Mark Zuckerberg: Success like mine only happens with luck
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Rationale: to prevent a massive influx of immigrants draining the treasury for free income, some of which they would probably send home, too. That wouldn't sit well with many people, nor be sustainable. There will of course, be people like in the situation you mentioned who feel marginally cheated, at least for a brief time.
First of all, "feeling cheated" is inaccurate. In an economic environment where everyone has UBI and there is no minimum wage/SSI/SSDI/etc, depriving someone of UBI makes them unable to provide for themselves unless they are skilled and/or lucky. It's common to find a low paying job fresh out of college. Let's say you get a $30k salaried job. With UBI, that might be a $10k salaried job with $20k UBI. Take away UBI and now you're trying to afford housing in a market where the most financially destitute earn twice what you make.
Second of all, immigration is a big part of what makes this country great and what sense does it make to pay immigrants less merely because they're immigrants? If they can do the same job, they should get the same pay, not just for moral but also for economic reasons.
You can fix the system but if you start from the assumption that there is a simple solution (18 year minimum) for a complex problem, you will be consistently disappointed.
To spell it out: we cannot afford to produce a UBI for the entire world, but if everyone is able to immigrate to America and receive America's UBI, we will have several billion of the world's poorest knocking on our door. The two are mutually exclusive in the real world, in which we both live. What is your solution?
Yes, you are correct that long term citizens would have higher financial negotiating power than newer citizens who do not yet qualify. Does it need to be 18 years? Of course not -- the point of that number was that you should be an adult to receive a UBI. In our current immigration system, it may be difficult enough to get citizenship that perhaps the only requirement should be that you're an adult citizen.
However, the most important takeaway for you is that if you just give away a UBI to every person that sets foot in America, immediately, you will either:
1. make it near impossible to immigrate to the US due to increased demand from people who were only persuaded by the UBI (in our current system)
or
2. open the floodgates to unsustainable immigration that will drain more from the UBI pool than the system can support (in a higher mobility system, which I otherwise support)
And in either case, you will have immense capital flight to other countries, which is obviously not in America's best interest.
I'm open to suggestions on how to address immigration with a UBI; I don't deny that it's one of, if not the primary shortcoming without an obvious solution for UBI.
Funny, that was exactly my reaction when to your comment.
> I'm curious, what do you think would happen if we gave the UBI out to everyone immediately?
I'm confused why you're even bringing this up, since we agree this wouldn't work. If that's the position you're arguing against it's a straw man.
I'm interested in UBI, but I think we'd need a system that isn't as deeply and fundamentally flawed as the "wait N years" system. I think it's a complicated enough issue that I have honestly no idea how to tackle it, so the comment that I am "overlooking" complexities seems completely out of left field.
Anything that cuts off all the people on SSI is a non-starter.
I didn't realize you were anti-UBI altogether. Is this the only reason you are anti-UBI then? But no ideas on how to improve it? And you believe the current welfare complex is superior?
Regardless, I would argue that even with an X-year rule to curb UBI-related immigration, a UBI would be vastly superior to our current system. If the income is truly basic, you have not significantly adjusted demand in the economy against what is already being purchased (to raise prices, as you mentioned) in the "necessity" category, specifically, and the reduced welfare in other areas may actually serve to bring artificial demand down in some cases (e.g. instead of feeling obligated to spend all of your food stamps because you can't use them for something else, people may be more focused on what they need). Yes, the currently homeless will also have money to compete with immigrants for inexpensive housing, but I don't think the formerly homeless would be complaining about that. Will it be harder to be an immigrant than a US citizen? Yes, that has and will always be the case for numerous reasons -- however, I don't think the financial effect of a UBI creates this unlivable economy you describe, and it provides a bright future to look forward to.
Always looking at ways to refine my policy ideas, so thank you for pointing out how extreme 18 years is given how long it already takes to become a citizen. However, it's always nice to see complaints that follow up with proposed solutions, which is unfortunately uncommon on HN political threads.
I'm still not sure where you're getting these conclusions about what my position is, especially when I say things like "I'm interested in UBI" which contradict it. If you have a question about my position just ask, if you don't care then don't respond, but I feel like I'm talking to Eliza.
What we seem to agree on is that "just give citizens money" doesn't work.
> And you believe the current welfare complex is superior?
Superior to what? It's hard to even compare something that exists in all its complexity with something that is just an idea you could write down on a napkin. How do you even evaluate a UBI proposal that doesn't have numbers in it?
One complaint here is that people who currently receive SSI should not be dropped by the new system. Rules like "you must be a US citizen for 18 years" are simply unworkable.
> however, I don't think the financial effect of a UBI creates this unlivable economy you describe, and it provides a bright future to look forward to.
It's already hard to be an immigrant, such a system would mean that immigrants get paid significantly less than non-immigrants. I am not interested in a system that deincentivizes immigration that severely. And again, it's hard to evaluate the potential effects a proposal without numbers or quantitative analysis, so I can merely say "I disagree" here and there's not much substance available to change my mind.
One thing to watch out for in these threads is that sometimes people will dismiss or devalue viewpoints or arguments merely because they do not provide alternative solutions to complex problems. That behavior is nothing more than a transparent attempt to shut arguments down without responding to their content.
Similar to why you might prefer a 10 line program that is O(n) to a 4000 line program which is O(nlogn) -- seems obvious to me.
There could certainly be exceptions for some programs (like Food stamps for children who don't yet qualify for UBI) or for things that are not bought with cash in a marketplace (if we ever had state health providers, for example), but for the most part, this comparison could eliminate dozens of government agencies and programs while expanding benefits.
The way it seems to me, it would make sense that actually jobs would shift away from menial tasks (which will be replaced by automation eventually anyway) in favor of things that people actually consider a valuable use of time. You can't get people to do jobs they don't want to do if they don't have to do them. At least, not at a scale that leads to the situation you seem to be implying.
If you had $2000 in your pocket every month why would you waste your time on a job that pays $9/hr? Maybe you'll find some people who take 5- or 10-hr/wk contracts so they have a little extra beer money, but it definitely would eliminate the need to submit yourself to the job market woes that currently plague the poor. People value their time with a money analogue, since this is a moneyed system we're living in, so you won't find many who will choose to earn less than what they can see themselves paying on a daily basis.
Oh and rent! The rent is too damn high. We need to build more, property prices be damned! Yes, ugly houses are OK. No, I don't care if the "eye sore" is damaging your view. Your pleasant view is not as important as shelter for me.
Many what might be called “moderate UBI proponents” have argued that certain use-specific universal or means-tested programs will still be needed because of social costs of failure of individuals to allocate funds properly to certain needs. Different sets have been suggested, but usually one or more of healthcare, food, and housing support programs (in roughly declining order of frequency with which I've seen them suggested) are proposed.
I would prefer a gradual phase in of UBI with a reduction of minimum hourly wage (after it is increased to $15/hr and indexed to inflation) by 1/2000 the annual value of UBI. This presumes you keep EITC, if EITC is eliminated, it's a little more complicated.
The common theme here is that these complex programs will not only come with bureaucracy and deadweight loss, but they also include complex side-effects, mostly negative economic incentives. Another common theme is that money can be used for any of these things, and that's exactly what a UBI provides.
One very good reason to keep (not necessarily in their exact current forms, mind you) the current bureaucracies involved in housing, health care, etc, is that that bureaucracy factors out the energy involved in obtaining those life sustaining societal structures. Certainly make the bureaucracy more efficient, but entirely eliminating it makes the society as a whole less efficient.
See here for a visualization of the world's money supply: http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-an...
Market capitalisations != money.
The drug lobbyists, for example, absolutely love Medicare. They prefer the government with its friendly politicians and bureaucrats "negotiate" the prices of drugs that the government subsidizes, rather than allow price discovery in a market system.
I also think that we can only get rid of all other programs as long as GBI also includes medicare for all. Medical is a basic need as much as a roof.
The safety net programs that UBI would replace don't require that (some require citizenship, others require only satisfactory immigration status, none have anything like an 18 year citizenship requirement.)
Jobs will shift, but thinking we need cash handouts for people to live on (because all the jobs will just POOF, disappear!) is just naive. Just as farmers & bowling-pin-setters found new jobs in the past, taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future.
Zuckerberg is right that people should be more entrepreneurial, but I see no reason why the labor transformation we're undergoing now will reduce overall jobs in the market. It never has.
The past industrial transformation has never had that trait.
Too many people are taking on obscene levels of debt to get a college degree, but most aren't really distinguishing themselves by doing that...they're joining a crowd of other people who've proven they have the same skills (on paper).
Do we need more of that?
Hence the need to be entrepreneurial. Everyone doesn't have to create the next Instagram, but if they can just acquire a skill to offer their communities some kind of a service, like the world worked before limited liability and the 401(k), they should be alright.
Many (most?) of these skills don't require $200k to acquire.
What is different in today's situation is that we're asking people to do more than they did in their past: learning a new skill and offering it to others is damn hard. Leaving a farm to work in a factory where someone tells you what to do all day is easy (not literally, but it doesn't require your livelihood to depend on your creativity/luck).
To use a strange analogy, in the past it has been a leaky faucet. Sometimes it's leaked a lot, sometimes it's leaked a little, but it's always been understood how to fix it. Automation (and offshoring) is affecting so many industries at such a fast pace, it's a river flood rather than a leaky faucet.
A current example is the number of truck drivers. 3.5 million. What are they going to do? That's just one of many.
A better critique of the argument is about the quality of the jobs, not the numbers.
that's the point though. seems like a standard example of the problem of induction.
Now lets hop outward just slightly: Lets include most shipping personnel, whether involved in packing, organizing, shelf arrangement, etc. While we're at it, lets do that for any big box store in the country.
With barely any adjustments, this single technological shift inside of one vertical just eliminated 5-10 million jobs.
This also only includes one level of extrapolation. What about the HR jobs related to these positions? Safety inspectors? Managers?
This is all ignoring the fact that "3.5 million is no big deal" is ridiculous. 3.5 million is massive. Losing that many jobs over 5 years would be a massive increase- it'd cut that 200k number by 1/3rd by itself, not including any of my additions above.
The entirety of the 2008 recession resulted in 8.7 million job losses- and a lot of that were temporary losses based on less revenue than previous years, so with a better economy the jobs would return. The jobs we're talking about now? They're never coming back. Nothing similar is coming back. They're gone, forever.
What does a country look like without a solid middle class? Broke and on fire. A reckoning is coming and our politicians are pretending it isn't, or they have no idea what to do about it.
It's a feedback loop where the more retailers close and jobs are lost, the less people have to spend, the more retailers/stores/restaurants will close, the less people will have to spend..the more... and so on..
I also recommend the CGP grey video.
When horses became obsolete, the car industry rose, and tens of thousands of people were needed to engineer, produce, sell, and repair cars.
So as automation takes over, the jobs it affects will disappear, but others will emerge to take their places.
The issue is that your last statement is correct but vastly understated - the jobs affected will disappear, others will emerge to take their place, but not in the quantities necessary to keep the same percent of the population employed. Add to that the fact that the population and number of people requiring jobs is going to continue to increase and you're just cracking the tip of the iceberg.
this seems like something of a religious view, and seems to downplay the nature and scope of technological advancement.
mechanization obviated a lot of physical labor. this made human expansion into mental labor and services more practical. however technology is fast approaching a point where substantial amounts of mental labor and services will be subject to automation.
most 'new jobs' won't necessarily go to humans, as they'll be ripe for automation from the start.
Advances in technology and business processes are often made specifically to allow for less brain labor. There are tens of thousands of people in retail banking who can't calculate an amortization table without a computer. This has only resulted in more jobs in banking not fewer.
Certainly automation may replace some jobs entirely, but in most cases it's merely an increase in efficiency.
A person who's job is replaced by automation is screwed in the short term. Nobody will hire them for their primary skills (because the job can be done better/faster by automation), and so they have to learn something new while also working some kind of job to support themselves and families in the meantime.
"Just innovate and come up with a new job and work for yourself" is easy to say, but it's a huge cop out. If it were just that simple then everybody would already be doing that.
I think there is a business model here to allow internet commenters to easily put their money where their mouth is. Like on reddit, 2 guys get into a long argument chain, and nothing ever comes of it. If it was easy to just say, "Bet me here if you are so sure," and all the other readers of the chain could as well, there is certainly a lot of takers. I know I would. I'm just so crazy busy right now to implement this, but maybe I'll find some time.
Being able to spend my time however I want instead of wasting my life away at work sounds awesome.
The real problem seems to be that our society puts so much emphasis on jobs and working. I guess it's a good way to keep people in line.
Do you really know what it takes to make something? Like something as simple as a hammer?
Iron ore must be located. Will we have autonomous robots scan the earth for ore deposits?Then a quarry must be set up, explosives must be brought in, mining equipment is needed.
Now step back. We need robots to make explosives, transport them to the mine, drill holes to put them in, take the explosives out of the packaging, insert them into holes, blow it, clear the rubble and decide if it's time to process the debris or just move it.
Now step back again. You need robots the find the materials to make the explosives, to package them up and deliver them to the factory.
Now step back again. You need robots to make and maintain all these other robots.
Despite the ease of robots doing everything there is still a finite amount of resources on earth, so some sort of economic triage is needed to decide if iron ore gets shipped to the hammer factory or another factory. I guess that would be some sort of AI?
The sheer scale of making a simple hammer from scratch with nothing but robots is immense. We are way, way, way further away than you think.
The future is humans and robots working together.
Once you make a more reasonable prediction that robots will replace some humans in some jobs then I think we can have an interesting conversation.
As robots take on manufacturing, I'm more worried about the political instability of Asia than anything else. It's manufacturing base could be decimated as factories move closer to consumers in higher wage nations due to automated manufacturing making it economical again.
You're really not thinking clearly, you can only push humans to new jobs if the robots can't also do the new jobs. Jobs will not just shift, they are being eliminated entirely and new jobs will not displace them because said new work will be automated from the start. When robots can "think", then automation doesn't just shift jobs, it kills them forever. Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same.
AI is incredible and only going to become even more incredible. But the creativity of the human spirit will always reign supreme.
A robot cannot start a new venture to fill a human need. Only a human can. A robot cannot write a new novel, make a new movie, or craft a new play. Only a human can. A robot cannot solve a human's medical crisis. Only a human can. A robot cannot govern a people. Only a human can. A robot cannot create a video game from start to finish. Only a human can.
I could go on forever. Because almost everything a robot can do must be started + guided + improved by a human before it can be consumed by a human. And ultimately, humans consume, not robots--so that's never going to change.
So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable.
Perhaps that means the companies of the future will be smaller and more focused.
Perhaps not. But it does not mean that human beings will be worthless.
> Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same.
I don't buy it.
> There will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable.
This simply isn't remotely true. While there will always be a place for the smartest and most creative humans, most humans aren't that smart or that creative and won't be able to compete with AI labor. Stop thinking in anecdotes and see the bigger picture, in a world of thinking machines, there will be little need for human labor, certainly not enough need to keep most humans employed at the levels needed to support themselves.
> So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable.
Not as many as have been eliminated; that's the point you seem to miss, new jobs will not be added at the rate they're being eliminated in a world of smart machines because the smart machines will be doing those new jobs as well.
> I don't buy it.
It's true none the less.
It seems plausible that robots could do physical and mental jobs.
There's a debate regarding creative jobs, but we already have good preliminary results, and once we crack some of the mental building blocks(like conceptual representation and abstraction), it's plausible we could get creativity in many domains.
As for the arts: they require a complex mix of mental, emotional and creative skills, so we'll see.
As for deep emotional jobs, for example, like a psychologist - it's hard to imagine people forming deep relationships with robots, etc. So maybe emotional jobs are the future of jobs. The big question is - how could you create low-unemployment economy around that ?
Most of what doctors do is pretty routine and we already have AIs that best them at it; we have bigger issues with getting people to trust these systems than to actually build them. The result will then mean that instead of an army of doctors doing basic diagnoses and occasionally hearing a hard problem, we will need a handful of doctors working on hard problems. This is what automation does: it doesn't fully replace all of a thing, but it drastically reduces the number of people needed. I mean, to take all of your other examples: maybe you are right that an AI can't design a video game from start to end, but the insanely large number of people who work on a video game are people doing extremely boring tasks of modelling and motion capture. Imagine making a movie where you just have a writer, a director, a costume artist, and a set designer, and every other role is replaced by a computer.
The simple logical flaw with the notion that robots will render human beings useless: okay, then who makes the robots better?
Who designs them? Who helps them? Who repairs them? Etc. There's going to be a whole economy around these things that many people in this thread seem to be oblivious about.
Don't take my comments as a proclamation that "NOTHING SHALL CHANGE, AS THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY."
Quite the contrary...I do think changes in training, etc. need to be made. I just don't think it's a markedly different shift from anything we've had so far.
I was referring to the entire period of the industrial revolution. But in any case, your argument is inductive and has all the issues as such. Since we have no reliable explanatory model of economics, you're never justified in making a claim with such certainty on the basis of some number of past observations. At any time the dynamics can change. Hence, at the very least it seems prudent to put some serious thought into the potential for things to go badly.
http://www.farmandranchguide.com/entertainment/country_livin...
In Ancient Rome, access to cheap slaves, created a very high unemployment among the plebs, who than became dependent on support from the state.
Than the question becomes: could technology create a "cheap slave" equivalent ?
Will these new jobs be skilled and require a high amount of education. They probably will, do you really think lot of people are going to retrain themselves.
Automation and outsourcing are two sides of the same coin: once the price of domestic labor eclipses the price of a non-domestic alternative, negotiating power vanishes. Entire classes of people move from stable positions in which they have bargaining power and sufficient protections to the positions we see today, which are often short-term, at-will, unstable, and often very low paying. This leads to what seems to me to be the most serious result: when you feel that your job is insecure, but your livelihood depends on that job, you are much more susceptible to exploitation. People in the service industry are beginning to feel this, and more and more industries will feel this in the coming years.
It's not a matter of IF, but when.
It isn't just "luck" that got him there. It was education, connections, hard work and many other things. I have alimony in about the amount that many people suggest for UBI. Yes, that has been a good thing, but it hasn't gotten me insider connections, magically taught me to code or solved many other problems that need to be solved in order for me to become rich.
There is just so much more going on that people like Mark Zuckerberg apparently fail to see. It isn't just the money they had that helped them leapfrog to the position they currently occupy. Simply throwing money at this problem will not make poor people the next multi-billionaires.
There are a lot of questions about people who will fall through the cracks. I raise those questions all the time.
However, I support a UBI, not because it is a silver bullet to everything but because it is a step forward. It is a real shame that we can't provide nutrition for everyone in these United States (much less the whole world). There is no reason other than greed why our economy can't feed and house each and every one of us.
I fear the real positive outcomes might take generations to manifest and might get wiped out by one major economic depression.
That feels like one of the biggest problems with it.
It's interesting how Zuck seems so generous when it comes to politics yet doesn't apply that same mentality to his cafeteria workers.
More generally, would you please only post civil and substantive comments here? You've done that a fair bit but you've also done the opposite some. In order for HN to have a hope of being slightly better than the nasty internet median, we all need to pitch in with the effort.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14842404 and marked it off-topic.
But I think the leader of a country needs to live life a bit more before leading a country. If he does want to be president someday, I think 2020 is way too early.
Oops. I was wrong. Only 35. He could possibly run for the next one depending on his exact age.
May 2019 - 35
That isn't what works in politics...
What works in politics is knowing which levers to pull, and having the money or influence (in the right paces) to do pull them.
Exactly the same reason “years of experience” are in other hiring situations; evaluating skills is hard, and it's an easier proxynthst people are intuitively drawn to, even if it is quite a bad proxy.
Being raised in a family that struggles to make ends meet might give one the grit and character one needs to succeed. Not being popular, athletic or good with people might push you into more intellectual pursuits.
Or it stacks the odds against you, and you'll struggle the same way those before you in your family/social group did.