‘Utopia for Realists?’ – a review
opendemocracy.net
opendemocracy.net
Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").
"Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse."
LOL. Sorry, but that is really beyond absurd.
A long series of failures only proves that those specific things didn't work. You need more than that to come to a final conclusion.
That being said, there probably aren't any capitalist societies today; capitalism was the dominant system of the advanced societies if the 19th century, so banned by various Socialist (including Communist, Marx in particular) critics of that system. Most advanced economies today are mixed economies which retain some features of Communism as well as substantial departures afford specifically to address the problems identified by critics of the system. While it is neither, the modern mixed economy resembles a form of socialism a much as it resembles capitalism. Actual advocates of capitalism, of which there are many on the right, seek significant changes to undo the departures from capitalism introduce offer the last century and a half or so.
We've tried capitalism and Leninism and various variations on the modern mixed economy, of those Leninism and the modern mixed economy each have some (but not the same subset) of the features that differentiate Marxism from capitalism. You could as well say we've tried Marxism and it proved better than capitalism (based on the modern mixed economy as a form of Marxism) as you could say that Marxism was tried and failed (based on Leninism as a form of Marxism.) But really, capitalism fell, evolving in a direction similar to -- but still distinctly different from -- that suggested by Marx.
There was an article awhile back, can't recall in detail, about how humor circulated in the Soviet Union.
As for open borders? Probably not going to happen until almost everyone else also has open borders and UBI (i.e. it's a chicken & egg problem). Otherwise the first nations to have both will probably face immigration overload and attract all the wrong kinds of people.
In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
Transformed me from an Eeyore into an unrepentant optimist.
Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies.
Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed.
"how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?"
Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety.
The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.
By the same reasoning, you wouldn't like to see a UBI because then you couldn't bash unions or McJobs anymore.
Sometimes when people say they want to see something go away, they mean it.
The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
Huh. I'll poll my union friends. This would surprise me.
(FWIW, apropos of nothing, union halls are temp agencies with collective bargaining.)
"The immigration fear mongers are against this..."
I assume nowadays economic immigrants mostly want to make their fortune and then go home to retire. I read a study that tracked immigration to/from Puerto Rico. Many (the majority) return home or plan to. Asking all my immigrate coworkers, I get mostly the same answers.
About the nativists: hater's are gonna hate. Just route around them.
Currently in Finland if you can ~800e/month from the government if you get asylum. That's not "rich", but it's lot better than most things available in Iraq right now.
The fear mongers (perussuomalaiset) won the last election and got to the government. Their performance controlling the situation has been very lackluster so far.
The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for.
Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.
The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society.
Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.)
In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains.
So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense?
Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc.
We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors.
Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.
That's not to defend the article, of course.
It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.
In other words if a mill worker's site shutdown and this person now depends solely on UBI I don't see why they should feel like they should afford some place in the closest big city if they don't get a job since their active addition to productivity is nil. If they get a job then they may or may not afford a place in that city. Still, it's not "owed" anyone.
The incentive itself does this. First, there's the "opportunity" of living on the UBI - not a great option but more than there was before. Second, there's the opportunity of meeting the needs of the other people moving to such places, as well as those who lived there before (with their increased ability to pay).
And this leaves aside the fact that an increasing number of opportunities are not inherently tied to location.
So the "alternative" you propose is actually what a UBI is by definition.
The only assets that would apply would be:
* Intellectual property (patents and copyrights). This would be a problem, but only to an extent-- there isn't such an inelastic demand on the return of IP as there is on housing stock. * Picassos, etc. This, while true, isn't especially relevant.
Is there something you're getting at that I'm missing here?
Property value escalation either means that the actual structure becomes more valuable (something that very rarely, if ever happens), or that the ground underneath becomes more valuable.
The land becoming more valuable (up to $X) is equivalent to saying that the market price on the unimproved land is now worth $X-- this is the amount of money any landowner can expect to collect on this land, given the proper amount of improvements upon it.
Since there is no marginal cost in the unimproved land, the entire return to this land is pure Economic Rent. The LVT would tax the full Economic Rent of the land (which is essentially equivalent to an annuity on $X, for land worth $X.)
Why wouldn't the landlord pass on the LVT to tenants? Competition, essentially. Land would only be desirable to be held by people well-equipped to build (and gain the return on) the proper improvements. These landowners would have an advantage over a landowner who does not make the proper improvements, and competition would drive the market rate of rent towards the marginal cost of improvements.
That aside, your tax on the unimproved economic rent makes some sense.
What of increases in cost of rents or property values?
In general, increases in the cost of land rents are an important signal that more should be built on this land; it's a bummer for current residents, but it's important that this demand is satisfied.
I believe financial instruments should help: an insurance policy taken by landowners against a rise in land value should dampen the blow. (This is somewhat related to the housing markets championed by Case/Shiller)
But in general, it would probably lead to a bigger change, that is that the property with the greatest risk (land) would likely tend to be owned by those best equipped to deal with this risk. More people would prefer to be renters (what's the advantage of landownership, anyway, other than the investment potential that the LVT would relieve?)
Really, independent of the unlikely characterization of housing supply curve in this subthread, UBI makes more sense tied to a progressive income tax without preferential treatment of capital income than to an LVT.
Imagine the UBI was raised to a level high enough that essentially no one wanted to work anymore; how could this possibly be funded, insofar as there IS no income to be taxed?
The LVT avoids this particular problem, in that it's driven fully by the value of land within a city. No matter how much or little people work, this land will continue to have value.
Land is valuable for its many uses:
* To grow on
* To live on
* To collaborate on
* To build on
* To travel on
What do you possibly mean that it "has no value"?
It explains nothing, nor distinguishes land from any other good.
https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc - "RSA Animate: Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us"
Short version: internal motivation is much stronger than external motivation.
For writing apps, you need only your computer. You don't have to interact with other people a lot.
For medicine, fundamental physics, you need a huge amount of resources, and you need to cooperate with lots of people.
It seems that smart people prefer complete independence.
As to the working in bursts I used to think of it as a manifestation of creativity and talent in heroic stunts. Years later I see it differently: if you do one hour of actual work in a week, you are procrastinating/slacking for the other 39 hours. Even, predictable pace of work is a hallmark of professionalism. At least now I try hard to keep my progress steady and predictable.
You are making an insestuous appeal to tradition while we discuss the merits of exactly that tradition.
No point doing marathon as a series of sprints.
I'm thinking of certain types of R&D, medicine, and certain kinds of leadership roles.
I'm totally stealing that line.
The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income.
You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything.
Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism.
When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed.
I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
Unless you're selling to those relatively inefficient humans because they're your customers, and they have no disposable income - something that UBI won't fix.
Capitalism is like any other ideology - you can make up just-so stories about what it "should" do to be "efficient", but ultimately it's just a way of legitimising power differentials that would otherwise be considered shockingly immoral.
And so is UBI. Because while it may, if we're lucky, keep people from starving, what's needed isn't just UBI but free access to continuing education at all levels, access to useful social networks, and other kinds of social capital.
But for whom is it more efficient? The capital owners or the non-capital owners? What happens when the non-capital owners are of no use to the capital owners? That's the problem with trying to excuse the abuses that are permitted within capitalism. Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital. So, I'm not all that friendly towards UBI advocates unless it becomes clear the laws are going to be changed in a manner that emphasizes the working class's right to ownership of capital (via some of the means I've suggested earlier).
How is capitalism exploiting workers that it doesn't employ? The history of capitalism is littered with abuses and exploitation of the working class, but that has nothing to do with UBI, and it isn't the case that UBI is some kind of make-up for capitalism's past abuses. The goal is to fix the system to avoid the abuses going forward. We can lament the past all we want, but only by acknowledging and understanding the past can we strive to fix it by making changes that will reap rewards in the present and the future; lamenting what is already done is a distraction, short of having a time machine.
Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital.
Providing a basic, consistent income to everyone isn't sharing in the fruits of capitalism, the ownership of capital? The owners of capital get to reap it's benefits. If everyone reaps its benefits, then is not everyone an owner? Distribution of the fruits of capitalism, equally to all, is effectively the same thing as communal ownership of capital.
Considering UBI to be a form of charity seems to be asking for a requirement that recipients (ie, everyone) somehow "give back" to the system, contribute in some way — that would be the only way to make it not be a form of charity. But this is short-sighted. In the classical capitalistic setup, the owners, by definition, are the only ones who can reap the fruits of capitalism, merely by being the owners, with no requirement that they contribute back to the system. Gain without contribution, no matter who is doing the gaining, sounds like charity. The point of UBI is to allow everyone to reap the fruits, which effectively makes everyone indistinguishable from owners.
Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to.
If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
If you have less cohesion among voters, then you have less cohesion among leaders. Which leads to corruption and cronyism, as every leader thinks "fuck this country, I have to secure the benefits of my voters and myself".
I seriously think smaller is better in every respect.