UBI frees people from economic coercion.
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.
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.
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...
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.