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Comment by weisser | Hacker News Reader

Exciting to see that this is the top comment (at least for now) because I think this is the sort of attitude and vision for the future that will solve many of the health problems in this world. I'm also very excited by YC's UBI experiment.

People should be able to not worry about basic needs and be able to focus on enriching their lives and, by doing so, the world around them.

I encourage people to check out the entry for the Civilian Conservation Corps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps) - few people realize how important programs like this can be.

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It would seem to me that UBI would increase consumption, and reinforce our perceptions of success.

Agreed, something has to be done at a cultural level as well and I think this starts with parenting and schools.

The idea is that with UBI people don't need to work 40 hours per week at a miserable job if they don't want to. This in theory causes prices for stuff like McDonalds to go up which should reduce consumption. In addition, people are free to pursue things like further education and the arts that are much harder when you're working two jobs to put food on the table.

UBI comes from tax money though. If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet. If tax income plummets, what pays for UBI ?

UBI can only succeed if people continue to consume, preferably at higher levels than currently, which would allow others who want to live a life at a higher standard to sell things to UBI recipients, who can then be taxed and support everyone else on UBI.

If UBI encouraged too large a portion of the population to pursue non-taxable income (say, making art and games and giving them away for free because they don't need money), then UBI would collapse from lack of income. Especially so if that art is given away freely to other countries over the internet. So it's a fine line that is probably a lot more complex than people give it credit. There's certainly no guarantee as to what the results of UBI would be, and no guarantee that the medicine won't be far worse than the symptoms.

EDIT: Even if you assume that a UBI could survive if it decreased with a fall in taxable income from a policy and livability perspective, if a person on UBI received $100 one week, and then had it drop to $75 the next, he would get a major shock and public opinion of a UBI would fall apart. You could print money to make sure UBI never falls, but if UBI is going out to the entire population, the amount of money needed would be enormous. That much money added to a system without an increase in real demand (people on UBI would still buy the same stuff), could easily cause hyperinflation. So another constraint that UBI has and I've never heard anybody mention - UBI can never decrease, even if tax income decreases. Plus there's no way anybody could trust politicians to manage something that complex. UBI practically demands a complete restructure of government, society and the economy. Instead of being a 'patch' as many have described, UBI is closer to 'The World 2.0'. It would be the most incredible Second System Syndrome ever seen.

While this is true mathematically, I prefer to think about the opportunity cost of not having a UBI. I (like perhaps many people on HN) basically wasted my 20s trying to make rent while I worked on my shareware game company. I basically failed at that and all of that code went obsolete before it earned me income.

Had I had a relatively small UBI of perhaps $12,000 per year, I could have met expenses long enough to get ahead of the curve. I wouldn't have spent that time burned out and getting sucked into dead end $20,000 per year jobs that took all of my time and energy.

So for me, not having a UBI and throwing away a rather prolific 20 something probably cost the US GDP growth whatever my business might have contributed for a decade, say whatever a typical game developer salary might be (perhaps $60k/yr), call it $600,000. That could easily be 2, 4, 10 times that much if we grew enough to hire other employees.

By not investing in the workforce like the country did with public works before the information age started in 1980, my generation (gen x) lost out on at least a 5x rate of return. My struggles happened just before Prosper and Kickstarter got big, so I ran up staggering credit card debt. Had we chosen a more progressive route, even at a 20% tax rate I would have paid the government back what it paid me, with the bonus of life sucking a whole lot less.

I think a UBI might be one of the few things that can raise the 10% startup success rate because it attacks burn rate directly. It would also allow startups to focus on things more meaningful than video games and social media apps because it wouldn’t just be about trying to get enough F.U. money to get left alone anymore. I had always planned to save enough to be able to work on AI and alternative energy, and now with consistent hard work I have a chance of doing it, but with a middle aged realism that is just not helping my motivation. To be 20 again and told “go do all the things” is one of my deepest wishes and I hope it happens for future generations.

That $600k of production is based on the idea that you would have worked at some point, and people would have consumed your work. That is very different from "let's all stop producing and consuming."

Produced and consumed digital works, which have no deleterious effects on the environment.

Okay - the growth sector these days (to the extent that there is one) is already services not manufacturing.

You're saying energy is free?

The electricity required for running a computer is negligible compared to, say, manufacturing a car.

And we can eventually move most/all electricity production to green methods but manufacturing physical items will always require physical resources.

The production and consumption of digital works has plenty of "deleterious" effects on the environment.

I disagree that the economy lost out in the situation you gave.

In the absence of your success, some other games developer generated 600K of benefit for the economy. + or - a few 1000's

yeah sure his game would have been crappier than yours

It's not a zero sum game.

There are many ways to gain funding now if you are expecting returns of the investment. The only thing different about UBI is that it is unconditional.

People will still have the same incentive to work they always had (to make money) -- but some people will quit jobs they don't like, which will drive wages up (due to falling supply in the labor market). But the reason why UBI is so interesting now is that, with increasing automation, increased wages will have less of an impact on general prices. So prices will hold steady, as people continue to go to McDonalds.

Note that there are other ways to collect tax revenue: sales tax, VAT tax, property tax, wealth tax, etc.

UBI can only succeed if people continue to consume, preferably at higher levels than currently

What basis do you have for saying this? Deflation may actually be beneficial in a basic income scenario (falling prices makes a fixed basic income worth more).

Why would they give it away for free when they could sell it for money instead?

> Why would they give it away for free when they could sell it for money instead?

I think the entire line of thinking is a bit flawed... UBI isn't about making sure any thing we do for money today remains a skill that anyone else will pay for.

Like with open source some software will be given away, most software will not exclusively solve a problem or even do it well and complex problems will still require paid collaboration to produce complex software.

I think there is a third path that could work even better. If you think about how money really works it first goes to those the bankers deem most worthy. Tech founders, producers of fine products, schools. It flows down a cascade of people's perceptions. If you really think about it money does not necessarily go to that which benefits society as a whole, it does somewhat, but it really the majority goes to those that have the perception of being the best from the perspective of a small subset of society. Possibly a more impartial and scientific method of deciding who gets money would be more beneficial instead of the whim of cabals of bankers.

> People will still have the same incentive to work they always had (to make money) -- but some people will quit jobs they don't like, which will drive wages up (due to falling supply in the labor market).

The market is already "suffering" from labor shortage, but it's just a cover for companies to demand more H1-B visas. Seeing jobs Americans are perfectly good at doing go overseas says American labor isn't being cut for quality or demand, it's being cut out for cost.

How do H1-Bs send jobs overseas? The visa brings people into the US. They pay taxes, and many go on to become Americans (or try to).

You're right. What H1-Bs do though is allow companies to replace a worker with full mobility and bargaining power (a US citizen) with one who has limited mobility and bargaining power, which drives down industry wages. Now, if the visa were attached to the person but not the company and were valid as long as the holder has a job, this would be much less of an issue.

Give immigrants the same bargaining power a citizen has and both would benefit.

What is to stop the corporation from raising prices? McDonalds management will still hold their obligation of creating value for its shareholders

The market. No one is going to pay $30 for a Big Mac.

> If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet.

The idea is that people don't need to go work, because robots do all the work, and thus any economic value attached to labor, either real or nominal, converges to zero. It doesn't matter whether people have financial incentives to do work, because people /do no work/. You don't tax labor income to finance UBI, because nobody will have labor income; all taxes will be on capital of some sort, such as land or securities, and such taxes would be sustainable because all income will accrue to capital and none to labor.

So why would anybody bother to put themselves through school to become something like a doctor or an engineer to build the robots that do all of the work?

Some of us enjoy building robots and having more than a basic standard of living.

People are geared to competing with one another in the social domain.

In order to maintain status, people will continue to get well educated and 'contribute to society' in some way rather than simply sit and be mediocre.

Granted, if you have a UBI, lots more people can maintain their status by say.... becoming top ranked at a video game, but even then so long as it doesn't lead to societal collapse... does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation?

I'm willing to allow us to improve slower if it means we grant everyone freedom from worrying where their next meal is coming from.

>does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation

Yes, when you consider the global problems we have with energy, climate, food supplies, water supplies, and general poverty it's pretty selfish to just stop pushing forward.

The major reason people work low skill, minimum wage jobs is to be able to afford basic survival.

A basic income is never going to stop someone passionate enough to be an engineer or a doctor. In fact, it would only help them.

* in theory.

This really, really, is not true at all. Only people who aren't doctors tell themselves it's all about passion. If you remove the financial motivation you will have far less people going through the rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician.

I would also argue that the vast majority of engineers became so because it was a "good job" not because they're fueled by some extraordinary passion.

The point you're missing is that a lot of people cannot even attend medical school because their parents are too poor to support a child which could be working an underpaid job at mcd instead. And I'm only taking about cost of living, not tuition.

Too poor to attend medical school is not an excuse. If you have the aptitude for medical school there are plenty of scholarships available for people that poor. There are also student loans, which a doctor will be able to pay back without much difficulty.

> rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician

Which wouldn't be such a barrier to entry if medicine were an undergraduate degree (i.e. an MBBS) as in the rest of the world, instead of a graduate one, and residents and fellows were paid market wages instead of government-depressed ones. Creating skilled and knowledgeable doctors does not require stacking a 4 year degree on top of another 4 year degree--a single 5 or 6 year program should be enough.

There's a lot of countries where financial motivation to become a doctor is far lower, yet people keep doing it. Don't assume your own drives are shared by others to the same extent.

I think the comment your replying to is saying that, if you have the passion/desire/drive to become a doctor, having a basic income can help that person get there. Especially so that they don't have to work as much while also going through rigorous schooling.

In addition, those jobs would still be good jobs on top of the UBI. Depending on how the implementation of robots plays out, they may be the only jobs if you wanted to make more than the living wage.

Because of the psychological joy of self expression doing work like that entails (see Maslows hierarchy of needs).

Some people like helping people, some people like the prestige of being a doctor.

Besides, it's ones family background which predicts ones future career path far more than economic insentives. I would imagine the social strata that is now educated will prefer to have their offspring educated in the future.

Human culture is often a far greater determinant of behaviour than any economic cost-benefit analysis done at an individual level.

I would also point out that in the 17th century there was very little financial insentive to pick up natural sciences and people did just because they could and because they were interested.

I for example would gladly work in my current field (software engineering) even if it did not grant financial benefits because I like it so much.

I think americans are so preoccupied with money because everything is so expensive there. There are far more interesting ways to spend ones life than by surviving (if one goes to a job just to survive - i.e. to get shelter and food, one really is just satisgying ones lower needs on the maslows hierarchy of needs).

Maslows hierarchy of needs is mostly garbage. There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority).

There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job, which is a long ways out of reach from where the most advanced countries are (let alone the whole world).

> There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority).

There's actually considerable evidence that even "basic survival being top priority" doesn't reflect actual human behavior in some important ways.

> There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job

Well, that depends what you mean by UBI: a mature UBI that can afford to pay a high standard of living will require phenomenal productivity which requires a level of automation which would go far beyond ubiquitous automation of every mundane job.

OTOH, the basic idea of a universal unconditional grant as a replacement for some subset of the existing social benefit system reducing the administrative costs to benefits ratio of the replaced programs and eliminate the adverse incentives of the means-tested programs replaced obviously doesn't require any additional automation than we have now.

I have a friend who lived in the USSR and I asked him the same question. In a world where everyone is paid the same, why become a physicist when you could just be a cab driver? His answer was pretty much what you'd expect: different people aspire to do different things. It's not about the money (physicists were working multiple jobs to make ends meet), it was about what they wanted to do with their lives.

And how did that work out for the USSR? An unfortunately small minority of people are driven by enough passion to ignore how they are being screwed by society (sacrifice all of your 20s to go through med school to get the same compensation as a high school dropout that sweeps floors).

But not everyone had the same amount of privileges. People in politics often had bigger apartments, for example. So if you wanted "more" in a communist state, you went into politics.

Except the value of labor - especially labor such as marketing, or government gruntwork such as FDA approvals - cannot be done by robots. At least today, and probably not in the next 50 years. So there is still a lot of labor that will have to go on.

As for shifting all taxes from income to capital - this can't work without enormous changes to free trade. This means that we'd have to stop free trade entirely (catastrophic for developing countries) or implement UBI across all countries at the same time (definitely impossible in the near future).

The problem is that all the capital holders would have immense pressure to move their businesses overseas if they're going to lose substantial parts of their capital every year from tax. Income and profit taxes don't do this because the business still has to be growing to pay the tax, so you can just increase prices to offset the tax, etc. But a capital tax big enough to cover income for the entire country would be significant percentage of capital every year. Any hole left open in free trade would have that capital rush to other countries where such a tax does not exist.

Plus even if capital stayed, that would further reinforce 'growth at all costs' mindset. You'd have to grow your capital at a rate greater than the tax every year to be successful. You'd have massive corporate thuggery - such as pricing things just above UBI to force people to come in to work as marketers and other roles to push each business above the competition and beat the capital taxes.

What if your whole economy had a bad decade and assets failed to outgrow your capital tax? As with income tax, your tax base has just shrunk. But you can't decrease UBI because your whole population and economy is based around a set price level. You're back to having to take extreme measures to keep everything running, and a mistake will blow your now-fragile economy out the water.

The takeaway for me is that UBI isn't something we could just graft onto our existing system and pretend it's a miracle cure. We are going to need to change our entire system.

> This means that we'd have to stop free trade entirely (catastrophic for developing countries) or implement UBI across all countries at the same time (definitely impossible in the near future).

That's a valid and important concern, and one that I don't have any answers to right now. One possibility is keep capital fixed while making people mobile, i.e. very tight capital controls combined with very loose immigration controls. Capital thus cannot escape to low-tax regimes, and people in developing countries can take still advantage of capital by moving to where the capital is. If that's too difficult to handle, there is also the possibility of "virtual" immigration through political union.

> You'd have to grow your capital at a rate greater than the tax every year to be successful

Since the tax would be about the same as the current (or 1960s, if you're generous) share of the national income from capital captured by wages, capital already grows at at least this rate--otherwise wages alone would be dragging down all economies today, and that's just not happening.

> What if your whole economy had a bad decade and assets failed to outgrow your capital tax?

We'd do what we do today, and draw down the sovereign wealth fund and/or borrow from the bond markets.

> That's a valid and important concern, and one that I don't have any answers to right now. One possibility is keep capital fixed while making people mobile, i.e. very tight capital controls combined with very loose immigration controls. Capital thus cannot escape to low-tax regimes, and people in developing countries can take still advantage of capital by moving to where the capital is. If that's too difficult to handle, there is also the possibility of "virtual" immigration through political union.

For real immigration: that is already happening massively in the form of economic migrants into Europe. If you restrict capital from traveling out of the developed world, you'll turn the developing world into a hellscape that everyone will try to escape. Real immigration of that size would make housing unaffordable, overwhelm all infrastructure, overwhelm local water resources, etc. It's the exact opposite of what we want: we don't want all of humanity in a 100km big city. We really really don't.

For "virtual" immigration - you basically mean annexing the sovereignty of citizens of developing countries. Extremely unlikely, no government would allow that without a fight. But assuming they do, you now have a billion new voters living outside of your country. What do they do the next election? They'll vote in their own leader who will promptly redirect all the social grant money overseas. Hell, I know African leaders, they'll redirect all tax money to themselves in massive quantities. We don't want all of the developing world electing leaders for us, we really really really don't. You'll likely end up with a devout religious leader of some kind because of uneducated voters.

On the tax stuff - we'd need hard numbers to draw a conclusion. I was just giving some examples of how a capital tax would not necessarily solve the problems faced by an income tax and may have far more unknown problems that would only come up after we face the unintended side effects. There's always unintended side effects.

"The idea is that people don't need to go work, because robots do all the work, and thus any economic value attached to labor, either real or nominal, converges to zero. "

This is entirely theoretical and will never happen.

My friend, the industrial revolution represented a vastly bigger shift to automation than anything we are witnessing today.

Imagine a 'magic machine' that could do the work of 10 000 horses (i.e. 10 000 horse-power) - and move people from Penzance to London - on coal - no horses or drivers needed!

It was called a 'train' :)

Same for farming, factories etc..

Automation has been ongoing for 200 years.

To be more precise: at the dawn of the industrial revolution, almost 95% of people were doing 'laborious' jobs. 95% of jobs at that time were 'at risk' of being replaced. Most of them were.

Not only did we move forward, but there were so many surpluses, and so much more to do that even common household jobs (maids, butlers, footmen, valets) - could find higher paying work doing other things.

Today, only about 30% of jobs are 'at risk' - and I'd argue they are not at as much risk as we think.

Call centers are not going away. For every task that is automated, 2 more will appear that need human intervention, and 5 more customers will be added (thereby creating more work) - new consumers from the current 4 billion human being who have yet to come into the world economy.

> "UBI comes from tax money though."

Not necessarily. It's quite possible to have UBI be part of the money creation process. In order to understand this approach, it's useful to understand how money is currently created. I'd recommend the 4 minute video found here as a starting point:

http://positivemoney.org/

New money is necessary for our current economy to function. Making UBI part of the distribution of this new money makes it possible to get spending power directly in the hands of all citizens, as well as doing so without raising money through taxation.

I'm not sure you mean it to be, but your comment reads like an anti-UBI argument.

My hope is that UBI will help grow the labor share of GDP by providing mobility to a segment of the workforce that currently lives paycheck to paycheck.

Isn't the point of UBI to get everyone access to the capital share of GDP?

In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want, and instead will engage in hobbies that provide little value to the world?

Your phrasing suggests you favor a UBI, yet your actual claims echo mine (and I'm a UBI opponent). I'm intrigued.

>In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want, and instead will engage in hobbies that provide little value to the world?

>Your phrasing suggests you favor a UBI, yet your actual claims echo mine (and I'm a UBI opponent). I'm intrigued

Your phrasing, with respect to the GP, suggests that you consider "things like further education and the arts" to be "hobbies that provide little value to the world", and "the things that others actually want" to be "stuff like McDonalds".

As a consequence, I'd encourage supporters of UBI to avoid engaging you on the topic. Your revealed worldview speaks more eloquently than any argument you could come up with.

Unless, of course, that's not your position in re higher education/McDonalds, and you're just mocking him. Either way!

Your comment implies you have a critique of the poster's argument, but you fail to provide one.

Provide an argument supporting the notion that people shouldn't be incentivized to produce things that the market values.

Hinting that someone's argument is absurd adds no value to the discussion unless you illustrate why.

> Provide an argument supporting the notion that people shouldn't be incentivized to produce things that the market values.

Most people should agree that things that "market value" is a means to obtain things people intrinsically value, such as comfort, security, happiness, meaning, procreation, etc. If, on a macro level, there is a more efficient means to achieve these end goals other than creating things the market values, theres no reason to incentivize that by itself. In some cases creating things the market values can actively work against these goals, such as many types of advertising and consumer product marketing.

You can't provide comfort, happiness, and meaning without the market to offer those goods. If we have UBI, people are still going to want their toilet unplugged and who will do that if UBI eliminates the need for plumbers to seek income plumbing?

It's likely going to drive the cost of everything up so quickly (because of a massive goods and labor shortage) that the UBI will quickly become useless.

Getting sick of this argument. Just look around you. Tons of people do tons of things all the time even though they don't get paid or don't need the money, or could get by on less.

If a minimal UBI (say, $700/month, similar to today's SSI in the US) is enough in your view to deter people from seeking employment, then how on earth is it that so many people today make more than that, even though they didn't need that much? (You can change the amount around and rerun the thought experiment. Whatever the amount of UBI would be, the existence of many people currently willingly working for more than that amount is proof that people will still strive to make more than UBI)

Enough with this tired argument, think a little before repeating it or at least state a version that explains why somehow we have people today who willingly work for more than the bare minimum

>Provide an argument supporting the notion that people shouldn't be incentivized to produce things that the market values

What?! That's crazy! Even if I were intending on debating any of you guys, I could hardly do it being prompted by this intentional strawman. But, of course, you're one of them! By which I mean an arch-capitalist, or whatever, who cares, whose internal value system precludes the understanding of what UBI might accomplish because, of course, people are just going to "do anything they want[ed] without contributing to society" [0] rather than behave differently under a system whose fundamental assumptions have changed. Just because you're absolutely certain that people would stop taking jobs in "construction, plumbing, electrical, farming, etc if they can choose to do nothing instead" [0] doesn't mean it's true, and dropping that slimy ostensible fact instead of an actual argument is hardly adding value to the discussion, either! At least my actions provided some value to those intending on discussing UBI in good faith -- ie, do it somewhere else, these guys don't seem capable.

>Hinting that someone's argument is absurd adds no value to the discussion unless you illustrate why

I think I'm doing a pretty good job, but just in case, said argument attempted to imply that higher education is a stupid hobby, those seeking higher education without the material means to pay for it in fact desire McDonalds, and for those reasons UBI upsets the natural order of things and deserves throwaway comment mockery. Am I really bound to provide something more substantive? I think I've made the 'response' that 'argument' deserves.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245629

No, you haven't provided anything of value beyond personal attacks at people that had the gall to suggest that UBI might not align well with economics.

Nobody implied that someone would desire to work at McDonald's instead of attend school. However, there is no evidence that people would attend school if they were free from work. If that were true, colleges would be packed with retired people auditing classes.

You are using your assumption that your position is objectively correct as an excuse to not even defend it. Please read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule

>No, you haven't provided anything of value beyond personal attacks at people that had the gall to suggest that UBI might not align well with economics

Without some evidence that it is true, the claim that started this all, namely that people who would use UBI to "pursue things like further education and the arts [that are much harder when you're working two jobs to put food on the table]" [0] are in fact "hobbies that provide little value to the world" [1], is insane. The things that "others actually want" [1] are implied to be "stuff like McDonalds" [0]. The comment authored by 'yummyfajitas [1] is a direct reply to the comment authored by 'mason55 [0]; the correlation of arguments are clearly outlined above. Unless you take issue with my interpretation, or unless you believe that 'yummyfajitas was just fucking with 'mason55, his reply is hardly a suggestion that "UBI might not align well with economics" and more "the rightful place of poor people is to provide low-pay services like McDonalds; those who couldn't aspire to higher education without UBI will provide little value to the world with their taxpayer-supported hobbies".

>Nobody implied that someone would desire to work at McDonald's instead of attend school

I never claimed this, but it sure would be handy for you if someone had. Coupled with your apparent belief that casting aspirations on those who can't afford higher education is not only acceptable but self-evident economic theory, the intentional twisting of my words in this way is a pretty clear indicator of what you're trying to do with this reply.

>However, there is no evidence that people would attend school if they were free from work. If that were true, colleges would be packed with retired people auditing classes

Ah yes, retirees -- the very people who might benefit from release from their low-income McDonalds wage-slavery, and who, with UBI, might aspire to go to college in order to bec-- wait, wait, wait. Why are you talking about retirees? That has little bearing on the discussion at hand, unless, of course, retirees are the people we've been talking about all along and I've missed it somehow.

>You are using your assumption that your position is objectively correct as an excuse to not even defend it

I'm making no claim to correctness, and I don't think you could actually state my position, because I haven't yet elaborated it; somehow, this didn't stop you. Please read this [2]. I'm ridiculing the sort of person who can, without the slightest twinge of conscience, drop two smug paragraphs detailing how UBI will make us all poorer by stating his hunches about the behaviour of the poor and the uneducated as objectively correct facts.

I suppose it's possible that the notion that UBI will lead to a new era of sloth, economic chaos, job loss and plagues of frogs is actually factually correct. But that claim is just as untested as my "claim", which is merely NOT(prevClaim). The illustration of the classist notion that people who couldn't aspire to higher education without UBI will become hobbyists who won't produce value is all the point I'm trying to make -- if you don't immediately see how that's intuitively wrong, our conflicting perspectives probably can't allow us to have a meaningful discussion about UBI and the poor and higher education, either.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243184

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12244546

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Take this analogy. Some people have rare diseases. However, because the diseases are rare and not common, not enough resources go into finding cures for this disease. Should no one work on the cure for a rare disease because it will provide little value to the world, in comparison to a more common one?

I'm not saying this directly translates to UBI, but it is something to think about.

Heck, the way capitalism works, people wont invest in cures even for popular diseases killing tens of millions, if they can't make a nice buck from them (e.g. if the majority victims are poor Africans).

And by the same token, they will milk a cure that they've found as much as possible, even if that means that millions (who can't afford it at the price) will die or get bankrupt etc. (Of course if they could sell it a two different prices to different groups (price differentation) they wouldn't say no to poorer people's money, but they can't).

(And the massive profits from such drugs and of such companies overall, reveal that it's not just "recuperating" money spend on R&D).

It's not about how capitalism works, it's about how humans work. Capitalism is not stopping anyone from investing into anything.

No, that's the way humans work in a specific belief and motivational system.

Historically societies have had many incentives and motives for behaviour, advancement, job production, etc, outside of profit, that were as or more important to it. This includes religion, morals, ideals, customs, laws, etc.

Christians, for example, were for centuries not loaning with interest, not because they weren't humans, but because they valued a moral code more than profit.

As a fact, we do such stuff too, and have even put it in laws, e.g. against child labour, slavery etc. All those could bring huge profit too, but we value our morals (e.g. anti-slavery) more. People certainly didn't stop doing them because they weren't profitable.

> Christians, for example, were for centuries not loaning with interest, not because they weren't humans, but because they valued a moral code more than profit.

That confuses who's making the choices with who they're making them for.

There were always christians willing to lend for interest, what stopped them was the other xians who thought it was bad.

Also, look as islamic banking as a modern example. It charges almost exactly as much as a system with interest would but the payments are structured as fees, etc.

There's still usury, it's just in the form of ruinous collateral-backed fees, instead of compound interest. A late-payment fee, on the capital plus a previous late-payment fee, is economically identical.

> the way capitalism works, people wont invest in cures even for popular diseases killing tens of millions, if they can't make a nice buck

1) You're wrong. Bill Gates, etc, are counter-examples.

but,

2) The problem is the word "invest". You're saying in the same sentence that the investment is a loser. That you won't be able to eat if you take it. So change the word to donate, where it's clear the money is gone, and you'll see that people do indeed donate to things that don't help them. All the time.

3) It's not "how capitalism works", it's how any self-sustaining system of value allocation works.

How would they afford to stay open, to give the drug away, if it cost them more to develop and produce it than they made? Literally, how do they pay their suppliers and employees so they can eat and keep producing the drug, if they don't make as much or more than they expend?

The short-term example of this is the guideline that you should put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

>1) You're wrong. Bill Gates, etc, are counter-examples.

Bill Gates is an example only of (a) the kindness of his heart, or (b) tax-incentives for philanthropy, depending on your level on cynicism.

Both tell us nothing about the system he operates in though (well, except the (b), which tells us something about the government and IRS).

Obviously anybody in any era and system could arbitrary out of kindess/a whim or for some hidden motive give money for a good cause. The question was whether the system encourages such a behaviour, not whether it can happen in some counter-examples.

>2) The problem is the word "invest". You're saying in the same sentence that the investment is a loser.

No, I'm saying that an investment shouldn't necessarily aim for the maximum profit, everything else be damned. I'm saying what enterprises only pay lip service to in their ads and brochures, their "social responsibility". I'm saying that if you can have a lesser profit (still profit mind you) but do far more good, you should do it instead of being a greedy bastard.

As for charity and donations, those existed both before and after capitalism. (In fact they predate capitalism by some millenia), so are no argument pro or against to our topic.

>3) It's not "how capitalism works", it's how any self-sustaining system of value allocation works.

There have been tons of "self-sustaining system of value allocation" (which pretty much means: any society) that didn't value profit first and foremost, or at least better juggled it with other concerns.

That doesn't mean that tons individuals or leaders in these didn't value profit first and foremost -- only that the societies at large had other moral/ethical/etc priorities and, err, values. In Ancient Athens for example, it was all about being a good citizen.

>How would they afford to stay open, to give the drug away, if it cost them more to develop and produce it than they made?

Nobody asked them to give it "away" or to have it cost them more to develop than they made.

That said, an organization can also operate at zero or marginal profit. Amazon did it for more than a decade, and not even for a good cause, just to gain market share.

> Should no one work on the cure for a rare disease because it will provide little value to the world, in comparison to a more common one?

Well obviously. We should invest in whatever saves the most expected quality adjusted life years per unit of resource spent. Investing in rare diseases is just silly and missing a huge opportunity cost. Usually.

A UBI might make us all poorer because we will no longer be able to get dirt cheap goods like McDonald's food produced by people in situations that amount to wage slavery made survivable only by welfare. Without the hidden subsidy of welfare and the stronger bargaining power that comes from the other party being desperate, McDonald's would have to charge a more realistic price that many customers would find makes their food even less palatable. But does this change make the market more or less efficient? I don't think it's a foregone conclusion either way—that's why it's a fun topic to consider.

It makes it less efficient.

Playing with the market causes deadweight losses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

Granted, many argue that there are more objectives than sum total economic efficiency.

> Playing with the market causes deadweight losses

Only a diehard capitalist thinks this. We already have a name for this type of pure capitalism. It's called anarchy. I.e. zero government interference.

If that's true, then almost all mainstream economists are diehard capitalists/anarchists. (Hint: They're not.)

This is an appeal to authority.

I don't think it is. It's just a counter to your implication that 'only diehards' take this position.

Welfare is a subsidy for people, not for companies. It raises the cost of labor for companies since it gives potential workers th - in fact ie "stay home and play video games but get money anyway" option.

Absent welfare we'd have far more people working since they'd have no other choice, which would lower prices for companies and create more value for consumers.

I'm also not sure why you are so dismissive of the fact that McDonald's will become more expensive and less available to consumers. Is it because McD's customers are mostly low status poor people that it's so easy to ignore their utility? If the result of a UBI was less healthy organic GMO free vegetables sold to starving artists at farmers markets (or less child care for working women) would that change things?

> Welfare is a subsidy for people, not for companies. It raises the cost of labor for companies since it gives potential workers th - in fact ie "stay home and play video games but get money anyway" option.

When a restaurant pays its full-time employees a wage so low that they need to be on food stamps to survive, that's a subsidy for the company as much as anyone. Since we have a minimum wage, McDonald's can't legally get labor any cheaper than they currently do, no matter how much the labor supply increases.

No it's not, because if food stamps/etc were unavailable, employees would be willing to work for less.

Since we have a minimum wage, McDonald's can't legally get labor any cheaper than they currently do, no matter how much the labor supply increases.

McD's currently has an average hourly wage of $9.01, well above minimum wage.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/news/companies/mcdonalds-pay...

Only 1% of the country (4.3% of hourly workers) earn minimum wage or below. So your argument is almost completely irrelevant.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/archive/minimum...

With or without UBI, people actually don't want crappy mcdo food. They want good food. But good food cost money and and/or takes time to prepare. So instead of having minimum wage workers working their asses to make some owner millionaire, we may actually get chefs and cooks paid what they deserves. So, bring UBI, at least it will stop this stupid race to the bottom. And then lets cancel UBI, I don't believe it is anymore sustainable than the current narcissistic/corporatism regime going own, but it cold be a buffer, while we move forward without back-pedaling.

>In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want

People being forced to "provide the things that others actually want" in a job they hate or hurts them, just to make a living and feed themselves is what makes us really poor.

If everyone were allowed to do anything they wanted without contributing to society, things would collapse very quickly.

You won't find people willing to take jobs in construction, plumbing, electrical, farming, etc if they can choose to do nothing instead.

>If everyone were allowed to do anything they wanted without contributing to society, things would collapse very quickly.

Citation needed.

Especially one that takes into account increasing automation and software, not merely medieval society needs, and which solves a large part of grunt jobs.

Besides, there are people genuinely love working in the fields you mentioned: construction, plumbing, electrical, farming, and that would do them over nothing. Especially with a pay increase over UBI, so that they do them as a choice, not merely because they're forced to not starve.

Maybe not so many for things like sewage cleaning, garbage disposal and burger flipping, but again a pay increase over UBI would help with that too.

This will also help compensate those jobs according to the value they offer to society, not according to how many people starve and can do them at piss poor compensation to feed themselves.

Very few people do construction because they love it. (source: worked in construction after high school) The same applies to most labor intensive jobs with little room for creativity (all of the ones I mentioned).

There is no citation needed to show that society would collapse if essentially all manual labor stopped overnight. To suggest otherwise is silly.

>There is no citation needed to show that society would collapse if essentially all manual labor stopped overnight. To suggest otherwise is silly.

To suggest what I proposed equals "all manual labor stops overnight" is taking for granted what you were supposed to prove.

That's exactly what we were arguing about, remember?

Ah, so it's a hand-wave of us somehow getting to a point where everyone was perfectly incentivized to automate everything (without price gouging in the case of monopolies) and pay enough taxes to cover the 12 trillion dollars to give 300 million people $40,000 anum? Last year the US brought in a bit over 3 trillion in tax receipts to put that in perspective.

I think there's a big question of what "allowed to" means here.

"We throw them in jail if they don't"? We don't do that presently.

What we're talking about is "in addition to anything they earn, they choose the disposition of $X/yr", for various values for X. If X is $1, clearly everyone is still working. I agree with you that the $40k figure you cite downthread is extremely likely to be higher than we can support. I think there are intermediate values that might work substantially better than $0. Based on toying with numbers that I've done in the past, my guess is that the optimum value $4k and $9k/yr (though I'm not all that confident in that and would probably want to see it ramped up gradually). If you claim that this would mean "essentially all manual labor stopped overnight", that certainly needs a citation.

People being forced to give the fruits of their labor to others who are unwilling to do anything in return is also harmful. Strangely, your calculus seems to exclude them.

Reduced consumption for BS + increased higher education, arts etc. What's not to like?

Does anyone really enjoy picking up the garbage and other dirty jobs?

Whether they do or they don't, I guarantee they make significantly more than the proposed UBI amount.

Given the choice between making $12k with UBI and sitting on one's ass, or making $50k (guessing here) + 12k UBI to work as a garbage man, do you really think people would just up and quit?

Janitors tend to make minimum wage. The average garbageman salary is around $33K.

Hierarchy of needs; cross fingers

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