I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste [1]. In fact, it is normal that as our society gets more educated and the supply of unskilled workers goes down, a lot of hard manual labor will become expensive. This is already the case with mining, for example. The fact that we software engineers do a job that we like and is well paid at the same time is a very lucky (for us) historical accident.
On the other hand, I see in basic income an opportunity to also do unalienated work. For example, I'd very happily use BI to take buy some time off and to do a kinda "libre software retreat", hacking on free projects for a while without needing to bargain with an employer that owns everything that comes out of my head.
[1] Excluding the cost of education, let's assume university is free as in a few places in Europe.
In general I agree. However, besides education costs (I have quite many friends who have a sizeable loan), software engineers also enter the workforce quite a bit later. E.g., taking Netherlands as an example:
- Waste collector: age 12-16 VMBO
- Software engineer: age 12-18 VWO, age 18-23 BA+MA university
Also, very few students actually finish university in time. So, they are usually 24 or 25 when they are on the market. So, there would be less opportunity to build up a pension at equal wages.
That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. Many attempts have been made to switch from the market to something else, not many were brilliant.
The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built.
Also you could argue on many different levels. To me, long studies meant delayed enjoyment of life, less freedom until 23, etc... You get less immediately, more later.
In the end, the question is really: "Do we want to use social engineering (as it's called) and try to build a brand new society, when all other attempts lead to poverty and war?"
> If those crappy jobs are necessary, they will have to improve, either by making the jobs more fun or interesting, or increasing the pay.
You make this sound as if an employer simply can raise the pay of his employees without taking into account the realities of the market.
Some services or products are worth less precisely because there is no customer available willing to pay more for it.
> Some services or products are worth less precisely because there is no customer available willing to pay more for it.
And for some services or products there simply isn't a viable market. If it's necessary to keep people in poverty to keep it viable, then I say we're better off without it.
These people are free to live in a tent and dive into trashcans for food if they don't like to work, which isn't nice but this certainly isn't death! It's just a crappy lifestyle.
It's just they don't want to live in a tent and they want to have a smartphone, a car and enjoy all the things that the working population enjoys.
It took me literally five seconds of searching to find a study [1] that notes that homeless people in the UK have a death rate that starts at twice that of people with homes and increases up to six times that of people with homes with age.
[1]: http://www.crisis.org.uk/data/files/publications/Homelessnes...
The reason why their death rate is higher is their state of mind.
It causes them to not take that crappy job that barely affords them a normal life and can potentially open up new perspectives for the future and instead choose to do nothing and hang out with the wrong people until it is too late and they end up on the street.
I don't see how giving them free money will in any way change their psychological condition. (of course there are always exceptions)
But you are obviously not interested in a normal discussion since you just try to read something into my statements to attack me.
Of interesting note in this domain, BI is often advocated as an alternative to minimum wage (such that in a mature BI system, there would be no minimum wage, though in some models there'd be a transitional period as the BI ramped up and the minimum wage wound down, at least in real if not nominal terms.)
So, while BI removes economic duress that forces people to take low-wage jobs, that also allows it to remove regulatory barriers which, while they exist to prevent abusive profiteering from economic duress, also have a side-effect of preventing generally mutually-beneficial arrangements that happen to have low wages (but where the low-wage earner might benefit from experience that increases future potential, etc.)
So how much do you pay your friends to hang out with you? I've been going with $20 a visit, but I've heard that might be a little on the low side these days.
edit: at least that's what i assume they're talking about.
You seem to suggest letting these American-style gangsters go unchecked. Why though?
You also seem to be suggesting that studying until 23 is less enjoyable than working 9-17 from 17/18 onwards.
This all leads me to think you have a very upper-class, down-upon, shielded from trouble perspective.
The moral argument is that the market is more fair at setting prices because it is a more fundamentally democratic mechanism than price controls. That is, all of us together, compared to a handful of easily-lobbied people, are better at finding sensible prices.
The point is that you couldn't have been a software engineer if you'd been born 100 years ago. And demand for software engineers might tank in the future. People who currently enjoy their jobs as software engineers are lucky to be living in a time when it's possible to make a good living doing that. If you'd been born in another time, there might not have been such a good match between what you're good at, what you enjoy, and what's profitable.
What do you think life is like if you choose to skip postsecondary education? In most cases, it's straight into a factory/manual labor job that is much more physically (and in many cases mentally and emotionally) draining than your standard white-collar coding job.
To characterize those who choose education as having less in the near term seems to ignore what modern universities have become: in America at least, it's basically a secular rumspringa, wherein students dabble in drugs, sex, and other "counter culture" in addition to their studies. This may not be the experience of every CS student (perhaps due to the field's gender inequality and the number of introverted personalities), but it's just a gross misrepresentation to state that choosing further education means less freedom and enjoyment of your life and you should be rewarded thusly.
"You'll do whatever you want but get a degree first": tell me you've never heard these words. Maybe this education-then-life approach is counter-productive: education should be a life long journey, and life shouldn't start after your studies. "Finish your homework first, then you'll get to play" may be related...
Also, I suffered a stroke at 32 because of my job, so I'm not sure IT is as safe as you think. YMMV.
And I didn't study in the USA. Free education in Europe is not always as sexy as some may think. I often think that maybe this difference is what makes Europeans boring, and americans so creative and innovative. It's like we're trained through higher education to be obedient (white collar) workers, and you're trained more to achieve whatever you really want.
Lastly, it's been studied/proven/observed/shown that children who can delay immediate gratification for a better future outcome will perform better at school and in their lives (cf The Stanford marshmallow experiment).
Garbage Disposal people earn over $100k. Software engineers earn about $80k. A job that can be outsourced or automated is not valuable. http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h...
Garbage disposal is at this point a lot closer to automation than software development.
Do you see a moral justification for paying a doctor more than a receptionist? I see none for paying them the same.
"Dirty" jobs being paid more certainly does sound a little more ethical than today, where those with little options have to work those dirty jobs to keep their house and to eat, and they are paid low.
Labor supply = Labor servicing consumption + labor servicing investment
Rearranging this implies:
Labor providing investment = labor supplied - labor providing consumption
Simple arithmetic shows we now have less resources devoted to investment. So how will this innovation actually occur? I realize demand for it might go up, but if supply doesn't increase correspondingly, so what?
That's a natty turn of phrase but I'm calling bullshit.
Rich people invest with the excess financial wealth they have after they've consumed hugely more than a poor person.
Give me more money and I can afford to eat better (reduced healthcare burden), can repair my house (reducing total resources needed over the lifetime of the building; and again there are health implications). Give that money to someone rich and yes, they will invest - sucking more value away from the populous without producing more value - but they'll also do things like buying a private jet which consumes/pollutes hugely and wastes resources.
Perhaps some of the wealthy won't be able to have private islands and maintain their more liquid assets, for shame.
Why not cooperatives and micro-investment? Why does a rich capitalist have to be the investor and suck all the value from the system?
There is no particular reason investment has to come from rich people. That's just how western economies seem to work. As I noted, in Namibia, poor people do seem to invest new wealth.
Redistributing this would allow poorer people opportunity to take part in investment which in turn should lead to more redistribution.
Tax increases for the rich in recession would (with a similarly naive analysis to the one you proffered) reduce the tax burden on the poor and allow then to become richer, increasing their consumption. Millions can buy a new TV instead of one person getting a yacht.
You just twisted my words and acted disingenuously.
I said, for the third time, the rich consume. The rich consume far more than the poor. The rich invest more than the poor, but that's because the poor don't have money to invest. Take all the money from the rich and give it to the poor and consumption and investment will shift. The people holding the money aren't as special as capitalism would have us assume.
You are unfortunately in the situation that the stated reasons for your preferred policies contradict each other. That's quite strange - it's almost as if those stated reasons are post-hoc justifications and not your real motivation.
Basic Income makes "vote with your wallet" a meaningful concept, instead of a hollow joke.
Most developed countries have unemployment permanently somewhere between 5-10% or even more during recession. Some, like Spain, have closer to 25%. Reducing labor supply may be the only answer.
It's not that I don't agree with you in principle. But you can only gain productivity if there are things for people to do. The fact of modern society is that we are running out of jobs.
There are lost of things to do. We have a situation of labor scarcity, not a surplus.
Complaining about a labor surplus right now is like a 350lb man eating french fries on the theory that he might starve in the future.
Some jobs aren't paid enough for people to do and still afford to live. Basic income actually fixes that by giving people a baseline to live off, upon which their salary can build.
A much better solution than BI would be a guaranteed job and/or an expanded EITC. These solutions - while not sounding as cool and hipster as BI - have no labor disincentive and cost a lot less.
India is filled with a ton of misery. It's the only country in the world where I saw dead people just lying in the gutter. The Mumbai slum was one of the worst places I've ever been and you want to hold that up as some sort of ideal? That people should just live down to that level instead of striving for better? If it wasn't for the Indian government welfare programs, that slum would be filled with rotting corpses.
You seem to think I'm endorsing having very few goods and services. I'm not. On the contrary, I oppose policies like BI which will reduce goods and services available.
Humans are needed to actually invent those innovative things. But in the BI world, we have fewer humans actually devoting their time to this. (See simple arithmetic above.)
Certainly the latter can enable the former, but the point made above is that Basic Income can do that as well.
In the long run, any menial task is supposed to be automated away completely. In short term, what you described already happened in area like Post-doc and game industry (or humanities degree, if you will ...).
Can you imagine what kind of autonomous robot would it take to be able to do regular plumbing work, in cramped spaces, with low visibility, requiring relatively significant physical efforts? The software side of it can definitely be solved (though not easy at all). The hardware side would require significant breakthroughs, if the device is going to be cost-effective even compared to a highly-paid certified plumber.
Same applies to electricians, and in certain degree to car mechanics, too. We have large swaths of infrastructure built with maintenance by humans in mind. These humans are not exactly easy to replace with robots.
Some not-very-intellectual jobs (plumbers are everyone's favourite example, which makes me suspect there aren't many others) pay pretty well. But most don't.
Some jobs that usually pay pretty well: Software developer. Lawyer. Doctor. Quant. Corporate executive.
Some jobs that usually pay pretty badly: Cleaner. Waiter. Shop-floor sales person. Bank cashier.
I think these are more representative than comparing adjunct professors with plumbers.
It's hard to disentangle the effects, since many of my age peers who went the blue-collar route weren't exactly responsible... but those who were, and some who weren't, still did very well for themselves. Theoretically, maybe we white-collar workers would do better after 20 years - but not if our blue-collar friends invested their savings in the meantime (which many do).
Second, if you go to places like Netherlands, Norway and Japan you'll see that it's not about money. Higher education prepares workers to do more complex, more efficient and more productive jobs.
Also, the society is more conscious about not having someone to do stupid things for them like collecting their trays after they eat at the McDonadls, this is YOUR responsibility as a member of a society, to look for others as well.
So in Amsterdam for example, street cleaning and trash collection are done with specialized vehicles. In Denmark, subways are autonomous.
I like to believe that as you increase education and income, the people that would be considered "dumb" in an very unequal society will spend their time developing technologies to automate tasks no one likes to perform and increase productivity.
Some jobs, such as cleaning, and collecting waste, literally deal with dirt. I don't think he was using "dirty" as an insult.
That strikes me as an extraordinary claim.
Also, while I've never been to Norway or Netherlands, I think you're underestimating the number of "dirty jobs" that support you. Who's tilling the land? Mining the minerals? Excavating land? Driving the garbage trunks? Emptying the lobster traps? De-greasing the engines? Tending the public spaces?
I'm not against legalized prostitution, but I think its a strong strike against any claims of higher responsibility towards society.
Yes, many of these things might be automated one day, but that seems far away (a century at least). Your parent's question is valid and, as far as I'm concerned, there's no place on earth that comes remotely close to what you seem to be describing.
Its why a pit deputy (coal miner) in the UK can charge £2k for a single weekend shift.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/18/kellingle...
To play devil's advocate, why? If my time is more valuable than a McDonald's worker's, why should I be wasting it on cleaning up trays?
Your argument could easily be extended to saying that restaurants are in general frivolous. Isn't feeding yourself a fundamental responsibility as a member of society? Except that destroying restaurants would actually be quite economically negative.
This is really why I want this to happen on a large enough scale to see if it really works or not.
In the US, we could already make great strides with removing the hard floor by simply implementing universal, primary health care coverage, free/low-cost higher education and wages that keep up with inflation. I feel that BI in some form is inevitable and the next logical step of civilized society, however, given the incredible resistance to providing universal health care, I do not see BI happening in my lifetime.
I don't see that happening to be honest but I do see something worse...
Won't the price of everything go up for those that don't currently need the welfare system? Is this a sort of stealth tax increase on the middle class?
I live in the UK and pay a lot into the system but I am by no means rich. I don't claim anything except child benefit (dunno how I qualify but I do... for £80 a month or something).
If you remove the need for someone currently on welfare to take a min-wage job then that means the job either doesn't get done or the salary for it must go up. So, if it goes up, then that company's price will go up or they face going out of business.
If they manage to stay in business, I will need to pay more to use their service than I did before but if they go out of business because I am not willing to pay it, they end up claiming welfare and my tax goes up to pay for it.
Honestly, I don't see an upside for anyone except those that can't/won't work!
I'm in favour of bringing back the Education Maintenance Allowance, and making it very slightly performance-related.
However, I am not in favour of Government handouts. How much money did it cost to give me £80 back? £100? £150?
Would it not be better to reduce my tax so I pay £80 less each month?
Straight handouts appear to be by far the most effective way of reducing poverty and its negative effects. It's rather like the War On Drugs; you can choose a system that moralises at people or one that improves their outcomes, but if you want to improve outcomes you have to give up moralising control.
It all makes sense if you think about welfare not as "these slouches are rewarded for the laziness" but as a price you pay so that unemployed people are not forced into violent property expropriation from you.
When large swaths of population don't have an access to money-making jobs, it significantly affects middle class well-being.
Of course you can "get yours" and double down on police and live behind electric fences South Africa style, but that's not pretty.
What do prisoners get while in prison? Basic necessities, like food, shelter, warmth.
A kind of basic income, if you will.
Government should provide every citizen with basics should they falter: Food, clothing, shelter, education etc. I absolutely believe that is a basic human right.
What I don't want is to fund anything other than a safety net: Welfare should be a helping hand to get you back on your feet or to give you a start - Nothing more.
It should also come with an expiry date!
> What I don't want is to fund anything other than a safety net: Welfare should be a helping hand to get you back on your feet or to give you a start - Nothing more. It should also come with an expiry date!
These two statements completely contradict one another. There are plenty of people who aren't going back on their feed any time soon due to disability or mental health issues.
I believe in a kind of 2 tier system but I didn't get that across.
e.g. You lose you job and the welfare system keeps you going at your current burn rate (you will likely have to make some adjustments but you won't lose your house!) until you can get back on your feet. Let's say 12 months (pulled that figure out the air!)
After that, the basic welfare system comes into play where you will be given food, shelter, clothing, education etc.
That's the basic human right part I meant.
I am glossing over the details but at a high level you are kept afloat at your current level for a period, then you are given the basics for as long as you need them.
As for disability, that would be kind of basics+ (Not trying to make light of it but it's easiest to put it that way). I believe that it's every citizens duty to take care of people that just can't help themselves through disability. Their case be slightly different e.g. a house may need modifications, special transport etc.
Does that make sense?
(It's more complicated once you consider immigration and asylum, but hardly anyone not subject to that system understands it)
With a basic income, now most of these people have more money. So I can charge $3 per apple, and even if I only sell 4 of them I still make $2 more than I made before. I eat the last apple myself, and the person who only has the basic income doesn't get an apple at all.
I think universal welfare makes more sense.
Your $12 in case B has a purchasing power equivalent to $8 in case A.
In general terms, UBI seems sane. I see two implementation problems. First, worldwide society competition: Can my society support UBI and compete with China? Second, automatic system balancing. What is the correct UBI level? Can we leave it out to be hashed by politicians?
As to "who would do the dirty work." You probably didn't mean it this way, but the question implies that we have to keep people down in order to do the work that "we" need them to do.
When something is in short supply, you compete for it. UBI would bring competition to employers, especially at the lower incomes. Part of that competition would be with "not working," but it would also be with other employers, as it would then be easier for people to look for or prepare for other jobs, and it would make it easier for people on the bottom rungs to expect better treatment.
Lovely.
More costly dirty jobs encourage automation and they will be automated away. The trend has started long ago. It used to take 3 people per garbage truck to collect trash, one driver and 2 people physically pick up the trash cans. Then it was 2 as better trucks came along. Now it's one driver per truck, as the truck has mechanical arms to collect the trash.
With driverless trucks in the horizon, it is not far fetch to have one driver overseeing 2 to a small fleet driverless trucks to collect garbage on a street in parallel.
Everyone, without exception, has to pitch in and do them - to a reasonable standard, with doubled time for slacking, and serious punishments for avoidance - for [very small number of days a year].
If that sounds authoritarian, consider that's how work already functions for most people - except they're compelled to do it all the time, not just for [very small number of days].
I met a retired Toyota engineer who was an expert in the hydrogen fuel-cell technology that is now in the Toyota Mirai. When I met him, he was volunteering his time to keep Atsuta shrine clean and feeding the local roosters, something he does whenever he feels like getting out of the house.
What I have learned in Japan is that if people feel like there is a chance of doing a good job together, it becomes a pleasure (not a chore or an imposition or an exploitation) to contribute. I believe this is universal, but Japan happens to have touched the magic ring (for the time being).
Remember, part of demand is the amount people are willing and able to pay.
Overall, I'd argue that by increasing a person's ability to pay for anything you increase their ability to walk away from all kinds of bad deals. One of the best examples of this is given by Terry Pratchett:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
A beef carcass might have 500 pounds of meat on it, but only 5-10lbs of that is tenderloin. If we all have enough money to buy tenderloin it doesn't immediately follow that cows are then made up of nothing but tenderloin. So the price of tenderloin will go up until the demand balances the supply again. You can take this and apply it nearly anywhere in the economy and find it'll be approximately correct for a great many situations.
And there's the rub. Even if we could make 500lb all-tenderloin cattle you wouldn't see people buying hundreds of pounds of beef tenderloin for themselves every day. Billionaries like Bill Gates can already afford millions of pounds of tenderloin yet you don't see him eating that.
Basic income might cause the price of tenderloin to go up a little bit but so what? It's not going to do anything to the price of corn or rice or wheat. Maybe the price of an apartment in Manhattan will go up a little bit (I doubt it) but not a house in rural Wisconsin.
First off, we can't make an all tenderloin cow. And second, that's the problem! If filet cost 1/4 of what it did now consumption might go up 100x. And obviously, it can't. But people would try. Until the price went up enough that the market for tenderloin started to clear again. But people have this extra money, right? So they can afford to spend more on hamburger. Congrats, we've raised prices!
Look at the headlines about solar panels! Demand for solar panels is much higher today than it was 20 years ago and yet prices are dramatically lower.
In the second scenario, he receives BI, but the same market forces would apply and he would only be able to charge more as long as there are no competitors. Additionally, since everyone will receive BI this will grant people more potential free time. Time they could use to make their own bread in case the baker raises prices. In this scenario the baker would have less incentive to work but would also have more potential competition in case he raises the prices.
Note that it is not merely a question of competition of perfect substites. An apartment competes with a house, but also with a shared apartment, with living with family, with leaving the area. And note that a Basic Income quite directly increases the supply of "housing near some source of income".
This idea seems to be built on a notion that there are needs and that their are wants, and that we are only going to give enough to supply needs. But there are two major underlying problems with this.
First, even if we assume that needs and wants exist, you aren't going to have agreement on what falls in what category. For starters, is having children a need or a luxury? Is a clean place to live a need or a luxury? Is having a healthy food a need or a want?
Second, I'm not sure the division between needs and wants is even real. Yes, you'll die without food in a few weeks, die without water in a few days, and die without air in a few minutes, but what about something that increases ones likelihood of dying in a few years, but not any shorter? For example, a starving person can survive off a very poor diet for a much longer time than with no diet, but if they are missing vital nutrients, they will still eventually die. Or look at loneliness and the negative effects it has on people. You won't die within a year from lack of human contact, but your overall life expectancy will drop greatly (except for infants, who will die from lack of human contact, as shown in a few experiments which scientists are ethically banned from reproducing).
So who will do the dirty jobs? I presume ways are found in which to make them less distasteful. They are not about "dirtyness" per se, but about application of high dexterity manual labour on various tasks.
"Worst" case scenario. You end up having to import a bunch more foreigners to do those jobs at the lower wages.
I doubt either one. To compare a full-time employee's hourly wage to an hourly billable rate you will generally want to multiply the hourly wage by about 2.