Why a Universal Basic Income Would Be a Calamity
wsj.com
wsj.com
I suspect that reason UBI has the following it does today is because it's socialism dressed in a funny mask. "Hey, no socialism here! Private industry still does everything! The money to pay for it all just happens to come from large taxes on the super rich". The left like it because it's socialism, the right like it because the government doesn't do very much at all except distribute the wealth.
I tend to argue instead for actual socialism over UBI. Socialized health care, public education, infrastructure, etc. Once you stop presuming the government can't do anything well, you start to see real possibilities.
(Bias: Canadian, enjoying my relatively efficient and effective health care system and public education)
I saved enough money so I don't have to work for years, but I'm still don't feel at ease.
First I had the fear I wouldn't get a job, then I had the fear I could lose it any time due to things out of my control (crisis 2008). Now I think, everything is okay, but for how long? This industry doesn't like old people, how long can I be a software engineer? till 40? till 50? What should I do then?
We are moving to a world where work as we know it will be more and more rare.
So why not provide every one a roof, to eat, and health care ? The most part of the population live in fear. Fear if you loose your job you won't be able to live in decent conditions.
So you keep on working a sh*tty job you don't like just because you have no choice. You restrain yourself of doing things you like because you come home exhausted (physically or mentally. Or both).
Some will say that it have been attempted in USSR. And failed. And it's very true.
But now is a time where most of the basic jobs can be done automatically. Where you can build a house in less than a day. Even print it !
May be it's a good time to change paradigm.
PS : I'm a 46 yo software engineer. So far so good. Crossing fingers ;)
I wouldn't be surprised if that has been said 100 years ago before.
But we have to reeducate people when their job gets rationalised away before they pensioners
Always being "a couple of times during stages of the industrial revolution" -- back when we had crude automation and no AI.
Hardly a long range of samples to make any safe deductions from.
Well, a turkey predicting death would get shunned by other turkeys every time the farmer just comes and feeds them. And then Thankgiving comes and it turns out that turkey was right.
Failure of something to happen in the past is not really a good way to predict whether it happen in the future. The similarities between periods don't tell us anything at all without considering the differences.
Back then there was still factory jobs (the second wave of industrialization) and tons of services jobs (which made most of the population into office and service workers). Both of those are things that are now being automated away. So where exactly do you see those jobs being created?
We mechanised the farm removing the need for hundreds/thousands of people to work on farms. Those people went to work in factories and mines.
The mines have moved to larger machines with fewer workers, preferring to use large open-cut techniques rather than underground mining wherever possible.
Then we automated large numbers of factories, and there were some more transport jobs moving stuff around en-masse.
Now we're looking to automate the transport jobs with self-driving vehicles.
When we automate transport jobs, where do all those people go to work?
Businesses are not automating things because they think it's cool, it's because it's a lower cost alternative to having humans do the work.
That's not socialism, at all. That's social democracy.
As someone who comes from a country that has actually been ravaged by socialism, there's a world of a difference between the two.
Those countries have been ravaged by being run by totalitarian parties that followed a specific Stalinist model
Not by anything specific in socialism itself. Social democracy is still a form of socialism, and until around the first world war there were one and the same (including being championed by the same people).
The author uses Saudi Arabia as an example as a country with UBI that works badly. First of all, I have no intimate with if there is any implementation. The author does not provide any sources, so that's not much help. A cursory Google search leads me to doubt this claim [1]. The author claims >50% unemployment in the country, again doubtful [2].
Then, the article states that proponents of a UBI claim that it allows people to self-improve and take risks, equating this with a transition from a low skilled worker to a high skilled one, which seems a far stretch. Of course automation removes low skilled jobs; but more training does not automagically turn everyone into PhDs with un-automateable jobs.
Then there are even more wild claims about it leading to a demise of the American democracy, where I don't even begin to see how the author came up with it.
1: https://www.quora.com/Is-Saudi-Arabia-an-implementation-of-b...
2: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/saudi-arabia-unemploym...
I'd love to ask the author how a guaranteed income would change his life. Would he stop writing? Does he only write for the money?
I'm not sure if this article exists only for the money, some agenda, or merely fearmongering. But in any case, the fact that it is getting so much attention and this kind of reporting is considered good journalism is worrying to me.
Most proponents of UBI expect it to lead to increased cultural creativity and entrepreneurial risk-taking, both of which are actively discouraged in Saudi Arabia.
It's a 600% increase compared to the US's 50% increase in the same time frame.
It's the same kind of dishonest cherrypicking of data to push your agenda. No different than when people try to compare norway to the US. What applies to a small racially homogenous scandinavian with tons of oil doesn't usually apply to a racially diverse continent sized nation like the US.
This is why my opinion on economics and newspapers have declined. Too much biased cherrypicking of data and too much agenda-pushing.
Yes? Especially when it disingenuous and cherrypicking data. As I said, people with an agenda tend to do this. Whether it is the people on the left trying to compare us to norway or the people on the right trying to compare us to saudi arabia.
- Most people are not egomanic workaholic persuing their carreer and don't need the job as a centor of life and pride. Why not let them play video games or do sports or anything they want?
- Isn't automation able to replace the booring jobs?
- Nerds still want to play with tech, give them 15h work weeks and some good pay and they will keep doing their job. High payed professionals today also would not have to work much for the equivalent ammount of money that UBI would give them and yet they still work.
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What I really wonder:
- if an inflation would happen
- how many are really incapable of finding purpose for themselves (I think most will do very fine, even if they just play video games with friends)
- if a country stays competetive with other more exploitive countries
- how much we'd have to pay people doing shitjobs so they stay attractive enough and if this is realistic to do
They never go into how bleak a dystopian future we are talking about if large numbers of jobs that pay $20k-$50k or so disappear and now you have to live on $10k-$20k with little or no hope of ever getting a job again while inflation steadily erodes the real value of your UBI. Glad to see one article exploring that (dystopian view), though it fails to mention this aspect of UBI.
We need to resolve the widespread lack of affordable housing in the US and we need to fix our broken healthcare system. That would give ordinary people substantial relief.
Assuming your assumptions, in this situation is living on $10k-20k a bleak, dystopian future compared to the default (if nothing changes in our policy, no UBI) scenario of all these permanently unemployable people having no reasonable income?
The last time we faced the possibility of "automation" taking our jobs, we invented the 40 hour work week to redistribute work and raise quality of life for more working class people. We called it The Industrial Revolution.
I think of this as The Second Industrial Revolution. I think we need new ways to cut the burden of work for the average individual without cutting large numbers of people out of work entirely.
Designing it that way is not a given. And it is a design choice to say "meh, too bad, so sad that many people will simply be unemployed -- not my problem." It is a terrible design choice, but it is a choice.
UBI is a response to automation to prevent economic collapse by ensuring demand in the face of effectively infinite supply.
If the economy can supply anything instantly[1] it is a huge barrier to entry for Joe Standard to be economically productive.
If you weren't good at computers would you have an alternate career to fall back on? I know I wouldn't. I'd be selling origami on the street corner to make a buck (and competing against e.g. Etsy, etc...)
The basic options are: slavery, mass death, or just give them (us!) money.
[1] Asymptotically approaching the singularity. Star Trek-style replicators based on nanotech. Read the lit. ;-) Amazon and the counterfeiters are already eating the sales of legitimate businesses.
IIRC, healthcare now accounts for about 20% of the GDP in the US. Provide universal basic healthcare and you cover around 20% of the budget of many people. You also benefit families and people with health problems more, without having to try to give them additional benefits.
Create an adequate supply of genuinely affordable, decent housing so you don't have large numbers of people paying 50% or more of their income to rent and you alleviate another huge burden.
Then, create gig work opportunities that are well designed so that people can work as much as they like, when, where and how they so choose.
The last industrial revolution gave birth to the 40 hour work week in order to redistribute work without throwing large numbers of people out of work. Gig work done right can be a means to uncouple work from its current constraints for many people.
If your cost of living is low and healthcare is covered, part-time gig work will be sufficient to provide for your needs.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/michael_munger_3.ht...
I think one of the biggest flaws of capitalism is the assumption that those are the bottom of the pile are rational economic actors, when in fact they often have factors like substance abuse problems, low iq, disability, miserable abusive upbringings, etc which prevent them from making smart decisions or functioning at the level required to get ahead in a competitive capitalist system. We can afford to, and are morally obligated to look after them. A starter UBI is a great way to do that. It also opens the door for employers to pay these people low wages, which can help them get a leg up in the job market, without risking losing benefits. Eg. a really low intelligence person sweeping floors for $2.50 an hour is moral when they get a reasonable UBI & if taxation of corporations and wealthy individuals means they get healthcare and education for their kids etc.
So overall, socialism for the people at the bottom of society, and capitalism for the people with a high enough level of function to be able to thrive under that system.
Yes, it's still up in the air whether it will happen, and there are reasonable arguments that it won't.
But it's incredibly telling that opponents of a basic income spend about 100% of their time saying it's solving a problem that doesn't and will never exist.
There's a real likelihood that the economy is going to go through massive, unpredictable changes. Working from that assumption, very few alternatives to a basic income exist, and most are either bad (make work schemes) or immoral (do nothing and let the peasants starve if they don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a nonexistent job).
It's really hard to justify the time investment in reading a piece that starts off with an implausible scare tactic like this.
One can only expect it to go downhill from there.
And who is Dan Nidess? I don't know a whole lot about economics, but I do know that semi-knowledgeable people like myself are usually wrong about economic issues.
In Firefox' reader mode you even do not get any popups if there could be any.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2017/08/14/why_a_universal...
The knowledgeable people are even more wrong about economic issues. The history of economics and economists is a history of failure. So your shouldn't be so down on yourself.
According to one of today's great economist, we are supposed to be in a global depression without end.
"So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec...
I was mostly speaking about issues like the deficit. I used to subscribe to the deficits are bad theory of budgets. If I shouldn't run my household with a deficit, then how does it make sense to run the country with a deficit? Turns out, they aren't the same thing.
Because the simplest solution that works is to progressively lower the retirement age.
It never happens does it because that would be a burden on the workers.
And that's because the problem has nothing to do with automation and money. The problem is that we are a reciprocating species. If you want the carrots I've grown then I need to see you do something of social value and benefit to me before I'll let you have any.
Hiding behind the money illusion doesn't fool people for long. You bought what I laboured to produce and you spent time on the Xbox. So you consumed my time and yours. That's seen as unfair and rightly so.
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. What we need is a social system that ensures everybody can make that rent.
And for that we need a Job Guarantee not a hand out.
* "took care of your aging grandmother"
* "worked on your new business that caters to the community"
* "contributed to open-source software"
* or "volunteered for a community outreach program"
how does it change your opinion? What can a job guarantee do to support the above socially beneficial activities that basic income doesn't do better?
UBI: you get yours, your neighbors get theirs, and everyone gets to mind their own business.