Policies that make the poor less poor
eclogiselle.com
eclogiselle.com
My niece wound up being a case in point. She got a job offer for $0.20/hour more than would allow her to stay on food stamps. As a single mother of 3, she could not afford to go off of food stamps. The job she would have joined was a union job and so could not pay her anything other than the union rate. The result? She remained in a job that she was overqualified for and turned down the better job because she literally could not afford to take it.
If you think that this is an argument for basic income, it is. And exactly because having it be not means tested avoids this kind of perverse incentive that helps trap people in poverty.
I think it's a simple, logical argument, but I'm not sure if it would survive a collision with reality^^
We don't need to automate away all our low-skill jobs: we could just pay the workers more. Most workers are paid well below the actual value of their productivity because they have a crappy BATNA, and there's no need for employers to pay much higher than the worker's BATNA.
The more you pay the workers, the more profit in a machine that can replace min-wage workers, and the sooner a machine will be cheaper than the well-paid workers.
You've got it backwards.
So? We should have make-work jobs and force people to do them as punishment for being poor? Forcing people to go and do a menial job that doesn't really need doing just because you think it's character building is not a good way to run a healthy society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar...
Unsurprisingly, most of the job is the "dig a ditch today, fill it in tomorrow" variety.
The point of UBI is to make it easier to fill productive jobs by (1) reducing the marginal disincentive to work posed by the funding structure of means-tested welfare, and (2) putting a bunch of people back into looking for productive jobs who are currently working in government welfare bureaucracy doing jobs that duplicate functions performed in the tax bureaucracy and/or serve the nonproductive purpose of maximizing the disincentive to additional work by welfare recipients.
Subsidizing salaries for private jobs may backfire through corruption.
So digging the hole and filling it back it is.
So what? I would argue that most people want to feel purpose in life. If they don’t work, they want to do something else to feel fulfilled, something to be looked up to for, something to feel good about doing. It could be art, a sport, maybe just gardening, picking up trash in their neighborhood or organizing local events/classes. Most retired people don’t just sit in front of the tv waiting to die, or become criminals because they don’t have a job.
I think it would be amazing if most people didn’t have to work for a living. And only the people that want to work did so.
This is how the poor stay poor, and those who are "just broke" become poor. In fact, people who are working are much more likely to engage in other community activities and volunteer.
I can definitely say that people who are forced to work with capricious scheduling, or those that have to work more than one job just to survive are a lot less likely to do that.
If you gave a poor person the opportunity to become rich through work, would they still decide to stay poor?
When you are being rewarded for hard work it is hard to grasp the concept that some not all people are being rewarded for hard work. Pretty much every entrepreneur falls into that trap. Everything they do can have a direct impact to their bottom line so they work hard and long hours. Meanwhile they wonder why their employees with low wages that are often below planned minimum wage increases do the bare minimum to not get fired. It is pretty obvious. They are going on a silent strike as that is the last drip of their bargaining power. We then get lessons that the poor are poor because of laziness.
Living as a species takes work - granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well.
If that won't end well, I genuinely look forwards to seeing how we deal with them.
Bingo. They didn't do shit to deserve it, they didn't work hard, and there's an entire industry of smart, morally ambiguous people dedicated to helping them hide it and keep it, and (as Abigail Disney discusses) convincing them that they deserve it, that poor people would simply waste it.
granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well Well, there they are, doing just that.
Once you get to a certain amount of wealth, you don't need to do anything. Smart trades? None of that's needed. I'm a tiny little part of it; I work full-time, but once my personal wealth reached about six times my salary, it made more money each year than I did. Six times [0]. That is pennies in the big scheme of things. There's nothing smart about my trades; dull funds and diversity. Piketty was on to something; Bill Gates made more money from being rich than he ever did from Microsoft. Maybe he deserved all his riches from Microsoft, but does he now also deserve to sit back, do nothing, and perpetually watch his wealth grow more and more obscenely by taking a part of the wealth generated by people actually working? How about his Grandchildren? Do they deserve that? Young was right; meritocracy is what we've got, and this is what it does - the rich shall inherit the earth.
Also, you seems to be applying that there is a fixed pie wealth.
I disagree. I made no such "application", as you put it. Implying, I guess you mean, but I still disagree. There is not a fixed pie wealth. Every day, a lot of people are creating more and more wealth, and the very wealthy every day sit back and rake in a nice helping of it for themselves. As I also do, and I'm not remotely near very wealthy.
Rob the rich and give to the poor is also a terrible strategy.
How about "make them at least pay taxes like the poor schlubs generating the wealth they're perpetually helping themselves to?" Is that a better strategy? How about "alter the system a bit so that labour pays better than simply being rich, or at least benefits the labourer ahead of the rich?" That one probably sounds like batshit crazy communist land.
[0] It's ridiculous, but it's true. I don't do calls, I don't do puts, most of it is in dull index funds and a big chunk of the rest is in slightly less dull fund offerings from Baillie Gifford and the like. Once you get some capital, it will happily act like a leech on society, siphoning off wealth generated by other people's work into your own pocket. I ride on the very, very long tail of this system set up to benefit the rich; I only hope that I die before their endless squeeze catches up with me as well.
Granted, obviously the current system is not perfect and does need a mechanism to make the rich pay their fair share in the economy. But saying all the rich just inherited their wealth and they did nothing to deserve it is plain incorrect.
Citation? I'd like you to be right, but my subjective experience is that a lot of them pretty much do.
And then you start hitting a sliding scale, and poor health, poverty, lack of transportation and/or wheelchair access, and a slew of other things makes it really easy to wind up being the person that sits at home. The other unfortunate reality is that some of the folks are sitting because they are dying. I've not yet died, but I suspect it tires you.
I also don't think this is a trend that will stay: I'm 42, and I have a completely different relationship to television than my mother. Unlike her, I rarely sit down and simply watch a show - and I know lots of folks like this. Games and hobbies and communication with others and all this other stuff is going on. And assuming we can still use our fingers and wrists well enough, I think this will stay.
That's right - "the idle rich" is not just a saying.
There is more than enough wealth to feed and house everyone, so the issue is not of contribution, but distribution.
And boy oh boy, are things badly distributed. Look at the graphs of worker productivity compared to average wage for the last hundred years - they are staggering.
Who doesn't? But we are not in a post-scarcity economy.
That said, there are other potential problems with UBI, like incentivising anyone on it to move to the most affordable cities, which are often already suffering from unemployment and underemployment.
Is this actually true? I feel like the research I've seen about this is mixed at best, and we really don't know if (meaningfully) fewer people would work if they didn't have to just to get by.
Intuitively it may sound nice, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a counterbalancing force at play, namely human curiosity and desire to do more than just, "get by".
This is one of the main benefits, if not the main benefit, of UBI. Someone’s survival is finally not dependent on working!
Right now, shitty jobs pay crap, because people have to take some job or starve. If you took away the starve part, millions of people no longer have to put up with a shitty job. If it really had to be done, the employer would be forced to raise the wage in order to attract people to voluntarily take the job. If UBI took care of everyone’s basic needs, then wages would have to rise to make it worth it to do a now-optional job. Would you flip burgers for minimum wage if UBI allowed you to live in an apartment and eat? I wouldn’t, but I might do it for $40k/yr extra over UBI.
This is a major goal of UBI, not a failure case.
If it maxes out approximately where current means-tested welfare does, then it will be at a place where you wouldn’t need additional programs to acheive the same level of living possible for those with no outside income under current means-tested welfare. If, as UBI rather than means tested welfare, it also didn’t face the strong disincentive to additional income posed by the current “funding-cliff” effect of means-tested welfare, the obvious effect would be more people working who would under the current system be welfare-dependent, not less.
Your analysis seems to be comparing it to a no-welfare position, but that’s not the system it is replacing.
If this turned out to be true, perhaps this says more about contemporary society than human nature. The tendency to offer low wages to replaceable workers, to force people into taking multiple jobs in order to survive, and to dictate a lower social status to some of the most essential roles in human society is bound to taint some people's impressions of work.
And why is that a problem? I see it as a net benefit. The only people working will be those that want to work, and in my opinion it will reduce all the posturing and politics that go on in a workplace because people don't want to be there.
and there wouldn't be enough of them to support the remaining.
The "funding" of UBI have to come from a technological advance, such as effectively free energy, which powers automation in such a way that owners of these resources would not miss a small tax to pay for the bare minimum UBI.
The biggest roadblock to improving the standard of living of most people in America, is this suspicious impulse folks have of suspecting somebody might 'get away' with something. It's time to recognize this unworthy impulse and discard it.
Part of the reason may be the implicit lessons we receive from a very young age. We must always be cautious of people who try to take advantage of us. It is a valuable less, because it is true, yet we seem to take it the wrong way. Rather than dealing with the criminal, the people who would defraud us, we treat everyone as criminal.
[0] There is a particular group of peoples in my country who are often portrayed as being lazy or exploiting the system. In many, if not most, cases this prejudice is just plain wrong. Since many of those people live outside of the system, they perform types of work that many of us would not even consider: hunting for their own food (and everything that involves), cutting their own fuel wood, hauling their own garbage to the dump, and much more. None of that work involves a paycheck, so it doesn't count. That attitude is just plain wrong. (Not to mention the other problems with prejudices, such as it discounting those who do function within the rest of western society.)
Anyone work in government or know a lot about the relevant history? Is there a good reason why it works like this?
I'm skeptical of the idea that it was accidental.
For those close to the line, there would always be a benefit to accepting that slightly better job.
One of the challenges of tuning means-tested welfare phase-outs is that means-tested welfare consists of dozens of different programs, most of which have additional qualifications besides the means test, governed by different levels of government, often with different definitions of what income counts against the phaseout.
UBI makes that simpler by consolidation.
That’s not an alternative to UBI, that’s what UBI (in a system which has income taxes) is. The marginal income tax rate provides the phased reduction in effective benefits.
Intended effect: Increase the buying power of those who proportionately receive the greatest additional income.
Likely real effect: The level of the tide rises, but the boat's don't change spots. The cost of rent and everything in the market goes up with the tide. The middle class, and even moderately well off professionals, get a quality of life and pay CUT (in effect, since they don't get the raise). The Rich who are rent-seeking, still get their rent and still win.
I agree with the Star Trek lifestyle goals, but they get there by providing for all equally. It's the major capitol things (leaving federation space, energy intensive development projects, etc) which still require funds other than basic allocation.
I disagree - a UBI means that anyone who's able to live frugally may, at any time, retire. This gives enormous bargaining power to workers, as if the pay is too low then they can say "fuck it, I'm moving to <insert rural ghost town>, buying an abandoned house for $1, and living off my UBI".
Not only does this put downward pressure on rent, it also encourages jobs to be more available in rural areas, as people will move to there for lower costs of living instead of moving away because it's unaffordable due to lack of jobs/UBI.
Your wage is not determined by your productivity, it's determined by your bargaining power (your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) being the main one, but how unique your skills are determines your employer's BATNA).
In other words, employers will employ you for any amount that still lets them make a profit off of your labour, but they will pay you the least they can get away with paying without you walking away. Some people literally can't afford to walk away, and they're the people who are paid dogshit wages. A UBI would let them walk away until their job calls them with a good offer.
Provide 'employment transition' by banking vacation carry over and get paid out when someone quits (optionally paid at the otherwise normal rate over time until depleted).
Medicare for all with dental, vision and hearing - Single payer healthcare so that it isn't tied to a job, and helps return those out of work to work if our medical tech is sufficient.
Make current US job benefits (vacation, sick pay, medical co-coverage) paid by taxes on corporations proportional to the pay for workers. Hourly workers should pro-rated with E.G. 20 hours of work for 'full benefits'. Also require hourly jobs to be scheduled in advance in some fair way that doesn't de-facto allow an abusive employer to have someone on call without paying them to be on call.
The socialization of the vacation benefits also benefits corporations, since they would no longer hold those assets on their balance sheet as liabilities.
It doesn't have to be expensive: Norway collects taxes in a way that means you basically fund your own vacation: The downside is that you don't get that money if you didn't work last year, but there is a push to fix that.
And I completely agree about scheduling: Employers should pay extra for changing a schedule in too short of a frame. Yes, this also means that everyone might get paid extra for releasing the schedule too late.
I'd also add that everyone should have the right to work contracts. At a minimum, it'd state how to break the contract (fair notice, both sides, exceptions apply), rate of pay, number of hours expected (even for salary workers), and a start date.
You might be right on rent, but that would probably exacerbate the price of goods problem further since there would be fewer people willing to do those jobs.
UBI will only make people better off if more goods and services are produced as a result of it. Or alternatively, if goods and services are somehow moved from excessive consumption by the rich to the poor. But that last part is probably a drop in the bucket. Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.
You rightly point out that that does not apply to supply-inflexible goods like housing in cities.
Artificial scarcity is created by producing machines that intentionally break, bunkering and throwing away stuff, patent trolling and so on.
UBI alone likely won’t fix this though.
People who are able to focus on their work because they can pay their bills, have good working conditions, are healthy and able to care for their families work better. Big surprise.
Of course there's an upper limit to this - if you're paying your apple pickers more than the retail price of the apples then you're going to be in trouble. But in those cases, the price of apples needs to be higher so that apple pickers can have some basic human dignity. Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.
There's this set of objections to UBI based around "yes, ok, it works in the small scale, but it'll never work on a large scale".
If we did a large scale experiment, and it confirms that it works, the objections will move to "sure, OK, but it'll never work on a national level".
So let's just implement it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.
They really, really don't. All the experiments on a small scale show is the trivial conclusion that if you give people some central government funds for a year or two, they tend to be slightly less poor at the end. None of them come remotely close to suggesting that people are so much more productive that they can cover the costs of UBI to people already out of the labour force by choice, never mind those that may choose to exit it in future.
Only if the country still has the ability to change and the economy isn't permanently damaged.
Elderly people already get a UBI in the form of Social Security, and that's politically impossible to cut regardless of whether it's a good or bad idea.
Once you turn it on and people get used to it, you can never turn it off in a democracy.
Small-scale experiments have been quite successful though.
And are absolutely useless to study the very important effects that these kinds of systems have on a nation's economy.
I've looked to history for examples of actual real world attempts to guarantee some minimum quality of life for all citizens of a particular group. They consistently do well for some self selected and committed initial group and then go badly when the doors get flung open to include everyone.
One result I recall hearing about is instituting policies like "You don't work, you don't eat" in order to prevent freeloaders from utterly killing the whole system and taking everyone down with them.
Tale as old as time:
> For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule:“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Thessalonia...
>No large scale experiment exists for UBI.
Non sequitur.
All of those become more and more true (and are already true for a large class of products) as mechanization and automation increases.
You can't just say, well, just reduce the amount fo labour to keep costs down. That labour still needs to be employed doing something.
it is in fact disproportionate, raising wages raising productivity by a greater amount.
Given the evidence, do you now believe this to be true?
You can see this in the current economy as restaurants and packaged foods suppliers in some sectors reduce the size of portions.
Source?
>Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.
What if raising the price of apples lowers demand, causing less jobs to he available? Presumably apple picking is the best job those workers can get, so the likely consequence is that they'll be unemployed and we'll have to substitute 100% of their income (rather than 50% or whatever if they were picking apples). That seems like a poor allocation of labor/resources.
“UBI” isn’t actually a specific plan, its a broad concept within which there are many specific plans. But the broad concept itself does address this, though many of the more detailed plans do so in…more detail.
At a high level, one of the central points of UBI as a replacement for traditional means-tested welfare (and why some of its earliest advocates were right-libertarians, not lefties, such as Milton Friedman who advocated “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI) is that it eliminates the disincentives to earning outside income that come with the sharp (sometimes greater than 1:1 when aggregated across all benefit programs a person qualifies for) funding reductions for outside income that come with means tested benefit programs, increasing the marginal reward (and thus incentive) to work.
> Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.
No, they generally don’t. Oh, sure, that might be true by mass, or even by calories; but not by labor-hours of work that went into it, or dollar cost, which is what is relevant here. And that’s true across all categories of consumption.
Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.
They are the same; both have the effect that benefits are “drawn down” through marginal taxation of outside income, though Friedman’s specific NIT proposal had an exceptionally high (though still lower than the effective drawdown rates often faced by means-tested benefit recipients) marginal rate (50%) for the the below-break-even bracket (essentially, the bracket whose outside income was less than “Effective UBI”/(bottom tax rate)), which most UBI proponents would reject in favor of consistently progressive rates. But this isn’t an inherent feature of generalized negative income tax.
Right now we have a trickle-down economy which caters primarily to the needs of institutions and big capital holders. This is why our society is so politically charged and divided and why we have such fast growing inequality.
We're already essentially giving institutions and capital holders free money through capital appreciation. We need to give some free money to those at the bottom too or else it's not fair and it will lead to a revolution sooner or later.
An alternative is to greatly increase temporary work visas, and make those immigrants exempt from getting UBI as a clause in their immigration visa. Of course this might lead to other issues.
However, UBI funded by taxes on bad behavior can still work but it would not act as a replacement for unemployment benefits.
They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. That seems to worth a lot to a lot of people. You are of course right about the very obvious two class system it will create and the long term social consequences of such a system are tricky to predict.
Edit: The US birthright citizenship rules might actually make this harder to implement.
If this is so good why the need for a UBI for citizens in the first place?
What does tend to happen when a system is put in place to provide support for those who refuses to accept any employment, is that the ability for wealth hoarders to use their hoards as a lever go gain more wealth and power declines as the bargaining power gets more even.
One of the benefits of universal(non-means-tested) welfare project is that the graft and administration overhead of those systems tend to be much lower then "charity" based welfare projects and UBI is the ultimate in low overhead universal welfare. And when you look at the structure of most post-industrial economies admin overhead and graft is more then 50% of the economy, i.e. it's by no means a given that we cannot keep up production of goods and services with even 60% of the population of UBI.
So I don't think we need worry about everyone stopping working. What we need to consider is the marginal effect of the small population that does. If the unemployment rates doubles, what impact would that have on the economy? There is a lot to figure out with a problem like that, but it is a different caliber of problem from total economic meltdown.
The answer is highly targeted programs that increase general prosperity. Money for cheaper energy, better services, public works, public transportation, more housing and favorable investments in future technologies are what drive prosperity. Make people as a whole less motivated to work is the antithesis of economic prosperity.
> Make people as a whole less motivated to work is the antithesis of economic prosperity.
Making people as a whole less trapped in dead-end jobs is great for economic prosperity. We know that people are more productive once they have a safety net that lets them take risk, e.g. there's a huge bump in people starting their own businesses - a big economic positive on average, but risky - once they hit the medicaid eligibility age. Or taking the time to retrain and switch careers - again, positive on average, but something a lot of people can't afford or don't dare to take the risk of.
What are you saying? That most government programs aren't working? Please share the data.
Except that this isn't how UBI should be implemented. An easy way to do it is to change Federal income taxes. Make $0/year? your tax bill is -$12000. Make $10000? perhaps it's now -$10000. And at some point - probably $40000 or $50000, it's 0, and then after that you pay gradually increasing taxes, the way it currently works.
so in other words, you don't have to give this cash to all 300M people. T(Though you do need to account for the fact that having this option available will change people's life choices, if we're going to estimate the funding needed)
Probably we'd also need to raise taxes somewhere to fund it - increasing marginal tax rates for higher tax brackets, possibly coupled with some new tax brackets at the upper end, seems like a possible answer.
A negative income tax is exactly the same thing as a UBI in a system that also has progressive income taxes.
If it was gradual withdrawal rather than a cliff, she could afford to take the job.
The UK's Universal Credit is supposed to be gradual and therefore work out to everyone's benefit. But in practice it has few of the good qualities of either UBI or negative taxation. Universal Credit has plenty of nasty cliffs, complicated rules and cruel penalties that push unlucky people deeply into poverty, and it also has an extremely heavy administration cost - every employer must file everyone's individual employment taxes every few weeks online and face heavy fines for getting anything wrong or being a day late.
If it is self-defeating, it is not more efficient. And we already have a bureaucracy whose functions include verifying income claims and adjusting net payments based on them in the income tax system, we don’t need a bunch of different bureaucracies doing that redundantly with slightly varied definitions and rules and paperwork that serve little practical purpose besides justifying additional bureaucracies and enforcing self-defeating funding cliffs.
It is possible that there would be fraud around pretending to be a person when that person doesn’t exist, or continuing to collect benefits for someone who is dead.
But “are you a live person” is much harder to fake than “did you make sure you didn’t do these 6 illegible things that would make you ineligible”.
When you eliminate means-testing in favor of income taxes and eliminste the myriad different definitions of income and assets for qualification for different programs and the opportunity it creates (and the incentive funding cliffs create) for specialized benefit fraud, there is no special “UBI abuse” to monitor for. You have to monitor for tax fraud, but we’ve got a bureaucracy doing that at society-wide scale anyway.
UBI could be a solution but has its own drawbacks. Progressive taxation without cliffs is another possible solution.
That is, you pay higher taxes but only from the amount above some threshold. That way, only the derivative of the tax rate has cliffs.
You mean with no public support? Because UBI is social support without cliffs, and typically paired with progressive taxation. So if you mean progressive taxation with social support and no cliffs, that's not an alternative to UBI so much as a long-winded description of UBI.
> That is, you pay higher taxes but only from the amount above some threshold. That way, only the derivative of the tax rate has cliffs.
That's (ignoring things like the injection of means-tested welfare into the tax system via EITC) progressive taxation and tax bracket marginal rates work normally. UBI is just adding public benefits in without introducing cliffs.
The problem with means testing is that it effectively raises the marginal rate, often to astronomical percentages. For example, the withdrawal of a $1000 benefit because of an additional $1 that pushes you over a means testing threshold means your marginal tax rate on that dollar is 100,000%. Of course the rational thing to do is to not earn that dollar, or indeed any of the next $1250 that it would take to get you back to where you started (assuming a normal marginal rate of 20%).
For example, a reasonable stepping stone would be for people to get their food stamps by default, but then be able to "pay" some of the taxes on any income they earn using those food stamps. This means food stamps are being reduced gradually and at the marginal tax rate, so it's fairer than just falling off a cliff when you hit a threshold.
In a mature UBI system [0], food stamps as use-restricted means-tested welfare wouldn't exist at all. (Food stamps in their original purpose as a system of agricultural subsidies might.) Their function would be rolled into the single benefit payment.
[0] transitional proposals often keep other means-tested programs during the transition, scaled back as UBI scales up.
Some people, mostly people who don't like the idea of UBI seem to think you can't tax it back again and everyone needs to always get X extra every year on top of what they would have before. I'm not sure if they dislike UBI because they think that, or think that because they dislike UBI.
For a low-wage earner today, the choice is:
* Don't work, get $300/week * Work, get $400/week
Depending upon circumstances, many find the former option better.
But UBI is proposing an option like this:
* Don't work, get $300/week * Work, get $280 + $400/week
With this kind tradeoff, many more will chose latter option.
People don't stop working if you give them basic income.
They do stop working two or three jobs to make ends meet. This is good, because it kills people.
They do stop doing the shitty underpaid jobs that no-one wants to do if they can possibly avoid it. This is good. Those jobs need to be redesigned because they're shitty. There are many happy garbage removalists out there, or cleaners, or retail clerks. It's not necessarily the nature of the work that makes a job shitty, it's often the incidental bullshit around it that makes it shitty. Making employers as a whole less motivated to keep their employees happy is the antithesis of basic human respect, and needs to be changed.
We have to get out of this bullshit Protestant Work Ethic mindset that work is about suffering and that we get paid a salary to compensate for that suffering. Work is what gives our lives meaning. For some of us, that meaning is found in climbing the corporate ladder, others enjoy serving food, others have a sense of satisfaction from their cleaning gig.
If the only reason you work is because you're paid to do it, find another line of work. No-one deserves that kind of misery.
They do, or we wouldn't have any retired people.
"Basic income" is just another way of saying "receive a state pension at 18".
The alternative is obvious - ensure that everybody can always sell their labour hours at a fixed rate.
If you have to give up your hours to earn money, then that is the same as everybody else. There is no longer a differential between the "unemployed rate" and the "employed rate" which eliminates the rate per hour 'dead zone' required to attract people from "doing nothing" to "doing something".
A lot of retired people still work, despite not needing the income.
> the rate per hour 'dead zone' required to attract people from "doing nothing" to "doing something".
There's this myth again. People don't need to be attracted from "doing nothing". The default state of people isn't sitting around on their porch drinking beer. I mean, don't get me wrong, that's fun for a while, but it's not a long-term occupation. The default state of people is doing useful work that gives their lives meaning. We don't need to be "attracted" to that. That's the default.
The reality is that any modern economy based on fiat-money have unlimited cash and tend to benefit enough from weakening the bargaining power of the entrenched elites though inflation funded welfare, that you can set the bar for how poor the poor are allowed to become without necessarily impacting the real world industrial/agricultural output, but because of dogmatic policies designed to facility wealth hording we pretend that we cannot really end poverty.
Another problem is that we measure societal success based on how well the 20% richest lives rather then on how well the 20% poorest live. which again support wealth hording policies that will eventually clash with the ideal that democracy, freedom and equally, should be available to everyone not just an small elite as was the case in ancient Rome or Greece(and to some extend The American south until ca 1970).
Stopping money printing is an interesting idea though.
If I'm reading it right, that's the opposite of what the person you replied to was suggesting:
> The reality is that any modern economy based on fiat-money have unlimited cash and tend to benefit enough from weakening the bargaining power of the entrenched elites though inflation funded welfare, that you can set the bar for how poor the poor are allowed to become
If OP wanted to claim the opposite, I don't see how it makes sense.
You could always import more, UBI exempt, workers if that becomes a problem. Of course that might bring some of its own problems.
On the other hand, workforce may be coming from another UBI territory with same taxation. What would happen in their former country? Would they still pay UBI taxes to it?
Because even with the "super high taxes" you'll probably still earn more than you would in your home country of Honduras or Mozambique or wherever labor will be imported from. People are crossing the border today for a chance to illegally pick produce or work low level construction. Making that easier will only make it more popular. Plus adding a clear path to Citizenship (say after working 7-10 years on a non-UBI visa) will only make it easier to attract people.
As to who gets UBI what happens when you leave a country with UBI, that is an interesting question. My initial reaction would be that you can only get UBI if you are a citizen or permanent resident AND live in the country (say a minimum of 4-6 month out of the year). If you emigrate you lose UBI, but that is a separate discussion.
In most theories I saw, UBI would supplement low wages and become negative only for well off people. So you'd have to pay a nice sum of money for someone to have same take-home pay as UBI jobless. This means UBI countries would need high import tariffs to compete with cheap import from non-UBI.
Now what would be nice is to work illegally in an UBI country.
Path to ubi sounds like a massive Ponzi scheme TBH. Come work for 10 years for an easy retirement. Especially if you can move back to your homecountry and keep earning UBI.
For higher wage, higher quality jobs it might be slightly harder to attract foreign talent, but even with a 20-30% real wage decrease from todays levels the US will still pay more than just about any other country for high end jobs, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Come work for 10 years for an easy retirement. Especially if you can move back to your homecountry and keep earning UBI.
That is why I think it's important to tie UBI to residency rather than just citizenship. If you leave the US you lose UBI.
An absolute sum of money is meaningless in such discussions. In my whereabouts $40-50k would be easily top-10% of not top-5% earnings. Median is a better measure. But how do we calculate median in UBI society? Do we calculate every resident? Only UBI citizens? Only working UBI citizens? Or do we take median pay of today, look what professions it is and then look at what those professions make after UBI?
Personally I'm very skeptical of UBI. IMO it's not possible till all low paying jobs are automated away. Otherwise your solution would create a very unhealthy two-ways society. Sort of like Arab oil states today. Where locals live off oil money and lots of 2nd-tier residents from poor countries are in sort a sort of modern slavery. I don't see how a healthy democratic society could in such a way. There're too many different groups with different incentives.
However setting the levels of UBI is probably not hard part, agreeing how to raise it every year to adjust for inflation and other cost of living increases is where all the problems will come from. I fear the UBI will also require a more dynamic tax code (to control inflation, as postulated by MMM) that will be very tricky to implement politically.
As to the two level society, I think that is inevitable with UBI. Hopefully it won't be as bad as what we're seeing in some oil states, but it will be similar.
Personally I don't think UBI is good idea, but do think it's doable. It will however permanently change the country, possibly for the worse.
Existing salary laws already create a lot of opportunities for arbitraging. E.g. truckers and handymen working in expensive, living out of cars or cheapest houses they can find and then spending their time off (as well as paying taxes) in cheap countries. Country-adjusted UBI could make this even worse. While EU-wide UBI median would create it's own share of issues.
Any idea is doable if you throw enough propaganda and/or gunpower behind it :)
Remember that 50% is an majority and would be entitled to basically run the economy as they saw fit, and yet we have never had a case(outside of apartheid/slave states) where an majority did that.
What UBI represent is more of an re-balancing on the employer/employee power balance as it grant's the employee the power to say NO without facing complete ruin.
For UBI to work the presumption that people wont just retire to cheap housing in the countryside living on bread, beer and love, but for the most part seek some kind of meaningful occupation, which real data based economical models seems to suggest they will.
The problem here is of cause that everything about UBI invalidates any economic theory compatible with an moral philosophy derived from Luther and Calvin's (protestant) Punitive Christianity, which unfortunately is the base for a lot of modern economic theory.
When people think about UBI, they think about living on UBI and still using products and services of a modern economy. Not living off the grid in a shack bumfucknowhere and doing substance farming (and brewing beer, of course) on the side.
If people flat-out dropped out of the economy, that'd create another interesting problem. Who would use produce of those people who keep participating? Would participating people produce&consume enough to put together UBI for the folks who got out?
Going further... Off-grid folk would make bread & beer and those wouldn't be taxed. UBI-producer would make bread & beer and those would be taxed through the roof. What if off-grid folks kickstart black market and trade non-taxed stuff between themselves? While still receiving UBI from UBI-producers. Then it'd make sense for an UBI-producer to go shopping in said black market too :) Buying less products from other UBI-producers.
Why would this happen?
The rich and powerful do not have tons of cash. They have tons of assets, like houses, land, buildings, companies, boats, cars, etc. Inflation simply makes all of those things more valuable, so their wealth is not affected. Meanwhile all the extra free money that everybody else has is still not enough to buy those actual assets. Aren’t you pretending that supply and demand doesn’t exist?
The problem for the wannabe feudalists is the same that killed off the landed gentry, when workers got rights and privileges in the 18th century, is that land not worked is not really worth anything so they will have to spend more and more of their profit maintaining the productivity as people gain more economic power to live elsewhere or differently.
And cheap land is around especially if you break free of the large cities.
We haven't tied the value of money to the value of land. Land has value. If you want it, you have to pay for it. (Unless you are advocating for the government to seize all property.)
If the value of money goes down (which is what you said to let happen), then the cost of land goes up. On what basis do you claim that hard assets will decrease in value as cash decreases in value? Can you name some examples where this has happened?
Edit: I don't think you can, because the definition of inflation means that the costs of things are going up.
I disagree. That rosy perspective comes off as being really naive
People really don't want to sit around doing nothing. They want to be useful, contribute, lead productive lives. Sitting around on the porch drinking beer is really boring after a relatively short while.
Again, if the only reason you're working is because you're being paid, go find another line of work. No-one should be that miserable.
> Again, if the only reason you're working is because you're being paid, go find another line of work. No-one should be that miserable.
reminds me of a great Office Space quote:
Michael Bolton : No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
Please tell me, who actually works because they enjoy cleaning shit up and not to just get paid?
Ex-girlfriend worked as a maid in a hotel in Broome while travelling. Perfect job, no responsibility, you could do it with a hangover, free accommodation, enough money to drink, an instant social life with the other employees. Stayed there for months until she decided she had to see other places.
I'm not saying they'd do it for free - well, possibly the cleaner in the UK (forgotten her name). But they definitely weren't stuck there doing a job they hated just for the money.
You can see it here: the number of comments saying basically "why should I work and pay taxes to support people who sit around all day doing nothing?"
This totally ignores the carers who don't get paid, but look after their relatives (and if they didn't, the state would have to either pay for that care, or let them die and confront some nasty truths). The volunteers who do god's work and never get paid (I'm an atheist, and I think it's horrible that we as a secular society depend on this, but I recognise the work of people of faith supporting our needy). This whole unpaid system of "work" that isn't "work" because we don't pay people to do it.
There is, as you say, a huge difference between "hating your job" and "doing a job to get paid". And it's a massive flaw in our society. No-one should hate their job. Why do we do this to people?
Forget Protestants, how about Mother Nature? You better reproduce and increase entropy of the universe, and who cares if you enjoy it? It's just reality (unfortunately for us).
> This totally ignores the carers who don't get paid, but look after their relatives (and if they didn't, the state would have to either pay for that care, or let them die and confront some nasty truths). The volunteers who do god's work and never get paid (I'm an atheist, and I think it's horrible that we as a secular society depend on this, but I recognise the work of people of faith supporting our needy). This whole unpaid system of "work" that isn't "work" because we don't pay people to do it.
I actually agree with you here. It is a shame they are not getting paid or some other advantages. UBI could help in this case, but I think there are other solutions that could be more targeted OR society itself could make this more efficient so that either they are paid or it's cheaper to have a service take care of it.
> No-one should hate their job. Why do we do this to people?
Economics explains why people will take on opportunity over another one. It's all about what they are willing to do for a price. And you know what else? If people are able to freely choose any opportunity they can have in a particular place and choose it, it means that it is (in their eyes) the best one available for them.
And it's also relative. There will literally always be people who are dissatisfied with their job if not just because everyone else has a better one (in their eyes).
Is the system perfect? No--hell no. We can help people change careers if they want to and increase social mobility etc., but UBI is not the only way. I think a targeted approach is more efficient than just giving everyone money
The 'B' stands for 'Basic'. Most of us already work to get better things. That won't change.
Its a strawman that won't die - that the Basic Income is going to make people well-off for no work.
• I can assume they're just wrong, and don't understand the implications of what they're saying, ignoring other people because they're profoundly confused
• or I can assume, instead, that they believe the basic entitlement of all people is less than the staying alive threshold – i.e., that human life doesn't have inherent value.
I hope this is a false dichotomy.
From what moral authority do positive rights originate? (a right that requires someone to provide you with a good or service)
From what moral authority do negative rights originate? (a right that prevents somebody from interfering with you or harming you)
Over the course of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, negative rights have been developed successfully in legal systems around the world. We've seen demonstrable evidence that enforcing protections of negative rights results in a happier and more productive population.
Different countries have also, generally more recently, brought forth positive rights by various means- welfare programs, socialism, full communism, or otherwise.
People that tend to care more about negative rights than positive rights tend toward right-libertarianism. Positive rights, in a sense, require those who can provide to forfeit some of their freedom, in order to help those who require it. There is a non-zero risk that a well-meaning welfare or socialist policy fails in its mission despite good intentions. Many of the communist states with the most heartfelt populist movements have seen the deepest failures. So in the right-libertarian mindset, there is a risk of a two-fold (or perhaps threefold) failure:
-It promised to provide (positive rights) prosperity to all, and it didn't
-It had to trample on the negative rights of the wealthy to try to redistribute their wealth
-(more vague)It eroded many individuals' notion of self-determination in the process, and in doing so left them less likely to work towards their own values.
Separately, there's the important notion of what the "staying alive threshold" is. Almost nobody in G7 countries dies of hunger or thirst, and those who do were likely in a crisis not determined by lack of access. Statistically, life expectancy increases with income up to and past $100,000/yr. The spectrum in between is fraught.
And it's absolutely not a straw man argument to say that a UBI is equivalent to a non-contributory pension for the much younger though (unless you believe that state pensions should be too little to survive on!) and well-evidenced that the average person retires earlier when offered state pensions earlier, especially if (unlike many of the workers funding pensions) they've already paid off mortgages.
Why should they use up their finite life for your benefit - unless you are prepared to do the same in return.
If human life has inherent value why do you believe that you should have command of a chunk of somebody else’s?
The capital endowment of society is already used up paying for those who are retired, so you can’t call in that.
Yes, yes, of course some engineers and truck driver and so on were involved. But one person for every 10,000 toasters, because automation.
The lie comes in when the equivalency is made between somebody getting a 'free' anything, and somebody had to sacrifice for that, or work for that. This is no longer the case, and hasn't been for decades.
Automation has made it possible to provide for almost everybody, with a tiny fraction of the inputs it used to take 50 years ago. But folks who's impression of what a factory is, or what work means was made in the 1950's keep exclaiming incredulously "Who will make things, if everybody has a UBI?!"
At root I blame the Protestant Work Ethic. Well-meaning folks want to keep believing that hard work results in a commensurate benefit. This has been a diminishing force in America at least, for decades. In our lifetimes it will disappear.
Ultimately if there are fewer jobs than there are people that want them, then wages get competed down - particularly in the secondary job market where individuals are near interchangeable. Give people money and the wages get competed down further. Which is what we see with the few retired people who continue to work. Very often they will volunteer just for something to do.
Offer a competing public job and you get a different effect. People move to that job and earn a wage. There is no argument about 'living incomes' then - if you are giving up your 8 hours you deserve a living wage. Private employers have to compete to get labour, rather than having it subsidised. Private wages are held up - particularly in the secondary job market which is changed overnight from a 'gig' economy into a 'talent' economy.
The private firms at that level will struggle pass the cost on, because if they do then those on the public job scheme will be permitted to replace them. You can't do that with an unemployed buffer stock. You can with an employed one that you can direct.
The resolution process in the 'battle of the markups' is moved from wage earners to low capital depth operations that frankly add very little value and ought to be competed out of existence by their higher capital depth competitors.
There won't be jobs for a lot of people to work to add to it.
>The 'B' stands for 'Basic'. Most of us already work to get better things. That won't change.
To me UBI is like a pension because you're getting a monthly payment for not doing anything. Your point doesn't really refute that.
Might as well call a dividend a pension - you get that 'unearned' as well.
Most software engineers or equivalent workers could retire right now or within a few years with their savings if they kept their expenses at what basic income would give. Yet basically none of them do it, why?
Re-designing jobs to be less shitty is one way, of course, but the reason they were not already done is not because the owners are evil per-se, but because it is too expensive, etc
See real world UBI examples in middle-east, where citizens get money, most of the world is done by imported labor, 2nd class citizens that are treated terribly, but their govt. and citizens are ok with the status quo.
So, here, we will have the worst of both worlds... - No money to pay for it ( No, the Fed printing press is not the equivalent of oil ) - More people to take care of.
--
> get out of this bullshit Protestant Work Ethic mindset that work is about suffering
Well, you created the strawman.
It is more about the values of diligence and discipline, no different from anything you want to achieve, like excelling in sports, arts, etc
Or simply because they don't have to. Too expensive is very often code for "Sure, I could change the job, but that would cost ME something and I still get enough workers without doing it, so ..."
An impartial observer will hopefully make predictions (driven by his biases, of course) but in a few years, use the hindsight to learn lessons.
Find another line of work, sure. Quit your job without getting a new one and expect me to pay all of your expenses the rest of your life, not so much.
What cities exist where you get more than $1,000/person-month in means-tested welfare?
Any benefit beyond the current means-tested welfare maximums from UBI is gravy; the main point is to replace means-tested welfare with a system that removes administative costs produced by duplication of function and perverse incentives created by fubding cliffs.
The USA spends $1.03 trillion per year on benefits at the moment, [0]. Most of that will be replaced. That's only federal benefits - more is spent by states.
I don't think this covers the administration costs of policing the benefits system (but I'm not sure).
There's also the veteran's pay and benefits which isn't technically part of this, but would be less necessary with UBI.
It's roughly equal to what the whole benefits system costs now.
[0] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...
> Universal basic income (UBI), also called unconditional basic income [...] is a sociopolitical financial transfer concept in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a legally stipulated and equal financial grant paid by the government without a means test.
Adding a means test to ensure that only some people receive the income would make it non-universal. You're describing a classic unemployment welfare system, but proponents of UBI argue that a universal income is simpler to administer and creates fewer perverse incentives.
And of course the US doesn't actually have 300 M people over 18, 20% are under 16.
The number is feasible for the US, though it would be one of the larger spending programs ever conceived. But not impossible.
Social security is not means-tested welfare.
Why do you presume that? Its common for UBI advocates to advocate it (at least as it matures) replacing means-tested benefits; its a lot less common for them to advocate it replacing other things, including earned benefits.
But just from a cost standpoint, it seems unlikely that we could actually afford a UBI would that actually provides universal-net-income. In practice those making above a certain threshold (from actual work, investments, or pensions/social-security) would have some kind of claw-back baked into the tax-system. The system still needs to be universal, everyone gets UBI payments, so that we don't cause the perverse effects of current means-tested programs, yet in practice, many individuals would just pay-back the UBI in taxes.
The point of UBI isn’t provide a universal net income, that’s plainly impossible (at least, from first order effects; after factoring in induced economic growth, it may be possible, but it is still not the point.)
The point is to eliminate the welfare trap posed by rapid early clawback of outside income in means-tested welfare programs, and eliminate the inefficiencies of redundant tax and welfare bureaucracies. If you tie in taxes on capital income as a progreasive taxes on non-capital income, it can also be a way to mitigate inequality driven by progressive automation and other factors driving returns to capital and a narrow subset of labor.
No.
with P as “person(s)":
300MP × 1k$/P/mo = 300G$/mo
300G$/mo × 12mo/yr = 3.6T$/yr
I have come to the realization that a perfectly free market is impossible as human nature and psychology dictates its self destruction. What is needed is a free market without the self destructive behavior. The five biggest candidates: export/import surpluses, excessive cash hoarding, rent seeking and cash inheritance [0]. The solution to these problems can involve a UBI but the UBI is never meant to achieve poverty reduction or provide bargaining power or whatever specific goal UBI proponents have in mind. It is merely a fair distribution mechanism.
Think of a speeding ticket whose payment is then used for a UBI. The point isn't that suddenly everyone can afford more things. The point is that a fine is a good punishment for a minor offense but the proceeds should not be used to fund the government lest it starts enforcing the law for the sake of government funding.
You can solve these 5 problems with taxation and fines and then redistribute the proceeds to everyone. The benefit will not come from the UBI, it will come from the fact that we cease self destructive behavior. Without the self destructive behavior we will be richer in real terms without engaging in a single hour of work. In other words, UBI is a good idea but not as a replacement for unemployment benefits.
[0] Cash represents a debt that society owes to the holder of the cash. Such a thing should never be inherited or held onto for long periods of time. If someone were to decide to spend all their money on stocks or gold and let their children inherit these tangibles, they would be acting in an exemplary manner as property should not be touched. As money represents the future property of others (it is not your property yet), it must not pass on.
As such, why can't people transfer cash to their descendants directly? What's the point of trading it for property, which can then be traded back to cash anyway?
Will never happen: a soon as it starts rolling to a significant number of people, the minimal rent set by landlords will be the amount of UBI. In addition to its other issues, it can't work in a market where landlords can freely set their rents.
Laws of economy are like laws of physics: you cannot cheat them. All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything, but no poor person will be better off because of it.
Small scale experiments on UBI are successful only because they are small scale, so they cannot affect economy at large. Once you make UBI truly universal the reality kicks in, and inflation eats it all.
If that was happen it would only encourage people on UBI to buy the cheapest houses or by land to build. Not being bound to a location, they would be able to do so easily.
> All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything [...] inflation eats it all.
Plain false. UBI does not create new money out of nowhere.
Even assuming that you somehow manage to finance UBI with tax raises alone think about what you'll be doing: you would be moving money from the rich to the poor, which sounds good in theory, until you realize that rich people and corporations keep their money in financial assets. Now, the reason why all the FED money printing so far caused only mild inflation is because the money flew to financial markets. If you use taxes to redirect it to common people then you are doubly screwing them: you are crashing stock markets, ruining their 401(k) savings, and at the same time causing price inflation of everyday things.
Not at all. In a lot of countries it's not possible to arbitrarily create money out of nowhere.
Most proposed UBI implementation replace the existing welfare and a plethora of financial aids, programs and tax reliefs, leaving the overall tax rates roughly similar to the existing one.
As demand and prices rise, supply will to rise to meet it, if not physically or legally constrained.
There are still no jobs there, so either those landlords keep the rent low enough that people can afford some kind of existence on UBI, or their houses stand empty (like they do at the moment). And competition would limit rent - on a national scale there is already a lot more housing than needed and the result is that rent is very low in flyover country, but people still can't afford to live there, whereas landlords in the cities that have jobs are currently a de facto oligopoly that can squeeze and squeeze.
> Laws of economy are like laws of physics: you cannot cheat them. All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything, but no poor person will be better off because of it.
At first order UBI is wealth transfer not wealth creation - the working poor will be better off, the middle/upper class will be worse off. At second order UBI unlocks a lot of real value that's currently a deadweight loss: people who could work for a few hours a week, but don't because that would lose them their benefits. It frees up the labour that's currently burned on complex benefit administration to be redirected to doing something productive instead. And by making it easier for people to change jobs, get training/education, or start a business, it increases labour efficiency.
There is no free lunch in economics, and if anyone tells you their policy will make people better off then you're right to ask where the brass tacks of that value creation actually lie. But UBI has some compelling answers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/VanDwellers
There are plenty of country towns that are rapidly emptying due to lack of jobs, and literally offer to sell you a house for $1 if you commit to living in it (and maintaining it) for a year. An awful lot of small towns are desperate for new residents.
There's no actual housing shortage. There's a shortage of housing near the jobs.
But even if that's not the case, riddle me this: how much does rural land cost? An average of ~$3000/acre in the USA (an acre is 4046sqm). Source: https://www.landsoar.com/acre-of-land-cost/
If landlords increase the cost of rent, people will just build cheap houses in cheap areas.
The bigger problem is that you have to punish working people with an income tax that funds the UBI. In most cases taxation is basically a punishment for bad behavior. You can optimize taxes the same way you can optimize profits. Tax involving activities cut into profits, so they should be avoided, at least from the perspective of an accountant.
i.e. people don't stop working because they have money, they stop working because they get less money from work
Ah yes, the God of Commerce doesn’t like it when you give other gods more attention.
If it's a theocratic state, that might be an issue, but if it's just a religious populace I see no reason to believe you're right.
You must diversify your economy to become less dependent on oil. However, it is easy for the government to take control over oil. The president can become a multi billionaire while ignoring the rest of your country.
Also, the second order impact of oil money appreciating the currency and therefore the reducing the international competitiveness of non-oil industries definitely has a big impact. In contrast, in a UBI situation, GDP still depends on the productivity of the country, not just the wealth generated from a niche (in terms of employment) extractive sector.
Exactly. This is what happened in France with the allocations logement (APL). Since the state was now funding a part (let's say 150€ over 400€ rent), what the landlords did was rising the rents by about the same amount. Results were net negatives:
1. Purchasing power of student didn't change
2. Rent augmented for everyone in the segment of housing that could be rent to students
3. Rich people get richer
Which is usually a small shrinking country town where people are leaving because there are no jobs.
Precisely. People are trying to treat the symptoms of inflation by throwing money (UBI) at the problem. The problem isn't that people don't have enough money; the problem is that the cost of living has become less and less affordable. The solution is to reduce the cost of living by offering people basic affordable alternatives - not giving people more money to afford housing, but helping the price of housing reduce over time (a process that, if it were entirely handled by the private sector, we would call commoditization and hail as a success). Not by giving people more money to spend on K-12 education, but by making K-12 education free (wait... we already did that one). If we give people more money (Pell grants for university degrees), the price just spirals out of control.
Treat the problem, not the symptoms.
In other words, the money spent every month in the US economy is much more than the money UBI would add.
It’s true that there would be inflation but it would not cancel the full effect.
I can't help but wonder if that isn't the actual goal.
That said, losing e.g. $5 of benefits per $10 you earn plus an income tax of e.g. 10% is the same as a marginal tax rate of 60% in terms of distorting the market. Flatter cliffs are less distortionary, and a UBI is what what happens when you take that concept to its limit.
Yes it is. In fact, its the central argument advanced by advocates on both the left and right who have advocated UBI (or the equivalent-policy-under-a-different-name of "negative income tax".)
> it’s an argument for gradual phase-outs instead of cliffs.
Gradual phase-out (through the effect of income taxes, at the marginal tax rate set by the earned income) instead of cliffs (through traditional means-tested funding mechanism) is the central point of UBI.
If you are a “fan of UBI” and you don’t understands UBIs central function and motivation, what is it exactly you are a fan of?
Yeah, UBI is just “gradual phaseout” plus “eliminate duplication of function between the multiple welfare bureaucracies and between th aggregt of them and the tax bureaucracy”.
You can in principal do the first without the second, if you have a strong ideological devotion to government waste, but since switching to a gradual phase-out, ceteris paribus, increases the cost for any given level of support for those most in need, realizing available efficiencies at the same time is kind of important for practicality.
And it sucks whenever you approach the edge of the assistance thresholds.
I was always grateful for the assistance, but it was always stressful when you were in the "just over the threshold" area.
And when I was working with people receiving assistance, managing that transition was critical in getting people into work.
I used to phrase it as "yep, you're only going to earn $20 a week more than the dole working fulltime in this job, but in three years, if you stayed on the dole, you'd still only be on the dole. Odds are you'll be doing far better after 3 years of working."
Policy makers are trying to minimise the impact of them, but people not receiving assistance expect those who are to be subject to strong limits.
With control of the firm, they can vote for certain benefits at no direct cost, and thus don’t need as much cash.
Now UBI and worker ownership of the means of production can be combined, but I thought I’d mention the latter as a possible alternative solution to be considered when talking about solving structural economic problems.
There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.
Aside from removing stigma from using the universal minimums it solves the problem of losing 3X your income when combining separate state food program, city housing, and medical programs. That remains a problem even when individual programs move away from thresholds.
Also, in the same way that a universal basic income removes a layer of bureaucratic overhead, having universal healthcare also removes the burden of middlepeople handling insurance claims.
Even 2 dollars a day of basic income would complete exhaust the government budget.
Fair, it's not just free money but it is a guarantee of at least 100 days of work a year.
https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/observatory/mahatma-gandhi-nat...
https://www.nrega.nic.in/netnrega/mgnrega_new/Nrega_StateRep...
There was nothing in the context that suggested that this this discussion was only about the poor in developed countries. After all, most of the world's poor actually live (unsurprisingly) in poor to low-medium income countries. Perhaps this is something that I should be mindful of in the future?
As someone born in a "third world country" I am obviously very interested personally in these problems. In the state I was born in, one out of three people is still below the poverty line (which is like 2 USD a day). To me it seems that for us it is much more practical to learn from whatever the fuck China is doing rather than a method whose primary appeal is ideological.
Some kind of support is needed in this case because none of the gains from all that efficiency are going to people who need money just to survive. It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.
I suggest Kolkata. The sight of frail old ladies barely covered by a single tattered sheet of cloth living on the footpath and begging for your alms has a way of communicating the reality of the world that nothing I can write could ever possibly match.
Even if you find yourself less fortunate compared to other people in your country, please have some empathy for the scale of problems in other, less developed countries.
Can you clarify what you meant by this? To me it seemed that you are implying that somehow the poor in third world countries are better off than the poor in first world countries because they still have their 2$ a day jobs.
My comment was quantitative, strongly implied by the math. If I were going to make a qualitative statement, I would say life sucks for almost everyone on this godawful planet in different ways. You're trying to parse out a judgement of those relative conditions in me saying UBI might not be a universal solution to the hell-sphere theory of life on Earth. I don't know why.
> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.
The reason universal basic income does not work in India is not because people here still have their $3/day jobs. It doesn't work because there is simply not enough wealth here to restribute, so the problem here is still one of creation of wealth.
https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/SNAP_Estimate/frmEs...
> There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.
UBI is a combination of two things:
(1) Gradual phase-out of support (I think this is your “progressive support”), and
(2) Recognizing that this isn’t just metaphorically “like taxes but in reverse” but it is largely identical (but for variations of definitions applied that do more to increase administrative costs than to advance any programmatic goal) functions performed by the tax bureaucracy, so that having multiple separate welfare bureaucracies assessing and measuring slightly different definitions of income and a few different add-on requirements for each program is mostly waste compared to having one common definition of income and one common benefit program for programs.
In Australia, we have a lot of outsourcing and automation ("robodebt" was a recent scandal, where automated overpayment clawbacks were sent out to thousands of people, sometimes incorrectly). This hasn't improved matters.
The problem is not particularly connected to "public servants" - it's clearly possible to screw up this kind of thing whether private/public or in-person/automated. It's a matter of policy and attitude, not the delivery method.
If you build a system with the intent to humiliate and deter its users, it will waste everyone's time regardless of who provides it and how.
In an ideal world, somehow all the major programs are carefully co-designed to not do this, but given that they might come from different levels of government, have been designed at different times and have their phase-outs "legislated in" in ways that's hard to fix.
One of the things about public services in the US is that they are punitive in nature. They are designed to make you feel terrible about yourself and give you as big a hassle as possible.
If you're a low wage employee, you might need food stamps, cash assistance, housing assistance, child care assistance, and medical assistance. Every single one of those is a different government agency with a 9-5 schedule that doesn't do weekends or federal holidays.
Did your day care for your 2 kids forget to give you a form to fill out? Well then, when your child care has lapsed, have fun waiting 3-6 months for slots to open up. No, we don't care that you have a job which is why they're in daycare to begin with. Have fun with our antiquated automated service in which you wait 2 hours to talk to someone for 5 minutes in order to get a code to call back every week to check on the status of your case.
Rinse and repeat that for every state agency and program. Keeping up with state benefits is a 10 hour a week job if you have kids, and that's if everything is going okay.
On top of everything else, one of the reasons poor kids tend to have worse outcomes is because their parents are consistently stressed out from virtually every direction. If it's not the crappy job, it's the social services people. If it isn't the social services people, it's the stress of parenting adults.
I'm mostly scared they'll try to implement a home run solution, screw it up, and then retard society for the near future.
Section 8 housing is also a great example of bad public policy. Since landlords are under no obligation to accept the vouchers, and even when landlords are they will find another reason not to accept the vouchers, it segregates poor people into specific apartment complexes that do accept the vouchers. These properties are usually terrible and not worth the market value cost. Years ago I lived in a very nice apartment that was cheaper and in much better condition than the apartments that accepted section 8 housing in my town.
Perhaps a universal basic income makes the most sense as it would provide choice without labeling someone as poor. I suspect this would simply lead to an increase in housing and commodity prices across the board, but at least people have the agency to decide what they need most. I also suspect it would be a much more efficient and effective form of public assistance.
For example, I’ve known people who have turned down raises because it would put them into a higher tax bracket. They thought it would result in less money overall (which is not how it works, in case anyone reading finds themselves in this situation).
That’s a benefit of something like UBI. It’s easy to understand your incentives.
I do not see why kids cannot be taught how the system works, including marginal tax rates which is a one day lesson in 5th grade math.
No government, more so democratic states, wants their citizenry to know and understand the system that subjugates them.
Think of all the things you learned after high school, then reflect on the things you were taught. Refer especially to the history of one's country. Now do you see?
If there was no monetary nor mental overhead to getting around the city could that boost commerce enough to pay for it?
More recently Seattle's Transit Riders Union (among other groups) has advocated for more substantial free transit. Some baby steps in this direction have been realized with such things as free transit for high school students.
There's probably a common sense solution somewhere that includes both free ridership and also fairly strong enforcement around loitering and hygeine, but I don't know if any city has managed to really nail it.
Incidentally, I think a lot of similar problems come up in cities that have free public bathrooms. A small number of abusers tend to make those bathrooms extremely unpleasant for everyone else.
Where you have an issue the fare requirement is often used an excuse to enforce a minimum level of "cleanliness" if you will.
If homeless people do not have ready access to shelter, but do have ready access to public transit, then you get them spending time on public transit for the shelter it provides, which means they use it a lot more then they would if they were using it for transit. Public transit isn't even particularly good shelter, but since most places don't allow loitering (with selective enforcement against the undesirables), you again get them congregating on the few places that do.
The higher prices of the paid compartment would go towards subsidizing the free compartment.
The problem is political. At least in the US, this approach would be opposed by both major political ideologies: the right because it is a government hand out, and the left because it is unfair to have a "poor" section of the bus (see the reaction to mixed income apartments having a separate section 8 entrance, or restricting the amenities that section 8 residents are allowed to use, which is essentially what you are proposing).
Further, the nature of bureaucracies in our economics system (be they for profit or government) is to prioritize profit centers at the expense of cost centers, so it would be difficult to maintain the "poor" compartment to an adequate level. Compounding on this is the fact that the poor and homeless tend to be the least politically powerful groups, and maintaining adequete funding for this scheme would be difficult,
It's worse than that imho.
I live somewhere that provides a fair bit of support and free services (e.g., transitional housing) for the homeless. That doesn't get rid of the homelessness, all it means is that the remaining people without access to shelter and showers are those that are generally incompatible with polite society for a variety of reasons. (Crime, severe drug abuse, severe mental illness, etc.)
Implementing it as "anyone can hop on wherever" implements a weak filter for the worst of the homeless population using it as shelter. Those who've been refused or kicked out of available shelter.
I could see it working more as a "free transit passes" program so they could be revoked and not re-issued for people that were going to cause ongoing issues in the same way someone that shows up to transitional housing and gets high and assaults other tenants and neighbours could be removed.
You can say all you want about Castro, but he did in fact eliminate homelessness in Cuba.
The city provides studio apartments with "daily meals, laundry, showers, housing application assistance, community and health service referrals, skills building, relationship building, connection to volunteer and employment opportunities, and other support services".
It's not a home, but it certainly means that the people availing themselves fully of the opportunities presented to them aren't unwelcome on transit because of their inability to maintain basic hygiene.
But there are a lot of wrinkles to this kind of thinking. What if there is access to shelter, but it imposes some kind of deal breaking restriction like no drug usage? Or no felons? Let's get even more controversial - what if the shelter bans sex offenders, should homeless sex offenders be forced to shower in libraries? Things get complicated, and a lot of politicians aren't willing to die on these hills when their housed constituents have strong emotional reactions to these things.
The only way to reduce homeless is rebuild traditional value and traditional family structure. Less people get divorced, less kids get abandoned. People always get last resort from the big family and the church and family friends and church friends, etc.
Get help from the government and charity organizations should be rare cases.
But we are on the destructive path for a long time. Part of it is natural consequence of social change, but it's also partly due to some people think they are capable of design a new society from top to bottom.
Afaik, most abandoned homeless kids are queers, most often trans. Then kids with behavioral issues (yes, stemming from crappy parents in the first place). I really dont understand how return to traditional values and family structure would improve either.
I agree that potential problems should always be anticipated. But if the conclusion is "well we have homelessness so we can't offer a service that will be taken advantage of by homeless people in unintended ways" we can just as well agree that everyone with a six figure income move into a gated community and leave the rest of society to THE PURGE.
The obvious conclusion for a self-respecting society should be "let's try free public transit and also throw money and mental health support at the homeless population until they don't exist any more."
The objection isn't that homeless people will use the service, it's that they'll effectively make it unusable by everyone else.
Yes, in an ideal world that wouldn't happen. But whether or not we should have homeless people, we do, so proposals need to take this reality into account. If you think you can "just fix" homelessness, then do that first and worry about transit after.
I would love to use public transit in SF, but instead I'll just keep using Uber for my own sanity and health.
Making public transit broadly appealing is the way to sustain it. Finding competing services to tax to pay for it is a minor part of the overall strategy I think.
For example, I know 6 sane, smarter-than-average, old guys who drift around the SF Bay Area mid-Peninsula region who don't drink or do drugs, but are poor and cannot afford housing on their own. 2 have managed to get accommodations, 1 by the COVID lockdown. That's 4 left looking for 24-hour coffee shops, laundromats, bus stops, and diners.
The solution in my mind requires everything, at once. Homes for those who need it. Mental support for those who need it. And enforcement for those who merely want to abuse and corrupt the system.
The homeless problem lumps everyone together into one camp and while they do suffer equally, their reasons are vastly different. There is no single solution, and it certainly will be difficult.
Unfortunately i see the friction involved in _actually_ solving this problem as so great that it will never be done. Though some extreme measures may be taken.
Furthermore, what about being homeless is good? Since all i said is a way to resolve homelessness, in my eyes, yet you perceive that as hate. To me it is hateful to leave those people in this state.
Doesn't ghettos implies that they're all in the same place? Maybe having a few everywhere would avoid that problem.
> That's an incidental effect of not providing proper housing.
There are many causes, it is not only an effect of not providing proper housing, which I think was GC's point.
I mean there's a lot of people who would gain a lot of opportunities if they could afford to commute, so free public transit would also reduce the homeless and poverty situation.
What really makes me angry is that it's not a dichotomy; the US is the richest country in the world, they can give free health care, housing and education to everyone. But they refuse, instead (nationally) pumping it into the military while (privately) funneling it upwards to the extremely rich.
That money could be redistributed to raise the minimum wage (and if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is effectively saying "I'd pay you less if I could") and improve the lives of everyone.
But the people in power (and their voters) don't want that, because that means considering those worse off as them as equals. It boils down not to economics, but egoism, classism and racism. It's the "as long as I got mine" attitude.
also the current Lab gov has promised to cap Public Transport at a maximum of $4.90.
A pretty significant saving https://twitter.com/MarkMcGowanMP/status/1350648142585217025...
*Goes into effect Jan 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22136... ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2017.10.002 )
> Findings suggest certain flaws limit the program’s potential success since the program design is misaligned with its primary stated goals, and several program goals relating to external effects of fare reform cannot be evaluated. Although it would be valuable for transport managers in other cities to learn about this experience, the Tallinn fare-free public transport program provides scant transferable evidence about how such a program can operate outside of a politicized context,
Another anecdotal one: Many companies offer travel / commute expense cover. If my commute wasn't covered by my employer, I'd be spending €250 a month out of pocket just to get to work (in addition to the time spent). It would make me reconsider working for that employer in favor of something more local.
As a public service, do we ask fire departments to be profitable? What consequences happen when we try and make other essential services profitable, e.g. police?
Should armed forces be made to be profitable?
How do you define profitability in the first place... how do you define the costs and benefits?
Why does this question only ever seem to come up when we're talking about things that raise quality of life for the poor?
It doesn't need to be profitable, but if it isn't, then the money to subsidize it needs to come from somewhere. Do you think raising taxes for this would be politically popular, especially if most taxpayers wouldn't use it?
> As a public service, do we ask fire departments to be profitable?
It is politically popular to use tax dollars to fund fire departments.
> Should armed forces be made to be profitable?
This is a textbook example of a public good. You can't give national defense only to people who pay for it. Either the whole country has it or nobody does.
> How do you define profitability in the first place... how do you define the costs and benefits?
This seems fairly obvious: if the income from fares exceeds the costs to pay the drivers, maintain the vehicles, etc.
> Why does this question only ever seem to come up when we're talking about things that raise quality of life for the poor?
Because people don't like paying for things that they don't get value from, even if other people do.
Where are people opposed to taxes being used to fund fire departments, and why?
Why don't we see public transportation as one of your "public goods"?
Is it possible those people who you say are so concerned about value are maybe not seeing how they gain from having public transportation for their community, or are they more concerned about someone else deriving more value from a service than they would?
By definition, public goods must be non-excludable. Public transportation is excludable.
> Is it possible those people who you say are so concerned about value are maybe not seeing how they gain from having public transportation for their community, or are they more concerned about someone else deriving more value from a service than they would?
The problem isn't that the value to someone else is greater than the value to them. It's that what they'd pay for it in taxes is greater than the value to them.
The commenter seems to be talking about the part of public transportation that isn’t excludable.
Because in general people like paying for things that are useful to them and don't like paying for things that aren't. The poor don't pay much in the way of taxes, so things that are only used by the poor are of course less likely to get funded.
How are you measuring this?
No need to get all righteous, I'm not saying all public services need to be profitable, I'm saying we need to stop evaluating public services on strictly on their cashflow as many often are, and instead look at them in terms of the greater economic system they operate in.
Huh? I mean, sure, enforcement is pretty lax, but most people who ride buses in SF do indeed pay. The homeless generally do not, and drivers look the other way. (Frankly, I'm ok with this, as long as they aren't violent or using the bus as a toilet.)
Look at areas where the cost of distance is high. Rural areas. Areas with bad transit. Islands. Then reverse that.
Basically anything you do to decrease the cost (in money or time) of moving from A to B flattens the cost of living. The poor guy who just wants to hang a picture doesn't have to put up with the insane costs of some wire and nails at the local hardware store that mostly caters to yuppies and has the pricing to match. He can justify the cost in time and money of getting on the subway or get in his car and go where it's cheap. Now apply this to every economic transaction from buying milk to getting a job and everything in-between. The second and third order effects are immense. People can afford to stop transacting with bad jobs and bad landlords because they can afford to access the alternative equivalent services.
Of course improving transit never gets much support because the people with the money don't want it spend on the subways they don't use and they don't want to have to compete with the poors for access to car infrastructure so you never see that stuff democratized, just more fees and whatnot to discourage use by those not wealthy enough.
It makes sense too. I can get a 30 day pass to drive with public transportation as much as I want, but it is so much faster to take my car that I essentially only take it (prepandemic).
[...]
In my case, without ever managing to arrange to get my disabled fare card, my life got better simply moving to places with cheaper bus fare and a lower cost of living. Keeping public transit affordable and/or making sure it is good quality and will get people where they need to go can help poor people more than other groups who are more likely to own their own vehicle.
I think part of what this boils down to, more than just means testing or fares/rates/etc. is that any time you put up logistical/bureaucratic/cognitive/complicated barriers to something, you discourage its use beyond what you're directly trying to prevent (in name - sometimes the barriers are entirely intentional. something something voting...)
This goes beyond just poor peoples' access to public transportation. Most adults experience this in at least some way dealing with government bureaucracy. It's key in product design - making something confusing and hard to use will discourage its use, even if it delivers a lot of value once the difficulty is overcome. Humans only have limited amounts of patience, focus, attention, time. If you are poor those are even more scarce, since they're being spent on basic day-to-day survival.
Anyway, I think particular public policy options that could fix these types of problems may delve a bit too far into politics. But I think the problem is fixable. Make things simpler
Voting. Packing heat. Getting a parking pass for the state park. Building a garage. Basically anything the white collar and higher class doesn't trust the poors to do to their liking gets all sorts of bureaucratic red tape added.
Rents are getting too high and people can't save to buy a place of their own anymore.
I believe if you fix the housing problem (fundamentally limiting how much property a person or corporation can own), then you'll make life easier for a huge percentage of poor people stuck in debt traps that leave them without a crucial asset for survival - a roof over there head.
The policies that today make the rich richer ... well, make the poor, poorer - who would think!
It should be noted that a policies make marginal housing impossible and so create the situation of anyone losing ordinary housing sinking to absolute destitution. We need more mobile home parks, more residential hotels and so-forth. And oppositely, these are seen things lower home values and so relentlessly attacked (though SF seems to be allowing more of these to open up lately, according to what I see on craigslist).
One thing I see traveling around the world and observing cultures, is lack of direction. It's a common theme in every country and culture.
And by that I don't mean just providing raw information.
But actually holding someone by the hand and showing them a better way too -- and arming them with the information and examples in real life to show that it actually works.
Example -- it's all well and good to give that mom lower bus fares. Good. But also how do you help that mom to craft a good sustainable 5 year plan to get her out of poverty by following it.
What's needed is to point out that - say - becoming a nurse is a good option. And that to become that nurse you start with A, then go to B, then C then Nurse.
The low bus fares alone, not gonna do that.
If you get this ones:
- Get to where they need to go conveniently and inexpensively. - Get access to education, training and credentialing. - Get access to things that support their health, whether that is nutritious food, adequate exercise, clean air or medical treatment.
It is easier to get this other ones:
- Access housing that is within their budget. - Get access to earned income.
All this seems quite basic. And it should be in place as it benefits everybody in the long term. But, I guess that that's the problem, short term some people will get more if this does not happen. Long term investment is lacking.
[0] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-med...
So easy to say. So hard to implement. Especially if the goal is that the access does not go away as income goes up.
Most solutions out there involve shoveling money at the problem. But in practice, this will just make housing prices go up. The poor will still be left out in the cold.
The only solution which might work is building more units that would appeal to people with low income in desirable locations. This is still almost impossible due to zoning restrictions, but it's the only way out.
The issue is not that employers are struggling to fill vacancies it is that the salaries have not kept up with cost of living for so long that people are now reaching a tipping point. As others have put it, it is not a shortage of people but a shortage of suckers.
Irrespective of UBI the cost of goods and services should probably have a much smaller profit margin or much higher price tag, but no one able to influence or correct this stands to benefit.
- [0]: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-federal-minimum-wage-has...
Many people in minimum wage jobs today would not be able to save enough for a house within their whole work life.
Owning a house and not having housing costs associated is a huge disposable income multiplier.
Also, the issue IS that employers are having trouble filling positions. You’re conflating cause with effect. It doesn’t matter if the effect is due to lack of housing or terrible wages, the result is that people don’t go to work in those places.
Everyone knows it's true, most slaves and non-slaveholders agree both morally and pragmatically it's the way forward.
And yet strangely, the people who became rich from owning slaves, when offered the opportunity to free those slaves, instead started an expensive and catastrophic war to try to prolong the practice.
What would you do if your absolute and relative wealth relied on a bunch of other people being poor?
It's a difficult question to answer or to ask. Some being people gave up motivation to get out of poverty for political or personal reasons, some people are happy enough in poverty, some people try hard to get out of poverty but are lacking education, degrees, experience, opportunity, appropriate network or just the proper social norm that let them be accepted in an environment that allows them to get out of poverty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism
“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'
Said Diogenes: 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".”
1) Homelessness is never a desirable state and it helps no one, especially tourism which employs a lot of lower middle class people. Look at SF and Portland.
2) Just because homelessness is bad != not providing assistance and putting these people in jail. They’re two separate issues. I would vote for progressive issues that are highlighted in the article but I can’t stand progressives that try to demean others by calling them ‘cruel’ and gain moral high-ground over others. It’s unproductive.
We should never accept crime and shitty streets as an acceptable compromise. We can do much much better as the article indicates. I am disappointed at how many people in SF Bay Area think that tent cities are okay and they think they’re some kinda of a saint for caring for the homeless. If they really cared, they wouldn’t have let this problem happen in the first place. Anyone who is trying to solve the problem is looked down upon here which is mind boggling. Immediately labeling people as cruel without having a deeper discussion is not going to solve the problem.
We should strive to eliminate homelessness and not make it the new normal.
I lived in vehicles for 9 years, so don't get self-righteous or white-knighting. It is cruel to criminalize poverty, and it is cruel to "benignly" neglect homeless people with a lack of services, treating them like criminals in the assistance programs, offer a troublesome patchwork of charity resources rather than integrated delivery, and give only a pittance of assistance instead of doing what is cost-effective and humane to get people into better situations holistically and comprehensively. Mental healthcare including psychiatry, social skills training, and therapy, substance treatment, nutrition, and good medical care are just some of the essential aspects of raising people up.
The US typically has an awful and abhorrent track-record when it comes to delivering necessary social services. For example, in Santa Clara County, an average homeless man without Social Security can expect to receive ~$149 in almost cash and ~$205 in SNAP (previously known as a "food stamps"). The ABAWD requirement comes-and-goes periodically with mandating work in order to receive benefits. (How can a homeless person hold a job if they don't have shoes or the resources to clean themselves?)
Healthcare is provided by substandard Medi-Cal (Medic-Aid) which now includes slightly less horrible dental services (Denti-Cal).
Cell phones are provided by the Lifeline service.
The only catch is that this magical work still costs natural resources to work. Topsoil, fresh water, oil, fish, lumber, pollinators, etc... every necessary resource to keep things working gets allocated and used automatically.
What will happen right after pressing this button is that there will be a massive population boost followed by a massive allocation of resources because perceive no longer perceives economic resistance as their families grow. So population grows exponentially and so does resource sage. Then, once resource depletion is imminent, a war over resources would take place.
After years of non-stop war, people will realize that peace is possible if they establish reproduction quotas. But each time the quotas are not respected, war happens again.
Would that be a better world? I don't think so.
See: population decline in advanced economies, especially Nordic countries and middle/upper middle class America.
Humans are still animals that act on instinct, and our instinctive behavior is, when faced with dangerous short term threats, to reproduce en-masse.
War torn countries are the best example of this, humans fall back to a mass quantity strategy for survival.
But in a situation of resource abundance? People have less kids and invest more in each child.
Anyway as another commenter pointed out, birth rates will decline on their own if people are comfortable and happy. Which presents itself with its own problems in the current economic system that seems to depend on constant population growth, and in many economies where birth rates have declined they compensated with immigration. Which presents its own challenges of course, but then, the US was founded by colonizer invaders, the local population genocided, then built up by millions and millions of immigrants (voluntary or slaves).
They are replenishable/renewable at a rate. And that rate has been for many years slower than the consumption rate. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=29athrowaway When the consumption rate is higher than the replenishment rate, the resource is depleted over time.
Care to explain? There is a high correlation between level of education and a reduced number of children.