Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

I think that's the most important question.

I believe the story is that one will abuse whatever welfare they get. Whether it's stamps, credits, services or money.

Here in Australia they've been trialing a cashless debit card to control what people spend their welfare money on. Somehow, it's still costing _more_ than just giving people money and the recipients aren't happier either. Some are using the card to buy things like batteries and re-selling them to then buy their drugs and alcohol. So there's money spent to restrict the money, but the money is still abused. So why not just give them the money?

In the end - money is money. Poverty is literally only solved with money. Surprisingly, the cheapest and easiest way to solve someone's poverty is to just give them money. If they abuse it? Fine. They were going to do that anyway.

What's the difference between that and the current reality? Food stamps can be sold and bought on the black market in exchange for drugs and alcohol; people who want whiskey will be able to get it. Whatever money is spent on enforcing the "sanctity" of food stamps could just go to more people directly.

And this is really the main point: the administrative burden all of these social programs incur, especially in terms of labor and office space, means that a very large sum of money is going into these programs that will never be seen by the people who need help. Just give everyone a check and be done with it.

To answer your main question: the person who blows their UBI suffers. They will be hungry for the rest of the month, and not many people will have sympathy for them because they already got their check. All mentally sane people realize this reality, and that is enough to prevent them from spending their UBI poorly. For the minority of people who are sadly physically addicted to drugs, there can be social programs specifically aimed at recovery and rehabilitation. This was another one of Yang's policies. UBI would help here too: let's say you spend 8 months at a government funded rehab facility while you kick your addiction to meth or heroine. At the end of the 8 months, you have $8000 waiting for you - to go forward, get a job, rent an apartment, and rebuild your life.

This is much cheaper than a bloated social program that ties your aid to measurable checkpoints, like how you have to prove you're looking for a job in order to keep receiving unemployment. Under UBI, the Fed just runs some script every month to raise a double somewhere by $1000; under unemployment they have to hire people to process your application, approve/deny it, review your weekly application submissions, hire someone else to distribute the money, hire a manager for all these people, pay an office to give these people a workplace, pay pensions and benefits for all these employees, etc.

One of the big reasons for UBI is the belief that an individual can better assess their own needs and wants, and procure them more cheaply than the government.

This is partly a moral/philosphical stand - the tension is between giving individual freedom in the form of money, or giving freedom via paternalistic methods where the government decides what is best for you. It can be argued either way.

I do agree it would be wise to have systems in place to trickle the money in daily instead of monthly - this would help your concern of people blowing all their money at once (but not prevent them spending on what was most important to them).

I also think that just UBI will never be enough - there is a place for targeted government support - healthcare, addiction (part of healthcare), mental health (also part of healthcare).

Foodstamps are already being traded for cash/drugs, all you are doing with UBI is removing the middle man.

Who is suggesting that this is the final form and cannot be ammneded? If anything, I think Dorsey just did what should have been done with the first wave of the vast amount of Campaign funds the 'Yang Gang' raised and actually create a through analysis along with coherent and cogent overview on the means by which it would initially be deployed with all of its cost-risk benefit analysis.

At which point it could then be vetted and and scrutinized via public discourse and eventually be further refined after some changes or be deemed worth a first trial process. I dislike Democracy as a system of governance on just about every aspect, but perhaps this is one of the few usecases it may have as we transition to this model at scale and will require the participation of everyone for it to succeed?

But your position is like following the fallacy that software is 'done' once its beta has been released... that's just not how this works. And the maintenance of this deployment is just as important, or more so depending on its application, as the creation of its earliest iteration.

You're a Cryptocurrency/Bitcoin person, don't you think Aurora was worth it, even though it failed? It showed us what had utility and what seemed sound in a theoretical sense and accepted via convention only to have it be stress tested and fail in practice.

As for subsidizing food, even further no less, is to undermine not just how broken it is but also how one of the biggest reasons the Global Ag/Food Industry not only relies on a system that often yields a near destitute farmer, but is also ultimately built on an expendable and often mistreated and undervalued labor force.

Just look at how meat packer workers are deemed expendable during COVID but required to remain at work due to being an 'essential worker' and a critical link in the Supply Chain, the deaths be damned. We can always get another low skilled, desperate worker to replace them.

You must understand that peril exists for a farmer everyday, getting injured on the job is the norm, working with those (ever compounding) injuries is enshrined within their very culture and it seems near exploitative when properly viewed for what it is as bankruptcy and suicide are often the alternatives to not meet one's obligations in that Industry (see wide scale suicide in Indian Cotton farmers in the 2000s, and the displacement and disenfranchisement of small farmers in the US in the 80-90s caused by large Big Ag-tech, Drug companies and Massive Food consortia).

Food has value that far exceeds its current fiat denominated Market valuation, it is specifically because Governments all over the World subsidize it so heavily (in various ways) and in turn obfuscate the externalities of not just growing a crop but also getting it to Market that it can and often forces a farmer to operate at a net-loss. If you allowed for freer access of Markets that create a means for producers to exchange their products with chefs/restaurants directly as well as the end consumer you'd have a more functional Market based form of price discovery. I should know, I've been both.

So I can tell you right now from both a Biological/Ecology sense as well as a Farmer POV tomatoes will NEVER truly be a $0.99/lbs product if properly priced, they are extremely heavy feeders that will require large preps and amendments to the soil upon planting, and ideally crop rotation as well as lots of labor during and after harvest, but also materials to trellis, prune, the labor costs for pest prevention, weeding, storage, transport etc...

In short, less subsidies could actually create not just more accurate pricing (as food prices are at very skewed Historical lows) but potentially also a greater supply overall as the incentives for growers/producers have been created to profit from a newly created venture if they can deliver to Market a desirable product at a desirable price.

We probably need tens of billions of dollars to pilot UBI properly in the US across borders and to help setup the infrastructure to distribute the funds. But compared to another missile program, the social good of such a program is undeniable. Which is probably why it’ll be rejected in today’s hell world US politics.

To a certain extent we have an opportunity to experiment now. Might as well learn what we can.

that's the wrong way to think about it. The above makes an implicit assumption that by doing this you "save" $5000/yr because the insurance company is "more efficient".

That's wrong - you actually cost $5000 (this being the "profit" the insurance company makes if you _didn't_ need the medical treatment that year). Under the gov't version, if you were healthy, you're "free". You only cost when you actually need the medical treatment.

Healthcare should not be done under a private insurance model. Any profit made by the private insurer is a cost to providing medical treatment, and does not contribute to the outcome. By making medical treatment a tax payer funded scheme, the cost of an unhealthy society is spread out amongst all. Not only does this give the gov't buying pressure to lower the margins of all medical treatments, it also makes a policy pressure for gov't to give preventative measures for good health outcomes (like legislating low sugar foods, or incentivize exercise and good diet etc).

There's not a single person on the planet who derives benefits from navigating the trade-offs of byzantine insurance plans, and school choice is a good way to speed up social and racial segregation and enabling quasi fraudulent religious schools that teach people nonsense.

It's time we do away with this altar of choice. I moved from Germany to the UK years ago, and I've never enjoyed anything more than the NHS because I literally do not have to waste a minute of my life on health insurance any more. I pay X amount of taxes, I go to the doctor, I get treated, I go home.

The government gives you $300 and makes sure that enough healthy food is available for those $300. You don't get $300 worth of food. You get money. Cold hard cash. And the option to buy cheap food from the government.

Companies can also make cheap food targeting those $300, and I'm sure there already exists non-government government cheese.

About education and healthcare. The government just needs to provide the bare minimum. Broke an arm? Goverment will cast it. Still crooked? Get in the wait line or go work for money and get an insurance or pay for the surgery. Want a better education for your kids? Homeschool if you can, or just work for more money and pay for one.

UBI should be:

survival -> socialism

good (material) life -> capitalism

You're really only making net transfers to the bottom half, and even most of those aren't for the entire amount. Someone at the 25th percentile gets $1500 but would be paying $750 in tax themselves.

Meanwhile it replaces what the people at the bottom were already getting in food/housing/other assistance. So it really "costs" almost nothing. It may even reduce costs, because now you don't need a wasteful means testing bureaucracy to process and determine eligibility for dozens of separate government benefits that no longer exist.

So, in practice, I imagine there would be lots of offices and agencies, services and interdependent liaison offices and agencies along with the requisite inspector general offices and agencies and the necessary committees, subcommittees, and working groups that would have to be created.

In the land of government bureaucracy, the rapidly increasing fixed-pie of current and (hopefully) future taxpayer revenue gets divided up into more and more slices every day.

However - I've always been puzzled by how each person in the US doesn't have a public, singularly identifying number assigned. Doesn't that make even an 'universal' basic income hard to define? How do you guarantee that every person gets one, and only one, BI check every month? How do you find out who is dead and should stop getting one...?

From what I know, SSN are used for stuff like that, but there's all this weird stuff about it (althoug I admit my knowledge of it comes from a half forgotten CGP Grey video, and that the impression that stuck)

the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute

so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster

Giving everyone their own money for, say healthcare costs, and having them navigate markets alone... achieves exactly the kind of divide-and-conquer that price-gouging pharmaceutical companies and hospitals have wet dreams about.

The only good UBI supplements, but does not replace, most existing social welfare programs.

Replacing existing programs just creates an open season for vultures.

I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical.

That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.

But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.

I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.

Not really. There are UBI models that are more or less zero cost - taxes are increased by roughly the UBI amount for employed workers, and for the unemployed the UBI would be similar to the unemployment benefits they would lose.

A guaranteed minimum income would need to phase out by income, so as to not discourage people from working if they want to.

This is simply false. Please provide sources for this claim.

Most implementations of UBI are comparable to the existing taxation.

Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.

Where I live now, that job now is done by the home owners or by staff of the apartment buildings. The job didn't go away, it's just no longer done by the garbage collectors.

Moved back to a much richer one 10x larger a couple years later. No robot arm garbage trucks then, and still none now. Bags on the end of the driveway, guys hanging on trucks.

Yes the death rate is higher in US than a lot of other countries, but overall it is quite low. According to this page [0], it's .64 per 100,000. As of May 20th the population was 329,672,928 [1]. Comes to a total of about 2110 people or 0.0000064 of the population. While tragic nonetheless, is an extremely small number.

[0] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

[1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/

Hopefully more of 3 than the alternative, because the alternative scenario of prices rising has negative consequences in the form of economic deadweight loss even if UBI pays for the price increases.

Yeah no kidding so there will be hyperinflation. Making the net effect of UBI almost zilch. What use is $1000 bucks when toilet paper is $100 a roll.

> 3) Because of (2), more research effort and investment will go into automating and otherwise reducing the number of humans required for unpleasant jobs. And with UBI, that becomes an unmitigated good, with no worry about putting people out of work.

So there will be a giant underclass of people who live on nothing but UBI (UBIers) while a small minority of elite researchers in corporate labs come up with more ways to keep the UBIers from earning their own living. Great. And who buys all the stuff? Is the "stuff" just for the gilded class smart enough to work? Or do we just give the UBIers a raise every now and then to "stimulate" the economy? How is this not communism?

They do not have UBI (yet) but have generous benefits for unemployment, sick pay, disabilities and pseudo minimum pay so that most people earn a decent income.

I am not an economist or sociologist but the economy still works, most people still work and it has lead to 2) and 3). There is less interest in the less desirable jobs so their salary has subsequently increased. And there is heavy investment in automation, in farms, in manufacturing, in shops, etc.

It is not perfect though. Maybe UBI will be even better.

Doing shitty jobs usually doesn't improve one's situation though. If you earn minimum wage you're going to be better off just trying to gain a marketable skill and living off your income.

You say 'easier for people to take risks'. Well, yeah. So who's gonna be dumb enough to keep scrubbing grime off the bathroom floor when its easy and safe to invest in yourself? There's a solution to that of course, which is "pay people more", which is great. Now people get paid enough to merit working a shit job even with UBI. But now we have a different problem, things cost more to produce, which means prices go up! How much do they go up? Well probably to around the point at which the guy scrubbing grime is at the same level of economic wealth as before, and the guy who stopped to work on self improvement suddenly can't survive on his not-longer-basic UBI.

We need people to perform shitty jobs. Increasing real wages would be a good step to do that. Talk of people being able to take more risks in entrepreneurship is just techie dreams about how it could be better if their privileged economic condition were a little more privileged. It's not wrong, but it's hardly an important problem for society.

Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage, is much closer to a UBI than "Original Medicare". Nearly 40% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ke...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INTDSRJPM193N

http://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interest...

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/search-interest--ex...

If you're not asking them to fund it, you're not testing UBI, you're testing "if an external entity provides money to a community without asking for anything in return, will that be cool?"

If you imagine that UBI would allow people to live with a lower level of stress around starvation, you have to imagine that they would want to rely on that income a decade from now. Saying "find a rich benefactor to decide to give money away" doesn't reasonably test anything meaningful about UBI. I can tell you that people will generally be happier if you give them money one time. Don't need much experimentation to validate that hypothesis...

To use an example the Yang often uses: It may not be economically viable to set up a bakery in some small dying town. But if everyone in that town were receiving UBI, it might become viable, due to a change in the town's spending habits.

That's... not a small test. That's a small city deciding to go all in on trying it.

What is interesting about the payouts is that we magically made the money for them while also magically making the money for a ton of other stuff. Obviously the scale of one time vs recurring is vastly different but I feel like this does go a ways towards proving its possible.

That said, I actually think Yang's ideas are going to reverberate throughout political discourse over the next decade. Similar to how Bernie pushed the base range of the Democratic party to the left, Yang shed light on some great issues that will plague us. For example, what are going to do about the massive loss of employment due to automation? Are we going to attempt to retrain these people? That's historically not been very successful.

"He took a very moderate and reasonable stance "

No, you don't get to label anyone who disagrees with a risky, existential upheaval as a 'whackjob'.

UBI is a fairly extreme ideology, partly because of the social welfare application, but mostly because of the cost - which its proponents tend to ignore.

We can argue a little bit over what 'free money' means for people, but the case falls flat when someone talks about a program that costs $350 Billion a month, or about 3 Trillion a year. FYI US economy is about 20 Trillion.

UBI is not a discussion about 'free money' or 'welfare' or 'means testing'.

UBI is a discussion about the existential level of wealth transfer or debt creation that comes from the most expensive program ever conceived by any government in the history of civilization.

The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?

Because all the nice talking points are otherwise academic.

Yang reminds me a little bit of Marx - really amazing insight and thoughtful understanding of problems ... but solutions that miss the point entirely.

We all know that 1 and 2 (probably) aren't going to happen. And I don't know many republicans that want the wealthy's money redistributed equally amongst all Americans.

I'd focus on accumulating non-monetary assets. Board seats, political connections, et cetera.

(Genuine question, no gotchas here)

And, by definition, everybody who earns higher than the median wage will also receive a tax increase higher than the basic income they're being given "back".

1) The incentive to enter the workforce is greatly reduced. Every high-school graduate would have the means to shack up with a few of their buddies and live the college lifestyle indefinitely. I'm currently a productive adult, but only because there was no alternative. UBI is an alternative.

2) The nest-egg required to retire is greatly reduced. If a married couple is saving up for retirement with a retirement income of 60K, they're currently need $2,000,000 to retire (pre social security). If that same married couple is receiving 12K each in UBI, the required nest-egg is almost halved to $1,200,000. That means couple can retire a decade earlier than they previously could. This will see millions of people retiring during what would have been their most productive (i.e. tax-payingest) years.

3) Much like a shorter work week, UBI will be a tremendous competitive disadvantage for US goods and services. When the labor market inevitably shrinks, wages will necessarily rise. This will a competitive drag on exports of US goods and services.

I'm not saying that these things are bad. They sound great for the individuals in question. But they will eventually hollow out the workforce.

Many people who "go off the reservation" and travel/live mobile tend to settle down after a while.

How few people would be allowed to go screw around instead of working, for this outcome to be okay?

If they raise the salaries and start getting applicants, who's going to buy the much more expensive produce? They'd have to increase the amount of ubi, and there you have inflation.

But probably less "meaningful" work, in however society defines meaningful.

>>Also, look around groups of wealthy people. The ones who don't have to work anymore. Sure, some of them live a life of leisure, but many of them still work, because they get bored otherwise.

This is due to earning a return matching their effort. At some point, if enough income is withheld at that level, what's the point? Or, they will leave en-mass to countries more willing to employ entrepreneur muscle. These aren't anecdotes. Look at emigration from USSR, China, Venezuela or others of their scientists, professors, doctors, lawyers, financiers, etc.

We have paid employment to get people to do things that need to be done!

Has even one of these been a permanent (for the recipients) experiment?

There has never been a test on a scale which would lead people to do it though. If you know you're part of a short lived experiment you're not quitting your job.

People who built their wealth, they keep working because it's in their personality makeup.

People who inherit wealth often wind up frittering it away.

[1] https://www.ncoa.gov.au/report/appendix-volume-1/9-11-unempl...

Go read about whose asses were saved with printed the money during the 2008 financial crisis. Or the 7 trillion bailout fund for corporations that just passed.

Ugh. That's way too complex, and you know it. But I'll try to give you some bullet points:

1. Homelessness 2. Inability to afford healthcare 3. Home ownership being inaccessible to most people 4. Inability to afford childcare 5. Inability to afford education

Note how 1, 4, and 5 aren't solvable by providing jobs--these are problems that prevent you from entering the workforce even when jobs are available.

Frankly, I don't think you're asking this question in good faith.

> How is an increase in the money supply related to income inequality?

If you implement UBI, you're essentially also implementing a minimum wage, since companies will have to pay significantly more than UBI. Rather than accept a cut in their own pay to pay workers more, executives will raise the price of goods and services. This effect, across the economy causes inflation. So if you don't find a way to prevent executives raising their own pay to maintain inequality, you get inflation any time you give money to the poor.

Economic conservatives tend to overstate this problem, in my opinion--there's nothing preventing you from just raising the UBI proportional to inflation. But historically, minimum wage hasn't tracked inflation, and I worry that UBI would suffer the same problem.

If you implement UBI, you're essentially also implementing a minimum wage, since companies will have to pay significantly more than UBI. Rather than accept a cut in their own pay to pay workers more, executives will raise the price of goods and services. This effect, across the economy causes inflation. So if you don't find a way to prevent executives raising their own pay to maintain inequality, you get inflation any time you give money to the poor.

Economic conservatives tend to overstate this problem, in my opinion--there's nothing preventing you from just raising the UBI proportional to inflation. But historically, minimum wage hasn't tracked inflation, and I worry that UBI would suffer the same problem.

> For one humans are tricky in that they don't just lie down and accept the laws you want that go against what they want and instead undermine and loophole it in ingenius ways. Trivially that would encourage "nesting doll tiered" subsidary companies and contractors to bypass the limits.

This problem exists in any solution, including all the ones that already exist. It should be addressed, but I don't think that's a reasonable criticism of any solution if it applies to all of them.

> Second the high end of income wouldn't even be affected as they make their money largely from investments not salary or wages. Even if they got the seed for investments from their high salaries - like every retired athlete who managed to stay rich and even get richer after endorsements dried up.

Yes, we'd have to find a way to treat investment income as equivalent to pay in order for this to work.

UBI should cover a room to live, bread to eat, healthcare and internet access (to participate in the democracy, voting, etc).

Wanna buy a car? Go out? Eat some candy? Build that dam / apartment.

My perspective.

What are they trying to do?

The benefit of the 'universal basic' part of UBI is that it just washes away all edge cases, and it's pretty hard to feel like you've been wronged by it.

Not everyone needs to live in the Bay Area.

COL adjustment to UBI would be a huge mistake and undermine the entire concept.

On an even broader level though, location caused cost of living differences being taken in to account in anything like this seems odd. I read it as the equivalent of “but what about people who want Ferrari’s not Honda’s!?” When it seems like others see it as “what about people who have expensive to treat medical conditions?”

COL differences aren’t some arbitrary accident. You’re paying more to live somewhere more desirable.

Is it monthly or weekly/bi-weekly/quarterly/annually?

Does universal include children under 18? Non-citizens? If so, for the same amount?

Can you borrow against your UBI or allow others to take liens?

How do you actually register and get the money?

But that’s about it I can think of!

I am highly skeptical of UBI. The U.S. is the last place that should try it, it should be experimented on in a country like New Zealand or Italy... not on an economy like the U.S., which could bring down world trade if UBI ends in economic catastrophe, such as hyperinflation, which is a very real possibility.

Or maybe you're talking about UBI to immigrants, but not actually allowing any immigration.

Otherwise, we are a country full of immigrants who have become citizens or legal residents and would benefit from UBI.

Nope it’s not.

In order for welfare to be « legalized » , and for taxpayer to accept that their money will go to «Non-Active» individuals it’s necessary to have a cultural fit between the two.

You cant tax like Norway or France ( 40% overall ) if people believe that you should work to earn a living, it’s not right to do so. American would never accept such sky high taxe rate if it cause against their believes and thus their culture.

US rely on entrepreneurship which create wealth which enable people to buy goods/services.

This is 100% cultural not propaganda.

That's, at best, highly debatable. I would like data showing that (or the opposite)

> Under any economic regime there will be a poorest 20% at any given time.

That's not what "20% of the population living under the poverty line" means. It means that 20% of people don't earn enough to live decently, which is highly dependent on the economic regime

Seeing as plenty of people are earning more with the federal unemployment compensation than they would if they were working full time, I'm not sure what exactly is "unconvincing" about it.

I'm one, I worked on the first Permaculture farm in Italy, (Modena) and it was nearly entirely funded by some incredibly underfunded Ag subsidies, and the elderly Mother's pension/retirement fund. It's labour pool was mainly made up of volunteers and apprentices like myself besides the 50 year old son who came back from Germany after a messy divorce.

When I arrived the eldest son (and to much lesser extent the youngest of his children, an 11 year old boy) had to do what was done by both parents and his siblings now entirely by himself. So Sales figures were less than optimal, even if the produce was amazing he'd be way too exhausted to do all of the farming duties throughout the day, so trying to get more exposure by going to more Farmer's Markets was out of the question.

Labour was the really needed part of the equation, once we got the Team organized and with solid schedules we were able to expand to 3-5 farmer's market a week as opposed to the single Saturday morning one that had been done for the past few years. The costs of transport and fees for the stands were higher but that was overcome with a larger volume of deliverable goods, as less was perished by sitting in the non-electric storage area after weekly harvest and we started to re-supply some local restaurants with our excess along the way to the farmers markets, too.

After I left we had turned sales around to a 10-year high, reached back when most of the family (2 parents and 5 late teen/early 20s children and a grandparent) could work with only just 3 extra men and myself in the fields in the morning and then going to farmer markets in the afternoons.

Suffice it to say, I met hundreds of people operating with some variation of that model at what I can best describe as an 'underground Farmer's Market,' where it felt more like a carnival than a typical one it was entirely 'Industry only,' some local chefs from the surrounding area arrived, too. Someone with a stand near us said they saw Massimo Bottura at one I didn't attend as I had to help in the fields that day.

In short, its a thing. WWOOF [1], the network I used for my apprenticeship, has most of the farms listed operating like that for decades now. I met lots of volunteers and apprentices in France, Italy, and Spain and much of Europe as far as parts of sub-Sahara Africa.

With that said, I think the majority of Farm labour should become automated and instead of making more Farm laborers alone, its best to offer people with limited opportunities in the City other opportunities to own farms with low cost barriers to the these tools. Land, especially between 'LA and Mississippi' is severely under utilized. On a road trip to Kansas City we could go 100 miles across Kansas before we saw anything remotely looking like it was inhabited by Humans.

1: https://wwoof.net/

If UBI becomes too high, people will stop working, inflation will rise, and there won't be a safety net of subsidies and welfare left to help. So if e.g. the price of housing rises, the UBI will be eaten up more and more by rent and mortgage, and people with only UBI will be as poor as before, and people will be forced into very low paying jobs.

Furthermore, I've never seen a convincing source of funding for UBI; at the first sight of an economic crisis, UBI will be lowered. At that point, there's no way to revert the UBI, leading to a new poverty trap.

And reality is going to be wilder than my imagination.

If the problem you're fighting is poverty, then provide welfare for poor people, stimulate work for them, make schools accessible (in backwards countries where that isn't the case), etc., but don't try to restructure society. That's just ego.

It's easy to throw one or two economic terms around, but its a lot more complicated than 'people have more money == prices rise'.

Of course, your concern is still totally valid if UBI will indeed be pointless without the other problems solved. I just wanted to point out how easy it is to say "start with universal health care and affordability of housing and education". That's a huge thing to "start with", and in fact we're already deep into the fight for them.

More people enter and participate in markets, which makes markets work better.

Markets behave better with more participants than with fewer participants. UBI is a net positive on this point.

Mental health & physical health are problems easier solved with money.

Most major cities have rent control of some sort, if not, it's not that hard to start new towns with nation wide UBI. There are other places in this country other than SF, LA and NY

Facing reality without cherry-picking problems the rich create while ignoring the problems the poor create would undermine his ability to people please the poor and get elected.

It's all bullshit - I don't know how many Obamas and Yangs it'll take for people to realize that there is no benevolent politician that can make the problems of the poor go away without having the poor change their ways, the same way there is no trainer that can make you get in shape without you working your ass off.

UBI or not - smart/creative people would rather not live among or deal with self destructive, dangerous dummies. Self destructive, dangerous dummies are being very actively replaced by robots who don't have the downsides of human beings.

The only bargaining chip the dummies have, is that they are still necessary for the infrastructure to function. This power will be eroded away, until one day, the dummies' only argument will be that of a street beggar - won't you spare some change? And the smart/creative class will throw some change their way, they'll call it UBI.

Two ways to answer this:

1) If you're printing money, then yes, prices will rise, and if price controls are implemented it will lead to shortages (e.g. Venezuela)

2) If you're not printing money, then competition will simply lower the cost. It's the same as today - outside of terrible policies like rent-control, why don't landlords just raise rents by $5000? Because the renters will leave and rent from a landlord that undercuts the crazy landlord. In the market, profits tend to 0 and if profits are too high more supply will come in to get a cut of the profits. It's not magic.

>BI just ends up funneling money directly back to the wealthy (eg, landlords and business owners).

Your view on reality is skewed. I mean, yes, people will buy products and services from landlords and business owners. That's not 'funnelling money' anywhere, that's just buying products and services. What do you think people will do with that money, if not to buy things they want and/or need.

>I'm not convinced yet that Yang has a thorough enough plan here.

For sure. UBI does not solve anything and is unworkable, but not for the reasons you stated.

That's a feature of the plan. Rents will go up, and wages will go down, but by that point, people will be committed to UBI, and the only solution will be the gov to step in and control the prices.

Who says UBI replaces a single welfare program? Any support that UBI gets from the left is under the assumption that it is an ADD-ON to the existing welfare state. The people employed in the administration of the welfare programs will also fight tooth-and-nail from losing their jobs.

So UBI is just another cost on top the mountain of costs.

That's a problem with how welfare is structured, that can be fixed with changing welfare.

>The great unknown is whether it also disincentivises work itself in a way that would be a negative overall

Why would you think it wouldn't?

>which potentially allows people to make more rational decisions, and negates the need for cruder solutions like minimum wage, regulations, unions etc

If you think you can get leftist/progressive support for UBI by cutting ANY social program, you are in for quite an awakening. Welfare state employes hundreds of thousands of people, they will not support UBI either. The libertarian view of UBI replacing social programs has ZERO chance of passing. So what's left is UBI being just another expense of top of the huge welfare state costs.

> It frees them from the chains of being stuck at their job

Yes. It would be nice to get nice things and not worry about working. You can't get away from the underlying reality that jobs aren't fun but they still need to be done. Also, we know that populations that are wholly supported by government welfare with no incentive to work suffer from drug/alcohol abuse and crime.