Why would they want to fill gaps when the rent is paid, the fridge is stocked, and there are so many games to play and movies to watch? I can totally see the "gaps" in fun jobs being filled. But the "gaps" in garbage collection, sewer inspection and other dirty jobs? Let's not kid ourselves and pretend that "if only people wouldn't have to worry about rent, they'd gladly take these jobs".
That's not very charitable. I rather doubt that anybody here considers "Dickensian Nightmare" as a desirable world-state.
Maybe the best way to showcase the concern is to talk about some relatives of mine, who work just enough to pursue their two great life passions: (a) smoking weed; and (b) playing video games.
Now, either of these things is fine! Both of them together are fine are fine! And should you have the means, I have no problem if this is the sum total of your existence.
But I have zero interest in funding those life-choices via taxes.
With no-strings-attached UBI, that's exactly what we are talking about.
Moreover, there is a massive danger in decoupling "value contributed to the tribe" (work) from "value received from the tribe" (income).
What I think would make sense is to require that people receiving UBI still need to do some kind of work.
It can be painting, or cleaning parks, or making horrible music, or greeting people at Wal-Mart, but you are required to spend at least four full-time days per week (32 hours) contributing to society.
I am unsure how to appropriately enforce this.
On the one hand, you want to prevent bad actors; on the other hand, it would be stupid for the cost of enforcement to significantly exceed the cost of those bad actors -- like when the state of Florida blew through an extra $2 million to save $80k of welfare fraud.
If we're talking about national-level UBI, that's a lot of people involved, and a lot of money for the taking by those who are high in enterprise but rather deficient in moral fiber.
There are likely a lot of options on the enforcement front, and that smart enforcement with appropriate penalties would keep bad behavior to a minimum.
The goal of enforcement is not to stop every bad actor -- just to make the risk and hassle high enough to deter a significant portion of them.
Consider how Taiwan cheaply enforces sales tax: when you get a receipt for anything, it has a lottery code on it. Winners turn their receipts in for prizes, and the government then goes and checks those specific transactions for tax compliance. Penalties for tax violations are severe, and compliance is high, at minimal cost to the state.
Truly random checks (low probability of being caught) with severe penalties (massive pain if you are caught), and maybe even a reward for compliance, seems to be the way to go in this case.
Really, the main problem is that landlords will raise rent to match the new income levels of their tenants and everybody will be left in more-or-less the same place, except with a wider gap, not a narrower one.
Yes and no. There's a balance between "severity of punishment" and "certainty of punishment". And also proportional to the damage caused.
Also, the goal is not to prevent all bad actors! Merely to keep enough people on the honest path to prevent systemic collapse.
If you are certain of being caught, the punishment only needs to be high enough to be undesirable.
Imagine that you had a 100% chance of being caught shoplifting, in which case, a reasonable punishment would be to have to compensate the store owner an additional 50% for the stolen goods.
If you only have a 10% chance of being caught, then the punishment needs to be (financially) severe enough to make that dice-roll very, very unappealing.
There's likely minimum and maximum thresholds for both; e.g., beyond some severity, punishment stops being meaningful, and below some certainty of capture, rolling the dice "feels" safe.
Not sure what those numbers are.
Also, regarding punishment, we really need more options, and I'm not a fan of criminal records -- debts to society should not be infinite.
Proportional punishment is one tool -- a $200 fine means something very different to "a kid from the projects" than it does to "Jeff Bezos".
The other thing is that we've already massively decoupled value contributed to the tribe from value received from the tribe - many people's wages have absolutely nothing to do with how much they personally produce value. Generally speaking, employed people receive less than the value they create, and capital owners/employers receive more.
"Solving" poverty will be a complex thing no matter what we do.
We want to keep people out of utter privation. Off the streets, as it were. A chicken in every chicken and pot in every pot... or something like that.
At the same time, our resources are not infinite, and being valuable to your tribe -- e.g. "work" -- is a critical part of maintaining a healthy psychology.
The thing we absolutely, positively, must avoid at all costs is what we do now: paying people to not work, and punishing them when they do.
Even the weed smokers and the people playing video games are often maintaining a social glue with others and improving the lives of people around them - we might imagine that if these people didn't exist, multiplayer game creators might pay people to play video games and be friendly when the servers aren't particularly full, as a service to their paying players. We might actually see interactive platforms like Twitch as providing this in a roundabout sort of way - you can strike up a conversation with someone over a shared interest in video games for just a few cents. Japan has a small rent-a-friend economy, and there's a global cat cafe industry - people appear to be willing to pay for their social lives if they can't get it for free, suggesting that what many of these people do is in fact unpaid work.
Punishing people for working is really the problem; if some work (paid or unpaid) needs to be done, and somebody wants to do it, they shouldn't feel that doing that work might affect their livelihood.
This is very far-reaching. We might also imagine, that, if only we sacrificed any and all redheads once they reach the age of eight to the volcano god, the world would be blessed by everlasting peace, wealth and bliss. But let's not do it just because we can imagine something.
> suggesting that what many of these people do is in fact unpaid work
No, it's really not. They accidentally do something that other people in other contexts will pay others for. It's not that you'd have to pay someone to play video games with you if some stoner wasn't online. You'd play video games with ... all the other people who want to play video games.
As long as the cafe pays taxes, follows the law like any other business, and claims you as an employee, sounds like work to me.
You could also be part of a nonprofit that holds mini-concerts in nursing homes, provided that all the appropriate tax paperwork gets filed.
Would self-employed work not count under your system? What if I was doing something with the hope that it will make money in future? What if it's not, in fact, intended to make money at all, but would be non-profit work? If I set up a company that would sign off on me and my friends, would that change anything?
Managing a cafe in Cafe Simulator 3000 because you want entertainment: not work (but these games often do a good job emulating the monotony of work in the long run).
The lines get blurry when you're managing an actual cafe because you're bored and want entertainment.
Hanging around a cafe because your friend works there: not work, even though some people sometimes pay other people just to hang around in a cafe.
Sounds reasonable.
> But let's not do it just because we can imagine something.
Does this mean I need to take down that ad on Craigslist?
First, the "prebate" is the right idea. Every adult citizen or permanent resident gets it, no need to do anything special. Direct to your bank account, every month. Adjust tax brackets as appropriate.
Enforcement for the "must work" provision would run through the tax system as well.
You need to be able to show yourself as working for an organization which has a tax ID, which should include nonprofits, churches, government agencies, co-ops, startups, private companies, global megacorps, all of them. That organization also (already) has to report you as an employee, so no major change there.
And while groups of people could form co-ops and nonprofits that claim to "employ" each other, that's probably fine. If you're willing to go through all the work to handle the tax filings and related compliance, and do so without committing fraud, I don't see a problem there.
Basically, hippie communes are fine as long as you do all the relevant tax paperwork and meet the legal requirements for being a non-profit/startup/what-have-you. To me, that sounds like a lot of work to do nothing, and probably just easier to work for the city government, cleaning up trash in the park.
Allow a decent amount of time to change jobs on an annual basis -- maybe a month?
Work requirements are waived if you are disabled, elderly, or a student (university, trade school, etc.), although the latter comes with a hard time limit (this is similar to how things work in Germany right now, by the way).
You can also elect to stop or restart UBI payments at any time, and the above work obligations are suspended when not receiving UBI.
Paying for this is a question -- would need to run the numbers on corporate tax receipts, but I suspect a combination of corporate income taxes, tariffs, and the savings from no longer needing to run a large chunk of economic aid programs (social security, etc.) would cover it. Not sure, though.
VATs tend to be regressive, so I'd be pretty strongly opposed to one of those. We'd also need to get rid of minimum wage laws (covered by the UBI), and public-sector unions likely also need to go into the fire -- they'd fight tooth-and-nail against UBI-paid "volunteers" doing work for the government, because those people wouldn't be paying union dues.
Modulo the numbers working out, and that there are plenty of special-interest groups that would rather maintain the status quo, I think this would probably work...
Yep, instead of UBI, I'd be fine with Universal Basic Employment. It needn't even be something onerous (e.g. keeping the sidewalk clean or visiting the elderly to cheer them up) if the individual has physical or health limitations as long as it's contributing to the well being of society.
I'm all for people doing dirty jobs to be paid more. They're doing essential, undesirable work.
If that's true, doesn't it also mean UBI won't cost anything? (I realize that's some pretty twisted logic)
Either the amount paid by UBI is meaningful, which means it'll make a difference to people's lives.
Or it's so small as to be meaningless. Which means it won't cost that much per-capita to implement.
(It's late, I haven't thought this through, feel free to downvote if this is completely bonkers :-P)
Which would in turn make garbage collection more expensive. Now everyone has to pay more for it, including UBI recipients. Now UBI won't be enough to live, thus UBI has to be raised, making garbage collection at the then current rate less interesting. Back to square one, repeat.
The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first one.
1. It's hard to tell how much costs would actually rise by.
2. UBI doesn't have to be enough to live on by itself. It just has to be universal and unconditional.
That'll be pretty much the increase in pay multiplied by how much of the cost of a product/service is labor, for all things your might have to buy, which includes housing, health care, food.
> 2. UBI doesn't have to be enough to live on by itself. It just has to be universal and unconditional.
I believe that's a minority opinion. Not getting anything, or getting $1 a month, meets those standards.
The point of UBI, as I understand the proponents, is that "the basics" (the B in UBI) are taken care of. They will always include housing, food, clothing etc, usually health care and it's up for debate what else should be included (TV, computer, internet etc are frequently mentioned as necessary to live in a modern society).
Not quite. Employers would be able to reduce salary costs by an amount more than the UBI, because of tax band effects, so costs of production for a bunch of stuff goes down.
If someone wants money to engage with society in a more meaningful way, there are always jobs to allow them to do so- even if they're dirty.
You can participate by spending money you were gifted, but you're not contributing. If it was just about participation, let's remove all the clutter, just give everyone a million bucks a month - we can all participate in the economy by spending roughly $30k a day and it'll be an economic wonder. The question is: who will be there to sell us things, to cook food at the fancy restaurant etc, if they also get $30k a day? You'll have to pay them a lot more than today. And that'll just mean that your $30k are worth proportionally less.
Money is just a placeholder for value. You need the value being produced to make the money meaningful.
Even without tangling with that question, there's the argument that moving money around is itself a contribution. It's a marginal one, and if that's all you're doing, that means your total contribution is marginal. But that's fine, there's always going to be a spectrum of contributions between those that are paper-thin and the earth-shattering works of great import. Some jobs that look like hard work are a net negative on society. If you get into the game of saying "contributions below this specific level don't count", you end up splitting hairs and, because everyone's values work differently, you can't avoid bringing moral arguments into the frame.
Besides, we're not talking about giving everyone $30k a day. That's qualitatively different, not least because it's so far from the basic cost of living that it just doesn't make sense as a comparison. It is far, far better to just say "nobody will be in poverty" and leave it at that than try to attach strings to it.
The more important question is: if so, do all human lives have that worth? That is: to satisfy A's personal hobbies, are we allowed to make B work more than B would personally like?
If moving money around is a contribution, let's automate it. We have computers, we can do it at a very high frequency. Even if it's a marginal contribution, we can do it many times per second. If it's indeed a contribution, that should help, shouldn't it? If we need more contribution, we'll just add another node or increase bandwidth, and voila, we'll have even more, which we can use to add even more. Magic!
> Besides, we're not talking about giving everyone $30k a day.
Right. It will still have the same effect if everyone gets it: to convince them to continue working, you'll have to increase the wages.
> It is far, far better to just say "nobody will be in poverty" and leave it at that than try to attach strings to it.
That's just another way to say "work is optional, you don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to, but the others have to share with you". You can make that argument, but it's a very different one from the idea of UBI, which somehow magically creates wealth by moving money around and reducing the incentive to contribute to society.
That's precisely the question, yes. Although there is the question of whether B would actually be affected. There's an underlying assumption to this statement that UBI would be an appreciable net cost, rather than being offset by savings in other parts of the economy. Bear in mind that there is already a rather dramatic range of income tax levels across the developed world; there's nothing inevitable about the current level of "paying for other people's hobbies" that we currently engage in.
> If moving money around is a contribution, let's automate it.
I'd hope it was transparent that the moving around of money that an individual engages in by buying food and services in their local economy (or online, it doesn't really matter) has qualities that aren't preserved by this system.
> Right. It will still have the same effect if everyone gets it: to convince them to continue working, you'll have to increase the wages.
So jobs that fall below a very basic income level cease to be relevant. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But also, the difference between your $30k example and the sorts of realistic proposals you see is proportion, and that matters. If I was being paid ${UBI} by my employer yesterday, and today I'm being paid ${UBI} by the state, my employer now has to add to that, not replace it. It might take another $30k a day for me to appreciate the difference from an employer if that's my current rate, but at the other end of the scale people are actually considering, if I can get an extra $10 a day on top of UBI, that might be enough.
Think of it from the other side, too: today, I've got a salary cost of $X for my employee. Tomorrow, the state pays them $X. I can add $10 to that and their take-home goes up, while my costs drop by $X-$10.
> That's just another way to say "work is optional, you don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to, but the others have to share with you". You can make that argument, but it's a very different one from the idea of UBI, which somehow magically creates wealth by moving money around and reducing the incentive to contribute to society.
Only for an arbitrarily narrow definition of "contribute". There is nothing magical about removing the economy-level costs of individual poverty, and work would only be "optional" if you were content with a very basic level of existence.
I do believe we all agree that it will be, yes. There are claims that you can "reduce administrative overhead" to pay for it, but they are many orders of magnitudes off. So for all proposals that don't include magic or just hand-wave away all objections, yes, B will be affected. If we only have A and B, and B would like to work no more than required to live comfortably, B would have to work twice as hard to also pay for A. If you have A, B and C, it's 150% for both B and C and so on.
I'm sure that most people will agree to do it if A is incapable of contributing, but not if A just is unwilling to contribute. You could argue that the unwillingness should be considered a symptom, but that's pretty close to saying the unemployed are mentally ill. And if they were, shouldn't we help them get healthy instead?
> I'd hope it was transparent that the moving around of money that an individual engages in by buying food and services in their local economy (or online, it doesn't really matter) has qualities that aren't preserved by this system.
The issue with "just moving money around" is that it's really no different than doing it virtually. The point of "moving money around" in the economy is exchanging goods. Just making money change hands doesn't produce anything, so to contribute you have to produce something (or help produce it as an employee etc), you'll get money for it and you then exchange that money for things other people have produced. As long as the money is backed by value, everything is fine, and moving it around a lot is great for efficient markets. But you're not suggesting money backed by value, you're suggesting increasing money by itself, without adding value (contributing) to the economy. We don't need an extra person to buy bread from the bakery for the person who makes the bread to then go and buy something from the fruit stand etc, we can just cut out the initial person you want to gift money to, they serve no purpose, they don't add value, even marginal value, just by existing.
> So jobs that fall below a very basic income level cease to be relevant.
No more garbage collection, no more grocery store clerks, no more sewer inspections, no more farming! That's not necessarily a bad thing ;)
> Tomorrow, the state pays them $X. I can add $10 to that and their take-home goes up, while my costs drop by $X-$10.
Their motivation to do $whatever drops by $X, so you don't have to add $10, you'd have to add $X.
> There is nothing magical about removing the economy-level costs of individual poverty, and work would only be "optional" if you were content with a very basic level of existence.
Please define that very basic level of existence. I have a feeling that it's not "a bed, 3000 calories, a chair and a change of cloths", but rather "an average sized apartment, a tv, diverse food choices, a computer, internet, an allowance to spend on fun things etc", as it's widely considered today in Europe as the existential minimum.
I'm not talking about "administrative overhead", although that's certainly part of it. I'm talking about things like reducing the costs to society of having significant parts suffering malnutrition. Reducing policing costs because people aren't forced into crime simply to survive. Those sorts of costs.
> I'm sure that most people will agree to do it if A is incapable of contributing, but not if A just is unwilling to contribute.
Who gets to define what "contributing" means? Or what "unwilling" means? Why are you sure about what "most people" think? "Most people" - 51% in a recent survey - are in favour of UBI, outnumbering those opposed 2:1. In my experience, once you strip away propaganda, most people aren't that paternalistic, moralistic, and judgemental, especially when it comes to a benefit they themselves would also get.
> The issue with "just moving money around" is that it's really no different than doing it virtually...
When already-rich people automate moving money around, it's called "providing liquidity" and "price discovery". The same ideas apply on the individual level, plus the baker gets to participate and build value in a long-term relationship with an individual. There's clearly economic value here over and above the base exchange of money.
> No more garbage collection, no more grocery store clerks, no more sewer inspections, no more farming!
No more exploitation of poverty to get these things to happen, possibly. Yes, there will be economic effects: the wages for some jobs will need to go up, the wages for other jobs can go down. The point is that the directions of these things will be in a favourable direction.
> Their motivation to do $whatever drops by $X, so you don't have to add $10, you'd have to add $X.
Motivation is not linear.
> Please define that very basic level of existence.
Ok, here's a concrete proposal: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/aug/12/andrew-yangs-... $1000 a month. $250 a week. Here's another: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/19/hull-univers... £50-£100 a week.
> I have a feeling that it's not "a bed, 3000 calories, a chair and a change of cloths", but rather "an average sized apartment..."
Where does that feeling come from?
I know people who live -in their eyes- comfortably off of that. They see no reason to change anything, as enough is provided to eat, sleep, smoke, get drunk, have a TV and an xbox, a computer and internet and use public transportation to meet with friends. Sure, you can't easily travel, and you're not going to buy a house any time soon (but if you own one already, you can keep it; if you're still paying the mortgage, the state will cover it for you within reasonable limits), but it's a comfortable life if you don't have a lot of ambition or can make some money on the side.