Coronavirus Is Making Universal Basic Income Look Better
bloomberg.com
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The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of job-seekers (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads.
Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while developing infrastructure to support the current and future society.
Above all, the WPA hired workers and craftsmen who were mainly employed in building streets. Thus, under the leadership of the WPA, more than 1 million km of streets and over 10,000 bridges were built, in addition to many airports and much housing.
Much of the infrastructure in the US is crumbling and needs to be replaced or fixed in the coming decades. Wouldn't society benefit more from training and hiring people to clean streets, rebuild infrastructure, beautify urban areas, etc. than simply sending everyone a check?
I know that Basic Income isn't simply to replace jobs lost to automation, but I don't see how paying people to improve aspects of civilization is not obviously better than paying people with no expectations.
> they are much better positioned to choose the kind of work they personally do best.
...lead to any sort of large-scale work getting done? Bridges and roads aren't open-source software and don't build themselves merely through the individual disparate actions of large numbers of people. I.e., thousands of people individually deciding that they want to improve their city's infrastructure doesn't result it in being improved; you still need an overarching leadership structure to organize it.
Perhaps that's hard to understand to software people, but working on something can be and often is rewarding.
My point is that large infrastructure projects require top-down organization, unlike open-source software, for example, which can be constructed through the individual, separate actions of large numbers of people. Ergo the disparate actions of individual people will not add up to a bridge.
FLOSS still requires top-down organization, just like any engineering process. You may be used to work at projects where a single person can parachute into a code base and rewrite everything from scratch, but there are also contractors who can build an entire house single-handedly.
Once you add enough complexity to a project, you start to require hierarchies.
> for example, which can be constructed through the individual, separate actions of large numbers of people.
It's the exact same thing in civil engineering. You get contracts that are entirely independent of other tasks. The guy putting up utility poles on a bridge deck doesn't care if the drainage has been finished yet.
- Some things can be created in sum, by individual people acting according to their own individual desires.
- Other things can only be created with larger amounts of resources and organization. No amount of individual action will get them made.
To use a different example: the Manhattan Project would not have developed a nuclear bomb if it simply gave every physicist in the country a stipend to live and said "work on nuclear physics." Massive amounts of coordination and resources were necessary.
For starters, a basic income does not stop anyone from working in structured projects. I have no idea where you came up with that nonsense. You gave construction work as an example and I explained to you why your belief made no sense, and still you don't follow. Let's be perfectly clear: people do enjoy what they do for a living, and don't do it because they are paid to do it. Self-fulfillment is real.
Secondly, people do enjoy working in structured environments, specially if they are working on a lofty goal. Academia is largely an example of that. You talk about the Manhattan project? How many physicists do you believe were working on that project because they wanted to get rich or were compelled to pay the bills? Once you satisfy your basic needs, you focus on other aspects of your life. See Maslow's pyramid.
Thirdly, people do cooperate and collaborate for the greater good, regardless of income. See volunteer work.
And finally, please refrain from trying to belittle fellow readers, specially if you do that while demonstrating some slowness grasping simple concepts or ideas.
There's a sense that if we have UBI, it'll take a huge number of people out of the workforce, but I think the only real rationale for that is the notion that a number of people hate working enough that the moment they get "sufficient cost-of-living" income they'll quit and veg out. There's a counter-argument that a huge number of people would instead still work really hard, but would pursue different jobs (often jobs that pay terribly right now) if they didn't have to worry about financial security.
There's a huge swash of jobs I'm actually personally interested in, in the trades, that I can't rationally touch because it's a massive pay cut - which wouldn't be so bad, except that our society has no safety net, particularly for end-of-life care, so squirreling money away is the only way to get an approximation of one. It's really the unbounded end-of-life/healthcare costs that force me towards a soft income-maximization path. I don't have to be too crazy about it, but if one possible career path (programming) has a reliable guarantee of earning 3-4x another one (construction), I can't reasonably pass that up.
I think if UBI dropped in, we'd see a mass exodus from "bs jobs" that provide no value to society, but I think a large number of jobs which do something meaningful would retain a surprisingly high percentage of their employment. There would probably be some major wage adjustments, but they'd draw a surprising number of people from the "now that I don't 'have' to do anything, what do I 'want' to do?" crowd. Doctors, food-industry, construction, mechanics, etc, would all remain surprisingly hirable. Quite a few other things like sales and management would dry up really hard.
This has nothing to do with UBI. That's why you're having trouble understand the excellent points by rumanator. He's pointing out that you can have both UBI AND large infra projects. They are not mutually exclusive. I'm not sure where you got that idea from?
Well, it seems to me that those who don't just never had the opportunity or good fortune to hold a job they enjoy doing. Isn't that a problem worth fixing? I mean, I doubt that desiring a fulfilling life is a niche thing.
So unless this "fix" involves some kind of radical social engineering, it's just not going to be "fixable". You got lucky; you are the kind of person who find fulfillment in being paid to do your job. There are people who don't have that, and given the way our society and economy works, never will. Many of those people, myself included, are fine with that. It's OK. What many such people are less fine with is how much those other people like you want us to be like you.
There are things that individuals, left to their own preferences and entrepreneurial habits, will never create.
Just less people willing to do the work.
Once you get people on the dole, they will continually ask for more while still doing nothing. And because we live in a democracy, they'll vote in whoever will give them more and more money for free.
How's that for a bombshell that will totally destroy our GDP, happiness, sense of self worth and ultimately our society?
The other big problem here is that when people do get money for free, the incentive is to vote more money for yourself. When most of the population is working, this isn't a problem, but once you get over 50% of the population who is expecting the government to pay their way, the country will just be a big free for all, everyone trying to grab as much as they can.
I could be wrong, but IMO the risk of it playing out this way and destroying the entire country is not insignificant.
Of course not. We live in a capitalistic society where people want to get ahead and make a better life for themselves. Raising the economic floor from $0 to $12k/yr (~poverty line) is juuust enough for people falling through the cracks to get back on their feet and become productive members of society again.
Will some tiny fraction of people be satisfied living in a shithole apartment, eating garbage and trolling on the internet all day? Sure. I'm willing to accept that negligible cost in exchange for the massive social benefits.
I think you do have a valid point regarding people voting for more money over time. I don't see this as big of a problem as you do but I acknowledge it's something that needs to be considered.
Are you trying to say I'm some sort of clown who unintentionally make people laugh when I speak my beliefs? Can you at least acknowledge that we may both be intelligent people who disagree? This sort of statement really shows your inability to consider opposing viewpoints in an objective way, IMO.
> Do you really think people will be satisfied making barely enough money to survive? Just enough to live at the poverty line?
> Of course not. We live in a capitalistic society where people want to get ahead and make a better life for themselves. Raising the economic floor from $0 to $12k/yr (~poverty line) is juuust enough for people falling through the cracks to get back on their feet and become productive members of society again.
> Will some tiny fraction of people be satisfied living in a shithole apartment, eating garbage and trolling on the internet all day? Sure. I'm willing to accept that negligible cost in exchange for the massive social benefits.
This is a straw man, since we've already seen that realistically, this is not how UBI would be implemented. The proposed "Heroes" act already had a (now removed) clause to give people $2000 per month, on top of all the other benefits they are already receiving, which goes to show that politicians who favor this aren't thinking in terms of the bare minimum to meet the poverty line, nor seem to care about how much it costs.
> I think you do have a valid point regarding people voting for more money over time. I don't see this as big of a problem as you do but I acknowledge it's something that needs to be considered.
What do think happens if you're wrong and doing this would cause a feedback loop of more and more benefits, spending, and money printing? You're going all in with the country at stake, with a vague hand wavy dismissal of the consequences.
Well, I'm a person, and you made me laugh, so, while I wouldn't actively employ that description, I wouldn't say that (apart from quite probably the “clown” part) it's wrong in any salient detail.
> Can you at least acknowledge that we may both be intelligent people who disagree?
Sure, but that's not mutually incompatible with the preceding option. Intelligent people can be wildly misguided on a topic, intelligence doesn't imply being informed, having spent the effort to think something through well (though it reduces the amount of effort required), or any of a number of other things that are needed to avoid that problem.
> The proposed "Heroes" act already had a (now removed)
“Now removed” is a hint that even as a temporary emergency measure, the form in that proposal is not the form it would likely be in were it to pass.
> clausee to give people $2000 per month, on top of all the other benefits they are already receiving
While it has some superficial similarity to a UBI, the HEROES act proposal was a temporary recurring stimulus payment, an ongoing money pump to get the economy going not a UBI. It was consciously, by design not sustainable beyond a limited emergency period with unusual economic conditions, and it's design reflected that. Just like the massive short-term trickle-down subsidies pumped into corporations and the banking sector, but this was bottom-up.
> What do think happens if you're wrong and doing this would cause a feedback loop of more and more benefits, spending, and money printing?
People concerned about that ought to support implementing it with the relatively trivial-to-implement negative feedback controls which prevent that.
> People concerned about that ought to support implementing it with the relatively trivial-to-implement negative feedback controls which prevent that.
I just don't see how that's trivial to implement at at all. What "negative feedback controls" are you referring to?
The simplest is just setting a fixed nominal benefit without any indexing, but this has the problem that active choice to increase benefits is expected, so the still fairly trivial, but less crude negative feedback method is to tie aggregate benefits to a revenue stream you expect to generally grow with the economy (to get a little bit beyond the trivial level, you can add some reserves and buffering for short-term fluctuations.)
Because of the natural effect of price levels on real benefit levels, a runaway scenario is really only possible with inflation indexing or something effectively similar.
You prefer to have nuclear physicists digging ditches like parent poster..?
There's plenty of people doing stuff at home, even on crazy projects. Zhang solved the twin prime conjecture while he worked at subway because he couldn't get an academic job[0]. I think many also know Grigori Perelman[1] turning down the Fields Medal. There's the nuclear boy scout. Michio Kaku built an accelerator as a teenager. How many SV startups came out of garages? It is so weird to hear the GP comment on a site where we glorify those that rose from shoestring budgets. In fact, what is more American than that kind of story? Maybe the dream died, but maybe it shouldn't have.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/a-former-subway-worker-made-a-breakthrou...
Michel started a prototype fusion reactor in a shed that turned into General Fusion. Einstein was of course a patent clerk. It all starts somewhere.
I’m however positive, in the case of essential infrastructure, enough people - engineers, technicians and the like will happily work together despite being provided UBI.
Same with health care and other essential professions.
They’ll do it no matter governmental or ”private” initiatives.
A lot of us would probably direct our effort more in unison to creating a better world once the basics are of no concern.
In the end all we need to do is to cooperate. It’s what we’ve evolved to do. UBI is kind of the final step here - realize it’s not a zero sum game.
Can you not see a lot of cooperatives and interesting governmental initiatives arising due to UBI? I certainly can.
When their reward is a real stake in the profits generated by the project.
It will mean that people won't be wage slaves if they don't want to, and can quit a shitty job or a shitty manager. It means that folks can miss work if the are sick. Or not go broke while getting education, both formal and informal. Folks might not work at a job they hate just to get food on the table and be slightly-over-broke. People can demand vacation time. But it'll still be worth it to go to work to have more money than UBI gives, even if some folks don't participate.
>Maybe we shouldn't be presupposing that governments are better at resource allocation than their citizens
A. allocate resources via new deal work programs B. allocate resources via UBI
The choice between 1930's work programs and UBI is a false dichotomy.
(C.) None of the above
The great depression was exacerbated by gov. spending and the new deal. Rarely mentioned is the crisis of 1920 which was resolved relatively quickly by cutting spending.
It becomes a tax on everyone else who is holding cash when we assume that the money supply will be inflated, which is the default scenario. Otherwise actual taxes will have to be levied to fund UBI.
If we accept that society has witnessed massive increases in productivity over the last hundred years, what happened to the 5 cent hamburgers? How does this price inflation help the impoverished?
When we create a monetary spigot and allocate resources via gov. intervention, those who specialize in currying favor with gov. will always benefit disproportionately. Ironically, proponents of further gov. intervention use this wealth inequality to rationalize further gov. allocation of resources.
Of course taxes would need to be levied to fund it, as with any other government expense. And setting the tax curve right is nontrivial. But a complex tax system and a simple disbursement system is still an improvement over a complex tax system and a complex disbursement system which is what we currently have. (Eliminating almost all tax deductions would also be a good programme to follow).
> If we accept that society has witnessed massive increases in productivity over the last hundred years, what happened to the 5 cent hamburgers? How does this price inflation help the impoverished?
So what you're saying is that in a non-UBI world, increases in productivity have not helped the poorest. How is that an argument against UBI?
> When we create a monetary spigot and allocate resources via gov. intervention, those who specialize in currying favor with gov. will always benefit disproportionately.
That's true in proportion to how complex the rules are. E.g. most TARP funding went to New York 1%ers, because those were the people who knew how to meet the TARP requirements. The whole point of UBI is to reverse that by having the simplest, most transparent rules possible for who gets what money.
What I am saying (sorry for not being explicit) is that increases in productivity have not helped the poorest because they have been robbed of said benefits by price inflation, which is a symptom of an inflation of the money supply.
>The whole point of UBI is to reverse that by having the simplest, most transparent rules possible for who gets what money
My expectation is that those who collect rent on low income housing will benefit more than those who pay the increased rent. At the end of the day low income people will have more money, but all of their expenses for basics like food and rent will increase.
>Of course taxes would need to be levied to fund it, as with any other government expense.
Recent history suggests that this is simply not the case. Budget deficits would be a more reasonable expectation. Either way, increased taxes will similarly create increased prices. Those with lesser incomes will suffer the most.
Price inflation doesn't change how much real value exists is in the world. The problem the working poor have isn't inflation (if anything, inflation costs the rich more than the poor, since the rich are more likely to have savings), it's that they're taking home an ever smaller proportion of the value they produce.
> My expectation is that those who collect rent on low income housing will benefit more than those who pay the increased rent. At the end of the day low income people will have more money, but all of their expenses for basics like food and rent will increase.
Cheap food is a competitive, low-margin business, so it's unlikely that the cost would increase. (If you're thinking about labour costs going up, higher-end goods are generally much more labour-intensive than cheap goods). Housing markets are their own total mess, but if there's a lot less need for people to live near their job then that should make housing a lot more competitive and if anything lower prices.
> Recent history suggests that this is simply not the case. Budget deficits would be a more reasonable expectation.
It's not like governments don't already run the highest deficits they can get away with. The mechanisms that limit them (credit ratings etc.) will be the same mechanisms we currently have; introducing UBI doesn't change that one way or another.
> Either way, increased taxes will similarly create increased prices. Those with lesser incomes will suffer the most.
It's absurd to think that doubling the proportion of extant dollars in the hands of the working poor (at the expense of people on the high end) would make those people worse off. Price adjustments might blunt some of the effect, but wealth redistribution must ultimately work; why would the rich be so afraid of it otherwise?
The truly wealthy have a lower proportion of their savings in cash. They preserve their wealth in assets like stock or property which pays dividends and increases in value along with price inflation.
>Cheap food is a competitive, low-margin business, so it's unlikely that the cost would increase
The Federal Reserve cannot print more supply for consumers. When they increase the supply of money to chase the same supply of assets, the outcome is price inflation. Food and rent is a disproportionately larger expense for low income individuals.
>The mechanisms that limit them (credit ratings etc.)
These mechanisms are not limiting them from monetizing debts. Additionally, credit ratings organizations are subject to retaliation by sufficiently powerful governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...
>but wealth redistribution must ultimately work; why would the rich be so afraid of it otherwise?
I'm not sure it is fair to assume that 'the rich' want 'the poor' to be worse off. Producers create products which consumers want to consume, because they perceive it to benefit themselves. Finally, I'm not sure that the truly rich elites are opposed to UBI. Bloomberg has published the article and continues to push this narrative. If anything greater centralization favors elites. When asset prices increase those who have their savings in assets benefit the most. Again, the elites are not keeping their savings in cash.
I don't think that's really true. The middle class often have a negative proportion of their savings in dollar-denominated assets (their mortgage), and the poor usually have no relevant savings at all (compared to their expected future income).
> The Federal Reserve cannot print more supply for consumers. When they increase the supply of money to chase the same supply of assets, the outcome is price inflation. Food and rent is a disproportionately larger expense for low income individuals.
The food supply is far from fixed (and the government does have a number of levers with which to affect it). Food and rent are a disproportionately large expense for the poor because they are poor; if we redistribute wealth towards the poor we should expect it to become a proportionately smaller expense for them. Demand for food will only actually increase if people are currently not getting as much food as they want, and in that case we should want prices to increase so that more food supply comes online.
> These mechanisms are not limiting them from monetizing debts. Additionally, credit ratings organizations are subject to retaliation by sufficiently powerful governments.
Be that as it may, all of that is happening anyway. UBI doesn't change the deficit because the deficit will always be as high as politically possible.
This assumes that the prices for all of the inputs for food production remain static in the face of either increasing taxes or as we both seem to agree upon, an increased monetary base. Land and energy will go up in price as more money is available to chase the same scarce resources. Similarly taxes would increase production costs.
>UBI doesn't change the deficit because the deficit will always be as high as politically possible.
More spending won't increase deficits because they're going to spend anyways? I'm not sure I follow your logic here.
It is true that price inflation helps debtors. Those who have homes have their debts minimized while their asset increases in price. Lately it seems that we have been incentivizing this behavior, rewarding those who borrow and punishing those who save in cash. I'm not sure how this helps low income individuals. Especially those who are trying to build savings for their first home.
>Food and rent are a disproportionately large expense for the poor because they are poor; if we redistribute wealth towards the poor we should expect it to become a proportionately smaller expense for them
And they will still be poor relative to everyone else. What is needed is not a money printer to merely print more paper and distribute it into the economy, but a similarly effortless method to print supply into the economy like a Star-Trek replicator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)
Worse yet, in the case of COVID-19 production has actually decreased.
You're conflating different kinds of thing here. I don't believe there would be any increased monetary base, because I expect UBI would be implemented in a budget-neutral way (covered by tax). But if you do think there would be monetary inflation, just ignore the cash numbers and denominate everything in 2020 (fixed-value) dollars. There are no more fixed-value dollars chasing resources (just the same number of fixed-value dollars distributed differently), so there's no increased demand at first order. At second order maybe those same fixed-value dollars circulate more quickly, so there's more demand and more consumption, a more active economy generally and higher GDP (in fixed-value dollars). That would generally be seen as a good thing.
> More spending won't increase deficits because they're going to spend anyways? I'm not sure I follow your logic here.
The political reality of passing UBI would be finding some way to balance (or retain the same unbalance in) the budget, either by cutting other expenditures or raising additional revenue.
> And they will still be poor relative to everyone else.
They will be less poor relatively, that's the whole point. If A has 100 dollars and B has 10 dollars, and you give 10 dollars to B, it's almost irrelevant whether those are dollars you taxed from A or printed afresh; either way you leave B proportionately much better off.
Yet somehow, the deficits keep increasing year by year. Even so, increased taxes on producers would result in increased prices for consumers. There's no free lunch.
>If A has 100 dollars and B has 10 dollars, and you give 10 dollars to B...
When B, who has a history of mismanaging his finances continues to do so, A will end up with this money. Even UBI proponents make the case that this is 'trickle up' economics. Additionally B may be buying things like gasoline with this money whereas A would have just parked it on the stock market, which wouldn't have the same impact on consumer prices.
The deficits follow a pretty steady trajectory regardless of which policies pass in any given year; a year in which UBI passed would be no exception.
> Even so, increased taxes on producers would result in increased prices for consumers. There's no free lunch.
Redistributive taxation is possible. The shape of the income tax curve doesn't affect production or prices (at least at first order): what changes is whose pockets the production goes into.
> Additionally B may be buying things like gasoline with this money whereas A would have just parked it on the stock market, which wouldn't have the same impact on consumer prices.
Parking it on the stock market has the same kind of impact, just on the cost of investment returns rather than on the cost of gasoline. (Hence why investment returns are so low). Buying future goods and services (by investing) isn't fundamentally different from buying other kinds of stuff.
Let's look at how consumption affects prices. There are two scenarios:
a) B wants gasoline to do something useful with. In which case, the value produced by using that gasoline is (generally) higher than the cost of the gasoline, gas prices go up because the economy as a whole goes up, more gas is produced because the higher prices justify more difficult kinds of oil drilling and so on. This is a positive case for everyone, even if higher gas prices might sound bad in isolation.
b) B wants gasoline to play around with; prices go up but the rest of the economy doesn't. This is the negative case.
Basic necessities like food and housing are, almost by definition, things that people buy for productive purposes rather than for unproductive consumption. Food prices don't go up if we redistribute food consumption; food prices only go up if overall food consumption increases. But food consumption is only going to increase if there are people who want more food but are holding back because they can't afford it - and in that case we should definitely want those people to be able to buy more food, even if that means increased food prices (and food prices should go up, to stimulate more food production, because clearly we weren't producing enough food to start with).
We can imagine a shift between different kinds of productive use. For example, maybe in a UBI world there is less demand for luxury cars and more demand for basic cars. But in that case prices should only shift a little: the car market is efficient and competitive (i.e. cars are a commodity), luxury carmakers can retool towards producing more basic cars.
Equally, we can imagine a shift between different kinds of unproductive consumption. Maybe fewer people want to watch opera and more people want to watch pop concerts. But again those are more or less commodity industries; as long as the cost is stable-ish, changing demand is going to mean slightly higher/lower prices and production will change to match, but the nature of a commodity business is that every company in every one is making more or less the same (low) level of profit.
What really matters is when and how the use of real value shifts between productive use and unproductive consumption. I'd expect that the rich use a much greater proportion of their income unproductively (looking at the big picture: e.g. maybe they put it in an investment that becomes their child's trust fund, but is ultimately spent on partying) than the poor. Certainly it's hard to imagine that rich people are often being held back from doing things that would be more productive for the overall economy because they can't afford to, whereas it's easy to think of cases where that happens for poor people: can't afford to take a better job because they can't afford to move, losing their job because they can't afford gas, performing poorly at work because they couldn't afford to eat enough, etc. Investment is currently a pretty unproductive use of value (as seen by how low investment returns are), because the economy already has more than enough investment in to pursue all the actually productive projects it can think of. And surely rich people spend more on consumption in the most direct common-sense form - decorations, entertainment and the like - but hit diminishing returns; wouldn't poor people get much more (aggregate) joy out of the same (overall) expenditure?
I guess if you think rich people are living frugally and putting all of their money into productive investments, then you could think that poor people spend a greater proportion of their income on wasteful consumption. But I find it very hard to imagine that that would be true in terms of the overall averages.
UBI works no differently than unemployment benefits or pensions, with the notable exception that UBI is far simpler and straight-forward to implement.
If people are ok with the way the state supervises unemployment benefits or pensions, I see no reason why a simpler and more straight-forward program would pose a problem.
Moral hazards will be ignored until they no longer cannot, and not a moment sooner.
Back to the topic of Civilization Improvement, there are models and designs for cities which are more walkable and which host themselves to grand productions and facilities and organizations: symphony houses, playwright theaters, exponential museums, renaissance fairs, amusement parks.
We would also love seeing rapid transit, tube freight transport for physical mail and small packages, medications, supplements, freshly laundered linens, underwear, and socks which use a very special chemical bath and high powered water jets and high-heat treatment for good cleanliness and hygeine, book exchange, small car part and tool delivery, 3D printed object delivery and exchange, fresh packed glass bottles raw milk and fresh vegetable or fruit juices and also fresh eggs, printer ink, pen ink refills, and printer paper, envelopes or post cards or birthday cards, etc.
The biggest challenge we face is probably the entrenched bidding, contract, and economic development process. We face financial hurdles in rallying the venture capitalists but the savings would be realized sooner than people think.
I have plans designed for grocery stores which are quite futuristic as well but I'd rather not spill the beans on this.
The beauty of OPTIMIZATION is that all it takes is a good vision and heuristic system. Basically imagination combined with Drraming and formula synthesis style logical production of your artistic masterpiece. The challenge to this beautiful thing is the on-boarding of key people and the emergent properties entangled with the process of moving in home buyers and setting up the build-out. Financials generally go in cascades and cycles therefore to have a whole city just emerge from the ground up requires a good level of buy-in which is difficult to achieve.
The results are worth it.
Automated homes and also driverless transport of any style whether self driving vehicle or light but fast rail would be ideal and then there is the idea of ultra-fast rail from cities to hubs and at the hubs would be plane ports otherwise known as an airport. The best scheme for transport seems to be local to regional ultra-fast rail, regional to regional interstate transport with driverless SUV's for multi-customer transport on interstates and these would go in drafting mode behind each other to reduce electric usage. Then the overseas transport would in fact be planes so we would massively reduce emissions by making transportation much more electrical. The global trade of organic goods would be rapidly and efficiently deployed to the end points via air mail or the other methods above. This is good like coffee beans, fruits, tropical plants and herbs, Olive Oil which traditionally grows rancid, Coconut oil or water. You name it. The possibilities for global newness and resoundingly positive change are massive in number and high in quality limitation. There's no excuse for not at least dreaming it up so that one day we could honestly see our way to a very nice system of life indeed.
The world needs to plant billions of trees to capture carbon. Lets start with that!
We then need alternate energy sources.
We also need heaps more fresh water so that farmers don't have to take it out of the environment. Lets build desalination plants everywhere!
So many great infrastructure ideas staring us right in the face, and now we have lots of people sitting at home and need something to do!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
Why not have the government plan everything? We won't even need money anymore! Everyone works to the extent of their ability, for the common good, comrade!
Society benefits from having cleaned streets, but it does not benefit from forcing people to waste away their life working as street cleaners.
Then how do the streets get cleaned?
A community desiring clean streets could allocate some of their UBI funds towards that goal. A community that doesn't could use those funds elsewhere.
The goal would be for communities to acquire what they need and desire, rather than to try to employ everyone in society even if their assigned roles would involve useless work.
Society should not rely on it's ability to coherce the less fortunate to sacrifice their lives performing horrible jobs just because it suits the fancy of a minority.
Here in Australia we have a liveable minimum wage, and I don’t earn that much more that it’s inconceivable.
Those jobs do have some benefits: the specification doesn’t really ever change, you can see the outcomes of your work fairly immediate, the societal benefits are self-evident, and when you go home at the end of your work day there isn’t a lot to take home with you.
This.
In some municipalities, garbage collectors do very well, and the occupation is even desirable. In others, it's the bottom of the barrel.
A job is what you do from 9 to 5 in exchange for a salary. Is it so hard to understand that some occupations are simply so bad that there aren't that many people willing to do them, particularly if they pay so little?
Australia has a liveable minimum wage, and all full time employees receive four weeks annual leave and two weeks sick leave, while casual employees receive a higher minimum wage but typically no paid leave / sick leave.
We also have a permanent part-time level where the conditions are somewhere between.
That doesn’t mean all employment in Australia is not-shit, but it probably helps.
It is inconceivable that there are enough people. We know this because even during the height of a recession, certain classes of jobs still cannot be filled. Most people would rather be unemployed than pick fruit for example.
That really depends on your definition of "forced".
Wage slavery is a thing, even in Europe. Society as a whole is divided into classes where one of them is characterized by how their livelihood is tied to their ability to hold their current job, regardless of how degrading or life-sucking it might be.
UBI would contribute greatly to turn that around, and enable more people to have a shot at a fulfilling life.
Both could work (and in fact aren't mutually exclusive).
The WPA is a little more like a 'stick' - here is the offer of work, if you want employment and remuneration.
UBI (if working correctly) would be more like a 'carrot' - here is some remuneration to keep you going; please choose the projects, pastimes and infrastructure that you would like to work on.
Both can conceivably lead to improvements in any area. Either way it's about creating the underlying incentives for people to want to do the work.
There is an argument to be made for job guarantee programs on the basis that they're cheaper, since you get some useful labor out of people who might otherwise be unemployed. But in my view that doesn't outweigh the disadvantages.
Although I don't see the problem of providing a combination of UBI and a Guaranteed Work program; with the UBI being a thing an GWP would have to offer actual progression and hope beyond just surviving.
Sometimes work is just work, and not everyone gets pride from "A job well done".
The primary problem, is that after 2008, instead of fixing the problem, the morons in leadership, bailed out the rich. They lowered interest rates so low, that it forced a bidding war on housing. Which drove up the cost of rent, which put some people on the streets.
For others, their rent became so high, relative to their income, that they cannot save any money.
Meanwhile, the rich kept buying more stocks. The corporate buybacks forced a scarcity issue in stocks, that it drove prices higher. Then, they cash out, and take that fake money, and spend it out on the real world.
So now, we live in a world where the rich are safe behind their walled gardens, and the poor are sacrificed as the essential workers. And Bezos is about to becomes the first Trillionaire.
Of course, I also think thatwe should give folks with a certified disability more than the basic UBI: Disability should not be a sentence to poverty.
That's supposed to be how UBI worked: a basic income that complemented other sources of income.
To put it differently, UBI is an income baseline.
This is why UBI is a lose-lose program. Either you are paying people to do nothing, or you are distorting the labor market by providing work product for free, displacing a paid worker.
It's a common misconception that there is a fixed amount of productive work to be done, such that immigrants / robots / UBI recipients "steal jobs" from workers.
In fact, when people are liberated from dull, meaningless and unnecessary jobs, they inevitably find more productive uses of their effort and creativity.
When people talk about "restarting the economy" they conveniently forget that the economy that provides food and shelter to people never stopped.
The fact that we can live pretty well without so many financial analysts, consultants and managers-of-managers shows that a very large share of the old economy was meaningless at best, and grift at worst.
Absent all that wasted commuting and office face-time, we can see more clearly the incredible surplus the core economy produces.
This is only true if they define what "productive" means. ...because they obviously aren't providing a product or service that anyone is willing to pay more for than their original employer - otherwise they could have made the switch without UBI.
It would be easier to present a WPA to a government of the people, if the people's basic needs are satisfied and they are not having to constantly argue that more resources need to be put towards their basic needs.
En masse for the US, it is a bad solution because we don't have that much work to do. We could probably double or triple our funding for infrastructure projects, but 2-3 trillion into it per year would be way overkill.
edit: (budget for department of transport is $70b. another $50b could be useful, but its not at the same scale as UBI)
Maybe in country, but not in a local area. That's a big part of this. If the issue is getting people jobs because there's not enough jobs, how are you going to move people around the country to do all these things?
You could make sure nursing homes have enough staff so the staff is less stressed. Lots of folks can learn to be a CNA pretty easily, and it is a better job if the shifts are well-staffed and not overly long.
We can rethink the 40-hour workweek and perhaps shave 10hours a week off of it. We could have maximum workweeks folks are allowed to work (even at top rungs). After all, if you need to work 60-hour weeks to complete things, you probably simply need another employee.
And to a point, yes, we will need to constantly upgrade. In the last 20 years alone, we've needed to upgrade both the cell phone network and the internet infrastructure and have done a poor job at that.
We can also look beyond one's own borders and help those in need without expecting anything in return. Famine is almost always man-made by not properly allocating resources: There are folks without clean water.
Even if the metric weren't capital efficiency, but rather other things (like environmental impact, social efficiency, etc) democratic voting is not the way to get efficient results.
That's because America built more than it can afford to maintain. No point in repeating that mistake twice.
Unemployment peaked in 1933 at about 25%. Currently, it is close to 15%, but if we drop the outlier of a virus -- assuming things will return to normal -- it was just recently around 3.5% and has been dropping drastically since 2010[0]. Yet, I think many will say that things haven't really gotten better since then, right? I think we'd say the problem has been growing.
So we have to conclude that a lack of jobs isn't the answer. Conversely, underemployment is fairly high at 12-13%[1]. It is higher for young people and even rising[2]. The lack of good jobs seems to be at least part of the issue. So I don't understand how WPA solves the issue. If people are paid market wages, sure, we can tackle that 3.5%, but is that even what we want? Fed says that the current rate is pretty normal and too low can cause inflation [3].
I'm not saying we don't have a crumbling infrastructure that needs to be fixed. I'm happy to support projects and make this country better. But I'm not sure how a jobs program fixes the problem. Because the problem doesn't seem to be a lack of jobs or unemployment (again, we're ignoring the current crisis on the premise of this being temporary). The problem is that productivity has increased[4] and wages are stagnant for most Americans[5].
I'm not sure UBI is the answer either, but I'm not convinced that WPA is either. Frankly, this isn't the Great Depression.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen...
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/payout/2017/07/21/the-underempl...
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14424.html
[4] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
A WPA-like programme would presumably offer good jobs - that is, jobs with stable hours and scheduling, decent healthcare, and no fear of arbitrary layoffs. Its mere existence would push aside precarious zero-hours contracts and solve the underemployment problem.
So, I don't agree that you can conclude lack of jobs isn't the issue.
For a modern take on the WPA, take a look at the 2009 Recovery Act[1]. It earmarked money for infrastructure and energy projects. Any new infrastructure/jobs initiative will likely look similar.
And to answer your question, UBI and jobs programs are not mutually exclusive. We can have both. But jobs programs don't really cover the same use case as UBI. There are a lot of people who are unable to work. UBI also helps when someone is in between jobs. And on a per-capita basis, job programs are more expensive. Most UBI proposals recommend $1k/month. Paying people $15/hr to clean streets would cost around $2500/month, and that doesn't count any benefits and overhead (managers, equipment, facilities, etc...). And how many people would really benefit from such basic work experience? To have a real impact, we would likely want to train them for more high skilled work, but that would cost a lot more. And as alluded to above, if you train people in high skilled work, you risk flooding the market, making things worse for existing employees. The nice thing about UBI is that it is simple and cheap.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...
Obviously there will be some level of misuse of UBI funds but imagine how many more people would be willing to pursue their "dreams" or interests as more than just a hobby.
As for a counter to the WPA style approach, employment in low income jobs can trap individuals in a wealth band more than liberate them from it. Being employed is great but when the choice is work or starve and be homeless, people will choose whatever work is available regardless of the conditions. People may want to move away from a poverty stricken area however are stuck there as they can't afford to move away on top of working all day. With UBI instead, there is much greater social and geographical mobility. You can quit your job and move away from the city into a much more rural region with a lower cost of living. You don't have to fear that your lack of savings will result in starving or being homeless if you can't find a job right away as the UBI should cover the basics to keep you off the street.
Another counter to WPA styled approaches is based on how the jobs are distributed. How easy would it be to get retrained if you are already trained in another field and are dissatisfied with it for one reason or another? Additionally, while not inherent to the system there is a risk that corruption could result in certain groups of people getting better selections from the job pool and other forms of preferential treatment. With UBI instead you can accept a temporary loss of productivity as an individual stops working to retool into a different profession depending on the cost of the training. UBI also largely sidesteps the issue of prejudice or other forms of inequality by largely leaving the labour distribution to the market.
Note: These are ramblings of a man about to pass out for the night so take my comment with as many grains of salt and sugar as you can spare.
One of things I like about UBI is that if you can get cash for not working you are free to do something else. So at least a few % of the people who can now give up work will jack that in and either go back to school or start a business. In a few years, both those groups will be contributing much more (in taxes but also in general utility) than 20 people working in McDonalds ever will. That's part of the trade off here: if 95% of people do nothing, but 5% start businesses or other become 10 times more useful (which isn't hard if your working a skill-less minimum wage job), the program has half paid for itself already.
That doesn't happen with a job-guarantee program, people remain too busy\tired.
The simple menial jobs of 1939 are robot jobs in 2020
This is an old take that has very rarely (if at all) seen tangible evidence. The Guardian reported on this [0] and so did QZ [1] Even if UBI pushes a small percentage of people to quit their jobs, those people will either move into different jobs that they enjoy more, free to pursue a career they like thanks to financial security, or contribute to society in other ways: creating art, volunteering, etc.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/12/univer...
[1]: https://qz.com/765902/ubi-wouldnt-mean-everyone-quits-workin...
It's literally what we face in Germany. Our unemployable are getting housing, health care, TVs etc + cash and they do not move on to jobs they enjoy more, they do not volunteer more, they do not start companies etc.
If you don't see evidence of that in the US, it's because you don't have anything that comes close to unlimited perpetual income with no requirements to work. If you have an economic shut down for a month or two and people expect the "free money" to run out eventually, they'll be eager to get back to work. The situation changes very much if they do not expect it to run out and adapt to the new circumstances where work is optional and considered a hobby.
It's like what happens when we remove the need for physical labor. People's health declines. Some people join gyms to compensate, some engage in purposeless jogging, but not that many.
Wealthy people are well aware of this, and will often try to make their kids earn their things, send them to a military school, etc.
This will probably be a very unpopular opinion but I definitely feel that men innately need this struggle.
Either way though, it might impact motivation negatively.
Improving the chances for success for your offspring is an innate desire, removing the ability will affect people's motivation to contribute beyond a certain point. A tax on inheritances will allow you to improve your children's life while removing the wealth if a family chooses not to work for a few generations, thus motivating contribution beyond "I exist and I inherited money".
Your opinion cant be removed, everything in life can be reduced down to biology if you accept to lose out on certain axioms.
But I rather like your "need for burden" theory as well.
Having a job where you get up, go out, do something useful, and interact with others is good for the soul. Sitting at home by yourself watching TV is a recipe for decline and death.
Maybe the timeframes would differ for people, but I doubt many people would enjoy not working on _something_, whatever that may be.
Germany is employing large number of Romanians for agricultural work. At peak of corona crisis, it cramped many people into airplanes and shipped them from Romania to Germany. No social distancing whatsoever. They sleep in container houses 8 people per room.
No way to use "refugees" for fruit picking.
Imho the primary issue remains: it's not required to work, you won't get a massive improvement if you're okay with the current situation and you have to expend energy and do stuff you don't love. Open source projects that rely on donations often face similar issues. Donations are not mandatory, so few people will donate, as they can still use the software without contributing. I don't believe that "donating is difficult" is the issue there either, most accept paypal, github sponsors etc.
In my very limited experience talking with Germans, it always seemed like those social benefits were a boolean choice that kept people from wanting to move up.
That could have just been my interpretation of the culture though, where it seemed many Germans simply seem to accept that retiring as a cashier is an acceptable level of ambition. That level of ambition is definitely not the same world-wide, and can come off as "lazy" to non-Germans who may not understand what it's like to simply accept one's lot in life.
As for ambition, it may have to do with a lower income disparity, where a cashier in a grocery store will certainly not make great money, but will be able to support themselves (median income in Germany is ~2500 Euros, full-time cashiers will make ~2000-2200 Euros). It's also often not a full-time job, but 20-25 hours per week.
Harz4 on the other hand is not universal, seen as a stigma (people who have to rely on it are called "Harzer") and forces you to jump through all kind of hoops, be present at dates in the job offices etc.
I happened to study at art school in Germany and never had to apply for it, but many of my friends did and it is quite frankly state organized humiliation. And everybody involved is cynical. If you go there as a young academic and seriously try to find a job, they laugh at you.
As for the stigma associated with not working: true, but it's not part of, or encouraged by, the law. It will be the same with UBI, it will not be admired to not contribute to society. Some people may feel that they do in fact contribute, but society at large values other things than self-actualization.
The university/higher education system is weird, but for other reasons (my personal theory is that you can't have organized bureaucracy in Germany without some senseless cruelty). It's another point on the board for "free doesn't necessarily give you the expected results" though: unlike in the US, it's free, our "student loans" (Bafög) are generally interest free and 50% of the amount owed will generally be forgiven. Obviously, we see plenty of people entering, but we don't see the results you'd imagine if costs were what's holding people back.
1. a UBI would very likely be unconditional and universal (as long as you are a citizen) so relying on it would carry no social stigma, because everybody gets it.
2. you still get a UBI if you get yourself a job – which means a job gives you extra money. With most current unemployment benefits you could sometimes loose money when you get a job, or you'd just get a tiny bit extra for a lot more work (especially if you are doing demanding physical labour).
This means the incentives are completely and utterly different – and incentives kinda matter when we want to discuss human behaviour.
Essentially then, you have the same idea you have today: those who will rely on UBI are the same people who rely on social benefits today, and those who do not get it are the ones who will have to fund it (with a slightly enlarged soft border between the two). The stigma isn't because people know that you get social benefits (the records aren't public), it's that they don't see you working.
The cut-offs are an issue, but we already have Mini (up to 450€) and Midi Jobs (up to 1300€) where you'll not get any reduction in benefits for 100€ and 20% of whatever you make on top will also not affect your benefits. That's not a perfectly soft threshold, but it's not a hard cut-off either. The thresholds that you lose money at are much higher (e.g. earning just a little bit too much to be eligible for subsidized housing, which is close to the median salary in most states).
We should allow UBI to take us back to the way things were before but without the gender discrimination. We should be encouraging fathers and mothers to spend more time looking after their children, not telling people their labor has no value unless they're contributing to GDP.
UBI will naturally create more of that same price inflation, especially for the goods and services which those who would benefit the most from it consume.
https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...
Where are the low income people decrying cheaper mobile phone prices?
If you suggest that UBI will be fully funded by taxes, then the taxes will increase prices.
Not true. Inflation refers to changes in the price of goods in services, not changes in the money supply. This is basic economics anybody who graduated high school should know.
"Webster’ American Dictionary of the English Language, published by G&C Merriam Co. in 1864, was the first to formally define inflation as an economic term:
undue expansion or increase, from over-issue; — said of currency."
https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/publicat...
"its original meaning—a rise in the general price level caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and trade needs"
A collection of second order effect questions that people don't really have a strong cohesive argument for or against:
1) What are the impacts of UBI on cost of labor, and how will businesses react or adapt? (will UBI ultimately lower cost of labor for businesses or will it raise it? Will it cause businesses to seek out investment into AI instead to replace manpower? etc)
2) Are there any situations where UBI's cost will spiral out of control? (Do we have smart enough people modeling out long term costs of UBI in a comprehensive, risk accounting way so it doesn't become another social security)
3) What is the change in percentage of people who will couch potato with UBI? How about percent change in entrepreneurial activity with UBI? (at the very least, is it in the single digits, double digits? A fraction of 1%?)
3rd order effects:
1) What will the economy look like 20 years from now with UBI? How will the structure of society change?
2) How will UBI change how the majority of people grow up and what they end up pursuing?
3) How will UBI impact the global economic climate? (My sci-fi dystopian vision of UBI's butterfly effects, not that globalization hasn't already done this: UBI will spur one country to develop so much AI due to lack of people in the workforce, and that AI is so good that it gets exported to all countries over the world, centralizing most of the money in the world to that one country, making that one country able to afford UBI while the rest of the world is jobless and has no money to take care of their own people.)
I'm just scratching the surface of the complexity of the topic.
1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up a small income disparity and will gladly quit their part-time jobs. Labor might get more expensive, but given how long minimum wage has been depressed, I wouldn't count on it.
2) No, UBI is as expensive to administer as the existing tax code. Also, the fuck are you talking about? Social Security has gotten cheaper to administer over time [0].
3) Who cares? Literally, it doesn't matter how many people "couch potato" or otherwise decide not to work when they already weren't in the labor market. Think about it for a bit.
4) Hopefully less wage slavery, less food insecurity, less homelessness, less wealth inequality. That is, UBI is hoped to do what it is marketed as doing.
5) In e.g. Sweden, the constant availability of funds from the government has enabled people to be more fully actualized, as they choose whether they want to go into secondary education, start a small business, buy a farm, or open an art studio. All of these are also subsidized in the USA, but poorly. UBI acts as an ideal prototype system for this sort of funding, without having to commit to a particular usage of funds.
6) Uh, we've had a global economy for centuries. All that has happened is that places with UBI and similar social programs have become well-known and globally visible. But UBI in Alaska exists [1] and does not draw people to move to Alaska, so I can easily conclude that it doesn't matter that much to the global economy.
More generally, I think that you are afraid of nothing.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...
1) impact on businesses?
2) not about administration, about the cost of UBI itself. cost of social security is ballooning, not administration of it
3) it's important to judge UBI's costs and impacts relative to other social programs
4) "Hopefully" it will end world hunger too and also discover the cure for cancer.
5) Sweden doesn't implement UBI though? How does looking at Sweden allow you to say how UBI will affect people growing up?
6) comparing Alaska, the 46th on the list when looking at the size of US state economies, with the US (#1 economy in the world) is not a good comparison.
It's not fear that are motivating these questions. The larger the investment, the more robust the plan needs to be and it's common sense for anyone to want to know more detail about a LTV ~100s of trillions of dollar investment.
This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing.
Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar.
Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society.
UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society.
Again, 2nd order effects. Businesses will rely on employees less too. It might make businesses more capital reliant, lowering the entrepreneurship rate further. It might not, but the point is that saying it will be good because of labor mobility is like looking 1 move deep in a chess game.
> Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar.
UBI is 3 times as much as our current social programs. It doesn't matter how cheap it is to administer if the actual allocation amount is so different. It's 15% of GDP, and yearly, not a one time cost.
I strongly disagree that increasing the budget for social programs from 800b to 2.3t is not worth thinking about the potential 2nd order effects, which was my original point.
> Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much.
I don't think Sweden avails government money the same way UBI does. If you could buy weed, alcohol, video games, vacations, travel, pets, furniture, sports equipment, or any other recreational activity in Sweden with their social programs then I would take this point more seriously.
> Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society.
Alaska's UBI is literally a dividend from an investment fund. 25% of oil's profits would be put into the fund and payed out as a dividend, and the fund was well managed, leading to around $1000 a year in peak years. This is a very different structure, both in quantity of money payed out as a dividend as well as how the money is being taken from, to what is proposed in many UBI policy implementations.
Alaska's money doesn't come as a re-distribution of tax, it's literally an investment fund. Alaska's amount is also 10x lower than most UBI proposals. When we have a $60 trillion dollar fund that we can draw 5.25% every year to pay for UBI, then I'll agree that Alaska is an example that UBI doesn't disrupt the economic fabric of our society.
Looking at actual models for UBI costs [0], there is a solid argument that GDP will grow. Keeping in mind that we are currently seeing trillions of dollars in bailout money being pulled out of nowhere, I feel that complaints about the sources of money are a little facile; there are clearly enough money sinks to handle all of the wealth not currently trickling down. We can pay for it. More importantly, there's a clear gaping hole in tax revenue where corporations are not paying taxes that they could clearly afford, and this has gotten worse over time [1][2]. Going back to Obama-era corporate tax rates of 35% would be worth $473b; going back to Eisenhower-era rates of 50% would be worth $676b. Combine that with the idea that social programs wouldn't allow double-dipping into both e.g. Social Security and the Freedom Dividend [3] and everything is now paid for.
Sure, we don't have to talk about Sweden or Alaska. But it's really hard to take the core counter-argument here, the idea that giving money to folks is so harmful, without pointing out all of the places around the world where giving money to folks is not only not harmful, but positive.
[0] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mo...
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Share_of_Federal_Rev...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Effective_Corpora...
i have nowhere claimed that giving money to people is harmful. in fact I love andrew yang's work on UBI and am a huge fan. He's done incredible work on the narrative on why we need it. just no one has done the work on actually creating a policy that has a sound investment thesis because its hard work. andrew yangs proposal on how we will pay for it "data is the new oil" is paper thin, especially if you dig into how Alaska pays for it. he even uses Alaska as an examole of it being affordable - again, excellent narrative, very poor policy.
you claim it isnt hard to answer these questions, and then waive off that we dont need to care about businesses, how the policy is implemented, or any second or third order effects of a massive 15% shift of economic value, and then fundamentally misrepresent my point that i am anti UBI.
you probably would grow some if you spend more time listening to other people and engaging in their arguments, not dismissing their points and putting forth your own idealogical narrative.
feel free to call me out on your own threads if i do the same to you
I've tried to help you see how UBI proponents have not only anticipated your line of reasoning, but have long finished figuring out things like impact on business. Quoting from the summary of the Roosevelt Institute's study:
> When paying for the policy by increasing taxes on households, the Levy model forecasts no effect on the economy. In effect, it gives to households with one hand what it is takes away with the other.
> However, when the model is adapted to include distributional effects, the economy grows, even in the tax-financed scenarios. This occurs because the distributional model incorporates the idea that an extra dollar in the hands of lower income households leads to higher spending. In other words, the households that pay more in taxes than they receive in cash assistance have a low propensity to consume, and those that receive more in assistance than they pay in taxes have a high propensity to consume.
As long as you are predisposed to look down on so many people for supposed moral failings, and look at people as "couch potatoes", you are going to have a blind spot where you don't recognize how essential cheap labor is to our way of life.
> Another positive sign for UBI is that most Americans seem keen to return to their workplaces. One fear has been that UBI would lead to a couch-potato culture, with people choosing to stay at home even when they’re finally able to leave. But blue-collar service workers are continuing to brave the front lines even when faced with reasonably high risks of infection. They are not trying to get fired so they can collect unemployment. White-collar workers, meanwhile, are feeling restless and unproductive. Working from home may become more common, but most people seem eager to get back to the office — especially if the alternative is a combination workplace/schoolhouse.
I have no idea why you think I'm predisposed to look down on people as couch potatoes. The article used the term, that's why I put it in quotes. My intention with the question was actually, "great, the article says there's evidence anecdotally that it won't happen, anything more concrete?"
Total US budget income for 2019: $3.422 trillion. US population: 328 million.
Assuming that we simply divide the entire budget amongst everyone, we get:
>>> 3.422e12 / 328e6 / 12 = $870 per month
Minumum wage in US is $7.25, so assuming usual 40-hour work week minimum income is about $1300 per month.
So even if US just drops all other concerns - healthcare, military, infrastructure - and just distributes money among the population, then it's still less than 70% than minimum wage. If we assume that only 50% of the budget is spent on UBI (still unsustainable in my opinion) then the number will get even lower.
And that's US, arguably the richest and most powerful country. For other countries this calculation is even worse.
Maybe there's an error in my calculations? How is UBI even supposed to work, where the money should come from?
UBI is not meant to be full replacement of a minimum wage salary , like you said we don’t yet live in a resource rich utopia were people only work when they want to, not because they need to.
sensible UBI proposals posit that it is efficient to directly disburse money without all the bureaucracy in programs for the economically affected , it also means trusting the recipients to make better judgements on how to spend that money than the government.
They could be wrong , while early studies have shown positive indicators, they are small and long term impact is not really well understood.
Personally I don’t think it is a good idea for a country. From what I have seen in the Middle East when you don’t have to work a shitty job because everyone gets minimum money every month, nobody does those jobs. This has been solved in ME by bringing in immigrants as effectively slave labour. Either you end up with nobody doing that work or you have to import labour who don’t enjoy the same benefits creating a classist society.
That's because those jobs are shitty to begin with.
From where I'm standing, it's clear that the problem is the inherited shittyness of those jobs, not UBI.
Perhaps it's worth a shot investing some work making those jobs less shitty?
I mean, FAANGs felt the need to invest heavily in job satisfaction to reduce attrition and improve their public image. Why are some companies, and even government entities, complicit in perpetuating the shitty nature of the occupations they expect others to have?
Richer a country becomes lesser people in that country want to do those jobs, it is true even here in the U.S. most of the jobs illegal immigrants do, have few takers in the legal job market .
FAANG outsource the ugly work to other companies , for example watching flagged video content is one worst jobs out there , most of this is not done in-house . Many of the service jobs in their campuses are done by staff not on their payroll, who don’t enjoy the same benefits . Even for pure tech roles they use contract staff in good amounts who don’t necessarily get the same benefits .
There are good reasons for this Facebook is not expert at say building a good team of security guards and they should perhaps leave it to experts
The point remains someone got to do these jobs , it does not mean UBI should not happen. Localised implementations mean these problems have to studied and solved for .
The drive to automate jobs increases when average pay is higher , for example you will find a lot more cooks, maids and security (gatekeepers) in developing countries in wealthier economies you will find more roombas, more home automation etc.
There is no incentive for self driving in say India , economically it won’t make sense given cheap availability of labour . Self driving is going to replace millions of jobs in the U.S. the upfront investment all the big companies are doing will not make economic sense if labour was cheaper.
UBI will increase the standard of living which in turn drives the need to automate making UBI more needed as lesser jobs are out there etc.
The point being if you think UBI will be positive, it will be positive across its whole range of impacts, and that range of impacts is soo huge it can be brought up in almost any context.
Edit: UBI and Land Tax are big enough we should consider them on their own merits, not look for "opportunities" to bring them into the conversation.
In Nordics UBI would be in addition to free healthcare, education etc. and funding it would not be a problem. Unemployed already get benefits. Even small housing allowance would probably remain to discourage segregation due to income differences. It's the combination of welfare that low income workers get that creates high effective marginal tax rate that UBI neatly solves. It would create incentives for working and reduce bureaucracy.
I was interested to see some numbers on this, so I did some quick and dirty googling.
It looks like Finland has about 4.5 million people, and currently spends around 4,491,000,000 EUR/year on around 370,000 people - around 13,500 EUR/person. I'd guess that would be a reasonable amount for a UBI program.
Scaling that up to 4.5M people means a huge number, 60,750,000,000 EUR/year - which I believe is larger than the entire yearly budget for Finland. Sounds like funding UBI would actually be a pretty big problem.
1) Do we all absolutely get it? That would be fine, unless it starts like that and then it is decided that only some people should get it. I see this as a strong possibility: the rich already have enough, why give them more? This then falls under the usual debate about whether the rich should pay for everyone else.
2) I would be more open to it if it was run as a one year experiment. A problem with a policy like this is that once approved, it is very hard to take it back if it does not work at scale or unforeseen problems arise. What politician in his right mind would tell the population that they are cancelling the $500 check everyone gets once a month?
3) It takes away the need for work. I don't but the "flipping burgers at McDonalds is no better" argument. If UBI solves this problem, then there won't be any more people flipping burgers at McDonalds? That is bad because a lot of businesses will go under. For fast food restaurants to work, someone has to be willing to do that work. The idea that now everyone will be "free to explore more meaningful work" seems far-fetched to me. If everyone gets money, then prices will increase accordingly.
UBI is a great debate topic as no one knows what will really happen. What it does do is reveal how people think of humanity and society.
The whole point is to avoid all the problems of means-testing, application and so on, and just give every citizen the money.
> 2) I would be more open to it if it was run as a one year experiment. A problem with a policy like this is that once approved, it is very hard to take it back if it does not work at scale or unforeseen problems arise. What politician in his right mind would tell the population that they are cancelling the $500 check everyone gets once a month?
Well, if you believe in democracy then democracy should be able to solve difficult problems. If UBI were disastrous, surely a democratic majority could be found to vote against it; to the extent that it remains popular, it can't be going that badly.
> 3) It takes away the need for work. I don't but the "flipping burgers at McDonalds is no better" argument. If UBI solves this problem, then there won't be any more people flipping burgers at McDonalds? That is bad because a lot of businesses will go under. For fast food restaurants to work, someone has to be willing to do that work. The idea that now everyone will be "free to explore more meaningful work" seems far-fetched to me. If everyone gets money, then prices will increase accordingly.
Businesses that rely on a supply of people doing really crappy jobs for very low money will go under, yes. If no-one is forced to flip burgers in order to eat, then if you want a burger you'll have to pay enough to make it worth someone's while to make it for you, or figure out a way to automate it, or do it yourself. The end result would probably be fewer atomised person-as-robot jobs and more people doing their own cooking / cleaning / repairs / childcare / etc.. Would that be so bad?
You don't need to choose between no social support vs UBI. You can actually just have a proper unemployment and healthcare support system (like EU).
Same goes for guns. There seems to be a thought that either everyone has the right to buy guns, or you outlaw guns. There is a middle ground where people get a license for a gun (proven with a blank criminal record, sanity confirmation from doctor and theoretical/practical examination), like EU you know.
So why don't you first try something like giving people that need support, better support. That would be a good start without going all in with UBI.
Maybe that would already help the many homeless people that are living on your streets.
If anything, the current way of implementing UBI is not sustainable.
"If you don't make stuff, there's no stuff. Obviously."
The software world is built on the back of stuff that was made, not for money, but out of a labor of love, or to impress others, or to scratch our own itch. Our servers run linux, but linux was mostly just linus hacking around. The free software community is about helping each other and building cool things. Most programming languages were birthed not for money, but because the person building them cared about it a lot and wanted to solve a problem for themselves.
UBI would let people who wanted to make stuff actually make stuff, not have to flip burgers 9-5 just to go home and feel too drained to code or write or do whatever it is they really want to do.
There are countless examples throughout history of people building great things and advancing science, not for money, but for recognition or passion.
But I agree with your overall point. Software has a good chance of "leading the way" mostly because of the lack of required starting capital to get first traction for an idea (a person and a laptop) and the theoretical high mobility of the workforce (a lot can be written basically everywhere, local is only required for customer contact).
But it's quite a strong claim that nobody will make anything if they receive a small check from the government that allows them to not worry about becoming homeless.
Surely most people want more than the bare minimum in life and will continue to work.
Saudi Arabia is an interesting example to study UBI, since their economy 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 now required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals.
There is little risk to giving free money to 20% of the poorest people.
Define "make stuff". I wouldn't listen to a billionaire when it comes to economics.
Ludditism has been proven wrong multiple times. New industries replace the old - more jobs are created. There can be short term pains when people are laid off due to automation, but social security programs can alleviate some of this. The kind that already exist. UBI does not seem like it will provide the incentives for people to learn new skills and get new jobs if they're guaranteed a living wage anyway.
> There is little risk to giving free money to 20% of the poorest people.
There's no "free money." There is taking money, often from productive people who make use of that money to generate wealth, and allocating it it, often to unproductive people who merely consume. Obviously not true in every case, but you get the idea. If we want to increase the wealth of a nation, the money is more effectively utilized by those who are effective at turning it around to generate more wealth.
> Define "make stuff".
I'd call it, adding to the national gain. If you're not performing productive work which leads to export of goods, but are continuing to import goods, then you'll build up a deficit, which at some point needs paying off, or those luxuries you've been importing aren't going to be available anymore.
I'll address your argument with a simple essay, "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell.
> adding to the national gain
> wealth of a nation
> to generate more wealth
Those notions cannot survive because infinite growth is not possible. Think about climate change. The earth is finite.
> There is taking money, often from productive people who make use of that money
Money is not a resource. People are not only the ones being productive if they're helped by machines and technology. You only answer is about finance and money. UBI goes beyond that.
Also, the notion that work is a necessary evil, in the modern world, is a flawed notion. Work should not be mandatory.
I'm tired of arguing those points, again and again.
We are absolutely nowhere near running out of resources on earth, and every time we dig deeper we find more. By the time resources begin to run out, we'll be mining asteroids. This is so far into the future that worrying about it now is just completely stupid. Like cavemen worrying that if they light too many campfires they might eventually run out of trees.
> Also, the notion that work is a necessary evil, in the modern world, is a flawed notion. Work should not be mandatory.
The purpose of trade is to improve ones (or one's nation's) standard of living. The standard of living can only improve if people are producing goods and services which go to that end. Nobody can produce everything they need, so at some point they must purchase some of it - and in order to make those purchases they need to offer something in exchange - else the other party who has laboured to produce the good being sold will have done so for nothing in return.
The default state of humanity is the same as any other primate - poverty, survival from the land. It is only through labour that we are able to improve our standard of living so that we are not spending most of our time on basic survival.
At some point, somebody must produce goods, farm land, build robots, program the robots and maintain them. They aren't going to do it for nothing - certainly not if their neighbours are receiving the same compensation for idling and watching Netflix all day.
If you aren't working, you're scrounging from the work of others. We give allowances for people who are unfit to work or are temporarily cast out of work beyond their control, and probably only because we'd appreciate the same privilege if we were on the receiving end. The main motivation people have to work is to better the lives of themselves and their families. The lives of others who they don't know are lower priority - bottom of the list.
This is really the flaw of UBI, or Statism in general. It assumes that we want everybody to benefit uniformly, but this is just not the case. We're hard-wired for survival of the fittest - to ensure our genetic lineage is preserved - meaning people closer to us are higher priority. If we can help others along the way, we do, as a social species - but we rarely do so at the cost of the well-being of ourselves and families. Self-interest is not going away.
UBI does not replace wages AFAIK. Perhaps people can choose to idle on Netflix all day - but I doubt that will happen with the majority. The UBI will offer a stable safety net for all just-in-case, but most will opt to either save the money or spend it (good for the economy) most of the time, and work again to gain extra wages. This just sounds like it will reduce survival-stress levels for people overall and that's a great thing.
How many people do those jobs? Not that many, in proportion.
> We're hard-wired for survival of the fittest
Yeah we disagree here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest#Social...
Social darwinism is inhuman.
"If people want stuff and you don't make it, someone else will." = Demand-Side Economics.
Also the article says a type of UBI is being used to stimulate job creation and work for industries that are rapidly losing in these areas. This is literally on par with what Elon said, how could it be a counter argument?
This is the rare Elon quote where I don't even have to attack his behaviour to discredit. It's just not applicable in this context as a counterpoint.
You'd have to shake up real estate market too for example by introducing progressive real estate tax to counter that.
1) progressive real estate tax
2) moving tax revenue from income tax to VAT
3) UBI
There is not enough wealth to redistribute in any country (except maybe the Gulf states) so that both anyone in a job or health emergency has enough and also give the same amount to everyone else.
So you have to deliver smaller sums - a patch to this system is to have everyone pay for insurance, proportionally to their income and need, but this the current welfare scheme UBI is supposed to replace.
Covid-19 exactly how disproportionate and random a crisis can be, so a one-size fits all solution doesn't fit anyone.
[Citation needed]
The global population grew from about 1.6 billion to about 6 billion in the span of a hundred years (1900-2000). Before the pandemic, over twice as many people were considered part of the "global middle class" than there were people alive in 1900. In that time, quality of life indicators have skyrocketed for all except the most isolated tribes.
Humanity has known that "wealth" isn't a zero sum game since the fall of mercantilism. Universal basic income is just the next phase of that realization.
* for social darwinism or survival of the fittest, trying to say inequality is normal
* that labor is necessary despite the great advances in technology. Those people would rather see people working as servants, in fast food, uber, cashiers, etc, than have those people educating themselves or lead more fulfilling lives.
The level of pedanticism I read from people arguing about "basic economics", is just a problem of politics.
People who support UBI need to provide a compelling justification for how it can be paid for, especially given how hard it has been, politically and financially, to give a one-time $1200 payment to American households. If it's so hard to do it even one time, how can we do it forever?
Can you source this? Because I understand the exact opposite to be true.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/26/698057356/if-a...
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/01/699261950/why-a-wealth-tax-di...
https://www.businessinsider.com/4-european-countries-wealth-...
https://taxfoundation.org/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax-oecd/
tldr: European countries dumped them because it is hard to calculate value of assets, especially for the ultra rich.
The difference between Zakah and wealth tax as proposed in the links you mentioned, is that the former applies to almost everyone (except the poor/needy obviously) in lieu of income and sales tax, not just to people with > $500k (or whatever) in their accounts. It may not be as straight forward to calculate compared to income tax, but the goal here is to solve a problem, not to just implement a mediocre solution that has been shown not to work.
I came across this article that gives a high level summary[0].
[0] https://nzf.org.uk/when-islam-eradicated-poverty-umar-b-abdu...
Yes, those in the upper tax brackets will pay more than they do today, to cover the situation you describe
Most households received $2500+. Many of those will have received in excess of 3.5k. Some will have received several thousand
That is even less sustainable than a $1200 payment. It's a counter-argument to the entire concept of UBI. Where does the money come from? Are you just going to make it up out of thin air?
It has been hard mostly for political reasons, not logistic. The big idea to UBI is that by giving money to everyone it takes out the complexity. Check if citizen, send check. There's no means basis that has to be analyzed. No formula. No background checks. Just simple.
As to it being hard right now, well do note that we, the US, is in one of the most divisive times in its history (clearly not the most, but it is up there). It is easy to convince people that it isn't fair. Just as it is easy to convince people that it is the most fair. But it is hard to realize that raising the foundation raises the whole building. If a few bricks come from the top, without destroying the building, can bring up the floor, everyone gets lifted. Even those where the bricks were taken from. Maybe UBI does this, maybe it doesn't. But we should find out, shouldn't we?
Human nature is not that simple. How do you think we ended up with the welfare system we have today? One example: pretty much everyone thinks single mothers are more worthy of welfare dollars than convicted felons. Guess who gets more welfare money?
Explain how our moral intuitions are going to magically change overnight.
If we pass a truly "universal" basic income law we will end up adding exceptions upon exceptions to it until we end up with something that looks a lot like the welfare system we have today. People just don't believe that everyone deserves the same amount of help from the government. Singling out certain groups as more or less deserving is a great way for politicians to get elected. That's where "tough on crime" comes from.
Just like every other power grab, those who question the narrative will be painted as lacking compassion for the underclasses, "think of the children", "the robots are coming", ad nasuem. Rationality will be dismissed with appeals to emotion. We've seen it all before. There's nothing new under the sun.
Identity politics and class warfare enters stage left, "If you don't like this, you hate group X. If you are part of group X and you don't like it, then you don't know what is good for you!". Benevolent and condescending feel good guilt culture abounds. I read it in comments here regularly. I don't argue, I don't bother to disagree. I hedge accordingly.
Taking the USA as an example, UBI costs trillions per year. How will this get paid for, even taking into account that some of the money gets taxed?
There isn't much point in hanging around, it should start now.
If the choice is low/no growth where population sustain itself than UBI is the way.
But what happens if for e.g. a country A moves to UBI but country B remains high growth? Country B will continue to invent new things and country A will be forced to inflate and moan and sacrifice its children and grandchildren to debt. That's pretty much what will happen.
That's why many of the 20th century supporters were libertarians.
My thought is that if you value your own life, and the lives of your descendants, you must make the drastic decision to escape any society that embarks on the path to UBI.
This is not UBI though. UBI is forever, this is exceptional, and people are aware that they 'll lose their jobs if they quit. The premise behind this article is false, hard to believe it came from exceptionally intelligent people.
Tell hospital workers that they 're guaranteed UBI for 5 years if they quit and watch what happens.
If it saves one life, it's worth ending the lockdown, right?
Why is there nobody running computer models estimating how many people are going to die as a result of the lockdown?
Because it contradicts the narrative. COVID is unknown and the government is as clueless as you are. They're in hysteria and are not thinking rationally.
What people need is the freedom to make their own choices. If people are scared of the virus and think staying couped up in a confined home is going to keep them from getting sick - I have nothing wrong with them doing that. Please stop forcing everyone else to live that way.
Now if you think your 'right' to put your own body at risk, you've failed to understand how contagious the virus is and how much you put others at risk by thinking you matter more. This will only prolong the quarantine, and this is why everyone is super concerned about the second wave and pandemic history repeating itself because some people are so arrogant and don't see their privilege compared to the at risk.
I'm arguing that people who accept the risk upon themselves should be free to do what they want to do - and those who are afraid of the virus keep themselves "quarantined".
If you are in quarantine, you are not being put at risk.
Why do you think that some people's livelihoods are more important than others that you can justify locking them up in their homes to protect those others, who have elected upon themselves to live a life of fear?
You are putting lives at risk by enforcing a lockdown. This is not a one-way street. Why is your justification any better than mine?
I'm suggesting that far more people are going to die because of the lockdown and its secondary effects than the combined waves of COVID. The rational conclusion is that the cure is worse than the disease. The position of the lockdown should be reversed in order to spare the greater number of lives.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell.
At the same time this dilutes the wealth of people and companies who have actually saved money.
Countries need LESS socialism and government control - not more.
Keeping people from falling off economic cliffs is likely to be more productive than letting them become homeless for the rest of their lives. That productivity offsets inflation risks. Technology and automation increases offset inflation, because they make us all more productive.
Either you have to raise taxes sky high or you start printing money like never before. Both are poor options.
It only matters to people who have lot of cash saved up. Value of their money might decrease.
But vast majority of population does not have cash saved up, they do not care about money losing its value as long as they are able to get more money today and buy the stuff they need.
I think more serious threat comes from existence of global market. It means, the local supply does not need to react to local increase in demand but people elsewhere can capture that demand by shipping cheaper goods.
To make UBI work you possibly need to become an island or already have huge exports to offset whatever your population might be interested in buying from other countries.
This is not a fact/experiment based, it's merely a hypothesis.
Government spending goes through the roof (due to money printing) OR they have to raise taxes ridiculously high. This will make working even less appealing and people start to downshift - until they quickly realize that they can't. If you raise taxes, many companies simply move their operations to some other country -> loss of jobs.
What's worse is that due to prices going up, the businesses become non-competitive in the global market. Why would you buy product Y from country X if the price is a lot higher than in any other country?
When the export business dies, companies start to die and people are out of jobs. It's a ripple effect that goes through the entire economy.
Then it doesn't matter how much money the government is giving you because prices are high and as jobless you are quickly dead broke.
If due to introducing UBI all other social welfare support is removed, sick and disabled people start getting homeless and dying left and right because UBI simply isn't enough for them.
The final nail to the coffin is that other nations tell country X: "We don't accept your currency anymore. Pay with something else or you don't get the goods."
Frankly I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened on larger scale - UBI or not.
Of course they care. Those that care most are the lowest income earners. For a simple reason: their wage does not increase with the inflation. They are either losing purchasing power or it is stagnated and they are not able to better their economic position. The silly minimum wage laws lag the price inflation, so people are in fact, no better off when they finally get their raise.
Edit: It is a completely serious answer and the only explanation that makes sense to me for the spate of pro-UBI articles I've noticed but mostly not read because UBI doesn't make sense and a global pandemic doesn't change that.
Usually when production decreases, cost of production increases - operation becomes less profitable and investor might pull their money and take it elsewhere. In some industries, margin might be so thin that once they lose economies of scale which comes with higher production, they simply may go bust or choose to stop, citing higher cost of inputs. This is what pushes the supply below demand level.
Also demand is usually established at some specific price, if cost of production increases, producer might have to increase the price and this might also put downward pressure on demand.
Inflation has been low for years and has historically gone done during recessions. The inflation hawk concerns so far have been utterly unfounded.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i...
UBI means lower taxes = value of money diminishes.
Jobs guarantee is how you implement UBI.
Jobs given out by the state doesn't have to awful.
(If down-voting, a thoughtful comment is appreciated; thanks.)
Also, there are so many downsides, that it's not even worth digging into the few upsides.