Universal Basic Income Will Likely Increase Social Cohesion
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EDIT: pvnick, yes the consensus is measured in decades. Some think fewer, some think more, but yes and thanks.
If you want to do away with various kinds of property rights that's a valid argument to make. But you don't get to pretend that it isn't a new, different way.
Ultimately you're going to take some things from some people in order to give it to other people.
Maybe that's smart, maybe it's not. But no matter how you slice it, it's not manna from heaven.
60% of all income above $X per year versus the 40% now is a tax, sure.
But the original comment was "The money for basic income will come from automation driven productivity improvements."
So you're going to make a new tax of 500% on sales of automation equipment? Or 50% of the money saved per year by your installation of automation equipment? And then hire several million auditors to go inspect every facility in the country every year to ensure that people aren't installing unregistered automation equipment?
There are already a bunch of tax laws on the books that should make those automation drive increases in profitability get taxed and go into the government's coffers. But companies are very adept at finding loopholes, getting new loopholes, etc. Structuring their business so as to minimize their tax burden. I think it's pretty obvious that just "raising taxes" won't accomplish enough revenue to make basic income work. So that means you've got to do something new, and something that probably won't feel like any previous tax ever levied.
While you might argue that if it's a tax it's a tax (and that's probably technically true) there's a huge difference between increasing existing tax rates and generating substantially new tax law.
You're already doing that with capitalism with land. Take a private beach as an example, no one created it, the state just added property rights to it and gave it out at some point.
Oftentimes in the US you can trace land ownership all the way back to the original grant of a King or Queen.
Your suggestion about automation providing the wealth for basic income is the only argument that makes sense, because wealth redistribution from the nebulous "rich" just would not work on such a massive scale. Personally I don't think we're there yet, but maybe in a couple decades when we have strong AI and automation is more pronounced and self-improving.
You are assuming that every one of those people stops working and lives exclusively on the dole.
That's almost certainly not going to be the case.
Now sure... wealthy people will pay more in taxes than they receive in basic income. But it would still be a tax credit.
Yes, but that doesn't mean it needs to be enough for a "living wage." It can still be a universal basic income while being low enough that recipients generally still need to work.
(Of course you'd want to supplement it with welfare programs for those who can't work, which under more generous schemes might be eliminated entirely.)
Also remember that the average person breaks even, so affordability isn't really an issue.
You probably want the initial value to be high enough that you can actually displace some existing means-tested aid programs, even though you may not initially be able to do all of them.
Slight adjustments in the number of beneficiaries doesn't really get you much benefit in terms of eliminating the inefficiencies of existing programs (in done ways out actually exaggerated them since there is a fixed component of the overhead costs for each program.) The real efficiencies Congress when you are able to eliminate programs altogether.
One benefit of that kind of ramp up is that it naturally phases out existing programs, making them easier to kill when their time comes (and much clearer when their time has come).
It also means (to the risk point above) that if we discover some ruinous dynamic caused by the UBI, we can more easily scrap it and fall back on existing systems.
Edited to add: I wondered how much of this was population growth, and certainly there has been some but real GDP per capita has grown about $5k over that period.
I believe offering free food and shelter would be far less expensive and a better investment.
Example: 25% of the homeless suffer from mental illness, what would they do with free money? http://www.studentsagainsthunger.org/
40% of the food supply in the United States is wasted and thus could be possibly reclaimed or reistributed: http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/food_waste_the_facts
The Federal government has plenty of land. Micro houses would be a one time cost and shelter should be built very inexpensively. A Finnish micro house costs under $11,000 http://www.gizmag.com/finnish-micro-house/22580/
Basic Income seems like it would inevitably lead to inflation especially since 'fiat money' economics are so prone to emotional speculations. (cryptocoin systems have not yet seemed to develop anything usable for large scale economies).
As a nation, investing in and developing infrastructure is attainable and maintainable where as simply giving cash out is much riskier, especially at the scale for all citizens.
This of course comes with the risk of shady cronyism for the contracts and vendors whom build and maintain these projects.
We give people food stamps, they sell them for less than they're worth for cash. We have public housing. It's called "The Projects" and they're generally known as the rough area of town.
Both of these services cost taxpayers exorbitant amounts in administration. If we eliminated most of that and just gave people cash, we could let them spend on what they need. Because they know better than we do what they need, and their needs are much more varied and specific than one agency could ever cover.
There would be inflation, yes. But inflation in itself is not a bad thing so long as wages keep pace with inflation. They haven't. A minimum income would bring people with almost-no spending power into at least the bottom. And poor people don't save their money -- they spend it, often at local businesses.
This model of BI (replacing existing programs) is nothing but a giveaway to landlords, which I assume accounts for the PR juice behind it.
It's possible to have social housing that's not terrible or stigmatized. Having moved from the US to the Netherlands, the contrast is remarkable. Social housing here is integrated in most neighborhoods, not a "hood" of its own. There are definitely exceptions of course, but even the Schilderswijk or Bijlmermeer are very pleasant places compared to most NYCHA projects.
It's mostly just rent-regulated housing, be it owned by non-profit housing corporations, coupled in case of direst need with a subsidy payment, and with agencies responsible for placement. Not, actually, much different the administrative structures present in most American cities. The main difference appears to be first an explicit goal of avoiding segregation, and second, scale. Most rental housing here is in the social sector, so the benefits extend beyond the very poor, which is critical for avoiding stigma and maintaining political support.
Replacing landlord oversight with cash payments to tenants is not going to do anything to improve the lot of the tenants. I'd rather see the US invest directly in expanding affordable housing integrated with neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, this is a political loser until a majority of voters stand to benefit directly from it. Things are going to have to get a lot worse before that happens.
Rents are a matter of supply versus demand. There is a tremendous supply of housing. What is limited is desirable housing - and a big part of that is housing somewhat near a stable income. A basic income - even a modest one - would seem to radically increase the supply of housing near a stable income.
We're presently seeing low income citizens forced out of city centers and into "undesirable real estate areas" within some stretch of what could be called "commuting distance".
The point is, "undesirable real estate areas" is not static. There are tons of wonderful places that are undesirable simply because they are unaffordable (not expensive - often cheap - but without sufficient income sufficiently available). A basic income will make more of these more desirable to more people. Some of these people will chose to move there rather than SF (or Hayward). This reduces demand for presently-desirable housing, which means fewer low income citizens being forced out of city centers.
Now it's true that centralization allows some efficiencies that decentralization does not. But it has some extra costs - and (especially) some extra risks, as well. I really don't think the ideal outcome is "everyone moves to San Francisco."
It'll be interesting to see which countries are willing to address housing as infrastructure for their economy. I imagine real estate bubbles will continue to happen as long as NIMBYism and tax policy facilitate speculation. There's no sensible reason housing should cost every citizen of each generation 20 entire years of daily income.
I agree very strongly with this. The question is how we best make that happen (more). I think helping more local communities have more places to work/buy/participate is going to be a bigger win than building more housing in the places the jobs already are.
People commute to San Francisco from Tracy. From Sacramento. Moving those people from Tracy to San Francisco cuts their commute. It also means the demands of those people are now more expressed in San Francisco and less in Tracy. That means fewer jobs available in Tracy and more jobs available in San Francisco; that means more demand for housing in San Francisco.
It shouldn't be surprising that bureaucracies are inefficient.
If justice and democracy prevail I predict the participatory budget will approach 100%.
See eg http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-...
*In markets ones with at least some competition
Also, its important to note that even the machine owners wont make profits in a competitive market.
That is economics 101. But if you had stayed for the later classes you would have had to unlearn that. It is not true.
Maybe that is because "competitive markets do not exist" as the libertarians say, but whatever, in the world in which we live the top automaters are going to make super profits.
What will the world look like when the means of production belong to a small group? In a society (capitalist) where ownership implies control?
http://marketrealist.com/2015/02/intense-competition-leads-l...
Yes ideal competition is just an ideal. But given the right regulatory environment you can very extremely closely mimic that ideal. Maybe even surpass it in terms of encouraging competition.
Implying that I haven't is needlessly rude, and not providing an explanation is unhelpful. Please do better.
"In an econ 101 competitive market you also will not make accounting profits."
The way I learned it, if market participants are making less than they could elsewhere then some will leave. This lowers production and raises the price. This dynamic will raise the profits the remaining producers make until they're making as much (accounting) profit as they could at the next best opportunity, which leaves the economic profit zero. I don't see what drives the accounting profits everywhere to zero.
Zero when accounting for the time value of money. I've read (for instance here http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/21?e=rittenber...) that firms can make accounting profit in the long run. But they don't go into the requirements for this to happen.... =( But I believe it is due to the time value of money - which, given a long term growing economy with relatively little inflation, will be be long term positive. I'm not for sure though.
It's possible, but - again presuming there is positive opportunity cost - as soon as the economic profit falls below zero it is a better idea for them to leave the industry than to lower their profit further.
I don't undercut your prices because I think I'll be taking home less money. I undercut your prices because I think I'll capture your business and make more money overall. If that leaves you (or some other participant) without the ability to make sufficient profit to stick around, you won't.
UBI is an excellent libertarian/small-government solution.
Every kind of redistribution must sum to zero across all people. Basic income is no different in this regard. So to say that basic income is different because the right and poor both receive it is pure sophistry.
Only if it has no impact on monetary velocity. Redistributing money from people who are not going to spend it to people who will (or vice versa) is not zero sum.
Lemma: redistribution is itself a monetary policy, given the velocity differences of different money holders.
Redistributing money from people who are not going to spend it to people who will (or vice versa) is not zero sum.
This is the essence of (neo-)Keynsianism but it only applies during recessions. In the long run, redistributing money to people who are going to spend it has zero effect.
Of course redistribution has a positive effect on welfare as defined by the sum of total utility, but it doesn't increase, for example, GDP.
"Monetary velocity" is not the usual phrasing I've seen, but from the context it was presented in and the description fo the effects attributed to it (and, well, the name -- even though its not exactly the usual term) its fairly obviously the same thing as "velocity of money" [0], a fairly basic economic concept covered in most introductory economics courses.
> Of course redistribution has a positive effect on welfare as defined by the sum of total utility, but it doesn't increase, for example, GDP.
That's debatable. Redistribution to a group more likely to expend money within the domestic economy can increase the velocity of money in the domestic economy even if it has no effect on overall velocity (which it can also have), increasing GDP, in either case.
In any case, measuring economy health by aggregate measures like GDP is not done because those are real fundamental goals, its done because measuring the sum of utility isn't practical. Improving the some of utility without increasing one of the headline proxies isn't "zero effect" in the first place.
I agree with the zero-sum idea; I should have been more clear that the point was only that making basic income universal might help psychologically. Here's my comments to a different post along the same lines above: People are foolish. That's the whole basis of behavioral economics. The point is not that a rational homo economicus would be any more comforted by the fact that the basic income is universal, but that normal people would be. I don't think this universal nature is essential to the basic idea, and would be happy to have a negative income tax.
Also, UBI is far from libertarianism. Libertarians want to be in control of their own money.
I've come around to the idea that there can't and won't be zero public social support, so UBI seems like the fairest, least-overhead way to take care of it.
The downside is, the argument/power of who to let in the country, or who in the country gets UBI, gets a lot more serious. There really aren't any easy answers here...
That's what insurance is for.
(And the state (or parents) can take out insurance for the kids before they are born---ie before anyone knows whether they are at special risk of any diseases or conditions, thus charging the average is economically fine.)
(I don't like gold as a currency, but it doesn't seem to require even the modicum of central planning that bitcoin does.)
Many libertarians are in favor of UBI. Including this poster.
People are foolish. That's the whole basis of behavioral economics. The point is not that a rational homo economicus would be any more comforted by the fact that the basic income is universal, but that normal people would be. I don't think this universal nature is essential to the basic idea, and would be happy to have the negative income tax.
> Also, UBI is far from libertarianism. Libertarians want to be in control of their own money.
Here's an essay on libertarianism.org that goes through some pros and cons: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...
One of the best-known advocates of UBI/negative income tax was Milton Friedman, and he most definitely was a libertarian.
There's a difference between idealistic versions of political philosophies that don't match human behavior, and practical versions of those philosophies that do.
Let's say we wind up with 50 million people who have no marketable skill. What's your solution? Let them starve? What are you going to do when they take exception to that?
If your answer is to simply kill them, good enough, but you need to face up to the fact that this is what you're advocating.
Jailing them is not an option -- that will likely cost more than the UBI scheme, and you can't even put them to work (it being a given that they can't perform any job that provides a net economic gain).
Second, this doomsday scenario of 50 million people waking up one day to discover there isn't a single thing in the world they can do to feed themselves is such hyperbolic nonsense you might as well be asking how opponents of a UBI plan to deal with a meteor demolishing Texas. Economies change. Sometimes a profession becomes obsolete. The people involved in it go elsewhere and on the whole everyone gets richer. It may sound unpleasant but it's only the same thing mankind has done a thousand times over already with great success. Unless you're mad about the fact that you don't have to milk your own cows anymore. This supposed choice between killing, jailing, or subsidizing millions of people is a false dichotomy that would sound like a joke to me if so many weren't sincerely buying into it. The other and far more reasonable option is to let free human beings navigate a changing world by adapting in the way each of them sees fit. They do it all the time. They don't need some savior swooping in with armloads of other people's money.
Free money to all citizens seems like a bold economic policy with no attainable goal and presumably would draw backlash from wealthy business owners who would simply raise prices on basic goods.
Instead why not just invest in public infrastructure like transportation and public housing, and education?
Why don't greedy people raise prices already today?
This includes everything from manicurists to medical doctors. Repealing these would do two things. First, it would eliminate an unnecessary barrier of entry into a wide variety of occupations, unleashing a great many new job opportunities. Second, it would give consumers -- particularly the poor -- access to low-cost alternatives that today are illegal. Government approval is no guarantee of quality anyway. We don't need it.
I would also suggest eliminating the Federal Reserve System and its monetary policy of gradual inflation. America's period of greatest economic growth was between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Under a regime of moderate deflation the economy grew 4% year-over-year for a sustained period. Living standards rose across the board. Economic mobility was high. I believe this to be directly attributable to the incentives that exist under a monetary policy of slow deflation: saving is rewarded, prices fall over time, yet innovation and wise investment are greatly rewarded. (Gradual inflation, on the other hand, impels people to borrow and borrow a lot, which just on its own reduces one's economic mobility. Excessive borrowing can also be understood as consuming too much in the present at the cost of the future, which is where the boom-bust cycle comes from. Gradual inflation also makes saving extremely difficult. Anyone who doesn't want their savings to erode over time is forced to become a speculator. It subsidizes Wall Street at the expense of every holder of Dollars.)
Yeah, and? He thought it was the best solution to the problem. See above about the difference between political theory and political reality.
Second, this doomsday scenario of 50 million people waking up one day to discover..
Don't give yourself a hernia setting up those straw men. No one said anything about people "waking up one day" to find themselves unemployable. The discussion is quite clearly about a problem that develops in the long term.
There does happen to be historical precedent for this in the many other technological revolutions modern industry has seen. Can you find one that resulted in one seventh of the country just sitting on their hands strictly because they had nothing to contribute (and not because government "safety nets" paid them to do so)?
Education/training can't solve the fundamental problem, which is that a large number of these folks just aren't capable of becoming programmers, or surgeons, or lawyers, or anything else that of that nature.
What should we do with them? The problem isn't going to go away.
And we don't need endless Neurosurgeons; we need folks who can operate our sophisticated society efficiently and pleasantly. There are a million ways to live better, than being sentenced to a life of burger flipping.
You?
I notice that you don't mention any of these "million ways to live better". Do you have any specifics?
Better ways to live: Shopkeeper. Mechanic. Concierge. Furniture repair. Pet groomer. Now you try to add some more.
More taxes please.
Manufacturing is going that way. We're well into the disposable junk and cheaper to replace than repair era. Relatively few people work in industry now.
That only leaves services. But how many people does it take to hand you your burger or bag your new cellphone? Repairmen have less to do now that most everything is disposable. Even in the more professional level services, salaries have been stagnant for decades, moreso than minimum wage in some cases. Sure companies complain that they can't find good talent, but they're not willing to pay for it, so they don't really need it.
The traditionalists say "people will just go do something else, like they always have" but what? Well, for now, some could become Uber drivers or such...until the automated cars come online in a few years. Then what? And how many Uber drivers do we need? Can they make a good living doing that if everyone else is too?
People moved from the farms to the cities to do industrial work, then commuted from the suburbs to do commercial and services work. Where do they go when none of the farms, cities, and suburbs need workers anymore (and they can't afford to live in any of those places)?
People making candles couldn't imagine another set of people would be employed for years making light bulbs. Newspaper owners, investors, writers and workers could not foresee the Internet. Nobody could imagine making money with software that played back fart sounds or allowed you to launch an angry bird into a structure.
The point is: Not being able to answer the question is of no consequence. Progress and change will still happen despite our collective lack of imagination and malfunctioning crystal balls.
Not to me.
If I had to make an attempt to predict the future I'd say there might be two trends. And they are opposite extremes:
First, the good jobs require more and more knowledge.
Second, automation, as you suggested, might result in jobs where very little knowledge is necessary. "Push this button. If that light turns red, push that button".
Then again, even in what could be seen as "push-button jobs" a great deal of knowledge and experience is required. One extreme example might be industrial CNC machines. You can, quite literally, push a button and watch it go. However, doing this without knowledge and experience would result in disaster.
I don't have a bleak view of the future. I recognize we are really, really bad at predicting it. Worrying about this is probably a waste of time. In a place like the US even the poor live significantly better than they the "middle class" lived 500 to 100 years ago. We must be doing something right.
That's not a job. That's something automated away in a day or two.
And of course don't forget the entire realm of possible jobs we can't even phantom about these days. Jobs such as a "ventriloquist" should not be ridiculed. Our societies should nurture the diversity of possible things that can be done via regulations and laws and minimum wage.
Then you still have those people that simply don't want to do anything. Which is fine, but if you give them a very large spectrum of possibilities to choose from, and not limit them to a few fields, they will probably find something they like and contribute to the whole system.
But again, the key here is that the government must regulate the free market to expand the possible amount of jobs - this is important because these jobs are not created by the free market, but rather are needed for reasons such as our health, culture, research, exploration... we need more of these.
Rather than "regulate", you want to "internalize externalities". Make bad things (like emitting carbon) more expensive by making people pay the estimated true cost of their actions. And don't be afraid to apply it to sacred cows, like agriculture. For example, it's probably tillage that is the most harmful thing that is done by modern agriculture. Tax that. Sure, that will definitely make food more expensive, but now you can use the proceeds to help ensure the poor don't starve. But leave it to farmers to figure out how to grow food without tillage -- it will likely require more labour.
To augment your second point, what's the difference between a "starving artist" and an unemployed person? In some ways there's very little difference, in others there's a huge difference. We need to stop categorizing people without traditional jobs as 'unemployed'. There are so many other labels that could fit: artist, student, parent, hobbyist, activist, open source programmer, et cetera.
The only people I've ever seen do this are those who claim the government is 'hiding' the true unemployment rate. The standard U3 rate only includes people actively looking for work.
Of course, the BLS publishes 6 rates with various criteria as well as the overall labor force participation rate, but U3 is the indicator mainstream commentators generally use.
i think basic income will not breed critical thinkers, instead you achieve a state of intolerant and angry uniformity.
You might also study some prior experience here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus
Well, i doubt that the UBI handout dependent class will have the same education opportunities as those who have valuable skills; we might end up with self perpetuating class distinctions - education somehow has the magical property to favor the better off
Now concerning choice - you better ask some long term unemployed about the degree of choice that they are experiencing. I guess that this UBI thing is only a catchword to turn long term unemployment into the socially accepted norm.
Still in my book: UBI creates a situation that is very similar to the hidden unemployment of socialism - indifference and apathy is the result when your salary and living conditions have absolutely no connection to the effort that you have to put into it all.
The indifference and apathy of bureaucratic communism comes from lack of choice, starting with who to vote for.
And as for long-term-unemployment... that's kind of the reason UBI is being proposed, because automation will eliminate so many jobs there simply won't be enough work to go around.
Would you prefer the new norm to be the owners of that automation forcing those locked out of work opportunities from birth into worse and worse living conditions, because in the automated future their labour has no value?
i don't think that is inevitable; there is a lot you can do - shorter working days come to mind. Also mind me but technology is also creating jobs, a hundred years ago there were no programmers, that's a profession created by technology. A hundred years ago there were more jobs in assembly, nowadays work is more varied - employment is more specialized and there are professions that nobody thought of back then.
The worst you can do is to label off a large percentage of your population and to refuse to educate them. You end up in a situation where many shops need to import H1B workers.
>The indifference and apathy of bureaucratic communism comes from lack of choice, starting with who to vote for.
I think that in the soviet block most people were working on the construction of Egyptian pyramids - projects that were not productive in any sense, everything was subordinate to the the military industrial complex, etc. There are many non democratic countries in the world, but here you had it that the bureaucracy was totally out of touch with reality, that's a quite unique situation.
i think that this would be the real danger - a ruling elite that is disregarding any feedback and which is totally out of touch with reality. One can argue that this can't happen in an enlightened democracy, i am not so sure about that.
I generally agree, but that doesn't resemble the situation with (realistic) basic income.
God damn lets just do this already.
Most of the arguments for basic income apply just as well to a welfare system like Australia's. The ones that to not are the worst ones. E.g. it's said that basic income avoids disincentivizing work. And yet as an accounting identity, all redistribution schemes must disincentive work for some people. Welfare systems place a greater disincentive to work on the poorest, which to me makes sense as many of these people have a lower intrinsic incentive to work in the first place. In any case, the lower marginal effective tax rate for the poor under basic income, is only possible because of a higher marginal effective tax rate for the middle class.
For reference, when I speak of "marginal effective tax rate" I mean the marginal effective tax rate after including (1) welfare payments to you, (2) the tax you pay and (3) any basic income you receive, although (3) does not directly contribute to the marginal effective tax rate, since it is zero.
I'm not entirely certain that I've actually answered the question you intended to ask. If I'm way off the mark, could you try rephrasing a bit?
The basic income can't be the money that pays for the basic income, unless your concept is that the government prints additional money for the basic income directly (note this is distinct from the Fed printing money and buying government securities, which is just debt financing.) That's possible, just as it is for any government spending, if you break the whole independent central bank system.
As far as it being more of a burden on the middle class, I would happily pay more if it meant that everyone was getting more in return. Furthermore, why does it only have to be the burden of the middle class? If a corporation sees a 500 million dollar increase in profits because it aggressively automated its processes, why can't we institute rules to mandate they pay a certain percentage of the back into the UBI fund? More money for people means more potential consumers of their goods, right?
Yes. Though simplicity has its own benefits. Simple schemes are cheaper to run and monitor. And they cause less economic disruption of people moving away from efficient behaviour.
Others (of a more utilitarian leaning) wonder whether redistribution will 'kill the engine of prosperity'. The USA has overtaken Britain in per capita GDP by growing 1% (point) faster per year for 100 years, and many believe that redistribution reduces growth.
What part of this is "absolutely ridiculous"?
[1] http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.For...
Seriously, America is the country where paid sickness leaves or maternity leaves are not guaranteed.
America is the country where waiters are expected to make the most of their living income from tips and not from their salary.
America is the country where local governments have outlawed people from collecting rainwater while giving exclusive contracts to rich corporations to collect ground water or pollute it by dumping fracking waste into or near it.
America is the country where the police can rob normal people from their money without probable cause (civil asset forfeiture) and the majority will rally behind said policemen because "blue lives matter".
America is the country where home owners aren't free to plant vegetables in from of their own houses, on their own property and you call that country "the land of the free".
America is the country that goes to war to make corporations and shareholders richer and you all call it "bringing them liberation and democracy" while America's legislators, judges, sheriffs and government officials can be bought by Political Action Committees and "unions", sometimes for as little as access to garden parties, golf clubs, tickets for sports events in VIP boxes and other trinkets.
Do you think those laws are to protect the people, or corporations like Walmart, Costco, Nestle, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and others?
Still absolutely ridiculous.
Here's the thing about the future of humanity: if we want to have a future without perpetual (American-caused) war, we must promote and nurture post-scarcity cultures.
America is the country that spends millions/billions/trillions invading desert countries and does not fund public education
America is the country where politicians have to publish in a register the bribes they take so voters know who they really represent (it is not he voters!)
America is the country that would not regulate derivatives and off market trading
America is not unique in any one of these things. But it is unique in being so rich and so dysfunctional. So smart and creative so cruel and failure prone.
And they have more military than the rest of the world combined, and they are quite will to use it for the indiscriminate slaughter of millions. Sending uniformed psychopaths all over the world to kill and maim was quite risky, so now all those smarts are turning to robots! Killing and maiming by remote control. Evil.
My hope? The USA elects a Tea Party slate of candidates and goes isolationist.
They can keep Elon Musk if they put their seven (or is it nine?) carrier groups in port and leave them there.
In a word (or two): Fuck Off.
The Tea Party can be motivated to support our continued invasions as long as it fits in their framework or is promoted by their figureheads, just like any other party.
There's too much money to be made in fucking up the world.
The question implies that there is a natural or divine law, not made by A, B or C, that says what is and isn't B's money in the first place.
What if the people (i.e A, B and C) are a radically meritocratic bunch and they define B's property as everything that can be ascribed to B's individual effort, not to the country B was born in, not to the social group B was born into and not to pure chance?
Based on this meritocratic definition, some of what ends up in the B's possession at some point is not legally B's property and must be redistributed.
What right does someone have to reap the benefits of society and not give back? What right does someone have to accumulate wealth from a system based on hundreds of years of driving people from their land and means of existence (enclosure), violence (anti-labor/union action), political misgiving (anti-labor laws), collusion and still not contribute?
Stratification to this extent wasn't possible without stripping people of their ability to bargain with capital for a share of profits from increased productivity. It wasn't possible without whittling the system down to the point where the wealthy pay a fraction of the taxes they did or could compared to other classes and to the point where raising their taxes is political suicide.
> Others (of a more utilitarian leaning) wonder whether redistribution will 'kill the engine of prosperity'. The USA has overtaken Britain in per capita GDP by growing 1% (point) faster per year for 100 years, and many believe that redistribution reduces growth.
Evidence for this? Countries with a strong social safety net sure don't seem have killed their engines of prosperity.
Note that the areas where this is true are precisely the ones with catastrophically high birth rates, and the areas where there are pensions, social programs, etc. are precisely the ones where population is stable, or even falling.
And then those countries with pensions and falling population are mentioned as ones who need to import immigrants in order to keep their pension pyramid scheme working...
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/children-of-isr...
Facts are facts, whether you like them or not.
How does that signal anything negative at all?
ps. gfsn54nsf never said they needed his help, nor did he say that he's somehow forced to support them.
But if you can't then society should be right there and without such a catch-net people will have children to support them, not because they actually want children (they simply see them as an economic asset and a pension plan).
I strongly suspect that UBI will result in a net decrease in the birth rate wherever it is implemented.
For the record, I supported my mom for some years because (1) I could and (2) she needed it but if she could have kept herself afloat she would have definitely chosen that path instead (she got hit with a brain hemorrhage (sp?) and needed to go back to work long before she was physically able to).
I'm sceptical that the anglophone world has it so figured out.
In Britain we have the pension system. In America the mechanism is rising asset prices.
In Britain the pension system is falling apart under the weight of demographic change -- pensions are by far the largest public expense, and the age to qualify is rising. I doubt I will ever get a pension.
In America, there is the opposite problem. People are supposed to put their money into the stock market (via a 401k). The idea is that equity prices go up over time at a rate exceeding inflation, so if you're old you can sell your assets to the people saving now -- for a profit.
The problem with this, is that it doesn't always work that way. The Nikkei hit its all-time high in 1989. The S&P sat in a two decade funk from 1970 to 1990.
So all we've done is add more layers of abstraction. Instead of your children supporting you, now everyone's children are supporting you, and instead of supporting you out of filial love, they hate your very existence.
However, the people who already have far, far more wealth than everyone else have nothing to gain from that way of thinking, as they already have most of the wealth without having to pay UBI. So why would they allow it?
So by "everyone" you really mean "not everyone but only certain geographic groups of someone".
That sounds less like a problem with the idea and more like an obstacle to implementation.
Also, what do the rich have to gain by not helping make UBI happen? Probably starvation, unrest and war as automation puts the lower ends of the economy out of jobs and destabilizes the society. Think at least French Revolution levels of mess. Some rich may survive, but their world would be quite shitty, and their conscience may not like it either.
What do they have to gain, on the other hand? A stable and growing society, able to continue on the path of scientific, technological growth. They'll maybe lose a zero from the bank account, but they get a fair shot at seeing the world improving for everyone, and being little less rich in a world that's much more wealthy is good - just like being a poor in XXI century West is much better than being a king in Medieval Europe.
I think smart rich people will totally go for it. Hell, I think some already say they want to.
Yes. We're definitely headed toward a world where significant percentage of the population have no skill or talent that anyone will willingly pay them money to perform.
There are ways of papering this over, but most of them are pretty unappealing. For instance, bringing back a servant, or even less appetizingly, a slave, class. You can probably think of others. They're all ugly.
The ugliest option, where we just leave people to starve, is a non-starter, both from a moral perspective and a practical one (as you say, if you get enough starving people, property rights are going to go out the window).
Would you do it by choice?
Not to mention that many people underestimate the laziness of themselves given infinite free time. Posting to HN is a significant indicator. :)
Seriously though, I'd wager the vast majority, if not all of the world's greatest inventions of the last millenium came not from those who inherited great wealth but those who had to struggle, worry, pray and perhaps cry about their fate before their survival instincts threw their imagination and determination into overdrive. UBI on the face of it seems like a noble idea but we are far too confident in what we think we know about the human spirit and our own nature to on average, try to follow the path of least resistance. It can certainly work well in small groups that have strong moral and ethical backbones but I fear it will ruin a land's people in direct proportion to how far it tries to implement it.
I think it's safe to say we don't have a clue how things would pan out with a UBI, since none of the examples have been universal yet.
A few things are a given though:
1) Many people wouldn't consider the UBI to be enough to sustain their lifestyles so they'd continue to work.
2) Low-paid work that people don't like doing will have to become higher-paid work. (Or at least the total of its pay + the UBI will have to become higher. I'm assuming here there'd be no minimum wage.)
3) Higher-paid work which people like doing may become lower-paid or charity work, depending on the work.
4) Work that's not currently done because it's uneconomic may start to get done.
5) Most benefits currently provided could be done away with.
In other words, it'd transform society. Whether it'd be for the better or worse remains to be seen. It's by far the most interesting economic idea around at the moment though, so let's hope some country tries it soon!
No they wouldn't. They'd vote for an increase in UBI.
> No they wouldn't. They'd vote for an increase in UBI.
UBI isn't magic. If you raise UBI to high for the conditions in the economy to sustain, it drives inflation such that further increases to the nominal UBI level produce ever smaller increases to the real UBI level.
(And people who understand this, and those who have moral objections to UBI beyond a minimal level, and those who oppose the UBI entirely but weren't strong enough to prevent it from being passed -- they would all vote against the increase to the UBI, either always or past certain points. So, there's political limits to the ability to raise the UBI, as well as, even if not all completely independent of, the fundamental economic limits.)
In the end, even with a UBI, people who aren't happy living on what the UBI does (or can) provide are going to need to engage in economic activity to produce non-UBI income.
That people can vote for a government which enacts policies which have an unsustainable balance of spending vs revenue is true independently of the presence of absence of a UBI, and not any kind of argument against a UBI. And it also has inherent limited, as seen recently in Greece, by access of the government to credit.
You can do some productive things while watching Netflix. Personally, I fill that time with cleaning, maintaining my wardrobe, and exercise.
And... I'm pretty sure all this will happen with time.
The problem now is we have this myopia about money. We think it's something more than just the symbol or variable it actually is. But really it's a fairly new invention. We have done without it for most of our history.
Don't get me wrong... the invention of money as a concept has allowed great leaps forward in technology and progress. But the concept isn't eternal and it has it's downsides. One is that it creates a certain amount of friction. You have people spending too much effort playing with the symbol rather than what it represents.
Ideally, I'd like to own absolutely nothing. Except for a great big sack. When I need something, I'd tell the sack and out comes the thing I need. When I'm done, it goes back and the sack and disappears and no more worrying about it. That's how I think it should be.
It will drive a further wedge between the producers and consumers in society, which plays right into the class warfare rhetoric that the politicians who would support UBI are always fomenting.
Who's going to pay for UBI? Everyone! I see the amount of $10,000 thrown about. There are 235 million adults in the U.S. That's $2.35 trillion per annum, more than 13% of the GDP. You don't think the taxation required to generate that kind of money won't reach far down into the middle class? Dream on.
And we are going sacrifice $2.35 trillion for what? It won't increase productivity. If anything it will reduce it somewhat. Yes, I'm ignoring the benefit it will be to the truly needy, and that's important, but for the majority of the country, the UBI will be way more offset by the much higher amount they have to pay in additional taxes.
Social cohesion, my ass.
Read more about it. Printing money is another way - I know, it has other effects, but that could be very useful in the current financial situation. There are other solutions as well.
'Money' is an imaginary concept managed by arbitrary rules, and if a BI is created then rules will have to be changed.
You can't open a nursery in a building above a certain height. Even if the kids are only ever going to be on the ground floor.
How will we make sure the quantum of basic income is enough for a decent life? How will we convince people that they got enough and avoid falling into dissatisfaction with it? I suppose people will always bitch about BI being too low.
Another related issue is greater incentive to restrict immigration, deny benefits to criminals, etc, compared to a society where no one collects any benefits.
They don't have basic income, yet, but they do have fairly generous welfare payments, that do try to provide for a decent life.