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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR

    How is it possible that the proposal of a couple of 
    Marxian professors from the Benelux—riffing off some of 
    the more utopian musings of Enlightenment dreamers in a      
    brief outline of an idea that they themselves concluded 
    was only “sketchy and tentative”—has been able to     
    capture the imagination of politicos of every hue in 
    recent years?

Also

    to get productivity growing again, labour has to become 
    more expensive. And the only way for labour to become 
    more expensive is for there to be a genuinely global and    
    militant labour movement

I don't even know what that means. Want to know a surefire way to make labour more expensive? Minimum income for everyone.

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I apologize for voting this up. Considering the rapid, popular support, I think skepticism and contrarianism regarding UBI are merited, and so it's great to hear good arguments against it to help readers be better grounded. So pretty much any essay to that effect is welcome in my mind.

But if that's all it's offering, don't bother. The first summary is "appeal to he's-a-baddy", and the second is reasoning from a price change.

Any good argument takes the form, "here is how an improvement in your worldmodel results in regarding conclusion X as correct/false". This isn't that.

On the margin, having something to fall back on gives workers more freedom, since they have more alternatives. I think it would have complex effects on negotiating power.

Some jobs might pay more because they're unattractive and workers are less desperate to take jobs that are barely worth it.

Some might pay the same or less, because they're attractive from a lifestyle point of view (good location or prestigious). This would be similar to how someone on a trust fund can afford to take an unpaid internship, but regular students can't afford it.

Other jobs will be mostly unaffected since they already pay a lot more than minimum income.

I don't see any way that having more money is bad for workers. It might not be great for unions because it's about individual workers having more power on their own. On the other hand, it pays for some part of the strike fund.

Thank you. A basic income increases the negotiating power of the laborer because he now has an implicit price floor from where he can start his negotiations.

Not so much a price floor as a better BATNA - the ability to walk away without having to go and live on the streets.

Yep, that's a much more apt description.

"to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive"

Productivity is the saleable value of the work, not the cost of the work. The latter is only a floor for the former (since work that cannot be sold at least at its cost will simply not be done - witness the rise of fast food robots).

I think that depends a lot on the level at which the minimum income is set; 1k is very different from 10k is very different from 20k.

If you abolish the welfare system and institute welfare at 1k/yr, you've probably fucked a lot of poor people over.

>> to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive. And the only way for labour to become more expensive is for there to be a genuinely global and militant labour movement

> I don't even know what that means. Want to know a surefire way to make labour more expensive? Minimum income for everyone.

It means when labor is cheap, there is little thought investing in labor-saving capital equipment, but when labor is expensive, labor-saving capital equipment is developed and invested in.

Some companies pay dividends. This is money not being used to resupply the company, nor reinvest in the company, nor to pay wages. Workers creating that wealth fighting for it to go to wages as opposed to dividends will have some side effects, one being a desire to automate the industry jobs more. Basic income for all has an effect on all of this, but not as direct. Particularly for say, programmers in San Francisco, where the small amount of money they get from basic income won't have much effect on work, automation and such at all.

The dividends are why people create and invest in companies in the first place.

Also, dividends aren't just burned. People can consume them or re-invest.

It's even more ironic when you consider that a small group of political philosophers riffing off the musings of some early Enlightenment thinkers are essentially responsible for Western civilization as we know it.

It also contains the point roughly: "UBI is a pittance offered to the proletariat from the elite to prevent us from revolting"

> "UBI is a pittance offered to the proletariat from the elite to prevent us from revolting"

So does the author actually want a revolt? Because that's insane. It is not rational to want a war when you can get the essentials, enough to stop a revolt, through peaceful means. And, during and after the war, who will be hurt hardest? The working class! The very people the author claims to support!

This is why nobody takes people like the author seriously. They demand everything and are satisfied with nothing, and then threaten to burn the whole thing down instead of investing the effort to fix it.

Revolution isn't a solution. It's a threat which, if it is carried out, causes even more problems. If it is continuously threatened, it is a cop-out, a way to avoid thinking about how to actually solve anything.

Sometimes revolution is needed. Never think it solves more problems than it creates.

> Sometimes revolution is needed. Never think it solves more problems than it creates.

I love that. I feel the same way about most forms of government regulation; in the small and short term they can be necessary to solve a problem, but in aggregate and the long term they harm competitiveness in an industry. I always thought "clean your shit up, or we'll regulate you" to be better at improving an industry than actual regulation.

Naturally, if you don't ever follow through, the threat has no power, so it is necessary sometimes.

I think the main thrust was that if labour does not have sufficient power at the point of UBI's implementation, it is likely to be, at best, neutral for the poor, as welfare will be withdrawn at the same time as UBI is introduced.

even if ubi is the same nominal amount as welfare, it is a huge improvement because (i) it is unconditional. there are a lot of tedious and humiliating hoops poor people have to jump through today to get welfare, and prove that they need and are eligible for it. and they have to keep on doing it, even though in relative terms a poor person's time is worth a lot more than a rich one's and they have less of it to spend on bullshit. (ii) in lots of places, welfare is means-based and scaled back if you find other sources of income. this effectively means that that income bears a huge tax. under ubi, any extra money you earn does not affect your basic income.

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