Finland to end basic income trial after two years
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=basic%20income&sort=byDate&pre...
Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic overhead. An enormous cost saving in other words. To put this in perspective: many European countries spend almost as much on unemployment programs and related bureaucracy as they do on the actual benefits payed to the unemployed.
With a basic income you could abolish minimum wage, make labor cheaper for companies and less risky, make it easier for people to take multiple small jobs to supplement their basic income and reduce their risk, stop forcing people to retire or forcing them to work until they are allowed to retire (both are bad), make all forms of income insurance opt in (pensions, disability benefits, unemployment insurance), etc. It just simplifies things a lot.
The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular.
Another reason it is not happening any time soon is that rolling it out in a country such as Finland would be WAY more expensive than the current wealthfare models in Scandinavian countries as they stand now.
To roll it out for every citizen as a replacement to current wealthfare, the people who are currently receiving wealthfare will be receiving much less. To many, this would be unacceptable, as these families already are percieved to be struggling to make ends meet.
While I am still a big advocator for basic income in the developing world, I struggle to see how it would work in a country such as Denmark where I live. While I believe there are workarounds such as only providing basic income for the people who apply for it (still unconditional just opt-in instead of opt-out) there are no studies showing the effectiveness of the limitations that are necessary to make basic income feasible.
How do they afford it ?
The west is so obscenely rich compared to most of the developing world that there simply is no excuse for us to not be helping out.
Give Directly, for example, is a highly rated charity on givewell, that focuses on giving both conditional and unconditional cash transfers to parts of the developing world.
Someone who has angst that is so extreme, they cannot leave their house without having a panic attack, is not out of a job because of a lack of incentive. I promise you, that person would prefer working a normal job if that were an option.
A mother of 3 young children is not on wealthfare because she has no incentive to work. she doesn't have a job because raising three young children and managing a house is fulltime work.
While it's still terrible that a huge amount of people are terribly disincentivized to work in the current system, the people who need the most care, are also the ones who would not be working after basic income either. These people would be receiving less than a living wage with no way of working afterwards either.
it is simply untrue to say that perverse incentives are the universal reason people don't have a job. We barely know if it is a reason as it stands right now.
There have been minimal trials in the west on basic income, and none of them have been here for long enough to measure anything meaningful.
And partly because it's not clear a basic income is actually better in practice. It's a huge change to how society operates, so it's hard to predict what effects it will have. I think a conservative approach that starts with small trials makes more sense than dismantling a large government bureaucracy that employs lots of people.
Maybe universal basic income is one of those things where, to escape the local optimum and reach a global optimum, you have to start from scratch and go all in.
Edit: And with airplanes, or almost any engineering artifact, you start with a proof of concept and then build from there. We didn't go from container ships to cargo planes, we went from the idea that a person could fly to a very brief flight in a barely airworthy "airplane" that is nothing like a modern plane.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-ben...
If someone is disabled and never had a good career going, additional disability insurance is not an option for them.
But based on the numbers you cite, the UK has about 66M inhabitants. So 167 billion/ 66 million, is about 210 per month per capita. Not great to live on of course but it's a start. And this is absolutely everybody counting babies, children, the elderly, etc covered.
I quickly googled some numbers https://fullfact.org/economy/welfare-budget/ that are loosely aligned with what you cited with a little more detail. Based on their number of 217 billion, you get to about 273/month. That's a little under what wellfare gets you per month (https://www.gov.uk/income-support/what-youll-get).
Interestingly that 217 billion includes only 2.4 billion as unemployment benefits as opposed to a category of 'other' that is listed as 14.5 billion or 18 pounds per month per capita spent on what I assume is bureaucracy. That 217 excludes NHS, which is another 110 or so billion; or about 138 per month. Since that basically already takes care of healthcare for everyone; no need to change that.
You get where I'm going with this. if you start doing back of the envelope math like this, stuff starts adding up towards an admittedly lowish basic income for everybody being feasible at the cost of 23% of GDP. It gets better if you take into account that some people live together (aka. families) and can pool resources. It gets even more interesting when you start looking at the tax situation. Income tax + social insurance fees don't quite add up but can be supplemented by VAT, corporate taxes, and other fees. Arguably, if you make labor cheaper, you could raise the corporate taxes a bit. Also, people that work still pay taxes over what they earn extra. There are a lot of people that are not working at all right now that might work a little bit if it earned them some extra.
So, it's not a zero sum game and there are lots of financial knobs to fiddle with here of course.
That isn't true though. The "universal" part makes it completely different. The only reason we are talking about basic income is because of major shifts in the workforce. It is about a new alternative to jobs if automation supposedly takes them all away. This is different to the current system, which is designed for a small subset of people who do not have the ability to work.
Disrupting bureaucracy means also higher unemployment, because that means, that those people have either to find another job or the will live on welfare as well.
Remember, “welfare” means “health, happiness and good fortune”. Yet “living on welfare” has somehow come to mean being unable to afford shelter, food and decent access to society.
If you aren't faring well on it, it's not really “welfare”.
But I take your point and this is why I pointed out that dismantling this will be highly disruptive and unpopular. Ironically, the problem is bigger in countries that are more likely to otherwise be in favor of a form of basic income. I.e. countries with extensive existing social security systems.
Don't oil-rich countries like Kuwait, Brunei and Saudi Arabia have basic income?
Do you have any programs like the EITC, where benefits fall on a curve and slowly phase out as you make more, so there's no hard cliff?
Wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
Graph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earned_IncomeTaxCreditW...
And yet, talk to any Scandinavian, and you get the same cynical comments about sub optimal government behavior...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43866700
Study: https://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Finland-2018-OECD-economic-...
Eventually, these people will somehow have to disappear. This means there will also be less demand for the robots to make things. This would then end with a small population with robots occupying the planet.
Welfare is essentially a way to kill a human's soul. If the choice is to go out slowly like this, then I would say "it is better to die on your feet, then live on your knees".
As for their eventual disappearance, they'll be neglected, but they won't be slaughtered -- if nothing else, that doesn't look good for the cameras. And if war breaks out in Elbonia between its "necessary" and its "unnecessary", Elbonia's enemies will probably provide military aid to the "unnecessary". It's worth remembering here that America lost in Vietnam.
That said, I think a lot of the support for basic income around here is connected to the demise of academia as a viable career track. Personally, I'd like UBI, but mostly because I'd use it to free up 40 hours a week (plus my commute, time outside of work invested in a career) for research in fields I'm interested in.
For whatever the people who provide the money need.
>There are already plenty of "necessary" people who consume the cultural output of the "unnecessary".
I don't think the corporations/governments will just have a few hundred million people around to add some culture to the place.
>It's worth remembering here that America lost in Vietnam.
Yes but the infrastructure of modern society is extremely fragile. The occupying force (the governments/corporations) already have control of it at the start of the war. The only reason we have so many people is due to this infrastructure. If it was a war where the population was not as fully industrialized, it would be different.
That is not to say the robot owners will win the war, but lots of people would die before then.
>Personally, I'd like UBI, but mostly because I'd use it to free up 40 hours a week (plus my commute, time outside of work invested in a career) for research in fields I'm interested in.
That is what people think they will do, but it is not what they will do. It is not the utopia that they think it will be because there are fundamentals about human nature that mean we don't really just sit around thinking up theories and playing guitar. The people on welfare now do not have that life. They are mostly depressed and subdued, which is the point of welfare.
Humans in general need things like self-determination, the feeling of being valued, the ability to maybe have hobbies that cost more than a basic income. Getting a job won't be easy to make more money, as there will not be many jobs.
We already have a sample population for this: retirees. Empirically, some people do need jobs, and some don't. I work with a guy who retired, couldn't stand it, and rejoined the workforce. On the other hand, my mother retired early to go into astrophysics.
I'm about to quit my job and work on improving my coding skills (and networking, and so on) until I get hired in tech. A few of my friends are doing the same. (Independently - I'd already decided to do this when they started telling me about their plans.) They seem to be doing better than they were before they quit.
Maybe that's a mistake, and I'll end up depressed and subdued if I'm not on someone's payroll. But I don't think so. I'm working a physically exhausting job with hours that aren't very compatible with having a life outside work - I don't think I have to worry about becoming more depressed and subdued.
> The people on welfare now do not have that life. They are mostly depressed and subdued, which is the point of welfare.
I think there are some important differences between welfare and UBI. If you're on welfare, it means you've failed at the grind - if you're on UBI, it might just mean you've opted out of it.
I don't know much about the welfare system, but I'd be surprised if it's possible for someone to live indefinitely on welfare alone. With UBI, that may end up being a possibility.
Another possibility with UBI is to use it to free up resources for investing in your future. I worked with a guy who was holding down three different jobs, working seven days a week, because that's what he had to do to make ends meet. Maybe he should just learn to code, but where's he going to find the time?