UBI smells like a trojan horse for privatization of what remains of social security, disability, unemployment, etc. I would much rather have a robust national pension system than "Uber, but for retirement."
Many UBI advocates explicitly say that UBI should replace all existing welfare programs and people should use their UBI to purchase any services (e.g. insurance) they need from private companies.
I like the idea but I doubt this will be sustainable long-term. There is already a lot of pressure to reduce the social safety net and to have more tax cuts for the "job creators". Why would this be any different with UBI? The people who work full-time jobs will complain about the slackers who do nothing. Maybe once almost everything is automated there is a better chance to do this.
Personally I think it would be better to reduce working hours.
I think many people view UBI as transformative (as you suggest), though they don't always talk about it in those terms. Increasingly, production and services will be automated leaving fewer and fewer jobs for people. In a far off dystopian future, there will be some Ubercorp that does everything, controls all production and services leaving no paid work for people. UBI is simply a means for smoothing out the transition for people to new careers or a world where fewer jobs exist. Obviously, as things become more automated, taxes on these corps will have to increase. There has to be a cash flow cycle, otherwise money will pool at the top among the shareholders of the companies that won the automation race. Thus, as long as there is cash flowing from the bottom to the top (thanks to UBI) it is sustainable. Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now.
" Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now."
If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major conflict.
We see that already with climate change. There clearly is no will to really address the issues. We'll have sea levels rising, millions of refugees and somehow deal with that. We will not prevent that.
I think you are correct. Typically, there needs to be pain before there is action that is human nature. That pain traditionally has come in the form of epidemics, famine, and war.
A large part of climate change denial is driven by economic forces. The oil and transportation industries have built an economy that relies on fossil fuels. As soon as alternatives are cheaper, there will be a transition. We are seeing that in the energy sector now where solar has gotten cheaper than coal. Power companies are starting to make the transition to wind and solar. IMO, the best thing we can do to solve the climate crisis is to make the economics of non-fossil fuel energy sources impossible to compete with OR close the loop on CO and CO2 emissions (converting atmospheric carbon back into fuel).
Unfortunately, capitalism is one of the primary drivers of this. But it's also correlated to any authoritarian system, as well as deregulated systems that use Social Darwinism.
The heart of the problem is an inability for people to organize and address societal problems in a non-reactionary way by means of central planning. Which means that the solution is inherently leftist politically. We can pretend that there are rightist solutions (the invisible hand of the free market, unfettered capitalism, etc) but there is ample evidence that those don't work in practice and are even accelerating global climate change and the collapse of ecosystems.
War is always about money. If we flatten wealth inequality via UBI, that suggests that the impetus for war may be diminished. So expect backlash from those in power or whose wealth is derived from armed conflict.
You bring up a very good point about the time value of money and how that could be manifested by reducing working hours.
When we say that we want to provide a UBI to all citizens, that could be looked at as an equivalent number of hours. Giving someone making $10/hr a $10,000 UBI would be the equivalent of 1000 hours freed of a 2000 hour work year. It would increase their quality of life by 50%. A $50/hr worker would get a 10% quality of life increase on a $10,000 UBI.
So for example reducing work hours by 1 hour per day on tech workers would be comparable to a $5-10,000 UBI. Which I think is what we're really talking about here. Providing alternative subsistence so that workers can someday get off the workaday world treadmill/rat race and go invent the things that will automate our economy and improve quality of life for everyone, regardless of income. Right now we have a system where some people live extremely comfortably while half the country has no economic stability or quality of life to speak of, and what's worse is, they currently have no hope for improvement no matter how high the gross national product (GNP) grows because politics has been coopted by lobbyists and special interests.
Nobody can ever answer the question of "What happens when someone blows their UBI and cant afford to eat?" Will we let them starve? You'd almost have to from the government side of things.
How about 5 years after when someone introduces another entitlement program to help single mothers/seniors/etc and then criticizes everyone else as heartless for not supporting it? Will we just end up where we are now with even more entitlements?
>“I know Jeff Bezos is probably worth $50 million. I know for a fact that he’s not worth $150 billion. The rest of that money is mine.
Yeah that says it all right there. This guy feels entitled to someone else's money.
What happens now? What about the people right now that cannot afford to eat?
And I'm not talking about the panhandler on the street. There are families right now who cannot afford to feed themselves, even with federal assistance.
Right now we have multiple federal programs (Welfare, SNAP, Disability, etc). Most of these UBI programs get rid of those in favor a monthly cash payment...
So how are you disagreeing with me that people mismanaging money would result in them asking for more? And eventually someone would start adding those programs back costing us even more...
There will always be people who either fall through the cracks or just simply people who are bad at managing their resources. I don't know if there is any real solution to fix that.
Because I don't think UBI will help in the long term. It will lead to inflation of commodities (rent, food, cars, etc) and will lead to us having a bigger entitlement burden in the long run.
I did. I dont think it would work because UBI requires getting rid of those other social safety net programs. $1k/mo will barely cover rent/food a month for things like single mother households and would lead to the reintroduction of other social programs to help those cases. Leading us right back to where we are now with more entitlement / debt.
Have you priced baby formula lately? $40 bucks a can, our baby goes through like $200 a month. We have a 2 year old and a 5 month old. $265 for 3 square meals for 1 child and 2 adults is rough. I think we spend close to 700 on food. I don't even want to think about when the kids get older, two teenage boys could easily bankrupt a family on snap.
We struggle some months because I freelance and am not the best marketer of my dev services, and the hurt is real. I have a valuable service I can provide and usually we eek through the hard times. But most others are not so fortunate, WE were not so fortunate before I self-taught myself to code 8-10 years ago. We had a stint of homelessness for about 2-3 weeks. Not by choice. We had no drug or addiction issues we (were) Mormon at the time and abstaining from coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, drugs -- wife still is (Mormon).
Anyone can fall on hard times, it's not just junkies and shitty people. And yes, not everybody is going to be great at managing their money, but if they at least had more of it, then they'd have less stress and worry. Less stress would lead to less anger and domestic violence, or robberies, and other crimes making society overall safer.
Less crimes = less inmates in prison = less money from taxes going to that. Less inmates = more potential workers adding value to the economy, or at the very least helping raise their kids to be better adults because they can afford to give them quality time because they don't need to hold down two jobs.
There've been studies done that show when certain occupations have feast/famine episodes, i.e. you get large amount of cash at a specific time of year, and have to make it last the rest of the year -- when you get toward the end of the year and begin struggling your actual IQ can go down by as much as 40 points. Stress from poverty actually causes IQ to drop.
If we can end poverty we make society's aggregated IQ rise, making us experience more progress. It benefits everybody not just a few as the current system is rigged to do.
I've asked this elsewhere recently but here it goes again.
Im sure Im wrong, but wouldnt it make sense to start with like "all rice, bean, potatoes, and broccoli consumption at the personal level is free" and start with a food stamp / ebt that buys unlimited of something very specific? It wouldnt be a currency thats worth trading to other people, landlords couldnt collect ebt credits in lieu of rent, because everyone would already have unlimited.
I guess I dont understand why UBI proponents think CASH is the best idea, compared to more specific tiers like "600 for healthy food, 100 to treat yourself, 300 for xxxxx." I guess I also find it confusing why it has to be nothing or 100% without any sort of gradual experimentation. Why does the program have to immediately ramp up to the full plan?
Because of the massive cost and buerocracy around maintaining a gradation system of handouts like you describe. By some calculations it can even be cheaper for the gov to go all or nothing than it is to run a system of checks with specific tiers based on need.
Destroying the value of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli would signal to producers that they should grow something more valuable.
The next inclination would naturally be to say "Well, you just force the growing of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli." You have now landed on a planned economy, which doesn't work very well.
So healthy staples can't actually be "free for all". I do think that providing the food directly for people who need it would be a better idea, but you get associated issues of government price-fixing and dumping of lower quality food-stuffs.
Federalism is all about experimentation. One of the features is to permit the autonomy for local governments to attempt local solutions to the specifics of the problem as it is faced locally. There may be something to be said for a central (federal) facilitation of local programs, but this almost always takes the form of funding.
Why would the value of those plummet? Wouldnt the opposite happen? Did insurance prices fall, did insurance stock prices fall, when the government mandated insurance purchases? Do college prices fall when easy access to loans become more available? I dont follow how a free subsidy would lead to less of a crop? Do corn subsidies lead to less corn? The government would be paying rice producers for all the rice people choose to consume. The loser in that scenario is the tax payer who pays a lot and doesnt eat rice.
If anything, the argument against it would be picking and choosing industry winners: pistachio, avocado, cheese, meat markets would find it unfair.
Yes. He created Amazon and employed the people who helped to build it bigger. Those people are/were paid as a part of their employment and that's all they are entitled to as per their contracts.
The way we value ownership may be something to think about. I'm very capitalistic, but I'm not happy. I'm reading "tribe: homecomings and belonging" (subtitle paraphrased due to poor memory).
I am a millionaire and I am thinking about how to use it to build a community, and while I dont think we should use force to take wealth, I did believe we need a new leadership class to inspire and influence how ownership is shared.
I believe that in the context of small communities, programs for the less fortunate can work very well. Mostly because the resources are attached to something/someone they know and they would feel to social pressure not to abuse those resources.
For instance, I'm not a religious person but that's one of the true virtues of a religious community. Giving to the less fortunate but you feel the pressure to do good with it, and you're expected to give back when you have the means to. If you abused that generosity, it would become apparent fast and your community would cut you off.
When you do this at a national level though, the tragedy of the commons come into play and no one cares who the money is coming from so long as they get it. There is very little social pressure not to game the system at that point.
I don't pretend to have a complete solution for all of these problems, I just think giving everyone a blank check each month is just adding more fuel to the fire.
Which is surely an argument in favour of UBI? No tragedy of the commons, or scope to "abuse" it - you exist, you get the UBI. Should work at any scale, no? No need to claim insurance or welfare if shit happens - that safety net stays. A baseline below which it's not possible to sink. Which was the original intent behind welfare etc.
The possibility of having small communities joining in once again, in addition would be great. That would require unwinding much of the neoliberal Thatcher/Reagan view of things though. Community or collective bad, "there's no such thing as society" as a matter of dogma.
We've all been made economic individuals, everything should be paid for individually, community and cooperation is old tech to be eliminated. No wonder there's a crisis of loneliness.
> No need to claim insurance or welfare if shit happens - that safety net stays.
In most UBI proposals (such as A. Yang's) those programs would mostly go away.
> Which is surely an argument in favour of UBI?
In a vacuum sure. But UBI will inevitably lead to inflation of things like food, cars, rent etc. Especially so in the poorer communities that already are heavily subsidized (which would go away under UBI in favor of a single payment).
If your landlord knew that everyone all of a sudden had an extra $1000/mo of disposable income they wouldn't be worried to raise the rent because they know you have it. We will then be in the same position with the option to either raise it to $2k/mo or re-introduce programs like SNAP/WIC/etc to earmark money for food/rent so people don't just go broke paying rent.
At what point do people take ownership? What if governments as we know them today are replaced by trillion dollar AI/robotics corporations that litteraly own the means of production? We'll all get very cheap goods and services, but at what cost? You're now beholden to a megacorp that provides food, housing, entertainment, transportation, and employment. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
Incorporation is granted by the state. While it wouldn't be popular the government could very likely give people the right to take ownership in a corporation without too much technical problems. It is a matter of how you want to structure employment. There is nothing really saying that salary has to be the only required compensation.
> Nobody can ever answer the question of "What happens when someone blows their UBI and cant afford to eat?" Will we let them starve? You'd almost have to from the government side of things.
This seems to be a strawman to me. I've never seen it argued that UBI should come with any kind of requirement that it be spent in certain ways, or that further monitoring would be required to ensure that people didn't do stupid things with it.
Yeah, some people will do with UBI what they do with their wages now: spend it on booze, gambling, video games, whatever their addiction of choice is.
But...that's not a problem that should be solved with strings on UBI, or anything like that. It's a problem that should be solved by trying destigmatize addiction, treat it as a disease, not a personal moral failing, and address the root causes that lead to it. Those things aren't easy, but that doesn't really matter for whether we should enact a UBI, because they're out of its scope.
However, if you reason through to some logical conclusions, it seems likely that, over time, a UBI that genuinely provides enough for people to live on, not in luxury but not in squalor, will tend to lead to these people having more opportunity to get themselves out of the negative spirals of addiction. It can give them hope. It can prevent many others from ending up in that situation to begin with.
> This seems to be a strawman to me. I've never seen it argued that UBI should come with any kind of requirement that it be spent in certain ways, or that further monitoring would be required to ensure that people didn't do stupid things with it.
Given that UBI replaces most other social programs, you'd have to consider if you let people who waste their stipend go hungry or not. If a single mom waste's theirs, do we now introduce SNAP/WIC back into play to cover that? How about disabled people? In my mind all of these programs will slowly be reintroduced to cover edge cases and then we are back where we started.
If the mother is endangering the children I'd rather the children be given a social worker(and protect their UBI if children do receive a benefit). The mother may still have her UBI.
> Nobody can ever answer the question of "What happens when someone blows their UBI and cant afford to eat?" Will we let them starve?
I've answered it a few times in comment sections such as this one, but I can do it again.
If someone cannot meet their needs in a situation where they have a BI that's substantial compared to the cost of essentials, they clearly need more help, and I don't think they are undeserving of more help, but I think circumstance has demonstrated that the help they need is not simply more cash. Assistance at that point should take other forms and address the underlying issues.
> Value, like energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can change form.
This is both false and unproductive. Value is unlocked and created all the time. People are much wealthier and better off than their ancestors, despite our far larger population. Hello technology! They didn't have refrigerators, microwaves, the internet, smart phones, modern medicine and so on. Today we're increasingly concerned with overeating vs starvation.
As for UBI, I'm not sure if it's the best answer or not, but Andrew Yang makes the strongest case for it that I've seen:
UBI will never replace welfare. People are not going to agree to cut off current welfare programs.
And it will not stay at a $1000. It will go up. Not long after implementation, a politician will soon say that $1000 is not a livable wage and that it needs to be $2000. The next politician will say that it needs to be $5000. Basically this opens the door to socialism where we will just be haggling on the amount of wealth redistribution. Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.
All Western countries (including the US) do some kind of wealth distribution and it clearly works. Societies without any form of wealth distribution don't work. Or do you have an example? I can't think of any.
It's a pretty horrible argument unless they come back through to actually explain what they mean.
> Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.
Is a HUGE sweeping generalization that has literally zero substance in a discussion - and technically it's false off-the-bat because I'm certain almost anyone can think of at least ONE example where the "redistribution of wealth" has worked to lessen human suffering. Also, don't let someone come through here and try to redefine what they meant by those words - they mean that they don't believe in wealth re-distribution plain and simple.
When you see binary arguments like that it's a flag to run for the hills.
Try responding to the logic of my argument rather than phrase 'wealth redistribution.' What's to stop this universal income from being pushed higher and higher to the point where it is a large fraction of income for most people rather than a small fraction of income? Do you really think that UBI will replace welfare?
the logic of your argument was " Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.". there wasn't much subtlety in that. Are you saying that Western societies don't work and never have worked?
> Try responding to the logic of my argument rather than phrase 'wealth redistribution.'
When y'all land it with "Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has" as the last sentence, I'm left to think that may have been your overall point!
Respectfully, I'm not going to respond to the rest of it because I do not think we would be able to effectively communicate on the topic.
That's the point - they won't respond to the "Western society" common sense because they'll just ignore facts and move the goalpost. Which is pretty convenient when you want to win an argument!
In their eyes, they've won because I won't engage them further when in all reality no one wins because no one is willing to give up their stance.
You can't nail these folks down on anything - they argue in almost pure logical fallacy, and the last thing they want is to concede to how the world _actually_ works... That's why the "fake news" thing was so incredibly damaging - if anything it signal virtues to everyone to just make up their own narrative =(
So you're saying that the $1000 dollars won't go up? Are you saying that we will eliminate current welfare by using UBI? Never going to happen. Go ahead and keep attacking a straw man.
Andrew Yang is getting a lot of traction with UBI in the Presidential race. It'll be interesting to see if more candidates run on this platform for the Senate & Congress.
I absolutely love Andrew Yang's calm, "common-sense" demeanor. I got into him thanks to the Sam Harris podcast. His platform is hard to ignore for someone who's been around the block both in the bay tech communities and rural America.
I really hope this is the start of a long and vibrant career in politics for him!
I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound.
Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity.
I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI. Their failures in big picture thinking and long term planning, whether in basic economic principles like opportunity cost or tragedy of the commons, or in more existential philosophical matters like whether it's ok to subsist on the toil of others, shouldn't take precedence over our self-governance/determination.
What I'm saying is that we're approaching a day when one person owns the entire discretionary spending of each country, and has effectively corrupted government to the point where propaganda informs our beliefs more than ethics. Are we there yet? Maybe not quite. 10 or 20 years away? Perhaps - look who's president.
UBI threatens the status quo (specifically crony and vulture capitalism) more than almost any concept I can think of. So for that reason alone, I'm strongly for it.
Ya thanks for pointing that out. I probably should have phrased it "I think it's time to question the rationale of arguments against UBI" because personally I think most of them are straw men masking cognitive dissonant or undignified positions.
In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US.
That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.
I would weaken the claim a little – UBI is at least interesting enough that we should be doing trials. What the skeptics need to show is that trials are not worth it.
> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI.
It's people who are invested into the system. Anecdotal: the arguments I get into on this one are with people who don't want to argue any of the human side of the policy. It's not even a thought to them - and they won't even meet you on that battlefield.
Also, people who fight UBI are always people who have some sort of investments, are rent collectors, etc. The first thing they will ALWAYS point to is that there's no proof it will help the economy/markets. They also like to point out how it's not fair for someone to take my money through taxes because "I earned" being a high earner (aside: I did get to being a high earner because of hard work, but also because an incredible network of external support via school + family + _community_ + _country_).
The fear of UBI is the fear of admitting that you had help. It's admitting the status-quo needs challenged. Like - by ALL MEANS tax the hell out of me if it means that we lessen human suffering and raise the bar for my fellow citizens. Selfishly, I think I'll be better off that way.
The point that someone gets the majority of the hotels in Monopoly the game is no longer fun, and it's a race to the bottom... but at this point I think they're just playing a different game than we are.
>If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity.
I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished way of life.
Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it.
Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here.
The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires.
UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time.
Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US:
But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%.
UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%.
I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.
regardless of other arguments for ubi this piece is full of flawed thinking.
> Universal Basic Income means that we can create a universal ownership stake in productivity,
There is already a term for that, it's called communism.
> At any point that they publish evidence that they are leveraging knowledge or information from an individual, be it an employee or a consumer, they owe us a piece
They owe a piece to the government and military that ensure the infrastructure safety and fairness of the economic environment they work in. They pay that (and should pay that) through taxes. It doesn't make sense to say that every time there is an economic transaction both parties should pay back to each other because they somehow "we owe us" . That's just confused logic.
> am interested in raising income, so I can give people more humanity, more dignity, more piece of mind to really uncover what their callings might be, so they can be more effective and more contributive in their communities
What you 're giving them is more money to gamble/spend on drugs/ be just as irresponsible as before. People dont suddenly become productive because you throw them a bone. Welfare is MUCH better at identifying peoples needs and filling the gaps rather than expecting that "they ll just figure it out themselves". UBI is more inhumane than welfare.
> At no point does automation mean that jobs go away,”
I mean, yes it does. by definition, and saying it doesnt doesnt magically fix it
> So, whatever cool comes from that culture, they owe me and people like me
UBI is not politically feasible in America, realistically I can only see it working in a very homogeneous country (religious, ethnic, language, etc.).
Those who want UBI in America should redirect their focus on an expansion of the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits. I think eliminating the phase in period of EITC and increasing the benefits (by absorbing other forms of welfare) is the way to go.
People more easily help people that are similar to themselves, simply because they can easily see themselves in their shoes.
You'd have similar productivity throughout the population, i.e. you won't have some distinct part of the population do most of the work while other distinct parts of the population are primarily taking but not contributing. Having cemented net transfers where, say, protestants to all of the work and catholics sit around collecting welfare will make for unhappy protestants (and you need those to be happy, because they do the work).
Perhaps this thinking on UBI isn't bulletproof, but when you recognise the distribution of wealth is so concentrated, at the very least this is a great beginning to start thinking outside of the box in terms of how we approach Human Rights.
I liked this phrase form JFK: "There’s nothing wrong with CEOs making more than their employees, but that there’s something wrong when the head of a failing company is making hundreds of times as much money as their employees..."
I don’t get what UBI solves vs the existing social safety net programs
>James Felton Keith, tells The Sociable that a Universal Basic Income is the best way to distribute an equity stake in productivity — thus creating an “asset holder class.”
US already provides a tremendous amount of value to its residents vs the rest of the world - doesn’t that count as a stake in productivity ?
The cost of administration of the social safety net programs disappears when you stop caring if the benefits are used to buy cigarettes instead of milk, validating that a Section 8 domicile is worth the payments to the owner, or verifying an individual on unemployment is actively trying to return to work. Everyone gets $X.
Current programs discourage working. If you have welfare for $500 a month and start working for $500 a month, you'll lose most of your welfare; so it's pointless - better to just stay at home or do something illegal.
Just imagine if Hacker News gave a monthly 'points' stipend to every user. You wouldn't have to earn up-votes or make popular submissions-- the upvote 'points' would be equitably distributed among all readers.
What would that do to the discussions? Would it encourage more free dialogue? Would it help promote more civil discourse?
Serious question. It seems like a close model to UBI. Is there a point-counting-forum that has tried this?
88 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadPersonally I think it would be better to reduce working hours.
Shouldn't they?
If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major conflict.
We see that already with climate change. There clearly is no will to really address the issues. We'll have sea levels rising, millions of refugees and somehow deal with that. We will not prevent that.
A large part of climate change denial is driven by economic forces. The oil and transportation industries have built an economy that relies on fossil fuels. As soon as alternatives are cheaper, there will be a transition. We are seeing that in the energy sector now where solar has gotten cheaper than coal. Power companies are starting to make the transition to wind and solar. IMO, the best thing we can do to solve the climate crisis is to make the economics of non-fossil fuel energy sources impossible to compete with OR close the loop on CO and CO2 emissions (converting atmospheric carbon back into fuel).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Unfortunately, capitalism is one of the primary drivers of this. But it's also correlated to any authoritarian system, as well as deregulated systems that use Social Darwinism.
The heart of the problem is an inability for people to organize and address societal problems in a non-reactionary way by means of central planning. Which means that the solution is inherently leftist politically. We can pretend that there are rightist solutions (the invisible hand of the free market, unfettered capitalism, etc) but there is ample evidence that those don't work in practice and are even accelerating global climate change and the collapse of ecosystems.
War is always about money. If we flatten wealth inequality via UBI, that suggests that the impetus for war may be diminished. So expect backlash from those in power or whose wealth is derived from armed conflict.
When we say that we want to provide a UBI to all citizens, that could be looked at as an equivalent number of hours. Giving someone making $10/hr a $10,000 UBI would be the equivalent of 1000 hours freed of a 2000 hour work year. It would increase their quality of life by 50%. A $50/hr worker would get a 10% quality of life increase on a $10,000 UBI.
So for example reducing work hours by 1 hour per day on tech workers would be comparable to a $5-10,000 UBI. Which I think is what we're really talking about here. Providing alternative subsistence so that workers can someday get off the workaday world treadmill/rat race and go invent the things that will automate our economy and improve quality of life for everyone, regardless of income. Right now we have a system where some people live extremely comfortably while half the country has no economic stability or quality of life to speak of, and what's worse is, they currently have no hope for improvement no matter how high the gross national product (GNP) grows because politics has been coopted by lobbyists and special interests.
How about 5 years after when someone introduces another entitlement program to help single mothers/seniors/etc and then criticizes everyone else as heartless for not supporting it? Will we just end up where we are now with even more entitlements?
>“I know Jeff Bezos is probably worth $50 million. I know for a fact that he’s not worth $150 billion. The rest of that money is mine.
Yeah that says it all right there. This guy feels entitled to someone else's money.
And I'm not talking about the panhandler on the street. There are families right now who cannot afford to feed themselves, even with federal assistance.
So how are you disagreeing with me that people mismanaging money would result in them asking for more? And eventually someone would start adding those programs back costing us even more...
We struggle some months because I freelance and am not the best marketer of my dev services, and the hurt is real. I have a valuable service I can provide and usually we eek through the hard times. But most others are not so fortunate, WE were not so fortunate before I self-taught myself to code 8-10 years ago. We had a stint of homelessness for about 2-3 weeks. Not by choice. We had no drug or addiction issues we (were) Mormon at the time and abstaining from coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, drugs -- wife still is (Mormon).
Anyone can fall on hard times, it's not just junkies and shitty people. And yes, not everybody is going to be great at managing their money, but if they at least had more of it, then they'd have less stress and worry. Less stress would lead to less anger and domestic violence, or robberies, and other crimes making society overall safer.
Less crimes = less inmates in prison = less money from taxes going to that. Less inmates = more potential workers adding value to the economy, or at the very least helping raise their kids to be better adults because they can afford to give them quality time because they don't need to hold down two jobs.
There've been studies done that show when certain occupations have feast/famine episodes, i.e. you get large amount of cash at a specific time of year, and have to make it last the rest of the year -- when you get toward the end of the year and begin struggling your actual IQ can go down by as much as 40 points. Stress from poverty actually causes IQ to drop.
If we can end poverty we make society's aggregated IQ rise, making us experience more progress. It benefits everybody not just a few as the current system is rigged to do.
Im sure Im wrong, but wouldnt it make sense to start with like "all rice, bean, potatoes, and broccoli consumption at the personal level is free" and start with a food stamp / ebt that buys unlimited of something very specific? It wouldnt be a currency thats worth trading to other people, landlords couldnt collect ebt credits in lieu of rent, because everyone would already have unlimited.
I guess I dont understand why UBI proponents think CASH is the best idea, compared to more specific tiers like "600 for healthy food, 100 to treat yourself, 300 for xxxxx." I guess I also find it confusing why it has to be nothing or 100% without any sort of gradual experimentation. Why does the program have to immediately ramp up to the full plan?
Cuz I'll be honest, with $1000 a month in cash, I would eat less healthy than $500 cash, and $500 in healthful grocery credits.
The next inclination would naturally be to say "Well, you just force the growing of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli." You have now landed on a planned economy, which doesn't work very well.
So healthy staples can't actually be "free for all". I do think that providing the food directly for people who need it would be a better idea, but you get associated issues of government price-fixing and dumping of lower quality food-stuffs.
Federalism is all about experimentation. One of the features is to permit the autonomy for local governments to attempt local solutions to the specifics of the problem as it is faced locally. There may be something to be said for a central (federal) facilitation of local programs, but this almost always takes the form of funding.
If anything, the argument against it would be picking and choosing industry winners: pistachio, avocado, cheese, meat markets would find it unfair.
Yeah, and that guy is Bezos (and you, it seems). Where did that $150 billion come from? Are you really suggesting one man created it?
No of course not. The company he built from the ground up did.
Those workers are paid as per their employment contract. That's it. That doesn't give them rights to take pieces of ownership in that company.
I am a millionaire and I am thinking about how to use it to build a community, and while I dont think we should use force to take wealth, I did believe we need a new leadership class to inspire and influence how ownership is shared.
For instance, I'm not a religious person but that's one of the true virtues of a religious community. Giving to the less fortunate but you feel the pressure to do good with it, and you're expected to give back when you have the means to. If you abused that generosity, it would become apparent fast and your community would cut you off.
When you do this at a national level though, the tragedy of the commons come into play and no one cares who the money is coming from so long as they get it. There is very little social pressure not to game the system at that point.
I don't pretend to have a complete solution for all of these problems, I just think giving everyone a blank check each month is just adding more fuel to the fire.
The possibility of having small communities joining in once again, in addition would be great. That would require unwinding much of the neoliberal Thatcher/Reagan view of things though. Community or collective bad, "there's no such thing as society" as a matter of dogma.
We've all been made economic individuals, everything should be paid for individually, community and cooperation is old tech to be eliminated. No wonder there's a crisis of loneliness.
In most UBI proposals (such as A. Yang's) those programs would mostly go away.
> Which is surely an argument in favour of UBI?
In a vacuum sure. But UBI will inevitably lead to inflation of things like food, cars, rent etc. Especially so in the poorer communities that already are heavily subsidized (which would go away under UBI in favor of a single payment).
If your landlord knew that everyone all of a sudden had an extra $1000/mo of disposable income they wouldn't be worried to raise the rent because they know you have it. We will then be in the same position with the option to either raise it to $2k/mo or re-introduce programs like SNAP/WIC/etc to earmark money for food/rent so people don't just go broke paying rent.
This seems to be a strawman to me. I've never seen it argued that UBI should come with any kind of requirement that it be spent in certain ways, or that further monitoring would be required to ensure that people didn't do stupid things with it.
Yeah, some people will do with UBI what they do with their wages now: spend it on booze, gambling, video games, whatever their addiction of choice is.
But...that's not a problem that should be solved with strings on UBI, or anything like that. It's a problem that should be solved by trying destigmatize addiction, treat it as a disease, not a personal moral failing, and address the root causes that lead to it. Those things aren't easy, but that doesn't really matter for whether we should enact a UBI, because they're out of its scope.
However, if you reason through to some logical conclusions, it seems likely that, over time, a UBI that genuinely provides enough for people to live on, not in luxury but not in squalor, will tend to lead to these people having more opportunity to get themselves out of the negative spirals of addiction. It can give them hope. It can prevent many others from ending up in that situation to begin with.
Given that UBI replaces most other social programs, you'd have to consider if you let people who waste their stipend go hungry or not. If a single mom waste's theirs, do we now introduce SNAP/WIC back into play to cover that? How about disabled people? In my mind all of these programs will slowly be reintroduced to cover edge cases and then we are back where we started.
I've answered it a few times in comment sections such as this one, but I can do it again.
If someone cannot meet their needs in a situation where they have a BI that's substantial compared to the cost of essentials, they clearly need more help, and I don't think they are undeserving of more help, but I think circumstance has demonstrated that the help they need is not simply more cash. Assistance at that point should take other forms and address the underlying issues.
This is both false and unproductive. Value is unlocked and created all the time. People are much wealthier and better off than their ancestors, despite our far larger population. Hello technology! They didn't have refrigerators, microwaves, the internet, smart phones, modern medicine and so on. Today we're increasingly concerned with overeating vs starvation.
As for UBI, I'm not sure if it's the best answer or not, but Andrew Yang makes the strongest case for it that I've seen:
https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/
Also branding it as a Freedom Dividend is smart.
And it will not stay at a $1000. It will go up. Not long after implementation, a politician will soon say that $1000 is not a livable wage and that it needs to be $2000. The next politician will say that it needs to be $5000. Basically this opens the door to socialism where we will just be haggling on the amount of wealth redistribution. Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.
> Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.
Is a HUGE sweeping generalization that has literally zero substance in a discussion - and technically it's false off-the-bat because I'm certain almost anyone can think of at least ONE example where the "redistribution of wealth" has worked to lessen human suffering. Also, don't let someone come through here and try to redefine what they meant by those words - they mean that they don't believe in wealth re-distribution plain and simple.
When you see binary arguments like that it's a flag to run for the hills.
When y'all land it with "Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has" as the last sentence, I'm left to think that may have been your overall point!
Respectfully, I'm not going to respond to the rest of it because I do not think we would be able to effectively communicate on the topic.
In their eyes, they've won because I won't engage them further when in all reality no one wins because no one is willing to give up their stance.
You can't nail these folks down on anything - they argue in almost pure logical fallacy, and the last thing they want is to concede to how the world _actually_ works... That's why the "fake news" thing was so incredibly damaging - if anything it signal virtues to everyone to just make up their own narrative =(
UBI is faith based science
I really hope this is the start of a long and vibrant career in politics for him!
Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity.
I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI. Their failures in big picture thinking and long term planning, whether in basic economic principles like opportunity cost or tragedy of the commons, or in more existential philosophical matters like whether it's ok to subsist on the toil of others, shouldn't take precedence over our self-governance/determination.
What I'm saying is that we're approaching a day when one person owns the entire discretionary spending of each country, and has effectively corrupted government to the point where propaganda informs our beliefs more than ethics. Are we there yet? Maybe not quite. 10 or 20 years away? Perhaps - look who's president.
UBI threatens the status quo (specifically crony and vulture capitalism) more than almost any concept I can think of. So for that reason alone, I'm strongly for it.
This sounds like a thinly veiled ad hominem against skeptics.
In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US.
That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.
It's people who are invested into the system. Anecdotal: the arguments I get into on this one are with people who don't want to argue any of the human side of the policy. It's not even a thought to them - and they won't even meet you on that battlefield.
Also, people who fight UBI are always people who have some sort of investments, are rent collectors, etc. The first thing they will ALWAYS point to is that there's no proof it will help the economy/markets. They also like to point out how it's not fair for someone to take my money through taxes because "I earned" being a high earner (aside: I did get to being a high earner because of hard work, but also because an incredible network of external support via school + family + _community_ + _country_).
The fear of UBI is the fear of admitting that you had help. It's admitting the status-quo needs challenged. Like - by ALL MEANS tax the hell out of me if it means that we lessen human suffering and raise the bar for my fellow citizens. Selfishly, I think I'll be better off that way.
The point that someone gets the majority of the hotels in Monopoly the game is no longer fun, and it's a race to the bottom... but at this point I think they're just playing a different game than we are.
I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished way of life.
Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it.
Still don’t get how UBI creates wealth
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s...
Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here.
The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires.
UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time.
Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen...
But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%.
UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%.
I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.
> Universal Basic Income means that we can create a universal ownership stake in productivity,
There is already a term for that, it's called communism.
> At any point that they publish evidence that they are leveraging knowledge or information from an individual, be it an employee or a consumer, they owe us a piece
They owe a piece to the government and military that ensure the infrastructure safety and fairness of the economic environment they work in. They pay that (and should pay that) through taxes. It doesn't make sense to say that every time there is an economic transaction both parties should pay back to each other because they somehow "we owe us" . That's just confused logic.
> am interested in raising income, so I can give people more humanity, more dignity, more piece of mind to really uncover what their callings might be, so they can be more effective and more contributive in their communities
What you 're giving them is more money to gamble/spend on drugs/ be just as irresponsible as before. People dont suddenly become productive because you throw them a bone. Welfare is MUCH better at identifying peoples needs and filling the gaps rather than expecting that "they ll just figure it out themselves". UBI is more inhumane than welfare.
> At no point does automation mean that jobs go away,”
I mean, yes it does. by definition, and saying it doesnt doesnt magically fix it
> So, whatever cool comes from that culture, they owe me and people like me
hmm. i stop here. cant read further
Those who want UBI in America should redirect their focus on an expansion of the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits. I think eliminating the phase in period of EITC and increasing the benefits (by absorbing other forms of welfare) is the way to go.
Two things I can think of off the top of my head.
People more easily help people that are similar to themselves, simply because they can easily see themselves in their shoes.
You'd have similar productivity throughout the population, i.e. you won't have some distinct part of the population do most of the work while other distinct parts of the population are primarily taking but not contributing. Having cemented net transfers where, say, protestants to all of the work and catholics sit around collecting welfare will make for unhappy protestants (and you need those to be happy, because they do the work).
>James Felton Keith, tells The Sociable that a Universal Basic Income is the best way to distribute an equity stake in productivity — thus creating an “asset holder class.”
US already provides a tremendous amount of value to its residents vs the rest of the world - doesn’t that count as a stake in productivity ?
What would that do to the discussions? Would it encourage more free dialogue? Would it help promote more civil discourse?
Serious question. It seems like a close model to UBI. Is there a point-counting-forum that has tried this?