Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.
UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing.
Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration.
Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.
Doesn't it though? You create a floor, so that anyone with a miserable job can say "screw you" and quit and go start their own business without having to worry about how they're going to make rent before the new business starts making money, and you get a lot more competition. More smaller companies instead of fewer bigger companies. And the big companies would have to pay more to get some people to not do that, so you get less inequality.
How isn't that solving the problem?
$1k/month worth of UBI wouldn't even cover average rent for a single person in any of the ~20 most populated cities in the US.
$1k/month doesn't quite even cover the cost of child daycare for a single child, in most of the US.
$1k/month of UBI is barely even ~50% of the current minimum wage in much of the US (a minimum wage that currently is so low, that it doesn't even cover bare-minimum cost of living either). The UBI is so low, it doesn't even give people the freedom to leave the lowest-paying legal job a typical person could have.
$1k/month doesn't cover average rent in the most populated cities because the most populated cities have the highest rents and its purpose is not to make you average, it's to provide a floor. Supplying enough for the lowest rent in the lowest cost of living place is sufficient for that, and if you want more you can go get a job or find some other way to make money -- which the UBI continues to supplement, so it doesn't even have to pay very much.
It's not supposed to make it so you can live a happy life for a hundred years without ever working. It's just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table, and give you a lot more runway when you're trying to start a new business.
My point is that $1k/month does not do this. Hell, minimum wage is approximately 1.5x to 2x greater than UBI (depending on the area), and even it does not quite take "starving and freezing to death" off the table.
"Working Homelessness" is a thing - https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel... and https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless...
No, what you get is more and more people who will say „srew you, why should I go and do stuff when I get money for doing f* all”. The people here on HN and those millionaires / billionaires are an outlier. An average shop clerk, security warden will not go and start their own business after saying „screw you”.
I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.
Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes), that will only give an equivalent of a minimum wage to everyone (ok 20% above national minimum wage but some states have it higher)... how far does that get you?
You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month, to say nothing of arrangements that involve roommates or shared facilities or couples who would then have a second UBI.
> I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.
You're forgetting the possibility for supplemental income. Combine the UBI with a part time job and you could live just outside of New York City and spend the other half of your time on the business for as long as it takes until it makes enough for you to quit the part time job.
There is also a whole lot of work that really doesn't care about location at all. You can do software development in Kansas if you want to, as well as anything else that involves selling your product over the internet.
> Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes)
The marginal rate isn't what causes revolts, it's the effective rate. Middle class people don't care about paying $12,000 in tax if they also get a $12,000 UBI. Upper middle class people aren't going to revolt over a difference between the two of an amount similar to what they pay already for the existing welfare system we would no longer need.
And the whole point of using VAT is that billionaires and international corporations can't avoid it.
... because there is currently no program in Austin whereby residents each get $1,000 of free money month.
Providing a "cash injection" doesn't require the UBI. It only requires taxing the rich. But the rich - yes, they mostly CAN actually leave the country to escape taxation, and operate from elsewhere, they can move their assets - increasingly virtual such as intellectual properly - onto offshore entities too... So there's really no option of taxing the rich.
Wrong. UBI financed by monopoly taxes makes rents go rock bottom. High uncompeted markup prices - Rents - are by definition caused by some kind of monopoly situation, because they are not competed away. You need to tax monopolies and not call it tax but a 'privilege fee' and reinvest the money into infrastructure or resistribute as dividends - which is UBI basically.
There is NO WAY anything like UBI would ever work without curbing monopoly pricing because any money raised by income tax, VAT or any other means freely given to people will end up rising up rents and monopoly prices even higher.
Probably better to just get rid of the monopolies, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions on density so that housing supply can respond to demand.
Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you?
I agree with you that money is power, but you are not going to stop the existence of Billionaires and Trillionaires. That would need to be a coordinated global effort.
Can you explain this, as this doesn’t appear to be backed up by IRS stats on effective rates & total revenue.
1. Are taxed at a much lower rate, and,
2. Are only taxed when the gains are "realized," e.g. when you sell at a profit.
As a result, if you have a large amount of wealth, your net worth can increase dramatically while being untaxed (if you don't sell) or taxed very low (if you sell some percentage of the gains — and only the sold percentage gets taxed, the rest doesn't). Depending on your investment strategy you can also play games with taxes, e.g. when rebalancing your portfolio, try to mostly sell your shares that have lost value, so that you put a loss on the books rather than a gain and are thus untaxed (or even get tax credits).
That's why Warren Buffett talks about paying less in taxes than his secretary.
The only way wealth can increase (in a usuable liquid form at least) is through income, which is already taxed.
If I eat beans and rice for 10 years to help save for a awesome retirement, I should be able to save that money.
Where are you getting this information? From what I can find, the top 20% of Americans pay 87% of income taxes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87...
Why stop at 20%? Map peoples’ wealth on a normal curve and then look at which parts of the curve pay the bulk of income tax. Saying the top 20% of income earners pay 87% of income taxes says very little, actually, about who, exactly is paying the bulk of income tax relative to wealth. I mean probably most people on hacker news are in the top 20% income earners in the US for crying out loud. Are most of us wealthy? Not relative to how much wealth is out there.
Income tax is collected as a percentage of people's income, I'm not sure why you're referencing wealth here. And judging tax as a percentage of wealth is not a very sound approach:
* You have someone that makes $50,000 and has lived frugally and saved up $500,000 over the span of decades.
* You have someone that makes $250,000 a year and spends nearly all of their money as they earn it, and so only has $50,000 saved.
The former will pay $4,342 in federal income taxes (filing as single) and thus pay under 1% of their wealth in income taxes. The latter will pay $58,424 in federal income tax and thus pay over 100% of their wealth in income taxes. Am I to understand that this situation is unfair because the former is paying a smaller percentage of their wealth as compared to the latter, and that the former should be paying more than the latter?
Judging taxes as a function of people's wealth is not a sound approach because people's wealth has much more to do with their financial decisions than their income. Why should frugal people who save more be taxed more heavily than someone who makes as much (or even more) but spends their money?
This portion of your comment seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of income vs. assets:
> ...they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.
Property (in other words, the assets people own minus their debt) is wealth. Talking about how the source of wealth is derived from property is nonsensical - wealth and property are two words for the same thing: net assets.
Income is the delta of people's wealth. If you have an annual income of $X then your wealth is increasing by at most $X each year. Gains from increased value of assets (capital gains) are another source of wealth. These are taxed, too, but at the time that the assets are sold rather than immediately. Inheritance is another source of wealth and that is taxed as well.
Income is taxed because income, not property, is the source of people's wealth. It's valid to think of "income" as short for "incoming property".
Sure, and that's why we need a mechanism to redistribute that wealth... like a UBI.
> a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay.
Yang proposes to exempt basic goods from the VAT, but more importantly, the central appeal of a VAT is that tax evasion is made more difficult!
A VAT naturally creates an audit trail of both parties in every transaction where value is added. If one party is incentivized to report, for example via a tax credit for the end consumer, then everyone else in the chain of crediting is incentivized to do so also.
If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.
The thing about VAT is that it is multilateral, and applies to many types of business-to-business transactions as well to business-to-consumer, so all the suppliers in the chain pay their share, not only the consumer.
And, given by pure numbers, the value provided by VAT paid by business is pretty significant. In some implementations (such as my country one), business share of VAT can not be less than final consumer's VAT, because consumer has paid VAT only once, while any producing business, was paying VAT for any transaction by any supplier.
The argument about aligning VAT against the poor, is that, given corrupt government being in power, some business can easily avoid paying VAT, or pay only small percentage of it.
This was (and, to some extent, still is) the case in my country (Ukraine), due to existence of so-called "VAT Refunds" scheme, which allowed many oligarchs to concentrate big amounts of value during 90s-00s. The scheme is easy as using non-market practices such as paying less VAT than their competitors, and being not punished then due to law loopholes passed by cronies in the state legislation.
The new governments, after 2014 Maidan revolution, being pressured by country's civil community, and also the international community, have started to remove many types of "VAT Refunds" scheme loopholes. That's why many oligarchs already went bust, and many are going to, just because their enterprises are now required to pay their share of VAT, and can not survive competition in changed reality.
So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.
> So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.
This kind of kills the VAT being feasible here in the US. We have crazy amounts of lobbying and legal loopholes and while the US gvt is powerful, that's somewhat antithetical to the founding ideals of that.
A flat value added tax is regressive, but a VAT itself is not inherently regressive. Imagine if we have a VAT on yachts and nothing else, does that disproportionately affect the rich or the poor?
That's why Yang is proposing to exempt basic goods and raise the rate on some luxury items.
Even under a flat 10% VAT paired with the UBI, you would only be worse off if you spend $120,000 yearly on items with a 100% pass through (the IMF's estimates on the average pass through under a VAT are much lower than this).
> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
You are going to need to specify a better alternative then. Again, a VAT has inherent properties that make it highly auditable and therefore easier to administer. A wealth tax, in comparison, is much more subject to misreporting because it relies on asset valuation.
> And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.
Do you want wealth redistribution or not?
Yang wants to give individuals legal ownership of their own data and control over how it is used, so I'm not so sure that most of those California billionaires are all that fond of him anyway.
It seems to me that many otherwise "normal" middle class people have one area, their hobby, where they own luxury products. That might be a sports car, a horse, a sailboat, ski trips, etc. Might a VAT tax on luxury goods make those products out of reach for the middle class?
While I can understand taxing a billionaire who buys luxury products in every area of their life, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for someone to have one area that they choose to focus their resources.
Nobody? They'll buy yachts abroad.
Sure you are. Joe Teach pays $5000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $5000/year is being transferred to him. Carlton Moneypenny pays $50,000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $40,000/year is being transferred away from him.
> much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium
But then you would collect more VAT at the same rate, which would fund a larger UBI. By the time that reaches steady state it's a wash.
On top of that, VAT is great for people who are in debt (i.e. the poor), because no more income tax means they can pay down their existing debt with money they would have otherwise lost to income tax.
> Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices.
The party who pays more of the tax is the party whose alternatives have gotten worse instead of better. For an individual, saving has just gotten more attractive relative to spending, so Amazon will have to keep the price of that stupid knickknack lower in order to get people to still buy it instead of banking the money and collecting interest on it to spend next year.
Meanwhile it's now the case that the tax applies to Amazon and not just their smaller, less international competitors, so Amazon would start losing business to them if they don't keep prices low by eating more of the tax.
> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
Not really. The primary problem is that shifting profits to other jurisdictions with lower taxes is easy to do and hard to prevent, and then there are no "profits" in the jurisdiction with the progressive tax, which turns the "progressive" tax into a massively regressive tax since the richest pay nothing.
The best way to fix it is to make everyone pay the same rate (so the rich can't avoid it) and then make it progressive by giving everyone a fixed refund (UBI), which gives you the effective rate curve a progressive income tax is supposed to have except that international corporations can't avoid it by declaring profits in Ireland.
It might not solve is but it's certainly a ding in the arc of the current status quo.
The problem with no floor is it creates fear. Lots of it. When you fear losing your job and/or your home your view of the world gets very narrow. Your options limited. Availability of opportunity and resources cause you to make bad decisions (e.g., blaming minority X or Y for your fate).
It's true UBI will not solve the power imbalance. But it can be a step in the direction of undermining the status quo.
It’s always puzzling to me when people equate wealth with evil. Why the unnecessary moralizing? Just say “concentrated wealth in the hands of the few has the potential to cause systemic societal harm”
No need to paint it as a battle of good vs evil, it severely diminishes the substance of your point.
But my point is that no tiny handful of people should be allowed to have that kind of power, whether they're evil or not.
A rather large chunk of billionaire's money is used to pay for a huge portion of the government (directly). Not to mention the amount of extra wealth in the world that (some of them) have created, which also turns into tax revenue.
I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
> I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.
Likewise, how is ubi regressive? What would a progressive solution to poverty be?
Arbitrarily set and legislated into oblivion means testing thresholds and the administrative overhead of checking in constantly plus the shame of assistance appears to be a serious problem. Similar happens with EITC which most people eligible for do not claim.
See also how awful state-run TANF has been in Mississippi. UBI nationwide could be thought of as taking back control of programs from states that have dismantled the nets already.
This is a tough issue that has a lot of dimensions of discussion that won’t be covered respectfully in an HN thread exactly for the gravity of the problem
Another effect to consider is where do all the staff go to get new jobs? Many will find the private sector exceptionally difficult to integrate into after decades in public benefits work.
Yang’s website says the plan will rely on poor people electing not to get other social safety net benefits. People will end up without healthcare and without food if there are not programs in place to address those problems specifically.
Creating systems which lower the costs of living (eg. public transit, below market public housing) benefit low income persons and aren't as easily erodible.
It is kind of right but essentially wrong. In any society with the size of more than hundreds of people, it always has a power structure, and always has a small number of people concentrate power way more than others. It is not a problem with super rich people. Even in all the Communist countries (Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.) where everyone is super poor and there is no millionaire, power structure and concentration of power still exists and is way more cruel than in a market-driven society.
Of course UBI doesn't solve this, because there is no way to solve this. Even if you nuke the modern world to stone age, power structure and concentration of power will 100% appear again and keep growing when you have a team, a tribe, a city, a nation.
Obviously power structures and concentration of power always exist in some form, but that doesn't mean we should never try to rein it in on occassion.
With current social support programs the government does get to choose who gets what. But with a UBI, every adult would get the same amount, effectively removing the government's ability to choose who gets benefits.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying, I don't know.
Many people add on the mistake of thinking they will belong to the class of enlightened despots. You haven't said enough for me to tell if you're one of those.
Money isn’t power. Power is power. If Putin became bankrupt tonight, he’d still be one of the most powerful people on earth tomorrow morning. Power is the capacity to have others do what you want, including handing you their money when you need it. Case in point: how many million-dollar lottery winners ended up having any nontrivial influence on their community or state? Nearly 0.
As you say, money helps. But there limits to what money can do.
Political power and capital are intertwined, but neither is above the other in a direct hierarchical relationship, because both can hold a gun to each other's head. So long as the state keeps the right to property, and it almost always will, capital has nothing to fear.
This defines pretty much every social system we ever had, unless you propose some sort of decentralized utopia, you need to trust power in the hands of a few. Money is just a vehicle of this particular system.
However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month. This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land. There are a few elders who would like to teach the young how to do so, but they are not interested. Nobody wants to do better and there is high resentment towards the federal government.
I've seen it in other places. When you are outside the balance of exchange with someone (or some organization), resentment breeds. I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers.
Economically, we would have to produce enough "extra" that a full, regular distribution of that wealth could continue to work with producers continuing to produce, and a growing collection of people who would lose all interest in contributing. We would have to have a way to deal with a dramatic rise in apathetic people. We would have to have a way to deal with producers just leaving the country.
In The Expanse, Earth has a UBI like thing. The whole planet. You get subsistence living, and if you want to be a producer, you start by doing menial work for a period of time to prove you are willing to work hard. It is also sci-fi for a reason :).
Again, I would love to free people from tyrannical employers and the fear and stress of not knowing what next month brings due to finances (I've lived that the majority of my life). I don't see how UBI can work.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...
Yang also discusses this in his book.
Please don't comment hyperbole if you're not able to support your thoughts with data.
Likewise.
That article is a highly anecdotal puff piece, focusing on a few exceptional inspirational stories from a single tribe. I could find all sorts of non-UBI rags-to-riches stories too.
AFAIK, despite no end of UBI pontification, no real study has even been done about existing native UBI (correct me please).
What we do know is that Native Americans consistently have 25% lower median income [1], double the poverty rate [2] [3], and nearly double the unemployment rate [4] of the rest of the United States.
Either UBI doesn't work, or it does work and without it Native Americans would be almost unbelievably terrible -- even compared to other historically oppressed groups (blacks, Irish, Japanese).
[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/2016-acs-shows-stubbornly-high-nati...
[2] https://theredroad.org/issues/native-american-poverty/
[3] https://census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-drop...
[4] https://thinkprogress.org/the-unemployment-rate-for-native-a...
Looking at a summary for some of that data, it's a very similar poverty rate in some parts, like Appalachian Kentucky[1] (25%) despite a relatively high rate of employment (compared to native Americans). I can't do a full breakdown from my phone, but I do wonder if there are other pieces of data about well-being that differ between working and non-working poor that are worth considering.
Though it's also hard to quantify what role racism might play in limiting opportunity for Native Americans, which would compound on the issues of being generally isolated from economic opportunities.
Their chosen highlights:
>Highlights >The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) has provided UBI averaging $6600 US (2015) dollars for a family of four since 1982.
>The PFD reduced the number of rural Alaska Indigenous people in poverty during 2011–2015 by 22%, down from 46% in 2000.
>The PFD reduced poverty among rural Alaska Indigenous seniors by more than 40%, to rates that are now relatively low.
>Child poverty rates have been increasing; however, the PFD reduced 2011–2015 rural Alaska Native child poverty rates by 25%.
>Errors in official statistics will cause them to understate the actual rise in poverty rates as future PFD amounts decline.
Note that the PFD amounts are about a quarter of what Yang suggests (assuming two parents; number of children is irrelevant to his plan).
The last line of the abstract is "Evidence has not appeared for commonly hypothesized potential adverse social and economic consequences of UBI."
I personally would be curious to know more about what kind of UBI-ish payments have been made, in what amounts, how it varies from group to group, and what are the differences in outcome. I imagine that a lot has to do with the actual amounts received and if there are conditions for receiving it (such as staying on the reservation) and what kind of restrictions might be in place for building up infrastructure or doing other economic activities in addition to surrounding oppressive attitudes. There would be a lot of interesting stuff that could be looked into.
There are other Native American owned casinos who give their tribe members payouts, but not all of them can. According to Partnership with Native Americans [2], fewer than 15% of Native American tribes operate prosperous casinos.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect... [1] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/ [2] http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=pw...
I would agree with a lot of the criticism of government should not target too closely etc, but those two programs seems pretty well run compared to the free market alternatives. At least when they are allowed to.
It's frequently the difference between someone being able to start and have a viable business or not. Remove that overhead and I think we'd see a flurry of activity and exploration that wasn't previously possible.
As wages have stagnated and been replaced through other incentives I kind of see ourselves entering a neo-feudalist society. We're not swearing oaths to our employers by any means, but we are being somewhat tied to the land, metaphorically. Healthcare is the lowest hanging fruit politically, but the unintended consequences of all non-monetary benefits should also be on the table.
Like companies building or compensating for housing. Pet insurance. Company doctors/clinics. Child care. All things we want and appreciate, and great to see in a benefits package, and fantastic that companies want to help people with those problems, but it's a bit disconcerting in the long run for the labor market and society if you think about how these things can potentially trap individuals. And how when companies pay for things instead of individuals and pricing gets hidden/warped how the market changes.
I support UBI, but a stepping stone easily could be:
Better support for freelancers/gig economy workers. Better support for self-employed w/ regards to welfare/health. Jobs guarantee. Single-payer health. Housing assistance, esp. in times of dire need (job transition). Free college education and retraining assistance (maybe gov't grants for dev bootcamps and similar programs).
UBI makes sense in that you get rid of a lot of bureacracy but I don't think we're politically ready just yet. I think after we get M4A and college as a 'right', then we will be a lot closer, plus a lot more genz and millenials will be voting and increasing the progressive voice in D.C.
Until there exists medicare/pharmacare/dentalcare/etc for all the big and wealthy entrenched corporations have a massive hiring and retention advantage over everyone else.
This sounds like a lot of tribal areas that don't have UBI.
Are you thinking of a specific study that establishes UBI as the cause of this behavior in this case, or are you guessing?
Criticism of indigenous folks without first acknowledging the real issues of genocide and disposession is problematic at best, racist at worst.
any and every discussion related to class on HN
> Just as you can find Silicon Valley techies who think Soylent is the only sustenance a person will ever need, intellectuals tend to think everyone could be as content as they would be living life in their heads or inventing their own destiny. Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics.
When I wrote this in 2017, the "intellectuals" I was thinking of was Sama specifically.
https://medium.com/s/free-money/after-universal-basic-income...
People need UBI because the purely survival backed capitalistic system harms society too greatly.
I like the idea of UBI, too. Taking that leap worries me, though, we might be in for a worse time because of it.
I definitely think we need to allow time for people's thinking to change, as well as to allow existing systems to adapt, and to respond to new issues as they come up. A brief look at Mao's Great Leap Forward should make anyone really cautious about making such sweeping changes immediately.
I think ideally what would happen is that there would be a planned gradation, where several things would slowly move from where they are now to the targets in sync, maybe changing every year. First year, UBI is $100 / month, minimum page is cut by about $0.75, taxes are adjusted accordingly. Second year, UBI is $200 / month, minimum wage cut again, and so on until UBI is the target "subsitence" value, where you can afford food and a roof over your head without working at all. At that point, minimum wage is done away with entirely.
The thing is, it will take time for people to re-adjust their expectations for how much a job is worth. If all my basic needs are taken care of by UBI, then maybe $1-2/hr is all I need to have a bit of extra spending money.
Ideally we would see more and larger randomized controlled trials, too, but that tends to strike people as unfair.
UBI will free throws labor force, and make it easier for labor to be more mobile and move to where the jobs are - the other key about UBI is everyone gets it, no matter if wealthy or poor.
Of course if you have anything above poverty level income, it gets snatched right back plus whole lot more though taxes to cover the other UBI recipients who don't. The "everybody gets UBI" rhetoric doesn't really fool anybody; money doesn't come out of thin air.
There are studies in other places that are more positive, but they probably aren't generalizable.
A big difference with a program where eligibility is based on citizenship is you could take it with you anywhere in the nation and probably the world. People willing to move should benefit greatly from this but the long-term effects seem hard to predict.
To be fair though, how much of that is due to the harsh winter conditions and long winter nights? A quick glance of the Google query "Alaska depressed winter" makes it look like it might be more of a weather/sun issue.
Also
>Alaska's alcohol mortality rate is three times the national average
http://www.newsminer.com/news/akrecovery/alaska-still-wrestl...
The need and requirement for a UBI is real. Private sector is simply never going to find a job for everyone who needs to survive. We offer no other way for people to survive. This isn’t a balance sheet calculation. It’s society saying “hey, we can’t just let our own people, as an individual of our society, have only one means of survival. That just creates too many pressures which lead to their suffering and exploitation.”
You're technically correct that unemployment will never be 0%.
But it's been < 4% for almost all of 2019.
Where does this strawperson come from? UBI has nothing to do with innovation.
I also don't think it will stifle innovation.
I don't understand why this word innovation is mixed with people on UBI.
You do talk about the active drug industry that has sprung up around UBI, so there's innovation there. But I'm not understanding what the claim is.
We are not bringing in UBI to help innovation for either people on it, which it obviously won't, or eco systems around it, which seems like would be a sum loss.
On the other hand, at the macro level (read: federal) there is risk. That is, elected officials will mistakenly see it as a replacement for opportunity; as a cure of institutional injustice. The native Americans got screwed. Their culture and pride destroyed. Simply tossing money at them isn't enough. But that's what we've done. We shouldn't be surprised.
the complacency angle is worth considering, but when I see how much money we waste to (for example) manufacture at least one part of a spaceship in every single US state, I wonder if we wouldn't come out ahead by just paying most of the people for doing nothing and then manufacturing the parts where it actually makes sense.
the main thing I fear is what it would do to rent. I don't understand enough about economics to know how much of a problem this is, but naively it seems like UBI would just shift rents upward in a tight housing market.
But in this case (Yang's Freedom Dividend), everyone gets it. Doesn't that essentially solve the issue?
http://priyadsouza.com/population-of-qatar-by-nationality-in...
It is impossible to know. GDP is a team effort, but if you think through some of the examples in tech I think you will realize that the labor productivity metric is lying to us.
A lot of paid labor going on in the US right now is probably not actually all that important to the overall economy, or unevenly important.
Ironically, a lot of the unpaid or highly under compensated labor in our society (teachers, social workers, stay at home parents) are probably adding economic value. One of Yang’s main points is that we need to start valuing this labor.
What about spending time with family, or learning a new language or just enjoying one's time?
When do we reach that magical future where we actually have leisure time and can enjoy the fact we're more advanced than we were a hundred years ago when everyone worked hard?
I'd like to get there now.
Consider the multi-billion dollar media productions (games, TV series, movies, music, books, etc.) that you can access at the command of your voice vs. the same ol' jester, resident poet or occasional travelling theater company that were the only option for a monarch not so many centuries ago.
I would argue that many people nowadays feel more like slaves than monarchs since they can hardly even afford healthcare in many cases, they probably won't have a pension due to current demographics, they have to hand over half of their salary to various land lords, tax lords, pension lords, healthcare lords and other various fee lords.
True, It does feel like Feedalism again, but for many not from position of monarchs but serfs.
18th century monarchs, yes. (Not 21st century monarchs.)
> hardly even afford healthcare in many cases
Better than leeches though.
> they probably won't have a pension
The reason that's a problem is precisely because health is good.
> hey have to hand over half of their salary to various land lords
Most adults in the U.S. own their own home (modulo mortgage...but even very wealthy people still choose to take mortgages for yet bigger houses). And expensive housing is generally driven voluntary by urbanization.
If you offered me the choice of life as King George III or the average American, I would choose the latter.
Tell the person working two jobs, paying more than half of their income to rent/mortgage and living paycheck to paycheck that they should just relax and settle down ...
Even just the limited healthcare you can get from free clinics and emergency treatment that hospitals are required to provide even if you aren't able to pay would be better than the best care money could buy 100 years ago.
The point of being a monarch wasn't to have the shiniest toys.
This comparison makes very little sense, because with change in society and social structures, human needs and desires also change. To compare today's person with someone from centuries ago ignores that doctrine. The fact is that kings had the best in society centuries ago, but the majority of people don't have the best in society today. Whether "the best" is accessible is a different matter, but kings had an excellent standard of living in their time period.
It is genuinely confusing why someone would think that saying we live better than a king lived centuries ago is some kind of argument that things shouldn't be further improved. Why, exactly, is the king's standard of living relevant today, other than as a historical curiosity?
It honestly feels like we're paid slaves waiting until we have enough to buy ourselves from our owners.
In Utah, the median wage is $15.8/he, which puts you around $32k/year (assuming 250 work days @ 8 hours/day), and the median salary with a bachelor's degree is ~$57k[1]. I'll be looking at the lower figure.
Let's make a few assumptions:
- $15/hr is take home, not gross, and we'll ignore all government programs - single, and living with roommates is acceptable - within range of mass transit, so no car needed - goal is to maintain minimal lifestyle w/o work
It looks like $1200 is a reasonable rent for a 2BR apartment, so $600/month should be doable with one roommate, less with two.
So, here are some expenses:
- rent - $600 - transportation - $85 (unlimited pass for light rail & bus, $200 for commuter rail, but I'm looking within range of the light rail) - food - $300/month (very generous $10/day, cooking for one could cut this in half) - utilities - $100/month (shared utilities)
So, $1100/month for basic expenses. $15/hr would get ~$2500/month. If we increase expenses to $1500, that still means ~$1000/month can go toward retirement. If our aim is $1500/month spending, we can estimate the amount we need to stop working using the 4% rule [2], and I'll include a range to go from 3-4% to account for a longer "retirement" (4% is for 30-year retirement, but expenses could be reduced as well).
Amount needed (today's dollars, 4% rule accounts for inflation):
- 3% - $600k - 4% - $450k
Saving $1k/month for 20 years puts you at ~$500k assuming 7% growth (average growth of stock market after taking inflation into account). This number is approximately in the middle of our range, and 22 years is $600k; monthly investment and return can vary, so 20-25 years seems like a reasonable estimate. If you start at 25, you'd be done by 50, which is way better than the average person, and you can make this less by reducing expenses, increasing income, or utilizing public services.
To make this process easy, we could also use this chart [3], which is based on savings rate. $1k/2.5k = 40% savings rate, which is 22 years according to the chart, which is in line with what I put down here.
The actual story is obviously more complex since I hand-waved medical costs, simplified assumptions, etc, but the general story is valuable. Maybe retiring at 45 isn't practical for everyone, but perhaps working significantly fewer hours is practical. If we simplify our lifestyle, we can be much more financially secure much earlier. I'm sure a savvy individual could earn a bit more (side hustles) and spend a bit less (decrease food expenses, bike instead of taking the bus, etc).
I'm sure the figures look a bit different in various areas, but the root of the matter is that the average person should have a much better outlook than we see on average. I think the solution lies in better education (I doubt the average person understands compound interest), better housing availability (reduce costs), better mass transit, etc.
- [1] https://slchamber.com/median-wage-in-utah/ - [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp - [3] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.
It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs.
It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.
Sure, this is an argument often made by self-driving car enthusiasts, let’s just remake all the roads, ban all pedestrians and non-self-driving vehicles and so on. But it’s another instance of the same paradox, instead of radically underestimating the computation involved in actions that nature has given us dedicated hardware for, underestimating the vast cost of doing so.
In this case not only would you need to standardise the toilet bowl, but the route through the house to get to the bathroom and what to do about any unexpected obstacles...
The paradox in general applies to everything that humans take for granted that we can do without fully appreciating that it took us a billion years of evolution to get here.
Shitty jobs are not must vulnerable, quite opposite in fact. Automating some 400K/year quant job at hedge fund makes morse sense than automatng MCjob that pays 40K/year. More to that, shitty jobs are hardest to automate (we are nowhere close to good janitor robot, for example).
Also, you can not outsource cleaning toilets or hairdessers, but you can software development or building trading models.
Also, typically lower paying jobs are physical labor jobs, trading time for money, not "thinking" jobs that deal with exceptions to the rules.
Robotics are suppose to automate lower labor physical positions, AI is suppose to replace our thinking and mental positions.
There appears to be a huge hump in difficulty of robotic “automatability” caused by the fact that humans are just so much better at these two tasks than machines are.
“Thinking” jobs that essentially entail transformation of one type of data into another seem no more difficult to automate (if not perhaps even easier) than most manual labor that has not already been automated.
My uninformed guess is that we will automate low- and mid-level “thinking” jobs and the remainder of physical jobs at around the same time, because both require near-human perceiving, communicating, and manipulating capabilities.
This is no longer the case. Now someone within a single lifetime can go through multiple job creation and destruction cycles. So it'd be helpful to have a floor to help deal with the transitions and provide a buffer.
So we just aren’t going to see the effects of automation. But I bet if you tracked percent of work time used for internet surfing you’d see it going up 5-10% per year.
I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust.
While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)
Currently, the $100 democracy dollars would outweigh special interest politician funding by 8:1, so for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction implies that political favors go up nearly 100x in price. That seems like an easy win to me.
[1] https://incometax.utah.gov/contributions/election-campaign-f...
Side note... not many people here would like the never ending series of populist presidents this would bring if it did work.
Isn't an analogous situation that of private loans for tuition? Tuitions have risen across the board to eat up all the new "free" money in the system.
Won't UBI make goods much more expensive for everyone and also increase our taxes? Wouldn't a better expenditure be providing healthcare?
I'm earnestly curious.
It's no problem because supply can adjust to compensate - the exception to this is land, which is why a UBI ought to be funded with a land value tax. This is why Yang's UBI isn't very good, because it is sales tax funded (he's too much of a centrist to tackle land and capital, touching either of these things upsets rich people's delicate feelings too much).
An underdiscussed advantage of UBI is that it's good even for those that don't get more out of it overall than they put in, because it spreads income out more evenly over the whole lifecycle (people generally have not enough money early in their careers and during child-bearing, and too much during later life and death).
The ideal scenario in my mind is a property tax, of some kind, that funds a UBI for children. Ideally, this would be at the federal level, but unfortunately property taxes have been deemed unconstitutional. This is likely true for wealth taxes as well.
But there is nothing to prevent states and cities for instituting a property tax -> UBI setup. It would no doubt help greatly with the problem of "buy properties and do nothing with them" aspect of rich foreign investors in some regions.
One of the things that Yang seems focused on is stuff that can actually be done. A wealth tax sounds nice, and he agrees with the spirit, but that is simply not a federal level option at this time. A constitutional amendment would be great to fix this, but that takes a long time and would require people to get out of survival mode to make this happen.
So Yang takes the practical approach of getting money in the hands of everyone now using a tax scheme that seems to be inoffensive to wealthy people. It probably is not, but the only way to really know is to do it.
As for the children, I am hoping this is also just a pragmatic thing. While it is hard to get this country to accept giving free money to other adults, it is even harder to imagine this country supporting giving money to "those people" with "lots of children". This is why schools are funded locally and why a UBI for children would need to be locally funded as well for now, particularly if the desire, as mine is, is to use land taxes.
Housing isn't expensive because of the cost of labor/materials, for example. It's expensive because the government literally says "you can't build that here". So the 100 old parcels of land where you want to live have 1000 people bidding for them.
UBI maybe on paper would cause additional inflation in that scenario. But it might also be the catalyst that allows people to move elsewhere for work, such as to a low cost of living area, because UBI can be relied on to survive.
Ask any Native American how empowering a UBI-esque system worked out for them.
Not that I’m rejecting the idea of UBI out of hand, but I’m very concerned about the lack of such discussion.
For example, imagine a government subsidy for smartphones that gives up to 2k for any phone you buy. The predictable effect of that is all phones would be at least 2k because there is no downside to the customers paying 2k. It would probably be 2k + pre-subsidy prices for many phones, particularly the high priced ones.
But if you just give everyone 2k in money, then why would they all want to spend it on smartphones? Maybe the price goes up a bit since there is more flexibility in spending, but there is not a specific pressure on that category alone. It gets spread out to the entire field of the economy including savings and investments.
Competition is still in place. The amount of the UBI also matters, of course. If everyone got a million dollars, a 1k phone would be a trivial price and could easily be raised in price dramatically. Basically, the spreading across the people would no longer dissipate the upward price pressure effectively. Targeting the level at basic poverty level seems like a reasonable first step to try to end poverty without spiking the prices.
As for healthcare in our current system, this might also address a lot of it. There is, of course, the removal of survival stress conditions and food deserts (by making poor regions not poor) which improves the health of people directly. But the UBI is also money that can be used for both insurance premiums and the max out of pocket levels. Much of the currently uninsured are not the desperate poor (Medicaid covers most of them), but are people in either states that did not expand Medicaid and are too poor to qualify for Obamacare subsidies or are just above the cutoffs and can't afford the full premiums. While directly changing how the subsidies work could fix that, the UBI is another approach that avoids a healthcare legislative debacle. For reference, in my state, an individual without subsidy can get health insurance for somewhere between 3-4k a year.
The other aspect of healthcare costs for consumers is the deductible/out-of-pocket. At least for the plans I see, 6kish is the max for out of pocket costs and that is half the proposed UBI. So this would seem to greatly solve the health insurance problem for US citizens. In summary, someone who needed the UBI for both premiums and out of pocket would be entirely covered with maybe 1-2k left over. Not ideal, but this is a worst case scenario.
Most UBI advocates, including Yang, do not believe that a UBI alone fixes the healthcare industry mess, but I believe it does help plug in the holes in a way that can avoid the healthcare debate dysfunction in our politics.
In the long run UBI promotes innovation and competition. Therefore those industries with competition would not suffer from rampant inflation.
Businesses without competition (monopolies) would on the other hand experience huge inflation simply because there is no pressure to keep the price down. This would be the case of natural monopolies (eg. banks or networks such as telecommunication, railroads, water systems) and government guaranteed monopolies (pharma, US healthcare, various overregulated industries).
If Indian reservations in the USA are any indication, it clearly doesn’t.
First, you assume that having multiple competitors is pointless if one product is the clear winner. Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now, and the reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation. They would argue that even if breaking up Twitter just resulted in 2nd-best Twitter, the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now.
Second, you assume that there would be a clear "best" product. In truly competitive fields, it's often difficult to point to one product and say, "that's the best, and everyone else is settling for a worse product."
Take iPhone and Android. Why does anyone use the 2nd best phone operating system? Why don't we have one OS? Because there isn't a clear 2nd best operating system. The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases. It seems obvious to me that the smartphone market is broad enough that other niches could be served better by more targeted alternatives to the two major OSes, if those alternatives were allowed to mature to the point where they became competitive.
Finally, you misunderstand what the proposals about breaking up tech companies often entail. Most commonly when people talk about breaking up big-tech, I find they're talking about Warren. Warren's proposals are (roughly speaking) about separating product offerings and platforms. Her plan isn't to take Apple and force them to split up and create a second iOS. Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.
It's not about blindly making a second Apple, it's about trying to remove conflicts of interest from platform maintainers.
I'm not going to say whether or not I think that plan is good. I do think it's pretty unlikely to happen even if Warren is elected. But regardless, it's a very different, much narrower plan with very different goals and implications than what you're describing.
They may be required to provide interoperability with other networks. This kind of federation is what tech people claim is what makes the internet good.
Then there is the question of if all their sub companies need to be under one banner. Must they own WhatsApp? Instagram?
Seems like they don’t need to but just swallowed up competitors.
They're talking about reversing mergers that many people claim were problematic (WhatsApp and Instagram). They're talking about forcing companies to give up the benefit of 1st-party access to the platforms they maintain.
That's a much more narrow, targeted change than saying, "let's just make another Facebook", which is what I see people interpreting it as.
Based on what criterion?
> reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation
Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?
> the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now
If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo. It's not as if it's technically difficult to create a product similar to twitter, thus any attempt to break up big tech companies would mandate the retirement of the incumbent domain and brand. How would this be implemented practically? Also, what happens to all the user PII? Does it just get copied over to a new corporate entity which in effect doubles the risk of the data being hacked or leaked?
On a more speculative note, I am not sure if it is a given that "innovation" in the realm of social media is necessarily a good thing for the consumer, especially considering that the barometer for social media success is engagement. Social media "innovation" inevitably means "getting more people to look at ads".
> The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases
Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.
> Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.
How would this work? Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store? It seems pretty impractical to prohibit a company from selling their own products on a platform they own.
My understanding is that, for example, Valve might be broken up into two companies:
- Valve: Produces video games such as Half Life, TF2, and Portal
- Steam: Sells video games
If Steam then sold Half Life 3, it would no longer be 1st party software because it is made by Valve not Steam.
Granted, that will never happen because Valve will never make Half Life 3. -_-
This is obviously subjective, but based on the criterion that the sites don't work very well. Recommendation systems on all of these platforms are abysmal, and they don't seem to be improving -- they seem to be getting worse. Most changes being made on sites like Twitter are poorly received by users. When the last time there was a change on Twitter that everyone liked?
Most of these sites are slow. Gmail is actively getting slower over time, to the point where it now has an extra loading screen. It's not clear to me what features have been added to justify that.
On sites like Youtube, creators are now at the point where they view the website like an existential threat. Youtube provides almost no real mechanisms for creators to fight copyright claims, its monetization rules and promotion algorithms are opaque and difficult to navigate.
Again, it's subjective whether you should look at that kind of stuff and say, "well no one could do it better." I look at platforms like Mastodon and say, "well, clearly some people are doing stuff like moderation and open API access better than sites like Twitter/Facebook." I look at sites like Nitter and think, "well, if one person built this, and even as just a blind proxy it seems to work better than Twitter's site in multiple ways, then Twitter isn't trying very hard."
> Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?
On Facebook: the email dump that came out late 2019[0] is a good place to start. In it, you can see Facebook design "open" data APIs where access was restricted to partners who spent certain amounts of money on ads. Companies that were considered competitive with Facebook's offerings were excluded from that already problematic agreement. If Facebook saw you as a potential threat, you were essentially banned from the platform.
On Instagram: users were threatened with loss of status and verification if they linked to other platforms in their bios[1]. Eventually, the code was changed to detect "add me" links and outright block them from being included on bios at all. This is a very bold, open attempt to hold a userbase hostage, counting on the fact that Instagram/WhatsApp users have too much to lose to go against the policy.
I know you specifically asked about social media, but if I can broaden that out a tiny bit: on Google's front, Chrome is advertised prominently in every one of Google's products, for free. Google offerings are also built to work best in Chrome even to the point of breaking standards[2].
This kind of "by default" push for Chrome on Android devices and in Google products is, in my mind, very reminiscent of the IE antitrust case the Microsoft got slammed with.
We could go on, but I don't want this to get too long. But it really shouldn't be difficult for you to imagine why someone might claim tech giants are anticompetitive, even if you disagree with those reasons. Heck, a new accusation gets posted to HN at least once a week -- just look at the conversations around AMP's search-result placement.
> If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo.
Based on Facebook's reactions to Instagram, Snapchat, and other similar competitors, this isn't the case. Every time Facebook has felt threatened by a competitor, in the brief period before they bought them, they were forced to uptake user-friendly features. In regards to Snapchat, some of those features were more privacy-friendly than what Facebook was currently offering.
A better argument that I'd be more sympathetic to here would be that Facebook already regularly feels the pressure of competition, and breaking them up isn't necessary. But it seems strange to me to argue that competition wouldn't do anything at all, given that we have a lot of examples of competition making these platforms better.
> Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.
No, but simply having an unserved niche in the market also doesn't mean a product will fill it. That's what people are getting at, that there are niches that would be filled by competing OSes and products if there weren't anticompetetive forces keeping those products from existing.
You need two things for a niche product to exist -- you need a real niche that's unmet, and you need an opportunity to create that product. Proponents of breaking up big-tech argue that we have the first, and not the second.
Once again, I think there is a case to be made that the situation isn't as bad as people say -- that we do have competitors starting to pop up for Facebook/Twitter, and talk about forcing the market is unnecessary right now. I'm not going to get into that argument, but I don't think the people who make it are dumb.
> Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store?
Roughly speaking, that's the intent. Google would be able to sell software on the Play store, but then Google couldn't own the Play store, it would need to be spun out into another company.
Similar rules have been proposed for media companies and ISPs; people argue that a company like T-Mobile shouldn't be able to simultaneously operate an Internet service and merge with a media provider on that service -- that would create a conflict of interest that would threaten Net Neutrality.
This sounds extreme on the software front because we have a pretty long history of companies doing exactly that -- creating a search engine and then using it to promote Chrome, creating a Play store and then using it to make sure that Gmail has prominent placement. People like Warren argue this is just as anticompetitive as an ISP operating a streaming service.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/12/05/email-dum...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11157124/instagram-blocks-...
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...
However, it's possible to see how Amazon being broken into at least one online retailer, a web services company, and a logistics provider and how that may increase competition in each of those markets.
Further, even in your social example, people used Instagram before Facebook bought them and likely still would if divested, and Snap, Tik Tok and more are going strong as independents.
I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing.
https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le...
I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.
Why can't they start deleting old videos?
You're already seeing this with the increased number of paywalls around publication content. I expect we'll see more subscriptions and services just shutting down if people aren't willing to pay.
* Dailymotion (France)
* Flickr (United States)
* Metacafe (United States)
* IGTV (United States)
* Photobucket (United Sates)
* Twitch (United States)
* Veoh (United States/Israel)
* Vevo (United States)
* Vimeo (United States)
Vimeo in particular has about one-quarter the "market share" as Youtube [1]
[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video/youtube-m...
In fact, it would make the lives of the middle/lower class worse off because the tax is in the form of VAT and the removal of welfare benefits.
If we were to take the current system, with no changes made to the rules, and send it forward 100 years in a time machine, I’m confident we can also agree that consolidation by large corporations will have increased significantly during this period of time.
If we can increase the velocity of the economy, I’m confident we can agree that this would have a similar effect as the aforementioned time machine scenario.
Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy.
If you’re with me this far, then you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that UBI will increase the velocity of the economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of large corporations.
Has it not occurred to you that there could be reasons, other than philanthropy, that many of the proponents of UBI are millionaires/billionaires, large corporations, and both of these in their roles at economic think tanks?
Only if you get it from the same place that provides free lunches.
You also handwave and make a load of assumptions in each of your statements.
I don’t expect you’ll reply :]
But the very vast majority don't.
According to the Federal Reserve website, 2/3 of their main goals are:
1. Seeking to maximize employment
2. Maintaining stable prices
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does...
Automation and ephemeralization minimize employment and prices, but the money system seeks the opposite. Until these contradictions are reconciled, how can a US Dollar based UBI not fail?
I'm seriously you guys.
Bootstrap off some desert land, convert it into e.g. Village Homes[0] (but up to date) using Permaculture, et. al. including local carbon-neutral fuel production integrated into the ecosystem[1], lease/sell units, rinse and repeat.
Alongside that, develop a kind of super-RepRap[2] to manufacture e.g. the contents of a Daiso store[3].
(BTW, no cult shit, no radical new lifestyles, just a small town built as if the last few centuries of progress actually happened: food production, power capture & storage, automation, etc... You know: Star Trek TNG sans fictional technology.)
Anybody?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
[1] http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/
[2] https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
[3] Not all human problems can be solved by a few ounces of plastic or metal, but those that can, can be solved at Daiso for $1.50.
To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not.
Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.
What actually works is government stepping in by producing a competitor when it sees oligopolies developing and the participating companies not innovating further but just undermining each other or colluding to undermine interests of their customers.
For example in the early railroads there were tons of companies building their own railroads instead of coopearing with others to reuse. Telecommunication networks tend to get stuck similarly. That's how AT&T was created to have a single infrastructure entity and lot of competition on top of that infrastructure. Similar situation can be observed in social networks today. The business model for them is not that great unless you infect them with advertisement. Twitter struggled a lot with monetization because it feels more like a infrastructure project similar to roads or phone lines. Perhaps it is time for government to create competing social network or just pump support money to a community created one.
Small, affordable residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods mostly don't exist in the US. Injecting funds won't change that fundamental fact.
Most likely, passing out UBI will actually make it harder to solve underlying problems of that sort because rich people, who have zero need of UBI, will have a new excuse to ignore such problems. UBI will become a reason to say "Quit your bitching!" without having fixed anything.
With UBI, are they a citizen and 18+? Send check. Not much overhead there.
Sure there is. In fact, all lunch was free until we invented money and farming.
The Sun is a free lunch. "It's raining soup, grab a bucket!"
But I doubt UBI is any better overall.
In the U.S. native tribes have effectively had UBI for years and years, whether from government settlements, or casino windfalls (granted, sometimes with limitations on mobility...but hopefully this system would work without just giving it to urban landlords).
The economies of many native tribes are notorious troubled.
Victims of genocide have additional complicating factors, eh?
That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy.
And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.
People concerned with it wiping out safety nets needs to understand how under equipped and under utilized they are for numerous reasons. The average benefits also average to only about $500/month. UBI is a new economic floor in which we can mobilize large swaths of the population and revitalize small towns that are falling apart. The shift in economic power will be massive and it's incredible to think about.
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-m...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...
If anything, I see UBI shifting power even more into the hands of the elites, as massive numbers of the lower classes drop out of the workforce and no longer care about anything the politicians or big businesses do, so long as the cash keeps flowing.
This could very well be the intent.
Take a look at any Native American reservation, or any caged animal for that matter. Hardly vibrant.
It can only do so either through taxation, or by printing money, as the government is not a value-generation enterprise.
If UBI gets its funding by taxation, UBI can't work economically (not to say it wouldn't be "UBI"). Even if you tax all the rich people, it won't provide enough money for the program. Besides, you can't really tax the rich, the moment you declare an aggressive taxation regime on them, they fly their money out of the country (and possibly their businesses too, which would generate poverty). If the assumption is that it would tax "everyone but the poor" then it's not universal "income", it's just another "social program" paid by the middle class.
If UBI is funded by printing money, then it's a debt generation engine. The USA is already heavily indebted due to at least 100 years of irresponsible governments spending a lot more than what they made through taxes. UBI would only make matters worse, and could easily lead to a currency crash within at most a couple decades (which would wipe out retirement funds, savings, etc. therefore generating poverty and causing social unrest)
This is incorrect. The value generated by providing a stable framework in which people can go about their daily lives is incredible. It's hard to measure this value, of course, but our modern way of life is impossible without this framework.
The government makes its own money (generating inflation, which is taxation on savings), and takes money from people through taxation in various ways. It then spends that money in any way it wants, without a price system to signal where that money should be spent. Therefore, it ends up generating "malinvestments", where money is poured in the government functions, social programs, war, "economic incentive" programs, etc. according to the current political agenda, which is generally of low time preference (as politicians have to keep promising on things they can deliver within their mandates).
The modern state (which dates from the 1700's) might have had its historical justification on the basis of making management costs smaller (as in: property records, basic infrastructure, etc.). But as time goes by and technology improves, making both management and transaction costs diminish, the need for a centralized state becomes less important. The problem, however, is that governments want to persist (as they have a large amount of politicians and public workers), and instead of lowering taxes and being less invasive over time, they are progressively doing the opposite.
It's really, really not the same. Just because you can't measure something properly, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Just how absurd that thought is becomes obvious when you translate it to a different topic: Magnetic fields did not spontaneously begin to exist when humans started to be able to measure them accurately, for example.
What it does mean is that we don't have as good an understanding of the concept of value as we have of electro-magnetism. That's not surprising, of course, since the inherent complexity of the notion of value is much greater.
Although if you sit down and work it out I’m not sure it makes sense quite yet. UBS though probably could.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough food to sustain a family. Or a 3D printer that can turn raw materials into clothing or shelter. In terms of cash needs, you could create a sort of minimum-wage Uber-style online mechanical Turk system that allows one to put in work and generate cash. You would theoretically get the benefits of basic income without having them be controlled by an external actor.
I don’t know enough about farming, 3D printing or biology to know whether this is feasible, but it seems within the realm of possibility. Have any economists explored options like this?
Realistically, a lot of people aren’t going to know how to use this technology up front, so what are they gonna do?
What if the technology breaks and needs to be fixed? Do people rely on the state for maintenance? You’re still paying for it either way.
In your first example, it sounds like the ultimate goal is grow enough food to sustain the family. But which is easier to actually accomplish that goal: an existing market that accepts cash, or some fantastical technology which would inevitably come with its own complexities, given the nature of the problem it tries to solve?
What if, instead of yammering about UBI, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, went out and started a company to make such technologies? The way to innovate is to innovate, not to try to milk money out of the government.
The whole discussion about UBI misses this basic point: to make it easier for people to make a living, you don't give them more money, you make the basic needs of life cheaper. And why doesn't that happen? Because the government keeps putting its thumb on the scale and preventing people from doing it. For example, the government subsidizes large agribusinesses instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs find cheaper ways of providing people with food. The government prints money and gives it to banks for mortgage loans to keep home prices high while rigging building codes so the only method of construction that's feasible is two by fours and drywall, instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs figure out cheaper and more durable methods of construction for homes.
The primary subsidy afforded to farmers is effectively assistance in paying insurance premiums. Insurance that exists to keep farms afloat during bad years in an environment that is highly volatile. The intent is not to make food cheaper (although that may happen as a side effect), but rather to ensure there are still farmers around next year to grow the next crop.
I am not sure that really limits the desire of innovators and entrepreneurs to seek out ways to provide cheaper food. I would argue that there is still great incentive to do exactly that. Someone who can successfully do so is in a great position to become the next large agribusiness. Those who have large agribusinesses today do so because they were the innovators and entrepreneurs of the past who figured out how to sharpen their pencil to a finer point than their neighbours.
The insurance system probably limits innovation in finding ways to survive bad years independent of government support, but I'm not sure how much that relates to the particular topic at hand.
It turns out that 2x4 construction on a slab is one of the cheapest and most durable methods of construction around. Building codes are built from lives lost, and are not trivial to replace or improve on (similar to lessons learned in aircraft design).
Building codes are purchased in lives. It would of course be cheaper to build favelas.
Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income.
Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money.
Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every community is getting a massive cash injection
Worried about a president like Trump cutting your SNAP benefits again? Opt-in to UBI and never worry about your funds getting cut without the entire country getting infuriated.
People rarely feel this level of freedom. I've only felt this level of security recently but I believe everyone deserves this. I was only lucky to have made it this far from the opportunities given to me by my parents and the support I had when I couldn't stop fucking up. People need to be able to take risks and have retries. Without it, you get people working jobs they hate while envying lives they'll never have.
I think another is the creative boom it could create. People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success. That could create a whole new class of artists that couldn’t be possible otherwise.
We haven't exactly seen an explosion of creative works coming from those on public assistance already. When is this hypothetical wave of creativity supposed to kick in?
It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.
Eg, To a pretty reasonable first approximation, all of Amazon's income is either going to be (1) distributed to shareholders and trigger income/capital gains tax or (2) invested in making goods cheaper for amazon's customers.
It isn't immediately obvious that it is a good idea to tax a system designed to get goods to people cheaply. The money Amazon reinvests in itself is in the short term all about making life better for its customers, not its owners. In the long term that reverses, but the reversal triggers additional tax events.
> It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%
The wealthy will be paying much more tax than you though. In raw amounts, the wealthy are doing much more to run the government financially than you are by orders of magnitude.
It isn't immediately laughable. A billionaire is making an absurd contribution vs. other taxpayers even at a 5%. And again, that part of their money isn't going towards themselves, it is difficult to consume that much in real resources in a year. It is likely going to investing in things that other people want.
There is no obviously-right or obviously-wrong with tax. Systems are complicated.
This also has a disproportionate effect on the rest of the government, however. The wealthy clamor for tax cuts because they already pay more than everyone else (and as long as income disparity exists, this is going to be a fact, so it's not really much of an argument) which in turn means said tax cuts can break the bank so to speak. Which results in cuts to systems that the poor and less wealthy rely on to live, things such as basic schooling or financial aid.
In turn, that money that they do get tends to go towards things that entrench their power. Politicians, mainstream media, things such as that. I personally have not heard a strong argument for not taxing the wealthy and corporations more, because for all the tax cuts we've seen we're still in dire straits when it comes to dealing with poverty and healthcare. So clearly something isn't trickling down here.
Also maybe worth looking at how big of a tax break Amazon got for their R&D budget who only benefits... Amazon.
The thing that matters here is the rate, the tax rate and America has it wrong, I consume the same % as a wealthy person, my class collaborated way more (raw amount and rate) to the society than the wealthy.
This is what causes the main issue with flat taxes. The problem is that at the end of the day, flat taxes are simply very inefficient in that they cause much more suffering for less revenue compared to progressive taxes.
1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it.
2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.
I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.
There are not enough high paying jobs. Period. Hard stop. There won't ever be.
Now, we need gas station attendants, room cleaners, baggers, bus drivers. These jobs will be replaced by much less expensive robots. Just like switchboard operators, seamstresses, tailors, cobblers, shoe shiners, appliance repairmen have all largely been replaced.
Pray tell, what high paying jobs will these people be given when they're put out of work? Who will pay to train them? How will they afford to live during the 2-120mos of training they'll need to get these high pain paying jobs?
UBI should be funded by a proportional tax on every product and the man hours of work it replaces. A calculator can do in 15 minutes what an average American would spend a day doing. Just as an example everyone should immediately grok. Then scale these up and require companies applying for patents, patent renewals, or business licenses to figure out how long it would take to do a job without their tool by comparing to other available alternatives. A positive net benefit of this is all the new jobs made figuring out how damn hard shit is to do without tools. Companies can then use their numbers to advertise.
Mind you, both our solutions are wholly unrealistic.
About high paying jobs, suppose we pay 100$/hr for people to monitor the machines, up to a cap of 1K$/mth.
Here's one of the semi startrek-esque longterm solution that works reliably but not yet possible. Suppose basic goods productivity improves 10000X. Then a small number of people can produce the basics for everyone without any money issues involved.
This isn't true, since the state can always just create more money.
The real limitation is in real resources and production capacity, and if a UBI was implemented by creating more money than the existing production capacity can sustain, it would likely drive up the rate of inflation.
If the UBI is set to a fixed nominal value, this would eventually balance out, possibly resulting in a corresponding UBI real value that is insufficient for people to live on. (What level of real value is sustainable is an empirical question.)
I agree with you that creating demand for labor is a better approach if done well. Ideally, you'd create a conceptually infinite demand for labor to ensure there's no involuntary unemployment. Of course, there's then the risk of increasing the rate of inflation via that labor demand, which you can fix by fixing the price at which the labor demand becomes infinite.
That's the direction that the "employer of last resort / job guarantee" proposals go in, though those also get flack from some people for being like workfare.
UBI, guaranteed jobs, seems all these solutions fundamentally require sufficient money flow to work. People spending slowly (rich or poor) means low tax/biz revenue causing program failure. I think the key problem is how we can guarantee the economy to sustain X velocity of money.