Basically, increased labor costs drives up cost of goods (inflation), which offsets the benefit of the UBI in the first place.
If my garbage bill goes up by another $5 each month, I'm way ahead with the UBI check.
Unless you can find 399 other things in daily life where wage increases will wipe out the UBI.
Of course a universal income will alter markets. Jobs that suck will have to pay more. That's a feature, not a bug. The alternative is that we enjoy low prices on ditches dug, because those doing the digging are desperate for the work. I'd rather live in a society that doesn't fight to preserve that dynamic.
I think there will be quite a many if you look closely. Garbage Man is literally a placeholder for bad-jobs-that-pay-less.
In fact something as important as teaching could come into this.
In a UBI economy the economic pressure to get self driving trucks would be an order of magnitude greater, creating financial incentives for Google et al to pour more money into AI research to achieve it because the market value is so much greater when truckers are demanding much higher pay to justify the labor when they have a choice in it.
The same would apply to an automated garbage truck that can use CV to scan refuse and collect it via a standardized bucket system rather than having two impoverished desperate humans cling to the back of the truck being paid dirt to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.
UBI would probably be the most beneficial policy to spur the R&D that gets us to singularity the fastest.
At present we have a situation where there are probably many very non-sucky jobs that could be done, but it’s not commercially viable to employ people for them at minimum wage.
Maybe some of the existing sucky customer service type jobs are only as bad as they are because companies are forced to extract $x/hour. e.g. if McDonalds could maybe they’d hire more people at a lower rate and make the job less stressful, resulting in happier employees and customers. As things are McDonalds must extract $x/hour or they will not be profitable, this ensures it’s a terrible place to work, and usually understaffed.
Don't buy the "companies will start treating you humanely if only they could pay you less". Corporations, particularly publicly traded ones, are in competition for profit. In most sectors exploiting your employees to the fullest presents a positive return on quarterlies no matter how much or little you pay them. Maximizing return on dollars committed is fundamental to growing revenues.
UBI helps improve worker condition by making the negotiation between labor and capital more equitable. So long as one person comes to the table for their needs and the other comes for their ones the former is always disadvantaged and ripe for exploitation.
poverty is like having a gun to your head. you do what you’ve gotta do.
if salaries for essential, dirty jobs must go up, i am all for it.
Because you need food and shelter to survive. There's been no point in time where we didn't have to acquire it. We're just now getting to the point where the production of it requires nominal effort.
These are unprecedented times.
the escape from suffering is wisdom and compassion.
in this new abundance, why not remove all the guns from all the heads?
Do the math: 300M people, $2k/mo, 12mo/yr is 7.2 trillion dollars. Even to first order that is unaffordable, and that’s without factoring in that UBI would decimate the tax base that’s supposed to support it, or the consumer price inflation that would result in that $2k not going as far as you’d expect.
We've never lived in a time where the majority could exist in the non-working class. Having the majority be in the non-working class raises certain issues. Like, who is going to be in the minority.
I'm not worried about what happens at 100% automation. I'm more worried about what happens when there are too few jobs to reasonably distribute among the people. There's an icky issue of essentially slavery we're going to have to confront.
Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.
nature is what we are. life is a beautiful struggle of a dance when we exist within that flow.
The world's mean income is about $18000 adjusted for purchasing power parity so it's not a complete stretch to get to $2000 per month for the whole world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040
The USA has a mean income of about $72,000 so in theory UBI could be $6000/mo without bankrupting the country.
It would be very interesting to see what kind of crazy spending-led boom you could achieve by redistributing wealth exactly evenly across every American citizen.
so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.
So do you increase UBI to counter this? Or do you let it be, and UBI no longer pays enough to maintain the same level of living standard. In which case, people are now once again, forced economically, to work "dirty jobs" despite not wanting it.
Perhaps partially. But you have no evidence to support your implicit assertion that it happens totally, or that your argument defeats UBI on the merits
let me put it this way:
if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. if that’s the cost to pay for a more equitable society, why not leave the keyboard for a day and perform that noble and necessary duty. i’m sure i’m not the only person on HN who feels this way.
the world isn’t all bad. it’s getting better. but it only gets better insofar as we ourselves become better. it is this striving towards higher harmony that propels us forward.
No you won't
Even if you _would_ do as you have proposed above, most people won't. A labour shortage is still likely the result, esp. if said labour is not high paying, but the doing of which is still relatively important to a functioning society.
I'm not against UBI - i would want it, even if it means a higher tax! But i just don't see how it is implementable atm, and also whether there are any negative consequences.
The unemployment benefits that have been paid out in the USA so far has many talking about how it is a disincentive to go back to work - because they are paid more than their original job. I can't see how this won't be the same under a UBI system - so the only way for a worker to _do_ work they wouldn't ordinarily do is to pay more!
Isn't this the same argument that's used to argue against increasing the minimum wage? "if you increased the minimum wage, then the costs will go up for those businesses hiring minimum wage workers, making the goods more expensive for those workers, and canceling everything out!". But empirical evidence has shown this has not been the case[1]. Because of this, I'm wary of any hand-wavy arguments like these that just mention some effects without attempting to quantify the magnitude of those effects.
[1] random result: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CBO_Projected_Effect...
My country (NZ) pays most families a weekly amount based on how many kids they have and their household income (Technically it is a tax break and so only applies to people who earn money, but for most people it might as well be a payment).
Some have claimed this has suppressed wages and is a subsidy to businesses from the government. Minimum wage rises counteracts this. I am not sure if this theory can be proven.
Regardless I would expect a wage/price spiral causing inflation initially:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price/wage_spiral
https://www.ird.govt.nz/topics/working-for-families/can-i-ge...
I’m exaggerating a bit, but still...
At least in New Zealand, those who can claim a benefit from the Government end up in a welfare trap, because we reduce welfare payments as you regain an income. There's no immediate financial benefit to you, the welfare recipient, in working 10-20 hours vs. not working at all.
There's a whole philosophical discussion involved in whether those people should have to work, but rightly or wrongly, a lot of societal and personal value is derived from employment. A UBI deletes the welfare trap, and allows people who exist on the margins/are incapable of full-time work to find and immediately benefit from employment again. Maybe the garbagemen will need to be paid more, but we should also see more part-time workers put their hands up.
A UBI would certainly change job markets; I'm not sure whether "distort" is the right word.
The garbage companies would have to pay more, but the result would be that instead of no garbage man, the garbage man now just works 20 hours a week and takes more vacations. And because this vital job is no longer as "sucky", other people have joined the profession too and also put in 10-20 hours a week thereby distributing this type of hard physical labor across a larger pool of people.
And who gets stuck with that job when everyone else doesn’t have to work?
Maybe we can pick this up 100 years from now.
Sounds like a gun to your head.
But it seems like there is some risk that young people who have never worked might not get in the habit of working? The ambitious will want more than just to barely get by, but I don't think we can entirely rule out a slacker lifestyle becoming popular. I think we should still try it and see, but the plan might need to be adjusted.
But also where I live, the garbage man is not a public employee, but an employee of a private garbage company. So my taxes don't need to change, instead my garbage bill goes up. That would be regressive, since a garbage bill is a higher percentage of poor people's income. But some poor people just don't pay the garbage man, and instead take their garbage to the landfill themselves, which is way way cheaper.
Incidentally, you can make the same argument about minimum wage increases - the cost of getting low wage work done increases, so prices increase. I don't want to get into an argument about the effectiveness of that, but the evidence generally suggests minimum wage works better than conservative naysayers sometimes claim.
Similarly, if there were not people to clean offices, then have the office workers do it (assuming there are offices, of course).
For things that are really essential and cannot be done away with, the cost would go up. It seems reasonable to pay more for vital services. That may mean higher taxes or some other payment arrangement, but it is only regressive if the taxes are done in a regressive way.
There may also be deflationary effects (namely eliminating the giant waste of BS jobs): https://medium.com/@austingmackell/the-deflationary-effects-...
A UBI would change the job market. But whether it is a distortion or fixing some externality cost that was distorting the market is certainly debatable.
Now a garbage man says “I’m not gonna be a garbage man anymore, I can do something I love now, like a music teacher that pays $30k”
"wait it's gone to $25K... to $15K.. aand it's gone". Other people might have the same idea and if more people want to become music teachers, music teacher salaries go down and garbageman keeps picking garbage.It will not affect day to day life very much unless you've been underpaying for a vital service (in this case, you're the slave owner). Then all the slave owners will just have to pay more for services that they want.
Every reaction to UBI discussions immediately assume UBI is trying to replace all income, which is very much not the idea.
It's a floor for society.
UBI means you can actually evaluate the system you live in and determine what's necessary (and then pay more for it). At the moment it's all "jobs jobs jobs" - we have entire federal agencies that are essentially jobs programs (Homeland Security is a great example... they've done almost literally nothing).
You're taking this as a given. Why? Remember that we are living in a time of record profits for many industries.
UBI proposals typically set the value at just enough to live on, or what someone who successfully claims unemployment + housing benefit would be given. At that level, the extra cost of UBI is because it's paid to non-claiming dependants, but there are savings from dismantling the bureaucracy which decides who is entitled to unemployment benefit and investigates fraudulent benefit claims, so it would be close to revenue neutral, so net tax rates shouldn't change much.
Assuming the revenue source is income tax, those already working would, on average, have their higher gross tax rates offset by receipt of UBI. There are other sources of taxation, e.g. corporation tax and a tax on land so a proportion could be taken from those.
This is something a lot of people just don't understand. Our entire monetary system isn't predicated on exchange or store of value like they teach you in school, it's a system of coercion. That sounds ugly, but it's observably true. Taxes, in particular property and income taxes, impose a requirement on everyone to participate in the state's ledger game. The question becomes is that coercion eucivic or not? A society without coercion isn't an option. Nature abhors a vacuum, and human societies abhor a power vacuum. Given our present level of technology, the alternative to monetary coercion is closer to gulags and plantations than it is to Star Trek.
The coercive aspect of monetization is perhaps most clearly seen in the example of imperial British Kenya. When the Brits rolled in they wanted the local to work in the mines. Local Kenyans, quite reasonably, said screw that we'd rather not. The Brits then imposed a head tax on every Kenyan adult payable in Pounds Sterling. And, in that economy, the only way to get Pounds Sterling was working for the British government. So maybe you could get a job as some kind of functionary, but the vast majority of jobs were, you guessed it, working in the mines. In this way the sovereign currency issuer was able to coerce the behavior it wanted, namely the dirty, dangerous and unpleasant work of mining, without any overt violence.