Basic Income should provide fundamental living cost support in a society that has no jobs so there is no "but" in there.
Edit: Keep in mind we already have Basic Income it's just conditional. UBI is different.
Can I do a few hours work for this guy without losing my unemployment? Yes.
Can I employ this person for a few hours without having to pay them while on paternity leave to make sure their kid gets a good start to life? Yes.
UBI doesn't really make sense as a replacement for unemployment insurance, unless benefits are really high. If you replace UI with a poverty-support-level UBI, it makes unemployment a lot worse for anyone but the lowest-paid workers.
UBI might reduce the perceived need for public funding of additional unemployment benefits in extended downturns (though if the be benefit level is poverty-support-level, probably not that much; that's more of a support for middle-income dislocation.)
For means-tested programs, you can replace means-testing with unconditional benefits and appropriate progressive tax rate changes, and acheive exactly the same effects (modulo differences in definitions of income, but is there really a big benefit there?) while eliminating duplicate bureaucracy. Most UBI proponents don't prefer as rapid of a claw-back (which sometimes exceeds 100% in some ranges) as the aggregate of existing means-tested welfare programs, and would instead claw-back at a slower rate but extend the claw-back higher up the income distribution so that the drag is on the rich rather than the lower middle class, to improve upward mobility compared to existing means-tested welfare, but if you wanted to optimize only for bureaucratic efficiency without moving the claw-back higher up the income distribution and keeping it below a 100% marginal rate to eliminate perverse incentives, you could do that with UBI and tax changes, too, and still have a (smaller) net win.
The point is not simply to give people more money (though in some countries that might not be a bad idea), but to ensure that they don't lose that money if their situation changes. Often it's more attractive to remain completely unemployed than to work part time at minimum wage. With UBI, every bit of paid work you do, leaves you better off financially. It removed disincentives to work, because working people get it too. The costs of UBI are easily balanced with taxes. And because you don't have to qualify for it, you can save a lot on bureaucracy; it leaves people at the bottom of the economic ladder with a lot more freedom in their lives.
I have no idea whether that's enough to make up the difference.
If we picture a dystopian future where due to the rise of automation, increases in population, lack of education and ability, ~90% of people cannot realistically work in a productive jobs, I think it's a good time to experiment now what and how to keep all these people busy, preoccupied, and happy.
So I am all for these experiments but judging them based on whether people stay jobless is missing the point of UBI in such a fundamental way it's hard to understate that.
So if we're talking about material post-scarcity, land is more than plentiful.
So yes, it is and it isn't. The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities, given the elimination of any cost constraints.
Do they get a choice? I want to live in Disneyland, but there's sadly a distinct lack of real estate available.
What matters is, how scarce are the necessities of a moderately-comfortable life? I would posit that people who live in cities do just fine. If some people want more space, well, you can still work for it. Not all jobs are going to disappear.
If the acquisition cost is >0, it is scarce in practice as well as theory.
Land in these places can be something like $500/acre. That's not zero, but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.
...and thus economically scarce...
> but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.
It's very cheap. But very cheap things are still scarce. Something that isn't scarce has no price and everyone (even the poorest of the poor) who wants any quantity of it will have as much as they want without sacrificing anything.
Land in the places you describe is cheap. The price may even seem negligible to people in the upper middle class in the developed world. It's very much still scarce.
The difference between scarce and not scarce is not a matter of price, it's a fundamental difference of kind.
I suppose lots of people enjoy owning their own land-- large tracts of it in fact, and not sharing it with anyone. That's a little tougher to conceptualize as post-scarcity as there's a limit to making land enjoyment more efficient with advanced technology. But in a world where other resources are less scarce perhaps we can think about colonizing other planets and terraforming as ways to increase supply.
If we increase land use efficiency dramatically, that effectively raises the carrying capacity and population growth can continue much longer
I don't think the volume of land will ever be an issue for humans, but I think that land will never be equally valued.
If we draw even to Hitchiker's Guide's concept of built planets, and we considered the cost of making planets would eventually trend to zero... there is still the concept of locality that would influence price.
There's lots of factors that go into the value of land. Available amenities, jobs, being near other people, quality of schools and other resources, transportation, etc. But those all seem to boil down to scarce resources being pooled in one area. If you could mass produce amenities, buildings, school supplies, etc, then NYC wouldn't have any inherent value, because its equal would exist everyone someone cared to plop one down where there was enough demand to fill it with people.
I think there's a bit of innate petty jealousy in human beings so land value differentials will always exist.
But, that angle is pretty thin, so maybe I'm just stretching the argument at this point. Quite interesting to ponder!
Also - money is no longer representative of a thing you can hold. Money is a share of wealth of a nation, which includes trust, culture, people, land and buildings.
I'll take scarcity, thank you.
It's weird and uncomfortable how tragedy sometimes leads to very good things. Similarly in the opposite direction, automation should have been a good thing yet it leads to unemployment and poverty.
It seems like to him it's more a convenient excuse to kill lots of people.
Most of the work people do today doesn't really need to be done, but we force people to do it anyway for various reasons. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (there's also a pretty decent free ebook on the subject by the author)
There's a virtually endless amount of unskilled work that could be done to improve the environment and people's lives.
As soon as you tie the payment to a certain type of task, you have to enforce a standard of time/quality.
20 hours a week is just my suggestion as a minimum that would allow for people to still job search if they choose to and could be averaged over a quarter or year or similar. Exceptions would be for those who would traditionally be on Medicare. Note: I think if UBI were implemented that Medicare and a lot of other programs should be replaced by it.
Medicare is a program that solely exists for the retired who over 65 and disabled people.
Medicaid, on the other hand, is available to those who live in states that accepted federal funding via the ACA and are within a certain percentage of the federal poverty line.
Those who don't qualify for Medicaid, but are under a certain income level, have their health insurance premiums subsidized via the ACA.
If you plan on eliminating Medicaid, you'll need to acknowledge the fact that even people who earn many multiples of the federal poverty level are still eligible for subsidized health insurance due to burden of costs. If people who are not poor by federal standards need to have their health insurance costs subsidized, that means people whose income is derived from UBI-esque make-work programs will have a hard time affording health insurance if they're considered eligible for Medicaid, but it was eliminated.
This is why many proponents see UBI as an adjunct, not a replacement, for existing programs.
Similarly, I think socialized insurance programs should also fold in VA medical benefits, medicaid and other subsidized programs under a single umbrella. I'm not a fan of bureaucracy. That said, the post you replied to mentions no such thing.
https://medium.com/s/free-money/guaranteed-minimum-agricultu...
(I use agriculture as the catchy example because almost every community could use some amount of it, but it goes well beyond that)
The problem is that I've heard many proponents of UBI sell it as exactly that, a way for people to get better jobs. And I can't really blame them, framing UBI as a way to make unemployment more comfortable is not going to be very successfully politically.
Not least because in developed countries alternative redistribution systems exist to make unemployment more comfortable (much more comfortable than UBI, potentially, since fewer people will be net recipients), but on the assumption that people will actually take a job if offered it. Arguing it's worth redistributing funds from those who need or want to work to those who prefer leisure is a much harder sell...
I generally align with your view, but I'm not convinced our definition is more "correct" than others. It would be nice to get the terminology straightened out.
The big fail is that the proposed way of giving it is the no "strings attached" method. A total waste of resources. If people get so lost, that they can't provide for themselves; how is money going to solve the situation? It can't and it won't. A societal characteristic is that their will always be levels. People that are taken care of are always at the lower level. UBI will only keep people at the lower rungs of society.
If UBI is ever going to be a reality it needs to come with guidance that helps people get out of the hole they are in.
The idea of a future with no jobs is silly. It will only come to be if that's what we make it. A job can be anything. I go out and I see ads for a local Palm reader. A BS job if there was ever any. But yet, it's been a business for at least 20 yrs. Don't tell me that people can't be creative and create jobs but without any force or guidance to help people out of the problem there will never be a solution.
I will go as far as saying that a future with a widespread no strings attached UBI will cause a future with no jobs.
> UBI encourages people to find work. Many current welfare programs take away benefits when recipients find work, sometimes leaving them financially worse off than before they were employed. UBI is for all adults, regardless of employment status, so recipients are free to seek additional income, which most everyone does.
Not increasing employment contradicts this claimed benefit.
https://www.yang2020.com/blog/ubi_faqs/benefits-universal-ba...
introduce basic income and people will make themselves useful.
you severely underestimate the psychological desire to be useful and live a fulfilling life.
the evidence is there - it's ideological convictions that prevent you from seeing and accepting it.
And yet the US has full employment.
Could it be that Finland lacks jobs for some reason other than technology?
The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?
All ages LFPR are probably low because the Baby Boomers are retiring and Millenials are still in college.
* Citation needed.
Here's the Fed saying we are:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan/feds-kapla...
Just like the cost of living index, Politicians often use misleading techniques to calculate "employment rate"
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
At 79.9, it's not quite record high employment, but it's close.
My point is that saying "people are happy but jobless" is missing the point of UBI.
UBI at this point is more an experimental pilot project to see what it does to people not to actually figure out how to pay for it which is another discussion also.
What it's not a pilot project for is to see if people get jobs as it's a proposed solution for a jobsless future for most.
At the other end we get better at making ever more stuff with less labour. That widget factory that used to employ 1000 people 50 years ago, now employs 10 for the same output. Now from a stuff buying point of view that's good, your products are cheaper so people can buy more. But what happens at the extreme. 0 employees in a factory? If everyone does that there aren't any employees to buy the stuff you've made.
Both of these trends are happening, both are unsustainable, sooner or later we are going to have to address them.
The US has “full employment” only under a definition of “full employment” that allows significant involuntary under- and un-employment to exist while still applying the label.
UBI is based on the assumption there will be no jobs because no one can deliver better value than technology rather than just a small job market. We already have the other Conditional Basic Income which is probably optimal as long as there is a solid jobmarket.
No, it is not. UBI, under a variety of names, is an idea much older than, and not at all dependent on, the idea of a situation where there are no jobs.