The colossal problem with universal basic income [video]
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2) Given the above point, the solution would seem to be a progressive tax on the wealthy. Unfortunately, this is very hard to make workable, as the wealthy have control of most of the wealth and power, and failing that, are the most mobile.
http://www.sfindicatorproject.org/indicators/view/146
([b] Ichiro Kawachi, 2000. Income Inequality and Health. In Social Epidemiology. Eds. Lisa Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 76-94.)
Similarly you could wrestle control out of the hands of the wealthy if you wanted to... it's just a question of what will replace that and not make it worse, i.e. Venezuela.
Periods of widespread terror and destruction should be remembered forever. No one should want that as a price for anything.
There are many who opposed the war, and feel that the American public was sold a bill of goods and lied to. There are many that would rather all that never happened.
Well, that's the only way it works well for the wealthy, sure.
> When they fail to do this, it might not be pretty.
True, revolution against and liquidation of the elites and their hoards isn't pretty. Which is a good reason the wealthy ought to voluntarily, in their own enlightened self-interest, act to convince the rest of society that they are committed to voluntary, ongoing redistribution; institutionalizing UBI enthusiastically would be a way of doing that.
Historically, when it's done by force, it doesn't work so well for the rest of society in the long term, either.
The French Revolution seems to have worked out reasonably well in the long term; the short-to-intermediate term, perhaps not as much.
Because the system that's currently in place is quite different from what came just after the revolution. In any case, a period of such terror remains indelibly in history forever, as it should. No moral person should want to create another. As far as I can tell, only angry and embittered people want that.
Sure, just like no moral person wants war. (But yet some moral people find engaging in war preferable to the available alternatives in some circumstances.)
OTOH, the thing is no moral person wants (or wants to continue) the conditions of oppression that invariably precede such revolutions either. Sometimes the choice is between morally bad and morally worse, and one's perception of which is which depends very much which side of the palace gates one lives on.
> As far as I can tell, only angry and embittered people want that.
Which seems to be an argument against creating the conditions which generate that particular kind of angry and bitter people, out of either self-interest or the moral desire to avoid the results it produces.
Which is precisely why the wealthy need to be voluntarily building up society, such that the fabulous potential of the world in 2019 is available to everyone, in the form of a noble, everywoman/everyman life.
The current arrangement is already not pretty, unless you have the means to ignore the unpleasant parts.
There is something deeply wrong with advocating for redistribution in your own country when you could simply migrate to a country that has implemented the policy you desire.
In other words: perception of relative status. People who are happy in their jobs, have enough to pay the bills, who have personal dignity, and who get genuine delight from their everyman/everywoman pastimes have good perceptions of their relative status. When everyone is truly "middle class" in perception, society is healthy.
https://flowingdata.com/2018/02/08/how-different-income-grou...
Housing, health care, food, and transportation make up close to 75% of of all household spending. And it's an even higher percentage the lower your income level. And on average people in our lowest income brackets spend more money than make - so really it's like they spend 100% of their income on necessities and then borrow for things like the Internet, travel to their uncle's funeral, repairing their broken heater, and so on.
These are basic life functions, forget about an iPhone.
I don't think it's "hard" per se to change the tax structure to be less advantageous to the wealthy, but it does take organization, imagination, and some money.
For every $1,000 a representative received from corporations supporting net neutrality, like Google or Netflix, they were 24 percent more likely to vote for it. For every $1,000 from companies opposing it, they were 2.6 percent more likely to vote against. [1]
So (under this study), regardless of which side you assign to wealthy interests, politician attention is pretty cheap. Furthermore, votes are leverage here (if not a multiplier) and it's a simple fact that there are magnitudes fewer wealthy voters than non wealthy. This can help make up for a lack of press attention.
Long story short, I don't agree that UBI is unworkable any more than I believe that today's robber barons are untaxable.
1. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/04/how-much-does-a-politici...
I'm referring to the the body of research around the GINI coefficient. It's not absolute poverty which causes crime and social unrest. It's perception of relative status, particularly its effect on people's calculation of their viability in the mating market. If people are so far down on the hierarchy, they have no chance, that's when they upend the game board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
Long story short, I don't agree that UBI is unworkable any more than I believe that today's robber barons are untaxable.
I never said that UBI is unworkable and I never said that the wealthy are untaxable. We know historically the 2nd isn't the case for the US. My point is that 1) it's not directly addressing the underlying problem and that 2) it will be hard to tax away the wealth of the wealthy. We appear to disagree on 2) but not really. Historically, the wealthy either donate their wealth voluntarily (in the case of Scandinavian countries, the culture is such that the entire society volunteers through voting for policies) or they're killed and imprisoned. (In the historical case of the US, it takes an outside existential threat.)
So basically, you have to have some sort of change across the entire culture, either bloody or not.
Which I guess could be an issue although as we don't have UBI who knows how it'd play out.
It's not a way of perpetuating the current roles, it's a way of treating the consequences of current roles so that the consequences are more humane. Of course, one may argue that keeping the consequences horrific is more likely to motivate radical change, which is true, but IMHO not a good way to proceed.
A UBI funded by a tax on capital income and/or wealth could equally well be construed as enshrining the role of the public as owners, representing a rent charged on capitalists who are mere fee simple property owners by the people, who are the sovereign owners.
What sustainability is can be up for debate. But i've never seen of a version that would put more people back in jobs than automation will take away.
3:55 : 'We will get the government to print more money, to give it to workers'.
Either this is some very small thinking for 'Big Think' or you they are skipping over a lot of assumptions that should be stated explicitly.
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One 'Universal Basic Asset' idea i like is giving every person a yearly carbon credit that companies have to buy, instead of gifting it to the largest polluters.
The major problems I see with this, is inflation (adjust the monthly contributions to keep up with inflation), and for multiple kids $350/month will not be achievable for people of lower income.
That's a big assumption, and doesn't take into account the reduced spending power (cost inflation) during that time.
Cost inflation is assumed to be 3%, which is why the withdrawal rate is 4% (4% + 3% = 7%)
Anyway a 4% withdrawal rate is fine for 30 years (the duration of the trinity study) but a lower withdrawal rate (say, 3.25%) is needed for longer timespans like the 65-ish years of life expected of someone just graduating college, see this: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2016/12/07/the-ultimate-guide...
Instead of UBI, why not create a system where people can actually "live" without needing to create a whole system where the government ends up requiring people to pay into the system?
From the video: "We can't just give these people houses because they don't have jobs".
Yeah, because they don't just get "the house" they also have to pay property taxes, and for the utilities, and for everything else that is required, you know, actually live in the house.
Maybe this is overly simplistic, but it seems like you can do one of two things: prop "the system" up by continuing to require things like property taxes and the like, or find a way for people to be able to actually, you know, OWN their property and do whatever they want with it so that they could be completely self-sufficient.
EDIT: Actually, that seems to be something along the lines of what he is saying: "UBI perputates people as consumers but not as owners" (my paraphrase)
Living in the modern works necessarily involves the consumption of valuable resources. Space, power, water, food, goods, services. Providing those at no costs will lead to horrible inefficiencies and excessive use. You need to charge for them so that people can make rational choices and trade-offs between them and take responsibility for their decisions and preferences.
It could possibly help people from having 3-4 part time jobs just to make ends meet, but other problematic areas still exist.
Affordable housing, get people off the street / living in their cars.
Public medical care that doesn't require insurance or bankrupt you.
Higher education system that doesn't leave you with a life long debt.
Right now there are essentially three groups that can afford to innovate: Students, the wealthy, and the people the wealthy give money to (via VC money). (Note that I'm using "wealthy" broadly here, if you can not have income for 1-5 years, you're wealthy by these standards).
UBI is basically having faith in human race is natural innovators, funding for the creativity of the entire human race, instead of just a tiny subset of the population.
To address the straw man upfront: Capitalism of course incentivizes innovation as well, and just as important as UBI. These approaches can, and must co-exist, and in fact form the two sides of the innovation coin: Incentivize (capitalism) and enabled (UBI).
The counterarguments to this model are ridiculous, because they assume you have to throw out capitalism to get UBI. Where are you going to get that goop for the 3D printer? You pay people to mine it! Why in the world would you think that wouldn't work? If you give every human $100,000 a year (for example), you think no one is going to be willing to work to earn more money? Which human race have you been watching when you formed those beliefs? All those rich people who earned their first million and then stopped?
And while I see his point that it's funneling more money to the top, I think that's also missing the point that someone needs to pay for all this universal basic income...and that's probably the people at the top...
To me, "the" colossal big problem with UBI (if there is only one) is the probable hyperinflation and crash that happens as a result of redistributing many trillions of dollars without the creation of commensurate economic value. Guaranteed employment (where at least some economic value is getting created) is a less risky approach to accomplishing the same goal.
In my mind a UBI allows increased economic freedom. It especially benefits the people currently most in need of it.
That's not a bad thing.
Please.
It does this because UBI means giving people money, and then they buy the usual crap from the usual wealthy guys.
Have I got that right?
But the alternative, "give everybody a job", does the exact same thing.
So the "colossal problem" with UBI is that it does nothing to cure the evils of capitalism?
Ok. Well it does cure some other big evils.
I think Douglas's point is just hot air. Sorry.
Also, pedantic here but it's Koch, pronounced like "Coke", rather than Kock. :)
I mean there is always going to be money behind anything. It's largely how our society works.
You instead should ask yourself what end goal the money is being spent for.
Doubly pedantic but in the original German it is pronounced Kawcchh
I know there’s a lot of talk about AI putting people out of work, but it doesn’t actually seem to be happening yet. Automation has been putting people out of work for hundreds of years now, yet there are more jobs than ever. Ultimately maybe we’ll all live in a Star Trek future when ‘work’ is synonymous with ‘slavery’. We’re a very long way from anything like that, yet people talk a lot as though it’s already happening when it really isn’t.
https://www.youtube.com/user/bigthink/videos?view=0&sort=p&f...
OTOH, Rushkoff's objections are from a left perspective, and leftists in general seem to be coming out against it.
In the past some less-radical leftists have been for it (and one or two very atypical communists), but now that it is officially coded "tech-bro" I see leftists reiterating conservative arguments against minimum wage, except against UBI. It's odd.
Here's some MLK quotes on it from his book Where Do We Go From Here: https://medium.com/basic-income/mlk-on-guaranteed-income-bfd...
Normally UBI is considered to be sort of a truce between the left and the right. The left wants the UBI, and the right wants to get rid of government bureaucrats. The left gives up on the government bureaucrats ("gut social programs") and the right gives up on tossing out all forms of welfare.
Of course, both sides are motivated to break the truce. You just admitted that in fact, wanting to not "gut social programs". Enforcing the truce doesn't seem possible.
No, it's not, or at least not by most people who back UBI. There are people who back forms of it on the Left, and people who back forms of it on the Right, and, sure, it's conceivable that one way it might pass is an alliance between those two that involves some compromise, but it's just as plausible that it would get implemented, if at all, by a Right- or Left-leaning governing coalition in a compromise between UBI-favoring elements and others from the same side of the spectrum.
By whom? There is nothing outlandish about implementing UBI without gutting every other aspect of the social safety net, it's just that the interests against it want their pound of flesh in exchange for any increase in social services.
For instance, all of this could be paid for with a tiny portion of the US defense budget.
Yeah, that's pretty much standard communism ("collective ownership of the means of production"). The million dollar question, is "how do we go about doing this without setting up a fascist state?"
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
-- Benito Mussolini
That is anything but right wing.
Fundamentally, the left is about collectivism and the right is about individualism. The difference is whether you think the state is a provider or a parasite. It's about wanting the government to take care of you or get out of your way. It's about wanting the government to make everybody have equal stuff or an equal opportunity.
No, its not. That's pretty much the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is largely orthogonal to the left-right axis. Libertarian socialism is not only a thing, it's an older thing than modern, pro-capitalist right-libertarianism. (It's also older than Leninism.)
Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition. If so, you should qualify it as something like "UK right" or "UK left" or whatever.
Relative to the center in the US they are on the left and also, if not on the authoritarian side, at least not on the libertarian side either.
> and you don't think Rand Paul and Clarence Thomas are on the right.
Paul is, rhetorically at least, a right-libertarian. Thomas is a partisan Republican who is quiet enough on ideological issues that I wouldn't try to place him other than somewhere vaguely on the right.
> Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition.
No, actually, my degree is focussed on the US political space, not that it really matters (the US center is way to the right of the developed world, such that what is by broader standards a center-right faction has recently been dominant in the left-most of the two major parties, but that just affects position on that axis, not what the axes are; it's also true that US politics seems unidimensional due to the two party system, so all variations often get characterized as left-right even when they aren't and only weakly, if at all, correlate with left-right variation.)
I mean, what's the practical difference between owning 0.00000001% of the nation's productive assets versus getting paid 0.00000001% of GDP as UBI?
One aspect is that ownership might be alienable (i.e. you can sell that basic asset), but a system like that would be just a short-term bandaid since we'd expect that within a few decades we'd have millions of people who own nothing, and then we'd back to square one. But if it can't be sold, then ownership of productive assets is pretty much the same thing as getting dividends from those assets, and that is pretty much the same thing as unconditional income, perhaps with a slightly different calculation rules on how it changes year by year.
It is true that you can find conservative thinkers who have been in favor of UBI, but it is not a generally-conservative idea right now. The general conservative idea remains to try to "get government out of the way" of the economy and let the free market provide people with jobs. I don't see conservative sites talking about UBI in positive ways; I see it as a generally liberal idea where one of the arguments the liberals are using is that some conservative leaders have written about it positively in the past. (Which is a valid enough argument.) "Nobody" "knew" that certain conservative thinkers had written positively about UBI until it was picked up as a liberal, left-wing idea and somebody found those arguments.
(Note I am merely mentioning certain arguments, not making them.)
The Koch foundation has also been fairly vigorously anti-Trump: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/koch-broth... , including opposition to the immigration restrictions from certain mainly-Muslim contries, a relatively liberal perspective. Whether or not you consider some of the other mentioned positions "conservative" starts getting down into some weeds. (i.e. "Is Trump conservative, and is opposing Trump therefore anti-conservative?" is something you could write a lengthy essay on that would largely come down to "it depends on which definition of conservative you're using", and would really be more a springboard for examining the relevant definitions and how they differ.)
I'm not saying they aren't often in the position of opposing liberalism (which I think may be more accurate than "being conservative"... there are more than two sides to the world), but it's not 100%, either. It's more complicated.
Nor am I particularly defending them here, either. I'm not a huge fan either, just for different reasons than most people here. Again, going back to "there's more than two sides in the world".
I think that Douglas's argument addresses a strawman : UBI fails to fight the evils of capitalism.
Which is totally not the point of UBI. The point of UBI is to increase the efficiency of our economy and to improve the living conditions of our population, which results in all kinds of other improvements.
And I think that this is obvious.
So ya, I gotta raise my eyebrow at Douglas.
After doing a lot of reading and research, I'm not. I think people should be paid for the work they do, whether directly or indirectly.
I'm now much more in favor of things like social dividends: taxing profits of businesses and distributing it equally amongst the population, taxing estates at 90+% and distributing it equally amongst the population, etc.
Another idea I like is the social fund: it buys controlling shares in publicly-traded companies, forces them to issue dividends, then sends 10-20% of the dividends to the citizens, and spends the other 80-90% on buying more shares in other companies, with the net effect of socializing the profits of large companies.
Yes, most of these ideas would fall under some loose definition of "socialism." That said, it ties passive income to overall productivity, something that UBI doesn't do.
I agree with this.
Citizens are responsible for the defence of the state, in the most extreme case through conscription into the armed forces, which puts an obligation on the state to protect them. This and the realisation by the government that many citizens were not fit for such service, was one of the impetuses behind the consensus on the creation of the National health Service in the UK. Partly it was quid-pro-quo for the sacrifices ordinary people made, but partly it was just good national security policy to ensure the nation had a healthy labour and fighting force. This isn’t socialism, it’s just good governance.
So while I see a clear justification for a social dividend for citizens, I don’t necessarily see a UBI as a sensible form in which to express it. The form that dividend takes should take into account the form of the obligations of citizens to state and vice-versa. For me health care is an obvious one. The state has a clear interest in a healthy population, ready for work and capable of defending it. I plain don’t comprehend how US conservatism doesn’t see this, it’s been plainly obvious to European conservatives since WW2 or earlier, perhaps because we faced a more existential threat than the US did. Pensions and Medicare or it’s equivalent are also just good policy, who wants thousands of destitute old people dying on the streets.
Unemployment benefit and UBI are more arguable. Both are a form of social dividend, but could disincentivize work. I’m not an absolutist about this, I think it’s certainly true that people from time to time can find themselves unable to work or find a job and need a helping hand and I think that’s fine and reasonable, however people able to work have an obligation to do so. I worry that a lot of discussion about UBI leans towards freeing people from the need to work. I’m sorry, but someone needs to do those jobs. We’re a very long way from a Star Trek utopia where AI does all the hard labour.
Employment rates and open positions in the west are both pretty high. The global economy has gobbled up hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers without breaking step and wages in China have until recently been soaring. The current economic risks have nothing to do with AI taking our jobs. It may happen, but it isn’t really now and I don’t think it’s likely to for many decades to come. Automation has been stealing jobs for hundreds of years, yet somehow there’s more work than ever.
I'm personally more in favor of real social dividends: a public fund that owns stock in publicly-traded companies and returns some portion as a dividend, and some portion it reinvests into buying more stock. The idea being people are getting a dividend (like UBI) but it's based on overall productivity so there's a connection between working and the payout (obviously, the connection is a few steps removed, but it's there nonetheless).
Regarding democracy/ownership, I think it's somewhat debatable. We're told the government represents us, but how many of your interests are represented by the Democratic party? How many by the Republicans? I can safely say at most 10-15% of my interests are ever really taken into account in a two-party system. I'd say people who are incredibly wealthy have a much greater say in political outcomes than the general population. In essence, we are told we have ownership over the state, but in reality our ownership share is collectively small.
Big companies have much less influence over here though due to our stricter campaign finance laws.