I'm reading the article and it seems to say that the government decided to not fund it further. But the headline "trial falls flat" seems to imply that somehow the trial returned a negative result. Am I missing something?
It seems that the article is drawing a conclusion without evidence. It states further down in the article that the full results will not be released until 2019.
The trial could easily have not had positive, but its also just as possible that the program died due to political reasons.
I'd like to see the statistics on the program as it'd be good to know if universal income is something that has no plausible chance of working, needs to be rolled out to more people to work, or if this is just basic politics killing a program
Nope, you're not missing anything. This is the exact same criticism made in the top comment on every site I've seen this story posted on (I think this is #4).
In such a case, an intelligent person always tend to think that the program bore positive results but politicians were too afraid of the consequences so they cut is short. They would be too happy to show a negative result to the public would that be the case.
What you're missing is that most journalism is written with specific narratives intended to convince you of a particular world view. Learning to read around it is a critical skill. Most people don't have it, which is why propaganda (this article is) works so well.
The article really doesn't address why the program wasn't continued. That seems like really important information. Perhaps it is unknown at this time why support is dropping, at which case it is good journalism not to speculate. However it would be great to know the why.
AFAIK the program was explicitly set up as a trial run to produce insight into how basic income affects people and communities. It's not wildly surprising that it ends without immediate replacement: When a clinical trial ends, patients don't get to keep the drugs either, even if they help them.
My biggest fear with basic income on a national scale is that it might get soaked up in bidding wars for limited rental housing and just end up being inflation soaked up by landlords.
That's pretty similar to what's been happening in Silicon Valley lately. According to investor Peter Thiel, the majority of capital invested in startups just flows to local landlords rather than funding real innovation.
Henry george explained it in san francisco in the late 1800's: any productivity gains will be captured by the landlords as long as the people are taxed for their work and the land is not taxed for the productivity gains.
California is the most anti-georgist place ever: if you work in SF, you pay sales taxes that go to fund Bart that makes your own rent more expensive. State income tax has the same effect, the very own official economists of the state say it. And then you have property taxes benefits and mortgage benefits for landlords!
Quite the opposite: universal basic income of a fixed amount would be much better spent outside of SF. Figure a 1k monthly stipend would be enough for rent and food in the mid west or some other small town. Currently the city of SF spends 2k a month per homeless person...
If I currently rent my apartment for ~400€/mo, why wouldn't I increase the rent to 600 or 800€/mo if the people were getting extra 1000€/mo from the government?
Obviously the people might move out to somewhere more remote where the prices where lower, but now they would have to pay for the journey to work place and get whole new social circle and all other things that are involved with moving - expect you are moving to a smaller city/town or at least to worse neighborhood.
>If I currently rent my apartment for ~400€/mo, why wouldn't I increase the rent to 600 or 800€/mo if the people were getting extra 1000€/mo from the government?
Because you don't get to put the prices on it, its a market.
> Obviously the people might move out to somewhere more remote where the prices where lower, but now they would have to pay for the journey to work place and get whole new social circle and all other things that are involved with moving - expect you are moving to a smaller city/town or at least to worse neighborhood.
Think of which kind of recipient is willing to leave a city because of a monthly stiped of 1k. Its not people with median wages. To be able to make a judgement on how it would affect rent prices you wuold have to model how many people leave the cities and how many people go to them. If basic income is fixed, its probably going to punish being in the city (higher taxes) and prize living outside (the money gotten with a lower tax rate will be worth more).
I never quite got why people think basic income would produce an inflation that would erode it: what kind of model or idea explains that? Its not taxation, its not inflation, its not supply-demand. Im honestly asking.
>Because you don't get to put the prices on it, its a market.
Except I literally can dictate the price as I see fit. Currently my 400 is slightly below of others because I don't want to deal with getting new tenants every year. You are now assuming that other people wouldn't raise the rents for "free" money - which frankly is just naive on your part.
Rest of your comment is just as nonsensical. There is no need to "model" anything. This is as simple as economics gets. People have more money to spend, so they are willing to pay more for the same stuff. My point with the moving is that people would not be doing it in general, which means they have to adapt to higher rent prices, which in turn means more money for landlords.
> Except I literally can dictate the price as I see fit. Currently my 400 is slightly below of others because I don't want to deal with getting new tenants every year. You are now assuming that other people wouldn't raise the rents for "free" money - which frankly is just naive on your part.
If you can set prices as you see fit, you don't need to wait for basic income to do anything, just raise your prices to the max today...
> This is as simple as economics gets.
But..it isnt. Inflation is a monetary phenomena, not a subsidy consequence: food stamps don't make food (significantly) more expensive, even though they increase food demand!
There is no way to know how will people migrate in response to a basic income, but the economists I talked to would expect people to move out of cities: again, a basic income through taxation would literally lower income of cities and increase income in rural, so you would expect people to behave accordingly.
I know livelihood after automation needs to be solved but I'm worried about how a guaranteed fixed income for a large section of young population might be exploited.
If you are 70 and get $1500/mo social security, nobody is going to sell you a $200k Ferrari. But if you are young, there is tremendous incentive for businesses to carve out that $1500/mo into life long revenue streams. Student loans cannot be easily discharged in bankruptcy. Pass a few laws and suddenly, contracts you signed as an 18yr old cannot be discharged through any means. This means an 18yr old could buy a $200k car if they agree to $750/mo for 600 months (50 years) at 4% fixed rate. A little bit of collusion in the insurance industry and suddenly anyone could be liable for $200k damages from healthcare to auto claims. No problem, just pay it off over the next 50-60 years of your life while you live in destitution.
In a Star-Trek post-scarcity world, cars don't cost $200k so this problem doesn't exist. But as long as we live in a world where money exists, I think giving everyone a fixed minimum income will absolutely result in unexpected exploitation on a mass scale. Right now, nobody is going to give an 18yr old with no credit a 200k car because there is no guarantee they can pay it off. They give them 30yr fixed mortgages today because property historically appreciates in value and can be repossessed. But in a post-credit rating world, instead of repossessing a 15yr old car, it is better to just put a lien on 50 yrs of somebody's income, bundle it up, and sell a million of these liens to a bank.
It's interesting to consider Star Trek. I mean in our society today you can easily blame capitalism for our woes. But I think more aptly, you should blame us. Consumerism is something you personally have to choose to become involved in. People buy overpriced phones offering marginal benefits over vastly more affordable alternatives, fancy cars that in the end do nothing but get from point A to point B, pay a massive markup on a Unix based PC so they can have a fruity label and a slightly thinner screen, etc, etc. And they do this all of their own will.
In Star Trek people always look to us as the humans, because we are humans. But the biggest gag in Star Trek is that we're not the humans - we're the the Ferengi. Seriously, that was the intent. [1] The first paragraph there is irrelevant, the second is from the actual screenwriters and producers for the show.
Society is a product of its people. The Ferengi live as they do because of the Ferengi. And the humans too live as they do because of the humans. If you thrust the Ferengi into the society of the humans it's not like they'd suddenly become as the humans. In short order it'd revert to Ferengi standards. And so too for us. Our society is a reflection of us. You need not change society - you need to change the people that makeup society. So long as there is somebody willing to buy something far outside their means for whatever reason, there will be people lining up to sell it to them. Something that is actually also still reflected in the show, even among humanity. Society is not something in isolation. Society is little more than the product of the people that comprise it.
I used to be much more positive on basic income. A big point here is that basic income could help develop the entire nation. In other words you don't need to live in downtown mega-city to make a living with a basic income. You could live in Bodunk, Utah where $300 gets you a great place. In the big picture you could even have a number of people band together and actually create new towns from the ground up. Imagine you just get 10,000 people working together to build up a new city. If we assume $1000/month income, that's a baseline of $10million a month for development. For low level development that is an enormous amount of money. People could literally build their own new cities from the ground up. And you could certainly entice plenty of engineers, construction workers, and the sort with such plans. Building your own future is enticing for anybody!
But I've become jaded here. There was a recent article about somebody on social security living in their SUV because they couldn't afford the rent in the area they wanted to live in, on their $1400/month social security. And people were empathetic and defended her. If society has become so inertial and entitled that they are unable to move to areas of greater opportunity even when they have every incentive in the world, as well as the means, to do so then a basic income would likely explode in a giant ball of flame. The idea is not to let you have live as you see fit without ever working, but to enable people to have an extremely modest baseline of means and allow them to live as they see fit within their means. Instead we'd likely just see nonstop articles about $x/month in a basic income doesn't provide enough in [insert absurdly high cost of living area], people protesting for more (protests now subsidized by the funds they're complaining about), and other such nonsense. It could work phenomenally if people were willing to make it work, but it could also just implode society if people saw it not as a stipend but as an entitlement to their desires. In our current state, I expect we're far closer to the latter than the former.
It doesn't sound like they picked people are random but rather unemployed people. So it doesn't seem a reasonable test of just giving some random group of people money but rather just something looked to everyone involved as a kind of welfare. Thus it doesn't seem like a fair.
That's not saying I think this could work but that it's different from the experiment in India I remember where everyone in a village was given an income.
One problem with universal income I would imagine is it would give landlord a strong incentive to immediate raise rents - IE, how could it not create inflation?
I'm not familiar with this trial specifically, but my guess is that the reason for limiting it that way is to focus on the most plausible kind of welfare program in the group most likely to benefit in a large way (the unemployed) and get as much certainty out of the data as possible. They had limited money (only enough for 2000 people, apparently), so if they split it across a random set of people, or a specific village, they would get a much less precise answer (eg n=200 unemployed, n=1800 employed; or arguably, n=1, at the village level). And if you don't get a clear good result in the unemployed, why would you expect clear or good results in the employed?
Clinical trials do a lot of screening of enrolled participants for similar reasons: you want the sickest or most likely to benefit, so you can see effects clearly, and you want to avoid participants with conditions that might override or obscure the benefits, like old age (a couple dropping dead on you at random might cover up a real benefit).
But once you actually roll out UBI, everyone gets it. If you only concentrate on UBI's effects on unemployed people, you're missing a huge part of the picture.
Well yes, but Finland wasn't experimenting with basic income for philosophical reasons. They were experimenting because they have high unemployment and a complex, and expensive, welfare system.
So what they wanted to understand was the effect a basic income had on those factors.
The next stage of the experiment, that wasn't funded, was to extend the experiment to include the employed. Even there, I would expect they would still focus on low incomes as that's where you would expect to see an effect.
To go beyond that, it's not clear what you'd learn without having a very large scale experiment i.e. one that materially affects the level of taxation. I can't imagine they'd be interested in that without seeing a significant, positive effect on the first two categories.
And as a side point, I don't believe the idea was ever to test a UBI just a basic income. Unless you're intending to do away with all differentiated welfare, highly unlikely in a social democratic country, the universal bit is probably more harmful than beneficial.
I'm not familiar with this trial specifically, but my guess is that the reason for limiting it that way is to focus on the most plausible kind of welfare program in the group most likely to benefit in a large way (the unemployed) and get as much certainty out of the data as possible.
The question is; "is this a welfare program or isn't is??"
I mean, if the program is structured to provide benefits for the unemployed and if we're looking how much the unemployed benefit, then it is a welfare/unemployment program.
The article mentions that the participants also saw this as an unemployment program and it seems logical that given this, they'd react to it in the fashion that we already know people tend to react to unemployment. There are already some unemployment programs that promise to taper off benefits rather than abruptly ending them and these don't have much difference from other welfare programs.
The sell of basic income is - "everyone benefits, everyone maintains an interest in working, the reduced bureaucracy provides more money to give people." Those together aren't saying "this is program to get more people working" and if it just gets reduced to that, the original plan is basically lost.
Which again, isn't saying basic income would work. But it seems reasonable to avoid letting the discussion just degenerate to debates on standard welfare.
That said, I guess I could accept one argument against basic income - "it will never work because in practice, the waters are always going to be muddied by these studies (done by the same old welfare bureaucracies) until the discussion becomes just a discussion of welfare strategies."
I wonder what the least fortunate people in villages in Africa and Asia would think about our desperate push to figure out UBI.
A looming threat of declining living standards (and a decline that will still never leave us anywhere close to where they are now) has us so terrified, quaking in our privilege boots. Meanwhile easily 3B+ people have been left out in the cold and hardly anyone gives a shit.
Every so often, I still find myself surprised by how unapologetically shameful humans can manage to be.
Ah, and so you are arguing that peoples success and failure is decided by other people? Who exactly are these other people? America went from a completely undeveloped and isolated backwoods to the most powerful nation in the world in just a couple of centuries because of these people? How about China? 60 years ago people were literally starving to death by the tens of millions in China and today they are one of the most powerful and rapidly growing nations in the world. Japan was obliterated in a war yet in a period of some 40 years reshaped itself into what was at one time the technological leader of the world. Is it because of those people again?
I subscribe to what the Durants argued in 'The Lessons of History'. There is an apparently irresolvable trade-off between freedom and equality and, historically speaking, the world has tended to vacillate between the two extremes, with inflection points typically demarcated by violent revolution.
In order to get closer to a stable equilibrium, we would need to achieve a more progressive wealth redistribution paradigm than we have at present.
A tremendous amount of wealth is being locked up by the global 0.1% in S&I. Yes it flows through the economy as capital, but we now know enough to appreciate that it mostly doesn't furthermore trickle down into increased wellbeing for probably anyone at or below the 90th percentile, at best. In other words, this system is highly inefficient when you measure it against one of the most meaningful criteria that we should (but do not) evaluate: statistical distribution of human wellbeing.
I have a lot more thoughts on this. But, in short, an unqualified belief in the virtues of capitalism is certainly misguided.
I'm not being philosophical but simply pointing out that the fate of a nation is largely determined by the people of that nation. And the driving force there is typically seeking better things for themselves. There have been extensive efforts at externally driven nation building and, to my knowledge, it has yet to meet with significant success.
I actually am currently voluntarily residing in a "developing nation." I enjoy it for a variety reasons. Regardless, everywhere around me the reasons that this country is a "developing nation" are clear as day, and it is of the nation's own doing. Corruption and cronyism are rampant. And, much like the US is becoming, politics is more about 'us versus them' as opposed to 'how can we best solve our problems'. There's also a complete lack of accountability. Failure is tolerated at all levels (which is something we're also starting to see in the US to some degree). When the electricity goes out for hours because of a glorified sprinkle people just shrug instead of striving for better. And this starts all the way at the school level - children, mostly, are not allowed to fail, which again seems to be the path the US is started down. They get passed along. Next thing you know you have a tenth grader that can't tell you what 9 * 7 is. But that's okay. Since has the right last name, he'll have no problem getting a job, perhaps as an administrator at the electric company.
Capitalism or whatever else is a red herring. Live in both a "developing nation" and a "developed nation" for some time, and you'll see the sharp and surprisingly clear contrasts emerge. And the problems lay primarily with the people themselves. However, focusing on the actions of people is something touchier than just philosophizing about political or economic systems, so it's no wonder our 'aid' generally fails to do much beyond sustain the status quo, if that.
And one quick note on rebellion. Rebellion is driven, beyond anything else, by a lack of complacency. The US is full on Algiers 1954 on internet forums. But in real life people are extremely content. Electronic devices and the internet are like pacifiers for adults.
> And one quick note on rebellion. Rebellion is driven, beyond anything else, by a lack of complacency. The US is full on Algiers 1954 on internet forums. But in real life people are extremely content. Electronic devices and the internet are like pacifiers for adults.
I'm absolutely aligned on this point and it strikes me, oddly enough, as one of the more insidious deficits of modernity.
The potential for corrective retaliation by suppressed classes has been eroded by some combination of (depending on where you are in the world): highly sophisticated surveillance and censorship apparatuses, advanced military technology, scalable propaganda dissemination and behavioral manipulation, corruption (institutionalized like lobbying and campaign contributions or otherwise), complacency as you noted, the invisibility/impenetrability of global wealth distribution, etc.
That is exactly the problem. The ancient Romans and Greeks could and did literally stab the elite to death to shift the balance back towards equality. There is no similarly effective recourse available to societies in the modern age, and thus wealth inequality has degraded to unconscionable levels.
But it's a bigger problem now than at any other point in human history. Thanks to technological innovation, we are rapidly approaching a reality in which capital holders will be able to sustain themselves in protected enclaves and the rest of us will be relegated to savagery, which is the end state of the most extreme possible shift towards freedom.
This is literally the entire point of the second amendment.
Quoting it verbatim: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." One thing that is sometimes misunderstood due to the phrasing is that the first statement is stated as a purpose, and the second statement the implementation. In modern common language it would be, "Since a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Some random quotes emphasizing their views:
Thomas Jefferson: "And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms… The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
James Madison: "The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. … The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition."
Thomas Paine: "The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside… Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them…"
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That said, I do not really agree with you on the doomsday scenarios. But I also find the politicization of things like the second amendment quite silly. I'm probably liberal, at least I've always considered myself as such, yet the constitution and its intent is extremely clear on this point - and I do tend to agree with the logic, even if I personally do not think the times of today are the eras of concern that the founding fathers were alluding to.
What they meant back then is quite nearly irrelevant in the modern age. No group of civilians is mounting a meaningful military resistance against USG for too many reasons to enumerate (though I did enumerate some of them above). The 2nd Amendment now arguably does more harm than good on balance and needs to be reevaluated.
Maybe the closest possible thing that can be managed is some vigilante or group of vigilantes assassinating provably corrupt politicians and the elite corrupting them, and publicizing the rationale while promising further retribution absent reform. But that person(s) would be a suicidal madman and might succeed only in instilling fear in potential targets and not in swaying public understanding or opinion. A short term solution that would serve only to drive corruption further underground and/or in said politicians and elite increasing their own physical security.
As for the doomsday scenario, you have to wait long enough for reasonably decent AI and robotics, but it will happen. There's no theoretical impediment to self-sustaining 'gated' (which will eventually move in meaning towards 'militarized', proportionate to deteriorating public sentiment) microecosystems. Incentives and rational behavior will almost certainly effect this outcome for people who happen to be capital owners (above a certain minimum threshold) in that technological epoch.
On the flip side, as we know, once we reach a certain end state of technological capability via AI and robotics, the employability deficit of the vast majority of humans will catalyze a crisis the likes of which our species has probably never dealt with before.
So now you get back to UBI and other questions of reform. Will humanity fix its shit in time? I doubt it.
I think your sentiment about the futility of resistance is reasonable, but not really well supported. Iraq is probably the best example here. The terrain there is absolutely awful for the insurgents with urban areas separated by vast empty flat mostly desert regions. In spite of this, they've managed to mount an incredibly effective resistance with little more than some rifles developed in the 50s and some homemade explosives.
This reality is arguably a major reason the current establishment in politics has been working to agitate against the second amendment. It has very little to do with harm. For instance the focus is always on "assault style rifles" yet did you know that of all gun deaths (which make up less than 1% of all deaths) that < 3% of those are caused by rifles? Even in mass shootings - the primary weapon is low caliber pistols.
As the UK is experiencing now it's not really weapons that are the problem. It once again comes back to the same problem of people. London earlier this year experienced a greater per capita murder rate than NYC, even though none of the attacks involved guns.
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But maybe more generally this division in society is the biggest protection of the establishment of politics. The 2016 election was an incredibly good example of this phenomena. How many people voted for Hillary thinking "Yes, this person accurately represents my views and feelings."? And similarly for Trump. But now how many people voted for one or the other thinking, "Oh dear god, this person is scum - but the alternative is unthinkable!"
Societal division in a republic is phenomenally effective at killing peoples' self interest. You can even make people vote for people they don't like, just by making sure they hate 'the other side' enough. Divide and conquer is a strategy as old as they get.
Everyone should read about how Finland is governance the country with new ideas and concepts, other countries do is just stupid and based on different bias, political views or just idiocy in some cases.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadThe trial could easily have not had positive, but its also just as possible that the program died due to political reasons.
I'd like to see the statistics on the program as it'd be good to know if universal income is something that has no plausible chance of working, needs to be rolled out to more people to work, or if this is just basic politics killing a program
Also: there are more participants than landlords: food, utilities, etc.
Land is limited, for example. And replacing buildings with higher density ones is... Frequently not easy.
https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...
California is the most anti-georgist place ever: if you work in SF, you pay sales taxes that go to fund Bart that makes your own rent more expensive. State income tax has the same effect, the very own official economists of the state say it. And then you have property taxes benefits and mortgage benefits for landlords!
Obviously the people might move out to somewhere more remote where the prices where lower, but now they would have to pay for the journey to work place and get whole new social circle and all other things that are involved with moving - expect you are moving to a smaller city/town or at least to worse neighborhood.
Because you don't get to put the prices on it, its a market.
> Obviously the people might move out to somewhere more remote where the prices where lower, but now they would have to pay for the journey to work place and get whole new social circle and all other things that are involved with moving - expect you are moving to a smaller city/town or at least to worse neighborhood.
Think of which kind of recipient is willing to leave a city because of a monthly stiped of 1k. Its not people with median wages. To be able to make a judgement on how it would affect rent prices you wuold have to model how many people leave the cities and how many people go to them. If basic income is fixed, its probably going to punish being in the city (higher taxes) and prize living outside (the money gotten with a lower tax rate will be worth more).
I never quite got why people think basic income would produce an inflation that would erode it: what kind of model or idea explains that? Its not taxation, its not inflation, its not supply-demand. Im honestly asking.
Except I literally can dictate the price as I see fit. Currently my 400 is slightly below of others because I don't want to deal with getting new tenants every year. You are now assuming that other people wouldn't raise the rents for "free" money - which frankly is just naive on your part.
Rest of your comment is just as nonsensical. There is no need to "model" anything. This is as simple as economics gets. People have more money to spend, so they are willing to pay more for the same stuff. My point with the moving is that people would not be doing it in general, which means they have to adapt to higher rent prices, which in turn means more money for landlords.
If you can set prices as you see fit, you don't need to wait for basic income to do anything, just raise your prices to the max today...
> This is as simple as economics gets.
But..it isnt. Inflation is a monetary phenomena, not a subsidy consequence: food stamps don't make food (significantly) more expensive, even though they increase food demand!
There is no way to know how will people migrate in response to a basic income, but the economists I talked to would expect people to move out of cities: again, a basic income through taxation would literally lower income of cities and increase income in rural, so you would expect people to behave accordingly.
If you are 70 and get $1500/mo social security, nobody is going to sell you a $200k Ferrari. But if you are young, there is tremendous incentive for businesses to carve out that $1500/mo into life long revenue streams. Student loans cannot be easily discharged in bankruptcy. Pass a few laws and suddenly, contracts you signed as an 18yr old cannot be discharged through any means. This means an 18yr old could buy a $200k car if they agree to $750/mo for 600 months (50 years) at 4% fixed rate. A little bit of collusion in the insurance industry and suddenly anyone could be liable for $200k damages from healthcare to auto claims. No problem, just pay it off over the next 50-60 years of your life while you live in destitution.
In a Star-Trek post-scarcity world, cars don't cost $200k so this problem doesn't exist. But as long as we live in a world where money exists, I think giving everyone a fixed minimum income will absolutely result in unexpected exploitation on a mass scale. Right now, nobody is going to give an 18yr old with no credit a 200k car because there is no guarantee they can pay it off. They give them 30yr fixed mortgages today because property historically appreciates in value and can be repossessed. But in a post-credit rating world, instead of repossessing a 15yr old car, it is better to just put a lien on 50 yrs of somebody's income, bundle it up, and sell a million of these liens to a bank.
In Star Trek people always look to us as the humans, because we are humans. But the biggest gag in Star Trek is that we're not the humans - we're the the Ferengi. Seriously, that was the intent. [1] The first paragraph there is irrelevant, the second is from the actual screenwriters and producers for the show.
Society is a product of its people. The Ferengi live as they do because of the Ferengi. And the humans too live as they do because of the humans. If you thrust the Ferengi into the society of the humans it's not like they'd suddenly become as the humans. In short order it'd revert to Ferengi standards. And so too for us. Our society is a reflection of us. You need not change society - you need to change the people that makeup society. So long as there is somebody willing to buy something far outside their means for whatever reason, there will be people lining up to sell it to them. Something that is actually also still reflected in the show, even among humanity. Society is not something in isolation. Society is little more than the product of the people that comprise it.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Interpretation_as_a_pa...
But I've become jaded here. There was a recent article about somebody on social security living in their SUV because they couldn't afford the rent in the area they wanted to live in, on their $1400/month social security. And people were empathetic and defended her. If society has become so inertial and entitled that they are unable to move to areas of greater opportunity even when they have every incentive in the world, as well as the means, to do so then a basic income would likely explode in a giant ball of flame. The idea is not to let you have live as you see fit without ever working, but to enable people to have an extremely modest baseline of means and allow them to live as they see fit within their means. Instead we'd likely just see nonstop articles about $x/month in a basic income doesn't provide enough in [insert absurdly high cost of living area], people protesting for more (protests now subsidized by the funds they're complaining about), and other such nonsense. It could work phenomenally if people were willing to make it work, but it could also just implode society if people saw it not as a stipend but as an entitlement to their desires. In our current state, I expect we're far closer to the latter than the former.
That's not saying I think this could work but that it's different from the experiment in India I remember where everyone in a village was given an income.
One problem with universal income I would imagine is it would give landlord a strong incentive to immediate raise rents - IE, how could it not create inflation?
Clinical trials do a lot of screening of enrolled participants for similar reasons: you want the sickest or most likely to benefit, so you can see effects clearly, and you want to avoid participants with conditions that might override or obscure the benefits, like old age (a couple dropping dead on you at random might cover up a real benefit).
The next stage of the experiment, that wasn't funded, was to extend the experiment to include the employed. Even there, I would expect they would still focus on low incomes as that's where you would expect to see an effect.
To go beyond that, it's not clear what you'd learn without having a very large scale experiment i.e. one that materially affects the level of taxation. I can't imagine they'd be interested in that without seeing a significant, positive effect on the first two categories.
And as a side point, I don't believe the idea was ever to test a UBI just a basic income. Unless you're intending to do away with all differentiated welfare, highly unlikely in a social democratic country, the universal bit is probably more harmful than beneficial.
The question is; "is this a welfare program or isn't is??"
I mean, if the program is structured to provide benefits for the unemployed and if we're looking how much the unemployed benefit, then it is a welfare/unemployment program.
The article mentions that the participants also saw this as an unemployment program and it seems logical that given this, they'd react to it in the fashion that we already know people tend to react to unemployment. There are already some unemployment programs that promise to taper off benefits rather than abruptly ending them and these don't have much difference from other welfare programs.
The sell of basic income is - "everyone benefits, everyone maintains an interest in working, the reduced bureaucracy provides more money to give people." Those together aren't saying "this is program to get more people working" and if it just gets reduced to that, the original plan is basically lost.
Which again, isn't saying basic income would work. But it seems reasonable to avoid letting the discussion just degenerate to debates on standard welfare.
That said, I guess I could accept one argument against basic income - "it will never work because in practice, the waters are always going to be muddied by these studies (done by the same old welfare bureaucracies) until the discussion becomes just a discussion of welfare strategies."
A looming threat of declining living standards (and a decline that will still never leave us anywhere close to where they are now) has us so terrified, quaking in our privilege boots. Meanwhile easily 3B+ people have been left out in the cold and hardly anyone gives a shit.
Every so often, I still find myself surprised by how unapologetically shameful humans can manage to be.
I subscribe to what the Durants argued in 'The Lessons of History'. There is an apparently irresolvable trade-off between freedom and equality and, historically speaking, the world has tended to vacillate between the two extremes, with inflection points typically demarcated by violent revolution.
In order to get closer to a stable equilibrium, we would need to achieve a more progressive wealth redistribution paradigm than we have at present.
A tremendous amount of wealth is being locked up by the global 0.1% in S&I. Yes it flows through the economy as capital, but we now know enough to appreciate that it mostly doesn't furthermore trickle down into increased wellbeing for probably anyone at or below the 90th percentile, at best. In other words, this system is highly inefficient when you measure it against one of the most meaningful criteria that we should (but do not) evaluate: statistical distribution of human wellbeing.
I have a lot more thoughts on this. But, in short, an unqualified belief in the virtues of capitalism is certainly misguided.
I actually am currently voluntarily residing in a "developing nation." I enjoy it for a variety reasons. Regardless, everywhere around me the reasons that this country is a "developing nation" are clear as day, and it is of the nation's own doing. Corruption and cronyism are rampant. And, much like the US is becoming, politics is more about 'us versus them' as opposed to 'how can we best solve our problems'. There's also a complete lack of accountability. Failure is tolerated at all levels (which is something we're also starting to see in the US to some degree). When the electricity goes out for hours because of a glorified sprinkle people just shrug instead of striving for better. And this starts all the way at the school level - children, mostly, are not allowed to fail, which again seems to be the path the US is started down. They get passed along. Next thing you know you have a tenth grader that can't tell you what 9 * 7 is. But that's okay. Since has the right last name, he'll have no problem getting a job, perhaps as an administrator at the electric company.
Capitalism or whatever else is a red herring. Live in both a "developing nation" and a "developed nation" for some time, and you'll see the sharp and surprisingly clear contrasts emerge. And the problems lay primarily with the people themselves. However, focusing on the actions of people is something touchier than just philosophizing about political or economic systems, so it's no wonder our 'aid' generally fails to do much beyond sustain the status quo, if that.
And one quick note on rebellion. Rebellion is driven, beyond anything else, by a lack of complacency. The US is full on Algiers 1954 on internet forums. But in real life people are extremely content. Electronic devices and the internet are like pacifiers for adults.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
I'm absolutely aligned on this point and it strikes me, oddly enough, as one of the more insidious deficits of modernity.
The potential for corrective retaliation by suppressed classes has been eroded by some combination of (depending on where you are in the world): highly sophisticated surveillance and censorship apparatuses, advanced military technology, scalable propaganda dissemination and behavioral manipulation, corruption (institutionalized like lobbying and campaign contributions or otherwise), complacency as you noted, the invisibility/impenetrability of global wealth distribution, etc.
That is exactly the problem. The ancient Romans and Greeks could and did literally stab the elite to death to shift the balance back towards equality. There is no similarly effective recourse available to societies in the modern age, and thus wealth inequality has degraded to unconscionable levels.
But it's a bigger problem now than at any other point in human history. Thanks to technological innovation, we are rapidly approaching a reality in which capital holders will be able to sustain themselves in protected enclaves and the rest of us will be relegated to savagery, which is the end state of the most extreme possible shift towards freedom.
Quoting it verbatim: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." One thing that is sometimes misunderstood due to the phrasing is that the first statement is stated as a purpose, and the second statement the implementation. In modern common language it would be, "Since a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Some random quotes emphasizing their views:
Thomas Jefferson: "And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms… The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
James Madison: "The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. … The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition."
Thomas Paine: "The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside… Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them…"
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That said, I do not really agree with you on the doomsday scenarios. But I also find the politicization of things like the second amendment quite silly. I'm probably liberal, at least I've always considered myself as such, yet the constitution and its intent is extremely clear on this point - and I do tend to agree with the logic, even if I personally do not think the times of today are the eras of concern that the founding fathers were alluding to.
Maybe the closest possible thing that can be managed is some vigilante or group of vigilantes assassinating provably corrupt politicians and the elite corrupting them, and publicizing the rationale while promising further retribution absent reform. But that person(s) would be a suicidal madman and might succeed only in instilling fear in potential targets and not in swaying public understanding or opinion. A short term solution that would serve only to drive corruption further underground and/or in said politicians and elite increasing their own physical security.
As for the doomsday scenario, you have to wait long enough for reasonably decent AI and robotics, but it will happen. There's no theoretical impediment to self-sustaining 'gated' (which will eventually move in meaning towards 'militarized', proportionate to deteriorating public sentiment) microecosystems. Incentives and rational behavior will almost certainly effect this outcome for people who happen to be capital owners (above a certain minimum threshold) in that technological epoch.
On the flip side, as we know, once we reach a certain end state of technological capability via AI and robotics, the employability deficit of the vast majority of humans will catalyze a crisis the likes of which our species has probably never dealt with before.
So now you get back to UBI and other questions of reform. Will humanity fix its shit in time? I doubt it.
This reality is arguably a major reason the current establishment in politics has been working to agitate against the second amendment. It has very little to do with harm. For instance the focus is always on "assault style rifles" yet did you know that of all gun deaths (which make up less than 1% of all deaths) that < 3% of those are caused by rifles? Even in mass shootings - the primary weapon is low caliber pistols.
As the UK is experiencing now it's not really weapons that are the problem. It once again comes back to the same problem of people. London earlier this year experienced a greater per capita murder rate than NYC, even though none of the attacks involved guns.
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But maybe more generally this division in society is the biggest protection of the establishment of politics. The 2016 election was an incredibly good example of this phenomena. How many people voted for Hillary thinking "Yes, this person accurately represents my views and feelings."? And similarly for Trump. But now how many people voted for one or the other thinking, "Oh dear god, this person is scum - but the alternative is unthinkable!"
Societal division in a republic is phenomenally effective at killing peoples' self interest. You can even make people vote for people they don't like, just by making sure they hate 'the other side' enough. Divide and conquer is a strategy as old as they get.
https://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/julkaisut/design-for-governm...
The experiment of basic income was not intended to expand to the whole country it was a study, to gather data.