> A UBI is the logical next step we must take to move forward as humanity. If we continue to wait more people will suffer and we’ll end up stagnating for decades, or destroying the fruits of capitalism in revolution anyway.
This simply isn't true, by almost every possible metric the world is getting better.
I actually liked his critiques at the time and I think capitalism should be constantly kept in check through government. (such that they balance each other out)
My unsubstantiated opinion would be that Marx probably would of changed his mind at some point about making it some sort of collectivist movement.
Well, you are labelling a prime example of what Marx calls “bourgeois socialism” as Communism 2.0, so you clearly don't understand Communism. Which you'd really understand better by reading a slim volume on the topic like the Communist Manifesto, and not thick volumes centered on critique of capitalism like Das Kapital, which is more about the problem (on which Communists generally agree with other crítics of capitalism) and not narrowly focussed on the solution (on which they differ.)
The UBI is also basically the welfare system most countries have without the expense and pain of trying to find the "cheaters" (See Australia's RoboDebt).
Its still capitalism and you still benefit from seeking a higher paying job but once most jobs have been automated it lets people easily train for better jobs without having to constantly report back to some defective government department and randomly getting their payments cut off.
> The UBI is also basically the welfare system most countries have without the expense and pain of trying to find the "cheaters" (See Australia's RoboDebt).
Basically.
> Its still capitalism
No, the modern welfare state is not capitalism, it's a socialist reaction to capitalism. Now, you can argue that it's “bourgeois socialism” that tends to reinforce the class relations of capitalism and which inevitably reverts to capitalism, as Marx—before it actually became the thing that completely displaced old-school capitalism in the developed world—did. But it's not, itself, capitalism. And the longer it is the dominant system of the developed world without a wholesale reversion to unmitigated capitalism, the harder to pure form of the Marxian charge against bourgeois socialism is to defend.
only if you put on the same blinders that the author does, and ignore things such as:
- no mention whatsoever of any existential threats e.g. climate change. full faith and credit in Mr. Market to get us out of that rut, i guess
- some definitions of "efficient" involve avoiding policies in one country (say worker and environmental protections) by moving to other countries where those same protections don't apply. so efficient seems to also mean unlawful, to some extent
- we'll trust these UBI recipients to "do the right thing" and goose up the economy immediately, instead of say, investing in infrastructure (education, health, science) that we know is a far better investment in the long term future of the country (but can't really be done by a couple grand per month, more like... i dunno... a government thing)
By making sure each person has their minimum needs met, one can then have a better chance at having support for solving big problems that require government which requires popular support.
There are schemes for UBI which don't actually cost much more than we are spending. It can just be reallocation with more clawback in taxes. If one wants to.
Its the opposite of truth. Which isn't a lie its just saying the opposite of facts.
The fact is less people suffer every year, the economy in the west had its biggest expansion every, and there more fruit especially in america than ever.
Every single thing we know about redistribution of wealth does the exact thing he said. Where is his proof.
Not to mention the fact that you believe giving more money to someone who is addicted to alcohol or drugs will be better instead of worse. The only thing you've given them is money money to buy alcohol and drugs with no extra motivation or responsibility so they'd stop doing those things.
In the event we did go socialist, UBI would be a much more effective way to allocate goods and services than a centrally managed economy. Let people determine what they need most, and use 'credits' to get it -- save the paperwork for less ordinary needs / circumstances.
At least where I'm from, poor people typically don't own land. They rent. I guess the argument can be made that the landlords would put the rent up to compensate.
For the 30% of Americans who rent it's not any of their net worth. But I agree it's weird to pick real estate as the only asset class. Introduce a progressive wealth tax and eliminate capital gains taxes in favor of taxing all income at one rate.
Land tax is one of those things that you can value easily and collect on easily. It also hurts people who just sit on land, waiting for the value to go up. It also stops negative gearing which drives up housing prices (see Australia)
I think taxing wealth is harder and then defining it is hard (how do you value illiquid shares, options, etc).
You can also have an exemption for the first $1m so that family homes are excluded from the tax.
I think a straight wealth tax should be the next step, because you will need to figure out how to stop people dodging it. Taxing someone who has a ton of debt and wealth might lead to issues.
How often outside a few cities in the world are people just sitting on land? How is the land valued? Where I live there’s an appraisal board to value land - they’re terrible at it and need investigations have shown their friends get lower appraisals.
I've heard this claim before, but have never seen it supported. Anecdotally, across decades of experience, it's typically not the poorest people I know who own much land, if any at all. Where they do, they own only a little, rather than a lot. Can you speak to your evidence for your claim?
For most middle class families the most expensive asset they own is their house. Do you really need evidence of that? It should be pretty self evident.
It doesn't, I was replying to the comment that assumes that a property tax wouldn't hurt the poor because middle class is infinitely closer to being poor than they are being rich and this type of tax would hurt those people the most thereby causing them to fall into poverty.
Classically [0], land taxes aren't on the value of the house, but of the land underneath. But, let's say that both the house and the land underneath get taxed, as is currently done. As a middle class homeowner, my total property tax bill is a small fraction of my income tax bill.
Let's say the US collects 6 Trillion/ year in all taxes [I'm probably off by some percent, but not too much for an internet comment.] Let's say there are about 1.5 Billion acres of taxable land in the US (Reverse engineered from "The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, about 28% of the total land area of 2.27 billion acres." [1]) That works out to $4000/acre. For my ~sixth of an acre lot, my Federal tax bill would be about $700. That works out to be less than what I pay in income tax, so it looks like a deal to me.
You can already do that in most places by just applying for welfare payments and making a fake effort to get a job. The thing is that working a real programming job pays a lot more.
Not if you genuinely don't care about impressing anyone. A real programming job involves convincing someone your work is valuable enough to pay for. A welfare scam involves convincing someone you deserve free money. Both are too much social involvement if you prefer a hikikomori lifestyle of writing code nobody will ever use.
Zero users and loving it! is not necessarily hyperbole.
Under a UBI you would not have to fake anything since the only qualification is having a low or no taxable income.
Again, this is how it works in most developed countries under welfare systems without issue. The majority still seek real jobs because they want to live above the base level of income required to live. A UBI won't be paying for your overseas holiday and fancy car.
I can’t help but think that UBI would distort job markets. Let’s pick an example of a “sucky job” (and I say this as just an example, I realize these guys work hard and are vital). A garbage man. He get’s paid $42k a year because they have to find people who would be willing to do this sucky job and need to pay higher than minimum wage to do so. At some point of income, people would be willing to accept the suckiness.
Now let’s throw UBI into the world. Everyone is getting $2k a month. Now a garbage man says “I’m not gonna be a garbage man anymore, I can do something I love now, like a music teacher that pays $30k”. Now we have no garbage man and the wage would need to increase to find new people. To cover that, taxes go up. Higher taxes are a regressive solution to giving people more money.
I kind of get that, but on the other hand, you could say "Existence is like having a gun to your head. You do what you've got to do."
Because you need food and shelter to survive. There's been no point in time where we didn't have to acquire it. We're just now getting to the point where the production of it requires nominal effort.
If we made it voluntary, almost no one would volunteer, certainly not enough to be viable. Taxation and the rule of law aren't opt-in for the same reason.
I wasn't given a vote when we decided to hand out all of the land and resources to them in the first place, so I hardly see how the system as it stands is in any way voluntary.
Because we are not living in an era of such abundance that we have the liberty to do that.
Do the math: 300M people, $2k/mo, 12mo/yr is 7.2 trillion dollars. Even to first order that is unaffordable, and that’s without factoring in that UBI would decimate the tax base that’s supposed to support it, or the consumer price inflation that would result in that $2k not going as far as you’d expect.
You're inferring more than I'm implying. I'm not saying "existence is suffering". I'm saying existence requires maintenance and for all of human history, it's been up to one to do that maintenance on their own.
We've never lived in a time where the majority could exist in the non-working class. Having the majority be in the non-working class raises certain issues. Like, who is going to be in the minority.
I'm not worried about what happens at 100% automation. I'm more worried about what happens when there are too few jobs to reasonably distribute among the people. There's an icky issue of essentially slavery we're going to have to confront.
To me, it seems like man's constant fight against the brutality of mother nature will never end. As long as we need food, need medicine, and entropy destroys what we create, we will need a lot of people working to solve problems.
Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.
Sure, give someone 500k and they might try to buy some luxury goods and inflate prices of various things. Give someone enough to not be destitute on a monthly basis and you’ll have a huge boon to the economy - because they’ll buy the essentials. People will always want more than just the basics and thus work.
American households own $98 trillion in net worth. Averages to about $340,000 per person. And this is just household wealth. So yes there is enough money out there.
the only wealth that isn't "household wealth" is public assets. I guess there might technically be enough to give everyone $500k (or $2000/month), but do you want the government to provide any services?
$2000 per month is with wealth right now. It will be more than affordable in the future since the country will have more wealth in the future. Pretty much everything in current economics relies on wealth growth (pension funds, 401ks, etc), so adding this into that mix is very reasonable.
the relationship between the two figures is that $2000/month is roughly the safe withdrawal rate for diverse $500k portfolio (ie, the most you can spend without risking that you use up the principal over several decades). if you use the almost all the returns from the nation's capital to pay out $2000/month, there isn't much growth to speak of. of course, it's sort of a naive analysis to treat a nation's wealth like a retirement account, but the idea clearly doesn't pass the "back of the napkin" test. there would have to be some powerful knock-on effects to make it halfway viable.
Growth where? If you "pay out" returns from the nation's wealth to its own citizens, the wealth still stays inside the nation and wealth growth still happens.
As is often the case in economics, the scarcity is not an absolute lack of resources, but a result of inefficient allocation.
The world's mean income is about $18000 adjusted for purchasing power parity so it's not a complete stretch to get to $2000 per month for the whole world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040
The USA has a mean income of about $72,000 so in theory UBI could be $6000/mo without bankrupting the country.
It would be very interesting to see what kind of crazy spending-led boom you could achieve by redistributing wealth exactly evenly across every American citizen.
I don't understand what you mean by this. UBI redistributes income - wouldn't it obviously be funded via taxation? USA would be able to afford a much higher UBI than Sierra Leone would because US income is higher. What determines how much UBI can be issued if aggregate income is irrelevant?
If you fund by a 100% income tax, everyone would quit instantly. There would literally be no point in working for money. UBI cannot be funded by the thing UBI would eliminate.
Money is not equal to wealth, money is a device. That's the first and most common mistake in economics.
UBI is a way to reshuffe the cards of modern economy and hope that'll fix some of the current problems. It certainly won't allow everyone to drive a Ferrari.
> if salaries for essential, dirty jobs must go up, i am all for it
so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.
So do you increase UBI to counter this? Or do you let it be, and UBI no longer pays enough to maintain the same level of living standard. In which case, people are now once again, forced economically, to work "dirty jobs" despite not wanting it.
Perhaps partially. But you have no evidence to support your implicit assertion that it happens totally, or that your argument defeats UBI on the merits
if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. if that’s the cost to pay for a more equitable society, why not leave the keyboard for a day and perform that noble and necessary duty. i’m sure i’m not the only person on HN who feels this way.
the world isn’t all bad. it’s getting better. but it only gets better insofar as we ourselves become better. it is this striving towards higher harmony that propels us forward.
so do you currently volunteer your time for social work (or any other work for which there is a shortage of people due to low pay and hard to perform)?
Even if you _would_ do as you have proposed above, most people won't. A labour shortage is still likely the result, esp. if said labour is not high paying, but the doing of which is still relatively important to a functioning society.
I'm not against UBI - i would want it, even if it means a higher tax! But i just don't see how it is implementable atm, and also whether there are any negative consequences.
The unemployment benefits that have been paid out in the USA so far has many talking about how it is a disincentive to go back to work - because they are paid more than their original job. I can't see how this won't be the same under a UBI system - so the only way for a worker to _do_ work they wouldn't ordinarily do is to pay more!
>so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.
Isn't this the same argument that's used to argue against increasing the minimum wage? "if you increased the minimum wage, then the costs will go up for those businesses hiring minimum wage workers, making the goods more expensive for those workers, and canceling everything out!". But empirical evidence has shown this has not been the case[1]. Because of this, I'm wary of any hand-wavy arguments like these that just mention some effects without attempting to quantify the magnitude of those effects.
"Change in employment: -500k" It's not just that costs could go up, it's that jobs could also disappear. What's the hardest part about entering the job market? Proving that your labor is valuable. It's hard to build a resume when the wage floor is set so high.
Unlike UBI, minimum wages don't affect everyone and aren't purely inflationary. Some workers earn more gross income, some get fewer hours and earn less, and some get laid off. I think I support UBI but it clearly cannot be raised to fully compensate for every price increase.
You make some interesting points here, but I think your logic is fundamentally limited. There are alternative, imaginative ways to solve this problem that don't necessarily involve capital. In _The Dispossessed_ by Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, able-bodied workers are required to perform essential work like agricultural work and other "dirty jobs". Much like we conscript people in times or war, we could do the same with regards to needed work that isn't getting done.
It's up to the free market to make jobs attractive to labor. UBI means employers won't be able to press-gang workers into anything just because a job needs to be done or because people need to eat.
The more you tax them, the less they work and save, and the more they make, find, and exploit loopholes and shelters. Top tax rates have been as high as 90% (during the Eisenhower administration) and revenue has never significantly changed as a function of GDP.
So what’s the exact math on this? About 209 million adults in the US times 12k a year, so $2.5 trillion. The current tax revenues look like it’s about $3.3 trillion per year.
I don’t think there’s enough people in the top 5% to get the amount needed without literally taxing them into oblivion. We’d need corporate taxes to pull this off, and those bastards cleverly hang out in tax havens, and I wonder how much more clever they’d be willing to get once we tax them more.
UBI proposals typically set the value at just enough to live on, or what someone who successfully claims unemployment + housing benefit would be given. At that level, the extra cost of UBI is because it's paid to non-claiming dependants, but there are savings from dismantling the bureaucracy which decides who is entitled to unemployment benefit and investigates fraudulent benefit claims, so it would be close to revenue neutral, so net tax rates shouldn't change much.
Assuming the revenue source is income tax, those already working would, on average, have their higher gross tax rates offset by receipt of UBI. There are other sources of taxation, e.g. corporation tax and a tax on land so a proportion could be taken from those.
Funding UBI isn't the issue. A sovereign currency issuer can literally create money out of thin air, taxes aren't necessary. The only real limiting factor is a collapse in productive capacity and the attendant inflation. The problem with paying people to do nothing is that it directly reduces productivity because hey why work if you can get just as much money doing nothing? Arguably most jobs today aren't really productive anyhow though. If 80% of HR Business Professionals were instead paid to watch Netflix and look at Facebook, what would change?
This is something a lot of people just don't understand. Our entire monetary system isn't predicated on exchange or store of value like they teach you in school, it's a system of coercion. That sounds ugly, but it's observably true. Taxes, in particular property and income taxes, impose a requirement on everyone to participate in the state's ledger game. The question becomes is that coercion eucivic or not? A society without coercion isn't an option. Nature abhors a vacuum, and human societies abhor a power vacuum. Given our present level of technology, the alternative to monetary coercion is closer to gulags and plantations than it is to Star Trek.
The coercive aspect of monetization is perhaps most clearly seen in the example of imperial British Kenya. When the Brits rolled in they wanted the local to work in the mines. Local Kenyans, quite reasonably, said screw that we'd rather not. The Brits then imposed a head tax on every Kenyan adult payable in Pounds Sterling. And, in that economy, the only way to get Pounds Sterling was working for the British government. So maybe you could get a job as some kind of functionary, but the vast majority of jobs were, you guessed it, working in the mines. In this way the sovereign currency issuer was able to coerce the behavior it wanted, namely the dirty, dangerous and unpleasant work of mining, without any overt violence.
The argument against that is base wages may drop as business pay less because people can afford to take lower paying jobs, or as low as minimum wage allows.
My country (NZ) pays most families a weekly amount based on how many kids they have and their household income (Technically it is a tax break and so only applies to people who earn money, but for most people it might as well be a payment).
Some have claimed this has suppressed wages and is a subsidy to businesses from the government. Minimum wage rises counteracts this. I am not sure if this theory can be proven.
Regardless I would expect a wage/price spiral causing inflation initially:
Or crappy jobs should have to pay more. Handling stinking garbage all day sounds like a job that should be high paying given how miserable it is. But due to desperation, people without other options are willing to accept very low amounts of money to do it. With UBI, the price of hiring a garbage collector would equal the price necessary to fairly compensate someone for having to pick up garbage.
But that’s exactly what he’s saying. The crappy jobs will have to pay more in order to attract people, and in order to compensate for the increase in labor costs, the cost of garbage collection goes up.
Basically, increased labor costs drives up cost of goods (inflation), which offsets the benefit of the UBI in the first place.
I pay about $25 a month for my garbage pickup. How much of that is to compensate the garbage man who spends about 30 seconds at my house? If he makes $20 an hour, then it's about 17 cents or so. Let's double his wage to account for benefits, employer-paid payroll taxes, workers' comp, etc. Hell, let's say the all-in labor cost for each garbage truck driver is $50/hour. That's still $0.42 I'm paying as my share of his time. Roughly $2 a month. Let's triple-ish that to account for the other personnel at the landfill and transfer stations.
If my garbage bill goes up by another $5 each month, I'm way ahead with the UBI check.
Unless you can find 399 other things in daily life where wage increases will wipe out the UBI.
Of course a universal income will alter markets. Jobs that suck will have to pay more. That's a feature, not a bug. The alternative is that we enjoy low prices on ditches dug, because those doing the digging are desperate for the work. I'd rather live in a society that doesn't fight to preserve that dynamic.
A nice side effect of UBI is that this scenario you describe, plus the hundreds of other undesirable jobs that people are forced to do now to have shelter that thus subsidize their real costs would be hugely pressured to automate them.
In a UBI economy the economic pressure to get self driving trucks would be an order of magnitude greater, creating financial incentives for Google et al to pour more money into AI research to achieve it because the market value is so much greater when truckers are demanding much higher pay to justify the labor when they have a choice in it.
The same would apply to an automated garbage truck that can use CV to scan refuse and collect it via a standardized bucket system rather than having two impoverished desperate humans cling to the back of the truck being paid dirt to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.
UBI would probably be the most beneficial policy to spur the R&D that gets us to singularity the fastest.
If UBI is implemented minimum wage could also be removed.
At present we have a situation where there are probably many very non-sucky jobs that could be done, but it’s not commercially viable to employ people for them at minimum wage.
Maybe some of the existing sucky customer service type jobs are only as bad as they are because companies are forced to extract $x/hour. e.g. if McDonalds could maybe they’d hire more people at a lower rate and make the job less stressful, resulting in happier employees and customers. As things are McDonalds must extract $x/hour or they will not be profitable, this ensures it’s a terrible place to work, and usually understaffed.
Replacing minium wage with UBI is definitely a net good.
Don't buy the "companies will start treating you humanely if only they could pay you less". Corporations, particularly publicly traded ones, are in competition for profit. In most sectors exploiting your employees to the fullest presents a positive return on quarterlies no matter how much or little you pay them. Maximizing return on dollars committed is fundamental to growing revenues.
UBI helps improve worker condition by making the negotiation between labor and capital more equitable. So long as one person comes to the table for their needs and the other comes for their ones the former is always disadvantaged and ripe for exploitation.
It also increases mobility. Now any 18-year-old kid can pick up trash and the guy getting paid more can be a supervisor or a technician. Repeat when the 18-year-old goes to college or decides to rise the ranks into waste management management.
Yeah, we don't need people to work. This will incentivize people to automate work where possible. The ideal world is everything is automated and EVERYONE benefits, vs what we have now: much is automated and the rich benefit while others have to work shit jobs or die.
I'll do it. Building robots sounds dope. I'd imagine a good chunk of people on HN would love to live in a post scarcity society where they can spend their time building and repairing robots.
Thanks for volunteering! Gonna need you to come in for a 12 hour day since no once else is available. It’s your spouses birthday? That sucks. Maybe next year!
There may also be ways to rearrange the labor if insufficient people wan to step up. For example, there are places where garbage trucks lift trash cans to dump into them. If that is too difficult, one could setup dumpsters at the end of neighborhoods and have a truck that goes dumps that stuff into it. So more work for the individuals.
Similarly, if there were not people to clean offices, then have the office workers do it (assuming there are offices, of course).
For things that are really essential and cannot be done away with, the cost would go up. It seems reasonable to pay more for vital services. That may mean higher taxes or some other payment arrangement, but it is only regressive if the taxes are done in a regressive way.
A UBI would change the job market. But whether it is a distortion or fixing some externality cost that was distorting the market is certainly debatable.
Made a throwaway because this comment and your other comments are just so wtf. It's like you are arguing that UBI will hurt poor people but thinly veiled with some boomer-nomics to make it sound legit.
> Higher taxes are a regressive solution to giving people more money.
There is a thing called progressive taxes. You can change the tax brackets. If you are in top x% you can have higher taxes that basically negate the UBI + more. Done. That is not regressive at all.
Garbage and other dirty jobs should pay more. That might be taxes or it might be that those services need more automation, or a better pricing model.
A UBI is a base. Will some people strive for nothing more in life and just live wherever they can afford to on this income? Yes. Thats okay. If there is more money, there will always be way more people who want to get ahead and get more.
I hardly think my comments are way out there at all, and would probably be agreed with by most Americans. I never made a comment that UBI would hurt poor people, merely distort the job market.
(And be a man, stand by your comments and don’t make a throw away)
Honestly, I think they are. Americans have really weird beliefs and call anything that could benefit other people "socialism" but it seems fine when they hand out tax breaks to rich people.
In terms of distorting the job market, well UBI might just force the free-market to accept that people deserve a dignified life and get out of poverty. Why should a garbage man not get 42k instead of 30k?
I don't share political opinions publicly because that is just bad for business. I still stand by my views.
UBIs also have the capacity to expand the workforce. As I age, I find my social circle increasingly includes people who can't work a traditional 9-5 job -- whether that's temporary (caring for an ill family member, early parenthood, etc.) or permanent (illness, disability, harmed on the job).
At least in New Zealand, those who can claim a benefit from the Government end up in a welfare trap, because we reduce welfare payments as you regain an income. There's no immediate financial benefit to you, the welfare recipient, in working 10-20 hours vs. not working at all.
There's a whole philosophical discussion involved in whether those people should have to work, but rightly or wrongly, a lot of societal and personal value is derived from employment. A UBI deletes the welfare trap, and allows people who exist on the margins/are incapable of full-time work to find and immediately benefit from employment again. Maybe the garbagemen will need to be paid more, but we should also see more part-time workers put their hands up.
A UBI would certainly change job markets; I'm not sure whether "distort" is the right word.
Taxation is not necessarily regressive. Where I live, income tax accounts for almost all of the tax I pay, and income tax is very much progressive.
But also where I live, the garbage man is not a public employee, but an employee of a private garbage company. So my taxes don't need to change, instead my garbage bill goes up. That would be regressive, since a garbage bill is a higher percentage of poor people's income. But some poor people just don't pay the garbage man, and instead take their garbage to the landfill themselves, which is way way cheaper.
Incidentally, you can make the same argument about minimum wage increases - the cost of getting low wage work done increases, so prices increase. I don't want to get into an argument about the effectiveness of that, but the evidence generally suggests minimum wage works better than conservative naysayers sometimes claim.
It will definitely change job markets. I see driving for Uber as a "UBI" in the sense that it allows you to make money if you have a car and know how to drive (I know not everyone can front that money, point is just for illustration). Now what has happened to the broader labor market? Well, if you don't like your minimum wage job at present, you can always drive Uber (and at any time you want at that). That would make crappy jobs have higher wages (for the sacrifice in flexibility, intensity of labor, etc) and I think that's fine – it's just the market correcting for the alternatives people have to make money. I think actual UBI will help motivate us automate these mundane repetitive tasks in the long run that we currently employ humans for. Although there is still a lot to do, eventually people will have the choice to do repetitive, laborious work. Instead, they can focus higher level creative work everyday for something they enjoy.
People who driver Uber for a living aren't duing it "anytime they want" though. They have to time their working hours to places and times of high demand to actually make money.
Most Americans will take the UBI and do good things with it, not quit or change their job. It will boost the lower tiers up a notch and allow people to explore better options, ie Music Teacher, but that is nothing but beneficial. People that dont like heavy work shouldnt be doing it. It will give workers a bit more power of choice, but that isn't something to be scared of. There will always be workers to fill those jobs with good pay, no skill but they may rotate out more frequently. Blue collar workers -like me- normally find certain comfort in their jobs being outdoors, hard labor, and not contained to cubicle (or a room of kids lol).
On the margin, some people will retire earlier or work less. Financial independence becomes feasible for more people at a younger age. These are the same choices you might make if you have money. That doesn't seem like a bad thing, and it would be pretty hypocritical for those of us who can do it to deny it to others.
But it seems like there is some risk that young people who have never worked might not get in the habit of working? The ambitious will want more than just to barely get by, but I don't think we can entirely rule out a slacker lifestyle becoming popular. I think we should still try it and see, but the plan might need to be adjusted.
The problem is that we don't know how many people have no interest in working at all at any salary. Some people would choose to not work than to get paid 62k a year at a job they hate. People who oppose UBI are afraid that no one will fill jobs that they think are essential.
UBI is not about "not working". It's about "here's some basic money so you don't have to worry every day about starving to death". Want to wear clean clothes everyday and drive a car? You're gonna have to work.
Now a garbage man says “I’m not gonna be a garbage man anymore, I can do something I love now, like a music teacher that pays $30k”
"wait it's gone to $25K... to $15K.. aand it's gone". Other people might have the same idea and if more people want to become music teachers, music teacher salaries go down and garbageman keeps picking garbage.
Having nearly unlimited free garbage removal is probably more than a problem than people realize.
UBI means you can actually evaluate the system you live in and determine what's necessary (and then pay more for it). At the moment it's all "jobs jobs jobs" - we have entire federal agencies that are essentially jobs programs (Homeland Security is a great example... they've done almost literally nothing).
The garbage companies would have to pay more, but the result would be that instead of no garbage man, the garbage man now just works 20 hours a week and takes more vacations. And because this vital job is no longer as "sucky", other people have joined the profession too and also put in 10-20 hours a week thereby distributing this type of hard physical labor across a larger pool of people.
Or they have to improve the working conditions on those jobs. Garbage workers have been treated poorly for a long time, and so have meat-packing workers, and Amazon fulfillment workers, and other "sucky jobs." If those workers have access to UBI they will have significantly more bargaining power in the workplace and would be less beholden to their employers for daily lives.
Garbage men are working one of society's most important jobs. They're deserving of respect for the hard work they do. If UBI results in underpaid people leaving, employers will have to raise wages to match the true value of the job or they'll invest in automation. Either way would be good.
Pretty hard, have to solve self driving trucks first, there's already just 1 person on a truck operating the remote arm in places where roadside bins work (ie basically anywhere other than the urban core).
Ever seen all the kinds of things people put out for the trash, and how dumpsters can be overflowing in various different lots? It won't be easy to automate.
This is a good thing, not a bad thing. I would say it corrects job markets, turns them from slavery due to lack of options, into fair competitive markets on both supply and demand sides.
It will not affect day to day life very much unless you've been underpaying for a vital service (in this case, you're the slave owner). Then all the slave owners will just have to pay more for services that they want.
Won’t it just be negated with increased cost of living? If people get 1000 a month free, you better believe that rent starts at 1000.
The free money will never do what it’s supposed to do in the long run. It’s better to just give the actual service for free (healthcare, college, transportation).
Not every week. Eventually the poeple paying for UBI will leave or guillotine over their head will be used and body will be looted. Rinse and repeat every-time equity is tried.
that's an awfully sad and ill-informed perspective. egalitarian communities have existed to varying sizes and durations for the existence of humanity. if anything we are wired for altruism.
From some of the comments here, and from talking to people in the past month, it occurs to me that 2020 seems to be causing people to remove their rose-colored glasses. It's hard to believe that the web page for the link below may, in some ways, have actually underestimated just how bad things would get in 2020:
Of course, only some of the disasters of 2020 have been beyond our control. However, in the face of so much calamity, it's soul-crushing that so much of the suffering in the USA in 2020 is self-inflicted. Think I'm overreacting?
life is a process, pain is a constant, struggle is a constant. the fact we are witness to so much of others pain when individually we are comparatively spared means that progress is being made. And remember could be we'll see the yellowstone caldera could blow or a gamma ray burst wipe us out.
Is that totally guaranteed though? It’s important to remember that the landlords as well will be getting the 1000$ UBI. So yes, there will be landlords starting their rent at $1000, but there will also be landlords who start lower because they too have become more enriched from the UBI and don’t need to squeeze the margins as much anymore.
Fair point, but if I had to counter I’d point to egregious wealth accumulation in our society, which is in it’s distilled form is just greed.
The greedy could siphon away most of the UBI, bringing us back to square one. UBI suffers from the assumption that we have a system with the right incentive structures. We kind of don’t from what I’m seeing.
but the only way to pay for the dividend is through taxing the greedy so even if they do that's a plus, again the greedy/enterprising are what make everything we love like these devices.
They get it and then it is instantly removed via taxes so their overall profits from UBI were $0. The only difference between UBI and unemployment/welfare is you don't have to apply for it, its simply calculated and distributed by the tax system.
The rent prices are high (low supply), so whoever has the most money gets it. If you only have 1000 from UBI, but the guy next to you has 1000 plus the 1000 from UBI, guess what the new price is?
Build another house, and then problem solved. Why start with the assumption that supply needs to be low forever? That is actually a very new problem in housing due to regulatory capture, a long history of terrible zoning laws, and a tragedy of the commons that there are always many people ready to oppose a new house but no resident of the unbuilt house able to counter that force and argue for it.
With better policy we really could end the current housing shortage in our biggest & richest cities.
But in America there are more empty houses than there are homeless people. Supply is not low. Maybe rent would go up in some markets (eg Bay Area), but people can move somewhere else. That’s the point of having a market system.
Yes UBI decreases market inefficiency, but the effect would be smallest on inelastic markets like housing. You’d see the biggest impact in the markets for the life-improving items/services that people with less money can’t afford right now, everything from fresh/healthy foods to nice shoes. The prices of those things would go up, but it would reflect an increase in demand.
1. Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. So as long as you pay for UBI through increased taxes rather than by borrowing or printing the money, it won't cause overall inflation. Certainly it will cause local distortions -- some stuff will go up in price but that should be balanced by the stuff that goes down in price.
2. Another possible theory is that UBI will allow people to move away from expensive cities to areas that are cheap to live in. $1K a month won't go far in SF, but you might be able to live on that in the middle of nowhere without having to fin a job. So decreased demand for housing in expensive cities means that UBI might cause housing prices there to go down.
3. Housing problems are fairly orthogonal to UBI. In pretty much every other market supply can rise to match increased demand so that prices stay close to their marginal cost of production. We need to fix our housing pricing problems UBI or no UBI.
Probably the biggest change I expect is very undesirable jobs will either become automated or high paying because you have people thinking "I hate working as a toilet cleaner but it pays so much its worth it" Or we will end up with self cleaning toilets. There is no longer a whole class of people who will work any job no matter how shit and for the minimum wage because they are forced to.
That's a very hand-wavy and ridiculously over-simplified way to just dismiss an idea out of hand. May I suggest learning even the first thing about a new idea before so confidently asserting it could never possibly work?
Of course it would. Over time UBI would destroy the value of our currency, and those who use the dollar as their reserve currency would get wrecked as well. IMO an Implementation of UBI would require the creation of a new currency.
Won’t it just be negated with increased cost of living?
Not unless landlords collude to fix prices. Competition will keep prices down, the same way that gas isn't always $4/gallon even though people will buy almost as much at that price as at $1.
Say you can be a chef, cab driver, plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder or whatever for 1000 riyals a month. And the government is already paying its citizens 1000 riyals a month. No citizen really wants to be a chef, cab driver, plumber etc anymore. No one wants to do a job, the pay equivalent of which you already get for free.
Now some one has to do those jobs, there are two options now. You either pay people more, and therefore now products/services cost more[Inflation]. Or you get people from outside to work at same price you would pay.
This has led to the situation where Middle east is full of South East Asians. Pretty much any skill based job you see is being done by Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis. On the very long run you turn your whole populace into freeloaders. Or worst the laziest kind of freeloaders, who just won't work no matter what. It will eventually precipitate to everything. Given you don't plan to do a job, why would you want an education anyway? Eventually you will arrive at where UAE or Saudi Arabia is today.
Spot on, having lived there for so many years this is exactly what I saw. People pushing for these things dont realize that there are countries where these policies are implemented for decades. Look and them and study. Most of these people have never lived anywhere else
It leads to more nationalism and youll be wishing for the good ol days of today when you go down the path others have gone down.
The Wikipedia article says that the Iranian plan pays $40 per month, which seems very low for consideration as a UBI compared to numbers like $1000-2000 per month that people throw around for the United States. I don't know much about Iran, so I'm not sure if it's 25-50x less expensive to live there.
The only numbers I found on the Saudi plan is $533 million per month paid to 10.6 million people [0]. This works out to about the same individual payment.
I think investigating the effects of these plans in those nations is worthwhile. Separating the effects of the plans from the specific situation in the Middle East would be challenging.
Similar arguments were made during our agrarian period, there's only so much farmable land so there is a limit on population and growth. Productivity gains and innovation remove that issue.
Surely sooner or later as we run out of resources (and destroy the planet enough) we have to move away from the idea of growth and toward sustainability. These are mutually exclusive goals.
these statements don't need to be mixed. GDP is bad because a hurricane raises GDP because you have to build a bunch of shit that got destroyed again. this is totally independent of resources and growth.
the split between quality of life and gdp and these variously with resource consumption is the issue.
Unlimited resources,
No, but technology can overcome any perceived resource shortage. Think of the discovery of fertilizer by the Germans around the same time that people were claiming there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone. People still claim that, but we can even foresee the technological changes coming to fix that - genetic engineering of crops, mass produced, lab grown nutrition, insects for protein, on and on.
But GDP isn't a natural resource, it is an artificial number extracted from insanely complex valuation of fiat currency, debt, policy, and subjective worth, all of which are subject to geopolitics and whims.
I completely agree that nature eventually puts an end to exponential growth, but I don't see how it puts an end to exponential wealth.
GDP isn't just physical goods produced it includes services which make up a large portion of the GDP of most advanced countries. These don't inherently require resources beyond energy and people's time so GDP can continue to grow.
> Even the most hardcore anti-capitalists have to give respect to how the combination of capitalism and technology has worked to lift most of the world out poverty and provided us with the security and comfort only kings enjoyed just a few century’s ago.
A few centuries ago we didn't have lighting, refrigeration, microwaves, electric ovens, clothes washers and dryers, cheap food, even fruits were only seasonal whereas in many capitalist-favoring places in the world now you can buy them year round. You can eat meat for every meal.
The view from the kitchen alone makes us look like we live like kings from centuries past.
Not to disregard the downsides of capitalism - rent seeking being just one of many. But to say we aren't living in the luxuries of capitalism is disingenuous IMO.
Having air conditioning and modern medicine as well as clothes not patched together from potato sacks brings you pretty close to king level of comfort.
The difference between a peasant and a king in the middle ages, and a peasant (e.g., a worker today) and a king (e.g., Bezos, or the Saudi king) is night and day.
A middle ages peasant has access to a tiny sliver of the goods and services available to the king. A modern day peasant has access to pretty much all of the goods and services available to Bezos today. It's not like the food Bezos eats is any better than any body else's. The clothes he wears is not much better than anybody else's. The computer he uses is not much faster than anybody else's.
So the gap in availability and access of goods and services between the rich and poor is lower today than it was in the past.
Kings back then had to shit in a chamber pot, were driven around by horse back, were treated with blood letting and leaches, had to wait weeks or months for news and goods from distant lands to make their way, with no guarantee of accuracy or delivery. Scientific understanding was poor. They had no electricity, no refrigeration, no vaccines or penicillin or X-Rays. The list in which middle class modern people are better off goes on and on.
I feel like this is the perfect example why everyone should at some point be required to start a business. Because some of these ideas stem from to many people not understand the economy in a real sense because they are always workers and see the world through that lens.
You don’t need to make an attempt as a business owner to understand why the economy is broken. A change in perspective doesn’t fix a broken system.
Edit: I am absolutely biased against a system that favors the wealthy at the detriment to your average citizen. “Look at how well this system works for us while the rest of you suffer!” is not helpful.
A change in perspective gives you idea of how the system work. The system isn't broken. Any system you don't understand probably seems problem.
Like how people call the US government broken. When it was meant for the very beginning to mangle federal power. The only thing broken about that system is federal power isn't more limited. But a lot of people call that system broken.
That would assume wealthy groups in america start businesses are higher rates than all other groups. But poor immigrants with no safety net what so ever start businesses at a much higher rate.
This is completely anecdotal but in my experience this is because wealthy people have high paying jobs and don't really see the value in starting a business unless they just want to be entrepreneur. I've lived below the poverty line and everyone I've met in those circles had a side hustle, business or second job. You gotta grind 10x as hard to get out of those circumstances.
Not necessarily there are tons of other things that depress business creation: debt load, health insurance, risk. Without a real bottom in the US even with a solid plan and decent savings building a business is extremely risky compared with just continuing to work at your current job.
I've always assumed part of that is that immigrants find it hard to get their foot in the door and get a job here. Imperfect language skills would be to your detriment in job hunting, but less so if you had an ethnic restaurant or a business catering to those in your community in a similar position.
yeah, if only more folks realized how well the system was working for the people closer to the top, they'd happily just march to their death instead of mildly requesting improved circumstances
> I’m a huge fan of capitalism and free trade, as laid out in Adam Smith’s genre defining book The Wealth of Nations.
The fact that he included an Amazon link to a book that came out over 200 years ago and is available on Project Gutenberg[0] certainly backs up his credentials as a "huge fan of capitalism".
I think UBI is a pipe dream with the current power structures. A proper UBI that covers all basic living expenses - meaning that you could actually live a dignified life solely on the UBI - would radically shift the power balance from capitalist/business owners to workers. I just can't see capitalists willingly dismantling their own power and leverage.
For this reason, I think that any sort of UBI will likely be woefully inadequate and may even be intentionally devalued over time, especially if it's used as a reason to dismantle welfare services.
People don’t need money. People need basics like housing, food, and medical care. No UBI scheme is going to work in an economic system like the one in the U.S. that isn’t capable of providing those things. It’s not like there’s a shortage of food or shelter now and yet we still have homeless people while homes sit empty. We still have hungry people while farmers are destroying their crops.
A UBI normally trades away the safety net and social services for a stipend. Perhaps one explanation is the US has partly done away with that net in exchange for a stipend of $0/mo.
But in society as it exists today, money is essentially equivalent to all of those things. UBI can ameliorate all three of those issues while helping to avoid the issues that crop up when trying to provide those necessities to people directly.
The article attempts to argue for UBI from the stance of being pro-capitalist and working within the existing capitalist framework, and I think the author would answer your criticism with something like "By providing money to people, they can allocate those resources wherever is most efficient for them- to buy the food and housing they need if they need it, or other things if not. The person receiving the money is the one with the most information about where money needs to go in their life."
I bet everyone reading this has at one time or another met someone who is completely incapable of managing money at even simple levels. Or thinking ahead even. Not everyone can wisely use XX a month. Or even eat with it. Then what?
The fixation on money is a little nearsighted imo. It didn't always exist. It's just a tool for determining access to good and services. What if everyone could get a healthy meal and a clean safe place to sleep at any time and a shower and some net access or whatever is deemed necessary. Would that cost less or more then UBI?
(I still think some form of UBI might be a good idea for the present, just, we should think bigger and outside of the current economic stack for the long term.)
That would be my reservation also. Give people regular money and some subset of the community will still run a life gauntlet that is effectively poverty. Squalor, poor food choices, poor relationship or parenting choices. Compounded by mental illness. They're not secreted away, so what changes in your neighbourhood?
During this pandemic situation, many Australians are getting $750/w virtually no strings attached. I know of people bumming around the house waiting for their perception of the economy to improve, and I know of others working more than usual to bolster their bank account with the influx.
A lot of states do. Maryland and California have housing and food programs for the poor (google "Maryland HOC"). Yet it doesn't seem to help much in terms of breaking out of inter-generational poverty - you just have poor people living in middle class houses trashing up the neighborhood and devaluing all the properties around them.
There is not going to be a Capitalism 2.0. Capitalism was progressive for a time, but it has gradually created the conditions for its replacement by democratic socialism. Those conditions are highly socialized production processes (not individual crafts) plus a gigantic class of wage laborers with an interest in a collective approach. A democratically planned economy is entirely possible and would outpace the massive waste and duplication of efforts that capitalism requires to function. Even the bureaucratically degenerated USSR grew to an economic superpower. Imagine what genuine democracy in the plan could accomplish in terms of meetings peoples' real needs.
Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale.
Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects.
Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving.
Whatever form of government and economy that arises most directly and naturally from the first principles of land and property ownership, the freedom to work, sell, and buy, and especially that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—which include freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, arms, etc.
Unfortunately, every other large-scale form of government that’s been tried has badly trampled on the personal rights enumerated in the USA’s founding documents. If anything should change here, it should be a dismantling of all the laws and institutions that have grown up like weeds since the late 1700s that are trampling on those rights.
That’s not to disparage some great things that have happened in the mean time: freeing the slaves, illegalizing discrimination by the government, women’s suffrage, etc. But each of those things I’ve named are good because they apply those first principles to areas of government that were lacking application when the country was founded.
That video is so funny, no one is on their phone! Did they not have smartphones in 1989?
While command economies have numerous documented failures, including actual fucking famine during eg the Great Leap Forwards, crowd-sourcing is a very real phenomenon, enabled by the Internet, even under capitalism. Right now, however, we're witnessing the failure of a free-market economy to provide for their poorest citizens. At least the people that starved under Stalin didn't have a Safeway on their block that was filled with food.
Markets are so efficient that even socialist food banks[0] use a "market" on the backend. That doesn't mean that an infinitely free market is infinitely efficient.
I think UBI would be disastrous for society even if it's perfectly implemented, which in a democracy is nigh impossible because there are too many stakeholders fighting for a piece of the pie. To think that you could replace entrenched welfare schemes with a flat sum sent to each citizen (?) and for it to be relatively successful is a pipe dream. For example, our disastrous healthcare system is a direct result of an afterthought FDR-era program. There are simply too many negative externalities to consider.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to "fix" capitalism. Our current problem is that the 1% are taking too much of the pie for themselves. This has led to increased corporatization, reduction in competition as companies merge and there's less players in any particular field, this results in the white-collar service class being beholden to their corporations, making it unable for them to save enough money to spin off and start their own small and medium sized businesses which would create more jobs for people lower on the economic rungs of society. In effect capitalism is working a little too well/efficiently as the owners of capital are using their entrenched power to squeeze more production/efficiency out of employees, which forces employees to stay employees instead of business owners.
This problem can be fixed by tweaking the tax code and some other small changes at the federal level. You don't need to effectively reboot the system to make capitalism work again for the 99%.
UBI is extremely dangerous as long as governments exist. Take what China is doing with their citizen score and it's not hard to imagine what could go wrong.
"...imagine how easy it would be for such a government that was also providing a basic income to its citizens to manipulate their citizens based on that basic income that they depended on. If they can deny citizens access to things like public transportation based on their ‘citizen score’, they can also deny those citizens (part of) their basic income depending on how ‘good’ their behavior is. So if you were too critical and thinking too independently, you could very easily be denied your basic income, and this could be a serious problem especially if you were brought up to be dependent on the government and to (heavily) rely on the income they provided."
Do you feel the same way about foodstamps? This isn't an argument against UBI, it's an argument against any kind of government provided assistance at all.
So, to be clear, non-universal foodstamps (what exists now) are ok, but if there were universal foodstamps that then became non-universal, then those non-universal foodstamps would not be ok and also proof that universal foodstamps are bad and scary?
'Ok' is tricky — we're weighing an unhealthy reliance on the government that gives it a dangerous amount of power against the well-being and guaranteed sustenance of our fellow citizens.
If people truly need to rely on the government for food, it would be absurdly inhumane of a society to let them starve.
Simultaneously, promoting reliance on the government and attempting to make that reliance universal has the potential to take away our freedoms.
Food stamps is an acceptable principle to Americans because it's meant to be temporary and need-based, and if you remove those two characteristics, it isn't just a reductio ad absurdum argument of taking the same concept further; it's entirely different.
I don't know, I kind of love the idea of basic sustenance being a hassle-free given and "money for food" being limited the realm of pleasure or entertainment.
Not to make any argument for the feasibility of the idea, of course.
Not only that, it's an argument against all forms of taxation. What if the government starts setting your tax rate based on your "social credit score"?
It's purely speculative FUD. It would be terrible if they did that, so make sure they don't. But it's a completely independent problem.
That’s literally the “universal” part of it. If you don’t have that, you don’t have UBI. The fact that the government has the physical power to withhold a hypothetical UBI might be an issue, of course, but every government has the physical power to do pretty much anything to any citizen, so there’s nothing unique there.
Until we are in a time where I can't find a disturbing number of people who are willing to deny someone UBI for saying the wrong things--and willing to vote for someone who will do that--then UBI should never be seriously considered.
How does that change anything besides making a "ha, gotcha!" point? That's your definition of universal, which is (I assume) limited to citizens of the USA who are adults.
EDIT>> Also there is plenty of precedent for limiting things which are worded in such a way as to suggest they cannot be limited, eg: "shall not be infringed"
It’s just weird to say that you don’t support a policy if there a lot of people that don’t support it. Surely that’s true of every taxation and welfare system in every government, for instance.
The tautology you see is in your own phrasing. The problem being raised here is that UBI is easy to abuse. Voters and politicians and bureaucrats can more easily hijack a deceptively simple UBI system after it's enacted, and no amount of "but that's not what Universal means" hairsplitting will help you then.
Welfare, on the other hand, is better understood and more narrowly focused. And even there you still have a ton of bullshit. I think UBI's deceptively simple yet vaguely broad scope will be tussled & twisted even more.
"Universal" is a lot vaguer than you claim. Even though you claimed that it means "no restrictions", you probably implicitly accept basic restrictions like "only for citizens" or "only people residing in the US" or "only people who bothered to register". "Universal" has practically never meant "free of all restrictions", but everyone who sees it thinks they know what those restrictions are and should be. Someone right now is probably thinking "obviously it doesn't include people who are in prison for life".
Beyond that, it's also ripe for political agitation because UBI would have fewer restrictions than welfare. You can already find provocative "news" segments about how disgraceful and undeserving welfare recipients are because they found one dude buying some crab meat or something using foodstamps. Imagine the outcry when people buy weed with UBI. The pressure to start policing and controlling UBI recipients would be enormous, even more than welfare which already has so many restrictions.
> Even though you claimed that it means "no restrictions", you probably implicitly accept basic restrictions like "only for citizens" or "only people residing in the US" or "only people who bothered to register". "Universal" has practically never meant "free of all restrictions", but everyone who sees it thinks they know what those restrictions are and should be.
Yes, and it's only for humans too. Raccoons and shrubs don't receive the basic income.
A very good example of how bad and wrong things can go with governments is comparing what the founding members of the USA fought for, with the status quo. Basic rights that they fought for back then are almost completely gone today, including freedom of speech, where you can get cancelled for simply speaking your mind and even the truth. Not to mention personal taxation which brought everyone back to slavery -- something they warned about 200 years ago.
It is not difficult to see the train coming at the other end of the government supported UBI tunnel.
Is there a meaningful difference between a government withholding basic income in a UBI world and a government fining away some traditional income in normal capitalism?
You’re right that a UBI effectively vastly increases the power a government could wield over its citizens.
One of the most important sets of principles the US founders relied on were the facts that power corrupts, that it (unfortunately) has to be wielded by someone in a governing sense, and that the best ways to keep government from becoming corrupt and abusive are to (a) limit its power to that which is essential for rule-of-law, representative government; and (b) divide that power among different people who have checks and balances on each others’ power.
Therefore it seems to me that a UBI is likely not a good idea because it vastly increases government’s power.
Note that the US government already wields a ton of power not explicitly granted by the constitution in the form of federal grants...
That’s equating all governments and forms of governance with China’s government. To be able to say that, you have to also say why you think this has a non-negligible chance of happening in a democratic society for example.
I find it rather hard to take seriously the writings of someone (Karel Donk) who believes that Hitler was good and that the holocaust never happened.
But I'll answer this anyway. UBI is unconditional. If a cash payment depends on the recipient's behaviour, it wouldn't be UBI. The same amount would be paid to everyone of working age.
Honest question - how does one prevent inflation with UBI?
If the market price of an apartment is $500, and suddenly everyone gets UBI, the landlord would raise the price as much as he can, say $1000.
People on UBI are in the same relative position as before. They still can’t get the apartment because there’s enough people who have the UBI plus something else and can pay $1000.
It could cause inflation because the money velocity would increase (if you’re a disciple of Milton Friedman). The presumption is that the money taken from rich peoples (and company’s) savings, that they’re not spending, and giving it to people who would spend it every month would increase the velocity and potentially cause inflation.
Not sure if this is directly answering your question, but UBI doesn't mean that everyone spends money the same way. One person might put that money towards their kids' education, another towards household groceries, and another towards higher rent.
'inflation' is probably not the right term; money is created and destroyed more or less at will by the financial system as set forth by the nation's laws. UBI is not 'funded' by just turning on the printing presses and letting 'er rip.
But, yes, of course, if there is a scarce good (there isn't enough for everybody) and due to UBI now everybody can afford this scarce good, then... guess what, no they can't.
But that's economy at work, and entices the populace to work, so they can supplement their UBI and get scarce stuff they want.
Perhaps you mean that certain goods are so price elastic they will just cost whatever it needs to cost to squeeze every buck out of the lower-income populace.
That IS a risk, but I'm not sure the current common western economic model is any different; the _vast_ majority of these economies do have a minimum wage already, and the majority of the workforce... works, or otherwise enjoys an income that is somewhat close to minimum wage at least, leading to the same problems.
Seems silly to put the onus on UBI to solve problems that aren't particular to UBI, no?
Note that these problems are solvable, and UBI can actually help solve them: Due to UBI it is _much_ simpler to just pick up your stuff, and move to a place that is in the toilet, economy-wise: A backwater with extremely low housing prices, nearly free land, and no jobs. With UBI, hey, you can make a decent living because your UBI bucks go a lot farther out in these boonies, which should push said boonies up.
It also moves negotiating powers to the workforce: Instead of companies that are offering jobs have to compete with the notion of being either destitute/homeless, or having to jump through hoops to prove that you are unable to find work (which is how many western economies are set up today), the job offerers are competing with 'no job, live on basic UBI'. This should allow the workforce to for example demand that they get to work from home a lot more, opening doors to letting them live in places with cheaper housing.
And then, if the -entire nation-, from stem to stern, has rents set up to gauge those living on UBI alone or on UBI+scraps, there's something very wrong with your nation. Go make some laws.
I understand and agree with how a UBI will benefit those that are currently falling between the cracks and not receiving any assistance. I can also see the benefits of greatly simplifying the social security system. (If it was implemented in a way that was actually simple. i.e. no distinction between sick, unemployed, old, lazy)
But I don't understand why people don't believe the UBI will just become the new definition of poverty. People will still be miserable and feel like they have nothing when comparing themselves to those who get UBI and have a job.
Exactly. And to ensure people have the freedom to pursue the training and development, search time, or simply freedom to explore, a UBI would be immensely and wonderfully beneficial. Many folks will end up pursuing that which makes them the most happy, not solely the options on the table (which for many in current society is crumbs).
Over time I would imagine that due to inflation and the increased cashflow that everyone will have the prices of basic necessities will increase to the point that UBI just covers them, or worse that simply living will require UBI + a job?
I don't mean that in a snarky tone, it's something I'm trying to wrap my head around as far as UBI discussion goes.
The same way all government spending doesn't lead to rampant inflation: by scraping money out of circulation largely with taxes.
Money is created by central banks, circulated by the government (including with 'entitlement programs' like UBI would count as, but also through things like spending billions on fancy jet fighters) and other banks (and there multiplied by fractional reserve banking).
It's then 'destroyed' by taxes and encouraging people to buy into government bonds and other things that slow down the flow of money.
These are all policy instruments that control how much money is flowing through the economy, and inflation is a product of that flow.
So the answer is, because they would raise taxes on it. A large portion of the money given out would just go straight into taxes from high income earners also getting UBI.
But also they could do things like lower the reserve ratio banks are required to hold to reduce the flow of money into the economy, instead choosing to create money through people instead of banks.
I can absolutely see how it would enable a certain type of very creative, very hard working person to peruse something they couldn't originally due to hard circumstances. But that seems like a minority case.
Inflation is not flat. When the money currently chasing luxury items like exotic cars or fine art switches to rent, produce and other basic goods their price will rise, it just will.
Real inflation does not require an expansion in money supply because inflation is not flat across all areas of the economy.
That is not the case.
If under UBI, which is reallocation of capital, luxury housing frees up it will not mean the uber rich move away and now the rest of us enjoy more selection without any other repercussions (though that will happen at first to an extent), it will mean they'll relocate to less expensive properties, thus chocking the market from both sides.
I always hear the argument that UBI will essentially subsidize people's ability to pursue work that gives them meaning/purpose, particularly if it isn't highly valued (economically) by their local market.
The US would benefit greatly if the people serving as teachers, daycare workers, healthcare technicians, retail service providers, and similar roles had a UBI.
It's a bit more nuanced. UBI just gives people more options.
The narrative is that people who live paycheck to paycheck are forced into undesirable jobs because they are under time pressure to make money and can't be choosy. UBI will reduce the time pressure and make them be able to be a bit more choosy in what kind of job they get. UBI will also allow them time to invest in themselves to be able to land higher skilled jobs.
It will also allow people to more willingly enter low pay, higher calling jobs (teachers, etc) if they enjoy it because it has been bumped up from "too little" to "just enough" with UBI.
Macroeconomics 101 shows that public welfare creates a demand floor, reducing the severity of recessions and lessens the boom bust of the business cycle.
Why does someone's purpose in life defined by their job? What if someone wants to make music or art? Or pursue some kind of other field that doesn't pay particularly well. Why do all Americans think that the point of your life is to work at a job for a majority of it?
>Why does someone's purpose in life defined by their job? What if someone wants to make music or art? Or pursue some kind of other field that doesn't pay particularly well.
The question is why the people who do work at a potentially unsatisfying job to earn money should be forced to support the people who don't want to do anything in their life that anybody else values enough to willingly pay them for.
Because we have certain shared values, including that folks shouldn’t starve to death due to lack of work.
The United States already supports millions of citizens via a backdoor welfare: disability. This simply takes away the corruption and bureaucracy and gives it to everyone.
I would argue that jobs that give meaning to life are the exception not the norm. There is a not insignificant portion of society that would quit their job today if they had any other option.
Hobbies and unpaid creative pursuits are more likely to bring meaning than employment in my opinion.
Exactly. The exceed money from UBI will create more demands thus more jobs will be created. The jobs will be much more `meaningful` than those empty, bureaucratic jobs created by a central entity. Isn't it the basis of capitalism?
"Create more jobs" the whole reason why Andrew Yang is a proponent of ubi is because he tried doing this for 8 years and realized that the Economy just doesn't work like that.
Also, getting rid of gigantic perverse incentives induced by welfare thresholds helps people find their way back into the working world. UBI isn't about making poverty more desirable, it's about making poverty less sticky.
The difference is the same as having $0 and having $20,000 in monopoly dollars.
The number printed on the notes is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what you can get with them, and if an apple costs 20,000 monetary units because there is so much money in the system (as it does in many countries) then everything else readjusts to match those levels.
As I understand it, UBI isn't about making people feel better, it's about providing a floor for income. It would be intended to assist those who struggle to pay their bills and afford basic necessities. There are homes today that don't have internet because of financial reasons. Additionally, it could enable those who'd want to pursue entrepreneurial ventures but can't afford to go 2-3 months without a paycheck to do just that. All UBI would be doing is establishing a floor. Right now, that floor is zero and results in many very unfortunate situations.
> There are homes today that don't have internet because of financial reasons.
Homes today don't have internet because of market reasons. Artificial monopolies, lobbying, and decades and billions of dollars spent by the government in failed and incomplete projects have created the current situation. And now without net-neutrality, it's getting even worse. This is all because of policy not finances.
> All UBI would be doing is establishing a floor. Right now, that floor is zero and results in many very unfortunate situations.
The floor today is not zero. Go to a village in Africa, or the Amazon rainforest if you want to see what zero really is.
> But I don't understand why people don't believe the UBI will just become the new definition of poverty. People will still be miserable and feel like they have nothing when comparing themselves to those who get UBI and have a job.
We don't know that people will 'still be miserable', let alone the ratio of misery in the current versus the proposed economy. My expectation is that fewer people will be in poverty / misery, but that's just as speculative as your opinion.
In any case, it's not cause to avoid considering a UBI. We should not be constraining our goals to a perfect first attempt [1] - merely to obtain some improvement over the current arrangement.
I agree with the notion of not waiting for a perfect plan, and for moving forward to improve the current situation. I consider myself "progressive" in that way.
But if I was writing some code and there was a problem in my algorithm where some people had nothing and some people had too much, I would just take some from the top and give it to the bottom. The UBI seems like a re-writing from scratch.
The troubles with that approach are that a) we've tried it, and it doesn't work very well, b) it's complex - how much is 'too much', how much do you 'take from the top', and how much do you 'give to the bottom', and c) it's expensive to administer, because a lot of time it spent working out the numbers and scheduling (and monitoring to prevent fraud) involved in the (b) bit.
This. There is compelling evidence that UBI, over the short term, really is effective at distributing money to a lot of people in need without a cumbersome burden of proof placed on assessing that need. That's why the treasury department used it for stimulus checks in the US. But long term, we don't understand if UBI is an effective tool for dealing with poverty. In effect, UBI would be like arbitrarily adding $15,000 to every persons annual salary. Over the short term this would be great. You'd be able to cover the costs of your bills with that additional money and live a little more securely. But in time, the market would absorb this expansion of the money supply as inflation. More surplus money in some people's pockets would lead to increased demand for goods and services. Increased demand would lead producers and retailers to charge more for goods. Renters would get charged more for desirable property. Gas stations would charge more for gas. And over time, your UBI check would need to get bigger and bigger to carry the same purchasing power that it did when UBI first started. There are examples of what this runaway inflation looks like in countries that pump free money for extended periods of time into their economies. Venezuela comes to mind.
To be effective, UBI might work better if it's distribution were random. And the duration of payments were irregular. Something that a market couldn't set it's watch by and producers couldn't game. If this sounds a ridiculous long term solution to poverty, it's because it is.
The market and production gaming UBI will inevitably happen. It's just people's money.
Actually, in Alaska's UBI program, alcohol and drug abuse go up by 15% after all check day (but crime also goes down significantly as well).
So yes, the payouts of it will create some sort of twisted marketing schedules. I think it would be really cool if the payout was daily (if they can make that happen). It would likely encourage the immediate spend of it into small items (like food)... but also probably drugs.
If producers are able to totally game a commodity market and control prices so completely than you have bigger problems than just poverty.
And yea, we do. If we had UBI tomorrow and people wanted more apples because they could afford more fresh fruit the apple cartels of today would collude prices up and use regulatory capture to block competition from entering the market to supply the elevated demand for apples.
But thats basically saying "hey, you want a government in your interest, you should probably get to a democracy first". If businesses control the legislature you don't have a democracy to begin with and should probably get that first before talking about... pretty much anything else. Because any other conversation is eminently pointless if you aren't influential upon your government.
> If producers are able to totally game a commodity market and control prices so completely than you have bigger problems than just poverty.
Game is probably more strongly worded than what actually happens : a shift in the demand curve. It's not that a cabal of producers are colluding to raise prices. Its more that, in aggregate, producers will decide to independently raise prices when consumer demand increases [0].
Except if its just a price shock than the increased profitability of apples will attract investment in apple farming to produce more apples because of unmet demand and fair market conditions. The price would go up, the profitability margin would be exploited by increased competitive production up to near break even costs, and prices would fall back to where they are today just with way more apples being grown.
In practice in pretty much every industry in the US incumbents put up regulatory barriers behind themselves to prevent competition from emerging.
UBI will become the new definition of poverty, and this is a great thing, poverty being you are on UBI is much better than any other definition of poverty in history.
Per the article (and I agree with this) UBI is not meant to uproot capitalism, it's meant to optimize capitalism. A capitalist system where the poorest person is still able to participate on the demand side is quite novel.
Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...
Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs. Essentially, people below a certain income threshold would receive money which scales to a maximum the closer their income approaches zero.
I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work. Actually, where I live now I live comfortably on $1200 a month. I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
The most likely implementation in the existing US federal government is a negative income tax.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.
You aren't alone, so your $1200 would not go as far in that future as it does now. There would be some inflation (perhaps only localized increased costs to some industries), but I'd suspect that people working less would be a feature, not a bug.
UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all. Work provides income, meaning, and dignity. Some people would move from industries which have lots of crappy manual jobs (like janitorial services) to industries which are currently only hobbies, but with UBI subsidies could be sustainable as a career. I imagine lots more Etsy shops.
Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.
“UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“
Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessity of doing things in exchange for money. Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.
I definitely don't want to feel like I'm in a rat race while on the job, but I enjoy lots of parts of work. After taking ~18 months off work, I realized I enjoyed the first 3-4 months of unstructured self-directed activities, but I think I'd prefer more daily structure (whether job or otherwise). If I get the place where I can retire, I'm probably volunteer for part of my time.
Most of the proposals I've heard of UBI / negative income tax are good supplements but don't completely replace work-based income. $1000/month per adult is among the largest benefit I've heard.
> I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities.
It is widely observed that many people work far more than is necessary to supply their basic necessities, because people's desires don't tend to end with those needs.
You may have quite limited desires, but there is no evidence that that is true of humans generally.
> Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.
That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.
I find it super hard to believe 35% of the population would be satisfied coasting out the rest of their life on UBI.
I'm pretty sure there have been various studies all but disproving the "common sense" notions people have about UBI and laziness. Or the fundamental idea that if you don't make it hard on poor people they won't do anything of value. Or that poor people are lazy, and that they are poor because they are lazy. Etc, etc, etc.
> Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.
Which serves to further increase inflation.
So you increase the amount more, and shortly thereafter inflation increases more again.
And so you increase the amount again, and so on, and so on until suddenly you have hyperinflation and your economy collapses, see for example the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or any of a dozen other examples throughout history.
You also have to remember that supply and demand still works. If the UBI causes several of your janitors to quit because they now have better options, you can still get them back by paying them more. All it does is give more negotiating leverage to labor because they no longer starve if they walk away.
Inflation refers to the value of the currency, which would not be directly affected.
If different people had money than currently do then they might buy different things with it, and then the demand for the things they want would go up and demand for some other things would go down. That isn't inflation, it's a demand shift. And for most types of products it would only cause increased production of those things rather than significant price changes. Meanwhile for other things (e.g. things which are artificially scarce), the price changes themselves would shift demand elsewhere -- who is going to pay $10,000 rent in San Francisco if it's <$1000 in Pennsylvania and the difference in local wages doesn't close the gap?
No telling if that would be the only effect. You could reduce income inequality while also increasing poverty, so I don't see the reduction of inequality as an end in and of itself.
> You could reduce income inequality while also increasing poverty
So let's think about what it would mean to do that.
In one case you could have some people who are just above the poverty line and if you took a little bit of money from them and gave it to people below the poverty line then the first group could end up below it while the people already below it don't get enough to end up above it. In theory that's "increasing poverty" but only in a strict technical sense which isn't even inconsistent with the result still being a net positive. Also, that wouldn't be possible under plausible rate structures because anybody in the approximate vicinity the poverty line would be receiving more than they pay in taxes and the net payers would be making significantly more than that with no reasonable possibility of falling into poverty as a result.
The other possibility is that the program somehow causes such a dramatic amount of economic damage that more people end up below the poverty line than started there as a result of increased involuntary unemployment etc. But the poverty line in the US is $12,760, whereas the most commonly proposed amount for the UBI is $12,000, so that seems incredibly unlikely -- people would have to be unable to find a job making $760/year, in an environment where employees have greater leverage. And you could preclude the possibility entirely if desired by making the UBI e.g. $13,000, which would just outright directly eliminate poverty.
If this program causes inflation because the cost of it is untenable, then $12K can quickly become worthless. Supply and demand are laws of nature, you cannot escape them. If the economy suffers from lack of productivity as a result of this program, and money must be printed in excess of what goods and services are being produced...then nominal payouts matter not. Hyper-inflation is a real possibility and has ruined more than one empire in history.
The argument that a UBI would cause a significant amount of inflation continues to be nonsense. Necessities do not have perfectly inelastic supply and would not be consumed in significantly larger amounts than they are already. The large majority of the US population already has access to food, shelter and medicine and pulling the remaining <10% of people into the market is not going to cause hyperinflation. There is a pretty good guess that it could relieve a lot of the existing regional high prices by making it more attractive for people to move into lower cost of living areas and use the UBI to offset the lower average wages there, until enough people have done so to bring down the already existing high costs in major cities.
>Some people would move from industries which have lots of crappy manual jobs (like janitorial services)
That work still has to get done though. Somebody has to be the janitor. If you then increase the pay of a janitor then lots of people that would otherwise increase their skills to do with that requires more skills would end up as a janitor instead. This triggers a pay increase in those jobs too.
I don't see how you don't end up with just a lot of inflation. The money a job pays doesn't matter on a societal level. What matters is the products/service doing the job provides. No amount of money shuffling is going to make 2 apples turn into 3.
Yes, that work has to be done. I'd just rather we find a way to do it that does not involve a system of glorified slavery where we force people to do it for survival.
I agree there would be inflation, but how much and where it would present aren't clear.
The highest paid jobs (eg. CEO) inflate very little and the lowest page jobs inflate quite a lot. There is currently an anti-inflation effect in the lowest paid jobs when inflation would help these workers have a better living.
Jobs thought of as "minimum wage jobs" in the USA (eg. hourly workers at McDonalds) pay a decent living in Denmark. They don't have runaway inflation. We should examine why there is a such stark difference in expectation between the USA and these other countries.
That said, I don't think UBI is the only way to solve the issues I care about. I might be satisfied simply by easier and fairer access to existing welfare programs (which are already subsidizing those low-wage employers).
> The highest paid jobs (eg. CEO) inflate very little and the lowest page jobs inflate quite a lot.
The issue is that you have few of the highest paid jobs and many of the lowest paid jobs. The labor cost of a giant factory isn't so much the director, it's the thousands of workers. If you double their wages, you double the cost. If you double the director's salary, you'll hardly notice in the balance sheet.
"Since 1978, and adjusted for inflation, American workers have seen an 11.2 percent increase in compensation. During that same period, CEO’s have seen a 937 percent increase in earnings. That salary growth is even 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market, according to the Economic Policy Institute."
Where people would otherwise have no income UBI will increase spending. Where they don't it has other benefits. But if you want to save that cash then that's also good.
Why give free school to everyone, libraries? Clearly a rich person doesn't need those either?
Public services should be public. There's extreme social value in equal access and you reduce an extreme amount of bureaucracy and debate in the process.
>If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK.
Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.
From that perspective, everything is a lottery. Sorry, you worked your ass off doing good things for your fellow humans, here's a tree branch falling on your head.
The standard of living has improved massively. I agree wholeheartedly that there are issues (e.g. people are giving more free time, but they don't know what to do with it and engage in unhealthy habits to kill the free time they've been given), but generally, it's not even close.
Amazes me that American Presidential candidates are in their 70s and people and parties just go with it. I was shocked reading the news that Wilbur Ross was hospitalised - he has a major work role and is 82 years old. Age of retirement in Australia for that age group is 65. I understand some people just don't know how to stop or what else to do with their time, but I feel like pinning too much hope on retirement is misguided. Far better surely to be doing more living while in your prime. More likely to be physically able to enjoy it, for one thing.
You don’t need to work like crazy if you do skilled work and spend your money wisely. When I was a software engineer I took months off between jobs. I worked less than 40 hours when freelancing. However, most of my colleagues used their income to buy trappings like a mortgage, clothes, eating out, video games, drugs, new gadgets and toys, cars, their own apartment, etc.
Most people choose to spend their money increasing their standard of living instead of buying time at a low standard of living.
As Picasso said, “I’d like to live as a poor man with a rich man’s money.”
You're responding to an aggregate statistic with an anecdote. I too did not graduate high school, but now have an advanced degree and a high paying job. Claiming that that invalidates the notion of privilege is silly.
Still, he literally said "do skilled work and spend your money wisely", the former implying that he focused on developing his skills, and the latter implying that he didn't live beyond his means. Hard to characterize either as some sort of undue "privilege".
While I kind of get what you're saying, mortgage/rent, clothes, cars, and food are necessities. :)
This sounds a bit like the Mr. Money Mustache philosophy -- live very cheaply, save like crazy, retire early -- which is all great advice, but elides the level of fortune involved, e.g., getting and keeping a high-paying job straight out of college, having no college debt, quickly marrying someone else who also has a high-paying job and is down with both combining incomes and practicing Extreme Thriftiness with you. IIRC, he made the rather bold claim that he could both live and retire on $25K a year -- which is something a lot of people would, well, prefer not to do. With all respect to Picasso, I'd at least prefer to live as a middle class man with a rich man's money.
There are expensive and inexpensive ways of approaching accommodation, clothing, food and transportation. The fact that so many things which used to be considered luxuries are now thought of as essentials (and that were once considered sensible but are now considered extreme thriftiness) goes to show that people actually want the frills of a lifestyle where they work hard and can as a result afford luxuries in every area of their lives.
> People actually want the frills of a lifestyle where they work hard and can as a result afford luxuries in every area of their lives.
Well, yes, sure, and sure, there are different levels of "luxury," e.g., there's getting a BMW 5 series, and there's getting a Honda Insight but springing for the Touring model -- and that's not counting the choice between used and new (what if the person with the BMW 5 series bought it used for about the same as someone else paid for a new Honda Civic). But, particularly at the income levels the average HN reader seems to have based on comments, "build up savings" vs. "afford small luxuries" is often a false dichotomy, which is what I was getting at.
There is nothing stopping you from working 10 hours a week and living like a person in the 1920’s. Local doctor who will put a $1 poultice on your skin cancer, no AC, no car, 10 to a house.
I'll say it again because apparently no one's listening.
We're working more and getting paid less for that work. This isn't because of the standard of living. Standard of living can still increase while pay tracks productivity, and it does in other developed countries.
This is the most frustrating HN discussion I've seen in a while. People are coming here to peddle this "quality of life" argument with zero evidence. You're not even stopping for a second to consider that the US isn't the only country in the world.
If you compare the American GDP to other countries, the average individual is getting very little bang for their buck as far as quality of life goes.
Our desire to have awesome stuff and amazing experiences expands to fit the space available. People compete for social status, and they don't want to miss out on whatever's new and exciting. There's an unlimited amount of resources that we could spend on medical research (curing every medical condition, including shortness, cognitive impairments and ageing, plus enhancements/transhumanism), climate engineering/geoengineering/megastructures, space exploration/tourism/real estate and other areas of scientific research, and most of this is going to happen as a result of private-sector employees exercising their consumer purchasing power. We're curious and productive creatures; I don't think a large proportion of us are ever going to just stop and make do with whatever the state of the art was at the time.
>Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.
Speak for yourself. Not everybody's comfortable spending most of their time lounging around doing nothing that anybody else even values enough to pay for.
The thing is... you can have the choice. Sometimes you need the choice, things can go south for any of us. The choice can also free you to take risks... it makes it easier to start a business, it makes it easier to fail.
I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.
Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.
> None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.
You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse.
Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking.
Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.
Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many.
p.s.
also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.
I remember my mom helping my dad write his book. She did a lot of the typing. Make revisions, retype the whole book. I thought that was hell even as a child watching her work.
Today, just do the edits, hit [print].
Hours, hours, hours saved.
Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland!
(He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)
Walter You can go on and on, but you're talking about an illusion. You are literally working more and getting paid less than previous generations. It's objective data. People had cars and televisions. Your cellphone doesn't cost the lifetime of productivity gains that are being stolen from you.
You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.
Sure things have changed and the wealth gap is a problem, but it is not stealing. If it were, you could take them to court for paying you only min wage and making you work 40 hours.
Money isn't wealth, money is just a common & convenient representation of wealth. You don't need to look into people's paychecks to see wealth. You can see wealth in the buildings and streets, in health and technology and culture.
People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion.
Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.
Then get a job, a hobby, or volunteer. Contribute to open source projects. Create a startup. Spend more time with your kids. Take care of your aging parents. Sit around and play video games. UBI creates so many opportunities.
No, but a massive, disproportional share of your population caring for the elderly is a real weakness. A market economy would weigh and value "caring for the elderly" in balance with other priorities, whilst UBI volunteers are free to care for the elderly too much, sacrificing limited resources that are needed to keep a society competitive in other areas.
Isn't it better to be happy than to be "the best"? Would you really rather draw meaning in life from your country's position in the global economy than from your own happiness? Do you even matter at that point as a human being or are you just a gear in the machine to crank up the economy of your country. You're disposable.
That's a rather emotional and wishful take on the matter. There are real benefits to staying competitive in the global economy. Countries with weak economies have less resources to invest in the health and happiness of their citizens. They are less resilient to crises. They are easily exploited by others and more susceptible to corruption. They lack the geopolitical strength to achieve long term goals that would benefit their citizens.
Building the #1 best economy obviously shouldn't be one's sole purpose in life. But if you really think it doesn't matter at all, why not leave the developed nation you probably live in and find happiness in the third world. Or just ask one of the many people who seek a better life in the first world every year.
There's a troubling number of people in this thread who seem think that wealth creation and strong economies is some pointless goal that we've been tricked into caring about. Let's not forget that we work to build wealth for ourselves and our children. We've already worked so hard to build wealth into our buildings and streets and health and technology and culture. Apparently that's why you can dismiss the value of a strong economy from the comfort of your laptop/desk in the first place.
Question though: would companies just move to Brazil, which doesn’t have UBI, and save all of the money from the now-even-more-expensive American workers? Maybe not immediately, if there are more skilled workers in the US than Brazil, but over time I’d worry about high value companies just leaving.
So you’d need to prevent that, but in order to prevent it you’d have to become somewhat isolationist, right? Sounds bad.
Though I’m curious if anyone has thought about how to prevent all of the expensive skilled jobs from leaving.
> Isn't it better to be happy than to be "the best"?
Have you played Civilization? If you don't strive to be "the best", eventually you're the guys with spears or even muskets being bombed by F-15s. In other words, lag behind the leaders for long enough and you can say goodbye to your freedom. That's basically how the XVI-XIX century colonization happened.
Giving everyone the ability to exercise their creativity, pursue their passions, take care of their families, while simultaneously eliminating poverty would make the US less competitive globally? I just don't see how.
You're only looking at the idealistic pros and none of the cons. Competition is about who's working the hardest. Imagine two companies, Company A in which workers are extremely hard working and Company B which workers are free to pursue their passions and only work when they want to. Which one do you think wins out in the long run? And I'm not talking about a version of Company A in which everyone is unhappy, worked to death, etc. I'm just saying more work = more productivity, which is what competition is about
One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on.
The people on space ships all have a form of UBI and choose a profession so that they can accomplish something of meaning. Space exploration is one of those.
Sure, but how the economy works is not explained. It's basically that first contact was made, humans realized they weren't alone, so war, poverty and money ended within 50 years, somehow. I'm sure it helps to have transporters, replicators and computers approaching AGI. But how everything inside the Federation just works is not discussed. I guess everyone just naturally wants to do what works out for society, somehow.
It isn't discussed because the closest equivalent it can be compared to is communism, which is the last thing any network or studio wants to be seen as advocating regardless of how accurate or realistic or good or bad the depiction may be.
That doesn't fill me with confidence. Communism has not been successful, so it's not clear why or how it inexplicably works out well for Star Trek society.
You might have here answer to the ”Where is everybody” question. Space is not economically viable. Not for us, not for the others. Not even in a billion years, literally.
>One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on.
Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.
Suppose that automation has greatly advanced, and our material needs are fulfilled as a given, as if Earth were now our own Eden, tended to by robots. About the only work left for humans to do, that is to say producing goods and services that other humans deem valuable, is researching and developing heroin. The robots don't do this because they know that heroin use is quite harmful to human well-being, but of course we find great value in being high and are willing to pay for the experience, thus creating a market.
In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?
That is a very weirdly specific scenario that won't ever happen, so why bother asking about it? Humans will always find new things to be valuable. There will never be a time when there is no work left except for producing heroin. People will always want what something no one else has, or something that someone else has that they do not. Humans will strive to create new things, thus creating value. I can see you are trying to pigeon-hole the conversation in a social media vs. heroin comparison, but that just isn't a good representation of the issue.
Spend more time raising your kids. Volunteer in your community. Restore the environment. Take care of the elderly. Grow healthy food for your neighbours. These all sound much more valuable than my job, but no one is gonna pay me to do it.
And you're making the argument that the effort of aspiring novelists is wasted. It's not. Or else we would have no novels.
There are jobs for all the things you mentioned. There are people who are paid to take care of the elderly, to grow healthy food, and there are even jobs for taking care of the environment.
Also, I think you missed the point about novelists. It is more about if you suck at writing novels, sitting around and writing one for yourself isn't very valuable for society. There are some people who have natural talent, but the average Joe sitting around not working and instead writing a novel for fun will likely not be producing much value--at least, not as much as if he were working.
Sure they might pay low, but you dont get to just decide the value of your work on your own. At least in a market you get paid for your time put in and there is pressure to deliver value vs. you just deciding to get off of your couch once in a while and still getting paid ubi.
For the writers, I didnt say dont try. There is a difference between trying during spare time while off work vs. doing it as a hobby while not working and thus not contributing to society yet taking money from it.
I think we just disagree about what value means. I'm of the opinion that you can easily find a job to be paid to create no value, or even destroy value, and you can easily create value that no one is willing to pay a living wage for. I have no trust in the market to determine what is or is not actually good for society... Because the activities I listed in an earlier comment would be paid well in that case.
If they are so valuable then why are they not paid well? Markets are just people deciding what value is with their money. Perhaps you think a service is valuable, and you can pay for it. But if no one else wants it and will not pay for it, then it is by definition not valuable to society.
Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.
I think we're starting to see all the various ways the market can completely screw up the relationship between price and value (in my definition, that being how much an activity contributes to the wellbeing of society). See, for example, the lack of pollution pricing or the insane low price of meat. If you view value as something external to "whatever the market decides," the market is a terrible way to create a hierarchy of value. Why do CEOs get paid so much? It's not because they're contributing the most to society.
It should be very obvious that raising children well or taking care of the elderly are hugely valuable activities, yet the market almost completely ignores them.
I agree that pollution pricing is a good idea, and that meat may be over-subsidized. I think those have to do with corruption rather than something intrinsic to markets. Regardless of what system is in place, corruption will always be a problem to reckon with.
And yeah, raising children and taking care of the elderly are certainly important. I know that in tech cities that childcare can be very hard to find and incredibly expensive, so maybe it is becoming more valued? But the key is that the value of the service itself is not based solely on how 'important' it is, but also how many people are performing it and how much is needed (supply&demand). Or maybe a better way to say is that importance is also a function of supply and demand. Take oxygen, for example--super important, but I'm not buying tanks of it.
Software development is pretty hot right now, but if almost everyone in the world were trained to do it, the price of that labor would be quite low. This is another feature of markets--it helps to allocate resources (jobs) to what is needed at the moment. With UBI, I think you would be missing out on that to a large extent.
You will have option to do what you want. That's the whole point.
They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do.
Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.
I don’t understand how UBI forces you to stop working at your job. Wouldn’t you potentially be paid even more if everyone who does that job but hates it stops? And the compensation to do it increases to compensate?
Vain and selfish people probably aren’t going to sit around and live on the basic level. It’s more about providing for the ignored, the sick, and enabling people to take risks in the market without putting their family’s lives at stake.
You can work as much as you'd like. But which would you rather - being obligated to work 80 hour workweeks as an "integrations architect" for a shadowy .com company that will sell and gut its workforce (including you) in a couple of years so that each VC gets a nice payload from the sale? Or would you rather choose to work 80 hour workweeks on your very own homesteading project, building your house from scratch while not having to worry about the cost of food, receiving just enough for basic sustenance all the while?
Why does his choice for how to spend his time offend you so much that you need to directly, overtly insult him for it?
Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.
The ire is because they are saying this in a context where they are implicitly talking not just about their personal preferences, but furthermore about the opportunities that should or should not be made available to others. They are saying this in a context where it functions as an argument against Basic Income, on the grounds that leisure is bad and everyone should be made to work as much as possible, to provide as much for society as possible.
"Work" means we know we're doing something valuable to society because someone in society is willing to pay for it. If we're doing something nobody values enough to pay for then we may well be contributing nothing of value to society.
This is not how a market economy works. There's no preordained pool of work that you can run out of. It's practically nonsense to say there's not enough work to go around.
People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work.
Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.
Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people.
There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case.
Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer.
I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available.
I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available.
This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths.
> Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that.
What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution.
> What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital
I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it.
> and it worsens inequality.
This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner.
Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class.
On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now.
At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.
You simplistic case is too simplistic. Assumes that advanced tech required for such farming comes from nowhere. Now for farmer to produce so much you need GPS (ability to build and maintain one), oil/energy, millitary power, modified grains, etc. to have this you need some people who spend more on thinking rather than being most of waking day the in field, so you need all the support jobs.
From my POV having job as au pair for example is still better than working hard in the field.
IMO we should focus on reducing much duplication od work, so I am happy that OSS, Wikipedia, SciHub, KhanAcademy, MIT, translations services, open hardware design and similar efforts are in progress.
IMO more focus should be shifted into education. I guess education problem isn't solved in western rich countries only because it's easier to brain drain from less developed ones, so people don't feel the pain.
When this will start I hope they start taxing more at very top and shift economy to more valuable stuff than zero-sum Tinder clones.
BTW in my country(Poland) they introduced small version of UBI (like 500$ per child per month for family). It cost 5% of whole country budget. It's quite controversial but IMO it was good move but we still need to see long term impact.
> There's no preordained pool of work that you can run out of.
But this is a point the article somewhat addresses - the graph for marketing-budgets shows that pretty nicely in my opinion.
At some points, its just easier to make more money/profits by trying to increase demand for your product than by improving it (or reducing costs of its production). And I think that's what we're seeing more and more on an ever increasing scale right now: "Actually productive" jobs (e.g. manufacturing) are already outsourced, and the gains from the cost-savings are spent on e.g. marketing.
This might make sense economically (in terms of profits, emplyoment), but arguably less from a "benefit-for-society" point of view.
I think David Graeber adresses this quite nicely (but rather aggressively) with his 'Bullshit Job'-theory.
As you said yourself, UBI's increased demand doesn't really help from a "benefit-for-society" point of view, which is the only point of view that matters. We don't encourage people to maximize profits because money is good, we do it because you usually need to create actual value/benefit in order to do so. When something makes sense economically but doesn't benefit society, that's an economic failure.
I have heard about the Bullshit Jobs theory and I find it unconvincing (I admit I haven't read the whole book). The meaningfulness and value of a job is not determined by the laborer - as suggested by the "do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world" surveys he cites - but by the employer.
The value of something has always been determined by other people who want it. It doesn't matter what David Graeber and his unhappy laborers think or say, something isn't bullshit just because they say it is. Many of the examples he mentions (doormen, content curators, PR) are valuable things that people want enough to pay for, yet his opaque judgment deems them "bullshit" simply because he or someone else thinks they're worthless.
History shows us economies that failed because some people thought they could plan them with isolated judgments of what society should value. UBI as a solution for Bullshit Jobs follows in the same tradition by personally judging whole swaths of jobs to have no value, then proposing a plan to get rid of them.
Thats why the definition is what it is. He knows it's a subjective phrase that means many different things to many different people. He also admits there will be some people who find value in the same job someone else does not.
I think it's a bit strange to hinge your opinion on this definition though, its really only defined that way so it doesn't piss people off, the book isn't about how you define bullshit jobs, the book is about what we should do now we know they exist.
Which you're sort of ignoring.
What do you think we should do since we do know bullshit jobs exist.
But bullshit jobs don't exist, which is my point that you're ignoring. Jobs that people in society value could never be bullshit. Quite arrogant of you to assume that the work that some do is bullshit and challenge me to do something about it. I don't really care what anyone calls "bullshit", the concept is nonsense because the value of work is determined by the people who want it. I don't plan to get rid of such work.
We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it.
Agreed. "Indeed, in 2006, the top twenty per cent of earners were twice as likely to work more than fifty hours a week than the bottom twenty per cent, a reversal of historic conditions." [1]
Hours isn't a great metric for direct comparison here. I worked 50 hours a week back when I was lead for a small company years ago. But 50 hours coding vs 50 hours working manual labor? My dad was a farm hand back in the 1950's-1970's. I'd much rather do 50 hours of my job than even 5 of his. To argue the two are comparable strictly on hours is… goofy.
They're not remotely comparable. The jobs themselves have gotten better even if the hours might have gotten worse.
I spend my day listening to music, watching YouTube, doing largely what I'd be doing anyway but with GitHub, Slack and a terminal open. Why do I care if it's 15 hours or 60 if I'm getting paid to do what I'd be doing anyway?
Doesn't it strike you as odd that you must perform the appearance of working all those 50 hours (even though, as you've just mentioned, you spend the majority of your day listening to music and watching YouTube)? And what about those of us who don't have that luxury - say, due to increasingly invasive corporate tools preventing "time theft"?
>Despite minimum wage, there is extensive child labor in agriculture in the US, because there is a gap in child labor law. Which suggest that minimum wage didn't make child labor obsolete, banning child labor did.
That is of course not true, because as you yourself point out, there is still child labor going on. Banning something has nothing to do with it existing, just look at drugs.
Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.
> That is of course not true, because as you yourself point out, there is still child labor going on.
In specifically the area where it wasn't banned.
> Banning something has nothing to do with it existing
Odd, then, that child labor has been vastly reduced in exactly the domains where it is prohibited, and not where it isn’t.
> Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.
Were that the case, and not prohibition being the limiting factor, you'd expect child labor to exist where minimum wage is inapplicable, but not where it is, even independent of whether it is allowed.
But in agriculture, where it is prevalent and not prohibited, minimum wage applies and hasn't limited it. Yet it's not found in most of the other places it existed before being banned, and where it is, in fact, prohibited. It's prohibition, not minimum wage, that did it in.
Although there is a technical sense where “minimum wage law” is the deciding factor, because it was actually the same law (though the applicability of the minimum wage and the child labor prohibition pieces differ) that implemented federal minimum wage and the child labor prohibitions and restrictions, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
> Were that the case, and not prohibition being the limiting factor, you'd expect child labor to exist where minimum wage is inapplicable, but not where it is, even independent of whether it is allowed.
Banning and prohibition are just ways of increasing the cost of hiring children: they now have to pay the wage + fine. And it only works if that is too expensive compared with the alternatives.
Machines made child labor mostly redundant, is what I should have said.
Where it exists is because machines have not been introduced, or are too expensive (see minimum wage laws).
We have a lot to show for our increased productivity, though the 'things' may not be what you care about. Fancy televisions, nice food, great cars, and a lot more travel are the current 'mindset'. If you think people should be happy with less, you shoud try to convince them; if that fails, you can also lead a less consumption-driven lifestyle on your own!
Why do you want to force me to follow your priorities?
This is false. I do not understand how so many people are coming in here peddling this theory with 0 sources. It doesn't even follow basic logic. You're positing that we're spending more while also earning less? Where's that money coming from then?
It's objective that productivity has increased while pay and leisure time have decreased. This isn't a result of any increase in material goods. People are spending less because simply because they're getting paid less.
In 1956 the federal minimum wage was $1 (roughly $10 adjusted for inflation). Today it's 3/4 of that at 7.25.
Minimum wage is irrelevant in a discussion about averages. Also, you’re forgetting that increased productivity has led to decreased prices for things that used to be manual labor intensive.
It’s possible to both make less on average (inflation adjusted) and have access to much nicer things. The equivalent computing power of an iPhone would have cost you millions of dollars in 1990. Food is cheaper, any automated manufacturing output is significantly cheaper, etc.
When so many people point something out to you that you think “doesn’t even follow basic logic”, it usually means you’re making a bad assumption somewhere.
Unless a corporation (or cartel) can monopolize an increase in productivity, society will reap the benefits through lower prices even if wages don’t increase. Competitive forces ensure that. If you’re interested in learning more, check out what happened with the mini mills and steel prices.
People prefer the better quality of life than what was had even in the fifties. That’s why they work more. Houses are bigger, multiple cars are had, people travel, people have elective surgeries, dental cleanings, the Internet, college educations, etc.
You’re proposing that people should be happy with what we had back then by reducing output. I’d rather work full time and have the better quality of life, thanks.
This ain't it chief. People are more productive than they were in the 50s and also have lower net worths.
You can work less and have a constantly increasing quality of life. They aren't diametrically opposed. Your labor is being stolen from you. Where do you think the increasing wealth gap comes from?
Literally the opposite. We do so much useless work that our productivity curve remains flat even as technology makes us extraordinarily productive at the tiny fraction of actually meaningful and necessary work
Also, to the OP Milton Friedman's 'Negative Tax' is the same thing as UBI - in the end, 'rich people' would not get a cheque in the mail because on the whole, they'd make too much money.
Also - the top 10% taxes would have to go up radically in order to pay for UBI.
We live in a planet. A planet that also has other countries.
The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries.
The only reason you think you are so productive is because almost all your clothes, technology, medical supplies, house appliances and most of your food was produced outside the US by foreign workers; you had nothing to do with it. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR, YOUR SUPERIOR PRODUCTIVITY, OR ROBOTS.
The US is living off the back of illegal miners in the third world and it tells itself "yeah, we should do less!".
I am not making a point against automation, we clearly need more. But the world is so big and the people so numerous all the automation we have pales in comparison with the needs of us all. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.
I'm talking about worker productivity within the US. Hour for hour we're outputting more and getting paid less. Before overseas labor you weren't less productive because you had to make your own clothes or something. That time had already long passed. I'm talking about what has happened since the 1950s, not the 1850s.
> The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.
It's not because the number of people existing globally has increased? People in poor countries didn't work at all until developed countries started shipping their work overseas? What did they all do then?
Some still don't. Just read the stories about villagers in China being brought in in truckloads to work manufacturing electronics. Not everyone is part of the labor-force, not even today.
That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little. In developing countries everyone works because it's a matter of survival.
> That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little.
Housewives obviously do something they don't stay in bed all day, and what they do is very valuable for society. But they do not directly contribute to the GDP and hence they are not part of the workforce, industrial or otherwise.
Rural "housewives" in the developing world run little businesses or sidelines (cooking, sewing, childcare, midwifery and other medicine, selling produce), and/or work on the farm. They're very much a part of the informal workforce.
> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...
The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter. Indeed, the arguments that we should do otherwise are to the benefit of the rich, because the proposed cutoff invariably comes somewhere in the middle income range, resulting in higher marginal rates on middle income people rather than higher income people.
In other words, a cutoff allows the rich to pay lower taxes in the amount of the money that had been going to people in the middle.
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check.
Seems even easier to increase the standard tax deduction we already have and are familiar with. Then you can increase tax rates to make sure those evil rich people don't see any benefit.
The standard deduction doesn't allow for negative rates, which means it can't be used to replace means-tested assistance programs in the same way as a UBI.
The EITC does, but it has a cutoff with the aforementioned problems, and if it didn't (and the amount was high enough to replace the other programs) it would be hard to distinguish from a UBI, outside of the easily-gamed income requirement which does little more in practice than discriminate against honest homemakers who don't get to claim it.
You're right, I meant tax credit and not deduction. My point is that a negative tax rate would be straightforward to implement and would be the path of least resistance to a UBI.
Yes, having a large unconditional "standard tax credit" with no phase out would just be another name for a UBI.
Realistically what you have to do at that point is to use a flatter rate structure instead of a phase-out so that the credit is paid back by the time you get to higher income levels, but that's much better than the existing nonsense where the marginal rate structure goes all over the place from sometimes >90% at low income levels (from phase outs) to ~20% in the middle and then back up to 30+%.
You get a strongly progressive effective rate just from the credit, so at that point you can use something like a 35% fixed marginal rate and simplify everything else too. Interestingly this also means it doesn't even have to be an individual income tax. You could use VAT or charge payroll tax to employers and get the same result without individuals even having to file tax returns anymore.
Sure, NIT + control of income tax rates is isomorphic to UBI + control of income tax rates in terms of how much money people get in a year. The core downside of piggybacking on the existing tax refund system is that individuals would get their NIT refund once per year, and spiky distribution has problems. One of the core benefits of NIT/UBI is that many inefficient means-tested welfare programs could be ended without people starving, going homeless, using the ER as healthcare, etc. But if the distributions are a year apart plenty of people are going to exhaust their money and require those welfare programs to continue, now all the more inefficient because the relevant population in smaller. NIT has to be tabulated based on income, but UBI can be monthly/weekly/daily/whatever frequency.
But you can buy food with the extra money from your tax deduction last year.
Meaning, your problem is only a one-time, short-term problem. You aren't arguing in good faith if you try to use that to discredit his proposed solution.
>The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check.
That's an answer, not the answer. A similar question is: “how much should UBI pay per month?”, and a similar answer is that “it's much simpler to just pay gazillion dollars than spend time figuring it out”. After all, the only difference is the cost.
IMO there's a proven balance in having a system (“bureaucracy”) to find out who need financial assistance, and simply assisting those. But then again, I fundamentally disagree with UBI because I have a differing view on society and the rights and responsibilities of its members, along the lines of “society takes care of you if needed for the price of you helping make this possible if you are able”.
Maybe it's easier to understand this from the other side.
Suppose we have some kind of assistance programs for food and housing. If you don't make enough money you can get a card and with this card you can buy specific kinds of food, but not alcohol and not restaurant food. You get housing assistance but you have to live in designated government housing.
Then somebody suggests that we extend these benefits to everybody. But that's stupid -- why would you want to pay taxes in cash in order to get a food allowance card which requires you to buy what the government says, or live where the government says, instead of just keeping your money and buying whatever you want with it?
So all of those programs have phase outs, because people who "don't need them" don't want them. They'd rather have the money instead.
A UBI is money to begin with. Lowering your tax rate so that you don't have to pay to give yourself a UBI is a no-op. It cancels out. The tax you would have to pay to fund it and the phase out you would need to not receive it are mathematically equivalent.
The difference is that by putting it into the tax rate, you can see what you're doing better. If you have a 25% tax rate and then implement a 50% phase out rate, you're effectively imposing a 75% marginal rate on lower and middle income people and then a lower marginal rate on higher income people. Requiring it to be set as part of the tax rate makes it more blatantly obvious how silly that is, and that's all. And then, seeing that more clearly, people might choose more sensible marginal rates than that, so that you're never taking more from people who make less.
Hum... No, on the case of paying everybody (with increased taxes) or just the poor there is no difference in cost or total distributed.
What you do lose is the hability to focus your help into an specific group. Every UBI proponent will tell you this is a positive, because governments just suck at this, but it's a very powerful politic tool.
>> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter.
There's a more subtle reason: if everyone gets a check, the program is more politically popular, making it harder for the rich to build a political coalition to kill it. That means the people who really need it will continue to get it.
IIRC, FDR opposed mean-testing social security for this reason. Almost everyone gets it, and the middle class gets enough to make some kind of difference in their lives, even if they could get by without it. Compared to other welfare programs, it's been unkillable.
It also blurs the distinction between "people who support themselves" and "people who need support". Given that one of the arguments against UBI is that it might create/expand/entrench a dependent underclass, giving it to everyone might be an important feature.
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check.
I am always shocked by the general lack of awareness people have about world intricacies.
Social welfare, fiscality and related issue in modern developped countries is one of the most complex systems I know of. I am 100% serious. It's a huge mess of rules, exceptions, directives, conflicting aspirations, unforceable & not unforceable || not unforced rules, outdated scheme, 0,1% population targeting welfare, federal, state, regional, city size rules and much more.
It crosses to healthcare, food, housing, education and more.
This whole mess was built bit by bit, step by step, over decades.
Thinking "we could send everyone a check" is right down heresy to anyone having truly worked aroung these fields.
* Else the check amount is the same for everyone and good luck to 4 kids families in high rent area
* Else the check is calculated depending on all the above factors and this system will never roll out (check Obamacare implementation issues)
Isn’t the fact that the current system is so extremely complicated (and because of that, expensive) exactly one of the reasons UBI is so appealing? Cutting out the bureaucracy will save a lot of money that can then be send to the people. If you spend $1000 to figure out that one person “deserves” $800 instead of $1000 you are wasting a lot of money/time for zero gain.
The people in the high rent area can move to a low rent area if they can’t hold a job: they have nothing holding them there under the UBI rules. As for kids, perhaps they should also receive (smaller) UBI that would go to their parents.
What is so bad about reduced "work"? Maybe people who are currently working at stupid, unnecessary jobs will make art and poetry and music. Or maybe invent cool things. Or maybe just relax and learn about themselves.
I have never understood this obsession with 100% employment.
> I have never understood this obsession with 100% employment.
Employment means income and tax revenue and social security funding. 100% employment means more people have personal income, the nation's social security system is not exhausted, and the state has more revenue to invest in public policies.
Reducing the number of hours/jobs that people currently work would reduce the labor supply and wages would rise (Econ 101). I don't see how these "consequences" are a bad thing.
Furthermore, "unforeseen consequences" are effects that we don't know will happen because they lie beyond our ability to predict them. There will always be unforeseen consequences of any major policy decision.
I'm not entirely decided on this matter myself, but I'll take the position.
One reason to include the rich in UBI is that it reduces administrative overheads. If it's means-tested, that means monitoring, investigating and ultimately punishing the poor. Why bother?
Giving everyone the same amount is symbolically useful, because it's a way in which all citizens are equal. Everyone gets the same amount and what can be fairer than that?
But, practically, anything a UBI plan gives you can be undone with an equal and opposite tax. The net effect after taxes is what matters and it's going to redistribute money or there's no point in doing it. Some people pay more taxes than others and raising the top income tax rate is enough to ensure that the wealthy don't benefit.
It can be made exactly equivalent to a negative income tax.
That depends on the competition. If the market rate doesn't go up, you might have trouble filling vacancies.
It seems that rents are going down a bit in San Francisco because some people who can suddenly work remotely are moving out (among other reasons). UBI is an income that you can take with you wherever you go, much like social security, so it's likely to make living in cheaper places more attractive.
This is why I strongly prefer "Universal Basic Housing" over (or in addition to) UBI. Landlords must be forced to provide a useful service for a good price instead of just freeloading off of the risk of homelessness.
Please no. How many times do cities have to try and fail at public housing for us to realize that the government cannot provide nor maintain it efficiently. There are much more effective ways that government can provide housing:
1) Allow actual competition. Adopt Japan-like zoning to make it easier to build. Landlords cannot freeload if they have competition. Make it harder for small special interest groups to veto new development.
2) Set property taxes appropriately or implement a land-value tax so that landlords have to pay for part of the surrounding improvements.
Most of the time is taken in getting approvals and permits, things that cities have direct control over and can + should optimize. Just doing that will decrease costs since a quicker turnaround means faster ROI and less risk for a developer.
You're right that cities do not expand uniformly, and city improvements are also not uniformly distributed. This is why a flat property tax does not make sense. Use land-value-tax to balance. If one area is very desirable, increase land taxes in that area and use the revenue to fund improvements like parks, libraries, schools all around the city.
So I don't think a UBI should be anywhere near $1,200 a month.
But one of the features of a UBI is it causes people to drop out of the labor market. Especially for shitty low end unskilled labor jobs. And this is great because the reduction in supply will drive up labor rates and help inequality in a far more natural way than a minimum wage.
>I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low.
But for every you, there's a me. I get satisfaction out of working. I had a job in college where I completed all of my work in the first week and did absolutely nothing for the next 6 months and I was MISERABLE. I needed a task to complete, a job to finish, to feel productive.
Furthermore I like having things - whether that be a boat, or a nice car or insert whatever. And that's not some "you've just succumbed to the capitalist monsters" - I buy things that I get enjoyment out of, I don't get enjoyment out of buying things. Quite frankly I feel disgusting anytime I buy something, so if it isn't something I enjoy I have borderline permanent remorse. The car I bought at 16 still hits a nerve because it was a pile of garbage I paid too much for.
I completely understand and respect and quite frankly envy people that don't want things, don't need to work to feel "complete" and can get by doing nothing all day. And with all of that said, the fact there's a you, and a me, tells me there's a very good chance UBI can work. People that don't care about having nice things can do fuck-all and get enough to survive, and people who want more can work until they have it.
Everyone agrees that there will be people who will want to work, and people who won't. The question is what is the ratio, and is it enough. No one can predict this with a high level of certainty. We all just have "a feeling", which coincidentally happens to align perfectly with whether or not we believe in UBI.
Sorry, I have a REALLY tough time believing automation can't replace a minimum of 50% of the current human workforce - we just haven't done it because there are large swaths of population willing to work for slave wages.
Whether you agree with UBI or not you better have a solution for how those people are going to survive when they are eventually replaced by a machine. The alternative will be endless war and famine or genocide.
- The cost of deciding who qualifies (and enforcement) is relevant. Particularly as you're spending money on every citizen, but only making savings from a small minority.
- You can "claw back" the money other, cheaper, ways (e.g. income tax increases).
- Negative income tax don't work for children, disabled, or the elderly like UBI does. If they don't work, it doesn't work. Therefore, you wind up with two schemes.
People keep on tacking on complexity, which breeds costs, which makes the whole scheme disproportionately expensive. It is universal because universal is cheap to run.
I think it could mostly be automated. Your tax filing from the previous year is put in a system and can figure out if you get money. They could even do an equation based on cost of living and other factors like number of dependents. They could either send out a check or direct deposit it.
If something changes (like a job loss) you submit a form and they send you the money. They can figure out if you owe them the money back on your next tax filing.
This does work for children since they would be counted as a dependent. This would probably change your tax filing which could change the calculation.
This would also work for elderly since they would still be filing taxes.
It would be easier to do it universally but it would likely cause other issues like more inflation.
"a system", "an equation", "They could either...", "a form", "they can figure out"
This posits the capability of the government to put together a really remarkably competent administration, that knows everyone's tax filings, everyone's citizenship status, where everyone lives, the cost of living in every part of the country (or the world?), and can speedily process paperwork continuously throughout the year. Certainly no such administration currently exists. It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.
Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.
How does immigration work without knowing who your citizens are? How would you prevent a non-citizen from getting a passport without having such a record?
If you want to get a passport the onus is on you to provide sufficient documents to prove citizenship. Because the US has birthright citizenship this is generally as simple as proving that you were born in the US or that either of your parents was a US citizen.
On a case-by-case basis it's generally pretty straightforward to determine whether someone is a citizen, but there isn't a list. The closest thing is probably the social security administration's register of people who have applied for a social security number, but even that doesn't cover everyone.
>This posits the capability of the government to put together a really remarkably competent administration, that knows everyone's tax filings, everyone's citizenship status, where everyone lives, the cost of living in every part of the country (or the world?), and can speedily process paperwork continuously throughout the year.
I agree that it would be more difficult than just doing UBI. I am not a fan of just taking the easier path just for the sake of ease. Only giving money to people who need it would be better for everybody.
The US already has cost of living numbers. Just to be clear I am saying they could use these numbers not that they have to use them. Receiving $5,000 in the Bay Area is different than $5,000 in Wyoming and making $50,000 in the Bay Area is different than making $50,000 in Wyoming. This is why I was suggesting using the cost of living numbers.
>Certainly no such administration currently exists.
UBI doesn't exist either so it already would need to be set up.
If they can set up actual tax equations it would allow for a more stream lined IRS. This would help modernize the whole tax process which would be beneficial for all of us. I recall a country (maybe state?) that released the tax program they wrote. You could download it and run it yourself if you wanted. This would be great for people. There would be no need for most people to buy Turbo Tax or go to a tax guy.
>It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.
You would not have to file forms. You would only need to file a form if you wanted to receive money or stop receiving money. If you are fine waiting until the next tax filing you would be free to do so.
This is no different than the current welfare system. If you wish to receive welfare or stop receiving welfare you have to fill out a form. What I am suggesting is less manual validation than the welfare system since I would go with the assumption the person should get the money. It would automatically be fixed after filing your taxes.
>Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.
I am in favor of replacing welfare with a negative income tax. If you want money from the negative income tax and your income did not automatically qualify you from your previous year's filing then you fill out a form. This would be less work for many people since there would be an automatic enrollment based on the previous year's tax filing.
I agree that UBI is easier. I just don't think people like Jeff Bezos needs government money. If Bezos receives a few thousand extra he is probably not going to spend more or invest more. It would be a waste to give to somebody like him. We could in turn provide extra money for people who actually needs help. The people who need help are more likely to actually spend the money than Bezos so it could benefit the economy.
One reason is simplicity in managing it, reducing government costs.
For a middle to upper income earner their overall tax rate would be the same, the income tax rates could be adjusted so someone on $100k still pays the same overall amount of tax.
Second it is gets rid of the high effective tax rates that low income earners deal with. While low income earners pay low or no income tax, they lose their benefits the more they earn, so a dollar earned could mean up to a dollar less in benefits, which is a disincentive to work. Something that is often missed by the people who say having a UBI would be a disincentive to work.
> I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work. Actually, where I live now I live comfortably on $1200 a month. I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
this is not an unforeseen circumstance, but a desired outcome
What UBI enables, I believe (and same with universal healthcare and other social safety nets) is lowest barriers to entry. I have no doubt that some will not do anything productive with the moneys it’s pretty much beside the point.
The point is to have a guaranteed floor for all in society, much like the idea of bankruptcy (before the conservative demonization of the idea particularly in the 1990s and Bush era, in the USA) it’s a way to ensure people can start over or continue to build momentum without fear of being homeless, starving and/or being unable to provide the basics for their family or themselves
This lowers the barrier of entry for people to free themselves of being shackled to giant corporations or dead end jobs just for “security”
Because it's simpler and avoids duplicating effort, since the means testing is rolled into the tax system, and avoids perverse consequences, since with a single payment system you don't end up with a combination that has greater than 1:1 reductions in benefits without outside income for some recipients at some income levels.
> Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs.
A negative income tax is, in terms of who gets what payment, exactly equivalent to a UBI funded by a progressive income tax.
A monthly UBI with the usual annual income tax filing and reconciliation payment/refund is a better mechanism than simply rolling the UBI into the income tax calculation and annual reconciliation, though.
> I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.
I think people like you overestimate it, because they ignore the well-established effects of general deprivation and voracious human wants. They may also overestimate their own tolerance for non-work, as do many people leading up to retirement.
> I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.
Some people would. But many more people would also be willing to work a little bit more for a little bit more, which UBI makes easier than existing means-tested programs.
And many people who initially would reduce work for the novelty of leisure would turn around later and work to have the things they couldn't afford on the basic stipend.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
Unless you are the poorest of the poor, that outcome isn't actually contrary to the design or problematic.
> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...
The problem is that a small loophole or exception paves the way for larger exceptions, and so on, which continues until the original concept is gutted and bleeds out to the status quo
The principled reason is that it is, well, universal. If you're a citizen, you get certain rights and responsibilities, end of story.
A more realist perspective notes that historically, if you make a program for the poor, it becomes a poor program (underfunded). A scheme it is more likely to succeed the more people who buy in to it. (Notice how the ACA is becoming more popular over time? Or look at Social Security vs. SNAP.)
> I definitely would choose not to work
I think people both pro- and con- are not really thinking through how this would play out in reality. Income, wealth, type of work and social status are intimately linked, especially so in the US.
There will immediately be some slur for people who choose not to work that will probably replace the "your momma's on welfare"-type crap. Lots of people's shallow, status driven dating rules will expand to exclude the voluntarily-unemployed. It will become obvious that there's a very low glass-ceiling over their heads that limits them in all sorts of ways. It will also become harder to crawl out of over time, both for individuals who don't maintain useful skills, and as a social class, because that's how humans act.
Some people will of course choose that life. But I think it will be a lot less appealing than you think.
Its a good point you bring up. And I think people don't talk enough about other options that assume you're working or trying to find work, such as increasing minimum wage and unemployment benefits dramatically, instead of UBI. Or like that proposal you brought up.
I think UBI is easier to swallow for some people, cause they'd get it as well, they might be more willing to open up to the idea.
That said, I think the amount you'd get on UBI would balance itself out to what can be given. If everyone becomes lazy bums that rather not work, we'd all see our UBI payments decline year over year until we can't live off it and would need to go back to work. A bit of a simplification, but it's possible that the system thus finds a stable level on its own that works.
> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...
Because then you need to test for means, and that means you have to hire new bureaucracy to conduct those tests, and then pay their benefits and pensions and travel expenses, and then you need to hire additional bureaucracy to address occasional loopholes in your checks, and then 10-20-50-100 years later you're back to square one with massively bloated self-serving bureaucracies conveniently appropriating dollars to save pennies.
That's what drives UBI advocates bonkers about the current benefit programs. For example, food stamps benefits. I say anyone with an SSN should be able to apply for one and get it electronically. It helps farmers, helps food availability, and is generally spent locally. Instead we have layers and layers of bureaucracy ensuring Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are prevented from receiving SNAP benefits.
I hear this argument a lot but it makes no sense to me. Suppose UBI is $12k/year. Then as long as it costs less than $12k to identify a rich person, it’s cheaper to not pay the rich people than to pay everyone.
In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.
You're forgetting that the citizens of the US are people, not robots. When everyone gets the same treatment, you get a feeling of unity and you don't divide society into "leeches" and "providers" based on who gets UBI and who doesn't. The UBI becomes part of what it means to be American.
Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place. So this statement you made is false:
> This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
I’m just responding to the common claim that means-testing UBI would be expensive relative to the expenditures of the program (well-illustrated by the quote “appropriating dollars to save pennies“ in the comment I responded to). This is a quantitative question, not a moral one. I don’t think it serves the movement to be making arguments that are obviously wrong if you do a bit of easy research or math, or just think critically about it. It makes the advocacy less credible. Since most people only read comments online and don’t post, you might not normally get any feedback from those who feel this way.
> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.
This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.
> When everyone gets the same treatment, you get a feeling of unity and you don't divide society into "leeches" and "providers" based on who gets UBI and who doesn't.
No; it may obscure that distinction slightly but it very much still exists. Anyone who receives more in UBI and other desired services than they pay in taxes will remain a "leach". Those who pay more in taxes than they receive are the providers, without whom the whole UBI system could not exist. (The relevant pre-UBI terms are "net tax payer" and "net tax receiver".)
No that's not true at all. Receiving a UBI and using the income to take care of your aging parents makes you a giver, not a leech. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.
> Receiving a UBI and using the income to take care of your aging parents makes you a giver, not a leech.
No that's not true at all. So what if you're not the only one benefitting from your UBI payments; they're still coming from someone else's effort, not your own. To be a "giver" you first must earn the things you're giving away. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.
Is that a bad thing? Say We went from participation rate from ~65% to 40%. That could be good, we stop trying to force people into jobs unnecessarily as we automate + it might encourage dirty jobs like cleaners to be better paid and balance the wage market as people have a way to walk away.
Point 2: Generally I agree that UBI is a bit of a pipe dream for now. I think we'd be better off doing some 'guaranteed job' system where we focus on societal roles that add value but dont compete with free market. Give people a guaranteed 3 day a week job for basic living wage type deal and earlier retirement ages. Use this as a transition point to hopefully automating much of the world and some system of UBI as we slim workforce needs.
It's literally cheaper to simply give everyone a $1,200 check than it is to try and create rules that exclude people based upon some criteria.
That is how the welfare program operates today. It's expensive to manage and at its current position not inclusive enough which then leaves a number of people worse off when you are just above the cut-off.
I think you'd be surprised and how meaningful work can be if it is actually meaningful. The definition of work has been taken over by the current economy as maintaining some rich corporation's systems of printing money. Work instead should be defined as adding value to society.
Oh, you sound too sure... Have you considered that maybe once not obliged to work anymore you could instead adopt a more entrepreneurial attitude? Perhaps exploring your genuine interests?
In complex systems, it's tempting to look for a silver bullet: If we only did "this".
This Capitalism 2.0 would also need to be a system of things that enables a new direction - whatever that may be - based on the fragile regression to the mean of what an expected aggregated view of that looks like.
UBI can or cannot be part of that system, but by itself it can quickly become irrelevant.
Most economic theories of capitalism are based on (mostly) rational behaviors of the majority of market participants. Social studies will show that in topics related to finances/money, behaviors are all over the place.
Want to drive towards Capitalism 2.0? Start with financial education, support systems, relevant incentives (maybe UBI is one of them) and a good shared vision of what that 2.0 is.
When an academic makes such an egregious error on spelling (centuries?!?), I just have to stop reading at that point. It casts doubt on the veracity of the arguments in the paper.
The best academic I know is dyslexic. It isn't me. The guy just finished the second of a planned five volumes on PhD level mathematics that, in my view, will become the mathematical encyclopedia for applied mathematics in coming years. He has to work 5X as hard as me and others I know to write. He is one of the most prolific mathematicians I know (averages ~1 paper/month).
Your complaint is a book-cover issue. The quality of the argument is independent of an occasional typographical error.
I am confident your colleague works 5x harder because he/she does not want to get the spelling of century wrong. This is not a simple typo.
For me, these mistakes are equivalent to Van Halen’s “Brown M&Ms” (see trending HN article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817), and I stand by my original assertion. If you cannot get this right, I do not trust any analysis or conclusions in your paper. Someone who hasn’t taken the time to proofread their work likely rushed the analysis and conclusions as well.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread> A UBI is the logical next step we must take to move forward as humanity. If we continue to wait more people will suffer and we’ll end up stagnating for decades, or destroying the fruits of capitalism in revolution anyway.
This simply isn't true, by almost every possible metric the world is getting better.
And all of this defiantly ignores the enormous impacts of globalization and automation on the "getting better" metric.
Random side note: Here is a snippet from a Lincoln speech -> https://pastebin.com/quzZqbiK
My unsubstantiated opinion would be that Marx probably would of changed his mind at some point about making it some sort of collectivist movement.
Its still capitalism and you still benefit from seeking a higher paying job but once most jobs have been automated it lets people easily train for better jobs without having to constantly report back to some defective government department and randomly getting their payments cut off.
UBI can exist in a capitalist structure. It can exist in another structure. It is not mutually exclusive to capitalism.
And when the day comes where job demand far exceeds supply, it becomes an inevitability.
Basically.
> Its still capitalism
No, the modern welfare state is not capitalism, it's a socialist reaction to capitalism. Now, you can argue that it's “bourgeois socialism” that tends to reinforce the class relations of capitalism and which inevitably reverts to capitalism, as Marx—before it actually became the thing that completely displaced old-school capitalism in the developed world—did. But it's not, itself, capitalism. And the longer it is the dominant system of the developed world without a wholesale reversion to unmitigated capitalism, the harder to pure form of the Marxian charge against bourgeois socialism is to defend.
You have this completely backwards. The welfare state is a bourgeois reaction to socialism. It is capitalism with a bulwark against revolt.
Here’s another: the suicide rate for Americans aged 15 to 24 years old
Or: Lung cancer incidence in India.
- no mention whatsoever of any existential threats e.g. climate change. full faith and credit in Mr. Market to get us out of that rut, i guess
- some definitions of "efficient" involve avoiding policies in one country (say worker and environmental protections) by moving to other countries where those same protections don't apply. so efficient seems to also mean unlawful, to some extent
- we'll trust these UBI recipients to "do the right thing" and goose up the economy immediately, instead of say, investing in infrastructure (education, health, science) that we know is a far better investment in the long term future of the country (but can't really be done by a couple grand per month, more like... i dunno... a government thing)
There are schemes for UBI which don't actually cost much more than we are spending. It can just be reallocation with more clawback in taxes. If one wants to.
The fact is less people suffer every year, the economy in the west had its biggest expansion every, and there more fruit especially in america than ever.
Every single thing we know about redistribution of wealth does the exact thing he said. Where is his proof.
The fact is suicide rates are higher in wealthier neighborhoods and in richer countries.
https://business.time.com/2012/11/08/why-suicides-are-more-c...
Not to mention the fact that you believe giving more money to someone who is addicted to alcohol or drugs will be better instead of worse. The only thing you've given them is money money to buy alcohol and drugs with no extra motivation or responsibility so they'd stop doing those things.
That said, I prefer capitalism.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
I think taxing wealth is harder and then defining it is hard (how do you value illiquid shares, options, etc).
You can also have an exemption for the first $1m so that family homes are excluded from the tax.
I think a straight wealth tax should be the next step, because you will need to figure out how to stop people dodging it. Taxing someone who has a ton of debt and wealth might lead to issues.
Let's say the US collects 6 Trillion/ year in all taxes [I'm probably off by some percent, but not too much for an internet comment.] Let's say there are about 1.5 Billion acres of taxable land in the US (Reverse engineered from "The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, about 28% of the total land area of 2.27 billion acres." [1]) That works out to $4000/acre. For my ~sixth of an acre lot, my Federal tax bill would be about $700. That works out to be less than what I pay in income tax, so it looks like a deal to me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands
Literal nonsense. What is this economic wonderland you live in where poor people have land and assets?
As for land tax, you can make it progressive with 0% for the first 1m to cover people in high cost areas with only a family home.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/205440/homeownership-exp...
Zero users and loving it!
Zero users and loving it! is not necessarily hyperbole.
Again, this is how it works in most developed countries under welfare systems without issue. The majority still seek real jobs because they want to live above the base level of income required to live. A UBI won't be paying for your overseas holiday and fancy car.
poverty is like having a gun to your head. you do what you’ve gotta do.
if salaries for essential, dirty jobs must go up, i am all for it.
Because you need food and shelter to survive. There's been no point in time where we didn't have to acquire it. We're just now getting to the point where the production of it requires nominal effort.
These are unprecedented times.
the escape from suffering is wisdom and compassion.
in this new abundance, why not remove all the guns from all the heads?
Do the math: 300M people, $2k/mo, 12mo/yr is 7.2 trillion dollars. Even to first order that is unaffordable, and that’s without factoring in that UBI would decimate the tax base that’s supposed to support it, or the consumer price inflation that would result in that $2k not going as far as you’d expect.
We've never lived in a time where the majority could exist in the non-working class. Having the majority be in the non-working class raises certain issues. Like, who is going to be in the minority.
I'm not worried about what happens at 100% automation. I'm more worried about what happens when there are too few jobs to reasonably distribute among the people. There's an icky issue of essentially slavery we're going to have to confront.
Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.
nature is what we are. life is a beautiful struggle of a dance when we exist within that flow.
The world's mean income is about $18000 adjusted for purchasing power parity so it's not a complete stretch to get to $2000 per month for the whole world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040
The USA has a mean income of about $72,000 so in theory UBI could be $6000/mo without bankrupting the country.
It would be very interesting to see what kind of crazy spending-led boom you could achieve by redistributing wealth exactly evenly across every American citizen.
so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.
So do you increase UBI to counter this? Or do you let it be, and UBI no longer pays enough to maintain the same level of living standard. In which case, people are now once again, forced economically, to work "dirty jobs" despite not wanting it.
Perhaps partially. But you have no evidence to support your implicit assertion that it happens totally, or that your argument defeats UBI on the merits
let me put it this way:
if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. if that’s the cost to pay for a more equitable society, why not leave the keyboard for a day and perform that noble and necessary duty. i’m sure i’m not the only person on HN who feels this way.
the world isn’t all bad. it’s getting better. but it only gets better insofar as we ourselves become better. it is this striving towards higher harmony that propels us forward.
No you won't
Even if you _would_ do as you have proposed above, most people won't. A labour shortage is still likely the result, esp. if said labour is not high paying, but the doing of which is still relatively important to a functioning society.
I'm not against UBI - i would want it, even if it means a higher tax! But i just don't see how it is implementable atm, and also whether there are any negative consequences.
The unemployment benefits that have been paid out in the USA so far has many talking about how it is a disincentive to go back to work - because they are paid more than their original job. I can't see how this won't be the same under a UBI system - so the only way for a worker to _do_ work they wouldn't ordinarily do is to pay more!
Isn't this the same argument that's used to argue against increasing the minimum wage? "if you increased the minimum wage, then the costs will go up for those businesses hiring minimum wage workers, making the goods more expensive for those workers, and canceling everything out!". But empirical evidence has shown this has not been the case[1]. Because of this, I'm wary of any hand-wavy arguments like these that just mention some effects without attempting to quantify the magnitude of those effects.
[1] random result: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CBO_Projected_Effect...
I’m exaggerating a bit, but still...
You're taking this as a given. Why? Remember that we are living in a time of record profits for many industries.
To fund it, you’d probably have to tax the top 50% at a much higher rate.
Total US income is about 9,200T. Top 5% represent about 30% of all income or 3,000T.
Pay every household $24,000 per year is about 3,000T total.
So yeah, you could tax the top 5% at 100% and just barely pay for it.
The 40% bracket in the UK starts at ~$60k USD (50k GBP). In the US you’d be in a 22% bracket up to $84k.
Not picking on the UK, just an example.
I don’t think there’s enough people in the top 5% to get the amount needed without literally taxing them into oblivion. We’d need corporate taxes to pull this off, and those bastards cleverly hang out in tax havens, and I wonder how much more clever they’d be willing to get once we tax them more.
I’d love for it work.
UBI proposals typically set the value at just enough to live on, or what someone who successfully claims unemployment + housing benefit would be given. At that level, the extra cost of UBI is because it's paid to non-claiming dependants, but there are savings from dismantling the bureaucracy which decides who is entitled to unemployment benefit and investigates fraudulent benefit claims, so it would be close to revenue neutral, so net tax rates shouldn't change much.
Assuming the revenue source is income tax, those already working would, on average, have their higher gross tax rates offset by receipt of UBI. There are other sources of taxation, e.g. corporation tax and a tax on land so a proportion could be taken from those.
This is something a lot of people just don't understand. Our entire monetary system isn't predicated on exchange or store of value like they teach you in school, it's a system of coercion. That sounds ugly, but it's observably true. Taxes, in particular property and income taxes, impose a requirement on everyone to participate in the state's ledger game. The question becomes is that coercion eucivic or not? A society without coercion isn't an option. Nature abhors a vacuum, and human societies abhor a power vacuum. Given our present level of technology, the alternative to monetary coercion is closer to gulags and plantations than it is to Star Trek.
The coercive aspect of monetization is perhaps most clearly seen in the example of imperial British Kenya. When the Brits rolled in they wanted the local to work in the mines. Local Kenyans, quite reasonably, said screw that we'd rather not. The Brits then imposed a head tax on every Kenyan adult payable in Pounds Sterling. And, in that economy, the only way to get Pounds Sterling was working for the British government. So maybe you could get a job as some kind of functionary, but the vast majority of jobs were, you guessed it, working in the mines. In this way the sovereign currency issuer was able to coerce the behavior it wanted, namely the dirty, dangerous and unpleasant work of mining, without any overt violence.
My country (NZ) pays most families a weekly amount based on how many kids they have and their household income (Technically it is a tax break and so only applies to people who earn money, but for most people it might as well be a payment).
Some have claimed this has suppressed wages and is a subsidy to businesses from the government. Minimum wage rises counteracts this. I am not sure if this theory can be proven.
Regardless I would expect a wage/price spiral causing inflation initially:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price/wage_spiral
https://www.ird.govt.nz/topics/working-for-families/can-i-ge...
Basically, increased labor costs drives up cost of goods (inflation), which offsets the benefit of the UBI in the first place.
If my garbage bill goes up by another $5 each month, I'm way ahead with the UBI check.
Unless you can find 399 other things in daily life where wage increases will wipe out the UBI.
Of course a universal income will alter markets. Jobs that suck will have to pay more. That's a feature, not a bug. The alternative is that we enjoy low prices on ditches dug, because those doing the digging are desperate for the work. I'd rather live in a society that doesn't fight to preserve that dynamic.
I think there will be quite a many if you look closely. Garbage Man is literally a placeholder for bad-jobs-that-pay-less.
In fact something as important as teaching could come into this.
In a UBI economy the economic pressure to get self driving trucks would be an order of magnitude greater, creating financial incentives for Google et al to pour more money into AI research to achieve it because the market value is so much greater when truckers are demanding much higher pay to justify the labor when they have a choice in it.
The same would apply to an automated garbage truck that can use CV to scan refuse and collect it via a standardized bucket system rather than having two impoverished desperate humans cling to the back of the truck being paid dirt to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.
UBI would probably be the most beneficial policy to spur the R&D that gets us to singularity the fastest.
At present we have a situation where there are probably many very non-sucky jobs that could be done, but it’s not commercially viable to employ people for them at minimum wage.
Maybe some of the existing sucky customer service type jobs are only as bad as they are because companies are forced to extract $x/hour. e.g. if McDonalds could maybe they’d hire more people at a lower rate and make the job less stressful, resulting in happier employees and customers. As things are McDonalds must extract $x/hour or they will not be profitable, this ensures it’s a terrible place to work, and usually understaffed.
Don't buy the "companies will start treating you humanely if only they could pay you less". Corporations, particularly publicly traded ones, are in competition for profit. In most sectors exploiting your employees to the fullest presents a positive return on quarterlies no matter how much or little you pay them. Maximizing return on dollars committed is fundamental to growing revenues.
UBI helps improve worker condition by making the negotiation between labor and capital more equitable. So long as one person comes to the table for their needs and the other comes for their ones the former is always disadvantaged and ripe for exploitation.
And who gets stuck with that job when everyone else doesn’t have to work?
Maybe we can pick this up 100 years from now.
Sounds like a gun to your head.
Similarly, if there were not people to clean offices, then have the office workers do it (assuming there are offices, of course).
For things that are really essential and cannot be done away with, the cost would go up. It seems reasonable to pay more for vital services. That may mean higher taxes or some other payment arrangement, but it is only regressive if the taxes are done in a regressive way.
There may also be deflationary effects (namely eliminating the giant waste of BS jobs): https://medium.com/@austingmackell/the-deflationary-effects-...
A UBI would change the job market. But whether it is a distortion or fixing some externality cost that was distorting the market is certainly debatable.
> Higher taxes are a regressive solution to giving people more money.
There is a thing called progressive taxes. You can change the tax brackets. If you are in top x% you can have higher taxes that basically negate the UBI + more. Done. That is not regressive at all.
Garbage and other dirty jobs should pay more. That might be taxes or it might be that those services need more automation, or a better pricing model.
A UBI is a base. Will some people strive for nothing more in life and just live wherever they can afford to on this income? Yes. Thats okay. If there is more money, there will always be way more people who want to get ahead and get more.
(And be a man, stand by your comments and don’t make a throw away)
In terms of distorting the job market, well UBI might just force the free-market to accept that people deserve a dignified life and get out of poverty. Why should a garbage man not get 42k instead of 30k?
I don't share political opinions publicly because that is just bad for business. I still stand by my views.
Please don't create accounts to post in the flamewar style in any case. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At least in New Zealand, those who can claim a benefit from the Government end up in a welfare trap, because we reduce welfare payments as you regain an income. There's no immediate financial benefit to you, the welfare recipient, in working 10-20 hours vs. not working at all.
There's a whole philosophical discussion involved in whether those people should have to work, but rightly or wrongly, a lot of societal and personal value is derived from employment. A UBI deletes the welfare trap, and allows people who exist on the margins/are incapable of full-time work to find and immediately benefit from employment again. Maybe the garbagemen will need to be paid more, but we should also see more part-time workers put their hands up.
A UBI would certainly change job markets; I'm not sure whether "distort" is the right word.
But also where I live, the garbage man is not a public employee, but an employee of a private garbage company. So my taxes don't need to change, instead my garbage bill goes up. That would be regressive, since a garbage bill is a higher percentage of poor people's income. But some poor people just don't pay the garbage man, and instead take their garbage to the landfill themselves, which is way way cheaper.
Incidentally, you can make the same argument about minimum wage increases - the cost of getting low wage work done increases, so prices increase. I don't want to get into an argument about the effectiveness of that, but the evidence generally suggests minimum wage works better than conservative naysayers sometimes claim.
But it seems like there is some risk that young people who have never worked might not get in the habit of working? The ambitious will want more than just to barely get by, but I don't think we can entirely rule out a slacker lifestyle becoming popular. I think we should still try it and see, but the plan might need to be adjusted.
Every reaction to UBI discussions immediately assume UBI is trying to replace all income, which is very much not the idea.
It's a floor for society.
UBI means you can actually evaluate the system you live in and determine what's necessary (and then pay more for it). At the moment it's all "jobs jobs jobs" - we have entire federal agencies that are essentially jobs programs (Homeland Security is a great example... they've done almost literally nothing).
The garbage companies would have to pay more, but the result would be that instead of no garbage man, the garbage man now just works 20 hours a week and takes more vacations. And because this vital job is no longer as "sucky", other people have joined the profession too and also put in 10-20 hours a week thereby distributing this type of hard physical labor across a larger pool of people.
It will not affect day to day life very much unless you've been underpaying for a vital service (in this case, you're the slave owner). Then all the slave owners will just have to pay more for services that they want.
The free money will never do what it’s supposed to do in the long run. It’s better to just give the actual service for free (healthcare, college, transportation).
There will be a riot every other week to change the UBI payments.
"Too high!" "Too low!"
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/615163630343397490/
Of course, only some of the disasters of 2020 have been beyond our control. However, in the face of so much calamity, it's soul-crushing that so much of the suffering in the USA in 2020 is self-inflicted. Think I'm overreacting?
https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-s...
The greedy could siphon away most of the UBI, bringing us back to square one. UBI suffers from the assumption that we have a system with the right incentive structures. We kind of don’t from what I’m seeing.
They get it and then it is instantly removed via taxes so their overall profits from UBI were $0. The only difference between UBI and unemployment/welfare is you don't have to apply for it, its simply calculated and distributed by the tax system.
With better policy we really could end the current housing shortage in our biggest & richest cities.
Yes UBI decreases market inefficiency, but the effect would be smallest on inelastic markets like housing. You’d see the biggest impact in the markets for the life-improving items/services that people with less money can’t afford right now, everything from fresh/healthy foods to nice shoes. The prices of those things would go up, but it would reflect an increase in demand.
2. Another possible theory is that UBI will allow people to move away from expensive cities to areas that are cheap to live in. $1K a month won't go far in SF, but you might be able to live on that in the middle of nowhere without having to fin a job. So decreased demand for housing in expensive cities means that UBI might cause housing prices there to go down.
3. Housing problems are fairly orthogonal to UBI. In pretty much every other market supply can rise to match increased demand so that prices stay close to their marginal cost of production. We need to fix our housing pricing problems UBI or no UBI.
Not unless landlords collude to fix prices. Competition will keep prices down, the same way that gas isn't always $4/gallon even though people will buy almost as much at that price as at $1.
And since no one (citizens who get de facto UBI) wants to work, they have to import labor.
Now some one has to do those jobs, there are two options now. You either pay people more, and therefore now products/services cost more[Inflation]. Or you get people from outside to work at same price you would pay.
This has led to the situation where Middle east is full of South East Asians. Pretty much any skill based job you see is being done by Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis. On the very long run you turn your whole populace into freeloaders. Or worst the laziest kind of freeloaders, who just won't work no matter what. It will eventually precipitate to everything. Given you don't plan to do a job, why would you want an education anyway? Eventually you will arrive at where UAE or Saudi Arabia is today.
Saudi Arabia even worked to fix this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization
But apparently cheating is common, and it mostly doesn't work.
Long story short, when something is given for free this way, its border line impossible to undo it until a total collapse comes to pass.
It leads to more nationalism and youll be wishing for the good ol days of today when you go down the path others have gone down.
The only numbers I found on the Saudi plan is $533 million per month paid to 10.6 million people [0]. This works out to about the same individual payment.
I think investigating the effects of these plans in those nations is worthwhile. Separating the effects of the plans from the specific situation in the Middle East would be challenging.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-allowances/saudi-ar...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_worl...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_...
Surely sooner or later as we run out of resources (and destroy the planet enough) we have to move away from the idea of growth and toward sustainability. These are mutually exclusive goals.
the split between quality of life and gdp and these variously with resource consumption is the issue.
I completely agree that nature eventually puts an end to exponential growth, but I don't see how it puts an end to exponential wealth.
For example, in many countries, per capita energy usage is decreasing as GDP per capita increases, because of more energy efficient tech.
no, we fucking don't.
A few centuries ago we didn't have lighting, refrigeration, microwaves, electric ovens, clothes washers and dryers, cheap food, even fruits were only seasonal whereas in many capitalist-favoring places in the world now you can buy them year round. You can eat meat for every meal.
The view from the kitchen alone makes us look like we live like kings from centuries past.
Not to disregard the downsides of capitalism - rent seeking being just one of many. But to say we aren't living in the luxuries of capitalism is disingenuous IMO.
A middle ages peasant has access to a tiny sliver of the goods and services available to the king. A modern day peasant has access to pretty much all of the goods and services available to Bezos today. It's not like the food Bezos eats is any better than any body else's. The clothes he wears is not much better than anybody else's. The computer he uses is not much faster than anybody else's.
So the gap in availability and access of goods and services between the rich and poor is lower today than it was in the past.
Edit: I am absolutely biased against a system that favors the wealthy at the detriment to your average citizen. “Look at how well this system works for us while the rest of you suffer!” is not helpful.
You've just shown your bias by labeling the system broken, despite calling for a change in perspective.
may be it isn't broken from the point of view of the business owners. How would you know without first living from their perspective?
Like how people call the US government broken. When it was meant for the very beginning to mangle federal power. The only thing broken about that system is federal power isn't more limited. But a lot of people call that system broken.
One can repeat this until they’re blue in the face, the data says otherwise.
https://theconversation.com/is-america-a-failing-state-how-a...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underly...
https://www.epi.org/publication/failure-by-design/
The fact that he included an Amazon link to a book that came out over 200 years ago and is available on Project Gutenberg[0] certainly backs up his credentials as a "huge fan of capitalism".
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm
For this reason, I think that any sort of UBI will likely be woefully inadequate and may even be intentionally devalued over time, especially if it's used as a reason to dismantle welfare services.
The economic system is the problem.
One common refrain I've heard is that the US already has a UBI, but it is $0.
The article attempts to argue for UBI from the stance of being pro-capitalist and working within the existing capitalist framework, and I think the author would answer your criticism with something like "By providing money to people, they can allocate those resources wherever is most efficient for them- to buy the food and housing they need if they need it, or other things if not. The person receiving the money is the one with the most information about where money needs to go in their life."
I bet everyone reading this has at one time or another met someone who is completely incapable of managing money at even simple levels. Or thinking ahead even. Not everyone can wisely use XX a month. Or even eat with it. Then what?
The fixation on money is a little nearsighted imo. It didn't always exist. It's just a tool for determining access to good and services. What if everyone could get a healthy meal and a clean safe place to sleep at any time and a shower and some net access or whatever is deemed necessary. Would that cost less or more then UBI?
(I still think some form of UBI might be a good idea for the present, just, we should think bigger and outside of the current economic stack for the long term.)
During this pandemic situation, many Australians are getting $750/w virtually no strings attached. I know of people bumming around the house waiting for their perception of the economy to improve, and I know of others working more than usual to bolster their bank account with the influx.
You better do as the government tells you, or you're not getting your UBI payment this month.
This can easily be abused.
Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale.
Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects.
Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving.
EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: https://youtu.be/jWTGsUyv8IE
Unfortunately, every other large-scale form of government that’s been tried has badly trampled on the personal rights enumerated in the USA’s founding documents. If anything should change here, it should be a dismantling of all the laws and institutions that have grown up like weeds since the late 1700s that are trampling on those rights.
That’s not to disparage some great things that have happened in the mean time: freeing the slaves, illegalizing discrimination by the government, women’s suffrage, etc. But each of those things I’ve named are good because they apply those first principles to areas of government that were lacking application when the country was founded.
While command economies have numerous documented failures, including actual fucking famine during eg the Great Leap Forwards, crowd-sourcing is a very real phenomenon, enabled by the Internet, even under capitalism. Right now, however, we're witnessing the failure of a free-market economy to provide for their poorest citizens. At least the people that starved under Stalin didn't have a Safeway on their block that was filled with food.
Markets are so efficient that even socialist food banks[0] use a "market" on the backend. That doesn't mean that an infinitely free market is infinitely efficient.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/food-bank-economics
You don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to "fix" capitalism. Our current problem is that the 1% are taking too much of the pie for themselves. This has led to increased corporatization, reduction in competition as companies merge and there's less players in any particular field, this results in the white-collar service class being beholden to their corporations, making it unable for them to save enough money to spin off and start their own small and medium sized businesses which would create more jobs for people lower on the economic rungs of society. In effect capitalism is working a little too well/efficiently as the owners of capital are using their entrenched power to squeeze more production/efficiency out of employees, which forces employees to stay employees instead of business owners.
This problem can be fixed by tweaking the tax code and some other small changes at the federal level. You don't need to effectively reboot the system to make capitalism work again for the 99%.
"...imagine how easy it would be for such a government that was also providing a basic income to its citizens to manipulate their citizens based on that basic income that they depended on. If they can deny citizens access to things like public transportation based on their ‘citizen score’, they can also deny those citizens (part of) their basic income depending on how ‘good’ their behavior is. So if you were too critical and thinking too independently, you could very easily be denied your basic income, and this could be a serious problem especially if you were brought up to be dependent on the government and to (heavily) rely on the income they provided."
More: https://blog.kareldonk.com/an-example-of-the-dangers-of-a-go...
If that's the case, then I would personally feel the same way!
If people truly need to rely on the government for food, it would be absurdly inhumane of a society to let them starve.
Simultaneously, promoting reliance on the government and attempting to make that reliance universal has the potential to take away our freedoms.
Food stamps is an acceptable principle to Americans because it's meant to be temporary and need-based, and if you remove those two characteristics, it isn't just a reductio ad absurdum argument of taking the same concept further; it's entirely different.
Not to make any argument for the feasibility of the idea, of course.
It's purely speculative FUD. It would be terrible if they did that, so make sure they don't. But it's a completely independent problem.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/5/20849020/alaska-...
EDIT>> Also there is plenty of precedent for limiting things which are worded in such a way as to suggest they cannot be limited, eg: "shall not be infringed"
Welfare, on the other hand, is better understood and more narrowly focused. And even there you still have a ton of bullshit. I think UBI's deceptively simple yet vaguely broad scope will be tussled & twisted even more.
Beyond that, it's also ripe for political agitation because UBI would have fewer restrictions than welfare. You can already find provocative "news" segments about how disgraceful and undeserving welfare recipients are because they found one dude buying some crab meat or something using foodstamps. Imagine the outcry when people buy weed with UBI. The pressure to start policing and controlling UBI recipients would be enormous, even more than welfare which already has so many restrictions.
Yes, and it's only for humans too. Raccoons and shrubs don't receive the basic income.
One of the most important sets of principles the US founders relied on were the facts that power corrupts, that it (unfortunately) has to be wielded by someone in a governing sense, and that the best ways to keep government from becoming corrupt and abusive are to (a) limit its power to that which is essential for rule-of-law, representative government; and (b) divide that power among different people who have checks and balances on each others’ power.
Therefore it seems to me that a UBI is likely not a good idea because it vastly increases government’s power.
Note that the US government already wields a ton of power not explicitly granted by the constitution in the form of federal grants...
I never thought of it evolving into different levels for different categories of people.
But I'll answer this anyway. UBI is unconditional. If a cash payment depends on the recipient's behaviour, it wouldn't be UBI. The same amount would be paid to everyone of working age.
Why mention China here? Something very similar happens in the UK with benefit sanctions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobseeker%27s_Allowance#Sancti...
If the market price of an apartment is $500, and suddenly everyone gets UBI, the landlord would raise the price as much as he can, say $1000.
People on UBI are in the same relative position as before. They still can’t get the apartment because there’s enough people who have the UBI plus something else and can pay $1000.
This isn't different to how it works now. UBI isn't about making everyone millionaires, its just welfare/unemployment with less steps.
I made a more detailed comment in response to a similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237910967
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/20/16256240/m...
https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...
https://basicincometoday.com/how-and-why-a-fed-financed-ubi-...
But, yes, of course, if there is a scarce good (there isn't enough for everybody) and due to UBI now everybody can afford this scarce good, then... guess what, no they can't.
But that's economy at work, and entices the populace to work, so they can supplement their UBI and get scarce stuff they want.
Perhaps you mean that certain goods are so price elastic they will just cost whatever it needs to cost to squeeze every buck out of the lower-income populace.
That IS a risk, but I'm not sure the current common western economic model is any different; the _vast_ majority of these economies do have a minimum wage already, and the majority of the workforce... works, or otherwise enjoys an income that is somewhat close to minimum wage at least, leading to the same problems.
Seems silly to put the onus on UBI to solve problems that aren't particular to UBI, no?
Note that these problems are solvable, and UBI can actually help solve them: Due to UBI it is _much_ simpler to just pick up your stuff, and move to a place that is in the toilet, economy-wise: A backwater with extremely low housing prices, nearly free land, and no jobs. With UBI, hey, you can make a decent living because your UBI bucks go a lot farther out in these boonies, which should push said boonies up.
It also moves negotiating powers to the workforce: Instead of companies that are offering jobs have to compete with the notion of being either destitute/homeless, or having to jump through hoops to prove that you are unable to find work (which is how many western economies are set up today), the job offerers are competing with 'no job, live on basic UBI'. This should allow the workforce to for example demand that they get to work from home a lot more, opening doors to letting them live in places with cheaper housing.
And then, if the -entire nation-, from stem to stern, has rents set up to gauge those living on UBI alone or on UBI+scraps, there's something very wrong with your nation. Go make some laws.
But I don't understand why people don't believe the UBI will just become the new definition of poverty. People will still be miserable and feel like they have nothing when comparing themselves to those who get UBI and have a job.
Over time I would imagine that due to inflation and the increased cashflow that everyone will have the prices of basic necessities will increase to the point that UBI just covers them, or worse that simply living will require UBI + a job?
I don't mean that in a snarky tone, it's something I'm trying to wrap my head around as far as UBI discussion goes.
Money is created by central banks, circulated by the government (including with 'entitlement programs' like UBI would count as, but also through things like spending billions on fancy jet fighters) and other banks (and there multiplied by fractional reserve banking).
It's then 'destroyed' by taxes and encouraging people to buy into government bonds and other things that slow down the flow of money.
These are all policy instruments that control how much money is flowing through the economy, and inflation is a product of that flow.
So the answer is, because they would raise taxes on it. A large portion of the money given out would just go straight into taxes from high income earners also getting UBI.
But also they could do things like lower the reserve ratio banks are required to hold to reduce the flow of money into the economy, instead choosing to create money through people instead of banks.
I'm curious what the other 95% are going to do.
They'd probably do it regardless of UBI, but without UBI they do it and are slightly more angry or frustrated at their own situation.
Real inflation does not require an expansion in money supply because inflation is not flat across all areas of the economy.
You can see the same effect when luxury housing goes up in a town. Rents go down for everyone.
What does HN think about that?
The narrative is that people who live paycheck to paycheck are forced into undesirable jobs because they are under time pressure to make money and can't be choosy. UBI will reduce the time pressure and make them be able to be a bit more choosy in what kind of job they get. UBI will also allow them time to invest in themselves to be able to land higher skilled jobs.
It will also allow people to more willingly enter low pay, higher calling jobs (teachers, etc) if they enjoy it because it has been bumped up from "too little" to "just enough" with UBI.
If a person has money, helping him is a job.
UBI creates jobs by "un-freezing" demand that was previously frozen out of the system due to poverty.
The question is why the people who do work at a potentially unsatisfying job to earn money should be forced to support the people who don't want to do anything in their life that anybody else values enough to willingly pay them for.
The United States already supports millions of citizens via a backdoor welfare: disability. This simply takes away the corruption and bureaucracy and gives it to everyone.
So to those who need it, and also those who don't. Why not just the first group? It'd be a lot cheaper.
Hobbies and unpaid creative pursuits are more likely to bring meaning than employment in my opinion.
But there’s a pretty big objective difference between the poorest person having $0 and the poorest person having, say, $20,000 a year.
The number printed on the notes is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what you can get with them, and if an apple costs 20,000 monetary units because there is so much money in the system (as it does in many countries) then everything else readjusts to match those levels.
Homes today don't have internet because of market reasons. Artificial monopolies, lobbying, and decades and billions of dollars spent by the government in failed and incomplete projects have created the current situation. And now without net-neutrality, it's getting even worse. This is all because of policy not finances.
> All UBI would be doing is establishing a floor. Right now, that floor is zero and results in many very unfortunate situations.
The floor today is not zero. Go to a village in Africa, or the Amazon rainforest if you want to see what zero really is.
We don't know that people will 'still be miserable', let alone the ratio of misery in the current versus the proposed economy. My expectation is that fewer people will be in poverty / misery, but that's just as speculative as your opinion.
In any case, it's not cause to avoid considering a UBI. We should not be constraining our goals to a perfect first attempt [1] - merely to obtain some improvement over the current arrangement.
[1] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
But if I was writing some code and there was a problem in my algorithm where some people had nothing and some people had too much, I would just take some from the top and give it to the bottom. The UBI seems like a re-writing from scratch.
To be effective, UBI might work better if it's distribution were random. And the duration of payments were irregular. Something that a market couldn't set it's watch by and producers couldn't game. If this sounds a ridiculous long term solution to poverty, it's because it is.
Actually, in Alaska's UBI program, alcohol and drug abuse go up by 15% after all check day (but crime also goes down significantly as well).
So yes, the payouts of it will create some sort of twisted marketing schedules. I think it would be really cool if the payout was daily (if they can make that happen). It would likely encourage the immediate spend of it into small items (like food)... but also probably drugs.
And yea, we do. If we had UBI tomorrow and people wanted more apples because they could afford more fresh fruit the apple cartels of today would collude prices up and use regulatory capture to block competition from entering the market to supply the elevated demand for apples.
But thats basically saying "hey, you want a government in your interest, you should probably get to a democracy first". If businesses control the legislature you don't have a democracy to begin with and should probably get that first before talking about... pretty much anything else. Because any other conversation is eminently pointless if you aren't influential upon your government.
Game is probably more strongly worded than what actually happens : a shift in the demand curve. It's not that a cabal of producers are colluding to raise prices. Its more that, in aggregate, producers will decide to independently raise prices when consumer demand increases [0].
[0] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/demand/shifts-in-demand-...
In practice in pretty much every industry in the US incumbents put up regulatory barriers behind themselves to prevent competition from emerging.
Per the article (and I agree with this) UBI is not meant to uproot capitalism, it's meant to optimize capitalism. A capitalist system where the poorest person is still able to participate on the demand side is quite novel.
Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs. Essentially, people below a certain income threshold would receive money which scales to a maximum the closer their income approaches zero.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work. Actually, where I live now I live comfortably on $1200 a month. I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.
You aren't alone, so your $1200 would not go as far in that future as it does now. There would be some inflation (perhaps only localized increased costs to some industries), but I'd suspect that people working less would be a feature, not a bug.
UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all. Work provides income, meaning, and dignity. Some people would move from industries which have lots of crappy manual jobs (like janitorial services) to industries which are currently only hobbies, but with UBI subsidies could be sustainable as a career. I imagine lots more Etsy shops.
Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.
“UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“
Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessity of doing things in exchange for money. Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.
Most of the proposals I've heard of UBI / negative income tax are good supplements but don't completely replace work-based income. $1000/month per adult is among the largest benefit I've heard.
It is widely observed that many people work far more than is necessary to supply their basic necessities, because people's desires don't tend to end with those needs.
You may have quite limited desires, but there is no evidence that that is true of humans generally.
That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.
I'm pretty sure there have been various studies all but disproving the "common sense" notions people have about UBI and laziness. Or the fundamental idea that if you don't make it hard on poor people they won't do anything of value. Or that poor people are lazy, and that they are poor because they are lazy. Etc, etc, etc.
Which serves to further increase inflation.
So you increase the amount more, and shortly thereafter inflation increases more again.
And so you increase the amount again, and so on, and so on until suddenly you have hyperinflation and your economy collapses, see for example the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or any of a dozen other examples throughout history.
If different people had money than currently do then they might buy different things with it, and then the demand for the things they want would go up and demand for some other things would go down. That isn't inflation, it's a demand shift. And for most types of products it would only cause increased production of those things rather than significant price changes. Meanwhile for other things (e.g. things which are artificially scarce), the price changes themselves would shift demand elsewhere -- who is going to pay $10,000 rent in San Francisco if it's <$1000 in Pennsylvania and the difference in local wages doesn't close the gap?
So let's think about what it would mean to do that.
In one case you could have some people who are just above the poverty line and if you took a little bit of money from them and gave it to people below the poverty line then the first group could end up below it while the people already below it don't get enough to end up above it. In theory that's "increasing poverty" but only in a strict technical sense which isn't even inconsistent with the result still being a net positive. Also, that wouldn't be possible under plausible rate structures because anybody in the approximate vicinity the poverty line would be receiving more than they pay in taxes and the net payers would be making significantly more than that with no reasonable possibility of falling into poverty as a result.
The other possibility is that the program somehow causes such a dramatic amount of economic damage that more people end up below the poverty line than started there as a result of increased involuntary unemployment etc. But the poverty line in the US is $12,760, whereas the most commonly proposed amount for the UBI is $12,000, so that seems incredibly unlikely -- people would have to be unable to find a job making $760/year, in an environment where employees have greater leverage. And you could preclude the possibility entirely if desired by making the UBI e.g. $13,000, which would just outright directly eliminate poverty.
That work still has to get done though. Somebody has to be the janitor. If you then increase the pay of a janitor then lots of people that would otherwise increase their skills to do with that requires more skills would end up as a janitor instead. This triggers a pay increase in those jobs too.
I don't see how you don't end up with just a lot of inflation. The money a job pays doesn't matter on a societal level. What matters is the products/service doing the job provides. No amount of money shuffling is going to make 2 apples turn into 3.
The highest paid jobs (eg. CEO) inflate very little and the lowest page jobs inflate quite a lot. There is currently an anti-inflation effect in the lowest paid jobs when inflation would help these workers have a better living.
Jobs thought of as "minimum wage jobs" in the USA (eg. hourly workers at McDonalds) pay a decent living in Denmark. They don't have runaway inflation. We should examine why there is a such stark difference in expectation between the USA and these other countries.
That said, I don't think UBI is the only way to solve the issues I care about. I might be satisfied simply by easier and fairer access to existing welfare programs (which are already subsidizing those low-wage employers).
The issue is that you have few of the highest paid jobs and many of the lowest paid jobs. The labor cost of a giant factory isn't so much the director, it's the thousands of workers. If you double their wages, you double the cost. If you double the director's salary, you'll hardly notice in the balance sheet.
"Since 1978, and adjusted for inflation, American workers have seen an 11.2 percent increase in compensation. During that same period, CEO’s have seen a 937 percent increase in earnings. That salary growth is even 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market, according to the Economic Policy Institute."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/heres-how-much-ceo-pay-has-i....
UBI doesn't.
Policing benefits hurts the poor, not the rich.
Where people would otherwise have no income UBI will increase spending. Where they don't it has other benefits. But if you want to save that cash then that's also good.
My irony alarm just exploded.
Public services should be public. There's extreme social value in equal access and you reduce an extreme amount of bureaucracy and debate in the process.
>If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK.
Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.
The standard of living has improved massively. I agree wholeheartedly that there are issues (e.g. people are giving more free time, but they don't know what to do with it and engage in unhealthy habits to kill the free time they've been given), but generally, it's not even close.
Most people choose to spend their money increasing their standard of living instead of buying time at a low standard of living.
As Picasso said, “I’d like to live as a poor man with a rich man’s money.”
Nobody should have to work like crazy
I didn’t graduate high school, my dad waited on tables to raise me. Get out of here with your privilege crap.
This sounds a bit like the Mr. Money Mustache philosophy -- live very cheaply, save like crazy, retire early -- which is all great advice, but elides the level of fortune involved, e.g., getting and keeping a high-paying job straight out of college, having no college debt, quickly marrying someone else who also has a high-paying job and is down with both combining incomes and practicing Extreme Thriftiness with you. IIRC, he made the rather bold claim that he could both live and retire on $25K a year -- which is something a lot of people would, well, prefer not to do. With all respect to Picasso, I'd at least prefer to live as a middle class man with a rich man's money.
Well, yes, sure, and sure, there are different levels of "luxury," e.g., there's getting a BMW 5 series, and there's getting a Honda Insight but springing for the Touring model -- and that's not counting the choice between used and new (what if the person with the BMW 5 series bought it used for about the same as someone else paid for a new Honda Civic). But, particularly at the income levels the average HN reader seems to have based on comments, "build up savings" vs. "afford small luxuries" is often a false dichotomy, which is what I was getting at.
There is nothing stopping you from working 10 hours a week and living like a person in the 1920’s. Local doctor who will put a $1 poultice on your skin cancer, no AC, no car, 10 to a house.
We're working more and getting paid less for that work. This isn't because of the standard of living. Standard of living can still increase while pay tracks productivity, and it does in other developed countries.
This is the most frustrating HN discussion I've seen in a while. People are coming here to peddle this "quality of life" argument with zero evidence. You're not even stopping for a second to consider that the US isn't the only country in the world.
If you compare the American GDP to other countries, the average individual is getting very little bang for their buck as far as quality of life goes.
Your job isn't paying less and outputting more because video games exist. When cars were introduced pay didn't suddenly stop tracking productivity.
>Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.
Speak for yourself. Not everybody's comfortable spending most of their time lounging around doing nothing that anybody else even values enough to pay for.
I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.
Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.
You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse.
Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking.
Cars need far less maintenance.
TVs are practically free.
My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time.
I could go on and on.
Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher.
You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit.
Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.
> all
I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.
p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.
Today, just do the edits, hit [print].
Hours, hours, hours saved.
Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland!
(He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)
People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion.
Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.
Caring about the elderly is entirely besides the point I'm making
Building the #1 best economy obviously shouldn't be one's sole purpose in life. But if you really think it doesn't matter at all, why not leave the developed nation you probably live in and find happiness in the third world. Or just ask one of the many people who seek a better life in the first world every year.
There's a troubling number of people in this thread who seem think that wealth creation and strong economies is some pointless goal that we've been tricked into caring about. Let's not forget that we work to build wealth for ourselves and our children. We've already worked so hard to build wealth into our buildings and streets and health and technology and culture. Apparently that's why you can dismiss the value of a strong economy from the comfort of your laptop/desk in the first place.
So you’d need to prevent that, but in order to prevent it you’d have to become somewhat isolationist, right? Sounds bad.
Though I’m curious if anyone has thought about how to prevent all of the expensive skilled jobs from leaving.
Have you played Civilization? If you don't strive to be "the best", eventually you're the guys with spears or even muskets being bombed by F-15s. In other words, lag behind the leaders for long enough and you can say goodbye to your freedom. That's basically how the XVI-XIX century colonization happened.
One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on.
The list is near endless of things to do.
The people on space ships all have a form of UBI and choose a profession so that they can accomplish something of meaning. Space exploration is one of those.
But others turn to art, literature, etc.
Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.
...have you talked to your sales guys?
In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?
And you're making the argument that the effort of aspiring novelists is wasted. It's not. Or else we would have no novels.
Also, I think you missed the point about novelists. It is more about if you suck at writing novels, sitting around and writing one for yourself isn't very valuable for society. There are some people who have natural talent, but the average Joe sitting around not working and instead writing a novel for fun will likely not be producing much value--at least, not as much as if he were working.
How do you know you suck at writing novels until you try?
For the writers, I didnt say dont try. There is a difference between trying during spare time while off work vs. doing it as a hobby while not working and thus not contributing to society yet taking money from it.
Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.
It should be very obvious that raising children well or taking care of the elderly are hugely valuable activities, yet the market almost completely ignores them.
And yeah, raising children and taking care of the elderly are certainly important. I know that in tech cities that childcare can be very hard to find and incredibly expensive, so maybe it is becoming more valued? But the key is that the value of the service itself is not based solely on how 'important' it is, but also how many people are performing it and how much is needed (supply&demand). Or maybe a better way to say is that importance is also a function of supply and demand. Take oxygen, for example--super important, but I'm not buying tanks of it.
Software development is pretty hot right now, but if almost everyone in the world were trained to do it, the price of that labor would be quite low. This is another feature of markets--it helps to allocate resources (jobs) to what is needed at the moment. With UBI, I think you would be missing out on that to a large extent.
They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do.
Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.
I know which I would rather do.
Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.
This is where you are completely wrong. I'm not even going to bother explaining, because there are too many obvious counter-examples.
Your always welcome to work harder for more.
The problem is, there is quite literally not enough valid, useful, and productive work to go around.
We've reached a point there isn't enough work for everyone to do. What does that mean if you want to work full time?
It means you're taking work away from someone else.
I don't think anyone minds that, what they mind is that you're also taking their livelihood away.
If there isn't enough work, but there is enough resources, what does that tell you about the system?
Either those who can't secure work will suffer, or we need to redistribute the outputs of those who can secure work.
Its a really basic question whether you agree with ubi or not:
Do you want people to suffer so you can work full time? Or would you rather everyone gets what they need, and we work for what we want.
People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work.
Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.
Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people.
There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case.
Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer.
I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available.
I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available.
This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths.
> Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that.
What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution.
> What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital
I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it.
> and it worsens inequality.
This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner.
Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class.
On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now.
At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.
From my POV having job as au pair for example is still better than working hard in the field.
IMO we should focus on reducing much duplication od work, so I am happy that OSS, Wikipedia, SciHub, KhanAcademy, MIT, translations services, open hardware design and similar efforts are in progress.
IMO more focus should be shifted into education. I guess education problem isn't solved in western rich countries only because it's easier to brain drain from less developed ones, so people don't feel the pain.
When this will start I hope they start taxing more at very top and shift economy to more valuable stuff than zero-sum Tinder clones.
BTW in my country(Poland) they introduced small version of UBI (like 500$ per child per month for family). It cost 5% of whole country budget. It's quite controversial but IMO it was good move but we still need to see long term impact.
But this is a point the article somewhat addresses - the graph for marketing-budgets shows that pretty nicely in my opinion.
At some points, its just easier to make more money/profits by trying to increase demand for your product than by improving it (or reducing costs of its production). And I think that's what we're seeing more and more on an ever increasing scale right now: "Actually productive" jobs (e.g. manufacturing) are already outsourced, and the gains from the cost-savings are spent on e.g. marketing.
This might make sense economically (in terms of profits, emplyoment), but arguably less from a "benefit-for-society" point of view.
I think David Graeber adresses this quite nicely (but rather aggressively) with his 'Bullshit Job'-theory.
I have heard about the Bullshit Jobs theory and I find it unconvincing (I admit I haven't read the whole book). The meaningfulness and value of a job is not determined by the laborer - as suggested by the "do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world" surveys he cites - but by the employer.
The value of something has always been determined by other people who want it. It doesn't matter what David Graeber and his unhappy laborers think or say, something isn't bullshit just because they say it is. Many of the examples he mentions (doormen, content curators, PR) are valuable things that people want enough to pay for, yet his opaque judgment deems them "bullshit" simply because he or someone else thinks they're worthless.
History shows us economies that failed because some people thought they could plan them with isolated judgments of what society should value. UBI as a solution for Bullshit Jobs follows in the same tradition by personally judging whole swaths of jobs to have no value, then proposing a plan to get rid of them.
Thats why the definition is what it is. He knows it's a subjective phrase that means many different things to many different people. He also admits there will be some people who find value in the same job someone else does not.
I think it's a bit strange to hinge your opinion on this definition though, its really only defined that way so it doesn't piss people off, the book isn't about how you define bullshit jobs, the book is about what we should do now we know they exist.
Which you're sort of ignoring.
What do you think we should do since we do know bullshit jobs exist.
Agreed. "Indeed, in 2006, the top twenty per cent of earners were twice as likely to work more than fifty hours a week than the bottom twenty per cent, a reversal of historic conditions." [1]
1 - https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont...
They're not remotely comparable. The jobs themselves have gotten better even if the hours might have gotten worse.
I spend my day listening to music, watching YouTube, doing largely what I'd be doing anyway but with GitHub, Slack and a terminal open. Why do I care if it's 15 hours or 60 if I'm getting paid to do what I'd be doing anyway?
Why don't we just drop the act?
Despite minimum wage, there is extensive child labor in agriculture in the US, because there is a gap in child labor law.
Which suggest that minimum wage didn't make child labor obsolete, banning child labor did.
That is of course not true, because as you yourself point out, there is still child labor going on. Banning something has nothing to do with it existing, just look at drugs.
Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.
In specifically the area where it wasn't banned.
> Banning something has nothing to do with it existing
Odd, then, that child labor has been vastly reduced in exactly the domains where it is prohibited, and not where it isn’t.
> Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.
Were that the case, and not prohibition being the limiting factor, you'd expect child labor to exist where minimum wage is inapplicable, but not where it is, even independent of whether it is allowed.
But in agriculture, where it is prevalent and not prohibited, minimum wage applies and hasn't limited it. Yet it's not found in most of the other places it existed before being banned, and where it is, in fact, prohibited. It's prohibition, not minimum wage, that did it in.
Although there is a technical sense where “minimum wage law” is the deciding factor, because it was actually the same law (though the applicability of the minimum wage and the child labor prohibition pieces differ) that implemented federal minimum wage and the child labor prohibitions and restrictions, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Banning and prohibition are just ways of increasing the cost of hiring children: they now have to pay the wage + fine. And it only works if that is too expensive compared with the alternatives.
Why do you want to force me to follow your priorities?
It's objective that productivity has increased while pay and leisure time have decreased. This isn't a result of any increase in material goods. People are spending less because simply because they're getting paid less.
In 1956 the federal minimum wage was $1 (roughly $10 adjusted for inflation). Today it's 3/4 of that at 7.25.
It’s possible to both make less on average (inflation adjusted) and have access to much nicer things. The equivalent computing power of an iPhone would have cost you millions of dollars in 1990. Food is cheaper, any automated manufacturing output is significantly cheaper, etc.
When so many people point something out to you that you think “doesn’t even follow basic logic”, it usually means you’re making a bad assumption somewhere.
Unless a corporation (or cartel) can monopolize an increase in productivity, society will reap the benefits through lower prices even if wages don’t increase. Competitive forces ensure that. If you’re interested in learning more, check out what happened with the mini mills and steel prices.
You’re proposing that people should be happy with what we had back then by reducing output. I’d rather work full time and have the better quality of life, thanks.
You can work less and have a constantly increasing quality of life. They aren't diametrically opposed. Your labor is being stolen from you. Where do you think the increasing wealth gap comes from?
Money is not a public service.
Also, to the OP Milton Friedman's 'Negative Tax' is the same thing as UBI - in the end, 'rich people' would not get a cheque in the mail because on the whole, they'd make too much money.
Also - the top 10% taxes would have to go up radically in order to pay for UBI.
The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries.
The only reason you think you are so productive is because almost all your clothes, technology, medical supplies, house appliances and most of your food was produced outside the US by foreign workers; you had nothing to do with it. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR, YOUR SUPERIOR PRODUCTIVITY, OR ROBOTS.
The US is living off the back of illegal miners in the third world and it tells itself "yeah, we should do less!".
I am not making a point against automation, we clearly need more. But the world is so big and the people so numerous all the automation we have pales in comparison with the needs of us all. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.
I'm talking about worker productivity within the US. Hour for hour we're outputting more and getting paid less. Before overseas labor you weren't less productive because you had to make your own clothes or something. That time had already long passed. I'm talking about what has happened since the 1950s, not the 1850s.
It's not because the number of people existing globally has increased? People in poor countries didn't work at all until developed countries started shipping their work overseas? What did they all do then?
That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little. In developing countries everyone works because it's a matter of survival.
Housewives obviously do something they don't stay in bed all day, and what they do is very valuable for society. But they do not directly contribute to the GDP and hence they are not part of the workforce, industrial or otherwise.
The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter. Indeed, the arguments that we should do otherwise are to the benefit of the rich, because the proposed cutoff invariably comes somewhere in the middle income range, resulting in higher marginal rates on middle income people rather than higher income people.
In other words, a cutoff allows the rich to pay lower taxes in the amount of the money that had been going to people in the middle.
Seems even easier to increase the standard tax deduction we already have and are familiar with. Then you can increase tax rates to make sure those evil rich people don't see any benefit.
The EITC does, but it has a cutoff with the aforementioned problems, and if it didn't (and the amount was high enough to replace the other programs) it would be hard to distinguish from a UBI, outside of the easily-gamed income requirement which does little more in practice than discriminate against honest homemakers who don't get to claim it.
Realistically what you have to do at that point is to use a flatter rate structure instead of a phase-out so that the credit is paid back by the time you get to higher income levels, but that's much better than the existing nonsense where the marginal rate structure goes all over the place from sometimes >90% at low income levels (from phase outs) to ~20% in the middle and then back up to 30+%.
You get a strongly progressive effective rate just from the credit, so at that point you can use something like a 35% fixed marginal rate and simplify everything else too. Interestingly this also means it doesn't even have to be an individual income tax. You could use VAT or charge payroll tax to employers and get the same result without individuals even having to file tax returns anymore.
Meaning, your problem is only a one-time, short-term problem. You aren't arguing in good faith if you try to use that to discredit his proposed solution.
That's an answer, not the answer. A similar question is: “how much should UBI pay per month?”, and a similar answer is that “it's much simpler to just pay gazillion dollars than spend time figuring it out”. After all, the only difference is the cost.
IMO there's a proven balance in having a system (“bureaucracy”) to find out who need financial assistance, and simply assisting those. But then again, I fundamentally disagree with UBI because I have a differing view on society and the rights and responsibilities of its members, along the lines of “society takes care of you if needed for the price of you helping make this possible if you are able”.
Suppose we have some kind of assistance programs for food and housing. If you don't make enough money you can get a card and with this card you can buy specific kinds of food, but not alcohol and not restaurant food. You get housing assistance but you have to live in designated government housing.
Then somebody suggests that we extend these benefits to everybody. But that's stupid -- why would you want to pay taxes in cash in order to get a food allowance card which requires you to buy what the government says, or live where the government says, instead of just keeping your money and buying whatever you want with it?
So all of those programs have phase outs, because people who "don't need them" don't want them. They'd rather have the money instead.
A UBI is money to begin with. Lowering your tax rate so that you don't have to pay to give yourself a UBI is a no-op. It cancels out. The tax you would have to pay to fund it and the phase out you would need to not receive it are mathematically equivalent.
The difference is that by putting it into the tax rate, you can see what you're doing better. If you have a 25% tax rate and then implement a 50% phase out rate, you're effectively imposing a 75% marginal rate on lower and middle income people and then a lower marginal rate on higher income people. Requiring it to be set as part of the tax rate makes it more blatantly obvious how silly that is, and that's all. And then, seeing that more clearly, people might choose more sensible marginal rates than that, so that you're never taking more from people who make less.
Hum... No, on the case of paying everybody (with increased taxes) or just the poor there is no difference in cost or total distributed.
What you do lose is the hability to focus your help into an specific group. Every UBI proponent will tell you this is a positive, because governments just suck at this, but it's a very powerful politic tool.
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter.
There's a more subtle reason: if everyone gets a check, the program is more politically popular, making it harder for the rich to build a political coalition to kill it. That means the people who really need it will continue to get it.
IIRC, FDR opposed mean-testing social security for this reason. Almost everyone gets it, and the middle class gets enough to make some kind of difference in their lives, even if they could get by without it. Compared to other welfare programs, it's been unkillable.
I am always shocked by the general lack of awareness people have about world intricacies.
Social welfare, fiscality and related issue in modern developped countries is one of the most complex systems I know of. I am 100% serious. It's a huge mess of rules, exceptions, directives, conflicting aspirations, unforceable & not unforceable || not unforced rules, outdated scheme, 0,1% population targeting welfare, federal, state, regional, city size rules and much more.
It crosses to healthcare, food, housing, education and more.
This whole mess was built bit by bit, step by step, over decades.
Thinking "we could send everyone a check" is right down heresy to anyone having truly worked aroung these fields.
* Else the check amount is the same for everyone and good luck to 4 kids families in high rent area
* Else the check is calculated depending on all the above factors and this system will never roll out (check Obamacare implementation issues)
The people in the high rent area can move to a low rent area if they can’t hold a job: they have nothing holding them there under the UBI rules. As for kids, perhaps they should also receive (smaller) UBI that would go to their parents.
I have never understood this obsession with 100% employment.
Employment means income and tax revenue and social security funding. 100% employment means more people have personal income, the nation's social security system is not exhausted, and the state has more revenue to invest in public policies.
Furthermore, "unforeseen consequences" are effects that we don't know will happen because they lie beyond our ability to predict them. There will always be unforeseen consequences of any major policy decision.
One reason to include the rich in UBI is that it reduces administrative overheads. If it's means-tested, that means monitoring, investigating and ultimately punishing the poor. Why bother?
But, practically, anything a UBI plan gives you can be undone with an equal and opposite tax. The net effect after taxes is what matters and it's going to redistribute money or there's no point in doing it. Some people pay more taxes than others and raising the top income tax rate is enough to ensure that the wealthy don't benefit.
It can be made exactly equivalent to a negative income tax.
It seems that rents are going down a bit in San Francisco because some people who can suddenly work remotely are moving out (among other reasons). UBI is an income that you can take with you wherever you go, much like social security, so it's likely to make living in cheaper places more attractive.
1) Allow actual competition. Adopt Japan-like zoning to make it easier to build. Landlords cannot freeload if they have competition. Make it harder for small special interest groups to veto new development.
2) Set property taxes appropriately or implement a land-value tax so that landlords have to pay for part of the surrounding improvements.
City expansion is hard because there isn't enough money to uniformly develop every growing areas in all directions.
This is very similar to any investment you will ever make. Including things like education.
If we walked down this route. Everything needs to be free.
You're right that cities do not expand uniformly, and city improvements are also not uniformly distributed. This is why a flat property tax does not make sense. Use land-value-tax to balance. If one area is very desirable, increase land taxes in that area and use the revenue to fund improvements like parks, libraries, schools all around the city.
But one of the features of a UBI is it causes people to drop out of the labor market. Especially for shitty low end unskilled labor jobs. And this is great because the reduction in supply will drive up labor rates and help inequality in a far more natural way than a minimum wage.
But for every you, there's a me. I get satisfaction out of working. I had a job in college where I completed all of my work in the first week and did absolutely nothing for the next 6 months and I was MISERABLE. I needed a task to complete, a job to finish, to feel productive.
Furthermore I like having things - whether that be a boat, or a nice car or insert whatever. And that's not some "you've just succumbed to the capitalist monsters" - I buy things that I get enjoyment out of, I don't get enjoyment out of buying things. Quite frankly I feel disgusting anytime I buy something, so if it isn't something I enjoy I have borderline permanent remorse. The car I bought at 16 still hits a nerve because it was a pile of garbage I paid too much for.
I completely understand and respect and quite frankly envy people that don't want things, don't need to work to feel "complete" and can get by doing nothing all day. And with all of that said, the fact there's a you, and a me, tells me there's a very good chance UBI can work. People that don't care about having nice things can do fuck-all and get enough to survive, and people who want more can work until they have it.
Everyone agrees that there will be people who will want to work, and people who won't. The question is what is the ratio, and is it enough. No one can predict this with a high level of certainty. We all just have "a feeling", which coincidentally happens to align perfectly with whether or not we believe in UBI.
Whether you agree with UBI or not you better have a solution for how those people are going to survive when they are eventually replaced by a machine. The alternative will be endless war and famine or genocide.
- You can "claw back" the money other, cheaper, ways (e.g. income tax increases).
- Negative income tax don't work for children, disabled, or the elderly like UBI does. If they don't work, it doesn't work. Therefore, you wind up with two schemes.
People keep on tacking on complexity, which breeds costs, which makes the whole scheme disproportionately expensive. It is universal because universal is cheap to run.
If something changes (like a job loss) you submit a form and they send you the money. They can figure out if you owe them the money back on your next tax filing.
This does work for children since they would be counted as a dependent. This would probably change your tax filing which could change the calculation.
This would also work for elderly since they would still be filing taxes.
It would be easier to do it universally but it would likely cause other issues like more inflation.
This posits the capability of the government to put together a really remarkably competent administration, that knows everyone's tax filings, everyone's citizenship status, where everyone lives, the cost of living in every part of the country (or the world?), and can speedily process paperwork continuously throughout the year. Certainly no such administration currently exists. It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.
Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.
> everyone's citizenship status
A government has to know one's citizenship already.
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/2019...
The US government does not have a list of citizens. No such list exists.
On a case-by-case basis it's generally pretty straightforward to determine whether someone is a citizen, but there isn't a list. The closest thing is probably the social security administration's register of people who have applied for a social security number, but even that doesn't cover everyone.
I agree that it would be more difficult than just doing UBI. I am not a fan of just taking the easier path just for the sake of ease. Only giving money to people who need it would be better for everybody.
The US already has cost of living numbers. Just to be clear I am saying they could use these numbers not that they have to use them. Receiving $5,000 in the Bay Area is different than $5,000 in Wyoming and making $50,000 in the Bay Area is different than making $50,000 in Wyoming. This is why I was suggesting using the cost of living numbers.
>Certainly no such administration currently exists.
UBI doesn't exist either so it already would need to be set up.
If they can set up actual tax equations it would allow for a more stream lined IRS. This would help modernize the whole tax process which would be beneficial for all of us. I recall a country (maybe state?) that released the tax program they wrote. You could download it and run it yourself if you wanted. This would be great for people. There would be no need for most people to buy Turbo Tax or go to a tax guy.
>It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.
You would not have to file forms. You would only need to file a form if you wanted to receive money or stop receiving money. If you are fine waiting until the next tax filing you would be free to do so.
This is no different than the current welfare system. If you wish to receive welfare or stop receiving welfare you have to fill out a form. What I am suggesting is less manual validation than the welfare system since I would go with the assumption the person should get the money. It would automatically be fixed after filing your taxes.
>Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.
I am in favor of replacing welfare with a negative income tax. If you want money from the negative income tax and your income did not automatically qualify you from your previous year's filing then you fill out a form. This would be less work for many people since there would be an automatic enrollment based on the previous year's tax filing.
I agree that UBI is easier. I just don't think people like Jeff Bezos needs government money. If Bezos receives a few thousand extra he is probably not going to spend more or invest more. It would be a waste to give to somebody like him. We could in turn provide extra money for people who actually needs help. The people who need help are more likely to actually spend the money than Bezos so it could benefit the economy.
For a middle to upper income earner their overall tax rate would be the same, the income tax rates could be adjusted so someone on $100k still pays the same overall amount of tax.
Second it is gets rid of the high effective tax rates that low income earners deal with. While low income earners pay low or no income tax, they lose their benefits the more they earn, so a dollar earned could mean up to a dollar less in benefits, which is a disincentive to work. Something that is often missed by the people who say having a UBI would be a disincentive to work.
- ends up being more expensive than just giving to everyone
- prevents some people who need it but are somehow obstructed by the bureaucracy from receiving it
- gets it's conditions increasingly narrowed to reduce the costs until it stops helping anyone
this is not an unforeseen circumstance, but a desired outcome
The point is to have a guaranteed floor for all in society, much like the idea of bankruptcy (before the conservative demonization of the idea particularly in the 1990s and Bush era, in the USA) it’s a way to ensure people can start over or continue to build momentum without fear of being homeless, starving and/or being unable to provide the basics for their family or themselves
This lowers the barrier of entry for people to free themselves of being shackled to giant corporations or dead end jobs just for “security”
This also applies to the negative income tax.
For administrative simplicity.
Because it's simpler and avoids duplicating effort, since the means testing is rolled into the tax system, and avoids perverse consequences, since with a single payment system you don't end up with a combination that has greater than 1:1 reductions in benefits without outside income for some recipients at some income levels.
> Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs.
A negative income tax is, in terms of who gets what payment, exactly equivalent to a UBI funded by a progressive income tax.
A monthly UBI with the usual annual income tax filing and reconciliation payment/refund is a better mechanism than simply rolling the UBI into the income tax calculation and annual reconciliation, though.
> I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.
I think people like you overestimate it, because they ignore the well-established effects of general deprivation and voracious human wants. They may also overestimate their own tolerance for non-work, as do many people leading up to retirement.
> I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.
Some people would. But many more people would also be willing to work a little bit more for a little bit more, which UBI makes easier than existing means-tested programs.
And many people who initially would reduce work for the novelty of leisure would turn around later and work to have the things they couldn't afford on the basic stipend.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
Unless you are the poorest of the poor, that outcome isn't actually contrary to the design or problematic.
The problem is that a small loophole or exception paves the way for larger exceptions, and so on, which continues until the original concept is gutted and bleeds out to the status quo
Two major reasons.
The principled reason is that it is, well, universal. If you're a citizen, you get certain rights and responsibilities, end of story.
A more realist perspective notes that historically, if you make a program for the poor, it becomes a poor program (underfunded). A scheme it is more likely to succeed the more people who buy in to it. (Notice how the ACA is becoming more popular over time? Or look at Social Security vs. SNAP.)
> I definitely would choose not to work
I think people both pro- and con- are not really thinking through how this would play out in reality. Income, wealth, type of work and social status are intimately linked, especially so in the US.
There will immediately be some slur for people who choose not to work that will probably replace the "your momma's on welfare"-type crap. Lots of people's shallow, status driven dating rules will expand to exclude the voluntarily-unemployed. It will become obvious that there's a very low glass-ceiling over their heads that limits them in all sorts of ways. It will also become harder to crawl out of over time, both for individuals who don't maintain useful skills, and as a social class, because that's how humans act.
Some people will of course choose that life. But I think it will be a lot less appealing than you think.
I think UBI is easier to swallow for some people, cause they'd get it as well, they might be more willing to open up to the idea.
That said, I think the amount you'd get on UBI would balance itself out to what can be given. If everyone becomes lazy bums that rather not work, we'd all see our UBI payments decline year over year until we can't live off it and would need to go back to work. A bit of a simplification, but it's possible that the system thus finds a stable level on its own that works.
Because then you need to test for means, and that means you have to hire new bureaucracy to conduct those tests, and then pay their benefits and pensions and travel expenses, and then you need to hire additional bureaucracy to address occasional loopholes in your checks, and then 10-20-50-100 years later you're back to square one with massively bloated self-serving bureaucracies conveniently appropriating dollars to save pennies.
That's what drives UBI advocates bonkers about the current benefit programs. For example, food stamps benefits. I say anyone with an SSN should be able to apply for one and get it electronically. It helps farmers, helps food availability, and is generally spent locally. Instead we have layers and layers of bureaucracy ensuring Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are prevented from receiving SNAP benefits.
In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.
Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place. So this statement you made is false:
> This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.
This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.
No; it may obscure that distinction slightly but it very much still exists. Anyone who receives more in UBI and other desired services than they pay in taxes will remain a "leach". Those who pay more in taxes than they receive are the providers, without whom the whole UBI system could not exist. (The relevant pre-UBI terms are "net tax payer" and "net tax receiver".)
No that's not true at all. So what if you're not the only one benefitting from your UBI payments; they're still coming from someone else's effort, not your own. To be a "giver" you first must earn the things you're giving away. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.
> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.
Is that a bad thing? Say We went from participation rate from ~65% to 40%. That could be good, we stop trying to force people into jobs unnecessarily as we automate + it might encourage dirty jobs like cleaners to be better paid and balance the wage market as people have a way to walk away.
Point 2: Generally I agree that UBI is a bit of a pipe dream for now. I think we'd be better off doing some 'guaranteed job' system where we focus on societal roles that add value but dont compete with free market. Give people a guaranteed 3 day a week job for basic living wage type deal and earlier retirement ages. Use this as a transition point to hopefully automating much of the world and some system of UBI as we slim workforce needs.
That is how the welfare program operates today. It's expensive to manage and at its current position not inclusive enough which then leaves a number of people worse off when you are just above the cut-off.
This Capitalism 2.0 would also need to be a system of things that enables a new direction - whatever that may be - based on the fragile regression to the mean of what an expected aggregated view of that looks like.
UBI can or cannot be part of that system, but by itself it can quickly become irrelevant.
Most economic theories of capitalism are based on (mostly) rational behaviors of the majority of market participants. Social studies will show that in topics related to finances/money, behaviors are all over the place.
Want to drive towards Capitalism 2.0? Start with financial education, support systems, relevant incentives (maybe UBI is one of them) and a good shared vision of what that 2.0 is.
When an academic makes such an egregious error on spelling (centuries?!?), I just have to stop reading at that point. It casts doubt on the veracity of the arguments in the paper.
Your complaint is a book-cover issue. The quality of the argument is independent of an occasional typographical error.
For me, these mistakes are equivalent to Van Halen’s “Brown M&Ms” (see trending HN article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817), and I stand by my original assertion. If you cannot get this right, I do not trust any analysis or conclusions in your paper. Someone who hasn’t taken the time to proofread their work likely rushed the analysis and conclusions as well.