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Comment by vminkov | Hacker News Reader

Guys, most people commenting here are having at least 2x the avg income of their home country and are dangerously wrong about the motivations and the right incentives for the poor.

You are shooting yourselves and the economy in the leg if you give everybody a UBI. People need to be given incentives to become more productive and that's the only right path in the world's prosperity. One day when automation reaches that state of the art form, everybody will have lots of food, energy and shelter not because they are GIVEN for free, but because they are PRODUCED almost for free - because of technology and competition.

We can reach that state if we focus our efforts in those essential areas and the government can help by providing incentives and (maybe) cheaper credit to the venture funds in those areas.

P.S. I have been raised in a post-commie country in a poor family and have gone through the path of breaking out of poverty. I have received lots of "free" stuff and welfare along the way, both for nothing and for the promise of educating myself. The first is dead wrong, the second is the deal breaker to me.

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> People need to be given incentives to become more productive.

That is the issue. With increased automation, we don't need people to become more productive. We just need people to continue being consumers of all of the crap that we keep producing for super cheap. And this is the case in most developed countries.

Think of the amount of bullshit jobs that we keep around just for the sake of justifying one's worth as a productive member of society. Think of all of the "me-too" apps that we see for every closed platform. Think of all of the overpriced espresso you pay at the hipster cafe to some barista that might be $100k in debt for their French Literature B.A, and dreams of becoming a journalist writing for $150 a piece to HuffPo.

None of these people are actually needed by the system, except for their capacity to consume. UBI can be a solution for it. If it actually becomes universal and it is used to replace the broken means-tested welfare methods, I'm all for it.

I agree with your first point, that we don't need all individual people to be productive. I don't think you can say, though, that your "me-too" app builders and hipster baristas are all employed deliberately in useless jobs by philanthropists as a form of charity.

It's no form of charity, quite the opposite. It's just that it is the current way of "the system" to keep the status quo.

It is already bad that people are getting 4 year degrees and ending up in an useless job. The vicious, even worse part is that it still manages to extract $100k+ out of them in the process.

True there are any bullshit jobs. But is this really the majority of the economy?

Advertising share of gdp is at ~2%. Healthcare share is ~20% and rising. And from my experience as a non- It worker, most of the jobs deal with useful stuff (however inefficiently they do so).

Is the quality of the healthcare rising as well, or is this rise in the GDP mostly due to increasing costs and more regulations and to deal with the bureaucracy? I might be wrong, but my intuition says that we are not getting more doctors, paramedics, nurses and bioscience researchers around due to any new law.

Also, it's not so much about GDP per industry, but perhaps if you have the GDP per capita at different industries, we could take a look at what kind of jobs are being created and that actually needed.

Healthcare share is ~20% and rising.

Ask anyone who works in healthcare: the portion of their work that is growing is mostly "bullshit". Insurance companies and other payers like Medicaid are constantly innovating in new techniques for delaying and denying payment. It isn't clear how much of that is just a feedback loop, as providers hire more admin staff to deal with billing and then feel pressure to increase billing to pay for that staff, in response to which payers feel more pressure to deny payment, but there's definitely a lot of "bullshit" going on.

> That is the issue. With increased automation, we don't need people to become more productive.

Everytime someone says that I look around at the cracks in the sidewalk, the mold in the walls of my house, the empty lots and single family homes in one neighborhood and the OD'ing junkies in the next neighborhood, and I think, if there's less work that needs to be done, then why isn't anyone doing all this work that DOES need doing?

That "anyone" also includes you, no? Why aren't you doing anything about it?

What you are describing is not a problem of lack of manpower, or productivity. It is socio-political. If it was in the interest of the status quo to actually fix all of these issues in the developing and developed world, then rest assured you'd get a machine that could clean and repair infrastructure in no-time.

I think it was Robert Reich who said something along lines of:

"It's interesting that rich need to be incentivized by profit, while poor need to be incentivized by existential threat of losing their job."

Unfortunately, your comment is exactly this line of thinking. But you're wrong - with UBI, people who want to get something will still have to pay somebody else to do it. That's why people will still work - because it will pay off.

Yes. One claimed advantage of UBI is precisely that it removes the disincentive to work found in many existing social programs. Under most UBI schemes I've seen, taking a job would never make you worse off economically. That is far from the case with most of the programs we have now.

Air is even more important than food, but (outside of a few science fiction stories) no one worries about people becoming lazy because air is free.

That's interesting comment about the air..

Anyway, I should point out, though, UBI would probably make higher middle class (the people who have job, but don't have to worry about unemployment) a little worse off - they would have to pay people having low-paying jobs a little more, because the existential threat is gone. That's a good thing, IMHO. Although it makes the GP comment a little more nonsensical - UBI is actually against the interest of the higher middle class professionals.

People need to be given incentives to become more productive and that's the only right path in the world's prosperity.

I don't think that's even remotely true, because even if the financial incentive is removed that doesn't mean there's no incentive. Rich people still do productive things.

The incentive doesn't have to be money. Incentives such as of respect, good will, or fame could work just as well as money as a way of motivating people. Once society is productive enough that the cost of goods is essentially zero we'll find other ways of proving status to one another.

Pure ideology. Class-divided society is bad, and your dishonest valorization of it here doesn't change that simple fact.

If we're so interested in incentivizing people to become more productive, why not outlaw income from land and capital to force the idle rich back into productive work instead of allowing them (and their descendants) to live off "free stuff"?

>Class-divided society is bad

Why? If class is simply a de facto consequence of the fact that not everyone is exactly the same (God forbid), why should we try to stamp it out? There's nothing wrong with being different. The only thing I would object to is an artificial class system that keeps people down. Enforced substantive equality (everyone must be exactly the same!) keeps people down just as much as any caste system.

We already have "an artificial class system that keeps people down".

Equality doesn't mean everybody must be exactly the same. Perhaps you should read some basic material about the topic before offering your opinion.

I agree, and it's called red tape. UBI won't fix that.

Perhaps instead of just disagreeing and then intimating that I don't know what I'm talking about, you could give a counter-argument.

You haven't provided any arguments to counter, merely parroted the most banal libertarian talking points.

You think poor folks are trash and deserve the terrible treatment inflicted upon them by capitalist economic institutions. I don't, and think everybody deserves compassion and decency.

>You think poor folks are trash and deserve the terrible treatment inflicted upon them

Wow, that's exactly what I said! Great summary.

>I don't, and think everybody deserves compassion and decency.

How generous and upstanding of you.

You still haven't said anything besides "you are wrong and mean".

My claim is that enforced substantive equality keeps people down as much as enforced stratification. Address that.

Also, re-reading your original response, it sounds like you don't know what substantive equality means. Perhaps you should "read some basic material", as you say.

>If class is simply a de facto consequence of the fact that not everyone is exactly the same (God forbid)

Except class is (mostly) hereditary.

> People need to be given incentives to become more productive

UBI doesn't remove all incentives. People will still want a nice car. People will still want a bigger house.

Right now the "incentive" is that you will be destitute and homeless if you can't keep a job. I find that incredibly cruel.

How does UBI remove the incentives to become more productive?

This is hard to respond to without resorting to cultural reductionism, but there are many societies in which economic advancement beyond the means of a comfortable middle class life is not highly valued by everyone.

Australians talk about the "tall poppy syndrome" -- that there is an Australian cultural tendency to cut down anyone who has been very successful.

In developing economies in general you often have a lot of people who have just gotten out of absolute poverty -- in a few generations their descendants may think differently, but they are often grateful enough that they can feed themselves and advancement beyond that is a pretty distant concern.

Then there is the Japanese proverb that "the nail which sticks out will be hammered down" -- the meaning is nuanced but is meant to convey that envy is an outcome of success and caution people against being ambitious or nonconformist.

These are all reasons why UBI might encourage some people not to work. And while these lines of thinking may be stronger in certain cultures than others, inevitably there will be some people thinking like this in any culture. Those people probably just won't work.

UBI will never be enough to fund a "comfortable middle class life".

What happened to "machines will be so productive they will make labor obsolete"?

They already do, to a large extent. I guess the OP should define what a comfortable middle-class lifestyle really is. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say: capacity to buy a decent house and car, pay off present and future debt and stay out of it, enough disposable income to meet life's necessities and yet have enough left over to save for a comparable lifestyle during retirement.

I don't think the UBI would provide all of that; instead it would be a means to avoid destitution (e.g. starvation, homelessness, unmet medical needs etc.) in the present. For all the luxuries that most of the middle-class hopes to achieve (luxury car, nice house, investments, vacations abroad etc) you would need more money than UBI.

They already did. In many industries, they made paying your labor every other Thursday obsolete.

Of course, since labor doesn't own said machines, they didn't exactly reap the benefits.

Nothing new. A "comfortable middle class lifestyle" 300 years ago was probably that of a craftsman, farmer or petty merchant. Their comforts extended to a roof over their heads, usually enough food to eat, and probably being warm enough in winter. "Poverty" meant literally freezing or starving to death in a gutter.

Nowadays, "comfortable middle class lifestyle" means a 40 hour work week, and gets you a nice 4+ bedroom house with hot and cold running water, two indoor toilets, heating and air conditioning, 2+ motor vehicles, bigass television, internet, mobile phone, nice clothes, as much food as you can eat, and spare money and leisure to go on regular holidays. "Poverty" (for most of the world) is about on par with "middle class" 300 years ago. Working lots of hours, usually enough to eat, usually warm enough.

In a hundred years, "poverty" will probably mean "only has enough compute power allocated to simulate one virtual environment at a time", whereas "comfortable middle class" will be having your own actual cloud palace with stadium-sized holodeck.

> This is hard to respond to without resorting to cultural reductionism, but there are many societies in which economic advancement beyond the means of a comfortable middle class life is not highly valued by everyone.

A UBI that is economically viable, even internally in a developed country, in the near term would struggle to replace more than some subset of existing poverty support programs with something with less perverse incentives (particularly, by reducing the disincentive to additional income -- and the incentive for any additional income to be "off the books" income -- for those on the poverty support programs.)

We're a long way from anything like being able to support a "comfortable middle class life" (even if by that, you actually mean something like a middle income lifestyle in a typical developed nation, which is more working class than middle class.)

> In developing economies in general you often have a lot of people who have just gotten out of absolute poverty -- in a few generations their descendants may think differently, but they are often grateful enough that they can feed themselves and advancement beyond that is a pretty distant concern.

Even in developed nations, it will be a few generations before a UBI that can supply "a comfortably middle class life" would be viable.

> "tall poppy syndrome" ... "the nail which sticks out will be hammered down"

Awesome to know that. We have same thing in Poland. Not sure if there's any proverb or a saying. There was a joke that in hell you don't need to watch a boiling tar cauldron full of Poles. If any of them tries to get away others will hold him down.

I guess that's a human thing then. Funny that USA doesn't have that.

Oh, they do. When someone manages to claw their way out of dirt poverty, they ended up cutting off contact with their poor relative and former friends so that they don't have to give all their newfound wealth away.

That's bit different. What I'm saying is that in other places than USA you as a rich, self made, person, you would expect people to be distrustful of you, gossiping, trying their best to make your life harder. You wouldn't expect them to try to exploit you to the point of driving you away.

The only idea I can think of that expresses same sentiment in USA culture is keying someone's car. Not exploitation. Just general malice with only being better of as the reason for it.

The same in Bulgaria and still few people realise that this exact saying about the boiling tar cauldron is pretty common in many nations across the world.

A UBI doesn't take away the incentive to make money. Give everyone enough to _not starve_ and then they can work towards a better level than that, safe in the knowledge that they aren't going to suffer from losing the benefits the second they earn a tiny amount (and thus earn _less_ for having a job).

Oh, but food is not even close in the share of expenses. Food is cheap, and hunger is very rarely something to fear of in civilized societies.

Rent, medical insurance and taxes — these are the bulk of poor person's worries (tax breaks etc? When you are hustling 18 hours per day, you don't have time to do the shitload of paperwork it requires. And if you were relatively well the previous year, then suddenly lost the means of income, but got the tax bill from that previous year — well, tough luck.)

In no way UBI is going to challenge that.

No one is starving in the US anymore. The poor are fat, and have cell phones.

False.

> An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014, meaning they lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The change from 14.3 percent in 2013 was not statistically significant. The prevalence of very low food security was unchanged at 5.6 percent.

> Economic Research Report No. (ERR-194) 43 pp, September 2015

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

Their own definition of "low food insecurity" is:

"Low food security (old label=Food insecurity without hunger): reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake."

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo...

That's not the same as starving. At all.

Their definition of "very low food security" is:

"Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake."

WTF does "disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake" mean? Missing breakfast because you're late? Dieting? Impossible to say.

In any case, very, very few people starve to death in the United States (barring medical conditions like anorexia, metabolism disorders, etc.).

This I believe to be the best answer. It is not a matter of how to provide basic means to all people, but rather how to produce means cheaply enough to not be a strain on society's budgets.

Unfortunately, the biggest and most typically debilitating costs are housing and health care. The former requires land and synchronization of other services (transportation, firefighters, law enforcement) and is a very hard and complex problem to solve. The latter is extremely human-intensive, both for physical labor, subject area expertise, and interpersonal skills (only the right diagnosis matters). It would take revolutionary advances in machine learning and robotics for health care costs to fall to the degrees of food and personal entertainment.

The other part I would add is that as living standards broadly increase, people expect more out of their purchases, both personally and societally. We expect that all buildings will comply with fire codes, which add cost. We want quality food without pumping animals full of antibiotics or chickens rolling around in each other's feces, which is more expensive when society deems "humane" conditions to be necessary.

I have argued here and elsewhere - to little agreement - that instead of establishing basic income, we should incentivize extreme cost reduction. However, I am still fully in support of universal state services, such as guaranteed health care, since nobody chooses to get sick and a sick populace that is either untreated or submerged in medical debt is a drag on all of society's potential.

People will always want more, but at the very least we can set a floor on the provision of basic necessities.

Whether UBI works or not might turn out to be a cultural thing. There are societies which value getting ahead of your neighbors and there are societies which value everyone being roughly equal.

In a society where being too ambitious is frowned upon (and if you live in America, it might sound crazy, but there are plenty of these), if you live in a neighborhood where everyone is on UBI, why would anyone get a job?

"Universal" in UBI implies every neighborhood. It's the the defining characteristic in comparison to welfare, everyone gets it.

This. We Russians understand that. Maybe also people of Cuba, Venezuela or those lucky few who managed to escape from North Korea.

UBI is totalitarian BS.

I fear the state will provide a too low UBI and people will be very poor. There will be very little to differentiate people because no matter what they do, they get the same income. The person becomes a dependent upon the state and is at the mercy of the current crop of politicians.

This problem can be viewed from a different angle: not to make the state a distributor of UBI collected from taxes, but to empower each community to own the resources necessary to generate their income and be essentially self-reliant. So there would be no need for help from the state.

As robots become available to do the work currently done by humans, each community / city / country will have to develop and operate its own fleet. So the profits should not be concentrated in the Google of the robotics era, but distributed to everyone by empowering them to be self reliant. 3D printing and renewable energy are going to be important for achieving self reliance.

> I fear the state will provide a too low UBI and people will be very poor.

UBI isn't a income ceiling, its an income supplement. If the UBI is too low, than those without outside income will be poor, but someone will be rich.

> This problem can be viewed from a different angle: not to make the state a distributor of UBI collected from taxes, but to empower each community to own the resources necessary to generate their income and be essentially self-reliant. So there would be no need for help from the state.

How is the "community" that owns resources distinct from the state or an administrative subdivision thereof?

No complete market system in any of those though. The structure of financial flows can radically change the growth patterns in an economy.

(I'm ambivalent on UBI)

> You are shooting yourselves and the economy in the leg if you give everybody a UBI.

Maybe, but you haven't given us any reason to believe that, especially not:

> People need to be given incentives to become more productive

...since that is one of the primary reasons for people advocating displacing means-tested social benefit programs (which negate returns for additional outside income within some range) with UBI (which does not.)

> I have received lots of "free" stuff and welfare along the way, both for nothing and for the promise of educating myself. The first is dead wrong, the second is the deal breaker to me.

Why is getting welfare for the promising of educating yourself a deal breaker for you?

First, let me admit that I might have not picked the right words above. To me, the best money/welfare that I ever got, were the scholarships. Just a little money that were exclusively intended to be spent on education.

This brings my thoughts to the second and more important aspect of the labor market. Recently there was an article here about Spain and how it had 5 million unemployed people and still the economy lacked the needed workers. And what's the response of the socialists there? Give more welfare to the people. That's just not adequate. They are hoping that the people will educate themselves but let's just see how that would develop and just few percent of them will study and fill in the labor gap. Governments should seek and demand from the people to study in exchange for that welfare money.

Last point may be only that education is highly correlated with the income and breaking out of poverty, but that's something we all know. And besides education, what else can welfare do to help you find a job?

P.S. I hope I am not the only one who is totally disregarding the claim that automation will eat out all the jobs. There has been written so much about this and we all know the problem is not there is less business to do nowadays, the problem is is harder to find the qualified workers.

That discussion about Spain's labour market also had many arguments along the lines of the pay being far too low. It's not that monodimensional of a problem, especially considering we have a free labour market in Europe, and Spain has good climate and nice people. However, many who do study change country and work somewhere else, which you can't really stop with your plan.

What are the schools like in Spain? Do people need to leave to study?

Not particularly bad, afaik. They leave after they studied, because now they're qualified to get good jobs in Germany or the Netherlands.

Exactly, UBI will not encourage a lot of people to be productive.

There are more creative ways to combat this problem. For example, restructuring the recruitment process, offering jobs instead of UBI since all of a sudden there is an abundance of capital or introducing legislations

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