of issues, yet share some of his core beliefs about the dangers of government and authoritarianism). I'll take more care in the future.
Libertarians intersect with liberals only on a handful of social issues: gay marriage, drugs, and abortion. Most of the social issues near-and-dear to the left are not compatible with libertarianism. There is nothing libertarian about the Civil Rights Act of 1964--which curtailed peoples' freedom to serve which customers they chose to serve or hire which employees they chose to hire. There is nothing libertarian about affirmative action, mandating equal pay for women, mandating family leave, and subsidizing child care. There is nothing libertarian about EPA and OSHA and their extensive regulatory codes. There is nothing libertarian about pushing more educational issues up to the federal level to redirect tax dollars to lower-income school districts.
"There is nothing libertarian about EPA and OSHA" is not 100% accurate. Care should be used when saying "nothing"
Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.
However, in general the cause is the same but the approach is different. For example, just of those two causes should be handled by the courts (as a libertarian sees it at least) rather than through regulatory agencies.
To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work. They just disagree with the top down approach to solving that issue.
> Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.
In certain narrow situations where there is an identifiable property right at issue (e.g. dumping waste on private land). But there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.
> To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work.
Libertarians generally believe that the level of safety in the workplace should be set by the market, rather than by a regulatory agency. I.e. if a workplace is known for being unsafe, it won't be able to hire employees (or will have to pay a premium for employees to take on the extra risk). Liberals in contrast believe that the government should impose a safety floor on all workplaces, irrespective of the market.
> there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.
To me, this is where the libertarian philosophy loses its internal consistency. For two reasons:
1) There is no such thing as a closed system, so land use is fundamentally social
2) For the most part, all existing property deeds were obtained by force, not through the voluntary agreeing to contracts, so no one who holds a deed really has any kind of moral claim on it.
Libertarians have to fall back on some other political system (manifest destiny, kraterocracy, democrasy, etc) to resolve the land use question. But to me land use is the foundation of all property law and the fact that Libertarianism has nothing to say about it makes it largely useless as a foundational political system. It's a nice thing to think about, but it can't be relied on to answer basic questions.
I like this notion of "political compass" : https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2 (not unique to this author), in which liberal vs conservative (left vs right) is an axis , but with a second one authoritarian vs libertarian i.e. more government intervention vs less government intervention is another axis.
Essentially this highlights the difference between your particular policy opinions and your enthusiasm for having a government enforce those policies on everyone.
Thank you for your response. I wrote this article because it seems to me the basic income discussion is orchestrated by people, notably in technology, who are unaware of politics and reluctant to get their hands dirty.
I know that UBI, on paper, looks like it’s a good answer to many of the challenges listed at the end. But I don’t think that UBI, once put in place, would be as strong, politically, as other universal programs such as universal social insurance:
=> Round #1: new left-wing government enacts UBI with appropriate funding.
=> Round #2: left-wing government loses elections, new right-wing government decides to target UBI on the poor in order to master the costs. UBI becomes BI without the "U".
=> Round #3: the rich find that their taxes are too high and denounce the BI-claiming poor as welfare queens, contributing to the right-wing government winning reelection and weakening BI even more.
There are two kinds of universal benefits: the rich (and the middle class) all need universal health insurance (in case they have cancer), but they don’t really need UBI because they earn enough money from other sources.
So I’m not sure why, even if they’re supportive at the beginning, they would keep on supporting UBI under the inevitable ideological and financial pressure that comes with a polarized democratic society.
Considering this perspective, my understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance (which the US still lacks even with Obamacare, and which could benefit for the attention and design skills from the tech community).
To come at it from the other side, UBI is sold as a replacement for a number of other social programs. I find it very hard to believe that, in the US at least, any of those other social programs would be dismantled and stay dead. It is more likely that UBI would temporarily replace one or two programs in the social safety net before being supplemented with two or three more new ones.
As both US parties currently have significant trust issues with one another, I would say UBI is a complete non-starter.
Thanks for writing the article. It was well thought out and pretty comprehensive.
I couldn't seem to find a clear definition of UBI in the article, which helps people discuss the concept as many people view possible UBI programs completely differently.
While I am in agreement that UBI is massively overhyped and not a true, large-scale solution to income inequality, I'm happy that it has gotten so much interest and might lead to productive conversations around tax reform.
Perhaps I missed it but one large advantage of badic income is
1: not means tested—losing benefits because you found a better job is a huge problem with current systems. I know from first hand experience as I went through school.
2: Universal and free market oriented. You are not told how to spend that income and you can then use it to support small business/entrepreneurial endeavors.
It's true, but those two arguments exist only on paper.
In practice, my guess is that it wouldn't be long before UBI is converted a means-tested benefit, for both financial and political reasons.
As for advantage number 2, yes you're not told how to spend that income but chances are that income is far from enough to pay for proper healthcare / childcare / elderly care or well-located housing.
The history of the social state shows us that transferring money to people is not enough: you also have to supplement the market and correct its imperfections.
"Means testing is how you would LOSE political support" => yes you're right. And this is the reason why those (the Republican Party for instance) who are opposed to social policy out of principle invest a lot in transforming universal benefits into means-tested benefits.
We saw that happen in many cases in the recent period of austerity, because scarcity of resources is a powerful argument to convince the rich, then the middle class, to renounce their benefits in favor of the poor.
As for "there has not been UBI" I disagree. Many supporters provide examples such as the Alaska dividend. There are many lessons to be drawn from many social policies in developed countries.
In France alone we had two BI-like programs which, for various reasons, underwent slow financial and political destruction:
- the RMI/RSA, about which I wrote in the article
- less known is the "régime des intermittents du spectacle", which works like a universal unemployment insurance for freelancers in the entertainment industry (and it costs so much money to the taxpayer that governments regularly try to kill it). It only survives because the entertainment industry is a powerful lobby in France.
> Round #2: left-wing government loses elections, new right-wing government decides to target UBI on the poor in order to master the costs. UBI becomes BI without the "U".
The flaw here is that this would seem to apply to any form of social assistance. Why hasn't the same thing happened to social security?
The answer is that Round #2 doesn't make sense. You can't take someone who is making $60K/year + $10K UBI and take away the UBI without lowering their taxes unless you want them to burn you in effigy. But if all you propose to do is replace $10K in UBI with $10K in tax cuts for the same people, who is going to be the lobby in favor of that?
The dynamic you're describing is what happens to things like education assistance. Because people would rather have in $1 in cash money tax cuts than $1 in education vouchers. But the UBI is cash that spends just the same as the tax cut would.
The dynamic (converting universal benefits into means-tested benefits) happened 2 years ago in France with universal childcare benefits ("allocations familiales"). It's true that people weren't happy, but the pressure in favor of austerity was just too much and it was implemented very gradually.
It hasn't happened to Social Security because, if I'm not mistaken, the pension amount is proportional to what you earned during your career => hence the rich pay more but also receive more. Same with unemployment benefits.
This is actually the only way to make a universal monetary benefit politically sustainable. And UBI, with its fixed amount, doesn't match that criteria.
> I wrote this article because it seems to me the basic income discussion is orchestrated by people, notably in technology, who are unaware of politics and reluctant to get their hands dirty.
While I myself am a programmer and support basic income, I have talked with many people outside the technology world who are also in favor of such a system. YC is getting their hands dirty with their research project and Finland's government is most definitely aware of politics. The only way for us (US citizens) to get our hands dirty in politics when not voting is talking about these things.
> ... energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance ...
BI and health insurance, universal or not, solve very different issues. Both deserve attention and one doesn't preclude the other. I do think that a very important part of BI discussions is what programs it can replace, what it can supplement, and what it doesn't solve.
Actually, talking is not the only way. Were 19th century factory workers content with talking? No: they initiated the labor movement and conquered the modern social state.
The fact that so many people talk about BI without leaving their job, raising funds, going on strike, founding unions, etc., is proof in my eyes that we're having an intellectual discussion, not waging a political battle.
The one precedent of authentic political action in the current context, the foundation of the Freelancers Union, was meant to fight for health coverage for freelancers, not a monetary benefit.
> The fact that so many people talk about BI without leaving their job, raising funds, going on strike, founding unions, etc., is proof in my eyes that we're having an intellectual discussion, not waging a political battle.
I don't exactly think that going on strike or leaving your job, serves as a good argument for UBI - quite the contrary. And no, the same cannot be said for worker rights or work similar issues.
I do think that unions have a great role to play in this, and that they could easily focus and do research on the effects on UBI, much like the YC project.
I would add that, one answer to replace all the welfare system is not a fix. Yes, the current system looks like a complicated pointless machine but it's a system that got that way because it needs to fulfill many needs. One solution for all sounds great but nothing is that simple.
Like knots in tangled string. We need to fix the system one knot at a time. We might even need to cut out whole sections but there's not one simple solution for the whole problem.
It's interesting how many of the techies out there would laugh at the idea of replacing the internet with just computers and wires - what could be simpler. Yet according to many, we can replace a complicated system like welfare with a simple system like basic income. To me this points out lack of understanding and as you said, reluctance to get ones hands dirty.
It's interesting how many of the techies out there would laugh at the idea of replacing the internet with just computers and wires - what could be simpler.
Well, dumb pipes are in fact simpler and superior to the centralized systems of control and preferential treatment that telcos are constantly trying to impose.
What gets me about your article is your utter lack of willingness to allow people to attempt to improve something.
Maybe BI won't work, and any money invested in it will be wasted. Maybe BI will work, and it will eventually solve many problems with today's Western societies.
Who are you to tell the rest of us we're not even allowed to try?
Is it your money being invested in the attempt?
Will it negatively impact you?
If we take your attitude, possible improvements will never be attempted, and therefore, nothing will ever improve.
>My understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance.
It's fantastic that you have another idea! Don't waste your energy nay-saying people who are trying something other than your idea, get to work making your idea happen!
I sincerely regret that the US is currently missing critical opportunities such as that to deploy a state-of-the-art universal health insurance, while most of the energy of those who could support that effort is dedicated to discussing basic income.
Also I point out that real-life enactments such as the French RMI, even though they succeeded at providing critical resources to those in need, are under extraordinary financial and political pressure. That pressure explains why it's become so complex, ridden with adverse effects and hated by much of the political spectrum.
I'm fairly certain that basic income would suffer the same fate. Therefore I see it as a political dead end and a distraction from much-needed debates on critical social risks in the digital age.
Your opinion does not give you the right to stop others from voicing theirs, and working hard to achieve what they think is a worthwhile goal.
The fact you ignored that's what my comment is saying, and merely paraphrased your article makes me think you don't care about other people's opinions and ideas, which is a really, really great way to make people not care about yours.
Universal healthcare is probably a good idea. And while it is a form of basic income, it feels fairly orthogonal to it politically.
I'm not really sure why an "old age and unemployment" security net is intrinsically more politically stable than a "basic income" social security net. You need some deal of political cleverness to implement both.
They're more stable because the rich, while paying more, also receive more. The pension amount is proportional to past professional income, as is that of unemployment benefits. Therefore old age and unemployment social insurances are not that redistributive, so the rich like and support them because they don't see it as "the rich pay for the poor".
Do you not see how this argument is symmetric though? It's like when Alice says to Bob "Your vote for the green party was wasted, it could have gone towards the democratic party". Sure it could have. But was Alice's vote not also wasted, when her vote could have gone towards the green party? What prevents all the dems from voting green?
"Momentum; i.e. the green party's candidacy is far less realistic" says Alice. "Therefore, the democratic party deserves your green vote." I don't like winner-takes-all elections since it incentives a two-party system. But despite this current state, I'd still vote for the green candidate if I preferred it over the dem candidate. Because in the long term, it gives the dems an incentive to more closely align with the greens if they want improve their chance of success.
In this sense, the green vote wasn't a distraction, it was a message. The sentiment that incumbents feel entitled to third party votes and feel that third party votes are "wasted", I find baffling. I could argue that all votes are wasted, because nobody but me voted for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The only interpretation under which others' votes could be said to be "a distraction" rather than "political input" is if one believed in the objective superiority of their own beliefs.
I wonder if you would change your tune if (hypothetically) UBI one day gained more momentum than Universal Health Care. But in your ideal world, this could never happen. Because all reasonable people would expend effort only into the coalition with the most momentum, which A) happens to be Universal Health Care ATM and B) will only ever be Universal Health Care in the future since the positive feedback loop never breaks.
Maybe in the future you can vote for a party with which you are not perfectly aligned, then weigh on it while it exerts power to bring it closer to your views?
I happen to think it's the greatest challenge to be tackled by civic tech startups...
Voters' power over a coalition varies directly with the voters' volatility. If I pledge my vote to the democrats, that gives them confidence to do what they want. Which means they'll be less likely to incorporate ideas from the greens. But I digress. My point is that I have a knee jerk reaction to arguments of the type "dems deserve your green votes".
So you believe UHC is better than UBI. All good. But to end the debate on UBI because it subtracts from a related discussion is ridiculous. I read the link, and I recognize that political campaigns require large expenditures. I also believe the market place of ideas can accomidate both discussions.
By calling UBI a "distraction", you are implying it'd be more convenient if the UBI discussion didn't exist because it's more convenient than letting the UBI and UHC compete on a their merits. It signals that it is inconceivable to you that UBI might in fact be the better idea, and that you'd bet the farm on UHC's superiority.
Sam Altman: "Let's perform a UBI experiment and see how it goes."
Nicolas Colins: "I'm a historian. I already know the outcome. The experiment is a waste of time and money."
- there have been a lot of large-scale BI policy experiments in the past in many countries, and none turned out so well on the long term. Yes it's true that technology changes many things, but I think it should be exploited primarily to improve existing benefits (considering the criticality of healthcare and housing, two major factors of both economic insecurity and inequalities);
- I think a healthcare single-payer or public option experiment would be more impactful, because this is what is currently at stake in Congress, the Supreme Court and the coming presidential election + it's important to win many small victories in the present rather than a hypothetical large one in a distant future (any union leader would agree). Finish the job on healthcare, and you'll discover that it becomes easier to advance the cause of UBI.
I guess you're more of a communist and I'm more of a social-traitor ;-)
> Finish the job on healthcare, and you'll discover that it becomes easier to advance the cause of UBI.
This suggests you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone to UBI. Is this actually your opinion? Because it doesn't reflect the vibe I got in your article. If I understand your article correctly, you believe
A) UBI is inherently fragile.
B) Conservative lobbyists will cause UBI to decay into something ugly.
C) UHC is more resilient.
D) Therefore UHC is better.
E) And France proves it.
But your comments upthread suggest you believe UHC is superior because it's easier to implement given its comfortable position within the Overton-Window. The Overton-Window Argument says it may become feasible in the future, while the Fragility Argument says it will never become feasible.
Frankly, I suspect the article is a Motte & Bailey. Maybe your real issue with UBI is that it will take too long to campaign for. I.e. you want your marshmallow sooner rather than later. Which is reasonable. But understand that it's another discussion entirely and was not clear to me from the article.
The more charitable interpretation is that you believe UBI's fragility is due to its immaturity. And that UHC will grant us experience. Okay. But if so, this was not clear to me from your article. And it would contradict your position that UBI experiments are a waste.
What I meant is that if you care for economic security and lesser inequalities, then you have to fight for the whole liberal agenda (improving the coverage of all risks), not just one issue, otherwise the bad guys win this time, and the next, and the next.
I you think UBI's worth fighting (I don't), your only chance to succeed is in the context of advancing that liberal agenda in its entirety over the long term.
And right now, with Obama's legacy and Trump on the verge of winning, the main social front is social health insurance. Sadly I don't hear many tech people on that issue (for hypothetical reasons laid out in the article) and I reckon the whole UBI discussion has a responsibility in that deafening silence.
> you're only chance is to advance the liberal agenda.
How convenient for you. The reason why you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone is probably because making UHC a reality will pull UBI within the Overton Window. But perhaps there are other ways to improve UBI's legitimacy. Like... discussing ramifications. Or performing an experiment.
Allow me to reiterate: "Voters' power over a coalition varies directly with the voters' volatility." Once a vote is pledged, the voter's negotiating leverage is lost. It's like haggling. If a potential buyer says "Oh what a nice sweater", the sweater's price is mysteriously doubles. People learn not to say things like that, because they don't want to waste their money.
Agglomeration is one tactic at one's disposal. Walking away is another. Maybe that sounds weird. Because as far as you know, the only force at work in politics is economies of scale. "Join us! Resistance is futile!" True, the power of a coalition (over other coalitions) is proportional to its size. But it comes at the cost of the voters' power over its residing coalition. By analogy. A heavier motorcycle is more powerful. But a lighter motorcycle has better handling. Meditation: why do states/provinces/municipalities exist if the federal government has stronger economies of scale?
UBI proponents should pledge their allegiance to liberals? Wouldn't that be convenient for you. Oops, the price just doubled. Question: how does a store convince a potential customer to part with their money? The store courts them with something of value. And how does a liberal convince a UBI proponent to part with their vote? "Your idea is dumb but mine is better. So buy into mine instead. Whoah, no need to compare -- trust me I'm a professional. Now shut up and give me your vote. By the way, your vote is worthless so you should totally give it to me." The pitch didn't start out bad, but things get sketchy fast. You're essentially trying to conscript (rather than entice) mercenaries into your coalition when you're not in a position to do so.
Erm but I'm not a candidate, so I don't really care for your vote. And I definitely agree with the idea that political engagement is both voice and exit.
That being said, what I suggest is not throwing away the UBI concept for the greater good. Mostly I regret the lack of participation in the discussion over social risks and economic security in general, which I don't think can be reduced to UBI and the problems it (supposedly) solves.
For lack of that participation, UBI ends up resembling a solution looking for a problem (a very bad starting point as you know if you're in the startup world). And those who support it so enthusiastically look like they're single-issue voters.
Workers engaged in the labor movement didn't fight for social insurance because it was a good idea. Rather they fought for it because some of them felt ill and couldn't afford proper care and then they died in misery.
Another way to put it: if I was aiming at building a giant tech company with a mission to provide economic security, I wouldn't start by promoting UBI but rather by solving my future customers' most pressing social problems—and those are (surprise) unaffordable housing and lack of health insurance, two issues that UBI doesn't address (or am I missing something?).
Maybe 10 years later, when you serve 1.7 billion users with a very large pool of risks, sophisticated financial tools and advanced machine learning, you'll end up with something vaguely resembling UBI. But UBI as a starting point seems like a failed startup to me.
Is there really tech-related job loss? Or does tech actually create more jobs?
I am from Canada, so that is the data I am most familiar with. The employment rate has almost never been higher (2008 was the highest), the unemployment rate has almost never been lower (2008 was the lowest). The US housing crash did take some toll on the Canadian economy as did the more recent fall in oil prices, but we're still looking far better than the historic norms when it comes to job numbers.
At the same time, I remember in the mid-1980s there was widespread media panic about how the robots starting to become common in manufacturing were going to eliminate all the jobs. A rise in employment, and decline in unemployment is exactly the opposite of what I would have expected in the following 30 years based on the panic at the time. The claims being made today are exactly the same as they were 30 years ago.
There will be a huge loss of jobs in the next 10 years, not job creation. At some point, self driving cars will exist with no driver, and around the same time, self driving trucks. Truck driver is still the most common job in many states [0].
When was the last time we saw the most common job on the brink of being wiped out? Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
> When was the last time we saw the most common job on the brink of being wiped out?
A couple of hundred years ago. And not just the most common job, but the job that was employing 90% of the labour force at the time. For comparison, transport truck driver accounts for just 1.5% of the labour force in Canada.
> Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
Yes. I struggle to believe we've reached the pinnacle of human achievement. Do you think the last time we went through this that people were sitting around thinking that the internet will provide jobs in the future? I'll be amazed if they even grasped that an internet could be possible. The jobs that will need to be done are things we cannot even dream of right now. If we could dream of them, we'd already be doing it.
> There will be a huge loss of jobs in the next 10 years
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of valuable work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all.
Unemployment is a phenomenon fabricated by the ruling class for social control. As long as people are afraid of becoming unemployed, they'll stay in an exploitive job.
It's not as if there is some kind of fundamental limit on productivity. We've been trying to finish the work for a thousand years, and yet each year we keep finding more!
> There will be a huge loss of jobs in the next 10 years
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all. We could probably erase global unemployment by adding mental health care jobs alone.
The article is all over the place. I don't even think that we can discuss the article as a whole. Furthermore the premises and the conclusions get mixed up, and there is a lot of circular reasoning going on.
I understand where you're coming from, however, there is no doubt an existing entitlement issue that is directly based on how much money you have. We have ALL seen this.
Also, what history books are you talking about? I've read some history books but your suggestion was very unhelpful!
I suggest starting with Pillars of Earth. It is a popular book, nothing too spectacular but it will put the perspective in your "it can't be worse than what we have today" attitude.
You literary said "I don't think things could get much worse than where we are today". This is dizzyingly insulting. Do you read that right? You misunderstood things so bad that I felt physically dizzy.
And that's the problem. People imagine BIG BIG BIG problems when the facts are on exactly the opposite side of the spectrum. Things are so good, that it is kind of hard to believe how good they are. Compared with the rest of the 9800 years of human history, we live in paradise. Do you understand what I'm saying? If a person magically comes to our time, he would think he is in heaven.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadI don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely.
I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.
People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere.
The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done"
It's never going to work that way.
Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again.
Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others?
The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has?
Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.
Sure, there will continue to be trade, but the need/desire to trade will be reduced.
To look at how/why, you need to look at decentralised production. Technologies like 3D printers promise to be able to produce many of the products we currently trade for, and this goes beyond the plastic trinkets people currently associate with 3D printers (there are already 3D printer devices in the fields of clothing, food, medicine, heavy machinery, etc...). So whilst there will be trade for the raw materials, why would you pay someone else to make something for you when you have access to a machine to do it for you (note that I said access, not ownership, I don't expect everyone will own a device that can create a car, for example)? It makes sense for people to cut out the middle man when the end result is just as good as they could've gotten by paying a premium.
There will still be people wishing to trade for things they can't get for low cost locally, but there will be a lot of industries disrupted by the ability of people to produce their own consumer goods.
I've heard it said that, "even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."
Unfortunately virtual scarcity will persist for some time. This is because the economic system isn't organized enough to distribute all resources fairly and efficiently. As jobs decline (due to increased automation and export), the old way of distributing resources fairly fails, and virtual scarcity will increase.
UBI seems like it can fill that gap but I worry that it's an overly simplistic solution. It seems like it can cause runaway inflation without a counter-balance. What prevents rent/food/gas prices from simply going up?
That's an incomplete statement, because it doesn't quantify the effect. Will the effect be zero, or will BI be priced-in (higher prices, lower present-value of BI)?
US college tuition and housing prices increased dramatically, because of decreased consumer price discrimination driven by low-barrier loans.
If [over]population is a factor, then "post-scarcity" is fiction.
This makes me think BI advocates are quietly assuming constraints such as "we'll discourage reproduction somehow"--while constantly mentioning how BI will be free of constraints.
By the way, the issue is not as much population growth as high consumption. What is worse, more people living on basic income or the billions in China and India aspiring to an American middle class lifestyle?
So absence of scarcity will totally be a thing if everything just goes according to plan. Got it.
Your sarcasm does not contribute to this discussion.
The real false assumption here is that increased standard of living leads to overpopulation. The data indicates the opposite is true.
Reproduction is a survival mechanism. Threaten an organisms survival, and that mechanism is triggered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system.
If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes.
> Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.
Here's a very simple example. We can make a very strong argument that we've reached a very high mark on safety. We live in a society that's safer now than ever before. Yet we are constantly scared that the world will come to an end. Politicians and the media have made sure we have something to be scared of. Do all people feel safe? No, yet by all statistics we live in a very safe society.
Another one, internet access. Forty years ago, if anyone even mentioned that it needs to be a basic need they would have been laugh at with no mercy. Today, it's not such a ridiculous thought.
You say these are really wants. Yes to some but wants are so strong to some(many) that they become basic needs. How many times have you heard some one say,"I need my coffee." Really, coffee is a need?
Given this what does post-scarcity really mean?
We can define a set of basic needs now but over time they will change and they will grow.
We had to hit each other with sharp bits of metal for a long time. We don't have to do that anymore. Do we notice or not?
Bucky Fuller pointed out that, in terms of our technical ability, post-scarcity arrived in the seventies. We can call it with the invention of the microprocessor. (We don't need to postulate fusion, as there is already a serviceable fusion reactor available nearby: it's that thing in the sky that burns your eyes when you look at it.)
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasis: We are already in a post-scarcity condition.
Put another way, all our problems now are psychological. Which is kind of what you were saying, or not?
Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had.
For an alternative view, I like the horses example in this video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Technology destroys some jobs and it creates others, but those new jobs are numerous enough only if we put in place the right institutions (sustainable and inclusive). We're not there yet (and I don't see UBI as one of those).
This is an older article about job destruction and job creation: https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-de...
"So enough already. Grow up now, study history..."
Regardless of the actual content of the article, I found the style of so many unnecessary ad hominim attacks offputing.
The actual content of the article isn't really backed up. It mostly seems to say that engineers are seduced by the elegance of Basic Income and that they should really just focus on making the existing social system have less friction. Not a bad opinion, just not really in line with the many statements that "Basic Income won't work".
I didn't write that basic income won't work as a solution designed to fix a problem. My point is that I don't see a political path to enacting it, and even though it was enacted, I don't see how it could survive the next round of election.
So yes maybe it's time to focus on more winnable fights such as implementing universal health insurance.
https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-respons...
Yes, for two reasons. First, the meaning of the label 'Silicon Valley' is unclear, but whatever it means, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized. Doing that is usually just a rhetorical device, and that dilutes arguments.
Second, the people I know in Silicon Valley are acutely interested in those things, so I'd say your claim is way off base.
As for the second argument, I trust there is much progress in terms of tackling politics and history in SV, but many sources contributed to forming my opinion:
- In "Googled" (published in 2004), Ken Auletta of the "New Yorker" explains in great detail how clueless Google initially was in dealing with Washington, DC., a trait he claims can be linked to the naïveté of engineers who see the world as a collection of "problems" all waiting for a "solution". As an engineer myself, I really recognize that engineering bias. Yet I agree the engineering culture may be stronger at Google than at other tech companies. But it's still dominant in the tech industry.
- In his "Secret History of Silicon Valley" conference, Steve Blank constantly jokes about the fact that people in Silicon Valley are ignorant of history, to the point where even students at Stanford University don't have a clue about who was Frederick Terman.
- More recently, another "New Yorker" article told the story of Mark Zuckerberg "getting an education" in his failed attempt to transform the education system in the state of New Jersey—see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
-In Europe most of us are appalled at how clumsy SV-based tech companies are when dealing with local governments and adapting to the various cultures, institutions, and special interests => hence the many problems that Uber, Airbnb, Google, and others have here in Europe on the regulatory front (Apple being the latest to suffer that fate with the infamous €14B European tax bill).
Maybe it's a false impression. Or maybe in Silicon Valley those who are genuinely interested in geography, history, and politics are not in the executive seats and so far fail to make a difference.
But I can assure you that the tech industry's passion with basic income has a direct consequence on the ground: when you try to open up the discussion about the future of social policy, the tech people's response is always: "nevermind those complex policies from the past, basic income will solve everything". Ugh.
In most cases the reason is that they read the books by Peter Thiel and others, they read the blogposts by American Entrepreneurs and VCs, they believe the hype around basic income, and, I'm sorry to say, I think they don't have a clue about what it takes to build inclusive and sustainable social institutions.
I can't wait for regulatory hacking to join the field of social policy. Many people will convert to social realpolitik at that point :-)
The author also mention the fight for Obamacare as more pragmatic. I think his argument are mainly targeted at the US were universal services are lacking (or perceived as lacking).
Funny how the article zeroes in on this as a criticism of basic income, even though it describes the biggest way France's system is totally different from what basic income advocates are talking about.
This is exactly the reason I want basic income. I want nobody to feel like someone else is cheating the system. I hear a bunch of people (even old people who are on medicare and social security!) who will talk trash about "welfare queens".
It is not like we can't afford it. There will be short term pain, of course but I think we will have greater solidarity. This is good for the 0.01% as well because if you are doing really well, you want to keep the ship steady. (Well to be cynical, you could try to keep everyone else fighting amongst themselves but any arsonist will tell you that a fire once started won't spare the people who started it.)
There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. You remove the incentive to grow and guess what happens next.
Or if you want to really start thinking hard, maybe you should ask yourself what happens when everybody has X in money and businesses raise their prices accordingly?
I wanted to congratulate you on your enduring politeness and civility while enduring exactly the opposite. I thank you for your tone and your contribution. While I may not agree with you, I applaud the manner in which you communicate.
It's people like you that really make HN a different place.
When kids are raised without the persistent threat of not surviving? They'll stand a better chance of flourishing and reaching their full potential, like many of us here on HN who have an affluent background.
Having to contribute to society by keeping a job, and using the income of said job to finance your cost of living is far from being a life-risking enterprise.
You're trying to avoid the point by inventing absurd emotional examples.
That's your assumption, and a baseless one at that.
Back in reality, we're experiencing unprecedented economic development which includes the inception of a whole new economic sector.
You're essentially complaining that buggy whip artisans have less job opportunities in a world that's creating whole new jobs such as forum moderators, social media experts, and data scientists.
Today's economy even creates jobs playing video games, surfing, and talking about gourmet food.
The world's most developed economies are enjoying structural unemployment rates.
And you're here talking about "less job opportunities over time".
You need to separate facts from fiction, including your own baseless beliefs.
There is also homeostasis. Perpetual growth is cancer.
What happens when kids know they don't have to steal or rob to survive?
What happens when kids know living for the good cause will never starve them to death?
What happens when kids know they can pursue their best interest without worrying about being starved?
Can you point out exactly how many people starved to death in any western country? Because I vividly remember that there isn't any universal basic income program in effect, and somehow people manage to feed themselves just fine.
You can't expect to be taken seriously if all you can come up with are absurd emotional works of fiction.
http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/12/teens-americ...
Have you looked at the US Economy lately?
(Jan 2016) Why 2016 keeps getting uglier for US economy - http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/29/why-2016-keeps-getting-uglier...
(April 2016) Americans' confidence in economy at 2016 low - http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/economy/us-economic-con...
(June 2016) The next recession is already here—and there isn't much the Fed can do - http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/21/the-next-recession-is-already...
I'm all for a basic income for lower income families, but I'm not sure how routinely volatile our economy is, we really afford this long term. What happens when you put something like this in place, and then can't afford it? There's a long list of government programs already awash in waste and mismanagement. I'm not sure another program (which would have to take the place of other programs - WIC, TEFAP, HUD, etc) is really going to solve the problem.
Universal basic income is a reform that satisfies both the left and right. My conservative brethren are totally on board. Not perfect, but good enough, and better than what we have now.
Economists will undoubtedly turn up their noses when not so well learned people like me start explaining our position because it is clearly too stupid for them. If we have $100 available and three people: one who doesn't need any money, one who needs $20, and one who needs $50 to survive, clearly it is best to give nothing to the first person, #20 to the second person, and $50 to the third person. Look, we were economically efficient and now $30 can go towards maintaining the system! What I propose is that the $100 should be divided more like $33 each with just $1 going towards maintaining the project itself.
This came up before when talking about college education and whether the government should subsidize college education for the wealthy. My answer is yes! Of course, the government should pay for college for everyone, even if that person is Bill Gates' son. Similarly, should the government pay for Bill Gates' health care expenses under a single payer universal health care system? I say again Yes! We should not discriminate against the wealthy. Sure, it might result is less care for the poor but at the end of the day, I think it is better for everyone.
If it's just moving some bits into everyone's account monthly, entire layers of bureacracy, with their buildings, staff, forms, and fraud checking departments, can be removed. It should make it remarkably cheap to run, comparatively.
Make it lower income only and you have to bring all that back.
You're assuming that it would be possible to simply eliminate government and state services and institutions, both politically and practically.
Instead, everyone working within an organization works to serve their own personal interests. This means that it's practically impossible for an elected official to eliminate all this state cruft, as every single person within the organization would fight tooth and nail to sabotage the project.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/28/government-p...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/even-in-an-era-of-bu...
I only read through about half of the article, but I didn't really see any real reasons why basic income would be bad. Most of the arguments boiled down to "That's not how we do things now". I ended up coming away from this article with more faith in the potential for basic income than I did going into it as none of these arguments were very compelling.
As a regular reader of mondaynote.com (and so therefore an expert), I have the impression that France has many other obstacles to entrepreneurship. Like their labor laws.
It seems to me that universal basic income, alongside universal health care and other reforms, would greatly reduce the need for stultifying labor laws. More simply, employers could hire and fire as needed.
This is a major disincentive of work.
However, the work that will not be done by those people who can do it but don't want to will still need to be done. The solution will then be to hire people at higher wages.
But since these higher wages are not a result of increased productivity, the employers won't be able to sell more. The result is that prices will go up, generating price inflation. And we know inflation is the worst of all taxes, as it affects the poorest the most.
In the long run, the money received via BI won't be able to sustain the "comfortable living" that it was supposed to.
Child care? Elder care? Volunteering?
Consider this scenario: you're taking care of you elders and you need to go out and buy some medicine. But the drugstores have all closed, since nobody wants to work there anymore (why would they? They're at home taking care of their elders too). Do you think this is not a realistic scenario in the long run? Why not?
Sure, above a certain level people's taxes would go up, so they pay back some of their basic income as tax. But that wouldn't kick in until people are earning rather more than $1200 a month.
This also has the inflationary consequences that I mentioned in another comment: you're effectively increasing wages without increasing productivity. This will cause prices to rise because employers will face higher taxes so that the state can support basic income, and demand will rise because people will have more money.
This will cause inflation, and in the long run purchase power will not increase, while society will be worse off with less people doing productive work.
Sure, some people won't work. But most of those would be people who either would have a hard time finding work, or who have some specific other thing they'd rather be doing.
You are also confusing money with wealth. Basic income may give people more of the first, but its inflationary nature does nothing for the second.
> So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. If you know politics, you can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, politics is not Silicon Valley’s strong suit.
Then, in the following decades, many people, notably on the right, started to hate it and, as a result, new, conservative rules made it more difficult to claim the benefit.
(Just like, for instance, Republican legislatures all around the US make it more complicated to vote, not because it's a necessary procedural evil, but because it's in the political interest of the Republican party.)
I think that the same fate awaits UBI if it were to be enacted (which I doubt, but that's another story).
As an example: see how quickly the Democrats lost control of both the houses once Obamacare was passed. And see how the Republicans are continuously trying to kill Obamacare.
Oh there will be many jobs left but they will all require a certain level of education, let's call that university degree for the sake of simplicity. Also people will need to have some degree of mental capacity to attain this level. It is pretty much natural to presume not everyone will have this mental capacity. Already this is showing everywhere. What will society do with those who have the physical capability but not the mental to work? BI is one of the answers. It may not be the best answer but do have a better one? We need an answer right effin' now because long range trucking will be automated away Real Soon Now(TM) and that's (at least in Canada) is one of the most populated occupation and society level answers are never reached quick.
Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.
Right now SF is not even capable to host 450 homeless arriving every year. What would you do if that number of people arrived every day or every hour?
I don't think immigration laws would permit that. For one, you couldn't "just move" to the US like that.
Within the EU it could become an interesting problem if some countries did this and others didn't. I suspect that if anyone were to try this there'll be some limitations at first, like you have to have citizenship, or prove legal residency for longer than "since the past few minutes".
Anyway, by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it.
Doesn't have to be. Some versions are, some aren't. Given we are talking about a system that does not exist, not sure why you say it is one thing or the other. Some versions give to minors, some do not. Some only give to citizens in good standing (no felons). Conditions can exist and should exist in my opinion.
This means, there's at least one condition: only humans can apply.
I struggled with this example on the RMI/RSA in France.
>So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers.
The author holds this example up as why UBI might fail. But the reasons listed why the RMI/RSA failed are all either driving forces for UBI or solved by UBI.
1) RMI/RSA is complicated to administer due to high burden of proof for the individual to demonstrate no income. UBI solves this by allowing everyone to have an income, not just those without a salary.
2) RMI/RSA has adverse economic effects because it disincentivizes people to seek jobs. Part of why people are thinking UBI could be a good idea is there will be fewer jobs in the future and so disincentivization to look for a job for a subset of the population is partially a good thing.
3) RMI/RSA is politically difficult. That's why people involved in the UBI movement are running private, small scale experiments. They want to prove/disprove their hypotheses to provide evidence in favor of or against UBI.
Entrepreneurship is at about 14% working age adults in the US (1). I would say that the number of people who would be entrepreneurs is higher, but limited by risk. Entrepreneurship is very high risk. Reducing that risk would enable more people to become entrepreneurs (a good thing). Removing the risk that being an entrepreneur will make you loose the shirt off your back, will allow more people to start companies.
It is not limited to entrepreneurship. How many more amazing painters would there be? Writers? How much more creative common good would there be in the world if basic needs (via UBI) was taken care of?
None of the current social risk insurance, are directly reducing this loss to us all.
(1) http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reache...
I get your point about painters and writers. But my guess is that working on affordable housing would do more good on that front—and would be more sustainable politically.
You can read this convincing article by Sarah Kendzior: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-c...
>> "The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals."
The only reason this is a problem is political. We have the NHS but we also have private options - get rid of those. Then there would be more staff available for the NHS, a huge some of money would not be wasted on locum staff, and therefore more money would be available to the NHS. Some of that could be used for funding and some could be used to pay staff a fairer wage. The fiscal austerity argument is nonsense. We have plenty of money - it's just spent poorly. We don't need to spend £30bn on nuclear missiles we'll never use (and if we ever do need to use them it'll be too late anyway). We don't need to spend £30-40bn on the military. Of course defunding these things is political suicide but you can't tell me we can't afford decent healthcare when we're wasting money on missiles we don't need, a huge military we don't need, and locum staff which shouldn't be a thing in the first place when you have a public health care system.
Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.
TL/DR:
> Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.
I didn't vote for Blair, or support many of his policies, but his governance utterly transformed the NHS for the better. It was adequately funded for the first time in a couple of decades, at the time of this speech, and they were now searching for ways to measurably improve care, especially in comparatively neglected areas such as mental health.
Quality goes down when governments start bringing political ideology to the fore - eg "we must bring the efficiency of the market to the NHS" neatly ignores the fact the NHS is actually pretty damn efficient, and is one of the strongest buyers on the planet getting significantly better pricing from all the drug companies. Adding managers and market aspects actually worsened this.
The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI.
I'm starting to doubt everything he's written by this point.
Read the article again. His point is that the RMI (RSA) is what they ended up with, even though they wanted (started with) something similar to UBI.
The RSA was a reform intended to "smooth the edges". While you would lose you're RMI as soon as you start working, now you can keep part of the RSA during a transition period.
But the problem with RSA is that it's really complex and most people still don't get it. And it's a lot of paperware for a relatively small amount of money.
I think France is actually one of the best place to start a real UBI scheme. Our system is close to UBI but probably the worst implementation possible, with a lot of edge cases.
This proposal details a complete reform of our tax system around a UBI: http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09...
What's interesting is the underlying philosophy: instead of providing citizens with money, the New Labour tried to rebuild the best system possible for rich and poor alike. A UBI is unable to achieve that goal in healthcare.
As for the French example: I agree it isn't the theoretical concept of basic income (and thought I wrote so). Rather my point is that this is how basic income would end up after 1 or 2 electoral rounds.
Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit:
>There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact.
That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention.
>The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk.
This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard).
>Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it.
False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk.
This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.
If that's what you believe then any tax would meet the criteria and you would have to consider almost every government in the world authoritarian. Is that the case?
>> "replace all taxes with user fees for use of government services and assets (like roads)"
I'm guessing with this we would also have to drastically reduce the number of services the government is providing? For example there will be certain services that they few people use but cost a lot to provide so if we aren't all contributing they can't continue to offer them.
As for a split rate tax I hadn't heard of it before but after a quick glance it looks interesting.
However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
>However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
Land, and to a lesser extent the property that's built on it, can more justifiably be taxed, because an individual has less of a natural right of ownership over it.
This is due to land being a natural resource, that derives almost all of its value from its natural form, rather than the value the party that appropriated it added to it.
Having a country where people fall, through no fault of their own (unless you count their genetics), to such an extent that they live in tents and sewers is enough indication that there's inadequate state protection.
Like something the Sparrows in GoT would justify.
>but if most people want BI then it would be authoritarian to not give it to them in a democracy.
That's not how authoritarian is defined. The majority have no right to violate the right of the minority. More to the point, I'm arguing that we should try to change the minds of the majority, because the majority held viewpoint is authoritarian.
>I also don't understand the distinction for private trade, in that without a functioning government to support a marketplace, such trade would not exist.
Private trade refers to trade amongst exclusively private entities, as opposed to trade amongst several entities, one or more of which are public (government).
Your speculation that private trade wouldn't exist without services rendered by government, even if it were accurate, would not disqualify trade amongst private parties as private.
How do you pay for military, police, courts and all other aspects of a developed state?
If taxes are ok to pay for those, why not a UBI that tries to improve on what's currently done? It won't be perfect, nothing human is.
Money introduces the question of "how do you ensure that people want your currency?" A problem Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies or blockchain currencies) face.
In the case of dollars specifically, demand is derived from:
1. The obligation to pay US taxes in dollars.
2. The status of the dollar as the international reserve currency.
3. The status of the dollar as the currency for all petroleum commerce.
(Consider what would have happened to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia/USSR, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, had their national currencies been the basis of their own oil trade.)
There's also the economic output of the US itself, of course. But there's a tremendous intrinsic demand for US dollars as a consequence of this mandated trade. And yes, taxes are an element of this.
Other national currencies have other bases, though not as broad a demand foundation as the US dollar.
For example, I knew a vet in college who came very close to dropping out, where a few hundred bucks the safety net never knew he needed made all the difference. I can only imagine what percent of their lifetime writeoffs come from having these condescending "shutup, we know what you need" safety net systems.
he's right when pointing at lack of a political argument. But form me it's quite clear. The argument is : redistribution. I know it's a simplistic left-wing argument but wealth redistribution is what basic income is. And unfortunately it's way too simple. I'd prefer a complex system because it offers many places for negotiating redistribution.
Read as "continue to serve the oligarchs who pretend to care, pandering their endless bullshit solutions that serve only their own interests".
Nicolas Colin eat your own.
A Basic Income program is unrepealable after enough time(say 20 years) has passed. People are terrible at making decisions: They don't save money, they run up their credit cards, they don't invest. A BI program limits the damage that their bad decisions can cause.
Even $800/month would wildly distort decision making. I don't think that a lot of people who've been receiving it their whole life are going to be in a position to function independently if you try to repeal it. There are going to be too many single mothers crying "How will I make my rent?" if you take it away. Even if they otherwise would've managed without it.
A law that's a one-way ratchet requires extraordinary evidence before you even consider it. It doesn't matter if it has a positive expected value, or the models say it will probably work; the risk that it won't deliver on its promises is too high, and we'll be stuck with it forever.
So tell me again why that shouldn't be taken into account when judging their position?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473341 and marked it off-topic.
Edit: Actually, since your account has a pattern of breaking the rules here, and we've warned you multiple times before, we've banned it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12475384
He didn't spent a lot of time offering up specific arguments against basic income, but rather on background, and the primary arguments he has are to me some of the strongest arguments for BI:
1) He worries about division and polarization. Well, BI is the only solution that I'm aware of that draws on support from both the libertarian right (strong support, mostly) and liberal left (many support, but some are suspicious like this guy). No other solution to the jobless future can boast of support from both sides of the political spectrum.
2) Oddly, the quote from Olaf Palme he offers up as a critique of basic income reads to me as strong support:
This sounds like an extremely persuasive argument for BI and one of the reasons why I support it.In fact, it's completely unclear to me after reading this whole damn essay why he is so strongly in opposition to the point where he wants people to stop discussing it altogether, other than it's not the favored solution of his team.
On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals.
On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options.
Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
You've missed the point.
The point is that the foundation of the basic income concept is that the income redistribution scheme works flawlessly and according to the people's expectations. This assumption is patently false, as the system is established and managed by people, particularly elected officials and the regime's apparatchiks, who have a long and plentiful resume of manipulating, distorting and corrupting the state to fit their own personal agendas.
I can tell you exactly what happened in my country's income redistribution scheme. It is supposed to be entirely independent of the state and self-managed. Yet' somehow the ruling regime managed to manipulate the system to finance golden parachutes to the nation's career politicians (golden pensions paid off to people who never contributed to the scheme) as well as forcing it as a cash cow to the state as a exceedingly cheap source of state loans.
And it is supposed to be a simple system where worker contributes 1/3 of their salary to finance pensions and unemployment benefits.
That's what these organizations made by people are used for, in reality, and reality always trumps fiction.
Now again, the fact that there is corruption in many countries and money is used wrongly simply means there might be initial or additional work be done, but it definitely does not mean it's inherently not possible, there are plenty of government with low corruption, too.
Finally, what's the alternative? Let the market work and private companies, which I highlighted have the exact same flaws as the government, possibly just on a smaller scale!?
Just putting our heads in the sand and saying this will never work is not a way forward, unless you think of course there's no problem in the first place.
Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects. Poverty inevitably leads to violence, drug abuse, disease, overpopulation, war, and other erratic behaviors.
How much more do we spend on bureaucracy in vain attempts to mitigate these resulting effects? Prevention is far more cost effective than maintenance in this case.
The NHS is also great value, costing us far less for universal healthcare than the US government spends on healthcare.
The NHS is also amazingly popular, and until the ideological austerity movement was pretty much getting better.
I'm not sure why so many people in the US think that government cannot run things effectively. The NHS is a great example. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Clearly.
I suppose that my previous comment's wording could be construed as assuming we couldexist in a post-scarcity economy. That was not intentional. However, universal basic income does not require a post-scarcity framework to be workable, and the claim that universal basic income will cause inflation to 'spiral out of control' is left unsupported.
Money is currently created out of nothing through the banking system, and the FED controls inflation just fine through various mechanisms e.g. setting interest rates. Basic income proposals can have similar inflation controlling mechanisms e.g. tie payouts to inflation rate or changes in tax rate. In any case inflatuon caused by basic income could be offset by increasing the fed interest rate which is currently near zero.
Dubious claim. Most serious proposals are largely revenue neutral and simply redistribute.
> and will require massive taxation to be sustainable.
Not anymore than already exists.
> Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
It requires no new infrastructure if given as a tax rebate. It also introduces no additional corruption than already exists via tax loopholes. Centralizing all debate and scrutiny over corruption in one location is a benefit of the proposal, not a problem.
Many (all?) libertarians lean left on a great many social issue and consider the social part of libertarianism as important if not more important than the right leaning economic part. I think the term "libertarian right" while not an incorrect term at face value -- there are in fact right leaning Libertarians just as some Democrats are further left than others -- is miss-leading and can potential lead to misconceptions about Libertarians as similar to Republicans. I for one share much more in common with the Democrats but I am very definitely a Libertarian.
I think many of us would prefer you just use the term Libertarian and leave off left or right.
Edit: or perhaps if you were in-deed referring to the conservative party, add some clarity and say "Republicans that lean Libertarian"
On the other hand, in my experience, libertarians are pretty far from being liberals, and even farther from being typical Democrats. Personally, I share even less with typical Democrats than with typical (non-Trump and non-Evangelical) Republicans. I do share a lot of social beliefs with people who consider themselves to be liberals first and foremost, and agree with them about some of this nation's greatest challenges. I've found typical Democrats to be against drug legalization and only with great hesitation have started supporting LGBT rights, when most libertarians were supporting gay rights 40 years ago (in the sense that gays rights mean that gays have the same rights as everyone else, because what people do in the privacy of their homes is not the government's business).
Anyway, I think it's fair to say that there's support for BI from two different parts, if not sides, of the political spectrum.
But fair point about there being left libertarians and right libertarians, I don't really disagree. I mean, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian, but is definitely "of the left" (and I happen to disagree with him on a lot of issues, yet share some of his core beliefs about the dangers of government and authoritarianism). I'll take more care in the future.
To be fair I think "The Libertarian Left" would also be miss-leading. We defy the left and right labels :)
By world standards, not to mention many past US standards, the two presidential candidates (and the current president) are clearly right-wingers.
Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.
However, in general the cause is the same but the approach is different. For example, just of those two causes should be handled by the courts (as a libertarian sees it at least) rather than through regulatory agencies.
To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work. They just disagree with the top down approach to solving that issue.
In certain narrow situations where there is an identifiable property right at issue (e.g. dumping waste on private land). But there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.
> To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work.
Libertarians generally believe that the level of safety in the workplace should be set by the market, rather than by a regulatory agency. I.e. if a workplace is known for being unsafe, it won't be able to hire employees (or will have to pay a premium for employees to take on the extra risk). Liberals in contrast believe that the government should impose a safety floor on all workplaces, irrespective of the market.
To me, this is where the libertarian philosophy loses its internal consistency. For two reasons:
1) There is no such thing as a closed system, so land use is fundamentally social
2) For the most part, all existing property deeds were obtained by force, not through the voluntary agreeing to contracts, so no one who holds a deed really has any kind of moral claim on it.
Libertarians have to fall back on some other political system (manifest destiny, kraterocracy, democrasy, etc) to resolve the land use question. But to me land use is the foundation of all property law and the fact that Libertarianism has nothing to say about it makes it largely useless as a foundational political system. It's a nice thing to think about, but it can't be relied on to answer basic questions.
Essentially this highlights the difference between your particular policy opinions and your enthusiasm for having a government enforce those policies on everyone.
I know that UBI, on paper, looks like it’s a good answer to many of the challenges listed at the end. But I don’t think that UBI, once put in place, would be as strong, politically, as other universal programs such as universal social insurance: => Round #1: new left-wing government enacts UBI with appropriate funding. => Round #2: left-wing government loses elections, new right-wing government decides to target UBI on the poor in order to master the costs. UBI becomes BI without the "U". => Round #3: the rich find that their taxes are too high and denounce the BI-claiming poor as welfare queens, contributing to the right-wing government winning reelection and weakening BI even more.
There are two kinds of universal benefits: the rich (and the middle class) all need universal health insurance (in case they have cancer), but they don’t really need UBI because they earn enough money from other sources.
So I’m not sure why, even if they’re supportive at the beginning, they would keep on supporting UBI under the inevitable ideological and financial pressure that comes with a polarized democratic society.
Considering this perspective, my understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance (which the US still lacks even with Obamacare, and which could benefit for the attention and design skills from the tech community).
As both US parties currently have significant trust issues with one another, I would say UBI is a complete non-starter.
I couldn't seem to find a clear definition of UBI in the article, which helps people discuss the concept as many people view possible UBI programs completely differently.
While I am in agreement that UBI is massively overhyped and not a true, large-scale solution to income inequality, I'm happy that it has gotten so much interest and might lead to productive conversations around tax reform.
2: Universal and free market oriented. You are not told how to spend that income and you can then use it to support small business/entrepreneurial endeavors.
In practice, my guess is that it wouldn't be long before UBI is converted a means-tested benefit, for both financial and political reasons.
As for advantage number 2, yes you're not told how to spend that income but chances are that income is far from enough to pay for proper healthcare / childcare / elderly care or well-located housing.
The history of the social state shows us that transferring money to people is not enough: you also have to supplement the market and correct its imperfections.
There has not been UBI so history tells you little. By supplement the market you mean
We saw that happen in many cases in the recent period of austerity, because scarcity of resources is a powerful argument to convince the rich, then the middle class, to renounce their benefits in favor of the poor.
As for "there has not been UBI" I disagree. Many supporters provide examples such as the Alaska dividend. There are many lessons to be drawn from many social policies in developed countries.
In France alone we had two BI-like programs which, for various reasons, underwent slow financial and political destruction: - the RMI/RSA, about which I wrote in the article - less known is the "régime des intermittents du spectacle", which works like a universal unemployment insurance for freelancers in the entertainment industry (and it costs so much money to the taxpayer that governments regularly try to kill it). It only survives because the entertainment industry is a powerful lobby in France.
The flaw here is that this would seem to apply to any form of social assistance. Why hasn't the same thing happened to social security?
The answer is that Round #2 doesn't make sense. You can't take someone who is making $60K/year + $10K UBI and take away the UBI without lowering their taxes unless you want them to burn you in effigy. But if all you propose to do is replace $10K in UBI with $10K in tax cuts for the same people, who is going to be the lobby in favor of that?
The dynamic you're describing is what happens to things like education assistance. Because people would rather have in $1 in cash money tax cuts than $1 in education vouchers. But the UBI is cash that spends just the same as the tax cut would.
It hasn't happened to Social Security because, if I'm not mistaken, the pension amount is proportional to what you earned during your career => hence the rich pay more but also receive more. Same with unemployment benefits.
This is actually the only way to make a universal monetary benefit politically sustainable. And UBI, with its fixed amount, doesn't match that criteria.
I think the reason that social security survives while welfare benefits continue to be slashed regularly is perfectly clear.
While I myself am a programmer and support basic income, I have talked with many people outside the technology world who are also in favor of such a system. YC is getting their hands dirty with their research project and Finland's government is most definitely aware of politics. The only way for us (US citizens) to get our hands dirty in politics when not voting is talking about these things.
> ... energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance ...
BI and health insurance, universal or not, solve very different issues. Both deserve attention and one doesn't preclude the other. I do think that a very important part of BI discussions is what programs it can replace, what it can supplement, and what it doesn't solve.
The fact that so many people talk about BI without leaving their job, raising funds, going on strike, founding unions, etc., is proof in my eyes that we're having an intellectual discussion, not waging a political battle.
The one precedent of authentic political action in the current context, the foundation of the Freelancers Union, was meant to fight for health coverage for freelancers, not a monetary benefit.
I don't exactly think that going on strike or leaving your job, serves as a good argument for UBI - quite the contrary. And no, the same cannot be said for worker rights or work similar issues.
I do think that unions have a great role to play in this, and that they could easily focus and do research on the effects on UBI, much like the YC project.
Like knots in tangled string. We need to fix the system one knot at a time. We might even need to cut out whole sections but there's not one simple solution for the whole problem.
It's interesting how many of the techies out there would laugh at the idea of replacing the internet with just computers and wires - what could be simpler. Yet according to many, we can replace a complicated system like welfare with a simple system like basic income. To me this points out lack of understanding and as you said, reluctance to get ones hands dirty.
Well, dumb pipes are in fact simpler and superior to the centralized systems of control and preferential treatment that telcos are constantly trying to impose.
Maybe BI won't work, and any money invested in it will be wasted. Maybe BI will work, and it will eventually solve many problems with today's Western societies.
Who are you to tell the rest of us we're not even allowed to try?
Is it your money being invested in the attempt?
Will it negatively impact you?
If we take your attitude, possible improvements will never be attempted, and therefore, nothing will ever improve.
>My understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance.
It's fantastic that you have another idea! Don't waste your energy nay-saying people who are trying something other than your idea, get to work making your idea happen!
Also I point out that real-life enactments such as the French RMI, even though they succeeded at providing critical resources to those in need, are under extraordinary financial and political pressure. That pressure explains why it's become so complex, ridden with adverse effects and hated by much of the political spectrum.
I'm fairly certain that basic income would suffer the same fate. Therefore I see it as a political dead end and a distraction from much-needed debates on critical social risks in the digital age.
Your opinion does not give you the right to stop others from voicing theirs, and working hard to achieve what they think is a worthwhile goal.
The fact you ignored that's what my comment is saying, and merely paraphrased your article makes me think you don't care about other people's opinions and ideas, which is a really, really great way to make people not care about yours.
I'm not really sure why an "old age and unemployment" security net is intrinsically more politically stable than a "basic income" social security net. You need some deal of political cleverness to implement both.
"Momentum; i.e. the green party's candidacy is far less realistic" says Alice. "Therefore, the democratic party deserves your green vote." I don't like winner-takes-all elections since it incentives a two-party system. But despite this current state, I'd still vote for the green candidate if I preferred it over the dem candidate. Because in the long term, it gives the dems an incentive to more closely align with the greens if they want improve their chance of success.
In this sense, the green vote wasn't a distraction, it was a message. The sentiment that incumbents feel entitled to third party votes and feel that third party votes are "wasted", I find baffling. I could argue that all votes are wasted, because nobody but me voted for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The only interpretation under which others' votes could be said to be "a distraction" rather than "political input" is if one believed in the objective superiority of their own beliefs.
I wonder if you would change your tune if (hypothetically) UBI one day gained more momentum than Universal Health Care. But in your ideal world, this could never happen. Because all reasonable people would expend effort only into the coalition with the most momentum, which A) happens to be Universal Health Care ATM and B) will only ever be Universal Health Care in the future since the positive feedback loop never breaks.
I happen to think it's the greatest challenge to be tackled by civic tech startups...
See this older story https://salon.thefamily.co/software-eating-politics-the-case...
So you believe UHC is better than UBI. All good. But to end the debate on UBI because it subtracts from a related discussion is ridiculous. I read the link, and I recognize that political campaigns require large expenditures. I also believe the market place of ideas can accomidate both discussions.
By calling UBI a "distraction", you are implying it'd be more convenient if the UBI discussion didn't exist because it's more convenient than letting the UBI and UHC compete on a their merits. It signals that it is inconceivable to you that UBI might in fact be the better idea, and that you'd bet the farm on UHC's superiority.
Sam Altman: "Let's perform a UBI experiment and see how it goes."
Nicolas Colins: "I'm a historian. I already know the outcome. The experiment is a waste of time and money."
Okay bud.
- there have been a lot of large-scale BI policy experiments in the past in many countries, and none turned out so well on the long term. Yes it's true that technology changes many things, but I think it should be exploited primarily to improve existing benefits (considering the criticality of healthcare and housing, two major factors of both economic insecurity and inequalities);
- I think a healthcare single-payer or public option experiment would be more impactful, because this is what is currently at stake in Congress, the Supreme Court and the coming presidential election + it's important to win many small victories in the present rather than a hypothetical large one in a distant future (any union leader would agree). Finish the job on healthcare, and you'll discover that it becomes easier to advance the cause of UBI.
I guess you're more of a communist and I'm more of a social-traitor ;-)
This suggests you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone to UBI. Is this actually your opinion? Because it doesn't reflect the vibe I got in your article. If I understand your article correctly, you believe
A) UBI is inherently fragile.
B) Conservative lobbyists will cause UBI to decay into something ugly.
C) UHC is more resilient.
D) Therefore UHC is better.
E) And France proves it.
But your comments upthread suggest you believe UHC is superior because it's easier to implement given its comfortable position within the Overton-Window. The Overton-Window Argument says it may become feasible in the future, while the Fragility Argument says it will never become feasible.
Frankly, I suspect the article is a Motte & Bailey. Maybe your real issue with UBI is that it will take too long to campaign for. I.e. you want your marshmallow sooner rather than later. Which is reasonable. But understand that it's another discussion entirely and was not clear to me from the article.
The more charitable interpretation is that you believe UBI's fragility is due to its immaturity. And that UHC will grant us experience. Okay. But if so, this was not clear to me from your article. And it would contradict your position that UBI experiments are a waste.
What I meant is that if you care for economic security and lesser inequalities, then you have to fight for the whole liberal agenda (improving the coverage of all risks), not just one issue, otherwise the bad guys win this time, and the next, and the next.
I you think UBI's worth fighting (I don't), your only chance to succeed is in the context of advancing that liberal agenda in its entirety over the long term.
And right now, with Obama's legacy and Trump on the verge of winning, the main social front is social health insurance. Sadly I don't hear many tech people on that issue (for hypothetical reasons laid out in the article) and I reckon the whole UBI discussion has a responsibility in that deafening silence.
How convenient for you. The reason why you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone is probably because making UHC a reality will pull UBI within the Overton Window. But perhaps there are other ways to improve UBI's legitimacy. Like... discussing ramifications. Or performing an experiment.
Allow me to reiterate: "Voters' power over a coalition varies directly with the voters' volatility." Once a vote is pledged, the voter's negotiating leverage is lost. It's like haggling. If a potential buyer says "Oh what a nice sweater", the sweater's price is mysteriously doubles. People learn not to say things like that, because they don't want to waste their money.
Agglomeration is one tactic at one's disposal. Walking away is another. Maybe that sounds weird. Because as far as you know, the only force at work in politics is economies of scale. "Join us! Resistance is futile!" True, the power of a coalition (over other coalitions) is proportional to its size. But it comes at the cost of the voters' power over its residing coalition. By analogy. A heavier motorcycle is more powerful. But a lighter motorcycle has better handling. Meditation: why do states/provinces/municipalities exist if the federal government has stronger economies of scale?
UBI proponents should pledge their allegiance to liberals? Wouldn't that be convenient for you. Oops, the price just doubled. Question: how does a store convince a potential customer to part with their money? The store courts them with something of value. And how does a liberal convince a UBI proponent to part with their vote? "Your idea is dumb but mine is better. So buy into mine instead. Whoah, no need to compare -- trust me I'm a professional. Now shut up and give me your vote. By the way, your vote is worthless so you should totally give it to me." The pitch didn't start out bad, but things get sketchy fast. You're essentially trying to conscript (rather than entice) mercenaries into your coalition when you're not in a position to do so.
That being said, what I suggest is not throwing away the UBI concept for the greater good. Mostly I regret the lack of participation in the discussion over social risks and economic security in general, which I don't think can be reduced to UBI and the problems it (supposedly) solves.
For lack of that participation, UBI ends up resembling a solution looking for a problem (a very bad starting point as you know if you're in the startup world). And those who support it so enthusiastically look like they're single-issue voters.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-unethical-to-be-a-single-issue-v...
Workers engaged in the labor movement didn't fight for social insurance because it was a good idea. Rather they fought for it because some of them felt ill and couldn't afford proper care and then they died in misery.
Another way to put it: if I was aiming at building a giant tech company with a mission to provide economic security, I wouldn't start by promoting UBI but rather by solving my future customers' most pressing social problems—and those are (surprise) unaffordable housing and lack of health insurance, two issues that UBI doesn't address (or am I missing something?).
Maybe 10 years later, when you serve 1.7 billion users with a very large pool of risks, sophisticated financial tools and advanced machine learning, you'll end up with something vaguely resembling UBI. But UBI as a starting point seems like a failed startup to me.
Do something people want :-)
I am from Canada, so that is the data I am most familiar with. The employment rate has almost never been higher (2008 was the highest), the unemployment rate has almost never been lower (2008 was the lowest). The US housing crash did take some toll on the Canadian economy as did the more recent fall in oil prices, but we're still looking far better than the historic norms when it comes to job numbers.
At the same time, I remember in the mid-1980s there was widespread media panic about how the robots starting to become common in manufacturing were going to eliminate all the jobs. A rise in employment, and decline in unemployment is exactly the opposite of what I would have expected in the following 30 years based on the panic at the time. The claims being made today are exactly the same as they were 30 years ago.
When was the last time we saw the most common job on the brink of being wiped out? Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
Edit: [1] questions the claim that trucking in the most common job by state. There's still a lot of drivers out there though!
[1]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...
A couple of hundred years ago. And not just the most common job, but the job that was employing 90% of the labour force at the time. For comparison, transport truck driver accounts for just 1.5% of the labour force in Canada.
> Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
Yes. I struggle to believe we've reached the pinnacle of human achievement. Do you think the last time we went through this that people were sitting around thinking that the internet will provide jobs in the future? I'll be amazed if they even grasped that an internet could be possible. The jobs that will need to be done are things we cannot even dream of right now. If we could dream of them, we'd already be doing it.
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of valuable work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all.
Unemployment is a phenomenon fabricated by the ruling class for social control. As long as people are afraid of becoming unemployed, they'll stay in an exploitive job.
It's not as if there is some kind of fundamental limit on productivity. We've been trying to finish the work for a thousand years, and yet each year we keep finding more!
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all. We could probably erase global unemployment by adding mental health care jobs alone.
I suggest reading books and history to understand how stupid what you've said is. Take that as an insult if you wish.
Also, what history books are you talking about? I've read some history books but your suggestion was very unhelpful!
I don't believe that "things can't be worse" but rather "things could be better than what we have today"
And that's the problem. People imagine BIG BIG BIG problems when the facts are on exactly the opposite side of the spectrum. Things are so good, that it is kind of hard to believe how good they are. Compared with the rest of the 9800 years of human history, we live in paradise. Do you understand what I'm saying? If a person magically comes to our time, he would think he is in heaven.
Seriously?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473529 and marked it off-topic.