I think this is where UBI leads if it ever happens.
A large benefit of a UBI compared to the status quo is that it reduces marginal tax rates on low income people. Right now you can get a lot of assistance if you have little to no income, but if you make a dollar you lose 90 cents in benefits. Who wants to work for 10 cents on the dollar?
With a UBI you make a dollar and you keep most of it, so there is more incentive to work.
Utility, as a function of money, generally has a negative second derivative - think Utility(income)=log(income) rather than Utility(income) = income. Utility'(0) > Utility'(UBI), so the UBI is still a massive work disincentive regardless of marginal tax rates.
A better solution is work incentives - EITC, Basic Job (UBI but only if you do government work), that kind of thing.
You could argue that watching people play video games isn't a real "benefit" to society in the way that food or houses are, but I don't see it as being fundamentally different than, say, televised sports. Are televised sports of no benefit to society? What about art, or music?
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Similarly, the average American fat person shouldn't eat 6 cheeseburgers on the theory that starvation is coming.
But on practical grounds I disagree with la terreur - call of duty is not really a substitute for military training. Senseless violence of the sort you almost seem to be advocating (am I misreading?) could be easily suppressed by a modern police force.
What makes you think the police are going to be on your side in such a situation?
But why would the cops side with a bunch of layabout gamers seeking only to pillage and plunder?
Why wouldn't they side with them?
Just to be clear here, I think the outcome of such a revolution scenario would almost certainly lead to even more suffering. But it would happen nonetheless.
It behooves us to not allow things to get that bad.
Starvation only seems to happen nowadays in war zones and communist countries.
This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper class liberals attending private liberal arts schools, anyone with a non-STEM degree... You get the picture.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that these people aren't afraid of having their cheeseburgers taken away, they're afraid of having their games and gaming time taken away. Revoke their social security cheque and give them a mop, they aren't going to starve but they are going to lose most of their gaming and YouTube time. And the people they'll end up serving? Those are the same people they passionately hate.
This perception depends highly on the media you read. Anyhow, identity politics for some but not all groups instead of "e pluribus unum" will lead only to more division and conflict.
All kidding aside, it may already be too late for a lot of these people. The argument to be made is what sort of program would do a better job of creating fewer violent nationalists. You think it's serfdom, I'm not so sure.
Do you think coddling their anti-social instincts will help them become better people? Or would a little bit of hunger motivate them to see past their animus and create more healthy and productive social relationships?
If you want some numbers to back up the intuitive argument I made in the other comment, take a look at this article by Branko Milanovic[0]. It shows in explicit detail where all this resentment is coming from. Juxtapose this chart against your suggestion (as presumably a member of the 95th percentile) that these global upper-middle-class people (between 78th and 90th percentiles) be reduced to the level of Indian domestic servants and you get a good sense that might hate the idea.
[0] http://voxeu.org/article/greatest-reshuffle-individual-incom...
I personally would not work as a personal servant for another person unless driven to it by starvation, and I am far from the only person who feels that way.
They can have a whiff of grapeshot.
If nobody can ever improve on anything, either everything is free or we're all dead, and in neither case do you need a job in the first place.
Just having a lot of manufacturing robots does not mean there is nothing to do!
The real reason people need jobs, as evident by the number of able-bodied people who don't work at all, is for acquiring status. UBI (nor any other welfare measure) will not solve this problem.
Work incentives for low-utility jobs are highly inefficient when people choose the makework jobs over real jobs, and work incentives for arbitrary real jobs are just a UBI with unnecessary paperwork, since you can just "work" for your friends and vice versa to do things you were going to do anyway.
Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so. That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma. UBI has no such mitigating factors.
The problem is it isn't fraud.
These are all real jobs: Cook, landscaper, courier, housekeeper, driver, repair tech, janitor, etc.
They aren't any less a "job" when you're doing them for your roommate, but they're also the list of things that are already on the chore wheel. Nobody bothers to tell the government about them right now or do the accounting in dollars because there is currently no financial advantage in that. If you change that all it does is cause the same amount of real work to have more deadweight paperwork around it.
> Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so.
It requires the same amount of active work regardless of whether or not you're "exploiting the taxpayer". Creating a bunch of paperwork for everyone is not an advantage.
> That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma.
The thing with a social stigma is playing video games all day, which hasn't changed.
Eliminating the social stigma of low income people using government programs for low income people is an advantage. There are poor kids suffering in America because their parents are too proud to apply for programs they qualify for, or don't understand that they qualify for them.
What's the point in having assistance programs if the only people you expect to use them are the most unabashed moochers because you shame honest people into not applying even though they qualify?
What's your theory to explain these choices? They're not crazy, and if anything are more typical than atypical. Some personal hypotheses, all of which except the last would counteract a UBI work disincentive:
1) In terms of labor choices, you've got to view utility primarily as a function of status, not income. Status is a positional good and, within a given profession, is highly correlated with income. So although I'm chasing a relatively small bump in salary, it will give outsize gains in utility.
2) Putting extra work in now is best viewed as investing in your own human capital, as a promotion isn't a permanent gold star for delivering on a project but instead supposed to recognize an increase in your human capital. That kind of increase in human capital provides lifelong excess monetary returns that exceed the decreasing marginal utility of money.
3) The increasing concentration of wealth accruing to the most productive workers means that income is in some kind of power law relationship with work effort.
4) The extra utility of a promotion is coming primarily from non-monetary effects, such as more autonomy in work and ability to work on more interesting problems.
5) Some combination of 1-4 exist and are valid, but they only have a significant effect on work effort toward the higher end of the income spectrum. A cashier boy doesn't gain any real status with a fifty cent raise, and the most-skilled and hardest working barista is not bringing home millions of dollars. Their work-for-utility functions are dominated by the effect of beer money, and the tenth beer is never as good as the first.
If 5) is true, a UBI would, of course, result in a significant increase in voluntary unemployment. I'm not sure it's even really a bad thing, though it'd be good to have a sense of how large the effect is and where it kicks in, which would have to be an empirical question.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise?
Sublinear utility merely means that there is some point at which you'll stop.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men. However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)
By that point you're just running into the superlinear cost of time. Easy demonstration: What about an extra 130 hours for 195%? 40 + 130 > 168, so that's literally impossible. 120 would be possible but you would die of sleep deprivation.
Even if the value of money is linear or superlinear, the value of time quickly catches up to it as it becomes more scarce.
> In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men.
You always cite the 10% but the link you gave last time showed that the majority of the decrease was from young mothers and students. That's clearly a different situation than people quitting their jobs to play video games.
Let me repeat: "However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)"
With UBI you'd get that same $100, but if you took that days work you'd get an extra $100 (minus tax, let's say 20%). Now you're reward for that days work is $80.
The UBI system taxes higher but also provides more incentive to the worker. Welfare cliffs are an awful demotivator.
A phase-out reduces effective hourly wage, which theoretically reduces the incentive to work. That's no different than any other kind of marginal tax rate, though, and UBI would require a high marginal tax rate.
Probably the best argument UBI is to replace current welfare systems with one cash payment because, in addition to theoretically reducing administrative costs, it would make phase-outs easier to understand. If there are welfare recipients who misunderstand when benefits apply, they might not want to obtain additional income even though it would benefit them.
Everything from utility companies to the financial sector to government to even academia has a heck of a lot of perverse incentives and corruption.
Over half a century ago John Maynard Keynes--one of the most influential intellectuals to shape the world today--said "it's better for people to toil over their bank account than each other."
I would easily wager it's better people toil over their virtual realities than their bank accounts, provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).
I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...
What are some examples of this? Why are people paying those workers?
In short, in modern, mainstream economic theory the ideas that explain this are what's called Market Failures. In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures.
A concrete and classic example is the Tragedy of the Commons.
My earlier example of the financial sector, which in 2008 showed everyone how private gains created public losses in the form of subsidies, recession, inflation, bail-outs, moral hazard, public-sector risk, was created despite (and many argue in part, because) of government-oversight.
Another, more benign example, is one I was reminded of while on vacation in France. A toilet bloc was guarded by an unhappy attendant who took 1 euro per use. It would be better to install a 100euro toll gate and give her the remaining profit to buy a computer to play video games (or art supplies, whatever she wants to do), in the hours between cleanings. Everyone wins. This is what's called pareto-efficient. Someone is made better off and no one is made worse off (tourists don't need to encounter an unhappy attendant, either).
However, to address your general sentiment: First let's establish the premise that the most important thing to ones survival and welfare in the world today is money.
Without that--and therefore by separating the relationship between survival, social status, welfare and money--it could be argued that we would take a step in the direction of fixing incentive alignment.
People might know part of this work better by the paper title / catchphrase "market for lemons" [1]. This inspired "lemon laws" in several countries.
It really isn't. AI might not be able to take over 100% of our jobs anytime soon, but if even half of the things we spend time on, things like understanding requirements. If an AI system can coax users/managers to provide better requirements, maybe even create tests for those requirements, then every programmer could be twice as productive. That means half as many of us are needed.
Lots more jobs (medical billers) exist mostly in opposition of other people (insurance adjusters).
Because in any large organisation they are indistinguishable from the productive ones. Sometimes even in your own team there might be someone that appears very productive but creates long term maintenance costs.
Anyway as manufacturing techniques improve more item will become post scarcity or effectively so if we can provide all the demand for an item for little to no cost.
But post scarcity happens all the time. It used to be the domain of nobles, who had easy access to basically anything they could desire. Now it belongs to middle to upper class first world residents, a growing class of people who can lean on mommy if they ever get in trouble and who generally are never more than an Amazon Prime delivery away from any good or service they need.
People will say oh but a feudal lord didn't have an iPhone it's all relative. And sure that's one argument, but I'm sure you can see the point being made.
You can work a lousy job, and play video games, eat pizza, and be basically happy. Or you can take on tens of thousands in student debt to work a much more stressful job, and wish you had enough time to play games, and stop eating pizza because it doesn't fit your lifestyle. A growing number of people can't rationalize the latter option. There's no need to endure that hardship, goods aren't that scarce. Hence, people bring up post scarcity.
So, food clothing shelter and maybe entertainment. Hey! We're already there - those things take a tiny fraction of the population to produce for everybody. Mostly automated from start to finish.
If there's a better term than "post-scarcity", would love to hear it.