Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the concept of universal basic income based on the idea that everyone who is a citizen, regardless of earnings/wealth/background, gets a set amount of money? Rather than the scaling mechanism based on earnings as stated in this article.
You are correct. The article is flatly wrong when it suggests that people would lose the UBI as they start making money elsewhere. It is not global unemployment insurance.
There are certainly UBI proposals in which at some point UBI does scale back. I don't see a good reason why it scaling back would disqualify it from being a UBI, and I certainly see little likeness to unemployment insurance.
I guess the justification for not scaling it back would be that it makes it more palatable for the people paying for it. If someone received $10,000 in UBI and payed $10,000 in tax it would be neutral but their attitude to other recipients might be different.
There are several suggested implementations of UBI, one of which is based on negative income tax. In that case, the amount of money you get from the government is based on how much money you make.
The author makes a classical mistake, thinking that the displaced low-skill workers can and will gain high-tech skills. I think that's a complete pipe dream. Yes, millions are employed in IT and engineering, but we're talking about billions of uneducated or barely educated people who will lose their jobs very quickly.
If you want to see what happens when people go into IT out of necessity, look at the Indian IT market. It's full of "programmers" who can't solve the simplest problems, who hate what they do, who produce really low quality code. (And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys, but the average case is rather bad).
Not only that, we don't have the IT jobs, even if all of them did learn to code.
As far as I can see, welfare state is inevitable, as much as I'm against it. It's still better than to let people lose their homes and/or starve.
The answer is that there is no solution. Basic income is economically unsustainable. Social crisis is inevitable (like in previous two installments, agricultural -> industrial and industrial -> knowledge economy), and there is nothing that can be done about it except of surviving through it.
Any possible basic income solutions will only make the problem worse.
In the current economic ideology, sure. But there is a lot of surplus (profit). What makes you think it's economically unsustainable? People would have to readjust their expectations, for sure. I'm not saying I know that it _is_ economically sustainable, but I haven't done the math. Have you?
If you think of giving everyone 6000 $ per mth it may be unsustainable , but i think 1500 $ per mth + a reformed healthcare is very much doable, it is less than 1 standard deviation from the mean per capita income
It seems clear to me that there is an IQ cutoff below which one cannot be an effective programmer. And this cutoff is actually quite high, comparatively. I'd be very surprised if more than 5 percent of the population, with the current distribution of intelligence, could become effective programmers, even if highly motivated. All psychometric evidence points to IQ being largely genetic, and the environmental components irreversible after after a very young age. It's odd, but my very "conservative" view on intelligence and heredity, that of agreeing with the scientific consensus, leads me to support some forms of wealth distribution.
Intelligence is not as set in stone as all that over time. The Flynn effect is well documented across different societies, showing a rise in the average population IQ by ~3 every year, and by 10 every 30 years. This means if you need an IQ of 110 to be a programmer, the average person will be able to do it in 30 years.
You've really hit on the elephant nobody talks about because talking about actual inborn differences in human ability is taboo across the board.
What we will see in the 21st century is a large fraction of the human population fall off the edge where the marginal value of their labor becomes <=0 no matter what they do. They can't change this because they got a bad hand in the genetic lottery, which is not their fault.
This is very different from industrialization 1.0. That created a lot of jobs because the machines were dumb, and because economic growth was huge. Now the machines are smart and growth is slow.
Welfare state, violent revolution, or absolute surveillance state totalitarianism and starving ghettos. Pick one dystopia. I think welfare state is definitely the least of these evils.
Eventually we could fix this with augmentation and universally available genetic engineering, but the tech is not ready and the social, philosophical, and religious understanding and assimilation is even less ready than the tech. The process of cultural adoption cannot even begin until the tech is mature enough. Unskilled labor disrupting AI will arrive long before the means of improving ourselves.
Edit: some have brought up the Flynn effect and evidence IQ is growing. Unfortunately even if true I think it's far too slow. Automation tech is advancing much faster with a decades shorter iteration cycle. Doubt digit median IQ growth over decades would probably be required to prevent mass unemployment at the scale of billions and that's pure sci-fi.
The IQ cutoff thing is, to me clearly, arrogant bullshit. In fact your whole comment seems like nothing but arrogant bullshit. If overall intelligence were indeed entirely genetic, since western societies operate on meritocracy, then the upper classes of these countries would be full of supremely intelligent uber mensch or whatever. That however, even from cursory inspection, is definitely not the case since you have more than your share of rich and stupid individuals.
Programming is nothing but an area of work which is more suited to people with a certain analytical skill sets. There are plenty of cases of people from diverse backgrounds excelling in this area in spite of the obstacles in front of them.
The upper classes do have higher average IQ, an effect which is more pronounced the more meritocratic the society. Yes, there are lots of stupid rich people and tons of smart impoverished people, but we are talking about averages here. As most people desire wealth and intelligence is your capacity to realize your desires, intelligent people acquire more wealth than less-intelligent people. As intelligence is very heritable, this has unfortunate class implications. I’m not endorsing this description as normative, I just think it is accurate. This state of affaires is allowed to be both true and objectionable. Natural selection is a horrible process that runs on death and suffering, it would be very odd if it shaped our variations in a manner that matches our ideological preferences.
> Programming is nothing but an area of work which is more suited to people with a certain analytical skill sets.
If you think you can turn 100 IQ people into productive programmers, you could make billions by training your own staff and undercutting everyone else. Give it a try.
Consider a Trump voting factory worker who lost his job. There is nothing (besides his own pride) preventing him from taking up elder care, house cleaning, nursing or something similar. This is a necessary economic transition.
As the article notes, a BI makes it easy for this person to avoid making the necessary transition into the pink collar economy. The result is that our elderly are not sufficiently cared for, our high skill labor has dirty houses, our patients don't get adequate nursing care, and similar things.
Why should the elderly suffer without adequate care simply because this person's misguided pride is preventing him from taking on pink collar jobs?
You realize that your number includes children, the disabled and retirees, right?
It's not an entirely different thing that people are refusing work because they prefer the laziness that government programs enable. That's the whole point. BI only makes this problem worse.
The only "children" on that chart are those 16 and up (i.e., old enough to quit school and go to work). While there have been increases in retirees in recent years, that's not nearly enough to account for the spike on that chart.
If you want people to join your "pink collar economy", you're going to have to pay them an adequate wage and provide decent working conditions. The days when people would work as personal servants in exchange for a crust of bread and a pile of straw to sleep on aren't coming back, nor should they, even for "Trump voting factory workers" (like Peter Thiel, you mean?).
By the way, nursing is a skilled profession. Most nurses today have degrees in the subject and a significant number have advanced degrees. The ones who don't have degrees are almost all older women who went through a multi-year hospital training program (these used to be common, but are pretty rare today). Nursing isn't something that you can just walk into the day after you stop tightening bolts at the Ford plant.
If you want people to join your "pink collar economy", you're going to have to pay them an adequate wage and provide decent working conditions.
Alternately, we could just stop paying people to sit around being lazy. Here in India people fill these jobs and earn far less than what most western activists consider a "living wage".
Why do you believe that the non-working Trump voters should be able to mooch off of the rest of society? Why do you believe social obligations go only one way?
Here in India people fill these jobs and earn far less than what most western activists consider a "living wage"
That's nice. I prefer living in a first world country with a first world economy, myself.
"Why do you believe that the non-working Trump voters should be able to mooch off of the rest of society?"
Do you have any evidence that "Trump voters" are more likely to be on welfare than non-Trump voters? I will be quite surprised if you do (in fact, I'll be shocked).
Public housing, medicaid, food stamps aren't the only form of government assistance. It's better to not make comments that tell your story that depend on partial statistics. It's easy to respond that states voting for Trump on a whole receive more federal aid than ones that didn't. The situation is likely more complex than what you've described.
Statistics in this article are so misleading it's hard to see it as anything other then deliberate.
From the raw data, 4.95% of democrats are on welfare compared to 3.48% of republicans (Total number of people on welfare in the poll is 54, so the margin of error is large).
You get the 65% number only if you don't account for the fact that there are more democrats in the poll (almost twice as many). The same goes for the 22% republican number in appendix.
That's nice. I prefer living in a first world country with a first world economy, myself.
Why do you think caring for the elderly, providing child care to working women and making Ubers more available would make the economy third world?
Do you believe India would suddenly become more prosperous if people refused to work? Will people sitting at home watching TV somehow build toilets for everyone?
> Alternately, we could just stop paying people to sit around being lazy. Here in India people fill these jobs and earn far less than what most western activists consider a "living wage".
I've honestly never understood why government believes they should make it illegal to pay someone a mutually-agreed-upon wage, or why anything thinks doing so is a good thing.
If it costs $X/year to live, and you can find people in a bad situation willing to work for you for $Y/year (where Y < X), where do you think the remaining $X-Y comes from? From government subsidies, of course. So why should the government have to pay that money? If you have a business plan, but to make it work you need to have your workforce on government subsidies, you have a bad business plan and should be allowed to fail.
If someone has no job the government pays the full $x. So the employer is only helping the government. I agree with you that we should cut these government subsidies.
However, the subsidies are to the worker, not the company. To see this, imagine a hypothetical world without the subsidies, and try to figure out if the employer would be richer or poorer. (Hint: richer, since they don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV while collecting welfare" option.)
> If someone has no job the government pays the full $x. So the employer is only helping the government.
Better to let the government pay the full $X, rather than keeping companies around that only succeed because they depend on the government to keep their employees alive. And think of a company like WalMart—by paying its employees very little, and depending on the government to take over things it doesn't want to pay for (like security, leaving it to the police instead, at enormous cost to them, but no cost to WalMart), they can undercut other companies that cost the government far less, leaving the whole economy less healthy.
> However, the subsidies are to the worker, not the company
The subsidies are to the worker, yes. GP was asking why the government has any say in a business relationship between a worker and a company, and the answer is: because they're involved as well, through the need to subsidize whatever the company doesn't pay. They're automatically part of the equation, and thus have a say in what the worker & company can settle for.
> To see this, imagine a hypothetical world without the subsidies, and try to figure out if the employer would be richer or poorer. (Hint: richer, since they don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV while collecting welfare" option.)
You mean, if companies were unable to pay less than a living wage? They would have to pay the worker more money, so they would be poorer. However, since all companies were paying more, everyone would probably do better in the end.
Or do you mean, if they could pay people as little as they wanted? They'd be richer, but less and less money would end up moving around in the economy, and everything would slowly grind to a halt. And lots of people would starve.
Better to let the government pay the full $X, rather than keeping companies around that only succeed because they depend on the government...
How is wasting more money and having less productive output better?
Or do you mean, if they could pay people as little as they wanted?
Of course. In this world, companies don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV and get free money" option, so they can pay less. Your "subsidy" is actually directly harmful to the people you claim it benefits.
...keep their employees alive....They'd be richer, but less and less money would end up mving around in the economy, and everything would slowly grind to a halt. And lots of people would starve.
Yet somehow I'm surrounded by about 1 billion living people with a GDP growth rate double that of the United States. Your theory doesn't fit any of the facts.
> Of course. In this world, companies don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV and get free money" option, so they can pay less. Your "subsidy" is actually directly harmful to the people you claim it benefits.
So if companies can pay people less, that will then lead them to... pay people more?
> Yet somehow I'm surrounded by about 1 billion living people with a GDP growth rate double that of the United States.
When your per capita GDP catches up to the US's, tell me again about your growth rate.
I think your alternatives for a factory worker are interesting as they are jobs whose wages I know are being driven down by (often illegal) immigrant labor. House cleaning is the most notorious and has almost always been done by fresh off the boat immigrants for peanuts, I pay my mexican maid in Austin $75 in cash for a day of labor. Elder care pays employees a bit more but usually less than $10 an hr. How many jokes are there that maids or elder care nurses are from foreign nations? Just the other day I saw a Seinfeld episode where the elderly care taker was african and didn't speak english. Of your suggestions the only with decent pay is nursing which requires a degree and my mom constantly complains about the thousands of oversee nurses they fly over every year to drive down her wages. Similar to how Tech the employers complain about the huge talent shortage but don't pay competitive salaries and rather import labor.
I don't know where I'm going with this other than to say that the Trump voters are justifiably angry at the WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM and suggesting the entire rust belt become house cleaners or personal aides is silly.
We wouldn't be hiring immigrants to do these jobs if the jobs were automated away. That's the point.
I understand that you feel an African woman should be prevented from economically competing with white men, but I don't really agree with that. I'm sure it feels very bad when people lose status relative to out-group members, but I don't consider the anger that result from this to be "justifiable".
Because Americans want to maintain their standard of living and can't do that if they are competing with a billion Africans who would be happy with half that standard.
Why do there have to be moral arguments? We want a particular outcome and can make it happen. If people in other countries want the same outcome then they can make it happen there.
FWIW no need to go as far as India (or China or SE Asia) to find mediocrity. There's also plenty in Europe and North America. The main difference is you're in the same office as the bad developers, so you spot them faster.
With all due respect, OP did note this: "And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys, but the average case is rather bad".
People forget that IT is not the final product. Facebook is not big because they solve technical challenges (related to code and infrastructure). They are big because they are solving a specific problem people had. They are not a special snowflake. If FB would disappear the world would not loose anything. We would just move to something else and which basically happened in China due to chinese gov's protectionism.
We do not need that many programmers,sysadmins,engineers. We do not need zillions of compilers,programming languages, frameworks or crud apps.
If we want to be effective at using and consuming resources we need to be effective at redistributing the wealth. I am a capitalist by heart but in a dystopian world of mega corps we just do not need billionaires. We do not need brilliant businessmen the same way we do not need that many workers.
In such a world we do not need capitalism. We do not need companies competing with each other (well at least not on planet earth). We can move on and reward the 1% of scientists and provide them with much more money and resources.
If we want to keep people in line we can make them study more and provide good standards of living.
We are talking more or less socialism / communism here but the reality is that we will not need to compete with each other anymore. Our only problem will be to avoid a war between superpowers and people revolting against governments. The fact is we do not really need improvements that much when compared to the past. We do not need faster iphones and more efficient batteries. It would be nice to have but it's not that important after all. The only purpose of iphone is to be connected and consume. The only purpose of a car be it electric or normal is to transport people or goods from point A to point B.
Data driven decisions please, all others are opinions and emotion.
If there is a greater (measurable) net benefit to society with Universal Basic Income vs. our socialist agenda of getting into peoples lives more directly (food stamps, healthcare, low income and child subsidies)... then who gives a damn?
If you are unaware, or lacking a deep appreciation, of what money is (fractional reserve banking) then you have little, if anything at all, to contribute to this "debate"
One difference is that UBI allows individuals to spend the money on whatever they need most, rather than requiring central planning to decide what they need. There's some evidence to indicate this may make it more efficient in delivering life-improving value to the recipient.
Not the GP, but yes I would. The problem is that this is very hard to demonstrate for several reasons.
First, most analyses assume that healthcare is fungible, so anyone who "has healthcare" is considered to be in the same boat. This is untrue. Most government-provided healthcare systems rank quite poorly in terms of wait times, fatality rates, etc. compared to private healthcare.
Second, it's hard to distinguish the benefit of government medical systems from the benefit of freeing the private medical system from legal red tape. For example, many people cite lower drug costs as a benefit of government medicine. This is not an intrinsic feature of "single-payer" healthcare, but rather a result of the fact that drug agencies in the US have the full weight of the patent system behind them in order to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. In other countries, since the government both buys drugs and controls IP, the government always has the threat of removing IP rights to a drug if a company fails to provide a "reasonable" price, which simulates actual competition. One could get the same effect by changing the nature of medical IP rather than taking the drastic measure of publicizing drug purchases. That is a utility analysis I'd really like to see.
Third, one must include the utility of having a choice. There are both psychological and practical components to this, but it's better when you're not forced to pay for a service you don't want. I know how good private healthcare can be; just go to a tourist hospital in Mexico or India. Truly an awesome experience. A super easy way to get all the alleged benefits of socialized healthcare (especially affordability) is just to deregulate the shit out of hospitals. A lot of Americans are scared about that because they think deregulation is synonymous with the triangle shirtwaist factory, but it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in medically deregulated countries.
Not really interested in finding a study that happens to support that particular claim, especially since "quality" in this case is 100% subjective, so someone else could very reasonably disagree with me. All I can talk about is my experience; take it as nothing more than an opinion. The NHS sucks, Canadian healthcare sucks, US healthcare is good but expensive and overcomplicated, Mexican healthcare is great. I have heard from friends how Indian healthcare is similarly excellent, and French and German healthcare suck (unless, in the German case, you are a US citizen with US insurance, then they'll actually treat you well because they can get paid for it).
> If you can afford it, can the Mexican and Indian citizens afford that health care in "tourist hospitals"?
That's completely irrelevant. We're comparing the quality of care at the same price point. Obviously poorer people in poor countries won't be able to pay for the luxury healthcare that your average first-worlder can. They also wouldn't be able to afford the kind of socialized healthcare we could afford.
Just to give you a price point, 2 hours with a doctor (not a nurse), 2 x-rays, and an ultrasound was under $250 in Mexico. No paperwork, no waiting, no bullshit. Happy medical staff, happy patients. The exact opposite of any red-tape-encumbered first-world hospital.
While I agree with the sentiment (data is the only reasonable way to make large-scale decisions), it is important to remember that any utility analysis needs to include such factors as the negative utility associated with workers knowing that xy% of their paycheck is going to support people who don't have any work obligations.
For example, if UBI resulted in marginally improved economic conditions by some utilitarian heuristic over a somewhat more laissez-faire system, I would probably prefer the more laissez-faire system due to the social/moral value I ascribe to greater freedom and autonomy.
I'm sure you're aware of this notion, but I figured it made a good addendum to what you said.
A certain % of my paycheck is already going to those people via soup kitchens, and the like.
It would be nice to know, assuming UBI is more effective, that the redistribution is not done in a condescending way. Such as empowering people to make their own decisions and be more autonomous vs. high overhead bureaucracies interfering with peoples' lives at the micro level.
I think your expression of "greater freedom and autonomy" is in line with UBI (once again, assuming there is clear evidence that there is a net benefit and no more money leaves my wallet in either system)
> I think your expression of "greater freedom and autonomy" is in line with UBI
While this is a reasonable argument, and why I would prefer UBI to existing welfare schemes, my definition of "freedom" doesn't include anything that you force someone else to pay for, and my definition of "autonomy" doesn't include living off the sweat of other people. They're almost antonymous, in fact.
Socialism is a political system where all the means of production pertains to the state, a social democracy is a capitalist system where the means of productions are private
It's a twisted ideology, but one can easily argue here that anything the government does is socialist, because it supplants a function that could be performed by the private market, regardless of the market's willingness or effectiveness at solving the problem for a greater good of society.
One good case is movie ratings: by rating films for age-appropriate audiences, the MPAA solves an issue that the government could do itself, but this way prevents unnecessary overreach. If a theater permits minors to see R rated films, it is barred from playing any films associated with the MPAA, which is pretty much all of them.
The obviously bad version of this ideology is health care and health insurance, where free market incentives result in milking the state (taxpayers) while simultaneously providing a poorer quality of service at an inflated cost because health cannot be bargained with.
I don't agree with the results of the American mindset but in a way it still makes sense, just by a very narrow and cold interpretation.
> while simultaneously providing a poorer quality of service at an inflated cost
It seems to me from personal experience that the quality of service in US is exemplary. I'm not disagreeing with you that the cost is inflated, just I do not readily agree with you that the service is poor. Usually when I hear about a problem in the healthcare realm, it's not a matter of poor service, rather it's a matter of inaccessible service due to the high cost. It's usually this, or something having to do with state-run healthcare, such as Veteran Affairs, or healthcare provided to prison inmates.
> The average annual income for tech industry workers is about $100,000.
Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?
> If the basic income will pay you $30,000 a year to do nothing, and that subsidy goes away as you make more money, so at an income of $100,000 your government subsidy disappears, you are paying an implicit tax rate of 30% on top of the taxes you are already paying to support everyone else's basic income.
The fallacy here is that not all taxes have to be on someone else's income.
> Officially, the poverty rate has only declined from 19% to about 16%—but by the admission of the War on Poverty's own defenders, "If government benefits are excluded, today's poverty rate would be 29 percent." That's what it means to make the poor more secure in their poverty.
Uhm... what? I think the author has a wildly different definition of poverty than I do. In my book, poverty means "not having enough money to afford the basic means of living and participation in society and culture". It's quite irrelevant if that money comes from a state subsidy or from a loan. It just means that I'm dependent on the state rather than on an employer. But for him, state money seems to be non-existent as far as poverty is concerned.
"Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?"
Yeah, that's so vague it's almost meaningless.
You could argue that the guy who unboxes stuff at Best Buy is a "tech industry worker", but there's a pretty significant gap between him and the guy who creates market models for a hedge fund.
Of course, there are a lot of jobs that aren't done because they're economically unviable - from dance to ministry to full-time parenting. The author is working from a hidden assumption in most economic discussion - that all value can be measured in dollars. If you can't put a dollar value on it, it has no value.
That is, of course, bullshit. But it doesn't stop them.
Beyond food, shelter, health care, communication, transportation... what are our needs, exactly? What problem do we solve by having most adults devoting the majority of their waking hours to something they actively dislike?
If you go that direction, then you have to acknowledge that there is work that can't be measured economically. That there is value that can't be measured in dollars.
This deliberate exclusion is already happening. I'm suggesting we should acknowledge the deliberate exclusion, or start including it, even if it makes the arguments more complex.
This is always the problem. I get it, activity that generates additional wealth is always preferred but it's not the only way a given person can contribute to society.
There's a economically solid argument to pay people to sit at home and not commit crime, start riots, devalue property by being homeless, or anything else vast numbers of people with no options currently do. Paying for someone's apartment and living expenses is FAR cheaper than the economic value lost by them devaluing property and tying up Emergency Services.
If the purpose of a BI is to protect productive members of society from destructive bandits, why not just wall ourselves off from them? That seems far cheaper.
Newark, NJ causes a lot of harm to taxpayers who are forced to funnel resources to it. As far as I'm aware, bandits from Newark do not generally stage raids into Hoboken to steal resources from the productive folks living there.
Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how an economically solid argument might work?
That was minus 4 years worth of inflation and even then, if you take the most optimistic homeless numbers versus the most pessimistic housing numbers, it's still only a few hundred more. Frankly I'd much rather my tax dollars went to that than a ton of other things we blow way more money on.
That's not really what I was asking about. I was asking about a comparative cost between a) paying people who would otherwise "commit crime, start riots, devalue property" or b) just walling ourselves off from them.
You're just comparing two different versions of (a).
Oh, I misunderstood what you were saying. My apologies.
Anyway addressing that point, putting aside the humanitarian issues of "if you aren't going to behave the way we want you to, you get thrown out of society and are left to presumably starve and die" the simple fact is that walling them off is going to be exceptionally difficult to do, just for the logistics and the construction required. Not to mention, even if you make the laws pretty permissive, I have a feeling you'd have a lot more have-nots than haves, and at the end of the day, numbers do matter...
I'm not sure what's wrong with "if you become a dangerous bandit, society doesn't welcome you". It's you who described the poor as bandits that are cheaper to pay off than protect ourselves from, not me.
I agree numbers matter, which is why I asked if you had a ballpark on them. I guess you don't?
Woah woah woah, back up a bit. I never once said that all poor people are bandits. I said that keeping people homeless who then in turn tie up emergency services (because they can't practice hygiene, eat properly or go to the doctor until they're on the edge of death) is more expensive that you'd think, and that when a number of homeless people live in a given area that it impacts property values, not to mention the image of the community. I'm not saying they're malicious about it, I'm saying that's what happens when you don't have access to basic services.
This study shows that just giving people a home is not only vastly superior ethically, but helps these people get OUT of that situation and in many ways can be cheaper too.
You said we should "pay people to sit at home and not commit crime, start riots...".
I'm asking whether paying the dane geld is really the most cost effective solution to this problem. I think we've now agreed that it's not actually a real problem, and probably just a post-hoc justification for what you really want to do?
Actually, it seems to me that you can put a dollar value on dance, ministry, or full-time parenting. Anyone who choses to engage in these activities rather than a more lucrative career demonstrates that they value those activities more than the career in question. On the other hand, those who choose the career over those activities demonstrate that they value the money more than those activities.
It seems to me that the problem isn't that you can't put a monetary value on these activities. The problem is that these activities have high positive externalities. Most of the benefits due to these activities accrue to society at large, and not the individual engaging in the activity. As a result, individuals will tend to undervalue the activity compared to its total societal value.
> What problem do we solve by having most adults devoting the majority of their waking hours to something they actively dislike?
Everyones problems, your problems, my problems. I spend every week interacting with people that I give money to that solve small but important problems for me.
In fact I have to call my bank soon to help me solve a problem with initiating a wire transfer, and i have no doubt the person on the other end of the line hates working in a call center, but I still need his help solving a problem.
This article is just relentlessly wrong. People did die of starvation and exposure after each of the revolutions mentioned. Working days did become shorter and welfare expanded massively after each one. Best line: "The future doesn't come that fast". How wrong can you be? It's hard enough to predict the outcome of multiple nonlinearities interacting. But it's impossible if you're not even looking. You definitely can't assume that things are going to turn out like last time.
This article makes a few false assumptions, I think.
1. That everyone can transition into new jobs. Whether it be lack of education, intelligence, or just being at an age where the brain isn't as plastic as it used it, it is hard to find a new job if your field ceases to exist.
2. He correctly assesses that this will be a slow transition (if at all). This will actually inhibit people from trying to learn new skills because they won't realize their job sector is dead until its too late.
3. He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.
>> He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.
And that's probably a good assumption. There's wisdom behind the old adage, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools."
Experience tells us that people who don't work tend to spend their time not in beautiful creative ventures, but in frivolous (TV, gaming, entertainment) or destructive acts (drugs, crime, violence...).
A person who works is likely more well-rounded (better at handling responsibility, working with others, contributing to society in some small way, etc.) than a person who instead spends his day watching day-time television.
His position is self fulfilling. We only see the negative folks he's talking about. There are plenty of financially independent folks who continue to work because they want to.
I heard a proposal that UBI should provide 85% of a solid living wage, people taking it may need to work some (or sell art etc) to reach their desired level of comfort.
Then people pursuing education would receive 115% of aforementioned baseline. The conceit here is that educating oneself is always good. This would, at least, provide some impetus to develop new employable skills.
I'm not a fan of UBI. Whatever this proposal is, I do not like it.
What incentive is there for real employable skills when sitting back in a classroom is going to give one more than what is needed for survival? People are more likely to take bullshit classes.
Real employable skills come from actual employment. If we're going to blindly trust that actual employment will magically provide 85% or even 115% of the cost of living, then we're making a dangerous mistake.
Just because the predictions in the past were wrong doesn't mean they can't ever be right...
I'd argue that when machines replaced the most menial tasks in the past, people always had the opportunity to move upwards (in terms of required skills). Up until now, they were replacing either animals (horse->tractor, mule->truck) or people who were overqualified for the work they did.
The animals couldn't move to greener pastures, except for a few extremely well-adapted creatures who found new jobs as pets, or in sports. Humans in general were versatile enough to find something better, and the machines added enough free productivity to the system to allow us to consume what they were producing on top of the necessities previously consumed.
It seems plausible to me that we're getting to the point where algorithms start to replace people actually operating at the limit of their capacities.
"Yes, the transition can be harsh for some workers. But let's be more specific: it is harsh for those who are unable or unwilling to adapt and develop the new skills required for the new work."
Aye, and there's the rub.
The problem isn't economic, though, in the sense that economics can be separated from politics; it's political. No one really cares about the poor. The fact that people are unemployed is unimportant.
What is a problem is social and political instability. A large class of poor are going to cause problems, from crime to religious extremism to good old fashioned bomb throwing socialists. Those transitions cause that kind of instability, in spades.
Unfortunately, hand waving that away with a minimum income probably won't work any better than retraining does.
Globalised world makes services and goods cheap but at what price ?
I see people and countries wanting self sufficiency and heavily taxing or even banning mega corps.
If production of goods will be so cheap that it will make 90% of workforce obsolete that will effectively leave countries at the mercy of mega corps that can afford r&d and servicing the automation machinery.
People are already fed up with eating meat that has been transported from the other part of the globe or just buying nails or some other basic commodity items that could have been produced locally.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 83.6 ms ] threadIf you make more than the basic income, at some point you have to go from getting a check to writing a check.
If you want to see what happens when people go into IT out of necessity, look at the Indian IT market. It's full of "programmers" who can't solve the simplest problems, who hate what they do, who produce really low quality code. (And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys, but the average case is rather bad).
Not only that, we don't have the IT jobs, even if all of them did learn to code.
As far as I can see, welfare state is inevitable, as much as I'm against it. It's still better than to let people lose their homes and/or starve.
Any possible basic income solutions will only make the problem worse.
What we will see in the 21st century is a large fraction of the human population fall off the edge where the marginal value of their labor becomes <=0 no matter what they do. They can't change this because they got a bad hand in the genetic lottery, which is not their fault.
This is very different from industrialization 1.0. That created a lot of jobs because the machines were dumb, and because economic growth was huge. Now the machines are smart and growth is slow.
Welfare state, violent revolution, or absolute surveillance state totalitarianism and starving ghettos. Pick one dystopia. I think welfare state is definitely the least of these evils.
Eventually we could fix this with augmentation and universally available genetic engineering, but the tech is not ready and the social, philosophical, and religious understanding and assimilation is even less ready than the tech. The process of cultural adoption cannot even begin until the tech is mature enough. Unskilled labor disrupting AI will arrive long before the means of improving ourselves.
Edit: some have brought up the Flynn effect and evidence IQ is growing. Unfortunately even if true I think it's far too slow. Automation tech is advancing much faster with a decades shorter iteration cycle. Doubt digit median IQ growth over decades would probably be required to prevent mass unemployment at the scale of billions and that's pure sci-fi.
Programming is nothing but an area of work which is more suited to people with a certain analytical skill sets. There are plenty of cases of people from diverse backgrounds excelling in this area in spite of the obstacles in front of them.
> Programming is nothing but an area of work which is more suited to people with a certain analytical skill sets.
If you think you can turn 100 IQ people into productive programmers, you could make billions by training your own staff and undercutting everyone else. Give it a try.
As the article notes, a BI makes it easy for this person to avoid making the necessary transition into the pink collar economy. The result is that our elderly are not sufficiently cared for, our high skill labor has dirty houses, our patients don't get adequate nursing care, and similar things.
Why should the elderly suffer without adequate care simply because this person's misguided pride is preventing him from taking on pink collar jobs?
(And how do we make them feel valued by society?)
What you really mean is "too few willing to do scut work for a pittance". That's an entirely different thing.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15000000
It's not an entirely different thing that people are refusing work because they prefer the laziness that government programs enable. That's the whole point. BI only makes this problem worse.
By the way, nursing is a skilled profession. Most nurses today have degrees in the subject and a significant number have advanced degrees. The ones who don't have degrees are almost all older women who went through a multi-year hospital training program (these used to be common, but are pretty rare today). Nursing isn't something that you can just walk into the day after you stop tightening bolts at the Ford plant.
Alternately, we could just stop paying people to sit around being lazy. Here in India people fill these jobs and earn far less than what most western activists consider a "living wage".
Why do you believe that the non-working Trump voters should be able to mooch off of the rest of society? Why do you believe social obligations go only one way?
That's nice. I prefer living in a first world country with a first world economy, myself.
"Why do you believe that the non-working Trump voters should be able to mooch off of the rest of society?"
Do you have any evidence that "Trump voters" are more likely to be on welfare than non-Trump voters? I will be quite surprised if you do (in fact, I'll be shocked).
80% of those in public housing are Democrats. 74% of those receiving Medicaid are Democrats. 67% of those receiving food stamps are Democrats.
"Trump voters"? Really?
I think skewing 80% Democrat is more than enough to show that the OP's characterization of welfare recipients as "Trump voters" is ridiculous.
From the raw data, 4.95% of democrats are on welfare compared to 3.48% of republicans (Total number of people on welfare in the poll is 54, so the margin of error is large).
You get the 65% number only if you don't account for the fact that there are more democrats in the poll (almost twice as many). The same goes for the 22% republican number in appendix.
This is propaganda.
Why do you think caring for the elderly, providing child care to working women and making Ubers more available would make the economy third world?
Do you believe India would suddenly become more prosperous if people refused to work? Will people sitting at home watching TV somehow build toilets for everyone?
I don't. I think expecting people to do those things in exchange for a crust of bread and pile of straw to sleep on makes an economy third world.
I've honestly never understood why government believes they should make it illegal to pay someone a mutually-agreed-upon wage, or why anything thinks doing so is a good thing.
However, the subsidies are to the worker, not the company. To see this, imagine a hypothetical world without the subsidies, and try to figure out if the employer would be richer or poorer. (Hint: richer, since they don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV while collecting welfare" option.)
Better to let the government pay the full $X, rather than keeping companies around that only succeed because they depend on the government to keep their employees alive. And think of a company like WalMart—by paying its employees very little, and depending on the government to take over things it doesn't want to pay for (like security, leaving it to the police instead, at enormous cost to them, but no cost to WalMart), they can undercut other companies that cost the government far less, leaving the whole economy less healthy.
> However, the subsidies are to the worker, not the company
The subsidies are to the worker, yes. GP was asking why the government has any say in a business relationship between a worker and a company, and the answer is: because they're involved as well, through the need to subsidize whatever the company doesn't pay. They're automatically part of the equation, and thus have a say in what the worker & company can settle for.
> To see this, imagine a hypothetical world without the subsidies, and try to figure out if the employer would be richer or poorer. (Hint: richer, since they don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV while collecting welfare" option.)
You mean, if companies were unable to pay less than a living wage? They would have to pay the worker more money, so they would be poorer. However, since all companies were paying more, everyone would probably do better in the end.
Or do you mean, if they could pay people as little as they wanted? They'd be richer, but less and less money would end up moving around in the economy, and everything would slowly grind to a halt. And lots of people would starve.
How is wasting more money and having less productive output better?
Or do you mean, if they could pay people as little as they wanted?
Of course. In this world, companies don't need to compete with the "stay home and watch TV and get free money" option, so they can pay less. Your "subsidy" is actually directly harmful to the people you claim it benefits.
...keep their employees alive....They'd be richer, but less and less money would end up mving around in the economy, and everything would slowly grind to a halt. And lots of people would starve.
Yet somehow I'm surrounded by about 1 billion living people with a GDP growth rate double that of the United States. Your theory doesn't fit any of the facts.
So if companies can pay people less, that will then lead them to... pay people more?
> Yet somehow I'm surrounded by about 1 billion living people with a GDP growth rate double that of the United States.
When your per capita GDP catches up to the US's, tell me again about your growth rate.
I don't know where I'm going with this other than to say that the Trump voters are justifiably angry at the WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM and suggesting the entire rust belt become house cleaners or personal aides is silly.
I understand that you feel an African woman should be prevented from economically competing with white men, but I don't really agree with that. I'm sure it feels very bad when people lose status relative to out-group members, but I don't consider the anger that result from this to be "justifiable".
In my opinion, you're intentionally misconstruing the previous poster in an attempt to discount their concerns as racist or sexist.
The issue wasn't the race of the individuals, but the fact that a American was being displaced by someone who came outside of America.
In my opinion, we can debate about levels of immigration with understanding.
Many people don't respond favorably to this argument because (if correct,) it defeats the "I'm not racist, I'm just nationalist" retort.
I don't think the poster is racist. I think he holds a moral position which is equally indefensible.
Can you make any moral arguments for nationalism that don't support racism equally well?
All of these will be automated as well. House cleaning first. It already started with Roomba and its clones.
Go and spend a few months doing all those jobs, then come back and re-read your post.
Would you make the same arguments using Chinese manufacturing and the fact that it leads the world in electronics manufacturing?
India is large.
Population: 1,250,000,000+
Population employed in IT: 10,000,000+ (i.e <1% of population)
In a group of 10,000,000+ people you will find all kinds of competencies, capabilities and behaviors statistically speaking.
I assume you have non-anecdotal data from which you have derived your generalizations.
I don't think any Indian child grows up dreaming that his greatest goal in life is to replace an American IT worker.
If you have been affected by Indian IT workers, blame it on your management. Somebody is definitely benefiting.
We do not need that many programmers,sysadmins,engineers. We do not need zillions of compilers,programming languages, frameworks or crud apps.
If we want to be effective at using and consuming resources we need to be effective at redistributing the wealth. I am a capitalist by heart but in a dystopian world of mega corps we just do not need billionaires. We do not need brilliant businessmen the same way we do not need that many workers. In such a world we do not need capitalism. We do not need companies competing with each other (well at least not on planet earth). We can move on and reward the 1% of scientists and provide them with much more money and resources.
If we want to keep people in line we can make them study more and provide good standards of living. We are talking more or less socialism / communism here but the reality is that we will not need to compete with each other anymore. Our only problem will be to avoid a war between superpowers and people revolting against governments. The fact is we do not really need improvements that much when compared to the past. We do not need faster iphones and more efficient batteries. It would be nice to have but it's not that important after all. The only purpose of iphone is to be connected and consume. The only purpose of a car be it electric or normal is to transport people or goods from point A to point B.
If there is a greater (measurable) net benefit to society with Universal Basic Income vs. our socialist agenda of getting into peoples lives more directly (food stamps, healthcare, low income and child subsidies)... then who gives a damn?
If you are unaware, or lacking a deep appreciation, of what money is (fractional reserve banking) then you have little, if anything at all, to contribute to this "debate"
If there is a net benefit for the society if Healthcare is provided, will you agree with the government providing it?
First, most analyses assume that healthcare is fungible, so anyone who "has healthcare" is considered to be in the same boat. This is untrue. Most government-provided healthcare systems rank quite poorly in terms of wait times, fatality rates, etc. compared to private healthcare.
Second, it's hard to distinguish the benefit of government medical systems from the benefit of freeing the private medical system from legal red tape. For example, many people cite lower drug costs as a benefit of government medicine. This is not an intrinsic feature of "single-payer" healthcare, but rather a result of the fact that drug agencies in the US have the full weight of the patent system behind them in order to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. In other countries, since the government both buys drugs and controls IP, the government always has the threat of removing IP rights to a drug if a company fails to provide a "reasonable" price, which simulates actual competition. One could get the same effect by changing the nature of medical IP rather than taking the drastic measure of publicizing drug purchases. That is a utility analysis I'd really like to see.
Third, one must include the utility of having a choice. There are both psychological and practical components to this, but it's better when you're not forced to pay for a service you don't want. I know how good private healthcare can be; just go to a tourist hospital in Mexico or India. Truly an awesome experience. A super easy way to get all the alleged benefits of socialized healthcare (especially affordability) is just to deregulate the shit out of hospitals. A lot of Americans are scared about that because they think deregulation is synonymous with the triangle shirtwaist factory, but it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in medically deregulated countries.
I suppose that you can provide sources for your claim.
> but it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in medically deregulated countries
If you can afford it, can the Mexican and Indian citizens afford that health care in "tourist hospitals"?
> If you can afford it, can the Mexican and Indian citizens afford that health care in "tourist hospitals"?
That's completely irrelevant. We're comparing the quality of care at the same price point. Obviously poorer people in poor countries won't be able to pay for the luxury healthcare that your average first-worlder can. They also wouldn't be able to afford the kind of socialized healthcare we could afford.
Just to give you a price point, 2 hours with a doctor (not a nurse), 2 x-rays, and an ultrasound was under $250 in Mexico. No paperwork, no waiting, no bullshit. Happy medical staff, happy patients. The exact opposite of any red-tape-encumbered first-world hospital.
http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf
For example, if UBI resulted in marginally improved economic conditions by some utilitarian heuristic over a somewhat more laissez-faire system, I would probably prefer the more laissez-faire system due to the social/moral value I ascribe to greater freedom and autonomy.
I'm sure you're aware of this notion, but I figured it made a good addendum to what you said.
It would be nice to know, assuming UBI is more effective, that the redistribution is not done in a condescending way. Such as empowering people to make their own decisions and be more autonomous vs. high overhead bureaucracies interfering with peoples' lives at the micro level.
I think your expression of "greater freedom and autonomy" is in line with UBI (once again, assuming there is clear evidence that there is a net benefit and no more money leaves my wallet in either system)
While this is a reasonable argument, and why I would prefer UBI to existing welfare schemes, my definition of "freedom" doesn't include anything that you force someone else to pay for, and my definition of "autonomy" doesn't include living off the sweat of other people. They're almost antonymous, in fact.
One good case is movie ratings: by rating films for age-appropriate audiences, the MPAA solves an issue that the government could do itself, but this way prevents unnecessary overreach. If a theater permits minors to see R rated films, it is barred from playing any films associated with the MPAA, which is pretty much all of them.
The obviously bad version of this ideology is health care and health insurance, where free market incentives result in milking the state (taxpayers) while simultaneously providing a poorer quality of service at an inflated cost because health cannot be bargained with.
I don't agree with the results of the American mindset but in a way it still makes sense, just by a very narrow and cold interpretation.
It seems to me from personal experience that the quality of service in US is exemplary. I'm not disagreeing with you that the cost is inflated, just I do not readily agree with you that the service is poor. Usually when I hear about a problem in the healthcare realm, it's not a matter of poor service, rather it's a matter of inaccessible service due to the high cost. It's usually this, or something having to do with state-run healthcare, such as Veteran Affairs, or healthcare provided to prison inmates.
Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?
> If the basic income will pay you $30,000 a year to do nothing, and that subsidy goes away as you make more money, so at an income of $100,000 your government subsidy disappears, you are paying an implicit tax rate of 30% on top of the taxes you are already paying to support everyone else's basic income.
The fallacy here is that not all taxes have to be on someone else's income.
> Officially, the poverty rate has only declined from 19% to about 16%—but by the admission of the War on Poverty's own defenders, "If government benefits are excluded, today's poverty rate would be 29 percent." That's what it means to make the poor more secure in their poverty.
Uhm... what? I think the author has a wildly different definition of poverty than I do. In my book, poverty means "not having enough money to afford the basic means of living and participation in society and culture". It's quite irrelevant if that money comes from a state subsidy or from a loan. It just means that I'm dependent on the state rather than on an employer. But for him, state money seems to be non-existent as far as poverty is concerned.
Yeah, that's so vague it's almost meaningless.
You could argue that the guy who unboxes stuff at Best Buy is a "tech industry worker", but there's a pretty significant gap between him and the guy who creates market models for a hedge fund.
That is, of course, bullshit. But it doesn't stop them.
Beyond food, shelter, health care, communication, transportation... what are our needs, exactly? What problem do we solve by having most adults devoting the majority of their waking hours to something they actively dislike?
Can you have an economic discussion without measuring things in dollars? Aren't value measurements intrinsic to economics?
This deliberate exclusion is already happening. I'm suggesting we should acknowledge the deliberate exclusion, or start including it, even if it makes the arguments more complex.
There's a economically solid argument to pay people to sit at home and not commit crime, start riots, devalue property by being homeless, or anything else vast numbers of people with no options currently do. Paying for someone's apartment and living expenses is FAR cheaper than the economic value lost by them devaluing property and tying up Emergency Services.
Newark, NJ causes a lot of harm to taxpayers who are forced to funnel resources to it. As far as I'm aware, bandits from Newark do not generally stage raids into Hoboken to steal resources from the productive folks living there.
Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how an economically solid argument might work?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/...
That was minus 4 years worth of inflation and even then, if you take the most optimistic homeless numbers versus the most pessimistic housing numbers, it's still only a few hundred more. Frankly I'd much rather my tax dollars went to that than a ton of other things we blow way more money on.
You're just comparing two different versions of (a).
Anyway addressing that point, putting aside the humanitarian issues of "if you aren't going to behave the way we want you to, you get thrown out of society and are left to presumably starve and die" the simple fact is that walling them off is going to be exceptionally difficult to do, just for the logistics and the construction required. Not to mention, even if you make the laws pretty permissive, I have a feeling you'd have a lot more have-nots than haves, and at the end of the day, numbers do matter...
I agree numbers matter, which is why I asked if you had a ballpark on them. I guess you don't?
This study shows that just giving people a home is not only vastly superior ethically, but helps these people get OUT of that situation and in many ways can be cheaper too.
I'm asking whether paying the dane geld is really the most cost effective solution to this problem. I think we've now agreed that it's not actually a real problem, and probably just a post-hoc justification for what you really want to do?
It seems to me that the problem isn't that you can't put a monetary value on these activities. The problem is that these activities have high positive externalities. Most of the benefits due to these activities accrue to society at large, and not the individual engaging in the activity. As a result, individuals will tend to undervalue the activity compared to its total societal value.
Everyones problems, your problems, my problems. I spend every week interacting with people that I give money to that solve small but important problems for me.
In fact I have to call my bank soon to help me solve a problem with initiating a wire transfer, and i have no doubt the person on the other end of the line hates working in a call center, but I still need his help solving a problem.
1. That everyone can transition into new jobs. Whether it be lack of education, intelligence, or just being at an age where the brain isn't as plastic as it used it, it is hard to find a new job if your field ceases to exist.
2. He correctly assesses that this will be a slow transition (if at all). This will actually inhibit people from trying to learn new skills because they won't realize their job sector is dead until its too late.
3. He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.
And that's probably a good assumption. There's wisdom behind the old adage, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools."
Experience tells us that people who don't work tend to spend their time not in beautiful creative ventures, but in frivolous (TV, gaming, entertainment) or destructive acts (drugs, crime, violence...).
A person who works is likely more well-rounded (better at handling responsibility, working with others, contributing to society in some small way, etc.) than a person who instead spends his day watching day-time television.
Then people pursuing education would receive 115% of aforementioned baseline. The conceit here is that educating oneself is always good. This would, at least, provide some impetus to develop new employable skills.
What incentive is there for real employable skills when sitting back in a classroom is going to give one more than what is needed for survival? People are more likely to take bullshit classes.
Real employable skills come from actual employment. If we're going to blindly trust that actual employment will magically provide 85% or even 115% of the cost of living, then we're making a dangerous mistake.
If you take issue with that idea: fine. Let's hash it out not in a basic income thread.
If you accept the above premise, then the notion of humans needing employment is absurd.
I'd argue that when machines replaced the most menial tasks in the past, people always had the opportunity to move upwards (in terms of required skills). Up until now, they were replacing either animals (horse->tractor, mule->truck) or people who were overqualified for the work they did.
The animals couldn't move to greener pastures, except for a few extremely well-adapted creatures who found new jobs as pets, or in sports. Humans in general were versatile enough to find something better, and the machines added enough free productivity to the system to allow us to consume what they were producing on top of the necessities previously consumed.
It seems plausible to me that we're getting to the point where algorithms start to replace people actually operating at the limit of their capacities.
Aye, and there's the rub.
The problem isn't economic, though, in the sense that economics can be separated from politics; it's political. No one really cares about the poor. The fact that people are unemployed is unimportant.
What is a problem is social and political instability. A large class of poor are going to cause problems, from crime to religious extremism to good old fashioned bomb throwing socialists. Those transitions cause that kind of instability, in spades.
Unfortunately, hand waving that away with a minimum income probably won't work any better than retraining does.
I see people and countries wanting self sufficiency and heavily taxing or even banning mega corps. If production of goods will be so cheap that it will make 90% of workforce obsolete that will effectively leave countries at the mercy of mega corps that can afford r&d and servicing the automation machinery.
People are already fed up with eating meat that has been transported from the other part of the globe or just buying nails or some other basic commodity items that could have been produced locally.