I think Tyler Cowen's post, "What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?" is one of the better analyses of why basic income is likely to fail even if it is implemented: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
The bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The larger point of that article is an important frame for this discussion: Everyone's income is based on the total economic surplus. No one's value to society is equivalent to their income.
Universal income is so complex and transformational that we have to assume that before it can be implemented in scale in the US, the prerequisites such as a welfare state with single payer healthcare will seem as a minor obstacle along the road. I guess what I'm saying is that "those forces" will have to change first, and that's the small problem. UBI is already a realistic possibility in some places but I think it's a few decades out (at least) in the US.
The places that can make realistic attempts to implement it now are those with large cradle-to-grave welfare systems and and an economic outlook that requires stimulus, which is why Finland is such an interesting example.
Basic income will require a major shift in attitudes. We already have a situation where even highly profitable companies refuse to pass on to their employees more share of profit than absolutely necessary. Why would the people who make these decisions support basic income? And they are the ones ultimately in power.
I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.
I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?
> The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing
The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.
The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.
I can't tell if this is an argument you are making, or just an argument you're saying exists, but there are several problems with it.
First, "hardworking peoples' income tax" already goes to people who, in their view, don't deserve it. Not just in the form of welfare and social programs that already exist, but also in the form of massive business in the defense industry or in the environmental industry, depending on where your political views lie.
Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
> First, "hardworking peoples' income tax" already goes to people who, in their view, don't deserve it. Not just in the form of welfare and social programs that already exist, but also in the form of massive business in the defense industry or in the environmental industry, depending on where your political views lie.
Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
> Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Good for you. If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
It's starting to sound more like this is your argument, rather than one you're charitably reminding us all of.
> Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
Well, that's one way to describe that point, I suppose. About the wrongest way, but one way.
Another way is: "this is a proposal which is not very different from what we already do, but might have a much better outcome."
Unfortunately, that's not a debate we can probably have, since we're having trouble agreeing on the meaning of English words.
> If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
Ah, the "ignorance is permanent" position. Sorry, I've got too many years of experience in arguments on the internet to want to spend any time on that.
If it isn't already clear to you that people's minds can be changed for better (or for worse) when presented with either evidence or convincing arguments, then I'm not sure which reality you're living in but it's not the same one I am.
Hardworking people would be free to leave paid employment and live on basic income themselves, rather than subsidise the unemployed. I think the hope is that work would become more pleasant as basic income lifts workers' bargaining power and that most people would choose to add to their basic income through paid employment.
This is why UBI will never be implemented in the USA. The culture's deep-seated puritanical belief that one's worth comes entirely from their productive work-output--that a living must be "earned" and "deserved" in order to be legitimate.
How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. This may solve some issues with basic income: it's not "free" money, which doesn't present as much of a problem to people's values. It won't feel like a handout, and people will more easily transition back to a real job if they want.
The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument against UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, might — enable them to be their flavor of productive.
I suspect that a lot of people's flavor of productive might turn on "artist" or "writer" where very few will be interested in "coal mine equipment operator", or "customer service person for DELL." For the foreseeable future there will always be jobs people don't want to do that machines aren't capable of taking over.
I agree with this. What will be interesting though is to see if the wages of those jobs will increase because people won't want to do them, or if wages will decrease because there will be so many more people that aren't employed, and there may be a certain prestige to being employed to do any work at all.
I suspect that no matter how you slice things, there will always be people who don't qualify for UBI (probably anybody without citizenship or a green card), and that those people will end up working many of those jobs for low wages.
> check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
Another demographic to consider is retired people with pensions.
Some of them waste it down the pub, others lead meaningful lives and describe these years as their happiest.
It sounds like you're suggesting that the government provide a class of jobs to citizens and pay them a small wage for it. Not only does that sound very different from the idea and principles of basic income, but it also sounds suspiciously close to certain socio-economic models that have been tried, unsuccessfully, by other countries throughout history.
Examples? You probably only think you have some because you're over-extrapolating what the proposal really is about. Job Guarantee advocates usually advocate for it within a larger framework that is pretty much the same as we have today.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
In addition there could be subsidy for for corporations and business that provide training certificate program material for entry level positions in there industries.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
Because they will be conditioned to a routine of getting up at 7am and getting to work by 9am putting in there hours and doing that five days a week.
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
I (PhD student) have a rather irregular/flexible schedule: Sometimes I'm at the institute at 9 am, sometimes at 11 am (but on the other hand I'm very often still at the institute at 8:00 pm). I believe I work a lot - but I'm the kind of person who strongly prefers a flexible instead of regular schedule.
TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
Are you going to apply for a job trimming hedges or cleaning up tables at a restaurant whey you finish your degree?
You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree. Many of them not even that and possibly some criminal or drug history. Or bad employment history.
~80% of the employment in the US is in the service industry. That is where most people are going to find employment.
These programs are not designed for PhD students they are designed for people who have had a hard time getting the basics straight like holding a job. Staying on the right side of the law. And making the right choices which You and I take for granted.
> You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree.
I know some people who are unemployed for a long time and/or have trouble getting a job or not getting fired soon after they get a job. I respect their problems. What I will never accept is why they aren't using the lot of free time that they have for example to learn a foreign language, learn computer programming or something similar. It's not that money is the problem: For language learning there is Duolingo or Memrise, for web programming there exists freeCodeCamp, etc. It's also not that there is a lack of people that they could ask for help if they really needed it: For programming or mathematics they could ask me if they really have trouble understanding, for language learning I would be willing to help them finding people they could ask etc.
I can accept that people have bad luck and end up in a shitty situation. But as I see it, many unemployed people are simply lazy.
People have problems doing those things for the same reason that people complain on Hacker News that they spend to much time procrastinating on the internet instead of working. And posting on HN when they should be studying etc.
Willpower is a very hard thing to master. Procrastination is a part of everyones life. Distractions are everywhere. People get sucked into watching TV. Playing sports. Video games, gambling etc, etc.
Also depression can be a big part of it. People get depressed and that can be very debilitating. Many people do not want to admit that they are depressed and would rather just shut themselves off from the world.
Some very smart and wealthy people end up dropping out of university or loosing all of there money and sleeping in the streets.
For some people that might end up in a work program simply having the responsibility of getting to work on time and having some obligations gives them a sense of order and purpose that can turn around there whole perspective and set them back onto a productive path.
You sure seem to place a lot of value in getting up at 7 am and being a butt in a seat five days a week. Why is that? You say it is important, but you don't provide an argument for why it is important.
I don't know why you are being down voted. I think you are right on. I grew up in West Virginia and escaped to Silicon Valley. I know people there who spend some time not working and then eventually lose the ability to hold a job at all. It is sad. Those people aren't lazy, they are normal. Many people on hacker news are the unusual (or exceptional) ones who would continue doing the same thing they are currently doing even if they weren't getting paid. I would.
Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
Engineering produces solutions to the problem the economy presents it. Its only going to solve the problems of poor people to the degree they can afford to pay for the goods and services designed. This could be a benefit of BI, redirecting some engineering focus from earners to non earners, who tend to live more economically sustainable lives by necessity.
I recommend you study some economics. A lot of the ideas you have seem to be a product of fear-based conjecture insted of knowledge. For example, you seem to not be aware that the economic development that market institutions facilitate makes goods/services more affordable for the masses, including poor people.
Did you read the articles I linked? What was your takaway from them?
You linked christian science monitor and an economist fluff peice fta: "take a bow capitalism," yea - quality, unbiased, non-ideological sources here. /s Neither mentioned the concept of BI.
Obviously after implementing BI the economy may not adhere to previous economic models since youre changing part of it.
What scientific studies would you reccomend? I dont consider ted talks to be a rigorous science community and I dont think its conjecture that products are designed for the people who will ultimately pay for them.
>Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
This isn't specifically about BI. My point is that you're wrong to claim economic systems don't matter. You're applying very little critical thinking and intellectual integrity to this debate. What do you think you'll accomplish by lying to others and yourself?
>You linked christian science monitor and an economist fluff peice fta: "take a bow capitalism," yea - quality, unbiased, non-ideological sources here. /s
Both are considered highly credible media sources. Do you think they are lying when they state that the spread of market institutions is responsible for the largest reduction in poverty in world history?
As for the TED talk, are you aware of who Paul Romer is? Do you know why he is considered credible? Did you watch the talk he gave, and the explanations he provided for why poverty has declined in various countries?
Your explainations of capitalism being great for various countries were tangental to any analysis of BI in america. That capitalism reduced poverty is both obvious and unrelated to BI. No one is suggesting removing personal property rights. Think about BI like the banking and auto bailouts, inject cash in a dead spot to keep the economy stable using quantative easing.
I didn't and won't watch your video source. I dont think cs and economist are lying just that one has christian in the name which says somthing about their preexisting political bias and I'm not lying to anyone, the economist article was definitely a fluff peice which even the most highly credible media institutions can produce.
BI is a form of forcible redistribution that weakens private property rights, which is a key market institution, so pointing put that stronger market institutions are better for wealth-generation/poverty-reduction is absolutely relevant to the topic of what the expected outcome of instituting BI is.
Putting your head in the sand and being optimistic is not going to make the potential problems of forcible redistribution go away.
When the evidence suggests that a particular idea is a bad one, even if that idea seemed wonderful at first, a d even if that idea is wildly popular, it has to be discarded, for the sake of society.
For that to be true all the socialist or communist states that have failed, or generally to live up to expectations, would have to be devoid of science. Which I'd posit isn't the case.
What I find best about these discussions is that when socialist or communist states fail, it's because of socialism or communism. When capitalist states fail, it's because of something else.
It's because the percentage of capitalist states failing is very low. The percentage of socialist states that failed (or converted to capitalism like China) is extremely high.
"workers owning the means of production" is neither necessary nor sufficient for socialism.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
It's unclear where you got the impression that collective ownership of the means of production is a definition of socialism invented by the American Left. The idea originates with Marx and Engels, the latter elaborating that it is both necessary and sufficient for the elimination of social classes:
"...said Marx, what we observe historically is that only one class of persons has always owned or monopolized the means of production throughout history. This condition of ownership over the means of production is the single most fundamental fact of the materialistic theory of history since it is this that leads to the division of society into economic classes." [Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, p. 44, paraphrasing Marx, The Germany Ideology, pp. 8-13.]
"...it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 72.]
"The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms and thus also to the state as state." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 93.]
tl;dr--In the analysis of Marx and Engels, ownership of the means of production is what divides economic classes; economic relations are the basis upon which are founded all social and political relations in society; in the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not, it is by the proletariat seizing the means of production that class differences are eliminated in society.
> French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
So "ownership of means of production" is simply the next step, an answer to an inevitable question that would arise from French Wikipedia's definition.
(1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
I don't think you'd find much purpose building the same road every week just because the state needs you to do something. It's not better than not working at all.
German has the so called "1 Euro jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_add... It's a job where you have to show up, cleaning up parks is one example, but essentially you're 99% on welfare. People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
> People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
How about an employer based basic income, where the government subsidizes X dollars per year, per employee. Seems like it would fit right in with an employer based healthcare.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
I think it is great they are studying UBI, but I agree with you in that giving people work is the way to go. I believe it goes by the term "workfare" (as opposed to welfare). There is always more work to do, the problem is people may not be willing to pay enough money to have it done. If the government is paying out the money anyway, there should be something productive coming from it. I think this is good for the country and for the people doing the work.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
"Make work" programs like this built the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn bridge.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
If those are providing tremendous value, as is I think your implication, then it's not "makework" as I would use the term. I have no objection to finding projects we want done and hiring people to do them (I may or may not object to the individual projects). I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one so that they "have a job".
>I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one
Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
There's no dignity in work, there's dignity in creating value, which not all work does. Private companies are quite capable of generating useless makework (If you haven't experienced this personally, I envy you).
My fear is that people would get stuck in such a program for life - they wouldn't have much opportunity to learn skills that could help them find a different job
> The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
Graeber is an avowed anarchist, so I don't think he's very keen on planned economies. People are forced into labor market participation because they can't meet their basic needs other ways, the police will squash these alternatives with violence.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".
I think most of the problem with "one-euro jobs" is more that they're (a) "one-euro" than anything else and (b) treated as a temporary thing for people who are unable to find anything else.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
Cleaning parks and repairing roads will be done via park cleaning and road repairing robots unfortunately.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
"Basic employment" sounds a lot like "the military" (or, in the USA, national guard etc). While they don't accept literally anyone, they will take mostly anyone and give them a job that they can perform reasonably well. Sometimes this is flying planes, but more often it's mopping floors and keeping track of inventory. To paraphrase a friend, the military can take somebody that's dumb as fuck and fit them into a little box where they perform one simple task well.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
Basic income will have to come with extremely limited immigration EDIT: or immigrants will be ineligible for the income.
That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.
This is an important point, especially because the first country that implements UBI will be the most attractive country to immigrate to for people who have no value to employers. Many potential immigrants who want to work hard will choose to go to other countries, so the country with UBI will miss out on their productivity and their tax dollars. That would certainly put a burden on the UBI system.
The developed world already has this problem: Australian unemployment benefits are on the same order as most UBI proposals. The current Australian response is the systematic rape and murder of unauthorised immigrants, which most of the country thinks isn't tough enough. (That is literally true, not a joke.) So this can go very wrong.
Version 2 of the transportation system is well known in outline. Undesirable elements are disappeared to remote islands, whose people don't want them there, and whose police, to the extent that there are any, aren't willing to protect them. The resulting rapes and murders are, well, results.
The people in charge of this go to extreme lengths to prevent anyone finding out the details, which is strong circumstantial evidence that they're doing something very wrong, and that they know it.
This isn't immediately obvious to me, especially if basic income is implemented as a negative income tax.
Of course if there are more people beneath the tax threshold you have to pay out more, but that might well be offset by their added contributions to the economy. I'm not saying it definitely will be, but it's not obvious that it won't.
I once went to a committee meeting held by an interfaith organization who wants universal Pre-K education. In CA, this will cost about $4500/student by the teacher's own estimates. I asked "Why don't we just pay parents with pre-K aged kids, say $3500/year. We will say the money is to enhance the educational environment of the child, but it will be up to the parent to spend it and the money will have few strings attached.
The schoolteachers in the room told me I was an idiot and to shut up.
Paying people to not contribute to GDP will result in decreased GDP. Lower GDP means less income to be distributed.
UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.
Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
Not on the short term no, but when you scale it on the long term it evens out and artificial increases like Keynesian style economics are temporary and GDP is in fact a good indicator of productivity.
The original argument was that GDP would decrease if we had less people producing, the counter argument seems "we could make GDP artificially increase" presumably as a way to suggest that GDP isn't meaningful. That's not a very good argument because artificial GDP inflation is a temporary solution that has devastating results down the line
I don't know what you are reading but that post had nothing about income or the relationship between individual income and GDP:
>Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
Probably not, actually, but to recognize that you have to go into the details of how inflation works.
Briefly, the only possible reason why there would be inflation is that the people given money for digging and filling holes now have more income that they can spend, so they increase demand for products. If this raises the price of products (and yes, that's an if), it will also mean that companies will have more money and an incentive to hire new people so that they can meet the increased demand. Some of those people will come from the digging-and-filling-holes program. It's a self-stabilizing feedback loop.
Obviously there are more subtleties, e.g. when a lot of domestic consumption is from imports. But even then, you wouldn't get runaway inflation. In the extreme case, currency markets would adjust up to the point where it becomes profitable to increase domestic production, and you'd get self-stabilization in that way. And increased domestic production in itself would be seen as a good thing by many people.
There is no such thing as "more money than you can spend" basic human nature. The issue is "more money in the system than the system is producing". And that's exactly what the digging holes and filling it system is about. . . it's actually an example that Keynes himself thought up to describe his theory of how to get out of the depression. And as great a man as Keynes was, unfortunately he was wrong because he didn't have the benefit of research into monetary policy. It'll be the same thing as if you printed a whole wackload of money and set it loose in the system.
I think you misread my comment. I wrote "more income that they can spend", not "more income than they can spend".
As for the whole Keynes being wrong thing, you didn't actually address what I wrote about inflation and how giving people a fixed amount of money for work (even if it's "make work") is self-stabilizing.
Also, to your "more money in the system than the system is producing": Keep in mind that the amount that the system is producing is not a fixed quantity. It's variable and part of the whole dynamics.
> Altman envisions a scenario in which the majority of Americans, fresh off their initial basic income payments, become perfectly content to sit at home in their virtual reality headsets. He questions whether that future is necessarily better than the stimulation and (modest) physical activity found in commuting to work and chatting with coworkers.
> "People do form bonds with their community and their society through work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."
I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.
I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.
Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self-funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.
It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.
[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.
Nevada County, California. Not really that far from the Bay Area.
Bandwidth is currently spotty -- your best bet is Comcast in their small and crowded service areas -- but a local ISP has secured funding for a large last-mile fiber deployment and I think they've either just broken ground or are about to.
It's beautiful here, you can get to the store and back in 5 minutes, you can go to Tahoe or to Sacramento for the day, and, seriously, it seems like everyone is always doing at least three cool things.
Its the company you choose to associate with. You probably don't hang out with the drug addicts,[0] unemployed[1] or the surprisingly large number of DUI arrestees.[2] Everyone has their own filter bubble of community, but I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
I've given a place to stay, a place to stow belongings, and paid work to homeless drug addicts. I am more familiar with their problems than most on HN (incl. the ones that are vocal about the contrast between the tech environment and the homeless in San Francisco).
Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.
In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.
> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.
b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.
d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."
e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.
f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.
g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.
h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?
I actually agree with your points here! I'm not trying to say all homeless or drug addicts would waste a UBI or other benefit. I think it is a great idea, and will work for the vast (some number of nines) majority of people, of any (current) income or social status.
I was just trying to say that no matter what we do, or how carefully we plan, there will always be some exceptional cases that UBI will fail for, and that these failures will generally be the same (very) small percentage pretty much everywhere in the world, people that behave in this way have always existed. The fact that this happens is therefore nothing to do with the community you are in, the government in power, the way the benefit is administered, etc. These outliers will always be available as anecdata, and it is useless to claim that you live in, or will generate, a utopia where they don't.
One thing I haven't really seen adequately addressed is this: what happens when some people inevitably waste their $2000 a month stipend on non-essentials and then don't have enough money for rent or food?
Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
> what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
The same thing that stops us from recreating the current welfare state on top of the current welfare state to protect people who barter away all their food stamps for drugs.
> Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.
For one thing, any "recreated system" would be dealing with fewer people. For another, it would be clear that the help those people need is of a different kind.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.
This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever.
I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and no income whatsoever are not the same thing.
Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.
You make some great points from personal experience which some might take as anecdotal but I'm grateful for you sharing something I haven't dealt with personally.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
This statement unnecessarily weakens your comment as it comes across as an attack and uncivil, regardless of the context. Your comment is very strong—and makes this very point—without it.
Thanks again for sharing your personal experience here. I trust you'll continue to do so!
Thank you for the feedback. I have deleted that piece -- not intended as shenanigans -- and ... maybe I need more opening lines or something. It certainly wasn't intended as a personal attack. We all have areas of ignorance -- aka simply not knowing.
I think I'd just remove it. An alternative would be to elicit in a charitable way what they're basing their comment on, or what their experience with homelessness is. That can be a tough to do (speaking from my own personal experience in online discussions). If I can't figure out a way to do that, I just leave it out.
For me the goal is reaching greater understanding. If someone were to tell me "You have no idea what you're talking about" I know my knee-jerk reaction would be to get defensive, and that wouldn't put me in a good place for continuing the discussion constructively. Granted, it's not a perfect reaction, but it's a very human one.
In any discussion I choose to participate in, I've tried my best to determine if I'm adding something purely factual/informational or trying to reach understanding of where the other person is coming from (not necessarily agreement), or sharing my own understanding. That sharing word is important to me right now. Some might choose teach or show or correct (which is where I hear "You have no idea where you're talking about" coming from), but I think words like these put up a barrier (or at least a speed bump) to understanding.
Like I said, that's where I'm at right now. Still trying to figure this stuff out.
No, I totally agree. I probably have some bad habits leftover from toxic school environments and from ...initial experiences on HN, which were a bit rough, with being openly female here.
It can be hard to see the beam in our own eye while we nitpick the mote in another's.
Have a great evening (or whatever time span it is where you are).
If the goal is to have more people working and we assume that the government would be paying the money for this "basic income", why don't we just subsidize companies that hire lots of people based upon how many people they have. And if you focus it toward jobs that require low skill only and manufacturing, then it directly benefits many companies in the US that would probably choose the same price for having something built in the US vs China. I am honestly pretty tired of flying to china to get products built.. Been doing it for years and I'd prefer to fly to Texas instead..
Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.
The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.
There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?
> Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
I think the gap however large is never a problem. It's if the influence of that concentration is allowed to subvert systems to self interest as extreme concentration of wealth tends to do then it becomes a destructive cycle for everyone else.
It doesn't matter if Bill gates or Queen Elizabeth has billions as long as everyone else is not bad off.
If everyone starts a 100m race and someone wins its fair, but this is a race where the privileged have advantages in too many ways from the time they are born and the unprivileged disadvantaged in too many ways and equality in opportunity in the context becomes nearly impossible beyond posturing and tokenism.
I'm fine with a wide wealth gap if (a) the bottom is bounded and (b) one's position on the spectrum depends more on individual merits than family lineage.
> The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to...
Happiness is correlated not so much with one's absolute wealth but rather with one's relative wealth compared to others in the local community. Even within those slums there is a wide range of incomes, and I think you'll find that the very poorest of the poor in a particular area are usually rather unhappy.
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.
I'm curious whether the basic income studies being done by Sam Altman and others will also cover what happens when subsidies are withdrawn?
Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.
(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."
I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.
139 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThe bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The places that can make realistic attempts to implement it now are those with large cradle-to-grave welfare systems and and an economic outlook that requires stimulus, which is why Finland is such an interesting example.
I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.
I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?
The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.
The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.
First, "hardworking peoples' income tax" already goes to people who, in their view, don't deserve it. Not just in the form of welfare and social programs that already exist, but also in the form of massive business in the defense industry or in the environmental industry, depending on where your political views lie.
Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
> Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Good for you. If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
> Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
Well, that's one way to describe that point, I suppose. About the wrongest way, but one way.
Another way is: "this is a proposal which is not very different from what we already do, but might have a much better outcome."
Unfortunately, that's not a debate we can probably have, since we're having trouble agreeing on the meaning of English words.
> If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
Ah, the "ignorance is permanent" position. Sorry, I've got too many years of experience in arguments on the internet to want to spend any time on that.
If it isn't already clear to you that people's minds can be changed for better (or for worse) when presented with either evidence or convincing arguments, then I'm not sure which reality you're living in but it's not the same one I am.
That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree. Many of them not even that and possibly some criminal or drug history. Or bad employment history.
~80% of the employment in the US is in the service industry. That is where most people are going to find employment.
These programs are not designed for PhD students they are designed for people who have had a hard time getting the basics straight like holding a job. Staying on the right side of the law. And making the right choices which You and I take for granted.
I know some people who are unemployed for a long time and/or have trouble getting a job or not getting fired soon after they get a job. I respect their problems. What I will never accept is why they aren't using the lot of free time that they have for example to learn a foreign language, learn computer programming or something similar. It's not that money is the problem: For language learning there is Duolingo or Memrise, for web programming there exists freeCodeCamp, etc. It's also not that there is a lack of people that they could ask for help if they really needed it: For programming or mathematics they could ask me if they really have trouble understanding, for language learning I would be willing to help them finding people they could ask etc.
I can accept that people have bad luck and end up in a shitty situation. But as I see it, many unemployed people are simply lazy.
Willpower is a very hard thing to master. Procrastination is a part of everyones life. Distractions are everywhere. People get sucked into watching TV. Playing sports. Video games, gambling etc, etc.
Also depression can be a big part of it. People get depressed and that can be very debilitating. Many people do not want to admit that they are depressed and would rather just shut themselves off from the world.
Some very smart and wealthy people end up dropping out of university or loosing all of there money and sleeping in the streets.
For some people that might end up in a work program simply having the responsibility of getting to work on time and having some obligations gives them a sense of order and purpose that can turn around there whole perspective and set them back onto a productive path.
More than 1/3rd of US adults are obese.
I agree that for some people routine would be helpful.
How did people survive before 9-5 jobs, then? Or, more drastically, before the beginning of agriculture? (Honest question.)
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
Did you read the articles I linked? What was your takaway from them?
Obviously after implementing BI the economy may not adhere to previous economic models since youre changing part of it.
What scientific studies would you reccomend? I dont consider ted talks to be a rigorous science community and I dont think its conjecture that products are designed for the people who will ultimately pay for them.
>Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
This isn't specifically about BI. My point is that you're wrong to claim economic systems don't matter. You're applying very little critical thinking and intellectual integrity to this debate. What do you think you'll accomplish by lying to others and yourself?
>You linked christian science monitor and an economist fluff peice fta: "take a bow capitalism," yea - quality, unbiased, non-ideological sources here. /s
Both are considered highly credible media sources. Do you think they are lying when they state that the spread of market institutions is responsible for the largest reduction in poverty in world history?
As for the TED talk, are you aware of who Paul Romer is? Do you know why he is considered credible? Did you watch the talk he gave, and the explanations he provided for why poverty has declined in various countries?
I didn't and won't watch your video source. I dont think cs and economist are lying just that one has christian in the name which says somthing about their preexisting political bias and I'm not lying to anyone, the economist article was definitely a fluff peice which even the most highly credible media institutions can produce.
Putting your head in the sand and being optimistic is not going to make the potential problems of forcible redistribution go away.
When the evidence suggests that a particular idea is a bad one, even if that idea seemed wonderful at first, a d even if that idea is wildly popular, it has to be discarded, for the sake of society.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
"...said Marx, what we observe historically is that only one class of persons has always owned or monopolized the means of production throughout history. This condition of ownership over the means of production is the single most fundamental fact of the materialistic theory of history since it is this that leads to the division of society into economic classes." [Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, p. 44, paraphrasing Marx, The Germany Ideology, pp. 8-13.]
"...it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 72.]
"The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms and thus also to the state as state." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 93.]
tl;dr--In the analysis of Marx and Engels, ownership of the means of production is what divides economic classes; economic relations are the basis upon which are founded all social and political relations in society; in the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not, it is by the proletariat seizing the means of production that class differences are eliminated in society.
So "ownership of means of production" is simply the next step, an answer to an inevitable question that would arise from French Wikipedia's definition.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
Further, the major difference between a "guarantee" and not comes when we've run out of useful things to hire for.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.
The people in charge of this go to extreme lengths to prevent anyone finding out the details, which is strong circumstantial evidence that they're doing something very wrong, and that they know it.
Of course if there are more people beneath the tax threshold you have to pay out more, but that might well be offset by their added contributions to the economy. I'm not saying it definitely will be, but it's not obvious that it won't.
The schoolteachers in the room told me I was an idiot and to shut up.
UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.
original source of this example: https://ploum.net/largent-doit-il-etre-notre-seul-objectif/ (in french, but interesting essay)
The original argument was that GDP would decrease if we had less people producing, the counter argument seems "we could make GDP artificially increase" presumably as a way to suggest that GDP isn't meaningful. That's not a very good argument because artificial GDP inflation is a temporary solution that has devastating results down the line
>Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
there's nothing about individual income there.
Briefly, the only possible reason why there would be inflation is that the people given money for digging and filling holes now have more income that they can spend, so they increase demand for products. If this raises the price of products (and yes, that's an if), it will also mean that companies will have more money and an incentive to hire new people so that they can meet the increased demand. Some of those people will come from the digging-and-filling-holes program. It's a self-stabilizing feedback loop.
Obviously there are more subtleties, e.g. when a lot of domestic consumption is from imports. But even then, you wouldn't get runaway inflation. In the extreme case, currency markets would adjust up to the point where it becomes profitable to increase domestic production, and you'd get self-stabilization in that way. And increased domestic production in itself would be seen as a good thing by many people.
As for the whole Keynes being wrong thing, you didn't actually address what I wrote about inflation and how giving people a fixed amount of money for work (even if it's "make work") is self-stabilizing.
Also, to your "more money in the system than the system is producing": Keep in mind that the amount that the system is producing is not a fixed quantity. It's variable and part of the whole dynamics.
> "People do form bonds with their community and their society through work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."
I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.
I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.
Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self-funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.
It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.
[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.
Bandwidth is currently spotty -- your best bet is Comcast in their small and crowded service areas -- but a local ISP has secured funding for a large last-mile fiber deployment and I think they've either just broken ground or are about to.
It's beautiful here, you can get to the store and back in 5 minutes, you can go to Tahoe or to Sacramento for the day, and, seriously, it seems like everyone is always doing at least three cool things.
http://gonevadacounty.com/
We're pretty high-tech for a rural county too, and we're actively recruiting tech companies to come up here.
If someone's seriously interested in relocating, contact me. I'm pretty plugged-in to the folks pulling strings to make it happen.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANEVA0URN [1] https://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/hhsa/bh/docs/Alcohol%20and... [2] Nevada County has a much higher rate of alcohol involved motor vehicle accidents than Placer County or the State as a whole
Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.
In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.
> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.
b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.
c. There exist right now entire classes of businesses which survive on exploiting poverty, and UBI might make them go extinct, and that would certainly be a net good for society. For one example: http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the... for another: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee... (and before all the supply-side armchair economists appear to tell me that UBI just means that impound costs and court costs will rise to exactly match: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/econo...)
d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."
e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.
f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.
g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.
h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?
I was just trying to say that no matter what we do, or how carefully we plan, there will always be some exceptional cases that UBI will fail for, and that these failures will generally be the same (very) small percentage pretty much everywhere in the world, people that behave in this way have always existed. The fact that this happens is therefore nothing to do with the community you are in, the government in power, the way the benefit is administered, etc. These outliers will always be available as anecdata, and it is useless to claim that you live in, or will generate, a utopia where they don't.
Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
The same thing that stops us from recreating the current welfare state on top of the current welfare state to protect people who barter away all their food stamps for drugs.
In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.
You may be interested in Tyler Cowen's post on this subject, which I posted about elsewhere in this thread: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.
This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.
That's, uhh, a bold assumption.
They have no income whatsoever.
I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and no income whatsoever are not the same thing.
Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
This statement unnecessarily weakens your comment as it comes across as an attack and uncivil, regardless of the context. Your comment is very strong—and makes this very point—without it.
Thanks again for sharing your personal experience here. I trust you'll continue to do so!
For me the goal is reaching greater understanding. If someone were to tell me "You have no idea what you're talking about" I know my knee-jerk reaction would be to get defensive, and that wouldn't put me in a good place for continuing the discussion constructively. Granted, it's not a perfect reaction, but it's a very human one.
In any discussion I choose to participate in, I've tried my best to determine if I'm adding something purely factual/informational or trying to reach understanding of where the other person is coming from (not necessarily agreement), or sharing my own understanding. That sharing word is important to me right now. Some might choose teach or show or correct (which is where I hear "You have no idea where you're talking about" coming from), but I think words like these put up a barrier (or at least a speed bump) to understanding.
Like I said, that's where I'm at right now. Still trying to figure this stuff out.
It can be hard to see the beam in our own eye while we nitpick the mote in another's.
Have a great evening (or whatever time span it is where you are).
Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.
The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.
There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?
This is what the leftist want you to believe.
It doesn't matter if Bill gates or Queen Elizabeth has billions as long as everyone else is not bad off.
If everyone starts a 100m race and someone wins its fair, but this is a race where the privileged have advantages in too many ways from the time they are born and the unprivileged disadvantaged in too many ways and equality in opportunity in the context becomes nearly impossible beyond posturing and tokenism.
Forced reverse wealth transfer.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to...
For example, he wrote:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.
Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.
(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.