Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I knew a life without work would be amazing, but I never expected it to be this great.
I had much more time and energy to enjoy life. There was never a rush to do anything. I woke up when I wasn't tired. I could read in bed for an hour if it felt right. Sometimes I'd just walk 3-5 kilometres to an appointment, and stop for a pint along the way.
I didn't stagnate either. My personal projects became my job. My work day started when I was ready and ended when I was done. With my finances already sorted out, I worked on things I enjoyed, not on potential startups.
Interestingly enough, life got cheaper. I didn't eat out as often, and cooked from scratch. I could afford the time it takes to be frugal.
Never in my life have I been so content with my situation. I didn't make much, but I had all the time in the world to enjoy life. Isn't that what people say they'd do if they won the lottery?
The second part of the experience came when I got a short work contract to finance a motorcycle trip. Suddenly, I was back to losing sleep, skipping breakfasts, waiting for the day to end, commuting and generally trying to fit life around my job.
I give basic income a 10/10, and wish everyone was given the chance to enjoy life on their own terms. I don't know if it's economically viable, but it's definitely the most enjoyable lifestyle I got to experience.
EDIT: this is getting a bit of attention. I'd be happy to answer questions publicly or privately. There's a fair bit of luck involved, but no dirty secrets.
I don't know about you, but living off $1k a month where I live (and it's a relatively cheap area) isn't feasible. Either you get roommates or you are going to end up in the cheapest most out of the way apartment you can find for $500 a month. If you are eating off $10 a day (which is reasonable, and isn't accounting for the odd pint), you're down to $200 for your monthly budget. You still have to pay for utilities and this isn't taking into account any modern necessities (phones, etc), nor certainly not a car, which you probably need because your cheap apartment isn't close to anything.
You, even with this extreme skimping, basically have no room for anything to go wrong. Hopefully your shoes that you're walking everywhere in don't wear out. Doesn't sound peaceful to me, it sounds like something that would put me always on edge (I've lived making 3x that and it does put you on edge). You felt comfortable because you were lucky enough to have a website that you could make income on by babysitting it. Is that really anything like UBI?
If we're going to discuss UBI, then we need to discuss UBI, not any form of passive income or welfare program, which by their definition are not UBI. Seeing stuff like this get upvoted only leads me to believe that a lot of UBI proponents aren't taking serious how many obstacles there are to overcome actually implementing it, nor what it will look like in practice.
Solely with respect to this person's comment, what we call such an arrangement matters a lot less than the high quality of the life he/she describes.
There are a lot of menial part time jobs you can get if you want to live as he describes. It's not fun.
It's also not the usual argument you hear from UBI proponents (we can reduce costs because we only need UBI).
I don't say this to be a dick, but political change has to happen within political realities.
The article in question is about Finland, where healthcare is already universal, largely free, and much liked by the populace.
UBI wants to change nothing abut the socio-economic structure that drives millions into extreme poverty. It just wants to slightly reduce the rising flood of people that are just run so far down into the ground by the system that they are abandoning society altogether and threaten collapsing it.
Make sure all your people have decent healthcare, housing and food. It is obvious that in some (rich) countries these basic levels of social security are failing hard.
UBI just wants the current rent-seeking financialization machine to keep churning even when its forced in the extreme to trow the bottom of the pyramid some breadcrumbs to prevent them from bailing out.
- I have health insurance. It's pretty far from free, and it's mandatory. I wrote a very detailed guide about how German health insurance works [1]. It's not comparable to the US system, and I want to write a separate guide to explain this more accurately.
- My take-home is slightly above what a full time minimum wage worker would make. My expenses are around 1400€ a month. It could be brought down to 1000€, but I insist on certain luxuries and planned my exit accordingly.
1. https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance I'm happy to answer more questions.
€1,500 ($1,700) per month gross for full-time workers, Germany has one of the highest minimum wages in the European Union.
So it seems you made about $20k. Obviously, this isn't much money, so props to you for that. It is about double what UBI could offer (at least in the US) in a country with one of the greatest social safety nets in the world.
Don't mean to castigate you nor be overly personal, but do feel like it is important to put into context.
Is anyone saying this is appropriate for the US right now?
In my opinion, the US has a long way to go before even beginning to consider such practices. The UBI is something EU nations can experiment with, not the US.
Those structural issues aren’t present in most European countries due to the expanded social safety nets. The US needs to implement a lot of infrastructure between the government and the citizenry to facilitate and distribute a program like UBI effectively.
I’m an American who wants a ubi, but we’re not ready structurally to handle it in the current political climate of any foreseeable political future in the next decade, IMO.
US's Overton Window is extremely far away from this kind of social policies. If the US can't agree on the fundamental importance of a socialized healthcare service then more daring experimental social policies such as a livable basic income is too far out to even contemplate.
But it would be awesome if they did, though. Perhaps if they slapped a "Milton Friedman approves this" sticker on it.
How much are you willing to tell us about the income source?
I’m finding it difficult to think of anything that generates a small but consistent revenue stream with no babysitting, that is also completely unresponsive to low-effort attempts at scaling it.
Usually if there’s no babysitting, that means low-effort scale. Or if it is hands-free but still can’t scale, it’s because you’ve found the boundaries of the market opportunity (but when is that ever just 1k?)
I guess my question is what niche product/service did you find that the entire world only wants $1000/mo of??
My niche is "make knowledge of Germany approachable to non-Germans".
This website works because moving to Germany implies paying for certain things, like health insurance. It also works well because most of the existing information is only available in German. This content also ages rather well, unlike programming tutorial or cellphone reviews for example. I don't need to constantly create new content.
I can't think of any other topic I understand this well that provides this much value to the readers. I know a thing or two about long distance motorcycle travel, but nothing I couldn't summarise into a few articles, and nothing that could generate affiliate income. I had some other ideas, but none of them withstood scrutiny.
Instead, I'd rather grow the website to cover more complex topics that I'm currently dealing with, such finance and retirement planning in Germany. It feels good to help people answer the same questions I had.
How do the website generate money though? I haven't seen any ads or paid content.
> I know a thing or two about long distance motorcycle travel, but [...] nothing that could generate affiliate income.
Anyone here a fan?
Criticizing the post about a specific vision of UBI strikes me as overly combative (and putting words in OP's mouth).
If you get $1,000/month right now, things would go smoother, and you still have to pay tax on your new higher wage.
UBI is not a "never work only consume" solution.
There is plenty of land and resources for everyone in America. But the oligarchs are super greedy, and force a fake scarcity, in order to have a supply-and-demand problem.
They just printed $4 Trillion USD, so it’s apparently quite easy to print money out of thin air. And then they gave it to their other rich buddies that don’t need the money. It was a pure and disgusting money grab, at the expense of everyone else.
Nor is an additional $3 trillion/year expenditure feasible forever. That's what's so disturbing about discussions around UBI: there seem to be people who, genuinely and unironically, believe that the reason some of us are concerned about the concept is because we don't realize how happy not having to work would make people. They appear to believe that, once they've demonstrated that yes, it will really make people happy, they'll have won the fight for UBI.
Let's try to make our lives better.
For anyone else that has a hard time knowing how much taxes the US has to play with, I checked the US military budget and it's around $721.5 billion for 2020.
Remembering that governments with fiat currencies don’t tax for income, they tax for constraining money supply.
Throughout most of civilization, most types of progress has been the result of the intellectual work of an elite. Most progress in science, art, and pretty much anything comes from a "noble" or some kind of free man either doing it themselves, or directly financing someone who did.
Most people today probably wouldn't buy into the reasons for this class society that were given at the time, and I think most people would probably (hopefully) agree that the progress made by these people can't simply have been due to genetic superiority or divine privilege. I would say it's more likely a combination of cultural capital (smart parents and friends) combined with just regular capital that gave you the benefit of not having to worry about surviving from one year to the next.
So if we accept that most of the work that has pushed humanity forward was made by the "nobility" of the age, whether that's lords from medieval times or obscenely rich venture capitalists of today, then what is the most logical way to structure a society if you want further humanity?
Here, the notion of "human nature" comes in. Some state with certainty that this innate nature will stop certain people from achieving success, because they're simply lazy, or dumb, or whatever else. Some people just want to sit around and drink beer and will never do anything else. Sure, that might be true to a larger or smaller extent, those people will always exist, but if we're talking about broad strokes, general humanity, what is the most beneficial policy?
For me, it has always seemed pretty obvious that you don't want the largest amount of people to work for the largest amount of time possible. Quite the opposite, you want to make sure that all goods and services are being provided, but only enough so that the primary goal can be achieved: to give people as much stress-free spare time as possible without breaking the economy.
If the "nobility" is what furthers human progress, why aren't we trying to create more nobility? And I'm not talking about material wealth and castles, I'm talking about the privilege of being able to just sit around for weeks, months on end and just think about what interests you. Why is it that water spins in a certain way, how do you make an automated temperature/watering system, what's the deal with combustion engines?
I can already hear some people screaming about human nature again, and yes, you are correct: some people will never be interested in this stuff. They'll use their free time for something that benefits no-one in any way. But as sure as you can be those people will exist, there will also be people who could have been the next Newton, the next Kierkegaard, slaving away in a warehouse somewhere, dead in the gate before the race even started.
I really, really hope for a future for humanity where free time isn't seen as a luxury for the few, but a requirement to grow as a human being. I hope to see societies and economies that prioritize something else than short term economical gain and meaningless widgets that get thrown in a pile after years or even months.
That's solved. 10 square meters, 18°C during winter, 2500 calories a day, and basic health insurance. It's cheap enough that we can supply that to everyone. It's just that people want 40 square meters, 22°C and food that's tasty and diverse and not just nutritious, and they want entertainment and technology etc etc. The basics can easily be taken care of (and are in most Western nations), but nobody wants to be limited to the basics.
> I hope to see societies and economies that prioritize something else than short term economical gain and meaningless widgets that get thrown in a pile after years or even months.
It's the majority of people that prioritize that which you do not like, it's not some hidden force that makes them. You might give them something else: bring back religion. Not for the elites, but for the masses. The void has to be filled. If you don't want to fill it with consumption, fill it with something else.
Sure they are. People today grow up being told and shown how to be materialistic, how to value short term economical gain, and so on, and then you get people that are like that. It's not surprising, is it?
Humans are very much affected by the culture they grow up in. Our culture rewards greed, values gadgets ... our culture is a culture of bread and circus. So that's what you get, people who want that, because that's what they're taught to like. It's not surprising, is it. To "escape the matrix", you have to seek to do so, it doesn't just happen by itself. And by forcing people to work till they are tired, and sleep till they must work, you don't give them much chance of ever discovering such things, nor any thing that furthers humanity, as hnarn talks about, except in very rare cases where the stars align, and against all odds, it happens, but only rarely, because our society doesn't foster an environment that optimises for such things.
And really, nobody here is forced to work till they are tired. Yet still, the utopian society where everybody is working on bettering themselves is not happening. At some point I believe we can consider that it's not the circumstances holding them back, it's just not what most people strive for.
Obviously, we have it better here than many other places, but this is something that is going on everywhere that capitalism is, because it's a core part of capitalism.
You can also translate this into "please do your share in society and don't rely on other people feeding you just because it's inconvenient to get up and do your part". That's very different from mindless consumerism. Denmark with e.g. luxury taxes on cars is going a very different route from the US.
We could all share and show solidarity and meet everyones needs, and not work 40+ hours/week hours a week. We are producing many times more than enough. But the structures are so, that most people work so, so much, while not seeing comparable compensation. This is because a few people take most of all the wealth and keep it for them self. Because of this, we need to work so much, but it's only because of this deep, fundamental flaw in our structures. If the wealth was more evenly distributed, we could probably get by with working maybe 15 hours/week, and still have all our needs met, including having more time to relax, enjoy life, be with family and friends, and sit down and do nothing, which would provide a better environment for these inventions and ideas that propels humans forward, as hnarn was talking about, that in history, and very much still, are kept for the nobility because only they have the time to "sit down and do nothing".
Mind you, I'm not talking about people who are unable to contribute because of illnesses, age or handicaps. I'm talking about people who absolutely could contribute, but choose not to because their needs are met even if they don't and contributing does, for them, not hold a positive result: have to expend energy, have to do something that isn't immediately pleasurable, am not getting huge loads of money and power in return. They politely thank you for the offer but choose to live comfortably off of taxes.
The direct consequence of that behavior is that others have to work more hours per week to pick up the slack. Even if you removed the top 5% and nationalized all companies, you wouldn't change this simple fact. And it will remain exactly the same as long as they are paid to do nothing. UBI is the plan to codify paying them to do nothing.
So sure, if you had everyone contributing, everything would be rosy and lots of things would be possible. Let's start with getting everyone to contribute, and not with changing the system as if they would and then hope that they maybe will. Because they won't.
How so?
> Mind you, I'm not talking about people who are unable to contribute because of illnesses, age or handicaps. I'm talking about people who absolutely could contribute, but choose not to because their needs are met even if they don't and contributing does, for them, not hold a positive result: have to expend energy, have to do something that isn't immediately pleasurable, am not getting huge loads of money and power in return. They politely thank you for the offer but choose to live comfortably off of taxes.
> The direct consequence of that behavior is that others have to work more hours per week to pick up the slack. Even if you removed the top 5% and nationalized all companies, you wouldn't change this simple fact. And it will remain exactly the same as long as they are paid to do nothing. UBI is the plan to codify paying them to do nothing.
I think that's just you drawing conclusions out of thin air. I don't believe most people would be doing nothing. Why should they? Would you? I wouldn't. Also we could just have contracts saying that if you want receive the benefits of being part of society, you must also contribute at least, say 15 hours a week of work, or whatever we figure out is necessary.
If there then ends up being people that don't contribute what they should, people in the immediate community would then, on a case-by-case basic, try to solve the problem by talking with the person, and so on. If nothing works, take away the benefits until the person are willing to partake in the community again. Make them understand that you have to contribute to be receive the benefits.
> So sure, if you had everyone contributing, everything would be rosy and lots of things would be possible. Let's start with getting everyone to contribute, and not with changing the system as if they would and then hope that they maybe will. Because they won't.
You do know that most people in the whole wide world do actually work, don't you? They already contribute plenty. Why do you think they would contribute less if 1) it meant more of their needs were met, and 2) they had more choice about how to contribute because society wasn't driven by profits that fill of a few peoples pockets, but by meeting everyones needs.
I think most people would contribute, just like most people today actually are contributing. And I actually think even more would be contributing and do it willingly, and we could reach new heights for humanity if contributions wasn't based on forced labour but instead of people feeling as a part of a cooperative community where their needs are valued and their voices are heard.
I didn't say most, but it's a significant number. We don't have to speculate either, it's reality today.
> Would you? I wouldn't.
That's always the issue with these proposals. It's smart, motivated people that look for tasks if they're idle and are ready to help others, and then they figure "I wouldn't just not work, so that's what everybody would do". It's the same issue engineers have when they design features. "I can type very fast without looking at the keyboard, that's what everybody can", and then it collides with the real world where most people can neither type fast nor type without looking at their keyboard.
I live in an apartment complex with ~50% social housing. About 30% of residents here are lower class, about 5-10% are what I described. They are quite happy with the accommodations and their allowance, they see no reason to work.
Your plans and ideas are made for a world full of people like you. But that's not the world we live in.
> Also we could just have contracts saying that if you want receive the benefits of being part of society, you must also contribute at least, say 15 hours a week of work, or whatever we figure out is necessary.
That would be reactionary, a large step in the other direction of unconditional basic income, and you'd get kicked out of every UBI debate, probably violently so.
Indeed, but why is that so? Maybe it's because they don't have much say in any matter, and are forced be exploited, and so on. You cannot declare that because they are not willing to contribute in this current exploitative system we have, that means they also wouldn't want to contribute in any other system.
> That's always the issue with these proposals. It's smart, motivated people that look for tasks if they're idle and are ready to help others, and then they figure "I wouldn't just not work, so that's what everybody would do". It's the same issue engineers have when they design features. "I can type very fast without looking at the keyboard, that's what everybody can", and then it collides with the real world where most people can neither type fast nor type without looking at their keyboard.
No it isn't. It's basic human behaviour. The reason why people "don't do anything but watch tv" is, I'm convinced, because they are beaten down by a society that doesn't care about them. They tend to the tv's and games when they have any free time because they are worked to death the rest of the time.
In a society where that wasn't so, the results would be different too.
Obviously, it's not each case that's so, but probably 99,9% or more, and that's good enough. There will always be bad seeds, but most aren't bad.
> I live in an apartment complex with ~50% social housing. About 30% of residents here are lower class, about 5-10% are what I described. They are quite happy with the accommodations and their allowance, they see no reason to work.
They are a result of society. They weren't born that way, they were taught to be that way by the experiences they had living in this current society.
> Your plans and ideas are made for a world full of people like you. But that's not the world we live in.
No, it's made for humans, contrary to our current society. It's based on the fact, that if you show solidarity, compassion, and try to raise people up, instead of beat them down and exploit them, as is currently the way our society treat people, they tend to do rather well, and are happy to do their part. Obviously, there will be some that won't, but I feel confident that it will be few. It's not a showstopper, the goods in a society based on solidarity instead of greed outweigh the bad in every way.
> That would be reactionary, a large step in the other direction of unconditional basic income, and you'd get kicked out of every UBI debate, probably violently so.
That's because UBI is a retrofitting of basic solidarity in our current system. I'm not talking about retrofitting our current system, I'm talking about building a completely new system. One taking a lot of pointers from the anarcho-syndicalism playbook. Our current system is completely broken, and needs to get replaced, not reformed because reforms can't be used for such drastic changes as are needed.
> They tend to the tv's and games when they have any free time because they are worked to death the rest of the time.
But the hours worked has steadily gone down while the hours spent in front of the TV has steadily risen. Something doesn't add up in your calculations. People don't work themselves to death any more. In fact, they have so much free time on their hands, that they spend money to kill it. They literally pay other people to entertain them, to take the free time off of their hands, and they don't know what to do with it. That's a very different situation from 200, 100 or even 50 years ago.
> It's not a showstopper, the goods in a society based on solidarity instead of greed outweigh the bad in every way.
Right, right, until people starve and we go back to the evil system because, when all is said and done, it's just more efficient. I mean, it's not that this hasn't been tried before.
And yes, I'm absolutely aware that it can work in smaller groups. I'm convinced you can have wonderful small groups based on solidarity. They will run on social control and everybody will make sure that everybody contributes as much as they are able and as much as is needed. But it doesn't scale, unless you want to create a massive police state that takes over the social control thing, and I don't want that.
> Our current system is completely broken, and needs to get replaced, not reformed because reforms can't be used for such drastic changes as are needed.
Burn it down, maybe we can build something better in it's place. But what if we can't? What if we end up with something that's terrible because all those nice ideas just don't work? Then you've burnt down a few centuries of progress for a dream. You may be willing to accept that risk, but I can guarantee you that most people are not, because, after all, even for the poorest 10%, this is the best time to be alive during pretty much all of humanity's existence. Well, okay, maybe witnessing the aliens landing the pyramids was pretty great, but aside from that, this is it.
Isn't the point that the current system doesn't provide a stable, peaceful and qualitative life for most of the population? Are you saying it's good enough because you and your dearest have it good?
> But the hours worked has steadily gone down while the hours spent in front of the TV has steadily risen. Something doesn't add up in your calculations. People don't work themselves to death any more. In fact, they have so much free time on their hands, that they spend money to kill it. They literally pay other people to entertain them, to take the free time off of their hands, and they don't know what to do with it. That's a very different situation from 200, 100 or even 50 years ago.
For most of humans history, humans have worked a few hours a day, or 15 hours/week. It's only in recent times that it went up. It happened when it became possible to store goods, and then a few eyed their chance to start exploiting the rest by claiming all the means of productions and forcing the rest to work all their life while the capital owners reaped the benefits. Sure, in some places in the western world, for example in Denmark where I live, it has improved a lot since just 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean it's good enough. People should only work as much as necessary, not as much as they can be forced to to fill the bottomless pockets of a few.
> Right, right, until people starve and we go back to the evil system because, when all is said and done, it's just more efficient. I mean, it's not that this hasn't been tried before.
It hasn't been tried for some thousands of years for a prolonged period for a vast majority of the population.
There has been a few places where they tried in recent times, like anarchist Catalonia in the thirties, but every time capitalist powers see free people as a threat because it might give their own people ideas about how life could be, so every time, like in anarchist Catalonia, they arrive with weapons and kill everyone that won't capitulate to their demands of surrender.
> And yes, I'm absolutely aware that it can work in smaller groups. I'm convinced you can have wonderful small groups based on solidarity. They will run on social control and everybody will make sure that everybody contributes as much as they are able and as much as is needed. But it doesn't scale, unless you want to create a massive police state that takes over the social control thing, and I don't want that.
It doesn't have to scale. That's the problem. We shouldn't try to create such big communities like the US, or Denmark for that matter. It's too big. Science has shown that people cannot trust and function properly in groups of more than ~150 individuals, so why do we try do force them to? Just look at the US, where the difference between the people are so vast, that it's a wonder that it's only now that it's crumbling.
Obviously 150 is too small, but the solution is lots and lots of small communities, a hierarchy, not in power, but in communication structure so that communities can cooperate while keeping sovereignty over themselves instead of being at the mercy of people that live hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.
There's lots of great writing about this. A good place to start is Murray Bookchin[1].
[1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...
> Burn it down, maybe we can build something better in it's place. But what if we can't? What if we end up with something that's terrible because all those nice ideas just don't work? Then you've burnt down a few centuries of progress for a dream. You may be willing to accept that risk, but I can guarantee you that most people are not, because, after all, even for the poorest 10%, this is the best time to be alive during pretty much all of humanity's existence. Well, okay, maybe witnessing the aliens landing the pyramids was pretty great, but aside from that, this is it.
Actually more people in absolute numbers are not able to meet their basic nutritional needs every single they than ever before[2] so while I have it pretty great, it's pretty damn bad a huge amount of people.
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
Also I'm not sure why you think we couldn't at least build something like this again, if all else failed. It was build ones, we could probably do it better with a clean slate. Still, I think we can even strive for more, and we would succeed. People want to survive, and if there is not something stopping them, they will. I have full faith in that, because humans have survived for so long, even when all the previous societies and civilisations has failed, even when Rome fell, and we will survive when this one fails. The question is how we will structure what comes next. Will we finally base it on solidarity, or will it ones again be based on greed, favouring the few over the many.
In North-Western Europe? It's good enough for everyone, more than good enough, it's too much, we're suffering the illnesses of abundance, not of scarcity, we're obese, not starving, we're bored, not busy.
The lowest 10% has never lived a better life, objectively. I assume your issue isn't objective measurements but relative qualities? I.e. how good is the poorest person's life compared to the richest? It's still pretty damn great. We do have a class-gap in life expectancy, but it's small, much, much smaller than it was a hundred years ago and let's not talk about any time before that.
> For most of humans history, humans have worked a few hours a day, or 15 hours/week.
First of all that's inaccurate because you're counting "work" as in "work for money". A subsistence farmer has never worked 15 hours/week, and even someone who has worked in some form of employment has had a lot more home-work than they do now. Specialization means everyone works more in one thing but doesn't have to work a little bit in everything.
Second: they've lived very simple and quite short lives. We can have that as well, but we don't. We want to live healthy and long and have retirements where we don't work at all that span 10-20% of our adult life span. That's unprecedented on a large scale.
> People should only work as much as necessary
What's necessary? Should they have a purse for a rainy day? Then they'll have to work more than what's strictly necessary for today's survival. Should they have retirement? Well, add another 20% and so on.
> We shouldn't try to create such big communities like the US, or Denmark for that matter.
I absolutely agree, but that's not going to happen.
UBI may well be the fuel you need for the acceleration of society's splintering. Maybe you can try the small commune afterwards, if anyone is still alive.
> Actually more people in absolute numbers are not able to meet their basic nutritional needs every single they than ever before[2] so while I have it pretty great, it's pretty damn bad a huge amount of people.
Right, but we're talking about modern societies, not the situation in the third world, aren't we? How many people in Denmark aren't able to meet their basic nutritional needs?
> Also I'm not sure why you think we couldn't at least build something like this again, if all else failed.
Oh, I'm sure we could. It's just that we'll have to wade through rivers of blood and endure unimaginable amounts of human suffering. We do not just stand on the shoulders of giants, we stand on the bones of the many that lived and died before us to bring about the world we have today. If we get thrown back a few hundred years, we'll probably get back here again, but it'll take a while, and it will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
It's easy to speak from the privileged position of wealthy peacefulness about how easy it was achieved and to wager it on a coin flip. It's a different story for those that achieved it, much like the politicians that send soldiers to war and the soldiers that do the dying and the killing.
That's an extreme exaggeration. Sure, I, and possibly you, are experiencing this. But still here, there are people who are not.
Doesn't matter though. Even if everyone here had it good, we do so because of the exploitation of others in different parts of the world. It's all connected, and we have to fix it all, to fix anything.
> The lowest 10% has never lived a better life, objectively. I assume your issue isn't objective measurements but relative qualities? I.e. how good is the poorest person's life compared to the richest? It's still pretty damn great. We do have a class-gap in life expectancy, but it's small, much, much smaller than it was a hundred years ago and let's not talk about any time before that.
Objectively? If you mean having more materialistic stuff than ever before? Sure. But what about life quality? Being able to relax, not having so many concerns, and so on. Sure, we have Netflix now, but we have also have for one a huge amount of mental illness. There are so much more about well-being than just having Netflix and a warm bed.
> First of all that's inaccurate because you're counting "work" as in "work for money". A subsistence farmer has never worked 15 hours/week, and even someone who has worked in some form of employment has had a lot more home-work than they do now. Specialization means everyone works more in one thing but doesn't have to work a little bit in everything.
I'm talking before there were farmers. Before it was possible to exploit others, because humans could only survive by caring for each other, because the tripe lived and died according to their team work. Surplus of food was not a possibility, so there was no way for anyone to hoard stuff, so compassion and sharing were the overall way of life for the most part because that gave the best chances of surviving. Back then, people surely hunted and gathered food, but it was in total hours not more than about 15 hours a week, sometimes less. That's the current consensus on the matter.
Then agriculture happened and few other technologies were developed, and suddenly surplus was a possibility, and then some wanted to keep the surplus for themselves, and work hours increased for everyone else.
> Second: they've lived very simple and quite short lives. We can have that as well, but we don't. We want to live healthy and long and have retirements where we don't work at all that span 10-20% of our adult life span. That's unprecedented on a large scale.
We still produce many times more than we need. There is absolutely no reason we couldn't work a lot less and still produce all that's needed for all that. The only problem is that a few people keep such a big part of the wealth for themselves.
> What's necessary? Should they have a purse for a rainy day? Then they'll have to work more than what's strictly necessary for today's survival. Should they have retirement? Well, add another 20% and so on.
They should have all that, and they could and still only work say 15 hours a week. We still produce way too much of which too much of the wealth go to a few hands instead of being more evenly distributed.
> I absolutely agree, but that's not going to happen.
Sure it can, I don't see why not, and at least I'm gonna do whatever I can to fight the fight.
> UBI may well be the fuel you need for the acceleration of society's splintering. Maybe you can try the small commune afterwards, if anyone is still alive.
I think climate change, corvid-19 and all the next pandemics that are coming, are the fuel.
> Right, but we're talking about modern societies, not the situation in the third world, aren't we? How many people in Denmark aren't able to meet their basic nutritional needs?
I'm talking about all people in the whole wide world. I don't see why I shouldn't care for other people just because they are not part of my world directly, and I don't believe you can fix something, like climate change, or inequality, or a pandemic, without fixing it everywhere. Gresham's law; if bad things exist, they spread until there is nothing good left.
> Oh, I'm sure we could. It's just that we'll have to wade through rivers of blood and endure unimaginable amounts of human suffering. We do not just stand on the shoulders of giants, we stand on the bones of the many that lived and died before us to bring about the world we have today. If we get thrown back a few hundred years, we'll probably get back here again, but it'll take a while, and it will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
> It's easy to speak from the privileged position of wealthy peacefulness about how easy it was achieved and to wager it on a coin flip. It's a different story for those that achieved it, much like the politicians that send soldiers to war and the soldiers that do the dying and the killing.
I'm convinced that if we don't do these things, it will be much worse. Climate change and future pandemics is not something our capitalist, oligarchical civilization are gonna fix, so if we don't fix it ourself, we will be much worse off.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you that we should fix it. But I also believe that you're fundamentally wrong about why we have it good over here. It's institutions and culture that brings about this quality of life, not exploitation. The exploitation helps, don't get me wrong, but it's the cherry on the top. If everything but the First World was swallowed by the oceans, our life style would change and the quality of life would drop somewhat, but not by that much. We don't depend on cheap labor in China to produce goods, but we'll gladly use it to produce even more goods so everyone can have five pairs of shoes and a big screen TV. Those aren't quality of life issues though, they are a luxury. A luxury that many would miss, but a luxury nonetheless. It's like if you have a billion dollars and the next day you lose 99% of your wealth. That's quite the catastrophic loss - but you still have ten million dollars, which is more than enough to live a luxurious life. Maybe not quite the 300ft yacht, but the 30ft yacht is included.
If you want to fix "it", fix institutions and culture and traditions. And, of course, increase efficiency. The scientist that develops a new way to plant and harvest rice that produces a higher yield will have much more impact than all the political activists.
> But what about life quality? Being able to relax, not having so many concerns, and so on.
Even then, yes. The worries in NW Europe today may seem terrible to you, but they'd be a joy for a 15th century peasant during a famine or a war, or on any given day that his local lord is in a bad mood. That's not to say that they're not real, but to worry about whether you can keep that nice apartment now that you're unemployed is not the same as worrying about whether you'll manage to find some food so your children won't starve.
> Back then, people surely hunted and gathered food, but it was in total hours not more than about 15 hours a week, sometimes less.
They lived to be 25, maybe 30, and often fell to a violent death because it wasn't all solidarity and peaceful happiness. Half of them didn't make it through puberty. And if you consider 15 hours per week of "work" to feed yourself little, then I've got some news for you: depending on your job, you can do it in far less. 7kg of rice will provide the calories you need and set you back about 7 Euros. Figure out how much you have to work to make 7 Euros and you have your answer. Remember, Hunter-Gatherer tribes didn't have houses, cars, health insurance or phones. If you want to go really basic, we've got you covered.
> Then agriculture happened and few other technologies were developed, and suddenly surplus was a possibility, and then some wanted to keep the surplus for themselves, and work hours increased for everyone else.
And, more importantly, population growth happened, and life expectancy grew, and life became more predictable and societies were created.
> We still produce many times more than we need. There is absolutely no reason we couldn't work a lot less and still produce all that's needed for all that.
Absolutely, I 100% agree. Here's the issue: we don't know what we want. Again, if you're solely going by basic needs, we have you covered. We can trivially supply enough calories and plain water to our citizens, even without imports. But we don't want that, we don't want to limit ourselves to the basic necessities. And as soon as we go beyond that, individuals want different things. If we had a perfect system that accurately predicted and aggregated what everyone wanted, we could provide it without excess, without waste and highly efficient. But we don't. And the chaotic and terribly wasteful mechanisms of the free market are the best system we have.
> I'm talking about all people in the whole wide world.
Give them Danish culture and their suffering will decrease until it is no more. If that doesn't sit well with you because "all cultures are equal" and what not, don't fight the fight. Become an engineer or a scientist in applied sciences, you'll move the needle for worldwide well-being much more.
I don't share your bleak outlook at all. Human ingenuity is a super power, technology and science are how we overcome obstacles, not by falling back into a status quo ante. We want to hasten our way to the 22nd century, not go back to the 14th.
I'm not only talking about us using cheap good. We, and the rest of the west, has since the colonisation, stolen riches and cheap labour from what is considered third-world countries. That has allowed us to develop the institutions we have now. Obviously, we wouldn't forget all that if we stopped using Chinese cheap labour. But we wouldn't forget that either if we abolished the states and built a better civilisation.
> If you want to fix "it", fix institutions and culture and traditions. And, of course, increase efficiency. The scientist that develops a new way to plant and harvest rice that produces a higher yield will have much more impact than all the political activists.
We already have more yield than is necessary. Do we need to produce 1000x, 10000x, 100000x before we start sharing it? What is enough? I'm convinced it's not about producing more than enough, it's about as long as we reward greed, power and wealth will concentrate. We're already seeing it here too. We need to fundamentally change so we punish greed and reward solidarity.
> Even then, yes. The worries in NW Europe today may seem terrible to you, but they'd be a joy for a 15th century peasant during a famine or a war, or on any given day that his local lord is in a bad mood. That's not to say that they're not real, but to worry about whether you can keep that nice apartment now that you're unemployed is not the same as worrying about whether you'll manage to find some food so your children won't starve.
I'm not talking about 15th century, I'm talking much longer back, and obviously also about those few tribes still living. They don't have Netflix, but they also don't have this constant stress and so on. Obviously I'm not saying to copy them, I'm saying we should take what we have learnt from this and that, and built something new, something better where greed is punished and solidarity is rewarded.
> They lived to be 25, maybe 30, and often fell to a violent death because it wasn't all solidarity and peaceful happiness. Half of them didn't make it through puberty. And if you consider 15 hours per week of "work" to feed yourself little, then I've got some news for you: depending on your job, you can do it in far less. 7kg of rice will provide the calories you need and set you back about 7 Euros. Figure out how much you have to work to make 7 Euros and you have your answer. Remember, Hunter-Gatherer tribes didn't have houses, cars, health insurance or phones. If you want to go really basic, we've got you covered.
I don't consider it little, I'm saying it's as far as I've seen, it seems we could all keep our houses, our Netflix, cars, cinemas and so on, and only work 15 hours/week. We just need to change our society so all the resources are better distributed, because we have already enough, they are just in the hands of the few.
> Absolutely, I 100% agree. Here's the issue: we don't know what we want. Again, if you're solely going by basic needs, we have you covered. We can trivially supply enough calories and plain water to our citizens, even without imports. But we don't want that, we don't want to limit ourselves to the basic necessities. And as soon as we go beyond that, individuals want different things. If we had a perfect system that accurately predicted and aggregated what everyone wanted, we could provide it without excess, without waste and highly efficient. But we don't. And the chaotic and terribly wasteful mechanisms of the free market are the best system we have.
The problem is that right now we reward greed. So we reward people who take to themselves and on the flip side hurt other people. No one says to limit ourself to 1 back of rice, but if society was based on meeting every single persons basic needs as a minimum - a home, work, food, and so on - and if you needed to say, get a yacht, you surely could, but you could not do it if it was at the cost of others, however that could work, there's lot of interesting ideas about how such an economy could work, but most importantly is that negative and ignored externalities, both human and ecological, would be punished.
> Give them Danish culture and their suffering will decrease until it is no more. If that doesn't sit well with you because "all cultures are equal" and what not, don't fight the fight. Become an engineer or a scientist in applied sciences, you'll move the needle for worldwide well-being much more.
Danish culture is rotten, and it is only going towards a nationalistic, hate-filled pit. Inequality is quickly increasing, and welfare is raising to the bottom, and so on. Gresham's law is very true. The problem is that fundamental to our society, is inequality. The hierarchies of politicians, judges, forceful obedience by police and so on. It can and has only ever gone one way, and that's toward failure, and that's what we are saying now too, even here, but also everywhere else in the world - the US, Sweden, Canada, the UK, France, spain, Italy, everywhere. We wealth and power concentrates, and the more that is so, those with it will fight to keep it and get even more, at the cost of the livelihood of everyone else. A society built on those foundations will only survive for a period of time, and we are right now saying it crumble everywhere.
> I don't share your bleak outlook at all. Human ingenuity is a super power, technology and science are how we overcome obstacles, not by falling back into a status quo ante. We want to hasten our way to the 22nd century, not go back to the 14th.
I'm not suggesting to go back to the 14th century, I'm saying our current civilisation is long overdue for a change. It will not work in the 22th century. We need something else, something new, and if we are wise, it will not be founded on inequality, greed, and hierarchies of power, it will be founded on solidarity and compassion, and it will punish greed, and it will allow everyone to have their voices heard and mean something, not only the few. And thanks to technology, we now have the means. We couldn't feasibly have direct democracy just a 100 years ago, but we can now, thanks to technology. Check out this 5 minute video about liquid democracy, it's very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0_Vhldz-8
> Do we need to produce 1000x, 10000x, 100000x before we start sharing it?
We buy rice, but that aside: we want diversity in foods and everything else, that's why we usually have too much of what we don't want and too little of what we do want. And be careful what you wish for: sharing is noble, but it will also create dependence.
> They don't have Netflix, but they also don't have this constant stress and so on.
I don't have Netflix either, and I also have less stress. Cut out Netflix, cut out the daily news, do more drugs, and you'll have a lot less stress also. Yes, living in a highly advanced civilization produces it's own challenges, and they are psychological more than physiological. But we also have a lot of ways to deal with them, and they look severe only because we are fortunate enough to lack a backdrop of the level of human suffering that was common throughout history. If you've only ever dealt with numbers below 10, your first encounter with 100 will stun you with awe. If you regularly deal with 10000, 100 barely registers.
> Danish culture is rotten
You may feel that way, and yet it is what has created Denmark of 2020. It's not that there was a paradise with an utopian society and then the Danish invaded it and their culture brought the slow but steady downfall. You may feel that much more is possible, but don't reject what gave you this with a shrug: it's also possible to have much less as is evident throughout the world, and I'm not talking about material wealth, I'm talking about peace, stability, solidarity and progress. Is anyone person or any culture perfect? Of course not. Can everything be improved? Of course. Is everything therefore rotten? Of course not. Good may not be perfect, but it's better than bad.
Inequality is a built-in issue of advancement, I believe. If you give people more tools, more leverage, that leverage will more strongly pronounce their differences and result in a more pronounced inequality. I do believe however that we've done a pretty good job at keeping it in check. Yes, I'm very aware that e.g. 40% of Germans have less than $10000 in personal wealth, but I'm also very aware that does not recognize pensions, health care and a social safety net into account. If you go to a bank and ask them how much you'd have to pay in a lump sum for them to provide you with a flat, health insurance and enough money to cloth and feed you for the rest of your life if you stop working, they will, after some calculations, come up with a number. That number is what everybody here has in wealth, it just doesn't sit on your bank account, and you can't pass it down.
I'm all with you if you want the poor to have more actual, material wealth. Having money grants independence, and I'd like to see them more independent. However, I do very much not believe that burning down our institutions would help with that, quite the opposite. Our institutions protect the poor and the simple from the harsh reality of limitless competition.
> We need something else, something new, and if we are wise, it will not be founded on inequality, greed, and hierarchies of power
But that's literally human nature. We are not equal. I may be able to produce the finest of farts, but the fart market is terrible and nobody wants my farts. You, being a fine apple farmer, are in much higher demand. It's a natural process that you'll gain power by being in demand.
> and it will allow everyone to have their voices heard and mean something
But do you want anti-vaxxers to have their voices heard?
I know about liquid democracy. I've watched the pirate party with some anticipation before they spiralled out of control into yet another utopian far-left "reality is not relevant" hobby club. First of all, for it to be meaningful, it requires an informed public. We don't have that, and we won't get that. Ah, but they don't need to be informed, they can delegate their votes! Please take a look at Youtube or Twitch and who the most successful content creators are. That's who will command the votes in your liquid democracy. You're annoyed by Trump? Add more liquid democracy and Trump will seem like an elder statesman.
I do not believe that democracy should be the dictatorship of the majority that it is today. When you want to decide everything by majority rule, you're turning everything into a political battlefield. I do understand the allure and the hope for efficiency if we decide something once and then it's settled and everybody has to surrender to that decision. I also do understand that it's a road to hell, that it will lead to conflict and war.
1) Acknowledge that people are different, have different preferences and aversions. 2) Acknowledge that your preferences and aversions are not the result of a quest for truth but simply that result of your genes and the experiences you made, so it's not that they are right, it's just that they are yours, which makes it feel like they are what everybody should have. 3) do not attempt to force yours on everyone, not by violence, not by vote. 4) Where the preferences conflict so that a (largely) unanimous direction can not be found, do not force a decision, but offer a split: if you and I cannot decide on a car and color, that's okay. We don't have to, we can get two bikes instead.
That's not thought out to any degree, but I believe that's a much better plan to get to a more peaceful society. It will remove a lot of the outrage though, and many people love the outrage, and hate compassion, because compassion doesn't give them adrenaline and excitement.
> But that's literally human nature. We are not equal. I may be able to produce the finest of farts, but the fart market is terrible and nobody wants my farts. You, being a fine apple farmer, are in much higher demand. It's a natural process that you'll gain power by being in demand.
It's not human nature, it's a structural property. There has been societies all through the history of the world, and some are still in existence, as described by the book Anarchy Works that I linked earlier, that has also had fine fart makers and fine apple farmers, but the difference was that the foundation was, that even though what I do is more in demand than what you do, we share what we have, so no one falls behind, and then maybe discuss if I really should spend so much time perfecting my farts. There is no reason why society should "allow" someone to hoard stuff when it's not beneficial to society. Instead, society should try to deter hoarding and greed, and in the event that it's not possible, they should exile the person until they change their behaviours to match the wishes of society.
If you structure your society so that greed is rewarded, you get greedy inhabitants. If you structure society so that solidarity and compassion is rewarded, you get inhabitants accordingly.
> But do you want anti-vaxxers to have their voices heard?
They should be able to say what they wish. Anybody should. The reason why such things seem to have a hold is because information is not free, you have to fight to be educated, and your education is dictated by lobbyists, and you have news and politicians and social medias who manipulate information for profit. That's why stuff like flat earth and anti-vax seem to be growing. It's because of misinformation and a lack of education in the populace, at least that's what it seems like to me. The more knowledge and information is available to all in a population, the less we see of such things like flat-earth, anti-vax, extreme religious beliefs, nationalism, racism, speciesism and so on.
It's because people can make bucks from stuff like that - see for example Facebook - that such things are spreading. In a society where compassion and solidarity were rewarded, stuff like that would be much less.
> I know about liquid democracy. I've watched the pirate party with some anticipation before they spiralled out of control into yet another utopian far-left "reality is not relevant" hobby club. First of all, for it to be meaningful, it requires an informed public. We don't have that, and we won't get that. Ah, but they don't need to be informed, they can delegate their votes! Please take a look at Youtube or Twitch and who the most successful content creators are. That's who will command the votes in your liquid democracy. You're annoyed by Trump? Add more liquid democracy and Trump will seem like an elder statesman.
And that's why we cannot reform society to such things. We cannot try to have a bit of direct democracy here, and some cooperatives there, because it will always be in opposition to the rest of society, and in the end, as greshams law dictates, bad will win. We need to "tear it down" and built it up anew, on a better foundation.
> I do not believe that democracy should be the dictatorship of the majority that it is today. When you want to decide everything by majority rule, you're turning everything into a political battlefield. I do understand the allure and the hope for efficiency if we decide something once and then it's settled and everybody has to surrender to that decision. I also do understand that it's a road to hell, that it will lead to conflict and war.
I don't believe in the dictatorship of the many, and direct democracy doesn't. It's not inherent it in. There is lots of ways to structure direct democracy is not a dictatorship of the 51%. Right now though, we have a dictatorship of the 1%. That's far worse than a dictatorship of the 51%.
> 1) Acknowledge that people are different, have different preferences and aversions. 2) Acknowledge that your preferences and aversions are not the result of a quest for truth but simply that result of your genes and the experiences you made, so it's not that they are right, it's just that they are yours, which makes it feel like they are what everybody should have. 3) do not attempt to force yours on everyone, not by violence, not by vote. 4) Where the preferences conflict so that a (largely) unanimous direction can not be found, do not force a decision, but offer a split: if you and I cannot decide on a car and color, that's okay. We don't have to, we can get two bikes instead.
What you are describing is directly fitting with the anarchist playbook, and it's directly contradictory to our current society in the modern world. Yet, you are saying our current society is quite good.
I don't wish to continue this discussion, it's just too draining. I think you should try and read these following books, and if you do, I think you'll find that you actually agree with anarchism very much. I'm not sure where on the anarchist spectrum you lie, but at least it does sound like you align very much with anarchism in general, if you'd just give it a chance.
Here are three books:
* Anarchy Works: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-ana...
* Post-Scarcity Anarchism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...
* The Democracy Project: https://b-ok.cc/md5/1BD930F7B17488F2F5BD28BE2AE4584C
And I do agree with some part of some anarchist concepts. The reason why I'm not eager to see them replace what's there today isn't because I'm a huge fan of today's society. It's because there are endless examples of it being much worse and arguably none of it being better, so the chance that a major change improves it are slim, the chances that it makes it (much) worse are plenty.
And much like a boulder that you're pushing over a cliff, once it's done there's no reset button, so you better make damn sure that that boulder will land where you want it to land.
Being from a "European culture" I can tell you that it most definitely is not. Materialism is deeply encoded in our DNA, and in my opinion hoarding modern valuables is just the equivalent of our time to hoarding berries or furs or whatever else might be useful in the future. I think our production capacity ran away from us before our ability to adapt to excess developed.
> And really, nobody here is forced to work till they are tired.
I really just can't understand what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying there's noone in the US that is forced to work "until tired" to survive? Surely you can't be saying this.
> Are you saying there's noone in the US that is forced to work "until tired" to survive?
I'm talking about NW Europe. We have plenty of benefit systems that you can tap into. Our homelessness is heavily associated with mental illness and substance abuse, not poverty.
There are surely far more efficient ways of nurturing the next Newton or Kierkegaard than by spraying economy-breaking quantities of money around blindly. That's simply being wasteful.
I'm also not sure that it's true that this would require "spraying money around", I think a lot of man-hours are already spent on useless work and/or basically doing nothing, but doing nothing during salaried time is not equivalent to doing nothing during your own time in terms of potential.
Sure, it's a utopia and a dream but I think it's naive to say that our current economy is already ideal when it comes to distribution of necessary goods and realizing the potential of the individual.
But, I think we already have done the experiment, and I don't think it's worked out the way you expect. Modern-day Westerners live like the gentry. We have luxurious fabrics, fresh vegetables all year long, we can video conference whoever we want (instead of posting letters), we've got servants to do household chores: Miss Washing Machine and Miss Dishwasher; Mr. Word Processor (secretary), Mr. Spreadsheet (finance), and Mr. Printer (typeset output). As a result we have enough leisure time to spend 3 hrs on our pocket tricorder and 4.5 hrs watching moving pictures (TV), on average, every day! [1] Instead of spending 7.5 hours producing amazing works of art and science, we entertain ourselves. (I suspect the original nobility acted a lot like this, too, given how productive the nobility in books like Jane Austen's or The Great Gatsby were--they sat around all day having a party)
On the other hand, we have created the nobility you were looking for: government grants fund much of the basic science, and a fair amount of arts (via universities)
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
I couldn't disagree more. Having "Miss Washing Machine" does not make you nobility. I'm talking about the privilege of no stress, not the privilege of not having to do some menial work. It's not hard to visualize a hypothetical modern human who has all the modern luxuries but still lives a miserable existence paycheck to paycheck with massive amounts of stress.
> As a result we have enough leisure time to spend 3 hrs on our pocket tricorder and 4.5 hrs watching moving pictures (TV), on average, every day!
Sure, but if you, or someone else, had 12 months to spend any way you want, do you think people would spend 12 months watching TV? People do it to wind down, from stress, from work. We are caught in a wheelhouse that never allows us any extended period of rest or contemplation, so we grab the most "energy efficient"/instantly rewarding relaxation during the time we are allotted.
> Instead of spending 7.5 hours producing amazing works of art and science, we entertain ourselves.
Surely you agree that there's a difference between 7.5 hours of spent "free time" in the context of working 8+ hours a day, compared to the context of not working at all? Don't you think you would use your free time differently if it wasn't regulated in the shadow of your "normal" job?
Everyone has their own theory of human nature but mine is this: given enough time, and boredom, a non-trivial percentage of human beings will sooner or later do something useful. And I'm not saying all work today is useless, obviously it's not, but some of it definitely is and probably, in my opinion, hinders other, truly useful work. And yes, of course "useful" is subjective, but my personal definition of it is emotional or physical labor that furthers humanity through any kind of altruism or sustainable technological advancement (or, obviously, supports these initiatives in any necessary way).
> (I suspect the original nobility acted a lot like this, too, given how productive the nobility in books like Jane Austen's or The Great Gatsby were--they sat around all day having a party)
Sure, there are lazy people in every group of humans in the world if you look for them. I don't think there's a way to "solve" that problem, if it even is a problem in the first place. Diversity is probably more good than bad, and boredom can be a catalyst.
> On the other hand, we have created the nobility you were looking for: government grants fund much of the basic science, and a fair amount of arts (via universities)
Sure, but that's exactly what I'm talking about. Not that it doesn't exist, but that it needs to exist more, and should maybe even be our primary goal.
This is not UBI and it’s certainly not the long term mental state of someone on UBI.
What is?
Some form or variation of learned helplessness? Something else?
Too bad we can't ask all the UBI recipients their long term mental state(Because there are none) so instead we'll have to go with this persons gut instinct.
Mega-Meta comprehensive, so to speak ... but maybe we need an AI assist for that or something. I don't know.
I get paid a living wage for very little work. The reasons are irrelevant. The most important aspect here is the outcome, which was quite similar to UBI.
Give anyone the humble monthly income I'm given, and they'll find a way to have fun. I just wanted to confirm that it's indeed quite nice.
One thing I didn't mention is that my revenue could plunge at any moment. It did because of COVID-19, for example. This is not the case with UBI.
"I really enjoyed my vacation paid for by my automated business and therefore basic income will improve people's well-being" is not a good argument for UBI. Of course people will have a good time when someone else is paying for them. But how does society afford to do that?
After saving for 2 years I quit my software job and spent two years driving from Alaksa to Argentina. I went on multi-day hiking trips, I poked lava with a stick, I paddled with icebergs, went scuba diving and camped in the mountains of Alaska and Patagonia.
I got up when I pleased, I cooked my own food (except when street food was stupid-cheap) and I worked on my passion projects (photography and writing at the time).
That experience changed my life, and after four more years saving money at a desk job, I quit again and spent three years driving around Africa.
I woke up to elephants and giraffes less than thirty yards from my Jeep-camper-house, I met tens of thousands of extremely friendly people and I ate delicious foods. I had adventures off the scale in the Congo, Sudan and Mali, I swam in white-sand paradise beaches in Mozambique and Ivory Coast and I again worked on my passion projects.
I certainly was "working" on the second trip - I wrote a couple of books, wrote for magazines, blogged, filmed video, etc. but I did it on my own terms. I could sleep in and take a rest day whenever I wanted, and I have not used an alarm for more than five years now.
Work on your own terms is so much more enjoyable, and life has a different focus. I highly, highly recommend people give it a shot!
I enjoyed this trip so much that I wanted to repeat it elsewhere, but the cost of living is higher in the places I want to see. Then COVID-19 happened and it delayed my trip. I got a short work contract to save up for it, and it means I get to save for a bit longer.
I find it cool that I get to choose how much of my life I want to exchange for money. It's a massive privilege to be in this position.
> I find it cool that I get to choose how much of my life I want to exchange for money.
I agree with you so much, and speaking at events and writing books about what I've done, by number one focus is helping people to realize work/life balance is often a choice.
What happens to rents, for example? If everyone's income goes up, so does the rent. If everyone wanted to live in the same places, for the same reasons, and suddenly has higher incomes, they would bid up the rent, just as they do in well-paying urban areas. Would you be so comfortable if everyone used that free money and it established the bare minimum for living expenses?
And before you say it -- yes, I know, the core problem there is actually rent eating up everyone's discretionary income, their "slack" -- hence why I advocate dealing with that problem first (not just rent, but every such eater -- healthcare, education, etc) before letting those things leech the UBI too [2].
[1] yes, yes, up to the age/citizenship eligibility requirements, you get the point
[2] My earlier elucidation of this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604788
Rent goes up because there are more people looking for a limited resource in urban areas: if you want to work in the city you must live near the city. A UBI that isn't tied to location makes it easier for people to live elsewhere, which reduces demand.
If we did cut out the theoretical work-requirement and possibly stopped paying the rent and instead paid out money (but then quite a few people would fail to pay rent and we'd need another social program to cover them), this would be UBI.
So far, I haven't seen the explosion in creativity, entrepreneurship, volunteering etc that's usually promised. On the other hand, we're up there fighting about the top position in OECD countries for total tax rate.
That's because most people don't have the ambition and discipline of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and if given the chance would rather bum around their whole life instead of work.
I see the same thing in Austria and so do my friends living in other wealthy European countries with strong social nets.
Most people, if given easy access to welfare, would rather lower their standard of living to fit in that small sum of money and not do anything all day rather than use their free time to hustle, learn a new skill or build a business that will permit them a higher standard of living later on.
In my experience in highly funded research groups that run outside out of traditional management (translation annoying and wasteful tertiary education administration) researchers that make an impact get on just fine and produce excellent results on a liveable wage and being given the space to do their jobs. In my mind, the highly masculine and overly aggressive capitalist mindset that competition == results is either untrue or false and discounts a wide range of motivations, personalities and skill sets which do things of interest or worth in intellectual jobs.
ALG II is pretty far from unconditional. You only get it after you burn through all your savings, and it forces you to look for work. TV costs 17€ a month per household even if you don't have a TV. Health insurance is pretty far from free, though it matches your income.
Don't get me wrong, it's generally a pretty good system, but it's not unconditional.
Yes, in a theoretic sense. Not practically, it does not run out and you have to be pretty combative and purposefully i-wont-work to be sanctioned.
> TV costs 17€ a month per household even if you don't have a TV
Which is waived for anyone on social benefits.
> Health insurance is pretty far from free
It is for anyone on social benefits, paid by taxing those that work.
It's not just "stop working, get free things".
If you are not a citizen, it's also going to ensure your visa doesn't get renewed. The government had to make an exception this time for COVID-19.
As for savings: true, but less relevant. With a high net wealth you're already free to do whatever you like. 41% of Germans have less than $10.000 in personal wealth, which will be pretty much the so called Schonvermögen (which you do not need to touch to be eligible for Hartz-4; retirement savings are not taken into account for this, and only applied to private retirement savings, while the super majority relies on the public retirement system in Germany).
So yeah, it's not "stop working, get free things", but it's pretty close to it. Close enough that we should see all the huge benefits that are promised by UBI proponents. But we don't.
> If you are not a citizen, it's also going to ensure your visa doesn't get renewed.
That's not accurate. About 2 million non-citizens are receiving Hartz-4 benefits, the trend is pointing upwards, it does not affect their legal status.
US statistics:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/04/baby-boom... (Millions of baby boomers are getting caught in the country’s broken retirement system)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/these-people-are-on-the-verg... (48 percent of American households over the age of 55 still have no retirement savings)
https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit... (Although most of those whom Social Security keeps out of poverty are elderly [14.8 million], 6.9 million are under age 65, including 1.2 million children)
For our purposes, it's important that you scope to only those who are collecting only Social Security, and have no other retirement savings to closely model your average citizen collecting a potential UBI.
So at some threshold level of income, flicking the UBI switch doesn't affect your net income. You get a same size of increase to your tax bill as you gain from the UBI benefit.
Below the threshold you get a net increase, above it you get net decrease. Opinions differ on where that threshold would settle at (because with UBI the state could shut down some other benefits that are currently funded with tax money).
Did anyone ever argue against it? The point of UBI isn’t that anyone wouldn’t want to get it - it’s that noone can pay for it (or rather, we as a society cannot).
I think COVID nicely shows what happens if the society stops working - labour shortages, soon translated into food and material shortages. Some (e.g. in the UK) are even paid by the government, it’s basically a temporary UBI!
There's a really, really critical difference here: You created something of value and UBI posits that we give everyone money simply for existing, which is inherently problematic for a long list of reasons. The most important problem is that "everyone" (or at least too many people) may become a leach and stop adding value to the system and then the whole thing may fall completely apart in a catastrophic fashion from which the world cannot recover.
The fact that you chose to keep being productive at stuff and life got cheaper and all that is great for your but doesn't generalize. About two-thirds of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years of winning the lottery.
From a non-scientific view point, of course giving people free money makes them feel better.
But from an experimental perspective, they aren't getting the 'full package' of UBI. The participants aren't seeing increased taxes and they aren't seeing inflation from this. Chances are, their landlord doesn't know about this extra money and hasn't raised their rent.
In fact I'm confused why this keeps being 'tried' like its some new idea.
1982 $1,000.00 1983 $386.15 1984 $331.29 1985 $404.00 1986 $556.26 1987 $708.19 1988 $826.93 1989 $873.16 1990 $952.63 1991 $931.34 1992 $915.84 1993 $949.46 1994 $983.90 1995 $990.30 1996 $1,130.68 1997 $1,296.54 1998 $1,540.88 1999 $1,769.84 2000 $1,963.86 2001 $1,850.28 2002 $1,540.76 2003 $1,107.56 2004 $919.84 2005 $845.76 2006 $1,106.96 2007 $1,654.00 2008 $2,069.00 2009 $1,305.00 2010 $1,281.00 2011 $1,174.00 2012 $878.00 2013 $900.00 2014 $1,884.00 2015 $2,072.00 2016 $1,022.00 2017 $1,100.00 2018 $1,600.00 2019 $1,606.00
If simply giving people money left them more successful at getting a new job, there would really not be any point in all the CV theatre a jobseeker routinely needs to perform.
An interesting case is Saudi Arabia that pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals.
We've got several demographics that have their basic needs covered without working. Not all are directly comparable with working peers, but surely some likely outcomes could be predicted.
An interesting datapoint since you mentioned that group.
You have to start somewhere before being "universal" and "basic".
I feel this experiment is better framed as means tested unemployment insurance bureaucracy vs an unconditional cash stipend. This strengthens my longtime argument that means testing is punishing to the less fortunate because it robs them of the resource most precious to all of us - time and energy. I took unemployment before when I was laid off and it was pretty laborious and took me several hours to go through the hoops to file in the first place and the confusion of how to confirm I actually applied for jobs didn't help.
If someone goes to a college that costs $500 per credit hour, can they spent the other $250 on whatever they want?
Its FUD that keeps the UBI from happening. Not logic, evidence nor sound economic principles. Old farts that can't let go of 1950's notions of how people should behave.
Read a dozen more articles, not from your bubble, and then get back to me.
In particular, there are people who say that if you give people money with no strings attached they will just spend it on alcohol or drugs, and it's good to have evidence for a more nuanced view.
It does? My belief, though I have no facts to back it up, is that some of people (but not all) would feel bad taking charity. For some people knowing they are effectively taking from others bothers them.
I happen to think I’m owed quite a bit of rent from all the externalities pushed on to me to allow the owning class to live of rent alone while I do the value crating labor in exchange for the lowest price they can get away with in a saturated labor market.
And I hope most people who are getting the short end of that stick also realize how they are being screwed over by the current system.
Other than that, there's absolutely nothing surprising. You give people a money and they feel better. That's like... not exactly new information. And yeah, it will change their choices somewhat, which again is no big find.
There was a pretty big and important hypothesis that the study was trying to pin down: is UBI profitable? Do you give 500 EUR and get more back? The question is very reasonable and there was quite a bit of clamor for exactly this kind of pilot study to get details. Quite a few mechanisms could potentially get us there - for example people could focus on training for a better position. Or simply having more time to look for jobs they'd find better matches. And so on.
And the answer is: there is no trace of that.
Sure, we do need better studies, longer durations, higher amounts, more people. It's definitely something that's worth studying. But the gold standard so far, the linked study, found nothing in this direction. That's a big negative, and well worth noting - not hiding it into a bunch of "people feel better with more money" like this article is trying to do.
> The researchers also noted a mild positive effect on employment
> Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.
And, of course, the often neglected (and that appears as a negative on the numbers):
> Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours
But actually nothing of substance on either direction.
Do you have a better article?
I don't have other sources at hand - just memories from when the study was published and there was quite a lot of discussion.
Besides, UBI being cheaper to administer than current social security, failure in finding any difference is a reason to adopt it, not to keep the status quo.
If you count taxing a person to give the money back to the same person as a cost, it's certainly not.
Of course giving people money makes them happy. Problem is that money represents resources, there's a limited amount of those going around, and printing money doesn't do anything except devalue the value of a dollar.
It's a functional problem, not a distribution problem.
You're right. Our current system requires us to use money to represent limited resources and those resources are not infinite. Congratulations.
However the idea here that some people just have to suffer and be catastrophically disadvantaged so that an (increasingly smaller and squeezed) middle class can enjoy the fruits of their hard labor as the money continues to concentrate at the top is absurd.
Try thinking outside of the box for a moment. The current system is fundamentally broken but I guess as long as you've got yours it suits your needs.
Somebody in my country once said something like: "If you're not communist at 20, you have no heart. If you're still communist at 30, you have no brain". So I guess I should be more patient. But well... I am a bit irritated by people saying things with conviction while not knowing enough history to cross the road.
Just as I do not advocate for the current economic system in the way it exists. However I know that our current system's goal isn't to provide for the people, and the failings of our current system are extreme.
My biggest point is that I'm not saying everyone should be provided a luxury yacht by the state. It's impractical and nobody needs a luxury yacht to be happy or live.
But I know that people do need things like a place to sleep, food to eat, and access to healthcare to be happy and live. And if you slip in to a situation where you lack any one of those things, getting out of it can be that much more difficult.
I think we have an obligation to each other as humans to try and provide for each other. I guess that it's an unpopular belief.
The goal of the system isn't to provide for people. That's the core fallacy that doomed pretty much any socialist system ever. Systems are shit - all of them. More you rely on one, more fucked you are.
What you want is to let people to provide for themselves.
Because yes, they can and they want to. And trying to say that they need a "system" to provide for them... ugh. It's offensive in so many ways. People are not children - children are children.
Now, this being said, things are quite complicated. There are commons problems, which are very hard to solve by the free market. You do, unfortunately, need some system for those, with the inherent shittyness. But as a rule, the smaller it is the better. More you try to do centralized, worse results you get. Even the modern great success stories in social democracy (western countries, northern europe etc) - they either have a catch (like natural resources) or did most of their growth on a small system, and now are spending their success as social benefits.
And yes, you do want a social safety net, for general principles. You don't want old people dying in ditches because an investment firm went bust with their pensions. But that's about it - safety net has nothing to do with treating perfectly healthy adults like they're disabled or children. They are the ones _paying_ for the safety net. Somebody has to.
You clearly didn't read the study or even the guardian article. There was clear evidence that basic income encourages people to find jobs in many cases, just not conclusively in every case (which no proponent of UBI argues).
> There was a pretty big and important hypothesis that the study was trying to pin down: is UBI profitable? Do you give 500 EUR and get more back?
That wasn't even close to the hypothesis that they were trying to disprove. You made this up off the top of your head. They were trying to develop a simpler, less bureaucratic welfare system that didn't have the pitfalls of the existing system while measuring dependent's wellbeing.
> And the answer is: there is no trace of that.
Again, not true. There was plenty of evidence that a UBI (as enacted in this study) could have positive economic effects, just not in every single case, and not conclusively.
Pretty much the only conclusive result from this study was that the dependents had a better sense of well being on average from the control group. That's it. I have no idea where you got these made up factoids from, I cant find any kind of review or analysis that shares your opinions or statements.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...
Turns out people do not, in fact, generally want to take precarious or otherwise unattractive jobs unless forced to economically. Who'd a thunk?
One of the arguments in Finland was that basic income would encourage and enable people to take on meaningful & important NGO jobs and community efforts despite their low pay.
Not everybody measures the success of UBI as "How many folks can we keep slaving away"
... and maybe they want that funded by other people doing the work. Sounds like medieval nobility to me.
Are they though? Who exactly would fund the self-actualization adventures of the lucky recipients, if not other people? I'm guessing here, but I assume the funding wouldn't be voluntary. In that case, those people's lives are not their own, those people's lives (and the results of them spending parts of their lives at work) are shared.
> Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!"
I live among the lower class. A good part of them do not work and still have a life.
After that, we're gonna have a big slug of people out of work, lots of relatively cheap goods, and a few very rich who own most of the factories. How is this gonna play out?
In the best scenario, we go on to a bright future of little work necessary for everyone.
Or, we blame those folks for being 'out of work', let them suffer and die.
The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. This is the notion we have to get thru everybody's head.
Somebody has to create, build, and maintain those factories. Someone else has to manage the output of those factories and distribute it. Someone else needs to work to secure raw materials for the factory. Age you can't produce everything in factories. You don't have a factory that grows food for example.
Programming, especially web development is a great analogy here. You have tools that do almost all the things you would want a website to do. Why do we need web developers at all then? Because it turns out that connecting everything and fine tuning it for your specific needs is quite difficult.
Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.
Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too.
The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't.
Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.
Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc.
I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.
To support a model of "build new factories forever" requires endless expansion. The world is no longer expanding at a rate that would support that, not nearly. And I don't see that as a desirable world .
Any repetitive job can eventually be automated away.
The largest impact is going to be fully autonomous self driving cars. That alone has the chance of eliminating 4 million driving jobs, including truckers and cab drivers. This does not factor in the ~3 million people that drive for Uber and lyft.
These are not people who are going to be able to easily switch to another position. Even fast food is exploring automating their restaurants. As far as building the factories, procuring raw materials, etc. all those jobs already exist and are staffed. With the constant advancement in 3d printing, even those jobs may be reduced.
The target near me used to regularly have 10+ registers open, now it generally has 3 plus 6 self checkout lines.
Since we decided to blame those workless people, and punish them if they don’t find work. They _have_ to find work. Which means more competition for consumption, you _have_ to consume their stuff to keep them fed. Which means more senseless competition to produce shit no one actual my need, more ads, more tele marketing, poisonous food, exploiting of addictive behavior, more jealously guarded trade secrets and “intellectual property” walls instead of cooperation and peer production.
In essense by insisting that all people must be employed at all time, we force the market to produce anti-value.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright
And, given the current state of automation, most of the work to maintain those farms is highly automated; the operators are mostly monitoring screens from non-integrated screens and acting as a simple PID controller.
Where did all of those thousands of previously employed farm hands go? Into the factories. But as they're pushed out of the factories, where do they go next?
Except up your estimate by an order of magnitude or three. Farms of 10,000 acres managed by a handful of people. John Deere estimates 100M acres under automated tillage today, worldwide.
More likely, the low hanging fruit of automation has already been plucked bare and the rest will require a century or more to figure out. I certainly don't expect an automated plumber or meat processing worker anytime soon.
It's not a case of 'can we'. Its only limited by the cost, which is a fixed upfront value. If the market is big enough, then that cost can be amortized. As America grows, more and more processes are entering the magic size where automation pays.
When somebody says they "Brought the factories and jobs back to America!" they're lying. They brought the factory back, but only because automation-at-home is cheaper than hand-labor-overseas.
How much of that is due to automation vs. factory jobs being done outside the US?
You're mistaking automation for outsourcing. The factory workers are still around, only they're in China now. Yes, we've automated some things but we're building other stuff now. Much like, yes, we have power tools today, but we're also not only building simple, uninsulated houses.
Dream your utopia, but don't forget that real people still do 14 hour shifts to supply you with the goods you desire, not some highly automated robot in some hidden factory under the streets of your city. It's just that most of these people are n ocean away now, so you don't need to see them and get your happy life disturbed by seeing their living conditions compared to yours.
The goods pour out of the factories, the power is generated by the the wall outlet, the internet lives in the cable and water flows directly from the tap. The magical world of tomorrow. I know, I know, "some day it will all be automated, just you wait". Yeah, let's wait until that's actually in sight and not just hidden away behind a tiny robot moving the product the last 500 feet to your door. It isn't in sight today and it won't be tomorrow.
Even China is automating. China is the US's #1 market for industrial automation machinery. They're behind us, but gaining fast. They're at about the 25% level now, and increasing.
Try googling around before making spurious, wrong comments please.
FTA:
“Some people said the basic income had zero effect on their productivity, as there were still no jobs in the area they were trained for,” said Prof Helena Blomberg-Kroll, who led the study. “But others said that with the basic income they were prepared to take low-paying jobs they would otherwise have avoided.
...
It also encouraged some participants to get more involved in society, by undertaking voluntary work, for example. “Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours,” said one of the researchers, Christian Kroll.
“The security of the basic income allowed them to do more meaningful things, as they felt it legitimised this kind of care work. Many of the people who performed such unpaid activities during the two-year period referred to it as work.”
>"The researchers also noted a mild positive effect on employment, particularly in certain categories, such as families with children"
at least says something.
> The researchers, who conducted 81 in-depth interviews with participants in the scheme, concluded that...
The quantitative employment analysis was based on 2000 participants.
I had a rough plan of working in a daycare (päiväkoti) as a native English speaker. Sadly there are few private daycare places that hire English-speaking people, and for those that are in existance demand is so high that I had no chance.
win/win
> Finns take stock soberly
> More security, fewer depressions: the Finnish UBI experiment benefited the participants. Alas, the results show: the desired effect for the work market cannot be shown.
For me, the German title reads very much like "this doesn't work" while the article mentions that the results regarding the market cannot be distinguished from other interfering changes to the social welfare system that were made in the meantime.
Which funnily reminds me of the top comment in the current ad-tech thread [2]: "The hard part is convincing the [people in charge] to stop messing with stuff long enough that you can actually measure the results."
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/grundeinkommen-finnland-10... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23103492
Here's my rough translation:
1. Introduction
2. Other basic income studies in other countries
3. Effects on employment
4. Perceived health, psychological wellbeing and cognitive performance
5. Economic well-being
6. Experiences on bureaucracy
7. Basic income and trust
8. Participant interviews on basic income's effects on employment, participation, autonomy
9. BI in media
10. General populations views on BI and uncertainty relating to income
I’m sure the hunter-gatherers were upset the farmers weren’t motivated to hunt and gather too.
Let’s say in telemarketing? I get quite a few unsolicited calls, would gladly spend some money to not have to have them.
Or in tobacco perhaps. N or sure how much of my taxes are spent on managing the fallout from that industry, but I’m pretty sure I‘d rather spend them on keeping people from working in it.
The challenge is whether or not it is possible to actually implement on a society wide scale without net negative or self nullifying side effects.
One self nullifying side effect: give everyone free money -> prices go up -> everyone is back to where they started.
I don't expect a perfectly representative model, but I think a lot along the lines of what made Warren Buffet famous: What is the worth of something vs. the price of that thing? And how does one bring labour into the equation?
Because so far, this sort of belief belongs to religious texts, and it's still an important pillar of how society works. We still judge the homeless and moochers because they are not willing to work. We even put people at job where they're not productive, as long as they look busy, available, and obeying.
The criticism of these programs is that they will cause economic problems in the long run. It's not to say they won't make anybody happy in the short run.
What QE does is - it concentrates the wealth in hands of 0.1% of society. Each financial crisis (2008, 2020) only speeds up this process. Once top 0.1 owns more than, say 90% of wealth we will be back to ancient Rome - "panem et circenses", wealthy people throwing some scraps of wealth towards mases, just enough to keep them from revolting.
Gig economy will also play some role: we are slowly cooking the frog, getting people used to the fact that they don't own their homes, or their cars, they do not have pemanent jobs. Everything they have is a short term rental. They are living using borrowed things, on borrowed time...
So UBI is just proxy for wealth redistribution. Sure, wellbeing has improved for small group of people, but the question is how scalable UBI is? Remember, road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The phrase was "road to hell is paved with good intentions". "Trying to build and maintain a prosperous society" was the good intentions part. The hell part is the reality that the next generation lives in after wealth redistribution has been forced: we've seen it over and over again, every time it's been tried.
Money supply is generated by banks creating debt on balance sheets while giving out loans of money they don't actually have (fractional reserve banking) and the same story between these banks and regional government proxy federal banks.
Unrelated but I really dislike this phrase because it tells us nothing, it's not actionable, nor is it accurate. The road to heaven is paved with good intentions too. There are other roads to hell paved with bad intentions, and probably a few to heaven with bad intentions as well.
A more accurate saying would be "be careful of unintended bad side effects". That's something useful you could say in the workplace in response to a proposal.
Under a basic, reasonable fair model, random economic flows in a free market will tend to have all the wealth accumulated by a few: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine... Depending on the redistribution amounts (not specifically UBI, just aggregate), differing levels of oligarchy will or will not form.
UBI allows for a very gentle way of avoiding all the wealth captured by a few. You could think of it as economic transfers tend to create blackholes and UBI pumps some of the accumulated matter back into the universe to keep activity flowing.
...why a UBI at the US federal level takes away freedom to try better ideas to do good at other levels, is morally wrong, is harmful, and that we can do much more good with persuasion, fundraising, letting states handle it (or smaller scopes), etc etc.
(With down-votes, a thoughtful comment is appreciated; thanks.)
1. These list of behaviors are good
2. This thing (UBI) does not serve those behaviors
3. Therefore UBI is not good
---
First of all anyone who disagrees with one or more of the list of behaviors will probably not be convinced by the remainder of the argument. Those are normative beliefs, anyone from another culture or background/faith won't share all of them with you.
But assuming we accept all of #1, I do not see enough evidence for point #2, why does UBI violate the norms? After all plenty of Christians have been in support of UBI, like MLK and the Pope. I saw the phrase "charity by force" several times but no clear definition of what that is or isn't, for instance the "Basic incentive of working" seems sort of like forceful coercion at some level: you either work or you starve and die. What exactly do these terms mean?
With all that, I'm not convinced that point 3 is supported by what I read.
States and private organizations can do it better, but that is hampered when the fed govt takes so much of the resources (and, as I mentioned (and linked to more), it often does things badly.
And there is a scripture in my belief system, that if one doesn't work, one doesn't eat. God can provide, and this life is not the end (my web site says how I know this personally).
But even (to me at least) logically there is no inherent right for one who does not seek work to take resources from one who does.
The USA fought a War of Independence in the 1770s, in part to be free from control of individuals by faraway people, which to me is the same as the fed govt taking taxes and giving resources to others that I did not choose to give to.
Edit: If we were 5 families on one desert island, there is no inherent right of one to steal food (or the results of other productive labors) from another. If I plan and save and work hard, why does anyone have the right to tell me I have to support someone else who does not choose to live the same principles? (cf. libertarianism.)
Edit: UBI is like forcing one family on the island to support the drug habit of another (or whatever lifestyle choice, agree or disagree), only with federal power and inefficiency. Local-decision-making can do a much better job, because you have the chance of knowing individuals personally and help them. The public/private humanitarian and welfare partnerships in Utah are a good example of this (probably there is a link somewhere on my web site with details).
That is we we have states, aka "laboratories of democracy" who can then learn from each other.
Edit: as far as birth goes, rich vs. poor, I observe at least one private organization (my church, but of course there are many others) working hard (with affordable educational opportunities, financial help, mentoring, food, humanitarian aid, etc etc) to lift anyone who wants to be able to live, and have peace. (I also believe the rich are responsible to help others, and that we all will someday answer to God for how we treated others. Again, web site in profile says how I know this, in great detail.)
(Edit: FWIW, I have not taken a position on what should happen when the rich get too rich and the poor get too poor, nor how that should happen. I think the rich should keep in mind that that is what starts revolutions, though I believe our constitutional order is the most important thing of all (like more important than UBI pro or con)--such things should be done lawfully and our constitution allows us to work things out, hopefully at the state level first an foremost. But to support idleness is a bad idea as I have tried to explain.)
Edit: Maybe my reasoning is not as persuasive to you as it is to me, and certainly we are individuals with the right to decide for ourselves. That individual right I believe extends also to deciding for ourselves what we will do with the fruit of our labors, with few exceptions (ie for common defense, safety) written as powers granted by the people to a constitutionally limited federal government. Again, I hope we can leave the rest to the states to try things and learn from each other what works well.
I will also note that libertarian principles are not very popular with the electorate because most people will gladly sacrifice abstract freedom for {economic growth|job opportunities|reduce poverty|etc}.
1) that we have a constitution that limits federal authority (for what I think are many good historical reasons);
2) socialism/communism has caused big problems, also with many extensively painful historical examples. I relate this to "government cares for us";
3) my beliefs about the nature of life, purpose of government, importance of freedom to choose what one does with one's earnings, etc., also could be considered separately. And that I have learned for myself of God's reality.
4) many others, individually also, I think...if were to take more time on them each. Like my personal experiences with the worst customer service I've ever had, being from federal agencies. Etc. But we don't have to, of course. :)
1. is normative, it assumes the reader respects the all of the (US) constitution's values. Two possibilities:
(a) the reader is from outside the US (this article is about Finnish basic income after all) and
(b) the reader is american but disagrees with the constitution's values (which ironically is somewhat in spirit with the constitution anyways, free speech and all)
2. This one is somewhat of a problem of semantics if you've ever tried to argue with hardline socialist/capitalists because there is no purely socialist or purely capitalist state out there, even in the US we have plenty of government controls. Hardline socialists are eager to distance themselves from historical failures (it wasn't "real" socialism) and capitalists are eager to distance themselves from supposed market failures (crony capitalism).
(I definitely have personal bias to the latter though. There are plenty of distorted incentives which create market failures, yet I will admit that markets left to their own devices often result in sub-optimal outcomes through a process like the prisoner's dilemma)
3. Not necessarily communicatable to every reader but maybe similar readers would be able to relate.
4. Also not communicatable to every reader but I can believe that one :) though the worst customer service I've ever had was from comcast (caused by either {lack of government regulation | government regulation creating monopolies } depending on who you ask), and they refused to refund a double billing mistake until I ended up having to use some FTC website to make a formal complaint, at which point they finally assigned me a real customer service person from their business division.
2) Disregarding "true believers" on either side of this one who would not be convinced regardless, I think Soviets, Mao, Venezuela, others in Asia, and even France are convincing enough to enough people that there is reasonable hope the USA will not go too far in that direction. If we do, we have serious problems of understanding, education, and communication, and whatever underlies those, IMO. Others are free to disagree of course.
3) Anyone who wants to find why I say I know what I know, can also investigate for themselves. :)
4) Re comcast: so they say, yes. Glad I have not been forced to use them so far, and for your tip on the FTC website in case I ever do have to.
Thanks for reading my comments, and your thoughtful replies. All the best to you.
You're stuck in viewing things in through a lens of how private property works now.
Why is it that those who own some land deserve a cut of the profits of that land? That land was stolen at some point. Who says that anyone can truly claim ownership of land? Isn't land to be owned by all? And the same can be said of much more then just land.
Instead of the work of all previous generations and large parts of land being inherited by the few who are lucky enough to be born to the rich or whatever, it should be distributed to everyone. That can take the form of UBI.
For an argument of these points, read the first 3 chapters of of The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin.