There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what a basic income does. A basic income isn't housing projects and government cheese, it's cash money you can decide how to spend for yourself. Different people will choose to spend it on different things.
What's your alternative? Let corporations accumulate all the wealth generated by technology and subject everyone else to serfdom?
It's not as if people are going to stop inventing things.
If you have a UBI then you don't have to buy cheese. You can buy beans, pasta, carrots, potatoes, rice, bananas, it's your choice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/...
...earning $10,000 a year (which was about half the federal poverty level that year)...
The state with the highest total value of welfare benefits was Hawaii, at $49,175. The lowest was Mississippi, at $16,984. Welfare packages in only 10 states, plus Washington, D.C., exceeded Grothman’s threshold of $35,000.
Note, that's an article showing that a representative was exaggerating how much welfare recipients receive; those are the numbers refuting his claim.
You won't have a choice between all the different things you have to choose from?
> Go break down the budget at $1k a month. You'll find that people on government welfare often already live better than that.
And the same people are completely screwed if they want to do one dollar better than that because as soon as they get a job most of the benefits evaporate. Which is why they stay unemployed.
Anything different just doesn't make sense in my opinion.
You also seem to discard the value of work (on a 10 hr workweek perhaps)
One way to defend against the welfare queen argument might be to recognize that there are economies of scale in child-rearing, and pay out adult/2 for the first child, adult/4 for the second child, etc, never going above one whole adult worth of BMI income no matter how many children you have.
WRT welfare queens, now it would make sense to have family intact.
You are kinda ignorant, your food expenses will be less than $1 a day if you only buy cheap food like that. I've lived on less than $1k a month most of my life, totally doable, you can buy good healthy food for around $4 a day if you cook yourself.
They can make all your savings disappear for a clerical error, for starters, and you are stretched on time to stay in lines to make things right.
Yeah, and they're often a mess. You often have to sign up in a bunch of different places and deal with a bunch of different broken bureaucracies, which isn't the ideal thing to have dropped on your plate when financial hardship strikes. It's not surprising that, for example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it."[1] Simplifying the system and having it already active when people hit a hardship would be a huge improvement.
I was reading a story about one cities dilapidated homeless shelter. The people there were living in poor conditions - the building's infrastructure was falling apart, the food provided was terrible, etc. It was costing the city $4,680 a month to house the people there. The people would be much better off if the city simply handed them that money - heck, they'd be much better off if the city simply handed them half of that.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/08/21/490822086/the-financial-trials...
It's already the case that if you don't work, you can "live". We should focus on making sure everyone can work if they want to, and their work will pay enough, which is the real problem at hand imo.
Do we crack down on automation? If so, how do we do that? And if we do, how do we stay competitive with the rest of the world?
The thing is, UBI has the potential to solve this. With a basic income, you're less likely to have to take a full time job you don't care about just to make sure the bills get paid. The labor market will shrink (and UBI allows that to be tuned), so there will be more jobs available, and there's no longer as much pressure to take an unfulfilling job.
This gives people options. Maybe instead of working a dreary office job full time, you work it part time (leaving hours open for someone else to fill), and spend the extra time with your family. Or maybe you take the extra time to foster a project you're passionate about. Maybe you tighten your belt and work on that project full time. And depending on how high the basic income is (which would be largely a function of how many crappy jobs we've automated), that passion project doesn't even have to be profitable. You can do what's rewarding instead of what puts food on your table.
This is, to me, the ultimate vision of humankind flourishing, sans-singularity. The only realistic alternatives I see are a massive increase in poverty, as we continue to convince ourselves that somehow price floors and retraining will save us, or a regulatory morass in which we try to stay one step ahead of the loopholes, preserving jobs that simply shouldn't be done by humans anymore.
So you would get all these basic necessities as part of the basic government program. To actually make any money to buy nicer things (car, bigger apartment or house), you'd need to find a job.
This would make sense as the basic income would not work as free market would adjust and increase prices as reaction to the new source of free money to spend available every month for everybody.
Do the government canteens have vegan options? Vegetarian? Nut-free? Just peanut-free? Gluten-free? Halal? Kosher? Why or why not? Which of those are "necessities" and which are "luxuries"? It may well turn out that your opinion on that last question differs from your neighbor's, which differs from that of the bureaucrat who actually makes the call. And at least in the US, having government-provided food facilities that are expected to be widely used but effectively discriminate on a religious basis in any way would end up in court on First Amendment grounds in a hurry...
That's just the food end. There are similar questions about housing. Should all the apartments involved be wheelchair-accessible? Should all the bathrooms be accessible by someone who is mobility-impaired?
(Healthcare and education have similar issues, though to a large extent people seem make the opposite choice on those, as compared to food.)
Anyway, one of my big takeaways from the history of the 20th century (both from nominally communist countries and the experience in the US with housing projects and urban redevelopment in general) is that uniformization schemes like what you describe tend to lead to a good deal of misery...
The government is bad at operating a business. They aren't subject to competition. If they do something poorly they don't lose business so they just keep doing it poorly. There is no reason to ever have the government build housing or grow food instead of just giving people money to buy housing or food.
Government products also have another flaw. If the government provides $500 worth of free government housing, and you have $200, there is no way for you to turn that into $700 worth of housing. Improving your housing by $200 costs you $700. It's a poverty trap.
And allocating money to specific things has the same problems. Governments are bad at allocating things. Give someone a housing voucher and they'll buy housing, even if they don't need housing as much as they need something else. Many people would be better off to e.g. live with relatives and use the same money to pay for car insurance so they can drive to work. With a housing voucher they can't do that, so instead they waste the government's money on unneeded housing. And in the process raise both taxes and housing costs for everyone else.
Moreover, in any situation where that isn't the case, vouchers for necessities are equivalent to cash regardless. If you're buying $200 worth of food anyway, a $100 food voucher is the same as $100 in cash, because you use the food voucher for food and use the $100 you would have spent on food to buy whatever you want.
Which means that vouchers require a voucher checking bureaucracy that spends resources doing something which is completely redundant in every case that it isn't actively harmful.
It's far more efficient to just give people cash and let them figure it out for themselves.
Fulfillment is not all about the money and what you can buy with it. It's about feeling that your'e serving some purpose, and there's value to what you do.
I would emphasize that money solves all problems measured in money, but humans care about things not measured in money. So faced with a janitorial job making minimum wage $13/hr or a volunteer gig that can only afford a $3/hr stipend, it lets the person take the job that pays more in ways not necessarily measured in money -- it some evolved enlightened form of capitalism that frees us from the serfdom of capitalism itself or some such aggrandization nonsense.
But we've been dreaming about the cultured and creative paradise that only a life formed solely on the unlocked potential of leisure could afford since the dawn of the industrial age, so shrug Maaaaybe this time is different...
You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.
How is this feeling "you're serving a purpose" and that "there's value in what you do" as per my parent comment? Again, a job is about much more than the money, and "not starving to death".
But your labor is worth only $3/hour. The only way to change that is for the person to improve their skillset, but if that was practical in a given case then it would happen regardless.
So your labor is not worth $3/hour, it's worth $3/hour in this market. The approach I think would be better for everyone is designing the market so that your labor holds some value.
Sure, but the issue is the relative difference between what your labor is worth and what your costs are. Automation reduces unskilled wages, meanwhile the worker's costs for necessities like housing have if anything gone up over time.
You could try to fix this by artificially raising wages for unskilled workers, but that's counterproductive. Increasing costs will increase prices workers pay when they buy things or drive people to substitute with alternatives that cause workers to lose their jobs. Exactly the opposite of the desired result.
What you really want is to reduce the cost of necessities so the wages they actually earn will go further. Doing so using government subsidies brings us right back to a UBI, and you seem to want something else.
The something else is basically changing the laws around housing and medicine to increase competition and drive down prices. Doing that is a good idea but good luck with that. The incumbents have a ton of lobbyists and a vested interest in staying fat.
So, when do we start talking about practical solutions?
Thousands of people have skills that are not worth enough, these days, to support the lifestyle they are used to. That's the problem here.
And the demand for labor at $3/hour is huge. People making even $40K/year would stop doing their own laundry or washing their own cars if they could hire someone to do it for that price. Good luck convincing anyone to work for $1/hour when everyone else is paying more.
Moreover, even if someone could only get a job for $1/hour, what is that supposed to change? Then they get a job at $1/hour + UBI, they don't starve, and the second someone offers $2/hour they trade up. Or they decide that their time is worth more than that to themselves and spend it volunteering to gain experience or going to school or whatever. Which one of these is supposed to be a problem?
I wonder why this is not a well received idea?
Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are.
Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.
Also, they don't need to keep up any self-denial that well-paying jobs will magically return for coal-mining or buggy-whip manufacture.
I'd rather put my money on the people trying to build solutions rather than more problems. Sure, it seems like the actual silicon valley location is mostly making solutions for problems that it created, these days. But there's plenty of tech outside of California.
And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.
You think if the majority of people in this country continue to experience a declining quality of life, there won't be riots in the streets?
This method of shifting blame from economic issues to social issues won't work forever.
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?
It seems like you're the one shifting blame, onto people who have no power to change the situation. How about taking a look at DC, Virginia, and NYC, where the real power is?
Nah, it's easier to complain, stoke divisions, and take potshots at people slightly higher up the ladder than you. Classic crab bucket mentality.
Uh, SV is an area with a concentration of power, money, and influence as well. Think of the incredibly influential power a company like Google could have on a democracy. Think of how they are trying to shape popular culture to suit their needs. If you don't think it is powerful, then spend some time in rural Arkansas and see what a stark contrast there is.
If inequality triggers a war, then it will be a war against the rich. It wouldn't be a matter of creating change, it would be about getting screwed by the rich so they can make more money off of us.
I guess, but I'll keep focusing on institutions that "are having" serious impact, and that "are successfully shaping" those discourses for now. The stark differences that I see across the nation are more a product of those than any young, nascent, 21st-century forces.
You don't think that's power?
So why are they blamed for it?
couldn't help but notice the irony of using the 1700's in the above example.
1776 was a rebellion of bankers, wealthy landowners, merchants, and industrialists, against relatively minor tax hikes and slight imposition of oversight on long-neglected possessions...
Many of the heads in the basket will be our own.
Sure they do -- there's plenty of homeless people in the suburbs these days, it's just a different interaction.
It's homeless people standing on the sides of freeway offramps and stripmall driveways, dying in front of them on the grassy lawn road medians. It's handing change to a homeless person in the stormwater road ditch while you wait at a red light.
You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities.
I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx-drug-lair-cleaned-...
If I don't have to work, sign me up.
My comment was responding to that sentiment.
In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.
Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian.
I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless.
The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling:
- Radically extending the human life span
- Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general.
- Colonizing the Moon and Mars
- Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient.
- Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit.
- Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment.
Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people.
... and so on.
Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work.
Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed.
"When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ."
Edit:
I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.
I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend about "what's the worst ideology you can possibly imagine" and it kind of resembles what I came up with but (mostly) minus the theocracy (I pictured a pomo professor, a Christian Reconstructionist, and a fascist hashing out a synthesis). In some respects it's worse-- its obnoxious meme aesthetic is far trashier than anything I would have ever imagined. No dystopian writer could have come up with a fever dream as hideous as the collision of 4chan and Stormfront.
Maybe you have to hit bottom before things can bounce back. I have a tough time imagining anything worse than this, but I'm sure people will try.
Not to be pedantic, but those are _illiberal_ ideas. You're conflating liberals and the left, which was mostly fine when they were in a coalition for a while. But if you're talking about identity politics et al, you're very specifically describing things that are almost definitionally illiberal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
Effectively, the governments at the time (USA), figured it was cheaper to ghettoize poor, sick, and others whom cannot support themselves. Wall them off, and keep them out of society. Out of sight, out of mind.
This literally is the thoughts of the Right-Wing. Ive seen that justification here, on HN. Why bother with the poor? They have no money! Better to keep them 'away', as 'We' are better. Of course, right now we have White-Nationalists beating on their drums. But the real war here is against the poor. Black people are.. disdained by the Conservative elite because they are primarily low income (by way of discrimination, but thats aside the point!). Ideally, all poor trash should be taken out, white, black, asian, native - you name it. No money = no livelihood = no choice = no living.
EDIT: Seriously? -1's? Am I wrong? I would love to see the conservative plans to boost people from poverty, medical maladies, and systemic discrimination. So far, what I see are attacks on any programs trying to assist with poverty, medical, and discrimination. And these attacks are done by the "ruling party", Republicans, with their base plans being as such.
This article is a great internal view of how Republicans support white supremacy values. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
> The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: …
There must be some way to get people to work on all this without dangling homelessness and starvation constantly over their heads. Can’t we have a basic income to at least take care of the basics, and still motivate people to participate in these projects using some carrots like a) desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself, or even b) consumerism?
> Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general
There's been waaay too many stories of how technology like this will only be available to the rich and privileged, furthering their already-sizable inherited wealth and privilege.
That's kinda the... not condescending, but dismissive?... attitude that the article is talking about.
We kinda need to find ways of how to just start having conversations about this stuff, let alone suggest how to avoid going down the dystopia route. Agree with your other comments that something like TNG couldn't even be written now -- look at how the new one is about an unprovoked war with a primal-looking warrior civilization. Yeah, we got interracial female leads, but the conversation being had is about nothing more than space sword fights with space explosions.
> The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species.
That part is well-said though. Cheers.
>There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true
No one says that you disingenuous weasel. Basic income is so that people can survive without being forced to hold a job. This is especially important for those that cannot hold a job - children, elderly, sick, disabled - or those that have lost jobs through automation, where there IS no more job to have.
> "put people to work"
Most people already work (95%+) and those that don't - children, elderly, sick, disabled - those people aren't ever joining your work programs. They make up a huge percentage of the total population and you just.. ignore them like they don't count. But i guess in your eyes 'work or starve' is better so there are no 'moral' issues, right?
> No one says that you disingenuous weasel
Is there any reason you're being so rude and hostile? It's very off-putting, distracts from your point, and is not in line with HN comment guidelines:
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names..."
I'm confused, what is the "95%+" then?
Today the proper collective response to depression is to double down. Economy failing? Double spending. Things look stagnant and bleak? Increase our ambition by at least an order of magnitude.
The problem is that we are thinking too small. A civilization of our scale should be thinking beyond the planet, beyond history, and beyond the current biological definition of human. Anything less is a waste of our effort.
> In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.
Too true. But that was Gibson's way of showing the "bad result" of society. There's plenty of places where scifi authors use constructs of absolutism to show very bad places policies go.
And if you think TV was the great pacifier, then just wait till VR and AR really take off. Live in a 15'x15' room and feels like a mansion.
> I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do.
No, basic income was a way to provide the basics of living plus a bit more, so everyone has the innate rights of: water, food, electricity, communication, lodging. To not have this covered for every human should be abhorrent. The converse to this is that some people just don't deserve food, or water, or shelter, or electricity, or communication. And especially with food/water/shelter, we see semi-significant efforts to try to stem those.
Solving lack of food is solved by... providing food. Same with water, but thankfully we don't see coin-op water fountains. We do have homeless shelters, but many have barriers for the people to use. Drug usage is rampant along with mental illnesses. And many a time they have oppressive "closing hours" so homeless cannot simply take any job.
A UBI would provide money in so that people could put it where they need it. Many a times, these are cashflow problems which can be solved by cash.
> (List of many non-UBI things that can be done)
Without the requisite resources for #1, it seems torturous to say you can lengthen life spans without the means to keep someone alive respectfully. This seems more like "Keep the rich living 2x-3x life span while the rest of us die in our 60's".
The extermination of mental illness is something I would heartily support. The only problems with those are well cited - you need permission from the very people whom you want to treat. And many times, their illness has them not give permission. This has been well discussed in the homeless/jail/mental health discussions on many places, including HN and Reddit.
But I believe that you have posted UBI as a "UBI -or- Multipoint plan". I disagree with the postulate of "A or B". Both can be done. With people freed from the monotony of tiring drugde-work, people could start working on the very societal things you mention. Not everyone will, of course. But that's the nature of freedom: people can and should be able to choose their destiny. Right now, that's bound by threat of hunger, lack of shelter, being divorced from social net, and poverty.
It only does that if a recipient decides to do nothing but sit on their ass. Otherwise, it provides the opportunity to explore things that one wouldn't have the time to do if they were spending most of their day laboring to afford food and housing.
"Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people."
Would they? Or would robots be doing most of that work?
"The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work."
Work how?
Regardless of wether I do nothing or go out and explore, it would mean I'm not essential. Working is not only about the money; is about finding a place in a community and having some sense of identity and purpose.
> Would they? Or would robots be doing most of that work?
Could be either, as necessary.
> Work how?
Work on the projects he listed
You never were. Neither am I.
"Working is not only about the money; is about finding a place in a community and having some sense of identity and purpose."
And now, since you're not forced to get a job to support yourself, you can go and find that identity and purpose with something you actually want to do, rather than something you must do to survive.
"Could be either, as necessary."
Doubtful. Most of those projects will largely be done by machines. So the jobs available will be small.
"Work on the projects he listed"
I mean work how, as in, most of the work on those projects won't be done by people. So how are most people going to work?
In much of the country, the number 1 job is truck driver. But we're working on driverless technology more and more, and eventually that will be phased out.
Uber isn't the reason Big Ag took over the family farm, and Google isn't the reason their daughter moved to Brooklyn and is now dating a girl.
But actually, I think the rural folk will be the first to adopt the "basic income" (scare quotes and all), because in a lot of ways, they're already doing it, just under a different name. SSDI, for example, is huge in rural West Virginia, whether you're disabled or no. Doctors there are in on it, as an act of compassion, because the work simply isn't there and there is no other safety net.
So, all middle America needs is appropriate framing. Call it the Real America Dividend instead of "basic income" and they'll line up for it.