Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
timjrobinson.com
timjrobinson.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259&p=4
I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic.
1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages.
2. Predators - individuals and companies will find a way to take your UBI check from you as fast as possible. We can see this in housing where some governments give poor people vouchers for rent. Those vouchers are targeted by slumlords who find a way to give you as little as possible for them. There will be rampant scams and bad behavior in areas where the UBI makes up a larger portion of total income.
3. Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up. They could spend it all on an addiction or just make a bad investment. Even with UBI they could still end up hungry or homeless. Will we help them? Or will we say "you had your UBI, the rest is on you". This changes the morals of how we treat people in the worst times.
I wish all of the above wasn't true. But I just don't think America can handle UBI and I'm not sure how that's going to change.
One aspect of UBI is that poor people would be less at the mercy of the rich. If you're a poor person now you absolutely have to try to keep your horrible job else you'll lost the ability to pay rent and buy food. You have to take all the crap your employer gives you. With UBI, assuming it's enough to live on, you could walk away from that job and still survive. That shifts a lot of power from employers to employees. It's one of the most appealing aspects.
Already happens, with welfare.
> Predators - individuals and companies will find a way to take your UBI check from you as fast as possible
Already happens, with welfare.
> Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up.
Already happens, with welfare.
Notice a pattern? People who are likely to mess up with their finances / welfare, etc. will likely mess up with UBI. UBI covers a way larger group of people and gives them opportunities and flexibility, I only see that as win.
There are no conditions except for having lived (not worked) in the country for at least 40 years of the 65.
This is basically UBI for elderly and it has been in place since the 1960s.
None of the (theoretical) issues you named have been a problem.
Do some elderly spend all their AOW on a slot machine as soon as it comes in? Sure.
Do some people try to scam elderly because all elderly get AOW? Sure.
But overall the program has resulted in <3% of all elderly living below the poverty line. In other countries without this, such as Germany, you can find older people still having to work well into their 70s to get by.
I think it should be pretty clear today to any scientifically-minded person that addiction is a mental health problem. Here In Germany, the vast majority of homeless people are addicts or people with major mental health problems. You have a small minority hiding from the law, and an even smaller portion of healthy people choosing the lifestyle.
Instead of relying on the charity of wealthy people, good public mental healthcare, public addiction centres and social workers engaged with the homeless community are the ways forward.
The current system results in widespread homelessness, despair and inequality. To say we are going to stick with what we have instead of giving everyone the basics to live a decent life makes no sense. We are sticking with a known flawed system that punishes the poor because a few people may not play by the rules in the new one.
Why would charity drop off, if someone is charitable, now they have more to donate. People are also easier to help because they are starting from a solid base instead of nothing.
As far as being at the mercy of the rich, we are already there. If everyone had an income, they could actually band together if they wanted and use it on projects causes that are important to them instead of just the constant struggle to survive.
Point 2: I'm not convinced that UBI worsens the opportunity for predators, compared to how things stand today. Why would it?
Point 3: I'm not convinced this is likely to be a real problem. Today, different countries have different levels of welfare. I doubt people are less charitable in high-welfare countries (although this is just a guess), and overall, you're certainly better off being down-and-out in a high-welfare country.
2. This is no different than now. Endless scams- advertising, etc all the time to extract peoples money. Regardless of source.
3. Duck ups aren't going away. Under UBI they at least won't be at the mercy of beauracy and changing political will re funding social services. And people who want to volunteer to help them will be free to do so not having to spend a 1\3 or more of their waking life just to survive.
UBI won't fix all problems. But its advantages outweigh.
This seems to be a problem because the vouchers are only redeemable by government-granted monopolies, and thus neither tenant nor landlord are participating an open market. If the tenant could go anywhere else with their money a la UBI nobody would choose those terrible living quarters / they would be priced appropriately.
1. People in the comments below have addressed this. Not really sure how this creates a greater power divide than the current system. Having money allows individuals choices. 2. Again, providing people with money will allow them to have more choices. If housing becomes too expensive in my county, I now have a greater degree of freedom to move and this creates more competition for rental rates. 3. This is one that I feel like most people miss the forest for the tree. You're right, it's going to happen. I just don't think that a portion of bad actors in the system should prevent that massive benefits it can create for the people in society that will spend it in more productive ways. I've heard arguments of how it will create disincentives in society. That people will choose to no longer work. But when I ask the exact same people that pose that question if they would stop working if they had $14,400 provided to them every year, the answer is unequivocally, no. If you're looking for policies that solve all problems, you're not going to find any.
- Give the same amount to everybody* , with no means testing to avoid it become a political football. Bill Gates gets it too. This also removes any dis-incentive to work while also collecting UBI. Otherwise congress with write up a 9000 page law about who gets how much and when, which they then hold everybody hostage to.
- Pay for it with a flat tax on all income from all sources, including capital gains, dividends and carried interest. All the money goes into a separate off-budget pool for immediate monthly distribution. Like SSI, but with no 'investing' in treasuries or anything else. Don't let the politicians get their hands on it. Money comes in and immediately goes out. This makes it self-balancing. As people reduce their work, the pool shrinks, causing some people at the margins to re-enter the workforce. As we become more productive the pool will increase, allowing more people at the margins to reduce work if they want to. The tax rate can be adjusted as necessary as we see how it's working out.
* "Everybody" certainly has nuance to it that has to be defined. Children? Green card holders? Illegal Aliens? Felons? Inmates? Citizens living abroad? This is certainly an important definition, but less important than the overall idea.
There's already a power divide between those who can live off of their assets and those who can't. Those who can't are at the mercy of those with significant assets when it comes to providing themselves with housing, healthcare, food, etc.
> Even with UBI they could still end up hungry or homeless. Will we help them? Or will we say "you had your UBI, the rest is on you". This changes the morals of how we treat people in the worst times.
Look at the standard UBI proposal of $12k a year. That is not even enough to cover health insurance premiums, deductibles and copays for a single person on the individual health insurance market, let alone a family.
If UBI were to replace social programs, people would necessarily have to choose between paying for healthcare, or going without it but being better able to feed and house themselves.
UBI must be a supplemental income on top of programs that address our societal and economic shortcomings.
2. Surely UBI is cash, not vouchers. At which point the particular lower-than-face-value scenario is moot.
3. This is a valid point. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but it does seem likely to entail some morality shake-up.
How is this different than welfare, except that with UBI people are able to get a job without fear of losing benefits?
2. predators
Again, how does UBI makes this problem worse than it already is? I've never heard of _any_ idea which makes this problem disappear.
3. charity
In my opinion this is actually an argument in favor of UBI, rather than against it. Maybe the charity mindset would change, but I don't see it completely going away. On the other hand, many excuses will. We would benefit from a system that gives people a better chance at demonstrating personal responsibility.
In countries with a tradition to have full government care for all citizens, those cases are solved by having the payments managed for you (usually by the city). So you would have weekly smaller payments rather than a monthly payment, and you may even have the city pay your rent for you rather than giving you cash in hand. And if you still mess up and are in a temporary urgent need for money, you can apply for an additional extraordinary amount to cover your critical expenses.
I'm aware that such a "nanny state" is not attractive to a lot of Americans, however this is an approach that solves most of the potential problems and it also relieves other citizens from being concerned about having to give out charities.
When everyone has an extra $1000 do you really think landlords won’t increase rent? The price of food and clothing won’t increase? When literally an entire country is richer by this amount?
UBI does not create more wealth. It does not mean all the people receiving it will put more value into the economy. It just means everyone gets X+$1000 more tokens for the same wealth/goods. Poor people will still be in just as difficult a situation as they will be competing for the same goods against the same people as before.
2. The primary predator are relatives and common thugs usually wrapped up into a gang environment.
3. We cannot always protect people from being stupid. The idea we can is a no win situation. All you can do is try.
America can handle a UBI but the two political parties cannot. To them it will be a means of control and a weapon. Unless #1 is solved, where the government buries people under fees, penalties, and taxes, UBI will only become a transfer of money from the right hand of government to the left hand.
UBI will require rewriting the whole structure of how the government collects money. UBI must include providing all services for individuals for free or heavily discounted.
Suppliers always price their goods as high as they can for the specific values of supply, demand and competition, and none of those things will change. The customers will just have more money to pay for the right to live under a roof.
UBI becomes the single biggest election issue. Politicians promising increases to get elected, and all the bad policy that stems from such motivations. This is then followed by an inevitable pullback at some point in the future, causing immense harm to everyone relying on every cent of their UBI (most people).
If every unscrupulous politician can promise to raise the base UBI rate to get elected, what stops that?
Obviously, inflation will fix it in the relatively short term, but that's not a good result. And there's an unscrupulous politician in power.
The third is a potential issue, but the question is whether it will be an improvement over what happens now; i.e. many don’t get the chance to administer their own funds or even have them administered on their behalf, we just skip straight to “it’s all on you”. A credible UBI would likely require a massive expansion of redistribution, because we spend so little on poverty relief today. True poverty relief would require giving people a lot of money, and that is by definition very expensive.
The fundamental issue I see with UBI in 2020 is that it must ultimately be paid for with massive productivity gains (in the face of many hard structural challenges), with no real evidence of where they will come from.
Elsewhere, neoliberal UBI would definitely cut into these systems.
The solution to this is easy... Low friction bankruptcy. If your UBI is paid daily, and one day you mess up and gamble it all away and get big debts, that should not stop you spending tomorrow's UBI on food.
Today, debts chase people for years or decades, and keep the poor poor. The fix is to let bankruptcy be something you can sign up for online in an hour. Then, if a debt shows up, you simply show them the bankruptcy certificate and walk away. The creditor then has to do all the work of finding any assets you owned at the moment you got the bankruptcy certificate and using them to pay off any debts.
I feel the opposite is more likely to be true.
An scenario of populist leaders capturing UBI individuals and controlling centralized UBI distribution, promising them benefits and at same time menacing them of cuts, and in the meantime dividing the non-UBI crowd with single issues like abortion.
Non-UBI people at the mercy of UBI people is the real danger.
3. I could see part of this as a good outcome. Charity is too many times a fraud. And people would not have any excuse to have their children begging on the streets.
Even taxing the richest households and extra 5% would only give the poorest households an approximate extra $1000 per year. This isn't life changing and isn't even much of a supplement. This is a very non trivial problem to solve. We need a much larger source of money.
This is why it should be a regular and frequent income, rather than giving people a lifetime's worth of money when they turn 18. As it is a regular income that resets every week/month/whatever, it's harder to mess up to that extent. Addiction or unwise Hire Purchase agreements might do it, but with the latter, lenders are likely to be even more aware of affordability than they currently are.
That aside, I would imagine that UBI could make people more charitable towards those who are thoroughly down on their luck. Partly because if someone is destitute under that system, something must be really wrong in their lives.
One problem with poverty at the moment is that it is so big. When problems are really big (see also climate change), people feel that effects of their own efforts would be trivial, and so are dissuaded from doing anything at all. If fewer people would be made destitute by bad decisions made out of desperation, donors might feel they can actually do something about it.
Another problem with poverty now is that there are so many diverse causes that it is much easier to aim relief efforts at the symptoms - e.g. shelters for the homeless, food for the hungry etc. If UBI covers that for most people, then we can put more effort into fixing the causes - abuse/addiction/mental illness/predatory lenders/discrimination etc. Thereby removing the need for charity.
Young men and women are coming out of school without the basic knowledge of how to set basic budgets and balance checkbooks. How to understand interest and how that will effect their payments in the future. Understanding that principal comes out last unless you make extra payments, so that it behooves a person to spend a little less on amenities and pay down the principal now .... things like this don't seem to be offered in basic education. Not to mention basic life skill classes, as well (again, these also weren't offered when I was in school either). School seems to be ONLY college prep but, even then, not very well suited for the skills one needs to transition to living a life there.
Anyway, like I said... Tangential conversation. But, basic home econ would seem to address to a degree, points 2 and 3 if UBI were offered. Though, I will admit, I am a major proponent of "education will set you free".
Another thing happening in US is the unemployment program and the Coronavirus relief program which pays unemployed extra $600/week on top of unemployment. This way they make more money than they used to when they were working. In this case their incentive is to just stay home and not work which is also not right as without essential workers in the service industry we cannot get work done and if we start paying them higher than they get with the extra $600 we won't be able to afford them to be hired full time or temporary basis. For example someone even earning the lowest minimum wage can make $800/week and that is about $42,000 annually so we sort of do have UBI currently happening and worth learning from that.
The problems exist now. How does more income make poor people more at the mercy of wealthier people? How does more income make poor people more susceptible to predators and scams?
UBI helps mitigate these problems, it doesn't create or make them worse. Even charity... I expect some people will increase their donations, because the UBI is free money and they don't necessarily need it.
> 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages.
The world is already divided like this.
A book to read, though older, is Tyranny of Kindness and it expands on the plight in vivid detail of our current system.
The article is an anecdote, but it tells the narrative of how the current setup is pretty difficult for people, particularly single mothers with children. They are already at the mercy of people and find no help for charity. In the article, it even mentions how the family that gets supported moves out of their subsidized apartment. It also mentions how brutal the current system is in terms of cutting off benefits.
It actually puts a lot of power in the hands of government and central banks.
So could you with your salary (assuming that’s how you get money). It stands to reason your employer shouldn’t be trusting you with that money they give you.
The main point is that it makes people dependent of the State if they entirely live on the UBI, which is a pretty poor behavior to encourage - the larger the UBI-reliant population becomes, the more they will extract value from non-UBI reliant people through elections and majority.
If UBI is pasted in without cleaning out the existing cruft then it'll just be another mess on the pile.
However if done correctly, and not as a form of welfare, then it will be a vast improvement (in terms of fairness) with no effect on inflation.
Still, I hear UBI proponents say that you have to allow loan payments, because otherwise it's not fungible basic income. I disagree and think BI doesn't need financial engineering on top.
Once there is more money in the system (that before the UBI just wasnt there) the prices of basic things might rise and at the end the money you get from UBI will be a "new zero".
I am not saying that this will happen but I think this is serious concern.
Re: 2 - Yup, people will have to learn to develop trusted networks and oversight to enforce and prevent, limit that behaviour. That's an organizational related problem.
Re: 3 - UBI on its own vacuum doesn't really work, it's why you also need social services, at least basic health care covered, etc - including rehabilitation programs to funnel people through.
The time will come so even Google-like companies will be taxed to the wazoo
Wow ... a comment about UBI I typed out on my phone now has 600+ replies. I sort of regret posting this since I assume others have much more insightful things to say than I do!
Many great points were made in the replies so I want to be clear about something: I do believe that UBI would be better than what we have now. However I don't think that's the appropriate standard of judgement. To move forward with what would be the biggest government program ever (in terms of cost) we can't only look for marginal improvement. We need to be sure it will be a radical improvement.
Free-market capitalism has mostly failed the lower and middle class of America. UBI gives money to everyone and lets this same market system sort out the rest. I don't have faith in that system to do much besides find new ways to crush those who are currently suffering.
4. Funding - How are you going to fund UBI today? How are you going to fund UBI through a global recession, war or global pandemic? Given the hard choice of continuing to pay UBI or keeping a key economic contributor from collapsing, which will you pick?
What will you do if people generally take the option to not work? In the UK, I believe we now have some fifth generation families that have never worked a day in their lives, and it's not clear how to motivate them to work with the safety net providing enough money for the small number of luxury items they enjoy.
5. Protection - Social wealth-fare systems need to be protected from outside influences. It's not feasible to import all the poor people from across the globe and pay them all a decent living allowance, the economy simply cannot support it. This will in turn have some knock-on effect for immigration policies.
6. Acceptance - When social systems such as the NHS (socialist healthcare) and a form of basic income (for those not working) were introduced in the UK, people were ashamed to use them. Gradually attitudes towards these systems changed, from shame, to general acceptance to expecting. Where people originally begrudgingly took money from the government to see them through hard times, but now consider it as a viable income to replace working. I would imagine the same to be true of UBI. As social attitudes towards UBI relax, I would expect to see unemployment increase.
7. Tax - You're going to fund this through taxes, which will mean increasing taxes on the rich. This will provide a higher incentive for them to avoid paying taxes. The result of implementing UBI could be to drive your 1% away. Also, as with the current tax-brackets (taxes based on incomes), people are dis-incentivized to work towards a promotion as the work-load increase doesn't increase linearly with income after tax.
I think Europe will have to think very hard about some of these questions, I would consider the coronavirus to have provided an unintentional opportunity to observe how such a situation may unfold.
Sadly, this will be important for selling UBI to moderates and conservatives. We have to be prepared for UBI to set us back in a big way when it comes to behaving compassionately towards people who can't solve their own problems. I still see it as a positive idea overall, though. Two steps forward, one step back.
If UBI ever becomes a thing, I hope that also means that people are on their own if they overspend it.
Where I live, if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today, hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?).
This tells me the utopian ideas of replacing the entire complex system with a simple UBI isn't feasible. You'll end up in dreadful ethical choices and moral hazard. This is indeed already happening, but the bureaucracy of it makes abuse less attractive.
If you mean this...
"Instead of continually trying to optimize supply, with diminishing returns, we need to optimize demand by giving consumers more money to spend on things they desire."
...then unfortunately it has a critical flaw: redistribution does not create wealth. If the problem is that growth is stagnating, you can't fix it by redistribution. You can only fix it by increasing wealth creation.
That's not to say that there might not be a decent argument in favor of UBI helping to increase wealth creation, by enabling more people to pursue innovations because they don't have to spend as much time and effort on basic subsistence. Such an argument might be worth discussing. But that is not the argument this article is making.
I'm a strong believer in self-reliance. I think solutions that tackle poverty should have a path to self-reliance in there. Current welfare programs reward continued reliance and punish self-reliance (i.e. government benefits yanked if you try to supplement income too much with self-reliant sources, etc.). The ideal program helps people work their way to a state where they are no longer reliant on the government to survive. UBI locks the poorest into government reliance permanently.
You might say "yeah, UBI will help people be more self-reliant because now it's unconditional and you can supplement however you want". And maybe that's partially true. But I still think without an incentive, indeed a culture shift that values self-reliance, the poorest UBI recipients will still be stuck in rut, because they don't just lack money, but fundamental financial education that middle/upper class receive as intellectual inheritance from their parents. Just like today, it doesn't matter how many government subsidies you get, the poor's standard of living will scale to their income until every penny is gone. Someone needs to teach the poorest how to live below means so you can save, invest, avoid expensive addictions and health problems, etc. and an unconditional check in the mail won't automatically bestow that knowledge.
I predict if UBI becomes a thing it will actually increase the divide between lower and middle classes, because the middle class will use it more effectively (i.e. saving, investments, etc.) while the poor will use it less effectively (as a consequence of lacking financial education).
I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panicking about my business. When I accepted the fate of my business, I chilled out and just hung out with my kids. These past few months were amazing. I loathe finding a new job now. Instead, I’ve built a mechanical keyboard, explored streaming, learned how to cook, read useless books, and learned how to be present.
I see the choice of UBI as: “do I toil away for the wealthy class? Or do I took away for myself?” No way will I toil for someone else if I had a choice.
Whos going to: - clean your hotel/office/home - cook your food - serve your food - fix your household - grab your garbage - build new houses - build/maintain roads - build/maintain water, sewers - deliver your packages/mail - Drive trucks around - pack/unpack trucks - produce meat products (have you seen a meatpacking plant?) - maintain farms/livestock - provide difficult medical services - be a nurse aide (clean poo?)
I have not even started to list all the jobs required in order to "magically" produce our cheap goods from overseas including clothing and electronics. These are farrrr from completely automated.
Lazy Americans don't need to work right? Discussion about UBI is an expression of guilt over how well our standard of living (general hacker news crowd) compared to the vast majority of the world.
I feel like nearly everyone (especially in America) are too caught up in their careers to realize how unhappy and unhealthy they really are.
Say I'm your landlord and you pay me $100/mo for rent. Now you start getting UBI thats $500/mo. Why wouldn't I increase my rent to $200/mo, $300/mo, or even $400/mo? I know that now you can afford the increase. So you'd still have to earn income if you wanted to stay in that place. All I see is prices going up for anything and everything in population centers.
Only option for people who want the benefit of UBI (i.e. freedom to do whatever they want and not worry about working for a living) would be to move in smaller cities/towns where the demand for the housing is already low enough that price hiking wouldn't make sense.
I also feel like UBI would divide the world even more wealth wise. People on UBI wouldn't be able to afford luxury goods or events since thous would be still aimed at the working people and for people to still work they would have to earn significantly more than what they would get on UBI. Putting this in other words: UBI would be the literal bare minimum to keep a roof over your head and food in your fridge. Forget streaming services. Forget eating out. Forget going to movies/concerts/theater.
Easier way is to think UBI as "free meal" tickets and free housing. Which doesn't sound all that appealing.
You might be in the minority of people with mature enough emotional response and ability to deal with stress.
What would happen if you had an existing alcohol/opiate/etc addiction? It seems that UBI provides few precautions from money flowing towards addictions and relies on everybody being at their best behavior and vice sector not expanding to capture that disposable income.
This is a false dichotomy. You don’t toil for the wealthy, you toil for your fellow citizens to whom you provide a service.
Nobody owes you a living.
Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs. Essentially, people below a certain income threshold would receive money which scales to a maximum the closer their income approaches zero.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work. Actually, where I live now I live comfortably on $1200 a month. I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.
Creating is hard work, studying is hard work. Just like having information and online videos/articles/courses at their fingertips do not make people more educated but instead chose to believe what they believe. Having money and time alone do not motivate people to study or create.
UBI will probably benefit most to those who already have inner desire to succeed. But for majority of people, I have my doubts.
That said, I completely disagree with the proposed solution of UBI and here's why. We humans have a rather nasty bug in our firmware: when we do not have to work, we turn tribal. We form cliques and our meaning of life becomes to bite, or at least to bark at the clique on the other side of the fence.
If you want some evidence, look at the correlation between cold climate (forcing people to do serious agriculture) and economic development in many countries. I also suspect that the recent spike of divisiveness and outrage in our society has something to do with people having more free time from lost jobs, and not desperately trying to learn a new marketable skill, because of the COVID-19 support.
Mind you, I'm not saying that COVID relief is bad, but I seriously suspect that the recent unrest is a preview of what the society would turn into if we eliminated the need for people to work.
I wish we could instead figure out a system for taxing scale or subordination levels. So that having a couple of owner-operated grocery stores in every neighborhood would become a viable alternative to centrally managed Walmart with armies of corporate zombies miserable at their jobs. Of course, it would reduce the overall efficiency, but I would happily pay an extra dollar to live in a society where people are putting their energy into producing objects of value and making others happy, than see endless infighting about who deserves that extra chunk off someone else's table more.
Just a quick estimate, assuming that we're talking about the UK here
The UBI pays out to 53,000,000 people (very roughly the number of people 18 and over).
The amount the UBI pays out is £1,000 a month (whether you could really live on this is debateable, but it's certainly not possible in most of London for example).
53,000,000 * £1000 = £53,000,000,000 (£53 billion) monthly cost
53,000,000,000 * 12 (months) = £636,000,000,000 (£636 billion) yearly cost
Bear in mind the entire UK budget for 2018 was £842 billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_Kingdom_budget
Infact, if you break this down to local/national spending, the national government budget for 2018 was £652 billion:
https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2018UKbt_17...
So a UBI would cost pretty much as much as the entire UK national budget (healthcare, education, defence, infrastructure, welfare etc.)
I'm all for increasing taxes, but assuming that you replaced welfare with a UBI, you'd still have a (roughly) £400 billion shortfall - just where does that money come from?
It's affordable at a lesser amount, sure, but at that sort of level, what's the point?
This is before even getting to other arguements (if you want to use it to replace a welfare system, then in my opinion, it's essentially a regressive scheme, because everyone is getting the same payout, regardless of need).
Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis...
They did a followup 5 years later:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis...
It seems like there are too many entrenched players to make this a reality unfortunately.
Given resources, consumers are remarkably efficient at consuming. My neighborhood is alive with home improvement projects, enabled by direct cash payments. The money isn't going idle. These dollars are flowing throughout communities into places that large money cannot reach. The velocity of these dollars is at least an order of degrees faster than sitting in an individual's offshore account. This invigorates production, adaptation, and research in ways a grant or tax discount cannot.
I often hear we live in a consumer-driven economy. If that is the case, its only prudent to empower consumption across the broadest possible base to grow the economy. The more I think about it, the more it seems like excluding people from being able to earn and spend money is actually sacrificing macroeconomic growth in exchange for social control.
- extremely cheap prison labor
- undocumented laborers who have (almost) no legal rights and who take difficult jobs
- ex-cons who have to pay a portion of their wages to employers who are willing to hire them
- jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest paid workers to sign up for SNAP)
That said, even if we can't address these issues, I'm happy to support modernizing the American (federal, state, and county) welfare programs -- including giving recipients the option of taking the cash value.
But I don't understand why people don't believe the UBI will just become the new definition of poverty. People will still be miserable and feel like they have nothing when comparing themselves to those who get UBI and have a job.
The US population has 199M adults[1]. Let's say a decent basic income is $40k. That's 8 Trillion that the government has to find every year.
The US federal tax revenue was of 3.86 Trillion last year[2]. Half of which comes from individual income, and another third from payroll taxes. This is before the effects that UBI will have on the economy.
Maybe my 10 minute research is wrong? It seems like a quite central piece to address in an article promoting UBI.
[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+adults+in+th... [2]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/budget...
Especially amongst poorer communities where extra children are viewed as financial stability. Already with free schooling and meals, there is a mindset that you can raise kids and let the state take care of them to some degree.
But I guess UBI is far more likely to be implemented in places which don't have population problems to begin with.
U1. Simple to administer
U2. Efficient spending since the UBI beneficiary has the most information about what he/she needs
D1. Will inflate cost of everything, including cost of housing and healthcare
D2. Some fraction of beneficiaries will spend it poorly, meaning we might still need a welfare safety net for them (which itself might incentivize spending UBI poorly)
With UBN, there's no need for unemployment insurance, which is a problematic part of the current welfare system because it incentivizes not being employed. Defining the 'basic' level isn't easy, but it should be good enough that each member of congress or parliament wouldn't mind living at that level for a day per year.
I find either of these opposite options better for the future of society than some middle ground of welfare benefits.
If the market price of an apartment is $500, and suddenly everyone gets UBI, the landlord would raise the price as much as he can, say $1000.
People on UBI are in the same relative position as before. They still can’t get the apartment because there’s enough people who have the UBI plus something else and can pay $1000.
Why would the rest of the world finance us (the citizens of the United States) to sit around and watch Netflix all day? Put another way, someone has to buy the debt we are issuing. Today our debt is sold to savers in China, and to other hard working individuals across the world. We have no means of paying back the debt we are issuing, so we are monetizing the debt through a mechanism known as QE, otherwise known as a printing press.
If we are debasing the savings of hard working people, why would they want to continue to lend to us? We could raise interest rates, but with the levels of our national debt, servicing the debt would become impossible. So that isn't an option. If trust is lost in the dollar as a reserve currency, we will become very poor very very fast.
It won't matter if we print more money, or if UBI is 1,000 or 1,000,000 per month. The dollar will have less value.
It's better to focus on improving productivity and making stuff. There can't be consumption without production.
There is no free lunch.
The economic system is the problem.
This would aim at efficient production, and have the side effect of efficient consumption.
1. Better Service - economics keep pushing the service quality bar lower as humans are an expensive way to satisfy customers. We do better with a human bagging your groceries than having you bag your own groceries and pay for an idle human.
2. Experience Ladders - people being interested in their own careers leads to more experienced people. For example, a corner store might hire someone to create a promotion if its cheap enough. The person hired might become good at it.
3. Crazy Startups - with survival being possible, people can start a company at high risk, hiring their friends at a cut rate. If it fails, they can give up and work for their friends.
Is UBI predicated on anything exactly? Can it be employed in Mexico or Cuba or Libya the same effect as it would in Japan or Australia?
Can everyone stop working or would there still be a requirement that some percentage of the population work or is there a premise that some fuzzy unquantified percentage of the population would always chose to work regardless of it being mandated or optional.
Because of the transfer of labor to the developing world, you had stagnation for the lower and middle class in the developed world. You see the same pattern everywhere in the developed world: Japan, Europe, United States, etc... It is only the end of capitalism 1.0 if you look just there.
Automation may eventually destroy jobs but probably more will be in those developing countries. The developed countries have already partly transitioned into service economies (especially anything that is low skilled and can’t be done elsewhere).
Some developed countries seem to have de facto UBI to cope with this stagnation. However some countries have been in a malaise for decades with no real signs of uptick. This would also counter the hypothesis that plain UBI would lead to greater productivity.
I think that there needs to be much greater emphasis on supporting learning and doing (not necessarily in a university setting) to develop the greatest resource (human potential). We just need to keep leveling up.
- Government provided housing
- Government provided meals. This can be in the form of communal kitchens much like British Kitchens [1]. This can then be used to ensure that everyone gets fed, that it is nutritionally sound and that it uses home grown produce. That way, it in effect subsidises farmers which means we can remove farm subsidies at the same time.
- Free public transport. Make all buses and trains free to use for everyone. This will help to reduce reliance upon cars and ensure that everyone can get around, so that it is possible to get to work.
UBI sounds wonderful, but it seems to be more of a subsidy to landlords, and those who are involved in selling. It would potentially provide for everyone but we'll then have the same problem as now where some children are going hungry [2] because there is no way to make sure that they are being fed. Without subsidised public transport, you have to use some of your UBI to get to work before you get your first pay cheque. This is a disincentive, as you are effectively investing up front for a future payout when you can just keep the money and enjoy it now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/15/levels-of-ch...
No, they wouldn't. Any more that they would have to "respect" that the combination of Stalinism and technology lifted Russia out of poverty and post-war destruction. That's because it's quite easy to imagine that Russia could have been electrified without Stalinist terror.
> Free-Market Capitalism has always outperformed top down economic control because those at the top can’t manage all the information about the economy, such as who is best at what, and where the most efficient areas to allocate resources are.
Citation needed. On the surface, this claim would seem completely absurd to anyone familiar with 20th century history. I'm writing this from South Korea, a country that developed "miraculously" under completely top down control of a military dictator working from centralised 5-year plans. One needn't search too hard to find other, similar, examples. It would be interesting to see a single large-scale counter-example that actually existed on planet earth in our timeline.
Edit: maybe I'm just being ornery, but I just couldn't get past the platitudes in the front-matter to the meat of the article which I no doubt would be heartily agreeing with. Hah.
My concerns:
1. Inflation - A UBI would touch into an increased money supply and higher wages which I think could push us towards demand-pull inflation. Possibly completely negating or at least partially negating the money earned through the program.
2. Funds - How would a successful UBI be funded? Would taxes increase? Maybe we just tax captial markets and use those funds? Could this somehow be a new role of the fed?
3. Social Programs - Currently, there are many unemployed making more then those working part-time and at minimum wage full time work. (This having to do specifically with the COVID relief added on top of original amount for unemployment). How would this effect incentive to work? Could it potentially impact GDP growth? (and by no means am I arguing that this is the only metric that matters. I am interested in the long term effects this could have. Obviously, "What are the long term affects of not having a home, to be able to afford education and food?" is the relevant counter question.)
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
― Jean Baudrillard
“You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other. You never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some 'sensation'. It is no longer desire, or even 'taste', or a specific inclination that are at stake, but a generalized curiosity, driven by a vague sense of unease - it is the 'fun morality' or the imperative to enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full one's potential for thrills pleasure or gratification.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
I worry about one specific economic factor - where is this $12K/year for every American adult and $6K/year for every American child going to come from? If you take per capita GDP ($65K), subtract out the government expenditures that aren't going away like the military, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, interest on the debt, running the government, etc. (~$13K), subtract out non-residential fixed investment which is basically business capex to keep their operations running ($9K), that leaves $43K remaining per capita. Now assume 210M adults and 120M children and you need to take ~$10K of that $43K to fund it. So an ADDITIONAL tax of ~23% across the board. Note: I'm not criticizing the theory of UBI, which I think is sound, I'm asking how we fund the specific amounts that often get thrown around.
You could imagine an army of robot consumers who are each allotted some amount of monthly UBI and who are programmed to automatically buy products chosen by certain criteria (or at random).
Then you can combine this with fully automated production and you finally have a fully automated economy where the GDP growth rate is just a line in a config file...
For instance, what would it take to devolve ownership of essential infrastructure for social reproduction (practically: hospitals, farms, housing, schools, etc) at the local level? How could we blend small forms of cooperative ownership into an economy that still has room for entrepreneurship? What's the right amount of state capacity to safeguard against disaster? IMO, these question of ownership were thoroughly excised from US political discourse for a mixture of reasons, some understandable (revulsion to Soviet totalitarianism) and some frustrating (lack of information because the conversation threatens entrenched power).
US political culture has an emphasis on personal liberty that I would never want to lose, but I'd love to see more Americans engage their capacity for invention toward resolving the tensions between individual freedom and collective wellbeing. In my opinion, Gar Alperovitz's work around the concept of a "Pluralist Commonwealth"[1] is a really interesting stab at this problem.
That means if everyone gets $1,000/month, then the rents go up by the same amount, which pushes prices of real estate and thus the mortgages. So after some period of adjustment, the money would be lost again.
I have not found an answer, but my gut says that it has something to do with the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Meaning that UBI should somehow provide shelter, security and food.
It might be easier that it seems. Most nations already have monopoly on violence (police).
Food is more tricky. We already do subsidize farmers, so maybe this could be extended and basic food could be provided by the government (bread and such) or subsidized in full by it.
Shelter is the trickiest. There are some interesting cases across the World where governments have strong regulation around housing. One idea could be that every new development of multi-family housing or condos has to "donate" 10% of them to the municipality. These are then held by the city, that can "rent" it out to people who need them. They can't sell it. This would push the cost of these developments by 10% but it would essentially wipe out homelessness.
There are some ideas that I thought through over the years. As I said, I unfortunately don't have the answers.
- Give the same amount to everybody* , with no means testing to avoid it become a political football. Bill Gates gets it too. This also removes any dis-incentive to work while also collecting UBI. Otherwise congress with write up a 9000 page law about who gets how much and when, which they then hold everybody hostage to.
- Pay for it with a flat tax on all income from all sources, including capital gains, dividends and carried interest. All the money goes into a separate off-budget pool for immediate monthly distribution. Like SSI, but with no 'investing' in treasuries or anything else. Don't let the politicians get their hands on it. Money comes in and immediately goes out. This makes it self-balancing. As people reduce their work, the pool shrinks, causing some people at the margins to re-enter the workforce. As we become more productive the pool will increase, allowing more people at the margins to reduce work if they want to. The tax rate can be adjusted as necessary as we see how it's working out.
* "Everybody" certainly has nuance to it that has to be defined. Children? Green card holders? Illegal Aliens? Felons? Inmates? Citizens living abroad? This is certainly an important definition, but less important than the overall idea.
For example:
If we give everyone $X, where is the money going to come from? Taxes from people making > $X dollars. But, how would those people have utilized that money, if they _weren't_ taxed? Perhaps in ways much better than its utilization for UBI, which leads to a net loss on balance for most.
If we give everyone $X, what is that going to do to low-income work? Say a person, previously could only get a job _making_ $X / month. Their incentive to work is now diminished. We may _think_ that they will will be spend time learning / etc, but this is an ideal, not reality. The person would most likely _choose_ not to work. This would deprive both them and society of the value they would have produced
---
> The first core component of capitalism is the understanding that when everyone performs the work they are best at, then trades with each other, everyone wins.
^ This is not quite true. Capitalism works through evolution: It simply rewards people for doing work that _other people want_, not necessarily work they are best at.
When you look at capitalism through the lens of: this is an opaque, higher-order process that allocates capital through evolution, you end up wanting to change some if it's core components less.
It has pernicious effects of causing 'growth for growth sake' including a vast infrastructure of wasteful spending - e.g. crop subsidies, fuel subsidies etc., millions of bullshit jobs[1] and an overall bias to create and foster consumption based economies.
That model was fine for a time of population expansion and little concern for co-ordination problems (e.g. environmental impacts, labor exploitation). In a time of rapidly slowing population growth (in developed and even many developing countries) and to avoid disruptions due to climate crises, the focus should be to improve the efficiency of the workforce, and direct that workforce to work on the several jobs that desperately need to be done - restore infrastructure, research and deploy efficient and clean technology and remediate (to the extent possible) the environment. If there is still productive capacity left over, it could be spent on reducing tail risk (e.g. viruses)
Is UBI proposed to be given to:
* every citizen of a country that implements it? (then, can I get more than one?)
* every resident of a country that implements it? (right now I have legal residence in three countries, but I know people who have zero.)
* something else?
I support this because it’s fair for all and much harder to game.
I also support this because it would be a net neutral outcome . Basically people would just get their money back.
If you can provide a receipt for accomodation/rent and utilities, you are eligible for the UBI up to the value of your accomodation and utility bills (with limits).
The UBI can subsidise classes of certain foods up to a certain value if you keep the receipts, but can not subsidise confectionary, soft drinks, smokes and alcohol. Only fresh food, milk, etc. with a nationally recognised UBI code on the packaging can be subsidised.
The UBI is not money that you can spend on barista coffee, lego, computers etc. You need a job for that. It’s a tax return for living that’s claimable each month and doesn’t rely on actually paying tax. Processing the UBI creates jobs and encourages people to organise their spending. But in this manner, any reasonably organised person can get off the streets or bootstrap their own business without anxiety about starving.
Social services would help people with low means (ie can’t read or write) to organise their affairs to make use of the UBI. Benefit payments for unemployment and for kids would be suspended. Naturally, taxes would be increased to support the UBI, but most of the cream that you make could be used on “nice” things.
We don't let people get away with transgressions, why do we allow corporations to get away with them? If corporations are to be treated like persons under the law, they ought to be held to the same level of accountability as persons too.
If a person committed minor transgressions against millions of people, they would be held accountable. Why don't we do the same for corporations??
As it stands today, corporations have more rights than people. To change this, it's crucial that we put power back into the hands of people and the best way to do this is by giving people money.
1) Does not solve the issue of 'meaning' and 'purpose'. That is, now that UBI (and automation) has gotten rid of the need to work for a living, what is left? Said another way, why not fall into alcoholism, drub-abuse, and crime? We don't have any good examples of large populations living off the government dole and thriving.
2) UBI isn't actually that much of an improvement over a well-funded welfare state, which leads to #3 ...
3) Does nothing to help developing world. First-world countries don't actually need UBI. They already have deeply funded welfare states. How does UBI help a laborer from a developing world compete when his labor is no longer required? How does UBI help a government of a developing nation build prosperity?
3) UBI is ill-defined. There is tepid acceptance of it on the left, but only with the implicit assumption that it doesn't replace most (or any) current welfare programs. UBI's support on the right almost always comes with the assumption that it will replace much of the welfare state.
You could argue that we already have forms of UBI in practice right now, but the UBI that gets referred to in tech circles with no significant tax structure changes just uses the government to guarantee more wealth accumulation for those already at the top. As the gulf between the workers and the capital class widens, it gets harder and harder for anyone to make the leap, and then we get the societies we see in Sci-Fi (ex. Elysium). It seems so absurd that people are pushing for UBI in a world where the US doesn't even have nationalized healthcare and a reasonable healthcare system. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
I think the right-ish solution in the US can be oversimplified to:
- Reduce ludicrous defense spending in peace time - Increase corporate and top end taxes to what they have been historically - Resurrect unions - Fix job displacement with investment in education and job retraining programs with extra support linked to enrollment
Unfortunately, getting any of these things done requires an insane amount of political know-how, political will, coordination, and effort, and someone to lay out a plan and lead the effort, not even including all the problems with today's hyper-partisan political climate.
Now, people have UBI. Let's say, 1000? Prices now reflect the poorest person with 10+1000 and the richest with 10^1000+1000. Goods and services that targeted the 10 income market are now priced for the 10+1000. Housing goes up, food goes up, everything goes up.
The power of money is relative. Adding money to an economy adds inflation, and adding money até the base of the pyramid inflates crucial goods and services.[1]
So, unfortunately, the solution isn't as simple as UBI.
The problem is that Americans, and most societies in the West in general, have totally lost touch with basic human existence. For example, in New York right now, people are delivering pre-cooked, packaged food in single-use containers to poor people[0]. If you can't provide food for yourself, are we to assume that this is the standard level of living that you are entitled to? I wouldn't be surprised if many people say: "Yes, this is what people who can't provide for themselves need."
My opinion, however, is that sustaining people in this way is completely unsustainable, a form of terrorism on the environment. You can't just give people free endless takeout and say that that is the basic standard of living they need to advance in life. But that is how this is being done right now, because the people who think UBI makes sense, I find, are by and large the same people who consume prepared, plastic-packaged foods all the time. These people, largely, live unsustainable, intensely capitalism-based lifestyles, and think for some reason that it makes sense to bring the rest of the world into their divorced for nature-reality existence.
Giving people a "universal basic income" so they can live the destructive Western capitalist lifestyle is a plague on our species, human culture, and worst of all, on the environment.
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/07/29/free-city-meals-meant-for-need...
Some libertarians advocate land value capture as a consistently
ethical and non-distortionary means to fund the essential operations
of government, the surplus rent being distributed as a type of
guaranteed basic income, traditionally called the citizen's dividend,
to compensate those members of society who by legal title have been
deprived of an equal share of the earth's spatial value and equal
access to natural opportunities. (See geolibertarianism)[1]
Instead of giving everyone $X,000 a month, what if there was some sort of secondary currency or credits that all Americans receive (call them Patriot bucks or whatever) that could be used for necessities like food, public transportation, etc.
I don't think the currency should be used for housing costs, but I could maybe be persuaded otherwise. Ideally though, by having the necessities covered, it would free up income earned through working to cover rent, and thus working would still be encouraged.
This seems like something that's easily doable and doesn't solve poverty completely (there are still other costs like health care), but this would help a lot of people and be a step toward UBI in the future maybe.
We can no doubt think of a million ways to calibrate the process when the need arises. Some ideas (probably not the best but its something):
Require everyone to apply for jobs and create a formal formula for it. Interviews with 1 employee, 1 employer, 1 government employee. 1 application per year seems the minimum. Permanent fines if employer or employee intentionally screws up. (not a real job opening, not showing up for the interview 3 times, etc)
Create a gov agency to repair rental homes cheaply or for free and zero interest mortgages for landlords - then hammer down rents dramatically. Invest in public transport in-to/out-of major (expensive) urban and industrial areas. Build lots of new houses fromwhere people can reach those urban centers.
etc
The OP's argument, to a large extent, would seem to me to hinge on this number, though I'm not sure I can work out the relevant math on my own. (If anyone else can, I would definitely like to see it)
[1] https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/37679
[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/273094/us-adv...
Global Universal Basic Income and Global Carbon Tax.
Global GDP [1] = $142000bn
Human population [2] = 7.8bn
GUBI = $100 * 12 months * 7.8bn = $9360bn
$9360bn / $142000bn = 6.59% of global GDP
6.59% is below the common tax rate. If it could end all wars forever, wouldn't it be worth it?
Can you survive on $100 per month? Barely anywhere so people would still work but it would be a big step towards rebuilding trust among humanity.
We can only avoid violent dystopia if we solve communication and resource distribution problems.
The free money will never do what it’s supposed to do in the long run. It’s better to just give the actual service for free (healthcare, college, transportation).
It's also useful to think about the economy as being divided in two halves: one that keeps people alive by making available basics like food and shelter (the efficient), and the other that is where we pursue our hopes and dreams (the dignified). UBI plays in the first half by making sure people can at least subsist. They may then choose to what degree they participate in the second half.
If you just want a few extra creature comforts, then you can do gig work when you need it. If you dream big, then start prepping to interview at a FAANG while UBI pays the rent on a modest apartment.
Anyway, food for thought.
Money was invented in a time of scarcity and it was a very useful tool then. In some situations it still is today, but for many things we have more than enough for everyone, so maybe those should be provided without the need to go through the money system.
Anyway, I don't know what would work, but it still bothers me that we don't try to constantly improve our systems and if necessary change them in radical ways. We just implement systems that then become controlled by a few people who greatly benefit from it and thus have no incentive to change it.
The core problem regarding UBI is the fact that throwing such amounts of money to economy will create an enormous inflation, which will basically mean we would only improve our well being by margin, since more money won't let us buy more goods.
Furthermore, the ones that will benefit most from UBI are those, who have reached en equilibrium, meaning they will generate even bigger profits without investing more money. As the author states - we need to have more money, so that we could consume more, but in the end, the ones that end up with more money are the top 0.01%.
If these jobs were more highly paid, our brightest minds might be pulled there instead of to companies whose goal is to capture our attention and display ads. And an influx of talent and more workers to these areas would surely improve quality of life, resiliency to future epidemics, literacy, belief in science, etc.
As for universal basic income, someone wrote that the 21st century has been the move from career, to job, to gig, to universal basic income.
How about enforcing an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, and a good minimum wage? That's a start. And make "time theft" by employers a crime.
> If we can give companies overwhelming demand so they have to scale up production instead of spending all their money on advertising, we can have both happy companies making profit hand over fist, and happy consumers who get everything they desire.
> everything they desire.
This seems very bad for the environment? The article seemed to make some interesting points, but I got concerned here. These paragraphs seem awfully gung-ho about runaway hyperconsumption
Wise governments should set policies to help this transition.
Zero users and loving it!
If you cannot implimented a good policy, it doesn't matter how good it is, it's a unicorn.
UBI to all is pure, unadulterated inflation. More money is chasing, the same goods and the same winners will suck that money out of the system. If the money is given to everyone, there will not even be a redistributive effect.
Hell, you might even have fewer goods being produced since there could potentially be less incentive to work. Couple this with a boomer population that's exiting the workforce, and a nightmare could potentially unfold.
So yes be prepared for GDP to skyrocket... because of inflation.
Now if you want to pitch employment guarantee programs and better social services, that's worth a discussion. Otherwise, injecting pieces of paper into the system does nothing for real growth in the economy.
I am not sure even OECD nations have sufficient production capacity for everyone and carrying capacity can solely rely on automation in the near future.
I think a short “draft” (2-3 years) of people into various community and defense activities should be mandatory for all healthy young adults before they are eligible for UBI.
I like the idea of efficient consumption.
I'm sadly not convinced this is the case right now in the U.S. People do stupid things with money, especially 'the house's money'.
For UBI to be a palatable choice to me, it would have to come with a mandatory financial education.
Every person can just go to a special Costco like store and spend x credits a month taking whatever they want. That way we can just make that stuff as efficiently as possible, rather than messing with the whole economy.
we don't a UBI, we need the government to stop dipping their hands in everyone's pockets and free up money.
1) stop taxing social security checks. these people have worked their entire lives and now you're taxing them on money THEY put in. 2) stop taxing disability checks. these people DEPEND on that money cause they can't work. 3) speaking of SS. we need to end it at some point. a good way of doing it would be to automatically put 25% of their SS contribution into a ROTH IRA. 4) you should be allowed to contribute an additional 20% of your salary to a ROTH IRA instead of the 6K it is now. 5) stop taxing people who make less than 40K per year.
these are just some of the ways i can think of to put more money into people's pocket without killing the economy, but that's just me talking out loud. maybe i'm wrong.
What level are we at now? I don't think a ubi should be very much, maybe a dollar a day. Maybe 2. Considering we have all the other social programs for needy people. 5 bucks a day, who knows. The problem is people wanting to start it at some real high number.
Renters need help. My priority would be housing rights. What I want is for the government to stop tiptoeing around and implement real regulation.
Minimum square footage per person. Minimum building standards to guarantee peace at home. Guaranteed rights, as a tenant, to remain in the property until you decide to leave. No more annual renewal fee stress when the estate agent threatens to replace you with someone (plucked from the free market) who will pay 3% more.
Regulation to prevent dense tenant battery farms. No more conversion of three bedroom homes (with two large living spaces) into six bedroom slums for common-licensed tenants. Oftentimes the kitchen is the only common living space and your bedroom has a lock on it. This is a horrible way to live.
It also drives down wages with a race to the bottom for lowest possible housing quality at the maximum possible price.
I’ve lived in — and seen my friends live in — various slums in the US and England over the years. In the very crowded rental markets of major cities and popular towns, tenants are treated like cattle, but without the animal rights.
Alternatively, if the UBI pays for children, that subsidy could help more moms go to work by effectively subsidizing day-care.
Why on earth should be reversing the trend ? Why not just accept zero-growth and organize the society accordingly ?
I'm thinking if tax dollars were shared in the form of education, training and entry level exposure to trade skills, and jobs that may not typically pay above a minimum threshold for poverty but are subsidized to make them comfortable.
The fact that he included an Amazon link to a book that came out over 200 years ago and is available on Project Gutenberg[0] certainly backs up his credentials as a "huge fan of capitalism".
> Strangely, even though we’re in a golden age of hyper-efficient production and trade, the overall GDP growth of the USA is slowing.
We don't have pure capitalism and we certainly don't have free trade, couldn't those be valid reasons why GDP growth has been slowing? Rules, regulations, and laws have only been increasing and corporatism is winning. It's a memory leak. This isn't the result of capitalism, this is the result of businesses colluding with government to create coercive monopolies. Natural monopolies don't exist in this country, they are all spawned out of the nation states' monopoly on force.
I also disagree with the premise that wealth inequality is necessarily bad. If everyone's quality of life is increasing over time, that seems good for everyone, right? It's a terrible metric to base economic policies on.
Having said all that, I'm a reasonable person. If we replaced the current welfare programs with UBI, I'd be excited to see that experiment play out. I think eventually the cost of basics (in particular rentals) will increase to meet the new income floor, and people will inevitably say "UBI doesn't meet basic needs anymore, we must increase it." Haven't we heard this before? We read about it all the time with minimum wages. After reading the arguments for it (which seem bountiful and raises red flags for me), I'm ultimately skeptical, but I'd be willing to give it a shot and I think it is better than the systems we have in place today.
Things that are too good to be true usually are.
And more importantly how do you promote equal opportunity to the kids? Still have to make sure that somehow kids from poor cities/districts get proper education.
I think universal income would be a positive thing but based on this explanation of why we need it I’m now not so sure
So what, say everyone over 18 gets 2k month * 12 = 24k per year. There’s roughly 250 million such people in the US.
Who do we tax to make that happen? Or do we just add it to the debt.
Now suppose you have UBI, it means some (formerly) poor people receive some money, in exchange of no work from their part, to spend on things they "desire" ("need" would be better here): so you end up having fake prices on those things, precisely what you wanted to avoid. And who can benefit from UBI? Could some not really poor people apply to it, even with a complex sequences of numerous...?
The only way is to have complete globalisation of finance while keeping localism for (most of) production and political decisions. Transitioning to that model won't be fun.
What if I don't want to pay the UBI tax? Are you going to send the government in unmarked mini vans to kidnap me or kneel on my kneck?
This Capitalism 2.0 would also need to be a system of things that enables a new direction - whatever that may be - based on the fragile regression to the mean of what an expected aggregated view of that looks like.
UBI can or cannot be part of that system, but by itself it can quickly become irrelevant.
Most economic theories of capitalism are based on (mostly) rational behaviors of the majority of market participants. Social studies will show that in topics related to finances/money, behaviors are all over the place.
Want to drive towards Capitalism 2.0? Start with financial education, support systems, relevant incentives (maybe UBI is one of them) and a good shared vision of what that 2.0 is.
> If we can give companies overwhelming demand so they have to scale up production instead of spending all their money on advertising, we can have both happy companies making profit hand over fist, and happy consumers who get everything they desire.
lol... Consumers won't be able to buy "everything they desire" with UBI. And the UBI will be funded with the taxes payed by the companies, so not all of them will actually make more profit.
> The second solution is some sort of socialism, ...
And UBI is not "some sort of socialism"? O_o
The article starts with a fallacy.. It should be: only technology has improved our lives, not capitalism. And there are still insane amounts of people suffering and living in poverty because they do not have access to even the most basic resources, let alone the latest technology.
In fact "the combination of capitalism and technology" has opened the door to horrific new ways to suppress and exterminate people.
UBI incorrectly assumes its capital that has kept people from producing, when it's skills. And then you're assured people will use UBI to acquire skills, but capital isn't what's preventing people from acquiring skills either.
UBI is, at its core, taking money from people producing and giving it to those who aren't. And that's not a recipe for economic growth.
There's certainly a place for public assistance, but UBI looks an awful lot like putting lipstick on the pig of wealth redistribution.
Airdropping money will not transform this world into a utopia where everyone is wealthy and can live without working. At the end of the day, we need plumbers, electricians, garbage men, software engineers, nurses, lawyers, etc. to maintain this civilization and this will not be changed from the top-down by inflating the money supply.
And this is not personal against the author a brilliant blog post (but note it's a blog).
TIL from this article that physical widgets pre-date digital ones.
I really don't have to. The best tools in software are free and open source, and if I contrast that with the tools which aren't it's really obvious that there are externalities from competition i.e. anti-cooperation. You also need an explanation for progress in communist countries besides "they would have been better off with capitalism." Maybe, but the premise is that capitalism is the reason for "comfort only kings enjoyed just a few centuries ago"...or one century ago in Russia. Research, engineering and trade are some of the real reasons for rapid growth.
A big problem with UBI is that it gives up on dealing with concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few ceos, often for no benefit to anyone else. This is especially true of the version of UBI with a funding model like Andrew Yang proposes. I think a better path forward for "capitalism 2.0" is to require companies give much more stock equity to employees - all employees, including low wage and contractor. An extreme option would be to force every company to reform as a coop. And neither of these are mutually exclusive with UBI.
Kind of like in sports, you need to reset the seasons once in a while. Otherwise last year's winner starts with too much of an advantage and the competition degenerates.
Now maybe you have to reset this throughout someone's lifetime, or maybe only at their death on inheritance I'm not sure. Like maybe you tax people for how long they've had their money for. If you've been sitting on that billion for X year, then you get taxed Y times X amount on it where X is the number of years you've had it. This would include asset holdings.
And maybe this tax goes to pay UBI.
What I like about this is, it retains the capitalist idea of having the right to enjoy your profits. If you've earned yourself the best of steaks, you are allowed to eat it. But you can't just get out of the game and continue to earn. If you are so self made, you should be able to make it again next season, starting from the same footing as everyone else.
I think it would require getting the right weights and equation in place. Like obviously you want to allow for retirement. And you don't necessarily want to reset things too often, people should be allowed longer period to acquire momentum and succeed. And maybe you want something more complex than just a multiplier of years. And the reset over one's life doesn't need to be to zero, same for the inheritance, though I'd imagine the inheritance one honestly could get close to zero.
Thoughts? This isn't something I'm clamoring for, still thinking about it, but I found the idea interesting. If you acrue a billion dollars, good for you, but why should your children get to start with that money? Unlike you, they didn't provide value to society. Why can't others have an equal footing with them? And even you, do you just get to sit on the company you setup for the rest of your life just taking money from it? Seems ridiculous, the amount of risk taking and effort being put year over year no longer corresponds with the reward. Why not let someone else a chance to shine, prove yourself that you're still this valuable ten year after?
Instead of everyone being born with nothing (except that provided by their parents), everyone would 'own' a share of the national wealth. This share would provide a UBI, and eventually transition into a retirement fund. The bulk of the capital in the share would be in safe income bearing assets (interest rates will need to go back to ~5% for this), but a potion could be allowed for spending at the discretion of the individual, to cover large purchases such as deposit on a house, or a car. You would be able to pay into your stake if you wanted a better retirement or to save for something.
This would be financed through a sovereign wealth fund, constructed from taxes on natural resource extraction (e.g. Norway), but also heavily progressive wealth taxes (perhaps increasing up to as much as 20% each year on personal wealth above 5MM USD). Such a wealth tax acts to counterbalance the natural accumulation effect of capitalism, i.e. the rich getting richer only because they are rich.
People will see it not as a handout, but as a way of participating in the capitalist economy. If the economy does well, then the stakes will increase. There would be a sense of ownership and (hopefully) a stronger feeling of social responsibility flowing from that connection.
However a UBI/UBS should only come after universal benefits in kind: Healthcare, public transport, professional policing, transparent and democratically accountable governance, education according to ability not ability to pay, high quality housing stock, consumer protection standards, environmental protection standards...
Where does that "some wealth" come from?!? More magic beans please!
Here's a "hot new idea that no capitalist has ever thought of" (it's phrased a bit provocative but I honestly think it's a good point): Wealth can be a bad thing if it's not shared. If I have a higher living standard in one country (or society, group, whatever) then my freedom to move to another country decreases because I wouldn't want my living standard to decrease. Differences in wealth make barriers which also disbenefit the wealth-bearer. In extreme cases, a difference in wealth can also lead to envy, hatred and, sometimes, escalation from the non-wealth-bearer side (as the article points out).
>is some sort of socialism, where the government introduces new laws and systems to redirect money to attempt to balance the system manually
"The government doing things" is not socialism. Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned (usually by the people who operate the means of production). What the author is talking about here is "welfare statism" [1], and IMO UBI is just welfare statism taken to an extreme.
That being said, I'd definitely agree that UBI (under a capitalist state) is a way to keep capitalism ticking along.
No form of universal basic income can free us from capitalist exploitation, since only wage labor in the service of profit can generate the wealth that is distributed in the form of a UBI.
The less our lives are exploited for the sake of profit—i.e., the more we devote our lives to the public goods of the welfare state or to non-profit projects supported by a UBI—the less wealth there is to finance the welfare state and the universal basic income. This practical contradiction in the redistribution of wealth is unavoidable under capitalism, since the measure of value is socially necessary labor time rather than socially available free time. The more we emancipate ourselves from the exploitation of living labor time, the less wealth we have to support our state of freedom.
Excerpts from "Hägglund, Martin. This Life"
Thus if you give people UBI, you rob them of the most basic motivation to get out there and improve themselves. I am sure if I had UBI when I was young I would've stayed at my parents', smoking weed, jerking off and playing computer games all they. The fact that I couldn't afford these things made me go out, get a job and educate myself towards making something out of my life.
So, am I wrong? I hope so. I really want UBI to succeed, it seems like such a wonderful idea. But so did communism and we know how that turned out...
I reject this premise, because it is not true. Extreme poverty is a different topic (and also defined at below $2 a day), but overall, poverty is not decreasing, it's just leveling out.[1]
In a way this is what the neoliberal vision of UBI does, so I guess that's pertinent to the thread even.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...
On the other hand more countries learn to make things more efficiently, instead of relying on the industrial monopoly of a few efficient factory-countries like China, Japan or the US (with which they might even have competing interests).
More efficient product != more efficient society using said product.
It is a share of the nation's wealth, which you receive as a legitimate co-owner of that nation. The only difference with a company stock is that you cannot sell it, citizenship is unalterable. This safeguard prevents a lot of extortion schemes.
And when discussing the amount of dividend to grant (a political discussion which must be repeated regularly), the tradeoffs are the same as for a company: you want as much dividend as possible, as long as it's not detrimental to the nation's future wealth.
Many opponents to such schemes wrongly perceive it as communist, it's important to present it in a way that debunks that misconception.
UBI may still be a part of the solution, but applying UBI with the current system will be capitalism 2.0, and therefore won't fix anything long-term. It'll simply be a band-aid.
This argument is incredibly flawed. Who will fund the UBI? The poorest 78% can't, so it will be the wealthiest companies. But for every $1 dollar they spend on UBI, they can only get back less. (Taxes, payment & postage fees, cost of production, cost of ads, etc.) Then they are better off simply giving away their products for free.
UBI may have interesting upsides - this is not one of them.
EDIT: replace "TL;DR" with "Summary"
Everybody gets equal UBI in the game Monopoly, and that never works out well.
I think there are more options for Capitalism 2.0 that can be explored: - Make healthcare fully free for everyone (e.g. including dental, eyes, etc.) - Make university education and evening courses free for everyone - Disclose compensation company-wide: This would likely also fix the gender salary gap, since women could compare their compensation to "that d00d that does nothing all day".
You better do as the government tells you, or you're not getting your UBI payment this month.
This can easily be abused.
Except capitalism had nothing to do with it. Technology, sure. But capitalism has only hampered this lifting out of poverty, not helped.
And yes yes, i cant wait for people to go "but what about USSR????", and i fully admit, dictatorships also don't work.
Why hasn’t any coalition of companies or rich people created a utopia with UBI? They could easily buy up tens of thousands of acres of property and do all of this fantastic stuff... but they don’t. Why? Because they are the ones who produce. Socialism is about taking from those who produce and giving it to those who don’t. The only way to keep that going long-term is by force.
Use some common sense.
Don’t say nobody warned you.
We're in the midst of an ecological catastrophe, where our very existence as a species is at risk. We're driving towards a cliff edge and the discussion here largely focuses on a strategy to get more fuel in the car. We need to change our fuel, rethink our metrics of progress and change our course.
There is no fair way, as far as I can tell, to implement a non-capitalistic program within a capitalistic economy. What the UBI concept might do, rather, is sway the debate towards exploring alternatives to capitalism, instead of reform.
Changing the UBI will make people less/more inclined to do bullshit jobs, changing the wealth cap will make people less/more inclined to "make a killing". People with more wealth than the wealth cap should be deemed an undemocratic force in society (they go lobby --use money instead of public opinion-- for their interests), and hence should be deemed undesireables.
I see people here saying $1k or even $2k a month. How should you calculate that amount and why? Will it be adjusted year to year? How so?
One practical problem right _now_, some conservatives are going bonkers that we're basically paying some part of workforce to NOT work as they're making more now not working. Pretty sure you're not going to convince them to vote for UBI.
I have some better ideas to increase GDP, using the author's chain of reasoning.
1. Use the military to break every window in every major city. This will force consumers to pay money to window manufacturers, thus increasing GDP!
2. Rob every poor person at gunpoint, and distribute all of the money to someone interested in funding a giant hole digging expedition. It will increase the GDP!
3. Threaten every rich person with the following ultimatum: "give me 50% of your money, or I will kidnap you from your family and lock you in a small cell for several years". Distribute the money to the poor, who will consume more goods, thus increasing GDP! <-- This is just a restatement of the author's position, since rich people who refuse to pay for a re-distributive tax are literally sent to prison.
In all cases (i) the economic fallacy is equating an "increase in GDP" with an "increase in wealth" and (ii) the moral fallacy is assuming it would be justified to take people's money from them without their consent.
In the long-run, it is the supply-side that increases societal wealth (not the "demand-side"), since long-run wealth is generated by entrepreneurs and investors who take risks to coordinate economic activity and invent new technologies. New technology, especially, is created by investors & entrepreneurs on the supply-side. So even if it weren't immoral, redistributing wealth from suppliers of capital and technologists to consumers doesn't actually create any new wealth. It is instead literally the consumption of wealth made by the suppliers of it!
The moral case against redistribution is the following argument: (i) it would be wrong for me or my gang to personally rob you of your money, even if I/we had noble plans for how to spend it; (ii) there are no morally relevant differences between individuals doing this and the state doing this, therefore, (iii) forceful redistribution of property is wrong. The details (and nuance) of this argument are supplied in Michael Huemer's "The Problem of Poltical Authority", which I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examinati...
I'm incredulous that an article which states, "Even if you're still doubtful you can see it's the least worst [sic] solution we have to make capitalism work in the 21st century." is getting this many upvotes. HN has a reputation as an evidence-valuing rational community that appreciates articulate arguments. I guess that these principles do not apply when we are talking about UBI (or when accusing Apple of business practices they do not engage in, apparently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23995750)
It's obvious that the author doesn't have more than an introductory macroeconomics course under his belt. The article reads like something an idealistic first-year undergraduate might try to pass off. It is full of cliches and incredibly bold statements with no citations used to prop up a flimsy argument.
For example:
"[The increasing size of markets] is why wealth inequality soared when capitalism went global in the 20th century." The increasing size of markets may be a factor in inequality, but it is certainly not the only one. Also, a graph would be nice. Inequality was higher in the late 19th century and took a dip in the early-to-mid 19th century. Without seeing this data, it is foolish to make sure a sweeping generalization.
"If we can give companies overwhelming demand so they have to scale up production instead of spending all their money on advertising, we can have both happy companies making profit hand over fist, and happy consumers who get everything they desire." First, the phrases "Happy companies", "profit hand over fist", "happy customers", "everything they desire" sound like they were written by a 12-year-old. Second, money is an abstraction used to allocate goods from production to consumption. When production does not match consumption, this causes either excess inventory or shortages - neither of which are desirable, but both of which tend to resolve themselves quickly. One of the often-stated goals of UBI is to free workers from unfulfilling labor. However, labor is an essential factor in production, and by "freeing" labor, we will reduce production. Since consumption is equal to production, workers will not be able to magically "get everything they desire." In fact, they might get less.
Are you really that socialistic drunk not to see that in current reality people just jump into drugs world with passive people happy to be on a basic income.
wut? "most" of the world? does he mean most of the usa? statistically, most of the world lives in poverty.
Furthermore, I find it interesting how a lot of the UBI studies concerned substantially lower amounts than the amounts currently discussed in American politics. I hear amounts usually ranging from Yang's US$1000 as a "starting point" to $2000 monthly, but there are many people throwing even higher numbers out there.
There's also a decent amount of straight up lies, mistruths, and misrepresentations of UBI and previous experiments. Articles about Mincome, the Canadian experiment, like to say or imply that it paid out a substantial amount (I've seen several people claiming that it was $16,000 of today's CAD a year for a single individual), but the reality is that it was far lower. From a paper about Mincome, the calculation for how much Mincome you got was 60% of Canada's low income cutoff [0], which was $3386 in 1975 CAD for a single person living alone and $4907 in 1975 CAD for a family of two. The official Bank of Canada CAD CPI inflation calculator puts that at 16130 of today's CAD (12092 USD) and 23375 of today's CAD (17523 USD). I suspect this is where the erroneous $16k figure comes from. Doing the correct calculation, using the Canadian CPI inflation calculator and multiplying by 0.6 would give 7255 USD per year for a single person and $10513 USD per year for a family of 2.
That, of course, completely changes the game. Nobody's going to retire on $600 a month in America, or $875/mo for 2 people. But take the lowest of the UBI proposals of 1k/person/mo - aka give a young couple 24 grand a year, guaranteed by the federal government in perpetuity - and I could definitely see them dropping out of the workforce. I just took a look and found plenty of entire houses for rent in the Midwest for $800/mo or even less. That leaves 1200 a month for food, transportation, and entertainment in a low COL state. You could totally make that work (ha ha.)
You increase that UBI even further, to what some congresspeople proposed recently of $2000/mo, and that young couple is now making $48,000.00 a year sitting on their couch. Assuming that's tax free, as most UBI proposals are, now your average couple is now making more than the median US household income. Now, you don't even have to live in flyover country; that's enough to live on for two people in nearly all of the country, minus a few cities. Keep in mind that the costs of working also evaporate when you don't work: commute, time to cook and find deals, flexibility in booking things etc. In the median household, everyone could quit their jobs and enjoy an _increased_ standard of living.
People like to dismiss the UBI attack of "people won't work" by citing Mincome and a slew of other experiments from the Alaskan Permanent Fund of $1200/yr to Iran's $40/mo. But giving $1000 - $2000 a month, permanently, over an entire society? The $24-48k/yr that a couple would receive would blow away the $10k that they would have gotten in Mincome.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170126003728/http://public.eco...
[1] https://books.google.ca/books?id=L4lBLrMaNkIC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA...
[2] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculat...
All these things are terrible for capitalism, because it would increase expenses...
Capitalism 2.0 is just shedding any pretense toward any common good coming out of it, and accepting being ruled by concentrated capital protected by the state, with little to no social mobility.
In modern capitalism, a humans worth to society is determined by their ability to consume, not create.
I fully agree with the idea that currently our economy is constrained by demand, because people do not earn enough. I don't believe we can fix this by using an UBI, which would create an even worse power dynamic between rich and poor as well as working and non-working people, but by increasing labours share in generated profit.
See wage share: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wage_share
We need to put more money in peoples hands, instead of shareholders and stock markets. And we need to use money to lift people from poverty, instead of using it generate real estate bubbles.
Send me a message if you have an idea how to do that ;)
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/i04tc1...
UBI is for the last nail in the coffin that justifies our current economic system. It just prolongs the eventual discussion about real changes.
I am not close to understand the current economy. As I see it, the thing that somehow works is FOSS and the path it took to succeed. People believe in free distribution and usage. People devoting their time to produce software for the community and participation in such projects.
Economy experts will always try to convince us that capitalism and the growth problem can be solved, but this only under the assumption that we continue exploiting and wasting resources, both natural and human.
Over last the couple of month I have been reading statements to be not that much productive. The argument is, that if we automate too much, how can the system live on?
By handing out income via UBI? All the unclear points have already been pointed out here and it does not solve my initial statement and that is that we are producing too much and development and with it production cycles are too short. New devices, new products just come with minor changes and those maybe because of the short development time with a shorter lifetime and more problems.
We are used to a certain way of living. It is time to overthink our lifestyle and then start a real discussion on how to solve our problems.
Can anyone explain how to find the end of capitalism? Is there a finishing line or is there just a theme which suggest I am getting close?
Anyone, currently can participate in"capitalism 1.0" by buying the stock market.
Most people prefer to watch sports, buy big TVs and not start saving.
Giving those people money will enable entitled feelings, and create perverse, non productive incentives.
Is he saying that wealth was better distributed in prior centuries ? Is he discarding the huge social progress in the 20th ?
> The third solution is a Universal Basic Income, where countries distribute some wealth to all residents equally.
Who's paying ? "The countries" ? Charming way to say "the middle class".
That said, I prefer capitalism.
Introducing UBI properly is basically just simplifying the status quo and has useful side effects in the form of it being overall cheaper, simpler, more effective, and fairer.
More importantly, it can act as an economic stimulus as well. Yes, there's a cost but it's not different than any other economic stimulus. The current corona crisis is basically a good example of governments printing a little extra cash to help out businesses and people. We're talking trillions here. Economies are not closed/circular systems and increasing the supply of money is routine. The role of central banks is to control the rate at which we print new money to keep inflation in line with economic growth. So people waiving the cost argument without considering the benefits are being disingenuous. Bailing out a bank is no different than bailing out an unemployed person. If we can do one, we can do the other. And we routinely bail out banks and other industries to the extend of trillions.
From an economics point of view, more people with disposable income is actually great because it increases spending. It's a particularly effective form of economic stimulus. Perhaps more effective than bailing out a few wealthy individuals could ever be. The current model of all the wealth accumulating with a small group of people is actually bad because while they spend some of it, a lot of the wealth just disappears abroad via off shore accounts, spending in other nations economies, travel, etc. Increasing incomes at the bottom by a few percent on the other hand basically feeds almost entirely in the local economy. People spend it and they mostly spend it locally benefiting local businesses. You could argue that our current system of sucking the lower classes dry so we can provide tax benefits to the rich is actually killing our economy and is actively harmful. This form of reverse robin hood style handouts is not new either. It's basically how feudalism used to work. Capitalism is reverting to feudalism.
The argument of stimulating the economy also can be used to motivate raising minimum wages; which of course become redundant with a UBI. This is another advantage because it reduces the cost and risk of employing people for employers. They can pay market prices instead of having to overpay a minimum wage for someone that they have to commit to keeping employed long term. It's a big reason why outsourcing to low wage countries is popular. So, UBI can potentially fix this too.
But again, we already have it. All we're talking about here is how to do it better and get more economic effects out of it.
You could tax the $1000 back away from me, but that doesn't stop the price from rising. It actually just boosts my incentive to take every last cent of the $1000 that I can extract.
I think you all need to think more about the economics. You have to be willing, on rational grounds, to step away from free markets in some other way in order to make this viable.
"...imagine how easy it would be for such a government that was also providing a basic income to its citizens to manipulate their citizens based on that basic income that they depended on. If they can deny citizens access to things like public transportation based on their ‘citizen score’, they can also deny those citizens (part of) their basic income depending on how ‘good’ their behavior is. So if you were too critical and thinking too independently, you could very easily be denied your basic income, and this could be a serious problem especially if you were brought up to be dependent on the government and to (heavily) rely on the income they provided."
More: https://blog.kareldonk.com/an-example-of-the-dangers-of-a-go...
Everybody should pick garbage on 'rotational' basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus
And UBI should lead everybody to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualizationBut who exactly will do the farm work? There are things we may never be able to automate, like picking green chili peppers. You may say,'Well those jobs will higher salaries,' but then the end product has a higher cost. I feel like you end up in the Animal Farm situation where, when you begging to stretch out all the cascading changes, someone will always find a way to either game that system, or just work insanely hard within that system, and end up on top.
This also doesn't address people with extreme wealth (Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg) who don't really care about the money, but only the insane power it wields them. Their wealth can't be pure luck. How much was merit? Is the merit worth the power they've acquired?
What about undocumented workers? Do non-residents of a nation get UBI? Do we create a new lower class, similar to the ones who rose up in Libya (a nation that now has a slave trade due to US bombings). Prior to the bombings, their citizens had dividends paid from oil wealth (similar to Alaska), and the government subsidized power, houses and education.
You will always end up with a group without UBI, unless you find a way to apply it to the planet. Otherwise your peripheral nations, and workers within your own nation, will rise up, and history repeats itself.
For this reason, I think that any sort of UBI will likely be woefully inadequate and may even be intentionally devalued over time, especially if it's used as a reason to dismantle welfare services.
Does it bother anyone that many of these places where the production is 'efficient,' are often not bastions of democracy? One of the biggest players is obviously the Chinese Communist Party, which literally has reeducation (and possibly forced labour) camps for certain ethnic/cultural groups.
Read the finnish experiment. All that happened is that people relxed and chilled on other's people money. They had no incentive to be productive so they weren't.
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/nordic-welfare-news/heikki-h...
This UBI movement is another form of mass hysteria which if passed will hurt the US and our economy.
no, we fucking don't.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to "fix" capitalism. Our current problem is that the 1% are taking too much of the pie for themselves. This has led to increased corporatization, reduction in competition as companies merge and there's less players in any particular field, this results in the white-collar service class being beholden to their corporations, making it unable for them to save enough money to spin off and start their own small and medium sized businesses which would create more jobs for people lower on the economic rungs of society. In effect capitalism is working a little too well/efficiently as the owners of capital are using their entrenched power to squeeze more production/efficiency out of employees, which forces employees to stay employees instead of business owners.
This problem can be fixed by tweaking the tax code and some other small changes at the federal level. You don't need to effectively reboot the system to make capitalism work again for the 99%.