European Citizen's Initiative for UBI | Hacker News Reader

European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

eci-ubi.eu

68 pointsnemexis146 comments

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote.

From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win for a sufficiently narrow group of people. You're basically taking wealth from the top X of society and transferring it to the bottom 1-X, where X is probably somewhere in the range of 30-70%. This is too wide for the strategy to work effectively. Either no one really feels like they're winning that much, or the cost to the losers is so high that they're going to fight tooth and nail to stop it.

That's just the implementation challenge I see from the political angle. I also think there are a ton of problems with UBI and it would probably be very economically and socially destructive, but that's a separate argument from the fact that it's going to be very difficult to implement in a democracy.

I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.

In a democracy, where votes are there to be bought, but perhaps not other regimes have this specific flaw.

I assume the hypothesis is that the potential benefits would be spread too thin across the population to be considered particularly valuable.

I listened to a Tulsi Gabbard interview, and she said that was one of the reasons Obamacare seems half-assed. She said that the Democrats and Republicans both had opportunities to make compromises that would have benefited everyone, but they decided not to work together because it gives both parties something simple to argue about during election season. Democrats get to say "Obamacare sucks because Republicans are holding it back", and Republicans get to say "Obamacare is another big government program that doesn't even do what they said it would". Both parties are right, and both parties have no desire to fix it.

I'm not a political scientist, but it doesn't seem too far fetched? What OP seems to be saying is that it's easier to capture a small but strong follower base with focused effort, than a large (or any) follower base with diffuse effort. If the current social and political climate is any indication, people (at society level) genuinely don't seem to be receptive to efforts of unification and the betterment of mankind.

The agendas that are most successful are those which are laser focused to benefit particular groups, or even worse, to ensure that certain vilified groups have it worse. In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people. Even worse, some of the most ardent opposition is from the social class would most stands to benefit from liberal policies.

The whole game theoretic aspect of rational actors is out the window. Instead we have ever more isolated groups of people who don't care that they have it bad as long as their presumed opposition has it worse.

In light of all that, I'm actually inclined to agree with OP that a campaign that would benefit north of 50% of the population could easily be unpopular as a punchy opposition riles up the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to vote against their own interests.

> In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people.

I don't think it's certain that it would benefit the majority of people. In fact, I think it's unlikely.

One of the tremendous advantages of the US (and why we're so rich compared to almost all EU countries) is that our cultural programming includes the implicit understanding that higher taxes introduce deadweight loss and other higher-order losses of efficiency. Taxes aren't as simple as "taking from A and giving to B" except in the very short term. Over time, it results in less efficient resource allocation, capital resources leaving to less distorted markets, etc.

This happens on both a personal and institutional level. The gamble you're taking when you raise taxes is that "stickiness" (social ties, pre-existing legal and technical infrastructure, procedural momentum, etc.) won't just cause your tax base to leave. However, stickiness only slows the process down, rather than stopping it entirely.

This is encoded in American culture's sense of economic fairness, which precludes aggressively shafting people with more stuff just because you want their stuff.

When would you say this cultural identity developed? Because there are millions of people in this country that can remember a time when the top marginal tax rate was above 90%.

It dates at least back to the earliest Scots-Irish immigrants to the US. The wartime stuff was an aberration and not sustainable.

What is considered "wartime stuff"? Because the US has been preparing for, engaging in, or recovering from war for basically the entire history of the country including today as we are currently engaged in the longest war in US history.

Obviously that's referring to WW2, when the peak marginal income tax rate was temporarily raised to 94%. That was unsustainable because, absent a worldwide violent conflict, the highest income people will just emigrate to lower tax countries.

All of our wars since WW2 have been wars of choice. The survival of our nation hasn't been at stake.

So what about when the marginal rate was over 60% in the 1930s or when it stayed at 70% into the 1980s?

> All of our wars since WW2 have been wars of choice. The survival of our nation hasn't been at stake

As if any of the world wars had the US' survival at stake. Being separated by other powers by oceans on both sides, and having enormous amounts of resources and manpower meant that the last time the US was at any legitimate threat was 1812.

The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has done some very significant work in showing exactly that, and has built robust and successful empirical models demonstrating and predicting it. His book “The Logic of Political Survival” covers it in fascinating detail.

It’s not really that rare, there’s a reason for the common saying in public choice, “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs”.

Think subsidies. Industry specific subsidies (e.g. farmer subsidies) are popular, while industry wide subsidies (e.g. tax cuts for business) aren’t.

They are talking about dilution.

You can analyze this from the perspective of Public Choice theory. I think the claim would not quite be that the policy would be unpopular _with the population_ - just that it wouldn’t be in the individual interest of any politician, and therefore, as rational actors, they wouldn’t take the action to enact the policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interest...

On the contrary, it's a straightforward application of selectorate theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory

That doesn't make it correct, but it's not 'wild' at all.

Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy.

Also, I want fun, cool, tech and if the masses are being put out of work by fun, cool, tech we will have problems, and thereby see far less fun, cool, tech.

Wealth is not income; one is a stock, the other is a flow. This is not even Econ 101, it's grade-school level knowledge. You can't have a policy of draining "wealth" to fund an income subsidy without very severe side effects.

You don't need to ridicule. Can you explain why such a policy doesn't work? I must have skipped that day at school.

There was no intent to ridicule. The answer is that the policy is (1) unsustainable, not unlike a Ponzi scheme, and also (2) even prior to its inevitable collapse, such a policy distorts investment choices and thus makes society as a whole increasingly poorer. Note that there are similar policies that can be more sensible. For example, you can tax wealth and use the proceeds to gradually pay off some of the national debt. (Note that even these policies are typically only resorted to during emergencies, such as war.)

Its not like a Ponzi scheme, though. Nobody is getting rich from such a policy.

There are under 3000 billionaires worldwide. In order to generate enough revenue for any sort of meaningful UBI the government would have to raise taxes on more than just billionaires.

> Many people have more than a billion

Yes, exactly 2755. I’m having two and a half men flashbacks.

These ideas always start out targeting the “rich”, then end up falling squarely on the middle class who can’t afford tax advisors.

Many of the 1B+ people out there aren’t in it for the cash but the B comes from valuation of things that they own, those things usually being big chunks of corporations, and what they own isn’t stuff but power and influence in that entity.

You do away with those people and that power leaving gl everything else the same, what you are doing is giving more power to the other existing social structures and ensuring no single person outside them can check their power.

So? More outsized government official power and more power to faceless corporations no longer under individual control but an entity up for its own best interests at the whim of a complex social structure bound by law to do the best for that entity which often ends up very bad for the interests of individual freedom.

You want to take away multibillionaires you have to start with structural changes to prevent mergers and pseudomonopolies, you need ten companies fighting for what two or three have now.

If you don’t you end up further encouraging next quarter profitability targets and megacorp best interests.

in other words there is probably something to fix, but you can’t just target a few of the symptoms or trying to make things better you drive us further into dystopia

> Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population.

I think this isn't true. The UK got single-payer healthcare (with the creation of the NHS under the postwar Labour government) because it was felt that a national regime could deliver better health outcomes, following the experience of WW2. The NHS was enormously popular, thus it was embraced by the Conservatives, who beat Labour in the next election.

This is normal: successful welfare policies do not grant the party that introduced them lasting popularity and competent politicians understand this. A better model is that they are introduced because the party base wants the party to do it.

I am worried about how cost of living would explode to untenable levels. Low skilled labor prices would get out of control I am guessing since it is a basic supply/demand issue - when you put a floor with UBI, minimum wage to take up manual labor jobs would rise dramatically. It is actually incredible how much of our society depands on manual labor. Most people on HN are out of touch with this reality. The world runs on physically moving, stacking, filling, driving, cleaning, joining and constructing things. UBI I can see can diminishing the ability for the same laborers to obtain affordable food, housing, and transportation.

> UBI I can see can diminishing the ability for the same laborers to obtain affordable food, housing, and transportation.

I don't understand how this follows. I was with you until then, but IMHO UBI might negatively affect middle/upper class who relies most on lower class paid labor (things like cleaning, delivery, cooking, repairs). But people who provide these services already can and have to do them themselves, I don't see how UBI causing rising labor costs hurts them.

Building new housing requires low skilled labor.

The problem is price distortion and that whatever you do, prices will be raised until a section of society can barely survive because essentially enough people tend to make bad decisions and live beyond their means that sellers will raise their prices to whatever the market will bear, and there are always people willing to buy things they can’t afford.

Attempts to shape markets tend to do this.

When you make physical labor more expensive, it gets automated out of existence. And the part that can't be automated away gets reassessed to improve work conditions and make it more convenient to pursue that line of work. This is precisely what you want to happen.

It doesn't and won't. Automation is useful in certain areas but impossible in many. There is a reason why Tesla factories still have manual steps in assembling a car - it can't be automated away with reasonable costs.

Look at Switzerland (it is not UBI, but they have some of the highest labor costs): https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Zurich . A meal at an inexpensive restaurant which relies on low skilled labor (not just cooks and waiters, but the entire food supply chain) costs $27 USD. I am all for improving labor conditions though.

The largest problem for UBI - from a state and political standpoint - is that you are actually taking away power from the civil service and politicians, because they would no longer have the power over people's benefits. UBI reduces the amount of benefits you could afterwards give to specific political groups you favour.

Actually do what the electors want instead of leaving us to do it our way while they do the fame and glory bit.
Reforming the Civil Service would remove his life-support system.
It would kick away the ladder that's put him where he is.
While he's still standing on it.
The only way to reform the Civil Service system is to reform the political system.

No government's going to reform the system that put it into power.

- Sir Arnold Robinson

> Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote.

Do you have any source on that? One of the original welfare systems, in Imperial Germany, was introduced by conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to preempt the popularity of the Social Democratic party which was gaining popularity with its proposals.

Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states. There were wealth transfers, of course, but they were to the state, not citizens, and welfare wasn't linked to it.

> Do you have any source on that?

Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal. If you read the thread under my comment, you’ll find plenty of people pointing out researchers and historians who came to the same conclusion, e.g. (apparently) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose book I have ordered.

> Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states

This is entirely compatible with my observation. They aren’t democracies.

> Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal

As you might have noticed from the rest of my answer, i disagree with your observation, hence the question about sources or any extra information to help me understand how you got there.

So, some of the original and most popular welfare states - Imperial Germany, post-wars UK disagree with your observation.

Germany got universal healthcare in the 1800's while ruled by a monarchy.

That is compatible with my predictions.

It's not, because it was a constitutional monarchy with elections and everything.

Reading the main site, or the Spanish one:

https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/

Can't find a decent, detailed description of the proposal. They have an intro video, a translation of the same one in the main page:

https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/...

which is mostly gross oversimplifications, I suspect, to trigger emotional responses. Around 2:00 they mention funding. Basically, more and higher taxes, and the critical point, IMHO: replacing current subsidies and other public services with UBI. The devil is in the details, though, and wording is critical: they seem to say, but don't clearly state, that they're getting rid of everything else, and thus saving all that money to spend on UBI.

E.g. for countries with a public healthcare system: does UBI mean all public healthcare becomes private, and you spend UBI on your provider of choice? Does this mean people/enterprises no longer need to pay healthcare taxes?

E.g. for countries with unemployment insurance: does this mean it fully goes away, so people/enterprises no longer need to pay the unemployment tax?

E.g. what about pensions? Does UBI become your pension, thus no more taxes paid for your retirement? We all know what you need to live when you're 20 is a fraction of what you need at 70.

I'm extremely skeptical of any of these initiatives because they tend to be scarce in basic details. Which is likely done on purpose.

Agreed that it’s too scarce on details.

The obvious problem here is that UBI only makes sense if you take those other programs out (no public healthcare, no public pensions), but it will be unthinkable for most europeans to loose those. There’s no way to sell a change that requires people to take that amount of personal responsibility, especially when they’ve enjoyed life without them.

I also hate that what was a good economics idea has become into a meme, and has been modified in a way that defeats the purpose.

All the current talk about UBI started with people discussing back the concept of NIT (negative income tax), and the on-paper benefits of removing poverty traps from the system.

UBI would replace a lot of existing social security programs, pensions and health care are jone of those candidates.

It can't really replace health care. The system works because people who don't need it as much (young people) pay for it. If they can choose not to, the entire system falls apart.

That’s the “idea”, but there’s no way this would be the end result.

You’ll find the odd case of someone who instead of paying their health insurance decided to gamble their income or spent it on drugs. If UBI truly replaces public health, these people won’t have health services. There’s a snowballs chance in hell that you’ll be able to sell this politically in the EU.

Again, that's not what UBI will be. It wil be a social program, health care being public in all EU countries will be apart. Also worth noting, you cannot be not insured in Europe. Drugs have nothing to do with that neither, all German drug addicts have health insurance.

Read my comments, and the answers to yours: UBI is the a flat playment for everyone, but most existing social services have vastly different costs depending on many factors, including age.

The only way it would work was if UBI was calculated as the maximum payment needed by the most needy person. But then there would be no incentives to work for the vast majority of the population. No one producing is no one paying taxes, so no UBI.

How does that work across the EU though? Eastern Europe has minimum wages of just a few EUR/hr.

The answer is it doesn't :-)

A lazy answer if so, and a disappointing take on organizing society if that’s considered acceptable.

Maybe because "organizing society" according to some grand central plan isn't actually a very effective strategy.

Labor laws, entitlements, taxes, and other public policy are “organizing society”, and based on quality of life metrics most of Europe is crushing it. Sounds effective to me. I am an American living in a third world country in a first world suit, so I am admittedly biased.

Taxes are less destructive than radically restructuring the entire economy, which most UBI advocates seem to want to do.

Median household income in the US is significantly higher than any EU country except Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I think most Americans who complain incessantly about how "third world" America is view Europe through rose-colored glasses. Any third-world aspects of the US (which do exist) are not caused by our economic policies.

The real idea behind the UBI is to "radically restructure" the economy in a freedom-promoting direction, closer to something like the US today than current policy in the EU.

How much economic and employment freedom does one have when health care is tied to the current employer?

The EU doesn't have that particular dysfunction.

My point entirely. The EU already has more freedom than the US, in sense. UBI would only increase that difference, and would by no means make the EU more like the US. And again, the EU is made up of independent nations, so these EU/US comparisons are already wrong.

Fine, but what's the argument that this proposal will restructure the economy in a freedom-promoting direction? What's the argument that this is a move in the US direction, instead of away?

Adding the state as a middleman for a huge fraction of all production does not promote freedom, unless your definition of “freedom” is “the unfettered ability to smoke weed and watch cartoons all day”. In reality, if UBI passes, it will be used as an excuse to un-person political undesirables while keeping people with no intrinsic ambition satiated.

Ok, let's not use waterfall then.

If you really want to rebut his comment, tell us how it would work ( including where the money would come from ). Your comment is as lazy.

The money comes from taxing citizens, assets, and corporations, colloquially known as “productivity and wealth”. I’m not European, so it would be rude of me to speak authoritatively on the quality of life Europeans want for each other, but I’ll take a crack at it. A UBI should be an inflation indexed amount that allows for enough food, clothing, and shelter for a dignified life. Not extravagant, but not USSR communist quality. Americans might think of it as a “LeanFIRE” quality of life, or how the elderly live on Social Security.

If we encounter any entitlements susceptible to inflation or supply constraints, we use automation and technology to solve for that (medicine, energy come to mind).

Sam Altman proposed something similar to a UBI with American Equity [1], so I don’t think it’s too crazy of an idea to move towards implementation and experimentation. If you’re a central bank, buying up securities and distribute the dividends into citizen deposit accounts also held at the central bank is another path.

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/american-equity

And how much would that cost? Be sure to include inflationary effects in your calculation.

It would cost whatever citizens collectively are willing to shave off of wealth and productivity with taxes. You wouldn’t set a monthly amount and then throw your hands up and say it’s unaffordable. You’d start with the max amount you could reasonably convince a majority of citizens (who vote) to support and work backwards.

I’m not an expert, by any means, but to say it’s impossible seems flippant and intellectually dishonest. A better way to approach it would be with caution and the understanding that a lot of research and effort is going to be required if it’s to be implemented soundly (or determined to be untenable).

It is dishonest not to set a minimum amount : you said it yourself, it needs to cover the Basic stuff. So there is a minimum.

For the EU, this is in the ballpark € 1000 - € 1500 - € 2000 ( we already have people on 'benefits' in NL, so there is consensus about this 'living minimum' ).

If you would really care so much as you claim you do, you could have easily provided a basic budget for this grand plan.

But you can't.

I appreciate the snark, but there’s a reason policy is made in real life and not on “Hacker News.”

Exactly. In real life you run the numbers and that is why we don't have UBI.

Because something has not yet been done, does not mean it cannot be done.

Sam Altman used to "predict" that it is inevitable that 80 percent permanent unemployment is coming and this is why we need a UBI. He's changed his tune a lot about the details and I have no reason to believe he's got any kind of special expertise that qualifies him to speak on this topic. It's just a pet subject of his and he's very rich, so he can get eyeballs on his ideas. And then people imagine that means he must have good ideas on the topic when it means no such thing.

There are people in the US on Social Security who are homeless. UBI doesn't solve one of the key issues in the US: The high cost of housing rooted in broken housing policies and broken city planning.

I don’t disagree that housing and healthcare policy are intertwined with UBI policy and implementation. An unregulated free market is unsustainable, and therefore UBI alone isn’t going to solve the welfare problem.

I would love your take, as someone who has a lot of experience with homelessness and life challenges, what you envision as impactful public policy to help set a firm quality of life floor for everyone.

The initiative is apparently to introduce “basic incomes”, plural, which is presumably determined based on local economic circumstances. Not sure how that reduces “regional disparities” and achieves “territorial cohesion”, though.

All that will happen is people will pretend to live in rich expensive countries and actually live in cheaper countries. I already see this all the time with benefits.

Source, please?

In my peer group. Incentives drive behaviour

So, none. Obviously there will always be some assholes, that should not determine policy unless it gets out of hand.

The whole point of UBI is to remove means testing. I think we can set a number that works on average and let people move to suit their needs. We definitely should avoid all incentives to game the system as it will only distract and get the initiative bogged down in paper pushing bs.

Unfortunately, living standards differ too much within the EU for that.

I don't think that is a concern. I had this exact conversation on Reddit a couple days ago. What I wrote:

>The flip side is it's much easier to make up the difference due to the increased economic opportunity in <high cost of living area>. If you can't it's a good incentive to move somewhere cheaper in turn reducing the pressure on housing in <high cost of living area>.

Say I'd like to live in Monaco or Luxembourg. No one owes me that privilege. I can't just demand to get that. Even if I get a job in a grocery store or whatever to legitimise my residency.

If you're from Monaco or Luxembourg, you absolutely have the right to live there. You can't force people to emigrate because they're poor, that's ridiculous. And moving from a high COL to a low COL area in the EU still amounts to emigration.

In contrast people are being forced to move now without UBI. Take Portugal for example. Lots of the younger generation can't afford to stay in Lisbon or Porto due to rising costs and low pay.

No reason why the UBI needs to be a flat universal rate rather than adjusted based off local economic factors.

How would that work in practice? Wouldn't people just move to the higher UBI areas?

The higher UBI areas would also be higher cost of living areas so in the right setup there would be little incentive to move just for UBI benefits.

But you would get to live in a higher cost area, at no cost to you.

What is the motive to live in a high cost of living area? Usually the two biggest reasons are economic and social opportunity. Economic opportunity is irrelevant in this instance if UBI cancels out in the two locations. Will there be enough social opportunities for people to leave their friends, family, and home country to move to a higher cost of living area?

Freedom of movement in the EU is conditional on you contributing to the economy; if you move just for the benefits, you will be kicked out (in theory)

What about asylum seekers and war refugees?

Not citizens, they don't have any freedom of movement to start with.

Most of them will not be able to work unless, or until, they're granted work visas.

The exact same is already true for minimum wage and salary in general, and while some people do migrate, there has arguably been no society-ending migration wave due to this reason. This is a common trope that has no basis whatsoever.

Although you can move freely to any country, to recieve benefits in a most countries you need to have had a job for 3 months before you can claim any benefits.

UBI is supposed to be a baseline guarantee, so it would be quite OK to size it for the cheapest, least developed areas in the EU free-movement area. This should be coupled with very low or non-existent taxation of entry-level wages, so this "low" UBI would still be a meaningful subsidy even in the wealthiest areas of the EU.

How would it be meaningful when the rent you need to pay in Munich is several times what you need to live in eastern Poland?

> How would it be meaningful when the rent you need to pay in Munich is several times what you need to live in eastern Poland?

Not advocating for this. But the assumption would be if you can’t afford Munich, move.

There is no inherent right to live in Munich, whilst there is a natural right to life and a decent subsistence even for those who cannot immediately secure gainful employment. UBI is about securing the latter, not the former - and doing it at the lowest possible cost.

> There is no inherent right to live in Munich, while there is a natural right to life and a decent subsistence even for those who cannot immediately secure gainful employment.

Why do you believe in one and not the other? I don't see any compelling categorical difference between either of these. The latter just "feels better" because "life and decency" are positively connoted. In both cases, the "right" is that person A has to pay the cost for person B to live a certain way. If you restricted your argument, to, say, a "right" to the bare minimum nutritional supply to survive, that would be categorically different. However, that's not an issue in the EU anyway.

Yes, there is a natural right to live where you're at home.

So if at some point I have a home in, let's say Beverly Hills, then I have a natural right to live there for the rest of my life?

Possibly.

The EU is no unified entity. Fot obvious reasons, any UBI would be adapted to local circumstances. Side note, unemployment benefits are based the last salaries already, as a result they tend to reach the cap more often in places like Munich than the Polish border. Social security is not based on region, any rent subsidies are so. And while there is no right to live in Munich, there the right to live where you want. Or to continue to live in the place you already live, if not necessarily the house or apartment.

I did not read this proposal, but if it is meant to pass as an EU directive, it will then require the member states to ratify it as an actual law, following the general principles contained in the directive. So for example, if the EU directive that passes says "The amount of the UBI has to be between 50% and 80% the average salary", the countries can set a number that way, which can be revised or not in the future, etc. That's how it usually works, for example PSD2, about payment services, had general ideas that obviously member states implemented differently in the details.

In theory, if a member state implements a directive in a way that is not faithful, it might risk a fine from the EU, but member states generally do not care much about it, I am not even sure if all of the fines that have been issued in the past have been paid...

This would probably be implement as a Directive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(European_Union)), meaning individual EU countries need to devise their own laws on how to reach the goal of an UBI.

The amount of UBI will most likely depend on how much money an individual needs to buy food, pay rent and pay basic utilities, in a given country.

My guess? By adapting the UBI to local salaries and living costs. Kind of like Amazon is obviously paying more Luxembourg or Munich than Poland.

I would really like to see a real world UBI experiment. For example, implement UBI on two small communities. To counter act the impacts of potential inflation the experiment would need to occur for about 5 years because inflation follows changes to cash flow with a tail of about 9 to 12 months. You would need two communities to test whether isolation has an effect such that one community is geographically isolated from other population centers and the other is a suburb of a major metropolitan area.

I suspect there are all kinds of interesting pros and cons worth study, but without trials everything is just a wild guess.

A lot of small rural towns around the country already virtually are with very significant portions of the population receiving direct welfare and disability payments.

The study to do is why existing programs don’t work better.

Unless you can isolate all supply chains, small experiments like this would be misleading.

it is happening in Spain right now for 850.000 households

That logo of money changing hands makes a bad impression IMHO. It made me laugh, but I doubt that's their goal. It seems like self-parody, though I'm sure it's not.

Something I've been thinking about is how are addicts and mentally ill detected/addressed in a UBI society? Today it becomes apparent because when you have issues you tend to lose your job and have to join job seeking programs and/or contact social services. With UBI you could just fall through the cracks undetected. Has this been addressed by someone?

I haven't heard of any programs anywhere where people who suffer from addiction or mental health issues and subsequently lose their job are somehow taken care of. People fall through the cracks all the time, every day. Here in BC, 851 people died of toxic drugs so far in 2021[1].

This is a huge issue and one that UBI might make easier to address. The person suffering from addiction or mental health issues would not be dependent on the job which could help prevent homelessness and further degradation of their state. Friends and family being able to temporarily leave the workforce to care for each other could help get that person the help they need.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-dru...

Many issues of mental illness and drug abuse come from a lack of stability and ability to reliably meet basic needs.

Some people… have a best possible outcome of at best not contributing anything to society for big chunks of their lives. This is just a feature of humanity. You get the most people out of this situation by taking away the fear of not having enough to exist. A big chunk of people don’t need to be in prison or institutionalized or in elaborate programs to “help”, they just need time and shelter and good food, with enough freedom to pursue happiness in their own way. Drugs, crime, and mental breakdowns always have a component of desperation as cause. You can take that away and help all of those problems without needing to do anything else.

I have known people in social programs to “help” and my god were they terrible under constant threat of losing support and filled with perverse incentives to not try to be better.

Right now (speaking from a US perspective, since that's what I know), a best case scenario for someone with mental health issues like you're describing is SSI. It's around $700 a month.

To qualify, they must establish that they're unable to do any job which could earn them about $1200 a month, they can never have more than $2000 in assets, and they basically can't work.

With UBI, they just... get the $700 a month (for the sake of argument). If they can work a little, well, then they do. If they get a gift, inheritance, any sort of windfall, good for them.

There isn't ever a choice between continuing to get the lifeline check or trying to reenter the workforce, also known as the poverty trap.

This is one of the basic arguments for UBI over means-tested benefits, in fact.

I’m sceptical about UBI, but I am willing to change my mind if it works (on a large scale) in practice. The only thing is that I do not want to be part of the experiment.

Since I am from the EU this initiative concerns me, but I would fully support an US or Chinese experiment.

world economic forum debate on the subject https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU

Where do I sign against this?

This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual.

This is complete insanity.

Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a very significant proportion would do: nothing.

So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.

You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There's no downside.

Or if you're one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever?

Do you know how many people would be "artists" or "authors" if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it's all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted.

I'm for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance.

UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else.

Neil Breen is funny because there's only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny.

And NONE of them would be forced to "get their life together". Their life IS together, they're "film makers".

So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing.

And we can't keep the world running on the backs of the 25%.

Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects.

UBI is absolutely bananas.

> This is just FIRE without the money.

I love how you framed this as a bad thing. As if FIRE was something one has to earn after years and years of wage slavery.

> Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful.

> So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.

That assumption has been disproved time and again.

>> This is just FIRE without the money.

> I love how you framed this as a bad thing.

No, not at all. I'm a Star Trek fan.

But for the 21st century it's a complete fantasy to think it's realistic.

You need money to do this. To just skip that step is disconnected from reality.

Or to put another way: You can't just take. In Star Trek you can, because food replicators, and extreme abundance.

In Star Trek people would give away a house because they can just get a new one.

We're hundreds of years away from that.

FIRE is about really intensifying your production (your "giving"), in order to then get back your fair share as others give back to you.

If you create a world where nobody has to "give", but everyone is allowed to "take", what exactly do you think will happen?

> That assumption has been disproved time and again.

Oh? How, where? I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

Yes, some wealthy people in history have used their time to make great things. But the vast VAST majority, like 99.9999%, have not.

Just look at royalty. The only productive thing they do is through their wealth and power. Who actually contributed, as opposed to have their wealth contribute?

The EU has around 450 million residents. And hey, maybe a portion of your 50 % start hyper disruptive start-ups in, say, Berlin. There they can really contribute.

Contribute what?

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

You end up with people doing things because they want to.

Lots of people do lots of things for reasons other than money and we’re heading towards an economy where living a middle class life doesn’t require everyone to work.

People will run factories and do science and make art without just needing to do it to eat.

Humans before civilization didn’t work anywhere near so hard to survive as people today.

Go look at github and tell me about how money is necessary to get everything done.

We’re not in a post scarcity economy but it’s nearby.

> Lots of people do lots of things for reasons other than money

Yes, but most do earn some money. Or in other words they provide some service to other people in exchange for others doing things for them. Literally doing their part to be in a society.

But with UBI there is no longer any obligation for even a base level of doing service to anyone else.

> and we’re heading towards an economy where living a middle class life doesn’t require everyone to work.

No, but we are hundreds of years from Star Trek utopia where basically nobody has to work.

I don't think you get my point about just how unproductive society would be if everyone had FU money. Literally anybody could say "Oh, I can't take a month off, starting tomorrow? Ok, then I quit. Bye".

> We’re not in a post scarcity economy but it’s nearby.

Not even remotely close. Nothing in the world is not scarce. Hell, they say water is going to be the next big expensive thing.

With the growth we have, in people and resource consumption, if anything we are further away from post scarcity now than ever.

What I don’t get is how can anyone else decide how much UBI I need to do what I want to do, art/science/sports?

Currently people decide how much work they are willing to do - want more stuff, earn more money to buy more stuff

We are already seeing the disaster of Social Security benefits not being enough to fund retirement - how will this work when people don’t even work to save for retirement

B is for Basic, not funding your passion projects. Enough for simple food and housing somewhere relatively cheap. You want more? You work. Work not working out? You can fall back to the basics without being afraid for your survival.

If it's enough to enable you to do what you want without working, then it's enough. If it's not you find a way to get more.

There are a lot of problems with people in tough situations where their outcomes are made worse by having to make bad choices. People accept abusive living or working situations, suffer through anxieties and trauma because it's a choice between an awful situation and going hungry and homeless. A whole lot of people are wage slaves. The "option" of working, where to work, and to accept situations is only an illusion because the alternative is much worse.

Give people UBI instead of difficult to navigate social programs which don't guarantee support and you have to be an expert to navigate well and you solve a lot of problems.

People living on the street are expensive to society and not in some abstract way. People have less lifetime value to society because they are forced to accept their current situation and don't have the resources to have job mobility or can't afford to put themselves in a better living situation. People also treat jobs like they are forced to do them. A workforce that is there by choice performs a lot better, gets treated a lot better, and has better outcomes for customers, employees, and in general everyone.

Social security wasn't meant to fund retirement, it's a safety net to prevent the elderly who can no longer reasonably work from pushing way past their limits or starving. It wasn't meant to fund your expensive suburb lifestyle. It isn't luxury, but indeed you can live off of social security but it requires choices that lots of people don't want to make.

> B is for Basic, not funding your passion projects.

This petition is explicitly about giving everyone a middle class lifestyle for no contributions.

People are quite content at middle class lifestyle.

We're not talking "struggling artist" here, we're talking "yeah, I'm doing quite well. Haven't quite decided what my book will be about yet, though".

Like the parent comment said, we're already failing at funding social security even with the classical age pyramid (which is disappearing, by the way), and now we want to expand that to not just seniors but EVERYONE?

It's just completely unworkable.

For the other things you mention, yes we do have a bunch of social problems. UBI is not the answer, or at least isn't the answer in the form this petition asks for. Two things are ridiculous: the "U" in UBI stands for zero means-testing, and in this petition made explicit again. The second is that middle-class is just way too high to aim for.

I'm in favour of more spending on the poor and homeless, even when it's not "fair". I'm even for less "punishment" and more "rehabilitation" for crimes, even when it's not "fair". Society is better off if (hyperbole alert here) criminals are rewarded for their crimes by getting education and support, than if they're stomped on.

But the idea of UBI (as proposed here) is broken on every level, with society-ending first and second order effects.

People add value to society because they get "social credits" (aka money), that they can then use to better their own lives or their causes.

If you remove that aspect then people will do what they want, not what needs to be done or is valued.

Relax, it's a petition. Anyone can sign a petition. The very idea that people think a petition is how to achieve UBI means that it will not be achieved. This is a way of feeding illusions to people who want to live in illusion, of catering to people who think complaining and wishing and imagineering unicorns and money raining down from the sky will bring said unicorns and money to them. And so the petition provides a valuable service of helping people live in their minds. It comforts them. They can pretend UBI is already here, or just over the horizon. It shouldn't upset you at all.

I know it's a petition. But it has some of the same problems that a "like" button has, if there's no "dislike".

But I also like your cynical take on petitions. :-)

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