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Comment by nogabebop23 | Hacker News Reader

>> Yang says Humanity Forward plans to immediately distribute Dorsey’s contribution in the form of small cash grants of $250 to nearly 20,000 people who’ve lost their jobs or taken an economic hit as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic

So money based on certain non-universal conditions?

Isn't this one of the root problems? People cannot accept a truly universal system - you've already got too much; that guy lives in the wrong part of the country; you have too much education; they're not citizens...

Bill Gates has stated he doesn't have enough money to tackle all major areas and make significant advances; then guys like Yang want to use far less money for even bigger mandates. This just looks like a way for rich guys to pick very specific winners.

UBI seems like it would be the most powerful vote-buying weapon ever created in the hands of any government given the opportunity to implement it.

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That isn't exactly new politically for better or worse and essentially "bug report closed - a feature not a bug". Fundamentally that is what more democratic systems are - more distributive of political power and interests to please. They are supposed to "buy" votes by pleasing the voters! Every human has their price but that price may not be monetary. Of course all ways are not equal in terms of wisdom or morality.

Athenian democracy was rather different but they had voted for several wars of conquest to enrich themselves and the rowers (the job was higher paid than a soldier due to scarcity and militarily you both want better performance of professionals vs slaves and for them to be allies of soldiers during naval boardings instead of slaves who rebel for freedom).

> UBI seems like it would be the most powerful vote-buying weapon ever created in the hands of any government given the opportunity to implement it.

What's the difference between debating over UBI and increasing/decreasing taxes with regard to buying votes? Truly universal as you say there's only one question re: UBI what's the monthly payment? With tax code there's a million different loopholes and special interest carve outs etc.

To be fair, there are a few other questions...

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!

The citizen question is so very hard, because in practice, non-citizens are numerous and very vulnerable. Cementing UBI for citizens only, would construct a gulf state like two tier society.

Eligibility for the UBI will always be contested. Would it not make it even harder for immigration laws as well?

If the choice is between a comprehensive welfare state/UBI for both citizens and non-citizens, with restricted immigration vs. welfare/UBI restrict to citizens only but with more permissive immigration, I suspect the vast majority of non-Americans would choose the second. UBI for non-citizens is nice, but completely useless if the US won't even let you in.

For people in poorer countries, the quality of life improvement from coming in the US would be so drastic, that preventing people from making that movement, simply to give a small minority of them a marginal benefit, seems to be the wrong decision to take.

Another way to put it is that the two tier system already exists, it's just that the second tier is outside the US/developed countries.

Its troubling to imagine the negotiations that might get restrictions put in place, to further political wrangles. If the 'U' is not there, then its just another program to manage with a huge bureaucracy. Instead of the great leveler and simplifier it could be.

Because the earnings part comes before the tax part, which is the proper order of operations. In order to produce earnings, our system dictates that you do something economically useful. That's not a perfect system, but it has produced the modern economy and for all its flaws, no economy in history has produced as much wealth as exists today.

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.

> Because the earnings part comes before the tax part, which is the proper order of operations. In order to produce earnings, our system dictates that you do something economically useful. That's not a perfect system, but it has produced the modern economy and for all its flaws, no economy in history has produced as much wealth as exists today.

It should be noted that if it weren't for the energy we are extracting from fossil fuels, we'd all be subsistence peasants eating mud, and shoveling cow shit with our hands for a living.

The economic system is a rounding error, compared to the colossal increase in wealth unlocked by cheap access to energy.

cheap access to energy is merely a lever for allowing people to be even more economically useful. By itself, cheap access to energy is worth nothing.

The economic system enabled the extraction of fossil fuels in the first place. Capitalism predates the industrial revolution.

Non-capitalist societies that industrialized also saw enormous gains in wealth.

The difference between the US and the USSR was much smaller than the difference between pre-industrialized Russia, and the USSR.

In what decade? By the 1980s, the U.S. had far outstripped the U.S.S.R. in economic performance by every single measure. Here's some clips of a Soviet grocery store:

http://www.strangehistory.net/2017/08/11/joys-supermarket-sh...

I see UBI as more of a response to the existing conditional welfare system which already exists and circumvents this system in the most perverse way where you can make _more_ money on disability than doing something economically useful. At least with UBI you can eliminate these incentive gaps.

Doesn't have to be UBI either, a NIT could do the same thing, maybe even the EITC as long as it keeps the earning curve monotonic.

As Henry Ford said, cars will never go anywhere, because, for all their flaws, no mode of transportation in history has been more efficient than the train.

If you think welfare or government handouts are some new technology that's going to usher in a new era, I've got some history books for you to read.

I would LOVE to see more US experiments with UBI. The economics have already been tested. The federal government has these enormous funded installations where the people living there don't have to worry about the economy at all.

These gov-funded individuals then go and spend their largesse in the local economy, in many cases propping them up all by themselves.

This happens on a massive scale, right here, right now. They're called military bases. Politicians lobby hard to get the federal government to build them in their states, whether they're needed for military purposes or not.

People pooh-poohing UBI just don't seem to understand just how much of the economy already is paying people to do not much that is actually useful. So many of us have bullshit jobs. There would be mass poverty and unemployment otherwise.

Formalizing it instead of hiding it behind a veneer of fake usefulness will allow us to study it. Companies will have to entice people to take jobs rather than coerce them.

It'll be amazing.

Bullshit jobs? Like which ones exactly? Who determines which ones are bullshit and which ones are not? We don't just create jobs for nothing. Companies that hire excess employees tend to go out of business or shed workers during a downturn like we're experiencing now.

In the meantime, no, we had a thriving restaurant and travel industry 2 months ago but the fact those people have been laid off or furloughed doesn't mean their jobs were bullshit.

It's never been tried at a macro scale for an extended period of time. You are being recklessly ignorant of the very real economic risks. Spending trillions more on top of the trillions in deficits we already have, but making those deficits permanent and ongoing with no ability to pay down will cause rapid inflation that could very easily evolve to hyper inflation like happened in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s and like has happened more recently in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. We may get there without UBI based on current trajectories, but UBI will just usher it in all the more quickly.

> Like which ones exactly? Who determines which ones are bullshit and which ones are not?

The market would, once one gets empowered to be created. Right now the market is tipped on the side of those offering money for work. If you truly flipped the tables around, then those offering money have to offer more and more and more. I'm not just talking money here but all those intangibles that make one job better than another.

You can't buy a sandwich with a piece of paper that says your taxes are going to be lower next year (especially when you don't have much income to be taxed).

Even universal has winners and losers. How do you deal with different cost of livings between Bay Area and Mississippi?

If the UBI is not adjusted and covers living expenses in cheap areas but not expensive areas, then people might decide to live cheaply without a job. That risks creating slums.

If it's adjusted to locality, then areas will grow and dwindle based on accuracy of those adjustment tables. Which would turn those tables overtly political.

I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about UBI. Can you explain how our current society doesn't already have slums? Or how UB would increase them?

People are free to move to lower cost of living areas. In fact, many would argue this is a benefit of UBI and will bring much needed economic resources to under populated parts of the country.

Not everyone needs to live in the Bay Area.

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

I think it's a double edged sword. Encouraging people to minimize their COL and spend the money on underinvested areas of the country is fantastic for decreasing the wealth gap.

But the other likely outcome is drastic COL inflation in low COL areas which adversely impacts them significantly more.

But if everyone including those in the low COL area was getting UBI then it should equalize no?

I believe so, but the economic impact isn't well understood yet.

The UBI experiments so far have shown that it does have an inflationary effect (which causes COL to go up), and at the same time, incomes decrease as secondary earners opt for UBI instead of working. People overall are much happier, but their financial situation gets worse.

Yes. Colorado hates on Texans for scooping up real estate and driving up prices and taxes. And Texans hate on Californians for scooping up their real estate. You can't have it all. And if you do, it won't last forever. Such is life.

Low COL areas are so widespread in practice that no real inflation would occur, even if all the money was spent there. Urban living is the kind that's scarce and expensive.

> People are free to move to lower cost of living areas. I

That's probably NOT what is going to happen if you implement UBI. Rather people complaining UBI is too low for the place they are currently living in. Well known phenomenon.

If you’re treating people wanting to live cheaply without a job as a negative situation that should be avoided, then I don’t think you’re in a mindset to be evaluating UBI specifics correctly. You should just be wholesale against it. The whole point is to free people from wage slavery. You’re worried that it will work!

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.

"wage slavery" is such a disingenuous weasel word term. There's no slavery involved at all. Involvement is purely voluntary and you're free to leave at any time.

And go to the food banks?

- to food banks

- to another job

- to a friend or relative

- to somewhere where they can farm or hunt/gather

The mere existence of any options they can pursue at any time without permission is testament that it isn't slavery.

Here we go again. People are not always in a position to leave a job. People are living paycheck to paycheck and not able to get other jobs. You're being disingenuous.

"Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Living paycheck-to-paycheck or hand-to-mouth like most humans lived for most of human history does not make one a slave. To state otherwise is to compare mere existence to slavery.

Unless someone is an actual slave under bondage or with threat of coercion from another person, they are always in a position to leave a job. Doesn't mean they are free of consequences, like no longer getting money because they are no longer willfully trading their labor for compensation, the same way that someone farming the land will stop reaping the benefits of their labor once they stop engaging in farming behavior or if someone living as a hunter/gatherer will stop collecting sustenance when they stop hunting and gathering. At no point are any of those people slaves because no coercion is involved.

Literalism does nothing here because the concept of wage-slavery is more like the concept of serfdom than slavery. But language is malleable over time and it's commonly understood what it means, especially to people familiar with the struggle to survive in the modern economy.

Then call it wage-serfdom then. It's not slavery.

> But language is malleable over time

If the liberty someone is taking with the language is intentionally trying to manipulate how people think about something by abusing what words are commonly accepted as meaning, it's completely fair to call out that manipulation.

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” ― Philip K. Dick

It happens all the time that people chose their language precisely and in ways that clearly have more impact on another party's perception. Being pedantic over the definition of a word only distracts from what that word(s) is trying to do. I sense that you are really uncomfortable over what the word "wage-slavery" implies about the society you are participating in and are trying to cheapen it.

You're cheapening what slavery is. It's honestly pretty disgusting to equate serfdom to slavery. They aren't even in the same league.

Go read more about modern day slavery and then come back and try to justify comparing the circumstance of these people to those who are actually being treated as property by others.

https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

Red badges not treating you kingly enough?

I'm for UBI. I'm just suggesting it should be implemented in a way that doesn't causes jobless people to group up into ghettos. Those areas would have high unemployment and little opportunity, putting those people in a dead-end. Even with UBI you want social mobility.

It's one extreme that could worsen class divide. The other extreme is making UBI too comfortable, which you highlight. It's a balance, and I don't know how to do it across different COL.

It seems like people would like it, being that it's in their own interest, but you should hear how much people today disregard social welfare programs. Either throwing their hands up in the air that it would be impossibly expensive, and/or bread would become $20.

That's going to do absolutely nothing. Small UBI is damn near worthless. You need to go toward at least minimum wage's worth per year to see any decent effects.

Whoever figures out how to do full UBI on that level will be heralded as a messiah if they can actually put their plan in place and execute it.

I think that people can accept a universal program, but legislators and the think tanks that govern their policy cannot. The point of Dorsey's funding is to provide high quality data to bolster the policy, and this might have that effect even if, like you say, the payments aren't universal.

So... basically people who lost their jobs to COVID are winners in your mind?

It's not bad, it just misses a lot of the benefit of 'basic' income. For example, my wife had just finished her education and was looking for a job when COVID hit. She's randomly just as hosed as everyone that actually lost an existing job, but qualifies for none of the same relief.

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.

Andrew Yang's Humanity Forward organization is not the nation's government. They don't have the resources to make something universal. That's one of the reasons he ran for president, was so he could do that. The people weren't ready this time, but maybe in 4 years, when he's probably going to run again, they'll be more willing to give him a shot.

But right now he is doing what he can and working with much, much more limited resources, so it only makes sense to target people who are in immediate need because of the crisis.

There are a lot more people than even that 20,000 that are struggling right now (40 million people have lost their job since the start of the pandemic, in the US), but if he divided $5,000,000 by 40 million people, it'd only give each person 12 cents, which doesn't help any single individual enough to make any difference, while simultaneously turning into a much more of a logistical nightmare.

For example he had Sam Harris on his Yang Speaks podcast recently, and Yang said that to a certain extent he sympathizes on how long the stimulus checks are getting out to people because he's been giving money out himself and it's been difficult to pin down current addresses for the people most in need.

So what is it you're expecting him to do with that $5 million instead, that would make it more universal?

I’m not the OP, but I would like to see some UBI studies that are at least permanent (per participant), if not universal.

It’d be a lot more interesting to me to see what happens when 30 people get $1,000/mo for the rest of their lives than what 20,000 people do with an extra $250 once.

You could run a test case in a low income country where 5 million goes a long way. For example, the median per-capita income in India is $600/yr[1]. You could use this money to provide 3,000 people with $300/yr for 5 years.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-income-by...

Give Directly does that. The organization is all about giving money to the extreme poor, and they're outstandingly effective at doing this. At the same time, they structure their giving activities as RCT's at varying levels (formerly household-based, now full villages AIUI) so they're also creating very valuable research output about these issues.

True.. I’d probably rather do $120/yr for 3,000 people for life (as opposed to just five years). Assuming $120 is equivalent to $12,000 in the US, and for life is going to be more interesting than even five years. And at 7% interest you could afford this forever off the $5M endowment.

I think the point is that giving 250 on 20,000 people is a poor way to " build the case for a universal basic income".

It is not a test case for any of the purported advantages for UBI, and actively undermines many of the fundamental principles of UBI.

Hell, the money would be better spent on lobbying.

> That's one of the reasons he ran for president, was so he could do that.

That requires an act of congress. Literally the only thing the president would have to do with it is signing a piece of paper.

Running for president gave the idea a bit of a platform, and just cemented the idea as so far out there that no-one need ever take it seriously.

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