Belgian think tank study: universal basic income is a dangerous utopia

Tech giants are predicting widespread, permanent unemployment. Jobs that currently pay something like $20k to maybe $50k are supposed to be replaced with basic income paying more like $10k. If large swaths of the population are going to take a de facto pay cut over jobs that in some places are already considered poverty wages AND then they have little or no hope of securing paid income to supplement their UBI, this sounds like a terrible nightmare to me.

I would much rather people be working on new ways to spread the work around while improving quality of life for the masses. You know, the policy they pursued during the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs.

It is one of those ideas that is neat, plausible and wrong. It suffers from several fallacies of composition.

The money becomes worthless in the eyes of those that receive it, and that's because if I have spent my time growing carrots - even if I have used machines to grow lots and lots of carrots, I still need to see you give up your time in the service of others before I am happy to let you have carrots.

If you don't, then you are not seen as contributing to society and humans get upset when that happens.

That's because you get paid twice in real terms. Once by the self-consumption of your own time and once with the consumption of the output of others you have purchased with your basic income.

That is seen as unfair.

The correct solution is to organise your time to the service of others as a job. A job that is focussed on social value, not profit. You then get the living wage for that job - a wage that is much higher than any suggested basic income, without any need to increase taxation.

The problem is a lack of jobs. The problem is the fallacy that the private sector creates jobs, when in reality its task is to destroy them and replace them with automation. A task we need it to do if we're to drive productivity forward.

Yes, how does a discussion on UBI go past this simple mathematical fact?

By looking at the income distribution and realizing that a vast majority of the worlds income is concentrated in the hands of a breathtakingly small group of people and is continuing to be concentrated even more by the advent of even more integrated automated production and services.

All the while this small group continues to lobby for lower taxes worldwide and engages in tax-avoidance schemes that drive local manufacturers and service providers out of business. Heck, this group has so much money, they don't even know what to do with it anymore! Profits have skyrocketed in the last 30 years, but these increases have gone exclusively to the richest people of the world.

Productivity per person has more than quadrupled since the 1950. Yet the wages have stagnant since the 1970. Where did all the money go? I bet you can answer that question yourself.

Now, where do you specifically go wrong with the math? By not having a high enough tax on those that mooch away all the money. They could afford it. They just don't want to. And the system they built for themselves allows them to get away with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_bracket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance#Methods

How much of their current revenue goes to social programs? If current spending was removed, or rather reapplied to UBI would the be coming out ahead?

Could the UBI as an entitlement program feasibly replace current programs?

Well, rich people move to Belgium to pay (a lot) less tax (popular among Dutch and Americans for instance: you can go to mansion towns like Schilde and Braschaat and find only American and Dutch legal tax evading millionairs); so as with everywhere, you will need to force the rich to pay like everyone all over the world at which point the problem will already look different. Sure they might have worked for that money but paying less or no tax: how is that fair? Won't happen soon though.

>We only have stuff because people work.

In a society where everything is built or farmed by robots, only a small subset of the population needs to work. The rest can just do whatever they like. Even in today’s world, large amounts of people don’t really make “stuff” anymore.

Universal basic income != enough money not to work.

The report itself says that Alaska has had a UBI for 40 years with none of the predicted dire consequences.

You do need a think tank if your objective is to launder unfounded prejudices and discredited lies into something that sounds serious and academic.

"Paying people not to work means they won't make stuff."

Right. Luckily, basic income is not paying people to not work, so we had a lucky escape there. On basic income, people are still free to work.

Labor force participation is falling while production is rising. That is what everyone on HN and in any engineering or computing related field does all day: figure out how to get more value from less labor.

You're right. People won't make stuff. People already don't make stuff. Machines do. A tiny elite class of engineers and managers figures out what the machines should do, designs them, and tends to them. The masses need not be involved.

The problem is, our society right now only pays for "physical stuff". Hardware and services that are made and performed by people (who are usually in poverty).

However, think of all the artists/musicians/journalists that spend just as much "work" producing this content that you consume for free on the internet. We haven't figured out how to pay those people yet, except through internet advertising.

Now look at the most profitable company: Google. We make pretty much all of our record profits through advertising. Yet everyone hates advertising, and it's only getting worse, as evidenced by the ad-blocker wars happening right now. Lets get rid of the middle-man advertisers, and pay those content creators fairly for their work. UBI is one way to do this.