Fact: The plan is about replacing you with robots at work so they can rake in more profits. In return you get to go on welfare rebranded as UBI. Look it up UBI is about automation AI replacing humans for profit. (see geordie rose) So your 40k job becomes 10k to 15k welfare. MegaCorps pocket the rest of your wage as reward for selling you out to UBI and AI.
That's very nice of them. If I had the means towards that end, I wouldn't hand out welfare like that. In fact, I would probably tend towards the future scenario that was painted in Terminator, only with me controlling the AI, while pretending towards humanity that the AI went out of control. More profits that way.
Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live?
An army of Terminators can't keep you safe from retaliation. Anyone who tries to take over the world with killer robots will be fought by other people. You might be able to provoke World War III by unleashing killer robots against all the world's governments and their militaries, but you won't be able to prosper or even (probably) survive.
You use the Terminators to pretend to be real people and than vote for other Terminators. You take over every country in the world without anyone noticing it even happened.
> Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live?
Ethics and morals, maybe? Basic human empathy? I think I get where you're going with this. There are those, sociopaths and psychopaths for example, who would go to any length to get that kind of power and... what, when they have their T-3000s they're suddenly gonna have a come-to-Jesus moment? Unlikely, yeah.
"MegaCorps" in any kind of healthy market will still compete on price, so simply stating that they will "pocket the rest" of AI-related productivity improvements is ridiculous.
The more likely outcome is that prices on a whole lot of things are about to drop drastically. Of course this does nothing to help the people who are left out of a job and can no longer contribute as they are no longer cost-effective. UBI is one option to address this, at least partially. Do you have a better one? Ban AI? Do you happen to be an anti-capitalist, and your convenient solution is (big surprise) to remove capitalism as an economic system?
I'm not saying the effect of more people being outcompeted from the job market will never be a problem. Perhaps parts of it will be solved with income redistribution being increased. Perhaps part of the effort will be in creating new jobs where humans can not be replaced. Some cookie cutter "anti megacorp" rhetoric ain't likely to help much.
Otherwise we have Great Depression again, when there was a lot of production, but public simply didn't have any money to buy it.
The solution last time was to basically distribute money to poor, e.g. fund mega-projects with tax money. I feel like UBI sounds pretty much like that as well.
There were major benefits of things like the new deal - massive road systems, parks, etc which allowed America to prosper for the next century.
Mass infrastructure investment would be great, trouble is we need educated workers now, not day labourers, so we need to combine the infrastructure building with education both formal and on the job, ideally at a part time rate, say 3 days a week
Megacorps will still have competition (other megacorps), along with customers (you, I). Automation will bring down costs all over the supply chain, so margins will be thinner. But - they still need customers. No customers, no product.
I'm glad we are having this conversation about ubi, but I see a lot of proposals that are basically "just give everyone $X,000 a month and turn off other social services".
My big concern with that approach is that we'd see landlords immediately bump rents, or we'd cut medical support for people (when medical bills can clearly be many multiples of ubi).
But I'm very pro ubi if we can figure out how to protect the people who rely on it (maybe with some sort of rent control?), support it with other social programs like healthcare, and build some educational resources about how to effectively use it.
You've pointed out why UBI makes no sense. As the saying goes, if everyone is a millionaire, nobody is. Likewise, if you give everyone $X that amount becomes the new baseline.
This is also the reason why it makes no sense to fight wealth inequality. Without wealth inequality, there wouldn't be wealth, only a baseline.
What UBI tries to solve isn't a bug, but a feature.
Sure, but it's a very different baseline when you can afford basic needs instead of being homeless and hungry. The fact that some other people might feel "less rich" as a result shouldn't really be considered an issue.
I think maybe OPs point is that current prices for basics are based on some sort baseline ability to pay. If you increase that baseline then whats to stop basic prices to rise leaving everyone at that same point or maybe worse since other social services would get turned off?
Rent control. Keeping other social programs like food stamps. There are ways to protect these dollars. They might not be popular, but they aren't inconceivable.
Competition is what should keep prices at bay, assuming no significant change in cost of production and market with no monopoly. Actually, more automation should in the long term reduce prices in real terms.
If everyone gets $2000 per month instead of 0$ per month just for existing, $2000 becomes the new zero. They won't suddenly be able to afford things. Instead, their rent may magically raise by $2000. In the end, scarcity will still exist for lots of things and if you give everyone more money, prices will just adjust.
Also, if you are starving or homeless in a first world country the fault lies with you. There's so many social security in place, you just have to make use of it.
> What UBI tries to solve isn't a bug, but a feature.
You can't possibly believe this...
There are millions of children who don't have enough food in America. There are millions more people who cannot afford to keep their heat on, or are evicted because of a small unplanned repair bill.
To say that millions of people should be starving, homeless, poorly clothed, dealing with crippling anxiety over keeping a roof over their heads, etc. is a feature is borderline sociopathic.
You're pointing out issues that aren't actually related to UBI. In a properly functioning real estate market, if rents rise to the point where landlords make easy money, more housing gets built and the effect diminishes. The problem is most metro areas have stupid housing and zoning policies so even without anything like UBI we already have massive rent inflation. Fixing the housing situation would largely diminish the potential for UBI to create massive rent increases.
Healthcare is also its own problem that is widely discussed on HN. Any sane national healthcare system would largely prevent huge increases in healthcare costs. Our privatized system is just a horrible model all around.
Also, it's worth noting that most UBI proposals include indexing the UBI amount to inflation, such that if UBI disbursements do lead to inflation, the UBI payments go up to account for it so that UBI recipients are at about the same means on a year-to-year basis.
That way of paying UBI conflicts their interests (pun intended). But it has an upside too: You could target exactly zero inflation in a UBI-based monetary system without adverse effects.
Is this AI revolution ever going to happen? Siri and Alexa still hear the wrong thing half the time, even when I speak and enunciate very clearly. What jobs have been eliminated by this revolution that I’ve been hearing about for the past decade? The self driving cars are not picking me up and not delivering my packages.
I have a better solution than airdropping everyone welfare money so we can laze around all day - make it easier to start businesses. It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. It’s extremely difficult for me to give massages, cut hair, sell retail products in a physical location, and innumerable useful services that require licenses, bureaucracy, tax forms, inspectors, and on and on.
Even worse is that whatever the poor saves is immediately lost to inflation - education, healthcare, housing, and literal inflation to the fed printing money.
Rather than bandaid government-created problems with more government and a disincentive to create value for society, I wish we would let people other than CS majors become entrepreneurs organically.
> It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users.
That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares.
If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box.
While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.
> people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc.
Oh, the humanity!
> And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products
Airbnb, Uber, etc. run into safety issues too. Other big tech companies can have privacy issues, and even data integrity issues. I'd much rather find a new barber than have Google or Facebook accidentally delete my account.
An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs. Robots are already doing the work of millions. You can see it everywhere you look. Was your laptop hand milled out of aluminum? Nope, a CNC machine did it. Do you see 12 cashiers manning 12 checkout lanes at the grocery store? Nope, 1 cashier is manning 12 self-checkout lanes. Do you have a secretary that schedules your meetings? No, you just use Google Calendar. That is what automation is. The 1970s sci-fi robot is just a distraction.
Yes, technology enhancements (which are not “AI”) have increased productivity, allowing less people to create more value. Where is the widespread unemployment?
The fear is, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, that change will suddenly spring forward at a rate that society can’t adapt fast enough.
And people are unemployed, or worse they are employed but at a rate they can’t afford to live, so are one of the tens of thousands of homeless in LA alone. They work 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so are dangerous as they drive to their third job at 3 in the morning which causes a crash which means massive traffic problems all day.
Even if you are a cold blooded Victorian thetr are benefits to keeping your customers alive and with enough free time to buy the crap you peddle.
There is a notion in economics of complements and replacements. The plow was a complement to horse labour, while the gas engine was a replacement. The former increased demand for horses while the latter basicly eliminated it. If we truly had human-level AI, labour models predict human wages would decline below subsistence. However, applying these labour models in a regime where we have AGI makes little sense, as all that will matter for human welfare is the objective functions of the AIs.
This is operating under the assumption that AGI is going to happen anytime soon. It may never happen. All of these studies and worries are intellectual masturbation.
>An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs.
Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.
You don’t need to eliminate all jobs to create a problem. By simply automating trucking, and you’ve put about 15% of our workforce out of work. What jobs could we easily retrain that 15% for, that are not already being filled?
How do you start a business for a product for which there is no demand? Not as in “didn’t know I wanted it” but as in “can’t pay for it “.
That said, I’m not a fan of UBI. Yes, do tax the hell out of people who made fortunes from their inherited wealth and social connections / status, but use the money to hire people to do something useful and purposeful. E.g., roads, parks, schools, healthcare, basic research.
Maybe we try old fashioned Keynes style policy again, as Reagan / Laffer nonsense seems to have objectively failed for 90+ percent of the population, then maybe we discuss UBI if still needed.
Also, by “hire people”, I mean directly, for a living wage, NOT outsourcing to billionaires who skim most of the money off the top and pay out minimum wage to a bunch of part time giggers.
The prevailing view seems to be: robots will take our jobs, therefore we will need UBI, which allows people to live without work.
The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer. Excessive inequality is bad because the aggregate utility goes down (rich people don't gain much from an additional dollar, so it's more effectively used by a poor person).
Transfering cash directly is the most efficient way of decreasing inequality, so UBI is the right approach. At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work.
And what about robots? There is a danger that automation will further exacerbate income inequality, so redistribution is a natural response, because it would increase the effective wages of low income jobs. It seems unlikely that robots will literally take our jobs, you can probably always be someone's slave (not literally) for $5 / hour.
I find it hard to believe that it would be effective at reducing inequality. It would make the lives of the poor better for sure, but it will not reduce inequality. When Jeff Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a day as it did this past Friday, giving the poor enough money to purchase food and bare essentials isn't going to make much of a dent in their net worth. I'm not saying it won't help them out, just that it really won't tip the scales as far as inequality is concerned. It's a more fundamental issue with how the current state of capitalism is structured in the U.S.
Because of how they utilize that money. The poor will spend it, because they need to. The rich invest their money since they do not need it all. Those investments are continuing to grow. Even if you transfer some of that money to the poor, they are spending it where? At Amazon etc...
Money being spent causes the economy to grow. How is that a bad thing? The investments of rich people often never see the consumer economy.
It doesn't matter how they utilize it, UBI is still reducing inequality. You are allowing families to purchase things they wouldn't have had the money for otherwise. Quality of life purchases that the well-off take for granted.
We need to rethink reward structures in this country. The fact that an investor can put up some capital and then gain "dividends" for as long as a company exists is ludicrous to me. They aren't actively doing anything to earn those dividends. It's simply a scheme to reward those with capital and assets.
Meanwhile, the employees who work hard to contribute to GDP and grow the company see a fixed salary. They do not see those dividends for the rest of their lives, instead when they leave a company it's over. Why? Why don't employees build up dividend streams from the companies they helped build? Why do Amazon employees get paid minimum wage and are denied bathroom breaks when Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a single day? Why aren't all employees, from Janitor to CEO receiving dividends from the success of the company?
It all seems ridiculous to me. We need to encourage people to work hard and innovate, not sit on piles of capital and assets.
I'm someone who invests heavily and takes advantage of the system. But I see the flaws and it really bothers me.
My proposal would simply be to make it a legal obligation for all companies to provide ownership in the company proportional to salary each year they are employed. Not only that, it's a special type of stock which is paid dividends on profits before external shareholders. This stock should have exclusive premium benefits over any other stock. A lot of thought would need to be put into how to structure this so it could not be gamed.
External shareholders could still see a return. But I think the days of seeing massive returns on capital need to be over. It should be a fight just to beat inflation imho.
To be honest though I'm still thinking about this a lot and don't have an exact answer. So this idea is in flux. That doesn't mean it's not a problem though.
Employees are welcome to use a portion of their salary to purchase a stake in the companies they work for already. Mandating that their employer do that on their behalf (thus decreasing their cash salaries) probably wouldn't go over too well.
If fact, its generally considered a poor idea to own shares in the company you work for - if the company takes a downturn, not only do your shares lose value, you're probably also out of a job.
> The investments of rich people often never see the consumer economy.
That's not true at all. Investments from the rich contribute greatly to the economy -- otherwise they would not be investments. Let's say that I had a billion dollars, and all I did was stick it into a savings account. The bank uses that to fund mortgages, LoCs, provide business loans, etc. Those all have a direct effect on the economy.
More likely the rich are investing in a combination of VC, real estate, and the stock market. Those are ALL job creators.
Really the only thing you can do with money that DOESN'T contribute to economic growth is bury it in the ground or spend it overseas.
Money spent well causes the economy to grow. Mindlessly spending money on things that aren't worth their cost is simply waste, and causes the economy to shrink.
In economics it is generally assumed that money wouldn't be spent if the transaction wasn't expected to generate a net benefit for the spender. If you make spending money a goal in its own right, however, then that is no longer true, and spending can result in a net loss instead.
The money has to come from somewhere. Assuming we're not completely stupid about it, the rich will pay more in new taxes than they'll get back from UBI.
So what? If those few people provide services to a great number of people who freely choose to spend their (now increased) income on housing, those people have improved the lot of a large number of people and have earned that wealth (upon which they'll be taxed).
Indeed, if UBI becomes a significant possibility (but before it's a certainty), I think that buying low-end rental properties would be a good idea as I'd expect UBI to result in a net increase in household formation. This is literally giving people freedom and agency with which to live their lives in the way they choose.
My guess is the now-incredibly-rich rentiers (with guaranteed income) will start lobbying the government for concessions (e.g. restriction on new housing, tax-breaks) that further distort the very inequality UBI is trying to solve.
No one loves UBI and its noble objectives more than I: but I'm worried about this inherent failure mode.
What's the failure mode? That broad swaths of society get provided a fundamental service (shelter) in a way that is profitable to the people most efficiently and effectively providing that service?
I think when people approach this problem as "how do we best punish the rich?" rather than "how do we best help the poor?", it's very easy to get stuck spinning in circles.
(IMO) No one should care that there are very rich people. We should instead care that there are not very poor people.
The failure mode is that rentiers and middlemen will eat up all of the UBI income, leaving most people’s material standard unchanged. Given the state of healthcare and housing in the US, this doesn’t seem an improbable outcome.
I’m sure, by contrast, you could do UBI in a country with robust state housing and healthcare programs, like for example Austria, and avoid these concerns.
Landlords need to compete for tenants. High rents are only tenable in hot employment markets with bad policies imposing shortages. Everywhere else, high rents lead to more construction which leads to lower rents, and the landlord who refuses the going rate sees his units go empty.
Ok, show me the real world place in the US where this actually holds true. This hypothetical gets touted around, but I’ve never seen it play out this way anywhere I’ve lived.
For example, I currently live in a second-tier Midwestern city in the midst of a housing crisis. Wages aren’t great relative to their respective industries, but rents and home prices are still skyrocketing. There’s no influx of new construction outside of the luxury sector in a few neighborhoods, a lot of which sits empty. Meanwhile, existing landlords just collect ever larger checks from their properties without meaningful continued investment.
Are developers complaining about not getting permits to build more? That's the usual failure mode in cities.
Median rent in Toledo, OH is $550/mo. With a median household income of $33,687, renters clearly could pay more, but there's no shortage letting landlords demand more.
UBI generally needs to be funded by increased taxes, either on wealth, capital, value-added, or income primarily from people who can afford to pay them. As such, it's a wealth transfer that is reducing inequality to a degree, not a magic handout to the poor that comes from thin air.
To your last statement, most proponents of UBI emphasize the "Basic" part of it. As in, it's meant to provide a subsistence level of income that a person could survive on, but not in comfort. I'm personally in favor of that level explicitly not being location-specific so that if you want to live solely on UBI, you have to live in a low cost of living area to do so.
I don't think it's a static system. Guaranteeing an income to everyone in those cheap areas could also have the effect of creating jobs in those areas because people would have money to spend.
That assumes these people are incapable of ever being productive. That's a different issue then just missing the economic opportunities to allow the communities to grow.
I'm not sure how you got that from what I said. There's nothing preventing people from moving out of those areas and getting jobs elsewhere. In fact, there would be a pretty strong incentive to hire those people because they would likely be willing to work for less than incumbent locals, which is pretty much the system we already have in place for many kinds of labor (not to mention outsourcing to cheap labor areas in the US that happens today). Additionally, freeing people in cheap areas from having to work shit jobs just to survive has the large upside of freeing those people to work on things they either care about or that have better economic potential than barely making rent.
My point is: UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions. Some people will jump at this chance, and that's fine. Many other people will decide they want to live in more desirable locations or increase their standard of living and will need to supplement UBI with other income accordingly. If we try to make UBI location-specific it opens up all kinds of arbitrage opportunities and weird incentives that I don't think most people want.
> "There's nothing preventing people from moving out of those areas and getting jobs elsewhere"
How about family ties? How about ties to their friends and community? These are human beings you are talking about, not robots. At a time when societal problems relating to atomization are increasingly evident (e.g. https://psmag.com/social-justice/americans-are-staying-as-fa...), we hardly need to encourage more of it.
> "UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions."
Oooh, yes. We could also give these cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions some snazzy label like, say, "ghetto", "favela" or "slum". /s
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It's destructive of the curious conversation we're trying to have here.
All your substantive points can be expressed in the curious style instead. Just be thoughtful, respectful, and open rather than snarky, indignant, and confrontational.
All the current proposals for UBI seem to be talking about relatively modest anounts of income... between 10-15K a year... that's not going to go very far unless the cost of rent, essentials, and services drops dramatically.
The reality is if we end up with a large amount of people that are not working then our economy is going to be totally hosed because it runs on consumption. If people don't have the money to consume then it just stops functioning.
Giving people free money is like putting a bunch of taped together printer paper over a hole in the wall and calling it "fixed".
If nobody has a job because they've all been automated away and you're just getting 10K/yr from the Government then your median income is.... 10K/yr not 60K + 10K.
That depends on where the higher taxes kick in. For a lot of people it would be getting some of your own money back, like a tax refund. This makes UBI seem both much more expensive and a much higher benefit than it actually is.
For the combination of higher taxes and UBI you need to look at how the net effects vary across the population. This isn't easy to do without understanding the taxes, and those tend not to be emphasized. (Yang's proposal has a big hole in it; the taxes aren't enough and he relies on economic growth to make up for it, which is a common dodge many politicians use for big proposals. Not that economic growth can't happen but it's not that predictable for something that hasn't been tried. You don't know when the next recession will be.)
In a zero-sum redistribution scheme intended to reduce inequality, if you're of average or high income you might not directly benefit at all, but that's no reason not to support it. You buy fire insurance for the worst case, not because you plan to make money at it in the average case. You get security from it that's not shown in the estimated average payoff.
On the one hand you're saying 15K/yr isn't enough to live on, and on the other you're worried it will prompt people to quit their jobs.
Unemployment isn't our major problem right now. The problem is that the jobs available for many people pay very little. Back when I made $18K/year, that extra 10-15K/mo would have been enormously helpful. I certainly wouldn't have stopped working; I would have paid down my credit cards and had an easier time training myself to write software.
I think you misunderstood... I don't think it will cause people to quit their jobs. I didn't say that in my post. I assume UBI goes hand in hand with automation straight up eliminating jobs. There are no jobs for people.
That will probably happen eventually but at that point, with UBI in place, we could increase the level to something people can live on. If, say, we get to a point where 90% of people can't find jobs, we really won't have a choice. Essentially we'll need to give the general population a share in the productivity of the robots.
In the meantime, with most people having at least low-paying jobs, we can start with something more modest.
How does it go hand-in-hand? UBI comes from the government, automation comes from businesses. No business is holding back automation waiting for UBI to be implemented.
When you automate production, prices go down. That's something that can be verified empirically, and hardly anybody will disagree. But when you automate the entire economy, prices should go down towards zero nearly everywhere¹ - that's because when capital freely creates capital, all restrictions on production and competition become meaningless.
When you automate the entire economy, salaries also go down toward zero. That's even part of what allows prices to go down.
So, did workers become richer or poorer on the process? It's a 0/0 situation, and the answer to that question will depend entirely on the path both curves take into 0. But UBI makes that all irrelevant by adding a minimum bound on the numerator. For the purpose of fighting the problems of automation any reasonable amount will do, it doesn't matter that it looks too low today.
But of course, there are other goals that one can reach by UBI, and none of the above apply to those ones.
1 - There are obvious exceptions, some things are truly limited, and some things are limited by the government, culture, or other such forces. The cost of those are the real limit that will say whether the UBI value is too low, not today's cost of living.
Do you mean that production costs (prices) go down with automation or that the selling price to consumers goes down? If you meant the latter this is wrong. The selling price depends on the pricing power that the producer has. Consider for example monopolistic pricing power, cartel pricing power, and regulatory capture.
Also, for marginal prices to approach 0, you need a true commodity.
Even if this happens for most other needs / products, housing isn't a commodity, and I expect won't ever be. It will generally be demand driven in terms of relative housing costs, and if you're of the mindset that inequality in and of itself is the problem, the lowest tier housing will never be enough, no matter how sufficient.
Which will just lead to a larger part of newly disposable income being spent on housing.
We already know people pay based on what they can afford.
> that's because when capital freely creates capital, all restrictions on production and competition become meaningless.
Not at all. There are still plenty of limited factors in the production function. The capital itself isn’t unlimited, so you need to price in opportunity costs for using it. Much of the capital needs to support people providing services, so you’re still limited by the labor force for doing things that people prefer having humans do, like knowledge work or personal services.
And then you have to contend with the fact that resources are finite and capacity to extract them is too. We’re a very long way away from automated labor being so effective and so ubiquitous that it fully realizes all the benefits you’re talking about.
In the foreseeable future, it’ll probably be rather unpleasant as shitty robots replace competent humans, meaning the quality of services and products we get are bad but the good versions are prohibitively expensive. And the jobs making things start going away so nobody has the money income to get quality versions of things.
The consumer products and services economy (and its enablers in government) is what happens when basic production gets way more efficient and the elite needs a new way to trap the underclasses in wage slavery and keep all the profits for themselves.
It's unsustainable nonsense, and incompatible with any sort of long-term stable future. The economic battery whose poles are the first-world consumer and the third-world sweatshop worker will run down eventually, and it's long past time to start thinking about how we'll adapt when that happens.
Demotivated to work like retirees, spouses in single income households, and people who can live off the fruits of their investments like the wealthy?
Perhaps they’d produce art, or seek out experiences and education that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded to them. Maybe they’d take on risk and start that business they’d always dreamed of if they weren’t taking of their parent with dementia or having to work fewer days to watch their newborn.
Maybe risking their and their children’s health and educations because they might not be compelled to tirelessly feed their lives into a labor machine like they were once is too simple and dehumanizing a way to think.
I’m not for UBI yet because society is still too unbalanced in favor of rent seekers, but I could see it being the next target on the agenda within the decade, assuming a Sanders presidency.
UBI will be useless unless rent seeking is eliminated with it, because the price of any good or service that profits rent seekers will be inflated almost instantly to maintain differentials.
Income inequality is a problem of massively unequal political and economic power, and of insider knowledge and class-cultural arbitrage - not a problem of income.
If - hypothetically - all the jobs required to provide food, shelter, and other basics were taken over by robots, there would be no reason at all not to provide them for free, and give everyone the political and economic freedom to do whatever they wanted.
It's a fair bet that while most people would do nothing much of interest - including most of those who are currently rent seekers - there would still be enough competitive drive to inspire a decent chunk of the population to excel in art, music, science, math, and other productive activities.
That would be real freedom as a birthright - not as the freedom from economic slavery that can only be earned by contributing to that slavery, as now, but as a true inalienable right.
So don't build ghettos. A modest proposal: make every builder donate a proportion of the flats/houses they build to local government, but decide which ones are to be donated by random lot after building work is complete.
> because the price of any good or service that profits rent seekers will be inflated almost instantly to maintain differentials.
Only if there is insufficient competition to keep prices down and the market is already broken, which is the case in some areas but not most. In the more notable cases like housing UBI still helps by freeing people to live anywhere instead of cities with plentiful jobs, and even that is largely an artificial problem in developed countries with birth rates below replacement levels.
> UBI will be useless unless rent seeking is eliminated with it, because the price of any good or service that profits rent seekers will be inflated almost instantly to maintain differentials.
I've heard this concern before, but what's the assumption that is being made? That UBI will drive more people to cities and increase demand? That landlords would simply increase rent knowing renters have a larger income? That people's long term expectations of inflation changes?
>>Is there a good argument for why this will not inevitably transfer much of the money to landowners?
I regularly rent out the guest bedroom in my house. When I do so, I do not run complex formulas to figure out what a particular tenant might be able to afford. I simply look at rents for similar units in the area, and bump it up or down slightly based on the various features and amenities the room has. I don't charge a corporate executive higher rent than I charge a college student. Their ability to pay is not relevant.
You might be thinking "okay, but what if everyone's income went up in an UBI scenario?" Honestly, unless literally all the landlords in a city came together and colluded, you wouldn't see much increase, because we would have the same level of competition we have today.
> I simply look at rents for similar units in the area
? Do you think these rents are set by God or something? The fact that it's a dynamic system doesn't change the fact that the equilibrium (and thus prices) are set through supply and demand.
What about this type of scenario, is this something you could see playing out:
People receive UBI, more people are able to move out and buy/rent an apartment or house, landlords are getting more applicants and apartment buildings start filling up, some landlords increase price to compensate for increased demand, average rent for an area goes up, the rest of the landlords increase their prices to match the market
The term "rent seeking" as economists and the parent poster use it isn't about leases on apartments and offices per se, but rather capturing surplus- an example could be if you live in a house which requires leaves to be raked, your having more income might incentivize "big lawncare" to get laws passed saying you can only use a particular brand of rake in the city limits, one which can't be bought outright and has a monthly license fee attached.
The notion being put forward here is that the more money Joe Sixpack has, the more things will crop up to extract some.
I was worried I would read the entire thread without finding the only sound answer. Thanks for proving my worries unwarranted. UBI is a farce. Redistribution of basic commodities like housing and healthcare are the answer.
> Perhaps they’d produce art, or seek out experiences and education that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded to them.
Honestly, I find this idea laughable. If the last 10 years have taught me anything, it's that people will spend every spare minute they have staring at their phones or streaming TV.
I have to totalky disagree. Look at GPL, DeviantArt, Twitch, steam mods. People will labor for free for the purpose of leisure or enjoyment. While those people are in a minority in terms of population since most consume as opposed to produce with an actual skill.
I think if the culture was ingrained to gain a source of prestige based off of what they contribute for free, that would incentivize people to pursue those Nobel endeavors. But that sort of culture shift would take Star trek levels of time to get to.
Food is not enough. People also want a purpose with their life where they are important for other people.
Denmark has kind of an UBI: a single mom + one kid, no work for past 20 years, gets more than $2300 per month. Such a person has enough money for food, good apartment, etc. All what UBI wants to provide.
But many of these people end up depressed, inactive, feels like a failure, etc. Many just give completely up.
They don't feel "UBI" is like having a long vacation and a meaningful life.
They may feel less depressed if there wasn’t a stigma associated with this. On the other hand a lot of people wouldn’t be working if there wasn’t societal pressure on them.
Why does everybody need to work? Less workers ALSO drives up pay because supply/demand. It also could propel the U.S. to a 30 hour work week or even 25 which would be more in tune with our ancestors (Middle Ages averaged 18 hour weeks).
I can’t read the article, so forgive me if that’s backed by research rather than just anecdata, but… is that really an issue people would have?
I would love UBI, because it would transform what I could do with my time. Instead of working 9–5 on software for a company, I could build whatever I want. There are tons of app ideas floating around in my head that I just don’t have time to build. And I could release them for free or cheap, because my survival wouldn’t depend on them being profitable.
With UBI, I would expect to see many more people building open–source software. I would expect many more going into the arts. I would expect many more doing volunteer work. There are so many fulfilling and valuable things to do that are not easily profitable!
"'Being a man means supporting your family,' says Mr Davis. 'You’ve got to do whatever it takes so they eat, [or] you’re no man at all.' Being a man, says Mr Redden, means you 'work hard, provide for your kids, have a car and [maybe] get your own house some day.'"
What would UBI do for them? It isn't going to fulfill their emotional or spiritual needs. (What they really need is a universal jobs program, IMO.)
> "With UBI, I would expect to see many more people building open–source software. I would expect many more going into the arts. I would expect many more doing volunteer work. There are so many fulfilling and valuable things to do that are not easily profitable!"
Funny, then why aren't people on public assistance already doing all these things you imagine? As others have noted, EU nations provide benefits better than any UBI proposal likely to succeed in the US. So where is this magical wave of creativity?
Could it be (shock, horror) that the vast majority of people don't have the creativity to build things or make art and don't feel they would be fulfilled by volunteer work?
Highly educated people like lawyers also suffer from self-doubt and stress, e.g. thinking "there must be something wrong with me since nobody wants to hire me".
The "lawyers union" in Denmark asked 127 unemployed lawyers who recently graduated. 65% percent responded that unemployement "to a large degree" negatively affect their everyday lives. Only 3% responded that they are not affected at all.
(in Danish) https://www.djoefbladet.dk/artikler/2013/8/ledighed-kan-kn-a...
So even people who are highly educated and for whom it should be easy to do a lot of fulfilling activity, still wants a job. They talk about the emotional burden, they don't talk about wanting more money.
I think that's because it's not socially acceptable to say that you just need money. You need to say that you want a job, or you sound like a lazy loser and a freeloader. Social media is full of extreme vitriol against unemployed people, and even the people who are supposed to help you can treat you in a rather dehumanizing way. The emotional burden comes from many things, including stress, anxiety, insecurity (UBI would help there), stigma, etc.
EDIT: Also, at least here the unemployment benefits are predicated on actively seeking a job. If you actually go and admit you don't want a job, that can backfire in a situation that sucks to start with.
I was unemployed for nearly 2 years and it was a fucking nightmare. Because I had no idea what would happen to my life next week or next month. It's an unsustainable and extremely hostile situation. Can't make any long term plans, can't start any project that requires investment. The only way out of that situation is to get a job, which is everything you need to focus on, in place of all those interesting and fulfilling free-time activities one could think of doing during a period of true freedom and financial independence.
A steady, guaranteed, stable source of income would've changed it completely. You wouldn't need to deal with the stress of trying to find a way out of a terrible situation.
I don't think most pensioners, for instance, think that they've got into a fucking nightmare of a situation. Sure, some get depressed because suddenly their days aren't filled with the activity and people they're used to. But I think most pensioners are quite content as long as they are healthy, have enough money for comfort, have friends, and are free to find activities for themselves. And yes, some even get something that resembles a job. Maybe volunteer somewhere. It's still a rather different situation compared to being employed, and usually volunteers have only as much responsibility as they volunteer for, and they can pretty much quit or reduce their load any time. Around here, becoming a pensioner is something that is mostly celebrated. You can rest in ease knowing that you've earned your future and no longer need to compete in the rat race.
I can say that I enjoyed the heck out of long summer vacations and time between studies when I had zero pressure to worry about getting a job. I would FIRE if I could. There are so many things I want to do with my life, and 9-5 only gets in the way.
I think the problem with this is that UBI is being given within the existing system of work-for-hire, rather than as part of a transition to a post-scarcity economy.
In the current system, if you want to do X, you have to prove to the people who are willing to pay you a living wage/market rate to do X that you are worth hiring to do it.
Under a (hypothetical) post-scarcity system, if you want to do X, you find a group that's working on X and say you want to spend some of your time working on it, and you do it, possibly getting trained first if you don't yet have all the skills needed. Depending on the particular work and/or the particular system that's been implemented, either your financial needs are entirely taken care of by the UBI, or you get the UBI and then you may get paid some extra to do X—but the amount you would be paid to do it would be determined by completely different factors than under today's system.
This more-or-less eliminates the gap between what people want to do with their time and what society will let them do with it...though it will still require a cultural shift away from the idea of the Rugged Individualist Man Providing For His Otherwise Helpless Woman And Children With Nothing But The Sweat Of His Brow.
I'd love this scenario. I'd love to maybe spend some years working on bio/disease research even though I know nothing about diseases. (I'm a developer), or work on Climate Change... Imagine if we put a ton of pressure for people ot just go into science regardless of career 'outlook' just to help save the world before it's too late ? Imagine handing out free college esp. to STEM students going into climate change tech?
What if men providing resources to their families is a drive that runs deeper than some kind of vestigial macho chauvinism? We already have mass depression, isolation, falling educational outcomes, suicide, and even radicalization of men who are unable to find purpose to attach themselves to in the modern economy.
Are we to gloss over the function and instincts of half the population as an attitude problem? Social engineering is way too easy inside a theoretical bubble, where expecting billions of people to fundamentally reconstruct their entire identities can be handwaved in two words. Progressivism is supposed to meet people’s social needs, not dictate them.
There's a big difference between "I need my family to be provided for" and "I need to be the one to provide for my family." The former is what UBI and similar efforts would resolve, and is what is healthy to desire and need.
If it is true—and I do not for a second believe it is—that the latter is an actual biological drive in men specifically, then that's something we need to work on developing strategies to mitigate and work through in a healthy way, because it's not helpful in our modern society. Y'know, much like our panic response is not helpful in our modern society, and when someone has an overdeveloped one, we treat it as a mental illness to be treated, not a "function and instinct" that needs to be catered to.
Personally, I find the idea that men have a biological imperative to be the sole reason their families survive to be nothing more than a ludicrous extension of modern toxic masculinity, on par with "of course men will rape women, once they get aroused they can't help themselves, they have a biological imperative to propagate their genes."
I take gross exception to your rape equivocation. That's the sort of intellectual mine that, much like an actual mine, destroys conversations and leaves the whole field unwalkable for decades.
Back to the claim, sexual dimorphism and sexual division of labor are such a fundamental and ubiquitous element of human physiology and society that it is a mistake to assume there is no adaptation to speak of, or that the role of the male provider is suddenly maladaptive.
It may be that we can restructure society by common agreement in a different way that continues to harness the productivity of testosterone. That is not what you are espousing. Your ideas are a form of social high modernism which assumes the sexes are interchangeable as a premise, then categorizes any deviation as toxic and unhealthy (or even on par with rape apology, which is just... you've got to be kidding).
I don't see any basis to believe this other than that it simplifies the theory and makes utopia seem within reach. But we do have evidence to believe that sexual division of labor is effective (in a word, "civilization") and we are also seeing festering male issues in the decades since we've been experimenting with the alternative premise.
> ... then why aren't people on public assistance already doing all these things you imagine?
Because public assistance in the US sucks. It's designed to. It is political tool more than social policy. There's a word of difference between these two things:
1. We as a society value families and children, so stay home and take care of yours, and we'll make sure you have enough resources to meet your needs.
2. Better get a job soon, parasite, your benefits expire next month.
In which of those situations do you feel safe, or free to create? Or to nurture, itself the greatest act of creativity? Is it not enough labor for society to raise a family? Must every mother also constantly be generating profits for someone else?
This is not my direct experience -- I consider myself fortunate -- but I've seen plenty of it. Getting public assistance is humiliating, time-consuming, and uncertain.
Humiliating - asking for public assistance immediately labels you as a problem and a failure, even for many of those tasked with providing assistance.
There are limited resources (artificially limited, because of course we can always afford weapons programs and tax breaks for owners of capital and real estate). The public assistance system is non-trivially optimized to weed out people who don't need it, in order to conserve these resources, and this process can be fraught and combative. "Prove to me that you're a failure" is the message and the context.
Time-consuming - it takes forever. People on public assistance are often assumed to have no jobs. They have to go (usually slowly, on mass transit if they're lucky) from one government office to another, making and keeping appointments weeks or months ahead. They have to do this often while they live in car that provides shelter, but not transportation, since they can't afford gas.
Uncertain - a large portion of the US political apparatus has for decades spent vast energy and resources in reducing public assistance, and in demonizing those who use it ("welfare mothers"). As we speak the US administration is pushing through further reductions, designed (they say) to "push people from welfare to work."
No surprise that people in that context don't feel free or safe enough to create.
> Funny, then why aren't people on public assistance already doing all these things you imagine?
If you’re on a sickness benefit you’re supposed to be too sick to work. If you’re on an unemployment benefit you’re supposed to be finding a job. If you spend most of your time doing volunteer work you’ll probably lose your benefit.
This is a really popular opinion among programmers. I used to have that too. I've met people with that. But I don't think it's true. Somehow the people who believe it all happen to also have jobs and not enough time for hobbies, or are retired professionals, and even then only a few. When I've had periods without work, my motivation went with it. Doing things seems to make you want to do more things. Part of it might be that if you have all the time you need, then you have to stop fantasizing and actually do it, which is of course less fun and more tedious than the fantasy, so what's the point if the reward of good feelings diminishes the more you do? But there's also something about being busy making you more busy.
Some people can work productively on their hobbies without a job kicking them in the pants every morning. But those people are so motivated, they're going to be doing real jobs anyway!
I live in a country with generous social welfare. Nobody is really too poor to pursue hobbies while unemployed. But they don't seem to be doing it. They do drugs instead. They probably feel useless and bad about life. Having a free house and food and healthcare doesn't help. We have a high suicide rate. Uselessness is an awful thing for humans.
Where is all the long term unemployed people's open source software and apps and arts? There's no shortage of unemployed people and those hobbies cost almost zero money, just time. So why aren't we already flooded with them? Or are we?
One of the most lingering takeaways from Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe” for me is how being a valued member of ones society is necessary for mental health. I worry that without addressing those other aspects of mental health, UBI can easily funnel into societal troubles like substance abuse as opposed to creative efforts
I'd argue that under the current system, the people who are unemployed are those who tend to be less motivated in general.
I'm not sure about your specific country though, I'd guess it's true in all countries(the majority of unemployed people aren't the kinds of people who write software in their free time) but I'm not sure and I'm interested in what you think. I also wonder, if UBI were implemented would it still be true that the motivated, creative people would be the ones who continue to work anyway? I think a larger portion of unmotivated people would drop their jobs and live off of UBI, but there would still be a sizeable portion of people leaving their jobs to pursue creative projects. I myself would definitely quit and start working on my game full time, I did it before without any kind of financial safety net and made some progress, but of course had to go back to work before getting close enough to completion. Having UBI would be life-changing for me
>Food is not enough. People also want a purpose with their life
Lots of people know what they'd like to do with their lives which would be important for (some) 'other people'. But often, those pursuits are not likely to be highly profitable soon ... if ever. (Many, many famous creatives never got to enjoy their fame.)
Most of them will never be able to afford to (happily, creatively, eagerly) pursue what they'd prefer. Not when they must invest (unhappily, dully, compulsively) most of their energies keeping body-and-soul-together while helping others fulfill their dreams.
I agree with you that purpose in life is very important. However, your assumption above about Denmark is not supported by The World Happiness Report (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019): both in 2019 and 2018, Denmark was at the very top (the 2nd place, after Finland). One could argue that many, if not the most, people, not having to work or having to work less at a normal job, might very well express themselves (and contribute significant societal value) by participating in entrepreneurship, innovation, part-time employment, creative arts & crafts, caring for their kids and/or senior family members, volunteering and much more.
> Denmark has kind of an UBI: a single mom + one kid, no work for past 20 years, gets more than $2300 per month. Such a person has enough money for food, good apartment, etc. All what UBI wants to provide.
> But many of these people end up depressed, inactive, feels like a failure, etc. Many just give completely up.
How would these people feel without the money, though? Presumably this group is at high risk for depression to begin with, and alleviating their material deprivation may well be doing a lot of good, even if their average life satisfaction is still not great. (This doesn't mean there's no better way, but I would be really wary of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here.)
I'd make a slight nitpick that that the purpose of UBI is to decouple work from the ability to have enough money to live on.
The "robots will take our jobs" argument is just one of the arguments for why we should do this decoupling, among many good arguments, but is the easiest to swallow.
>Transfering cash directly is the most efficient way of decreasing inequality
Is there any evidence for this? Is there evidence the money won't go right back into the lottery, consumption of unhealthy food, other vices, or right back into increased rent? What percentage of people will turn around and commit to an unnecessary more expensive car payment?
If you hand people cash, but don't correct a lack of financial knowledge, health knowledge, and overcoming marketing, why do you think it will be spent wisely? Aren't lottery windfalls exact evidence of the opposite?
At at an extreme minimum UBI should come with a budgeting framework. At a more extreme level it may be better as food stamps, health care, and retirement funding. Remember, the Freedom Dividend is instead of other, more directly allocated forms of social support. For those on SNAP and other cash equivalent programs, it's less than $1000 in net benefit, which makes it more net increase in welfare for the middle class than the poorest. A person who currently gets $600 in welfare will be able to upgrade to $1000, gaining $400, but somebody who currently qualifies for nothing gets $1000 more. So sure, the poorest are getting slightly more, but is it really actually tackling inequality, for the poorest to have the smallest net gain in the program?
Suppose 50% of the population is on UBI. Those 50% all need housing. What do you think the probability of the market generating optimal housing is? I’m guessing close to zero.
Planned housing can do far better.
The same with food. Let’s assume part of UBI is given as food stamps and only certain items qualify for use of food stamps. Combine this with required education (class you must attend to get UBI) and the quality of food consumed can increase significantly, helping to lower obesity and all the related problems.
Plus with some foods, like leafy greens, the "food stamp" could be unlimited consumption. Instead of giving people $300/m for food, just say: from this day forward all spinach, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, peas, beans are fully covered. Eat to your hearts content. A reverse sin tax. Subsidize things more the healthier they are.
I'm obviously cynical about regulatory capture and dairy, livestock, etc industries lobbying to get their products certified as healthier than they are. With pizza being a vegetable and all now.
I hate the argument that the market will correct with low income housing. The presence of housing alone isn't the problem, it's the desirability of the location and access to infrastructure like groceries and hospitals. Low income housing thrown on the edge of a city causes ghettos. Creating a livable are requires some level of more complex urban planning.
> And what about robots? There is a danger that automation will further exacerbate income inequality, so redistribution is a natural response, because it would increase the effective wages of low income jobs
Why does it make more sense to redistribute the outputs of the robots rather than redistributing the ownership of the robots so that everyone gets and equal share of the output?
The latter approach addresses the root cause of inequality (unequal access to resources) rather than trying to put a bandaid over the wound by constantly having to siphon the money back.
UBI is the typical "utopia" style thinking that's been the cause of most problems in the history of the world. The reason why this is problematic is because when you promise an utopia, the ends will justify _any_ means, including the destruction of the very economic system with which the United States has reached unprecedented levels of economic development and prosperity.
_If_ the world saw a significant increase in the amount of automation in the foreseeable future, which is by no means certain at all, a less "utopian" solution would be shorter work weeks, and more guaranteed days off IMO. That would create more jobs than there are people and lead to the increase of the minimum wage through market mechanisms. It has to be coupled with Trump-style protectionist trade policy to be viable, however.
Being idle is not a healthy way to live. Being (much) less busy while still being able to support yourself is.
>The prevailing view seems to be: robots will take our jobs, therefore we will need UBI, which allows people to live without work.
This is the prevailing view among technologists, a group that includes large swathes of romantic people who view themselves as something akin to wizards. Meanwhile, mainstream economics just sees a lot of business as usual.
> The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer.
The main problem UBI is solving is expensive duplication of function between status quo means tested social safety net programs and the tax system. A secondary problem that it can solve if benefits are tied to revenues and the right dedicated revenue stream is chosen has to do with calibration of benefits in status quo safety net programs.
> At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work.
As long as you don't automatically tie UBI to inflation this is self limiting since excessive demotivation causes critical labor shortages driving both wages and final goods prices up which (1) lowers the quality of life which can be maintained on UBI so it isn't as comfortable as the nominal benefit would seem to provide, and (2) raises the marginal benefit from chosing to work, both of which serve to negate demotivation.
If automation will truly do all jobs, then by definition we have human-level AI. As labour supply enormously limits economic growth, we would have economic growth that is unimaginably large in this scenario. Imagine how quickly a startup could scale if they could clone their best engineer. Now imagine that applied to the economy as a whole. We would get economic doubling times on the order of months. If we truly get automation as flexible as any human, economic growth would be truly insane. Even mild redistribution would be effective in such a scenerio.
Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs.
But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.
I think a point to consider is that for jobs for "tasks only humans can do", the precise job/opportunity for employment may not exist, but I agree that some opportunity will be created that utilizes that human skill that hasn't been displaced yet. This lag between human-replaced and human-finds-job could be problematic to the structure of society (also, consider the current human-job-search). A UBI here could be a shim (also, government welfare/unemployment support) to help support society during the lag - a buffer against the unknown which can help with the necessities (imagine having to find a job and deal with the prospect or being homeless because your were replaced and couldn't pay rent, that will exacerbate the problem.)
The number of human jobs will shrink over time as the machines approach human intelligence.
Fewer jobs with more people seeking them will drive wages down.
So the last gasp of human labor will look like a few excessively educated, qualified and well-connected people competing fiercely for the few remaining low-paying (but still paying!) jobs. The rest live on government benefits or rely on the charity of the trillionaires.
Those with pre-existing capital use it on automated businesses to multiply their fortunes. (And I bet they'll also automate personal security, a necessity when a trillionaire can still be killed by any of the other 10 billion humans. That's how you get private armies.)
You say that as long as there are tasks that only humans can do, "we will have jobs". True, but if and when only highly qualified/specialized jobs (doctors, researchers, engineers, etc.) need humans, most of the population will not have a realistic chance to get a job.
In my experience automating tasks many highly educated workers are easier to replace than low-skill workers. Many a university grad has been made redundant by a Python script; 0 plumbers have. AI people have a term for this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Imagine a mandatory allowance for your kids... like you are required to feed them and cloth them. Add a requirement to give them some cash too... otherwise the state takes them away for negligence. (Not actually suggesting we do this..., just a shower thought).
We have that in the uk - £20 a week for the first child, £13 each for the rest
You are required to feed clothe them and deliver them to school. If you don’t do that you’ll get social services on your back very quickly and eventually they’d be taken into care.
That article isn’t about UBI in much the same way that capitalism isn’t about money. Capitalism is primarily about obtaining advantage and money is one measure among many.
The supposed goals of capitalism are great: competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others. The problem is that those are goals they teach school children. They aren’t the primary goal that actually matters in practice. If capitalism could be refocused to these more ideal goals it would be better, perhaps more utopian. The difference is that the primary goal is highly exclusive while the ideal goals are highly inclusive.
Im not sure I agree. These things are relative, and I would argue that "Capitalism" is an environment that is beneficial to "competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others" relative to other things. Im not sure about what the "thing" is. Rule system? Laws? Societal norms? But I hope you get the idea. Things are obviously not universally perfect, but what are they in relation to other comparable things?
Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade? Some argue that capitalism is more specifically about gaining rent (money) through capital alone, and they criticize that this is undeserved and to the cost of others. But in my view, such criticism ignores risk of loss and potential long term changes.
The University of Chicago propagandized about free markets, but we see what was really going on in the modern economy:
Cartels and Monopolies. Everywhere. Almost all sectors are down to a 1-4 dominant companies that simply entrench themselves with regulatory protections and rent seek for revenue generation.
Even seemingly pure free market commodity markets like frozen concentrated orange juice have shadow cartels like ADM and Cargill, and billions of government assistance and price manipulation.
>Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade?
The core concept of capitalism, multiple individuals pooling their financial resources together for a unified purpose, seems quite logical and noble to me and certainly not inherently evil in and of itself.
I think the real problem that anti-capitalists (who I find often do not understand even what money is and where it comes from) have is that they conflate the problems resulting from corporate personhood with relatively free-market capitalism.
The concepts of private property ownership, the rule of and due process of law and habeas corpus are dramatic improvements overall in the human condition and are part of the core that makes the US in particular and as well as other "Western" countries the enviable result of such concepts.
I'm of the opinion that corporate personhood is, along with money printing outside of the scrutiny of the general populace and guided by multinational origins, an insidious "backdoor" that overrides the freedoms that result from those concepts.
I am not an economics law or political science professor or anything remotely close to that, though. I could be barking up the wrong trees but giving abstract concepts like corporations the same rights as humans seems like it screws up so many things - take political election financing as one of many examples.
Oh goodness, this thing has only been up for 40 minutes and it's already got 20 comments...
I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal.
In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory.
If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it.
But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income.
One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.
Tax in the Uk pays no attention to your marriage or other domestic situation*
A house with a £55k earner and a £5k earner will pay more in tax than a house with two £30k earners (about £2400 a year more, even without student loan repayments)
*(There is an odd £200 tax break for people on lower tax brackets who can apply for a transfer from one person to another, but I think it’s going away)
I do not see how a flat tax is any more or less agnostic about family structure. Unless by "flat tax" all you mean "no deductions/credits for particular aspects of family life", which is not even close to what is usually meant by a "flat tax".
"Flat tax" generally means that any income above whatever the standard deduction is (even if that is zero) is taxed at the same rate.
That removes progressivity from the tax, which in turns is a reflection of the fundamental observation about the marginal value of income - the notion that an extra $1000 to someone who earns $20k a year means something very different than an extra $1000 does to someone who makes $20M a year.
So if you're just arguing for "let's stop using the tax code to promote and inhibit certain kinds of behavior", then you should probably say that.
If you're actually arguing for a conventional "flat tax", then I don't see what that has to with either UBI or "family structure".
> If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it.
No, you can just have a normal progressive tax, with the tax assessment unit being the household, and then distribute the taxes so assessed among taxed members of the household by some method (e.g., proportional to income.)
I don't see how UBI will be any better than food-stamp-esque social welfare.
If a person is poor enough to need UBI, then their major concerns will be housing, food, education and medicare.
All 4 of these are taken care off (to varying degrees) by social welfare structures in place in various western economies.
I do not see why UBI would be a better alternative to instead directing funding towards welfare programs for the above 4 amenities instead ?
I dislike UBI, because it pretends the problems are not of total free-market capitalism's own making. UBI won't solve the problem by addressing the symptom. Centralized regulation and collective bargaining instead address the problem head on. Thus, I find them to be better solutions.
Align incentives. Trickle down economics basically means that the more unequal society is the better society is off. This is trivial to prove wrong. When a business invests in automation workers lose their job while corporate profits soar. The success of a company isn't tied to how well it treats its employees. If one could reverse this situation and somehow make workers look forward to losing their jobs only then can we truly say that increasing inequality makes everyone better off. UBI is one way of achieving that. As a country's GDP grows so does its UBI.
I simply don’t think UBI can survive long term even if it ever gets introduced. The same people who advocate for tax cuts now will also be advocating against UBI and the “lazy parasites” the “job creators” have to feed. People are already complaining about welfare recipients and in the eyes of the people who work full time people who live on UBI will be exactly the same. Unless we totally restructure society this won’t work long term.
Also all proposals I have seen are way too low. They will create slums where people will barely survive.
How about doing some pragmatic stuff like universal health care and increasing the supply of low cost housing dramatically? They are pretty much prerequisites for UBI. If we can’t pull that off forget UBI.
> [...] increasing the supply of low cost housing dramatically? They are pretty much prerequisites for UBI.
Yes, I'm sort of surprised that fixing housing costs is not the first priority of people who want UBI ASAP. As I see it, if you don't start adding supply to the housing market quickly, a UBI would actually become a regressive policy where a tax on consumption (VAT) is effectively transferred to land owners. On the intended effect of reducing inequality, it might be counterproductive.
Supply exists. Surplus exists. It’s just reserved for the wealthy, since homebuilders can make more profit off one luxury home than a hundred affordable homes, even if they have to leave the luxury home vacant for years before finding a buyer.
Suddenly having an extra $1k/month isn't going to bump many people into the bracket where the can suddenly afford the luxury housing, though. It goes back to the housing supply needing to be fixed, UBI itself does not fix it.
It's very strange to call a proposal (negative income tax) made by economists as orthodox and central to 20th century conservative politics as Milton Freedman as _utopian_.
But even beyond the aspirations of a UBI/negative income tax, the real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all.
Will UBI be counted as income? How will this interact with other programs such as SNAP, healthcare subsidies, HUD housing subsidies, or any number of state operated programs? Will they be mutually exclusive?
Will existing policies or laws need to be modified in order to accommodate such a proposal?
> real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all.
They do talk about this, you just haven't been listening. Yang proposes a voluntary switch between needs-based welfare and UBI combined with a national VAT.
To me, it's the other way up: without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income. Usually not direct starvation, but exposure-related due to homelessness, or issues such as not being able to afford insulin. There are basically three kinds of response to this:
a) they deserve it, all of them
b) it's sad, but it's not our problem
c) this is not acceptable and something should be done about it by the state
People who believe (a) and (b) are not going to support UBI. Once people accept (c), only then can we start talking about how to deal with it, and the disadvantages and distortions of the current means-tested system. Liberating the system from means-testing means completely giving up on (a) and accepting that trying to sort the poor into deserving and undeserving is both intractable and hostile to human dignity. But it's a very long way to get there.
> without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income
If workers spend a few days per year to pay for your ubi that takes away that time of their life. If they spend 1% of their life working for ubi it’s 1% of workers life lost. That’s asking quite a lot.
One could instead think of social programs, such as UBI, as insurance. People gladly pay >1% of income for insurance. I believe that nearly everyone has the potential to end up in the financial dumps (no one is above drug addiction, serious health problems, mental disorders, lawsuits etc). If a worker ends up there, they'll be glad to have the "insurance coverage" of UBI.
If that is so, why don’t you form an ubi society, whose members pay an ubi for everyone that wants to join (and net pay).
According to you it won’t be difficult to find people that are glad to join.
To the downvoters of my initial comment: I don’t want people to die on the street. But I doubt ubi is an adequate cure either.
If I considered saving no longer worthwhile, I wouldn’t consume more. I would work less and enjoy more free time. Of course this leads to over proportional less taxes for the state or ubi.
I don’t see why you couldn’t try ubi in small scale by the fans. The most obvious reason why it wouldn’t work on small scale and only on state or global level is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.
While I was being slightly flippant in that, I note that your example of $300Bn as being a completely unreasonable, unachievable number for UBI is less than half the US military budget, and in fact represents about the increase from the pre-9/11 post-cold-war low point. Also that most UBI proposals involve fiddling with the tax bands so that above-average earners see much less or no net increase.
"Do you want $1000 each for twenty years or a war for twenty years" was of course a question that was never on the table in 2002.
What ever happened to d) this is not acceptable, and something should be done about it by individuals directly? Why do we need to abdicate responsibility for our local problems to a larger authority? Mutual Aid Societies and religions used to fill this gap - perhaps we can jointly invent a new modern substitute.
The problems are not fundamentally of local scope. Consider for example the coal mining towns that have been left in a state of ruin by the shift away from coal. There is no local prosperity to fund local aid there.
Let's use your coal mining example - Gilette, Wyoming recently had two mines close. There are 30,500 residents in that town, and 600 were left without a job. (Compare this to the 153 mining jobs lost across the entire state the year before). If every single individual there needed ten thousand dollars in temporary aid to help them relocate, retrain, or just weather out the year - that's 6 million dollars. So if six million people aggregated a dollar apiece, or six hundred thousand (roughly the population of Wyoming) aggregate ten dollars apiece, then problem resolved.
Being that this is too difficult a logistical problem, we instead propose as a solution raising many times that amount of money in campaign donations, lobbying, and volunteer hours to convince a significantly larger group of (the exact same) people (who we don't think will give a dollar or ten to the same cause) to spend at least that much in gas and time to get up and go vote for specific or general measures to care for these people instead.
It's debatable whether the amount you could get by taxation would be enough. Why would you expect people to be generous enough voluntarily to solve the problem?
We already have moved these local problems to a larger authority. The modern wellfare programs are just that. UBI proposes to simplify that mess with a single more efficient way. UBI isnt introducing a new form of wellfare, but rather replacing the current ones.
Also very interested in proposals on joint ventures between the church and state to fill the gaps, as UBI will no question still have gaps. But overall UBI is simply replace a slow (testing and reuping, lots of minute conditions), unreliable (delays, not gaurenteed to be there forever), innefficient(high administation overhead, lots of monmey diverted to distrobution and testing, rather than the end individuals) wellfare program(s) with a fast (universal, so no testing), reliable (gaurenteed for everyone, so no thinking it will go away if you get a job or if you run out of balance) and efficient(little admin overhead, higher % of cash going to individuals) wellfare program.
Many UBI schemes propose that local institutions like states and/or cities also impliment a UBI tax to suppliment the federal. so still a local issue and local solution too.
I don't think robots will steal all jobs, but people will have to do new types of jobs. If we can't give them a save space to learn these new jobs we are doomed in the long run.
The "why not UBI" section misses the most salient critique: what will landlords do when they learn all their tenants have an extra 2k in the pocket a month?
There is considerable reportage of food stamp usage on for e.g sugar soda based drinks, and whether even restrictions on usage such that vegetables should be purchased and soda banned to inhibit diabetes. Inference being ' its our money and 'they' dont know whats good for them'. Ubi would be distributed as some credit ( not 'money' ) , and in an era where everything is tracked, its usage and your monitoring by the 'state' (or whatever apparatus is used) does not paint a pretty picture of utopian freedom.
It may also be an exercise in converting money to a digital format to enable negative rates and forced expenditure. The poorest will likely not resist such a change, it will seem a bargain. Cash would abolished for all and 'banks' and 'bankers' would be permanently entrenched.
Certainly automation will potentially free up some labor, and the currently underway automation of thought processes will take out some (or all) middle class roles.
Until there is some sort of direct democratic methodology i would not trust any of these utopian policy makers.
A future where you own nothing, and timeshare a place of living, transport etc strikes me as one with zero social mobility and is a prime candidate for corruption.
Its a place you need the stainless steel rat to visit and disrupt.
Otoh i guess i could be wrong and it could be just super.
I think this misses one of the social benefits of UBI, or maybe glosses over it in the umbrella of "addressing poverty and income inequality", which is that it gives people on the margin the safety net to reboot their career/job into something more productive rather than destructive behavior they might otherwise fall into.
I got this insight from the end chapters of the book "Ghettoside", where the author describes US social security payments to those who are "disabled" as the closest the US has today to a non-universal basic income. Coal miners who are no longer able to work because the coal mine shut down and they have no other skills get this "disability" income, and in Ghettoside the author describes former gang members also qualifying under the rationale that they are unsuited to the formal workforce and are therefore "disabled" as well. But what it can serve to do is break the cycle of criminal behavior: when the former drug dealer gets out of jail, absent other opportunities or a safety net source of funding to cover life's basics, they quickly fall into the path of least resistance and return to their criminal behavior. The social security disability payments give them another option to turn things around. Now, if they transform themselves into a legal entrepreneur or productive employee, they sure don't seem disabled any longer, which is part of the problem with this being a non-universal BI. It is akin to the downsides of a negative income tax: it gives only to some, and when you do that you have opportunities to abuse the system, and you have more process costs/friction and barriers to entry which keep some who should get it from getting it.
Social security disability is an abused program, with attorneys advertising their ability to get you qualified, which is the irksome aspect of this being a non-universal basic income: it is only available to the savvy or those willing to engage an unscrupulous attorney to qualify. So it is a flawed comparison to UBI, but I think the social benefits described in Ghettoside deserve more attention.
A common way to seek social security money is to get a bogus diagnosis of autism for your children. This makes life a living hell for people with children that actually have autism and depend on SSA to allow them to act as caretakers.
I think the current system in the US is designed to degrade and abuse people for being poor. People who depend on welfare and disability payments are constantly treated with suspicion as grifters and fraudsters because so many others actually are. They spend most of their time fighting with the government to keep their benefits while having little to no hope of replacing them.
A UBI would allow them to go out and get a job without being afraid they will just have their other benefits cut. There is no means testing or degrading requirements to "Prove" you or your dependent is disabled. The government has no reason to investigate you or pry into your personal life.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live?
Ethics and morals, maybe? Basic human empathy? I think I get where you're going with this. There are those, sociopaths and psychopaths for example, who would go to any length to get that kind of power and... what, when they have their T-3000s they're suddenly gonna have a come-to-Jesus moment? Unlikely, yeah.
The more likely outcome is that prices on a whole lot of things are about to drop drastically. Of course this does nothing to help the people who are left out of a job and can no longer contribute as they are no longer cost-effective. UBI is one option to address this, at least partially. Do you have a better one? Ban AI? Do you happen to be an anti-capitalist, and your convenient solution is (big surprise) to remove capitalism as an economic system?
I'm not saying the effect of more people being outcompeted from the job market will never be a problem. Perhaps parts of it will be solved with income redistribution being increased. Perhaps part of the effort will be in creating new jobs where humans can not be replaced. Some cookie cutter "anti megacorp" rhetoric ain't likely to help much.
Otherwise we have Great Depression again, when there was a lot of production, but public simply didn't have any money to buy it.
The solution last time was to basically distribute money to poor, e.g. fund mega-projects with tax money. I feel like UBI sounds pretty much like that as well.
...why again do you need customers?
Mass infrastructure investment would be great, trouble is we need educated workers now, not day labourers, so we need to combine the infrastructure building with education both formal and on the job, ideally at a part time rate, say 3 days a week
I never thought UBI meant communism. If you want more out of life, get a job that pays over-and-above UBI.
My big concern with that approach is that we'd see landlords immediately bump rents, or we'd cut medical support for people (when medical bills can clearly be many multiples of ubi).
But I'm very pro ubi if we can figure out how to protect the people who rely on it (maybe with some sort of rent control?), support it with other social programs like healthcare, and build some educational resources about how to effectively use it.
This is also the reason why it makes no sense to fight wealth inequality. Without wealth inequality, there wouldn't be wealth, only a baseline.
What UBI tries to solve isn't a bug, but a feature.
Also, if you are starving or homeless in a first world country the fault lies with you. There's so many social security in place, you just have to make use of it.
You can't possibly believe this...
There are millions of children who don't have enough food in America. There are millions more people who cannot afford to keep their heat on, or are evicted because of a small unplanned repair bill.
To say that millions of people should be starving, homeless, poorly clothed, dealing with crippling anxiety over keeping a roof over their heads, etc. is a feature is borderline sociopathic.
Healthcare is also its own problem that is widely discussed on HN. Any sane national healthcare system would largely prevent huge increases in healthcare costs. Our privatized system is just a horrible model all around.
Also, it's worth noting that most UBI proposals include indexing the UBI amount to inflation, such that if UBI disbursements do lead to inflation, the UBI payments go up to account for it so that UBI recipients are at about the same means on a year-to-year basis.
(Don't say they aren't thinking about it)
I have a better solution than airdropping everyone welfare money so we can laze around all day - make it easier to start businesses. It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. It’s extremely difficult for me to give massages, cut hair, sell retail products in a physical location, and innumerable useful services that require licenses, bureaucracy, tax forms, inspectors, and on and on.
Even worse is that whatever the poor saves is immediately lost to inflation - education, healthcare, housing, and literal inflation to the fed printing money.
Rather than bandaid government-created problems with more government and a disincentive to create value for society, I wish we would let people other than CS majors become entrepreneurs organically.
That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares.
If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box.
While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.
Oh, the humanity!
> And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products
Airbnb, Uber, etc. run into safety issues too. Other big tech companies can have privacy issues, and even data integrity issues. I'd much rather find a new barber than have Google or Facebook accidentally delete my account.
And people are unemployed, or worse they are employed but at a rate they can’t afford to live, so are one of the tens of thousands of homeless in LA alone. They work 18 hours a day 7 days a week, so are dangerous as they drive to their third job at 3 in the morning which causes a crash which means massive traffic problems all day.
Even if you are a cold blooded Victorian thetr are benefits to keeping your customers alive and with enough free time to buy the crap you peddle.
Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.
That said, I’m not a fan of UBI. Yes, do tax the hell out of people who made fortunes from their inherited wealth and social connections / status, but use the money to hire people to do something useful and purposeful. E.g., roads, parks, schools, healthcare, basic research.
Maybe we try old fashioned Keynes style policy again, as Reagan / Laffer nonsense seems to have objectively failed for 90+ percent of the population, then maybe we discuss UBI if still needed.
Edit: P.S. I mostly like your comment, otherwise.
The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer. Excessive inequality is bad because the aggregate utility goes down (rich people don't gain much from an additional dollar, so it's more effectively used by a poor person).
Transfering cash directly is the most efficient way of decreasing inequality, so UBI is the right approach. At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work.
And what about robots? There is a danger that automation will further exacerbate income inequality, so redistribution is a natural response, because it would increase the effective wages of low income jobs. It seems unlikely that robots will literally take our jobs, you can probably always be someone's slave (not literally) for $5 / hour.
It doesn't matter how they utilize it, UBI is still reducing inequality. You are allowing families to purchase things they wouldn't have had the money for otherwise. Quality of life purchases that the well-off take for granted.
Meanwhile, the employees who work hard to contribute to GDP and grow the company see a fixed salary. They do not see those dividends for the rest of their lives, instead when they leave a company it's over. Why? Why don't employees build up dividend streams from the companies they helped build? Why do Amazon employees get paid minimum wage and are denied bathroom breaks when Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a single day? Why aren't all employees, from Janitor to CEO receiving dividends from the success of the company?
It all seems ridiculous to me. We need to encourage people to work hard and innovate, not sit on piles of capital and assets.
I'm someone who invests heavily and takes advantage of the system. But I see the flaws and it really bothers me.
This (and other forms of return) is the motivation for the investor to put up the initial capital.
Do you have an alternative proposal to handle the common case where someone who wants to work hard and innovate needs capital to do so?
External shareholders could still see a return. But I think the days of seeing massive returns on capital need to be over. It should be a fight just to beat inflation imho.
To be honest though I'm still thinking about this a lot and don't have an exact answer. So this idea is in flux. That doesn't mean it's not a problem though.
If fact, its generally considered a poor idea to own shares in the company you work for - if the company takes a downturn, not only do your shares lose value, you're probably also out of a job.
That's not true at all. Investments from the rich contribute greatly to the economy -- otherwise they would not be investments. Let's say that I had a billion dollars, and all I did was stick it into a savings account. The bank uses that to fund mortgages, LoCs, provide business loans, etc. Those all have a direct effect on the economy.
More likely the rich are investing in a combination of VC, real estate, and the stock market. Those are ALL job creators.
Really the only thing you can do with money that DOESN'T contribute to economic growth is bury it in the ground or spend it overseas.
Money spent well causes the economy to grow. Mindlessly spending money on things that aren't worth their cost is simply waste, and causes the economy to shrink.
In economics it is generally assumed that money wouldn't be spent if the transaction wasn't expected to generate a net benefit for the spender. If you make spending money a goal in its own right, however, then that is no longer true, and spending can result in a net loss instead.
Except the fortunate rich who own the housing that the UBI beneficiaries will pay for.
I can see UBI making a few people very, very, wealthy.
Indeed, if UBI becomes a significant possibility (but before it's a certainty), I think that buying low-end rental properties would be a good idea as I'd expect UBI to result in a net increase in household formation. This is literally giving people freedom and agency with which to live their lives in the way they choose.
My guess is the now-incredibly-rich rentiers (with guaranteed income) will start lobbying the government for concessions (e.g. restriction on new housing, tax-breaks) that further distort the very inequality UBI is trying to solve.
No one loves UBI and its noble objectives more than I: but I'm worried about this inherent failure mode.
I think when people approach this problem as "how do we best punish the rich?" rather than "how do we best help the poor?", it's very easy to get stuck spinning in circles.
(IMO) No one should care that there are very rich people. We should instead care that there are not very poor people.
There is one of your assumptions.
It is more likey be captured by connected rentiers who exclude the more efficient.
IMO
I’m sure, by contrast, you could do UBI in a country with robust state housing and healthcare programs, like for example Austria, and avoid these concerns.
For example, I currently live in a second-tier Midwestern city in the midst of a housing crisis. Wages aren’t great relative to their respective industries, but rents and home prices are still skyrocketing. There’s no influx of new construction outside of the luxury sector in a few neighborhoods, a lot of which sits empty. Meanwhile, existing landlords just collect ever larger checks from their properties without meaningful continued investment.
Median rent in Toledo, OH is $550/mo. With a median household income of $33,687, renters clearly could pay more, but there's no shortage letting landlords demand more.
My point is: UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions. Some people will jump at this chance, and that's fine. Many other people will decide they want to live in more desirable locations or increase their standard of living and will need to supplement UBI with other income accordingly. If we try to make UBI location-specific it opens up all kinds of arbitrage opportunities and weird incentives that I don't think most people want.
How about family ties? How about ties to their friends and community? These are human beings you are talking about, not robots. At a time when societal problems relating to atomization are increasingly evident (e.g. https://psmag.com/social-justice/americans-are-staying-as-fa...), we hardly need to encourage more of it.
> "UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions."
Oooh, yes. We could also give these cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions some snazzy label like, say, "ghetto", "favela" or "slum". /s
All your substantive points can be expressed in the curious style instead. Just be thoughtful, respectful, and open rather than snarky, indignant, and confrontational.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The reality is if we end up with a large amount of people that are not working then our economy is going to be totally hosed because it runs on consumption. If people don't have the money to consume then it just stops functioning.
Giving people free money is like putting a bunch of taped together printer paper over a hole in the wall and calling it "fixed".
I fail to see the major disaster if it becomes somebody else instead.
E: to the downvoters, look up how money gets "printed" in the USA
For the combination of higher taxes and UBI you need to look at how the net effects vary across the population. This isn't easy to do without understanding the taxes, and those tend not to be emphasized. (Yang's proposal has a big hole in it; the taxes aren't enough and he relies on economic growth to make up for it, which is a common dodge many politicians use for big proposals. Not that economic growth can't happen but it's not that predictable for something that hasn't been tried. You don't know when the next recession will be.)
In a zero-sum redistribution scheme intended to reduce inequality, if you're of average or high income you might not directly benefit at all, but that's no reason not to support it. You buy fire insurance for the worst case, not because you plan to make money at it in the average case. You get security from it that's not shown in the estimated average payoff.
Unemployment isn't our major problem right now. The problem is that the jobs available for many people pay very little. Back when I made $18K/year, that extra 10-15K/mo would have been enormously helpful. I certainly wouldn't have stopped working; I would have paid down my credit cards and had an easier time training myself to write software.
In the meantime, with most people having at least low-paying jobs, we can start with something more modest.
When you automate the entire economy, salaries also go down toward zero. That's even part of what allows prices to go down.
So, did workers become richer or poorer on the process? It's a 0/0 situation, and the answer to that question will depend entirely on the path both curves take into 0. But UBI makes that all irrelevant by adding a minimum bound on the numerator. For the purpose of fighting the problems of automation any reasonable amount will do, it doesn't matter that it looks too low today.
But of course, there are other goals that one can reach by UBI, and none of the above apply to those ones.
1 - There are obvious exceptions, some things are truly limited, and some things are limited by the government, culture, or other such forces. The cost of those are the real limit that will say whether the UBI value is too low, not today's cost of living.
Even if this happens for most other needs / products, housing isn't a commodity, and I expect won't ever be. It will generally be demand driven in terms of relative housing costs, and if you're of the mindset that inequality in and of itself is the problem, the lowest tier housing will never be enough, no matter how sufficient.
Which will just lead to a larger part of newly disposable income being spent on housing.
We already know people pay based on what they can afford.
Not at all. There are still plenty of limited factors in the production function. The capital itself isn’t unlimited, so you need to price in opportunity costs for using it. Much of the capital needs to support people providing services, so you’re still limited by the labor force for doing things that people prefer having humans do, like knowledge work or personal services.
And then you have to contend with the fact that resources are finite and capacity to extract them is too. We’re a very long way away from automated labor being so effective and so ubiquitous that it fully realizes all the benefits you’re talking about.
In the foreseeable future, it’ll probably be rather unpleasant as shitty robots replace competent humans, meaning the quality of services and products we get are bad but the good versions are prohibitively expensive. And the jobs making things start going away so nobody has the money income to get quality versions of things.
It's unsustainable nonsense, and incompatible with any sort of long-term stable future. The economic battery whose poles are the first-world consumer and the third-world sweatshop worker will run down eventually, and it's long past time to start thinking about how we'll adapt when that happens.
Perhaps they’d produce art, or seek out experiences and education that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded to them. Maybe they’d take on risk and start that business they’d always dreamed of if they weren’t taking of their parent with dementia or having to work fewer days to watch their newborn.
Maybe risking their and their children’s health and educations because they might not be compelled to tirelessly feed their lives into a labor machine like they were once is too simple and dehumanizing a way to think.
I’m not for UBI yet because society is still too unbalanced in favor of rent seekers, but I could see it being the next target on the agenda within the decade, assuming a Sanders presidency.
Income inequality is a problem of massively unequal political and economic power, and of insider knowledge and class-cultural arbitrage - not a problem of income.
If - hypothetically - all the jobs required to provide food, shelter, and other basics were taken over by robots, there would be no reason at all not to provide them for free, and give everyone the political and economic freedom to do whatever they wanted.
It's a fair bet that while most people would do nothing much of interest - including most of those who are currently rent seekers - there would still be enough competitive drive to inspire a decent chunk of the population to excel in art, music, science, math, and other productive activities.
That would be real freedom as a birthright - not as the freedom from economic slavery that can only be earned by contributing to that slavery, as now, but as a true inalienable right.
Which is why I'd prefer to see UBH (Universal Basic Housing).
Only if there is insufficient competition to keep prices down and the market is already broken, which is the case in some areas but not most. In the more notable cases like housing UBI still helps by freeing people to live anywhere instead of cities with plentiful jobs, and even that is largely an artificial problem in developed countries with birth rates below replacement levels.
I've heard this concern before, but what's the assumption that is being made? That UBI will drive more people to cities and increase demand? That landlords would simply increase rent knowing renters have a larger income? That people's long term expectations of inflation changes?
This one seems a serious problem. Home sales too, since sellers know people could make larger mortgage payments.
Is there a good argument for why this will not inevitably transfer much of the money to landowners?
I regularly rent out the guest bedroom in my house. When I do so, I do not run complex formulas to figure out what a particular tenant might be able to afford. I simply look at rents for similar units in the area, and bump it up or down slightly based on the various features and amenities the room has. I don't charge a corporate executive higher rent than I charge a college student. Their ability to pay is not relevant.
You might be thinking "okay, but what if everyone's income went up in an UBI scenario?" Honestly, unless literally all the landlords in a city came together and colluded, you wouldn't see much increase, because we would have the same level of competition we have today.
The market is all the collusion necessary.
> I simply look at rents for similar units in the area
Iterate that and the rents rise until they reach a new, higher global equilibrium.
? Do you think these rents are set by God or something? The fact that it's a dynamic system doesn't change the fact that the equilibrium (and thus prices) are set through supply and demand.
People receive UBI, more people are able to move out and buy/rent an apartment or house, landlords are getting more applicants and apartment buildings start filling up, some landlords increase price to compensate for increased demand, average rent for an area goes up, the rest of the landlords increase their prices to match the market
The notion being put forward here is that the more money Joe Sixpack has, the more things will crop up to extract some.
Honestly, I find this idea laughable. If the last 10 years have taught me anything, it's that people will spend every spare minute they have staring at their phones or streaming TV.
I think if the culture was ingrained to gain a source of prestige based off of what they contribute for free, that would incentivize people to pursue those Nobel endeavors. But that sort of culture shift would take Star trek levels of time to get to.
Denmark has kind of an UBI: a single mom + one kid, no work for past 20 years, gets more than $2300 per month. Such a person has enough money for food, good apartment, etc. All what UBI wants to provide.
But many of these people end up depressed, inactive, feels like a failure, etc. Many just give completely up.
They don't feel "UBI" is like having a long vacation and a meaningful life.
budget: (notice that the mom can afford a $1000/month apartment) https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/danskpolitik/article...
I would love UBI, because it would transform what I could do with my time. Instead of working 9–5 on software for a company, I could build whatever I want. There are tons of app ideas floating around in my head that I just don’t have time to build. And I could release them for free or cheap, because my survival wouldn’t depend on them being profitable.
With UBI, I would expect to see many more people building open–source software. I would expect many more going into the arts. I would expect many more doing volunteer work. There are so many fulfilling and valuable things to do that are not easily profitable!
Hell, yes. There are a vast number of low-education people with what the HN crowd would call "old fashioned attitudes". From https://archive.is/CCTXs#selection-1205.100-1205.363:
"'Being a man means supporting your family,' says Mr Davis. 'You’ve got to do whatever it takes so they eat, [or] you’re no man at all.' Being a man, says Mr Redden, means you 'work hard, provide for your kids, have a car and [maybe] get your own house some day.'"
What would UBI do for them? It isn't going to fulfill their emotional or spiritual needs. (What they really need is a universal jobs program, IMO.)
> "With UBI, I would expect to see many more people building open–source software. I would expect many more going into the arts. I would expect many more doing volunteer work. There are so many fulfilling and valuable things to do that are not easily profitable!"
Funny, then why aren't people on public assistance already doing all these things you imagine? As others have noted, EU nations provide benefits better than any UBI proposal likely to succeed in the US. So where is this magical wave of creativity?
Could it be (shock, horror) that the vast majority of people don't have the creativity to build things or make art and don't feel they would be fulfilled by volunteer work?
Highly educated people like lawyers also suffer from self-doubt and stress, e.g. thinking "there must be something wrong with me since nobody wants to hire me".
The "lawyers union" in Denmark asked 127 unemployed lawyers who recently graduated. 65% percent responded that unemployement "to a large degree" negatively affect their everyday lives. Only 3% responded that they are not affected at all. (in Danish) https://www.djoefbladet.dk/artikler/2013/8/ledighed-kan-kn-a...
So even people who are highly educated and for whom it should be easy to do a lot of fulfilling activity, still wants a job. They talk about the emotional burden, they don't talk about wanting more money.
EDIT: Also, at least here the unemployment benefits are predicated on actively seeking a job. If you actually go and admit you don't want a job, that can backfire in a situation that sucks to start with.
I was unemployed for nearly 2 years and it was a fucking nightmare. Because I had no idea what would happen to my life next week or next month. It's an unsustainable and extremely hostile situation. Can't make any long term plans, can't start any project that requires investment. The only way out of that situation is to get a job, which is everything you need to focus on, in place of all those interesting and fulfilling free-time activities one could think of doing during a period of true freedom and financial independence.
A steady, guaranteed, stable source of income would've changed it completely. You wouldn't need to deal with the stress of trying to find a way out of a terrible situation.
I don't think most pensioners, for instance, think that they've got into a fucking nightmare of a situation. Sure, some get depressed because suddenly their days aren't filled with the activity and people they're used to. But I think most pensioners are quite content as long as they are healthy, have enough money for comfort, have friends, and are free to find activities for themselves. And yes, some even get something that resembles a job. Maybe volunteer somewhere. It's still a rather different situation compared to being employed, and usually volunteers have only as much responsibility as they volunteer for, and they can pretty much quit or reduce their load any time. Around here, becoming a pensioner is something that is mostly celebrated. You can rest in ease knowing that you've earned your future and no longer need to compete in the rat race.
I can say that I enjoyed the heck out of long summer vacations and time between studies when I had zero pressure to worry about getting a job. I would FIRE if I could. There are so many things I want to do with my life, and 9-5 only gets in the way.
In the current system, if you want to do X, you have to prove to the people who are willing to pay you a living wage/market rate to do X that you are worth hiring to do it.
Under a (hypothetical) post-scarcity system, if you want to do X, you find a group that's working on X and say you want to spend some of your time working on it, and you do it, possibly getting trained first if you don't yet have all the skills needed. Depending on the particular work and/or the particular system that's been implemented, either your financial needs are entirely taken care of by the UBI, or you get the UBI and then you may get paid some extra to do X—but the amount you would be paid to do it would be determined by completely different factors than under today's system.
This more-or-less eliminates the gap between what people want to do with their time and what society will let them do with it...though it will still require a cultural shift away from the idea of the Rugged Individualist Man Providing For His Otherwise Helpless Woman And Children With Nothing But The Sweat Of His Brow.
What if men providing resources to their families is a drive that runs deeper than some kind of vestigial macho chauvinism? We already have mass depression, isolation, falling educational outcomes, suicide, and even radicalization of men who are unable to find purpose to attach themselves to in the modern economy.
Are we to gloss over the function and instincts of half the population as an attitude problem? Social engineering is way too easy inside a theoretical bubble, where expecting billions of people to fundamentally reconstruct their entire identities can be handwaved in two words. Progressivism is supposed to meet people’s social needs, not dictate them.
If it is true—and I do not for a second believe it is—that the latter is an actual biological drive in men specifically, then that's something we need to work on developing strategies to mitigate and work through in a healthy way, because it's not helpful in our modern society. Y'know, much like our panic response is not helpful in our modern society, and when someone has an overdeveloped one, we treat it as a mental illness to be treated, not a "function and instinct" that needs to be catered to.
Personally, I find the idea that men have a biological imperative to be the sole reason their families survive to be nothing more than a ludicrous extension of modern toxic masculinity, on par with "of course men will rape women, once they get aroused they can't help themselves, they have a biological imperative to propagate their genes."
Back to the claim, sexual dimorphism and sexual division of labor are such a fundamental and ubiquitous element of human physiology and society that it is a mistake to assume there is no adaptation to speak of, or that the role of the male provider is suddenly maladaptive.
It may be that we can restructure society by common agreement in a different way that continues to harness the productivity of testosterone. That is not what you are espousing. Your ideas are a form of social high modernism which assumes the sexes are interchangeable as a premise, then categorizes any deviation as toxic and unhealthy (or even on par with rape apology, which is just... you've got to be kidding).
I don't see any basis to believe this other than that it simplifies the theory and makes utopia seem within reach. But we do have evidence to believe that sexual division of labor is effective (in a word, "civilization") and we are also seeing festering male issues in the decades since we've been experimenting with the alternative premise.
Because public assistance in the US sucks. It's designed to. It is political tool more than social policy. There's a word of difference between these two things:
1. We as a society value families and children, so stay home and take care of yours, and we'll make sure you have enough resources to meet your needs. 2. Better get a job soon, parasite, your benefits expire next month.
In which of those situations do you feel safe, or free to create? Or to nurture, itself the greatest act of creativity? Is it not enough labor for society to raise a family? Must every mother also constantly be generating profits for someone else?
This is not my direct experience -- I consider myself fortunate -- but I've seen plenty of it. Getting public assistance is humiliating, time-consuming, and uncertain.
Humiliating - asking for public assistance immediately labels you as a problem and a failure, even for many of those tasked with providing assistance.
There are limited resources (artificially limited, because of course we can always afford weapons programs and tax breaks for owners of capital and real estate). The public assistance system is non-trivially optimized to weed out people who don't need it, in order to conserve these resources, and this process can be fraught and combative. "Prove to me that you're a failure" is the message and the context.
Time-consuming - it takes forever. People on public assistance are often assumed to have no jobs. They have to go (usually slowly, on mass transit if they're lucky) from one government office to another, making and keeping appointments weeks or months ahead. They have to do this often while they live in car that provides shelter, but not transportation, since they can't afford gas.
Uncertain - a large portion of the US political apparatus has for decades spent vast energy and resources in reducing public assistance, and in demonizing those who use it ("welfare mothers"). As we speak the US administration is pushing through further reductions, designed (they say) to "push people from welfare to work."
No surprise that people in that context don't feel free or safe enough to create.
If you’re on a sickness benefit you’re supposed to be too sick to work. If you’re on an unemployment benefit you’re supposed to be finding a job. If you spend most of your time doing volunteer work you’ll probably lose your benefit.
Some people can work productively on their hobbies without a job kicking them in the pants every morning. But those people are so motivated, they're going to be doing real jobs anyway!
I live in a country with generous social welfare. Nobody is really too poor to pursue hobbies while unemployed. But they don't seem to be doing it. They do drugs instead. They probably feel useless and bad about life. Having a free house and food and healthcare doesn't help. We have a high suicide rate. Uselessness is an awful thing for humans.
Where is all the long term unemployed people's open source software and apps and arts? There's no shortage of unemployed people and those hobbies cost almost zero money, just time. So why aren't we already flooded with them? Or are we?
One of the most lingering takeaways from Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe” for me is how being a valued member of ones society is necessary for mental health. I worry that without addressing those other aspects of mental health, UBI can easily funnel into societal troubles like substance abuse as opposed to creative efforts
I'm not sure about your specific country though, I'd guess it's true in all countries(the majority of unemployed people aren't the kinds of people who write software in their free time) but I'm not sure and I'm interested in what you think. I also wonder, if UBI were implemented would it still be true that the motivated, creative people would be the ones who continue to work anyway? I think a larger portion of unmotivated people would drop their jobs and live off of UBI, but there would still be a sizeable portion of people leaving their jobs to pursue creative projects. I myself would definitely quit and start working on my game full time, I did it before without any kind of financial safety net and made some progress, but of course had to go back to work before getting close enough to completion. Having UBI would be life-changing for me
Lots of people know what they'd like to do with their lives which would be important for (some) 'other people'. But often, those pursuits are not likely to be highly profitable soon ... if ever. (Many, many famous creatives never got to enjoy their fame.)
Most of them will never be able to afford to (happily, creatively, eagerly) pursue what they'd prefer. Not when they must invest (unhappily, dully, compulsively) most of their energies keeping body-and-soul-together while helping others fulfill their dreams.
We can do better.
Is this alimony/child support? And if it isn't, does alimony and child support not exist in Denmark?
> But many of these people end up depressed, inactive, feels like a failure, etc. Many just give completely up.
How would these people feel without the money, though? Presumably this group is at high risk for depression to begin with, and alleviating their material deprivation may well be doing a lot of good, even if their average life satisfaction is still not great. (This doesn't mean there's no better way, but I would be really wary of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here.)
The "robots will take our jobs" argument is just one of the arguments for why we should do this decoupling, among many good arguments, but is the easiest to swallow.
Is there any evidence for this? Is there evidence the money won't go right back into the lottery, consumption of unhealthy food, other vices, or right back into increased rent? What percentage of people will turn around and commit to an unnecessary more expensive car payment?
If you hand people cash, but don't correct a lack of financial knowledge, health knowledge, and overcoming marketing, why do you think it will be spent wisely? Aren't lottery windfalls exact evidence of the opposite?
At at an extreme minimum UBI should come with a budgeting framework. At a more extreme level it may be better as food stamps, health care, and retirement funding. Remember, the Freedom Dividend is instead of other, more directly allocated forms of social support. For those on SNAP and other cash equivalent programs, it's less than $1000 in net benefit, which makes it more net increase in welfare for the middle class than the poorest. A person who currently gets $600 in welfare will be able to upgrade to $1000, gaining $400, but somebody who currently qualifies for nothing gets $1000 more. So sure, the poorest are getting slightly more, but is it really actually tackling inequality, for the poorest to have the smallest net gain in the program?
Suppose 50% of the population is on UBI. Those 50% all need housing. What do you think the probability of the market generating optimal housing is? I’m guessing close to zero.
Planned housing can do far better.
The same with food. Let’s assume part of UBI is given as food stamps and only certain items qualify for use of food stamps. Combine this with required education (class you must attend to get UBI) and the quality of food consumed can increase significantly, helping to lower obesity and all the related problems.
I'm obviously cynical about regulatory capture and dairy, livestock, etc industries lobbying to get their products certified as healthier than they are. With pizza being a vegetable and all now.
I hate the argument that the market will correct with low income housing. The presence of housing alone isn't the problem, it's the desirability of the location and access to infrastructure like groceries and hospitals. Low income housing thrown on the edge of a city causes ghettos. Creating a livable are requires some level of more complex urban planning.
Why does it make more sense to redistribute the outputs of the robots rather than redistributing the ownership of the robots so that everyone gets and equal share of the output?
The latter approach addresses the root cause of inequality (unequal access to resources) rather than trying to put a bandaid over the wound by constantly having to siphon the money back.
_If_ the world saw a significant increase in the amount of automation in the foreseeable future, which is by no means certain at all, a less "utopian" solution would be shorter work weeks, and more guaranteed days off IMO. That would create more jobs than there are people and lead to the increase of the minimum wage through market mechanisms. It has to be coupled with Trump-style protectionist trade policy to be viable, however.
Being idle is not a healthy way to live. Being (much) less busy while still being able to support yourself is.
This is the prevailing view among technologists, a group that includes large swathes of romantic people who view themselves as something akin to wizards. Meanwhile, mainstream economics just sees a lot of business as usual.
The main problem UBI is solving is expensive duplication of function between status quo means tested social safety net programs and the tax system. A secondary problem that it can solve if benefits are tied to revenues and the right dedicated revenue stream is chosen has to do with calibration of benefits in status quo safety net programs.
> At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work.
As long as you don't automatically tie UBI to inflation this is self limiting since excessive demotivation causes critical labor shortages driving both wages and final goods prices up which (1) lowers the quality of life which can be maintained on UBI so it isn't as comfortable as the nominal benefit would seem to provide, and (2) raises the marginal benefit from chosing to work, both of which serve to negate demotivation.
No easier than general tax cuts—or implementing a UBI—are now.
Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs.
But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.
Fewer jobs with more people seeking them will drive wages down.
So the last gasp of human labor will look like a few excessively educated, qualified and well-connected people competing fiercely for the few remaining low-paying (but still paying!) jobs. The rest live on government benefits or rely on the charity of the trillionaires.
Those with pre-existing capital use it on automated businesses to multiply their fortunes. (And I bet they'll also automate personal security, a necessity when a trillionaire can still be killed by any of the other 10 billion humans. That's how you get private armies.)
You are required to feed clothe them and deliver them to school. If you don’t do that you’ll get social services on your back very quickly and eventually they’d be taken into care.
The supposed goals of capitalism are great: competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others. The problem is that those are goals they teach school children. They aren’t the primary goal that actually matters in practice. If capitalism could be refocused to these more ideal goals it would be better, perhaps more utopian. The difference is that the primary goal is highly exclusive while the ideal goals are highly inclusive.
Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade? Some argue that capitalism is more specifically about gaining rent (money) through capital alone, and they criticize that this is undeserved and to the cost of others. But in my view, such criticism ignores risk of loss and potential long term changes.
Cartels and Monopolies. Everywhere. Almost all sectors are down to a 1-4 dominant companies that simply entrench themselves with regulatory protections and rent seek for revenue generation.
Even seemingly pure free market commodity markets like frozen concentrated orange juice have shadow cartels like ADM and Cargill, and billions of government assistance and price manipulation.
The core concept of capitalism, multiple individuals pooling their financial resources together for a unified purpose, seems quite logical and noble to me and certainly not inherently evil in and of itself.
I think the real problem that anti-capitalists (who I find often do not understand even what money is and where it comes from) have is that they conflate the problems resulting from corporate personhood with relatively free-market capitalism.
The concepts of private property ownership, the rule of and due process of law and habeas corpus are dramatic improvements overall in the human condition and are part of the core that makes the US in particular and as well as other "Western" countries the enviable result of such concepts.
I'm of the opinion that corporate personhood is, along with money printing outside of the scrutiny of the general populace and guided by multinational origins, an insidious "backdoor" that overrides the freedoms that result from those concepts.
I am not an economics law or political science professor or anything remotely close to that, though. I could be barking up the wrong trees but giving abstract concepts like corporations the same rights as humans seems like it screws up so many things - take political election financing as one of many examples.
This is a really great discussion thread, though.
Basic needs are taken care of, and the ultra rich get to accumulate their wealth.
I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal.
In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory.
If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it.
But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income.
One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.
A house with a £55k earner and a £5k earner will pay more in tax than a house with two £30k earners (about £2400 a year more, even without student loan repayments)
*(There is an odd £200 tax break for people on lower tax brackets who can apply for a transfer from one person to another, but I think it’s going away)
"Flat tax" generally means that any income above whatever the standard deduction is (even if that is zero) is taxed at the same rate.
That removes progressivity from the tax, which in turns is a reflection of the fundamental observation about the marginal value of income - the notion that an extra $1000 to someone who earns $20k a year means something very different than an extra $1000 does to someone who makes $20M a year.
So if you're just arguing for "let's stop using the tax code to promote and inhibit certain kinds of behavior", then you should probably say that.
If you're actually arguing for a conventional "flat tax", then I don't see what that has to with either UBI or "family structure".
No, you can just have a normal progressive tax, with the tax assessment unit being the household, and then distribute the taxes so assessed among taxed members of the household by some method (e.g., proportional to income.)
If a person is poor enough to need UBI, then their major concerns will be housing, food, education and medicare.
All 4 of these are taken care off (to varying degrees) by social welfare structures in place in various western economies.
I do not see why UBI would be a better alternative to instead directing funding towards welfare programs for the above 4 amenities instead ?
I dislike UBI, because it pretends the problems are not of total free-market capitalism's own making. UBI won't solve the problem by addressing the symptom. Centralized regulation and collective bargaining instead address the problem head on. Thus, I find them to be better solutions.
Also all proposals I have seen are way too low. They will create slums where people will barely survive.
How about doing some pragmatic stuff like universal health care and increasing the supply of low cost housing dramatically? They are pretty much prerequisites for UBI. If we can’t pull that off forget UBI.
Yes, I'm sort of surprised that fixing housing costs is not the first priority of people who want UBI ASAP. As I see it, if you don't start adding supply to the housing market quickly, a UBI would actually become a regressive policy where a tax on consumption (VAT) is effectively transferred to land owners. On the intended effect of reducing inequality, it might be counterproductive.
Since UBI is mainly pushed by wealthy people I wouldn’t be surprised if this was intended.
But even beyond the aspirations of a UBI/negative income tax, the real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all.
Will UBI be counted as income? How will this interact with other programs such as SNAP, healthcare subsidies, HUD housing subsidies, or any number of state operated programs? Will they be mutually exclusive?
Will existing policies or laws need to be modified in order to accommodate such a proposal?
They do talk about this, you just haven't been listening. Yang proposes a voluntary switch between needs-based welfare and UBI combined with a national VAT.
https://ubicalculator.com/ provides a good amount of detail about how various UBI plans will be funded.
a) they deserve it, all of them
b) it's sad, but it's not our problem
c) this is not acceptable and something should be done about it by the state
People who believe (a) and (b) are not going to support UBI. Once people accept (c), only then can we start talking about how to deal with it, and the disadvantages and distortions of the current means-tested system. Liberating the system from means-testing means completely giving up on (a) and accepting that trying to sort the poor into deserving and undeserving is both intractable and hostile to human dignity. But it's a very long way to get there.
If workers spend a few days per year to pay for your ubi that takes away that time of their life. If they spend 1% of their life working for ubi it’s 1% of workers life lost. That’s asking quite a lot.
To the downvoters of my initial comment: I don’t want people to die on the street. But I doubt ubi is an adequate cure either.
If I considered saving no longer worthwhile, I wouldn’t consume more. I would work less and enjoy more free time. Of course this leads to over proportional less taxes for the state or ubi.
I don’t see why you couldn’t try ubi in small scale by the fans. The most obvious reason why it wouldn’t work on small scale and only on state or global level is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.
Yes, obviously? Preferably the people with more than one megayacht?
According to [1] the top 3% (>250k USD household income per year) earn in total per month
needed to fund your ubi. Maybe it's not enough to take from people with more than one megayacht?[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
"Do you want $1000 each for twenty years or a war for twenty years" was of course a question that was never on the table in 2002.
Check your numbers: US military budget 2019 [1] is $686Bn or $60 Bn per month vs $300 Bn per month for ubi.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Being that this is too difficult a logistical problem, we instead propose as a solution raising many times that amount of money in campaign donations, lobbying, and volunteer hours to convince a significantly larger group of (the exact same) people (who we don't think will give a dollar or ten to the same cause) to spend at least that much in gas and time to get up and go vote for specific or general measures to care for these people instead.
Do you see the issues with this logic?
Also very interested in proposals on joint ventures between the church and state to fill the gaps, as UBI will no question still have gaps. But overall UBI is simply replace a slow (testing and reuping, lots of minute conditions), unreliable (delays, not gaurenteed to be there forever), innefficient(high administation overhead, lots of monmey diverted to distrobution and testing, rather than the end individuals) wellfare program(s) with a fast (universal, so no testing), reliable (gaurenteed for everyone, so no thinking it will go away if you get a job or if you run out of balance) and efficient(little admin overhead, higher % of cash going to individuals) wellfare program.
Many UBI schemes propose that local institutions like states and/or cities also impliment a UBI tax to suppliment the federal. so still a local issue and local solution too.
I don't think robots will steal all jobs, but people will have to do new types of jobs. If we can't give them a save space to learn these new jobs we are doomed in the long run.
He forgot "do nothing".
> Rather, we need a fitting policy framework to guide utopian energy back into mainstream economic thought.
It looks like certain leftists are looking for a way to create a collapse of (what's left of) free markets so that the State can completely take over.
Certainly automation will potentially free up some labor, and the currently underway automation of thought processes will take out some (or all) middle class roles. Until there is some sort of direct democratic methodology i would not trust any of these utopian policy makers. A future where you own nothing, and timeshare a place of living, transport etc strikes me as one with zero social mobility and is a prime candidate for corruption.
Its a place you need the stainless steel rat to visit and disrupt.
Otoh i guess i could be wrong and it could be just super.
But it is a political disaster. It creates a fundamental divide in society.
Are you tired of hearing about folks receiving undeserved 'handouts' for things like food stamps today?
UBI would supercharge that and cement it as a fundamental understanding of ones status in society
I got this insight from the end chapters of the book "Ghettoside", where the author describes US social security payments to those who are "disabled" as the closest the US has today to a non-universal basic income. Coal miners who are no longer able to work because the coal mine shut down and they have no other skills get this "disability" income, and in Ghettoside the author describes former gang members also qualifying under the rationale that they are unsuited to the formal workforce and are therefore "disabled" as well. But what it can serve to do is break the cycle of criminal behavior: when the former drug dealer gets out of jail, absent other opportunities or a safety net source of funding to cover life's basics, they quickly fall into the path of least resistance and return to their criminal behavior. The social security disability payments give them another option to turn things around. Now, if they transform themselves into a legal entrepreneur or productive employee, they sure don't seem disabled any longer, which is part of the problem with this being a non-universal BI. It is akin to the downsides of a negative income tax: it gives only to some, and when you do that you have opportunities to abuse the system, and you have more process costs/friction and barriers to entry which keep some who should get it from getting it.
Social security disability is an abused program, with attorneys advertising their ability to get you qualified, which is the irksome aspect of this being a non-universal basic income: it is only available to the savvy or those willing to engage an unscrupulous attorney to qualify. So it is a flawed comparison to UBI, but I think the social benefits described in Ghettoside deserve more attention.
I think the current system in the US is designed to degrade and abuse people for being poor. People who depend on welfare and disability payments are constantly treated with suspicion as grifters and fraudsters because so many others actually are. They spend most of their time fighting with the government to keep their benefits while having little to no hope of replacing them.
A UBI would allow them to go out and get a job without being afraid they will just have their other benefits cut. There is no means testing or degrading requirements to "Prove" you or your dependent is disabled. The government has no reason to investigate you or pry into your personal life.