A World Ruled by Persons, Not Machines
newramblerreview.com
newramblerreview.com
I think you’re mischaracterizing some part of the opposition with “should have to work”. To my school of UBI skepticism, it’s not at all about Lutheran work ethic as a deontological good.
To clarify: I don’t believe we take care of elderly/disabled/children solely because it’s “the right thing to do”. Instead I believe we do it due to other conditions e.g. “it could be me one day” and “it’s just a few people so we can afford it”. Based on that, I think the stance will change if the conditions change.
Longer term, if we wish to continue having a distributed economy, then the gains of automation need to accrue to people directly, through something resembling ownership. Basic Income should only ever been seen as a social safety net. Collecting most of the wealth by a centralized entity ("government") to distribute back out to people is fraught with political hazard, if it is even possible to sustain.
Where I live, optometry and dental medicine are carved out of socialized healthcare. Hard to reconcile that with the purely utilitarian theory.
I think the “few people” aspect is important in practice. If the prevalence is too great, it could stop feeling like an accidental curse of fate. Just theorizing.
Remember back in the 1400’s there was little education and what like 95% farm work. Developed nations have reduced farm work to like 5% of the population, through education and better nutrition, to focus on improved medicine and leisure. See the Flynn effect.
That sounds like a lot of work. Isn't tech supposed to make life easier?
Sounds like Eugenics
Not since the Reagan era. That's why there are homeless camps.
If 10% of the population doesn’t have to work I can justify I’m helping those in need. If 70% of the population doesn’t have to work there’s zero chance I’m working.
Culturally it tends to lean in a direction I’d call “make some richer person happy for a portion of nation-state scrip.”
If you take a more scientific, physical, definition, raising kids is work. Learning anything is work.
Politics aren’t manipulated and how things work are organic. So we should just be happy since look at this math, cause behavior and statistics aren’t game-able.
Why would anyone in the most competent 30% of the population be willing to accept a deal where they must work because they are the most competent, but the less competent people get to spend all their time traveling, socializing, enjoying romantic relationships, etc? And remember, they must ALL accept this deal because if any significant percentage of them drops out the infrastructure isn't maintained.
When you add up everyone on social security, disability, government make-work jobs (which includes 95 percent of the military) and the assemblage of programs (section 8, EBT, medicaid) that constitute modern welfare, you are pretty much at 30/70 now. So...to answer your question, why are you accepting the deal as we speak?
Sure, some will accept a system where the less productive stop pretending and just brazenly take. But most won’t. The fairness/justice system is ingrained in primate dna. It would take an evolutionary time scale to remove it and the productive would kill the nonproductive either directly or indirectly long before that happens.
And the place it falls apart is the other side. Why would the 10% most competent people work a traditional job when everyone else can leisure travel, take up hobbies, spend time with family, or focus on romantic relationships?
Not nobody. There's enough work for some people. Just not enough for everyone, working 45 hours a week.
> Why would the 10% most competent people work a traditional job when everyone else can leisure travel, take up hobbies, spend time with family, or focus on romantic relationships?
Because they want a bigger house/car/yacht
This reads as though this shouldn’t be the case. People need to contribute to society, and not everyone will be an artist or pursue their passion if freed from labor.
I no longer support a UBI (unless we’re in a post scarcity society), but I do support a CBI.
Andrew Yang and Mark Cuban debate UBI vs CBI https://podverse.fm/clip/__ihv7eFk
Citizen’s Basic Income in Scotland https://www.alliance-scotland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017...
I look forward to learning the difference, which doesn't seem that great at first glance
only when you think the only work that needs doing is work that makes someone's boss money does it look like there are all these extra people that need to be taken care of because there's nothing they can contribute.
It's not just "low-skilled" people who will have trouble finding good employment. It's most people.
I like the idea of a society sharing the wealth from resources, cooperation, and technological advancement, and trying to ensure that everyone is lifted up by it.
I'd like to be careful of language around that, since I often hear comments from people who happen to be benefitting from the status quo (for now), talking down about people who aren't benefitting.
For example, some people hear about how "we" need to take care of others, and they seem to think it means asking "meritorious" them "for a favor, to benefit those less meritorious." But I think more appropriate is that the we is society, and that we need to revise our rules and conventions, because they're unfair, reward the wrong things, etc.
Right now, our rules and conventions seem to be under something like regulatory capture. So, exploiters benefit wildly disproportionately, and some of the rest of us (myself included, at times) effectively ride the coattails of that economic setup.
I propose that those of us who are currently making tech money would do well to speak up for those currently getting less a share of society. One reason is that it seems the right thing to do. Another reason is that, while we may be benefitting now, we might not later, and current rules&conventions are to listen to those with money, so we should speak up while we can.
That might soon include almost all people in society.
The piece starts by noting that our current market systems are coming up short for laborers, but then suggests that a government job guarantee would somehow necessarily produce quality opportunities with fair compensation. It is possible that methodologies for making labor markets fair might apply both to market and government subsidized opportunities.
Cost disease gets called out with respect to education but is misunderstood. Education is not inherently a harmful cost but rather is having a problem with unsustainable cost increases that result in an existential threat. This phenomenon of labor intensive products becoming unreasonably expensive over time is extremely important to understand and characterize and should not be glossed over.
That doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. I’d expect marginal spending for each marginal dollar of income to be far higher in the latter households.
For example, current minimum wage is $7.25. We up this to $10 paid by employer and $5 paid by government. For each 2c above that the employer pays, the government kicks in 1c less up until $20. Exact numbers are just examples.
The issue with only higher minimum wage is that it accelerates the economic move towards automation. That may be seen as a good thing in this crowd, but too high of a pace of change could cause suffering.
My question is: if we're okay with doing this, why not just give them $5/hour whether they have a job or not? (For people who have jobs, the phase-out can be made to be the same as what you described using an income tax.) That program would have the same social cost, the person could still get a job that pays $10/hour and generates $11/hour, they'd take home the same amount of money, except now the subsidy isn't tied to a job that isn't worth as much to society as what the person is making.
(This is essentially a UBI)
If you tie UBI to per-person, for better or for worse, you distort the market to increase the price of labor. Each person has to work fewer hours to have the same income as before, thus you'd likely see less labor supply and thus higher price.
By tying UBI partly to labor, for better or for worse, you distort the market to decrease the price of labor at least in comparison to per-person UBI. I'd imagine vs. the status quo it's an price increase, but stacked against per-person UBI it should generate more labor supply and thus a price decrease.
If made independent from livable wages, it isn't clear that increasing the price of labor is optimal at the moment. It would seem to accelerate the pace of automation which would increase the pace of inequality. It would also slow overall economic output - the $11/hour generating job may cease to exist.
This is actually trivial to do: get rid of income tax. Taxing land property by its value makes much more sense, as it correlates with the burden a property has on the government (city, country infrastructure), but I guess that policy is not that popular with the older generation.
This is trivially false.
The same house will cost vastly different amounts depending on where it is, and yet assuming the same occupancy, the burden will be approximately the same.
If I were an employer running a factory with little automation, then I could spend some R&D money to develop machinery to automate my manufacturing, and then spend money to retool my lines to use that automation, and then under your proposal I would now lose all of my profits, since 100% of my profit would now be taxed. This would seem like a pretty big disincentive for me to invest in automation.
But even if we stick with that - perhaps using profit-per-employee to determine corporate tax bands would be the way to go. Or, allowing them to count salaries at 2-3x other expenses when calculating expenditures.