Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.
So the tasks in your example are easier, but the easier jobs have been eliminated or replaced with harder jobs.
This is a radically misinformed statement. These are the real-world experience I've had with translators:
- translator with degree in languages, occasional translator: never mentioned Google Translate
- semi-professional translator (significant source of income coming from it): said that most professionals nowadays use GT as first pass; never mentioned GT being a threat
- multiple gigs I've requested for official documentation: those can't be done via GT, as they require a certified translator
- realtime translation I needed: again, can't be done via GT, as a certified translator is required
The idea that GT is eliminating translators is nonsense. It actually augments their capacity (re-read above, this is a real-world opinion of a translator).
> The jobs replacing it are much fewer and higher skilled (software dev).
Even assuming the (wrong) argument that GT eliminates jobs, SW devs are just one of the options. This actually reflects the ancestor comment: "Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination". Computer translation surely helped businesses around the world in communicating on a global scale, in a way that previously was not resource-effective (e.g. lookup on the dictionary); while this can't be quantified, it's the opposite of "reducing jobs".
Automation started around 300 years ago, not 30. If the automation-pessimists were right, essentially no jobs would exist by now. See lump of labour fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour.
Or you could just realize that real estate is a broken industry and why does there even need to be a broker at all... List your home yourself, have software that does the rest...
I mean, lawyers, doctors, software programming, can easily be placed in the next 20 years. All fast-food, grocery, freight(depending on self-driving cars, or perhaps better train systems that have direct to store delivery)..
I look forward to the day when only 5% of the population is employable, because we'll have to figure out someway to live post-scarcity or just let people starve, but if 5% work, 5% then are consumers too...and that leaves out a lot of power, control, and economic potentiality.
I don't buy that doctors, lawyers, software engineers or real estate brokers will be automated away in 20 years. As a society there has been 15 solid years put into automating driving a car - a skill so simple we allow 16 year olds with no formal training and half of who have an iq less than 100 to do it. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers and real estate brokers have jobs which are very complex compared to driving a car.
No, you can't get an equal share with every other citizen that way, especially if you are a lower-class worker without substantial surplus income.
I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor".
UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees).
If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc.
[0] https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-ho.... and this is in the USA in-spite of charity, government subsidies and regulations for getting more access to the internet.
> Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen
Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
For example, not everyone in the USA has smartphones[0]. The biggest discrepancy is by age, which we can possibly factor as a choice. The second biggest discrepancy is by wealth. There is a 2000bps difference in rates between people making more than $75k vs people making less than $35k. There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan. So the poorest will consistently be excluded.
This isn’t a market failure. Markets are in their nature utilitarian on a single metric and truly aren’t designed to improve the floor of the human experience.
Take the trolley problem for example. It’s supposed to be a hard problem because of all the nuance. The market “solves” the trolley problem trivially by running over the least wealthy group of people.
Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor. At best, the market is punting the problem (until that group of least fortunate dies) and at worst the market is rent seeking, exacerbating the problem.
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?
Not a coincidence but education, health and housing are heavily regulated everywhere and even governmentally run in some places. De-regulate them, allow the free markets to do their magic to find solutions, reduce prices and thus raise that floor.
Then remove artificial barriers in the jobs market like minimum wages. Allow people to be employed no matter how little their added value is worth. Free companies from onerous regulations and make creating a competing company easy and cheap instead.
Finally, separate the Economic power in state, just like Executive and Legislative powers are separated. Make it illegal for governments to engage in, regulate or influence economic activity. Focus their role on ensuring freedoms and applying externalities to markets through taxation. Also accept and use taxation's role in shaping societal behavior.
Oh, and re-energize private charity by removing the corrupt and ineffectual state welfare crutch.
Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
If eliminating poverty is the end goal then we need a safety net for those who fail.
It's still capitalism in much the same way that capitalism is still feudalism.
Given that redistributive taxation and benefit systems labelled “social democracy” designed specifically to mitigate the adversity that provides the whip behind the capitalist mode of production modify both the property system and the mode of production that together are labelled “capitalism”, social democracy literally is not capitalism. It retains substantial elements of the property system of, and it's mode of production has important similarities to that of, the system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (as does that system with pre-capitalist aristocratic systems), but it's not the same system.
It's not Marxist socialism, either, and I know Marxists like to deny that any system that isn't pre-capitalist that fails to be Marxist socialism can be anything other than capitalism-under-a-different-name, but that's a giant false dichotomy.
Bearing in mind that I'm using "capitalism" as a descriptor, not a snarl word. The snarl one is "neoliberalism" ;)
We’ve seen countless state welfare programs growing out of control and eating more and more funds and we are nowhere near eliminating poverty.
You’d think that if it was just a matter of throwing money at the problem, we would have solved it by now.
I'd also like to know how you think we should maximise people's happiness and wellbeing. Because that's my primary interest, and economic productivity is valuable insofar as it enables that utility maximisation.
You can't maximise happiness by definition. Happiness is fleeting, a peak, it exists only through comparison to our regular state. Evolution made sure of that, or we'd've stopped evolving. The only way to cheat it is with drugs.
I want to maximise humankind's potential instead. Gain infinite knowledge, spread through the stars. I think that is a much more worthwhile goal than happily dying out on a small planet at the edge of the galaxy.
I don't think "potential" is worth anything if it isn't used to benefit people and make their lives better. The imperium from 40k has much greater technology and planet span than us but it's deeply dystopic - I'd rather live here than there.
But I believe becoming multi-planetary is imperative and urgent for mankind. The dangers while all of us are on the same planet are simply too great to sit and enjoy the view.
I do agree about becoming multiplanetary too, but if we're talking about existential risk then climate change is the most urgent one and we need state power and institutional change to avert that one.
The only way to solve climate change is through technological evolution. I see almost zero progress with policy changes. BTW, we wouldn't even be in this mess if would've completed the previous energy tech transition from hydrocarbons to nuclear as planned. What stopped us? Politics.
We'd also need to move off of ICE cars, and it was the car industry that tried to suppress that. Also the fossil fuel industry that puts out propaganda against new forms of energy - capital and the state are in alliance. Some parties can be better (left wing ones) but there's a ton of propaganda against them by corporations too.
Politicians are by definition corruptible - that is why they are there. They failed to succeed through merit in the free market so politics is their last resort. That is why power to the State and politicians means yielding to corruption.
The biggest opponents to nuclear were not corporations but parties: greens and ecologists. Ideologists and luddites. We are living the world the anti-nukes protests of the 60's built.
Politicians are corruptible, but the free market actively promotes corruption - when the only motive is profit, morality goes out the window in favour of the dollar.
As I said I'd rather we had neither, but between the two only politics has the possibility of significant change in any direction that isn't inherently profitable.
Profit is the only motive for everyone, all the time, no matter what. The only difference is that in a free market that motivation is aligned with societal goals and it is in the open, a game with rules and laws. Free markets allow you to make a profit and keep it, legally.
Without free markets, the deals are made in power and influence, in fiefs and networks. Leftist politics are not only ipocrit (no left politician cares for "the poor") but also feudalistic and corrupt by default, from definition, because that is the only way to make a profit in such a sistem.
They were also very frustrated that the regular people were… simply not like that.
If you don't care whether your friends, neighbours or kids in Africa live or die, that's a you problem. For the rest of us, we'd rather reduce the suffering of others.
Today's Western people, in comparison, are angels.
You know why communes failed? Because everyone was stealing - from workers to guardians, even those in charge were stealing. You know why they stole? Because they were starving. You know why they were starving? Because they couldn't buy the food they needed. Why? Because there was no profit motive for others to provide that food.
People don't work the way you think they do. Until you understand that, you'll spread suffering instead of reducing it.
That doesn't invalidate the point that capitalism has some significant flaws that we should be trying to address. As an anarchist I believe that these flaws cannot be fundamentally addressed by just changing our masters. In the short term (as in, my lifetime) all I can hope for is an increase in the prevalence of worker cooperatives and unions, nationalisation of naturally monopolistic necessities like healthcare and public transit, improved welfare systems (UBI would be good) and improved community bonds. In the long run I think the ideal human system would be without coercion, oriented around cooperation and coordinated from the bottom up - but as ideals should be, this is something to guide efforts towards to the degree practical, not to throw human bodies at in the pursuit of power and a fever dream (plus little power over others is to be begin with in anarchism, that's the point).
But when there is no more land to grant, what happens? When there are no more tribes to conquer, what happens?
When there is massive abundance and most of it is owned by 1% of the population... What happens?
> Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating
... to the people who end up with less. They seem to be motivating to the people who end up with more. [https://singularityhub.com/2020/05/18/here-are-the-results-o...]
In a country where 1 in 100 people own a total of 40% of the nation's total wealth, a back-of-the-napkin guess strongly suggests the net motivation of spreading that wealth around would be positive.
> demotivating... to the people who end up with less
No, demotivating to the people creating value.
> spreading that wealth around would be positive
That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
What systems have we tried, and who and when are you talking about? What are you comparing to? Some of the best examples we have today are the ones that aren’t exactly pure capitalism, like Norway and Finland. If capitalism is so great, why are countries that hold capitalism back and provide more social services raking better than the US on nearly all economic, development, and social measures?
> it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create.
Do you recognize this spin, or is it unintentional? It’s motivating to lose some of the value you create by working to someone else?? Wouldn’t it be a lot more motivating to keep all the value you create? Wouldn’t it be even more motivating to not work, and get to keep some of the value other people create? Yeah, I think it probably is.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
This feels like the McCarthy school of economics. Russia’s problems didn’t stem from lack of proletariat motivation, it came from authoritarian abuses of power. You seem to be forgetting about China entirely.
There were a lot of overlapping factors that killed the Soviet experiment. A major one, and the real root cause of "people started starving," is that Russia is a massive country that is historically vulnerable to famines because food is relatively hard to grow at those latitudes; people had starved under the czars of the past, and the main reason we think starvation will be minimized in the future is a global revolution in how agriculture is done of which Russia was a part, not anything particularly virtuous in the modern Russian practice of capitalism.
Another major factor was a combination of central planning and failure to grasp modern science which resulted in error being expanded. Stalin famously supported a Michurinism view of trait growth through stress over the Darwininan view of natural selection, which led to some bad conclusions when agriculture was centrally-planned under a bad model. While central planning can aggravate error (and there's a reasonable discussion to be had about how tax dollars are allocated), a capitalist society is extremely vulnerable to similar failure modes; while ideally, damage gets contained via the "firebreak" of a few companies failing when their heterodoxy proves wrong (or succeeding and displacing other companies when their heterodoxy proves right), bad memes spread widely still cause damage. Consider the dust bowl, or the housing crash; both happened under capitalist models.
But all of this is a bit of a distraction because the fact the communists spread wealth around doesn't imply spreading wealth is communist. Indeed, the US, while actively engaging in McCarthyist anti-communist suppression of free speech, had a maximum marginal tax rate of 91% and was fifteen years into its own project of guaranteeing a basic income (via social security) for the elderly, because we as a society had grown weary of the elderly dying from poverty when the winds of fortune had blown them to a circumstance where they had no savings and no ability to work. Even capitalist societies agree that taxation and use of taxes for social benefit is a good thing; the only argument to be had is how much, and "taxing the rich is communist" is a doorstop meme that doesn't contribute to that conversation.
There is nothing to redistribute when we all have nothing - and that is our initial state. Then through capitalism value is created. Part of said value is retained by its creator - thus providing the motivation to create it in the first place. But the most value is distributed in the society (through regular consuming of goods and services), raising its level and thus pulling more people out of poverty.
Just check out how dramatically poverty was reduced when Eastern European states switched from communism to capitalism.
Working people trade labor for money. Are you claiming that you cannot make surplus from a salary? It seem you're claiming agreed upon salary is preventing you accumulating capital and the rich are to be blamed somehow.
If the initial state is nothing, where, exactly, does the “capital” in capitalism come from?
> Then through capitalism value is created.
That is an amazing magical sentence. Capitalism creates value? How does it do that?
Of course they do, but they aren't allowed to use them to their full potential.
I don't think you have read your own links. Hint: read the first sentence of your wikipedia link. And yes I have partially studied economics and have family members who are trained economists.
How is that physically possible, when poor people have nothing?
That's the core mode of capitalist production, better known as the M-C-M' cycle.
> buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index
There are some pretty big differences between these
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment.
I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority
With basic income, that's still true.
With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
Rising wages means more competition over the same resources, leading to inflation. Even inflation in some industries/products will affect the CPI.
Where would the UBI come from? Presumably it would be from those who automate. This means your claim of lower prices will likely be marginal - the people need to support themselves whether they or a robot does the work. So UBI would mostly offset.
Inequality shouldn't be that out of whack anyways and having a max speed on it could encourage better equality.
Personally if I had UBI I'd work more on side-projects and try to get some recurring income coming in...I'm still trying to do that but it's harder w/ all the distractions of doing client/freelance work..and the depression when I can't meet bills because I'm having a ADHD poor-motivation month, or anti-social-can't be bothered w/ marketing to find new clients month... both of which seem like every month since the Pandemic began...
I'd hope a lot more people would actually go into science fields and do research when they can afford to go to school and have a guaranteed home and basic necessities...
Honestly a utopia to me would see 95% of kids becoming scientists and technologists, the rest in the arts... and everything else being automated and we work on solving things like aging, space travel, and climate change.
It makes sense to tax money where there is money - income and gains.
Ah, "you will own nothing" accelerated! This seems like the fever dream of a World Economic Forum plutocrat. Let's make it so people will literally never be able to own a house because of prohibitive taxes. This will solidify the domination of those who already have houses, like older generations, while completely selling younger people down the river with the promise of a tiny handout that will be totally devalued by time it reaches you.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works beyond a small $ amount.
Nobody just keeps millions of dollars in a bank account. When you have lots of money, you own businesses which generate income. The value of those businesses is not fixed, but constantly changing, and dependent on the values of other businesses. So it’s very difficult to assess “PersonX has $Y million” because the value of the companies that they own changes all the time.
They might have $300k in cash, $700k in stocks, and be the founder of a company worth $40m, but they can’t just spend or be taxed on that $40m. The company is significantly less valuable without them running it. And if they tried to sell some of it, then the value would drop and they’d be worth even less. But their net worth still says $41m. How do you tax that?
We don’t tax ownership of companies today because it’s WAY too complicated and convoluted, and would cause significant problems. Instead, we tax the transactions. Meaning that if they sell half of their $40m company for $20m, then they have to pay taxes on that $20m that got converted from “fake money” (company valuation) to “real money” (cash from selling). That’s “Capital Gains” and is taxed today.
Or we also currently tax payments, aka dividends. When a company converts value within itself to cash for its owners. If the $40m company makes $4m in profit and pays that out to the founder, they pay income tax on it.
But the fact that they own a company that’s “worth” $40m shows up in their net worth, even though that’s not real money.
If it is funded by eliminating the preference for non-labor income in taxes by bringing up taxes on other income (which also itself reduces the incentive to automation created by premium taxes on labor), that's not true.
If you want Netflix, eating out at a restaurant, playing Games or any sort of entertainment? If you want a life, you need to work. There is nothing disincentivized against work unless those people want to live like zombies.
If it's half the price to run a robot compared to using a human, then jobs can be eliminated even if the people want to work.
I hate my job. If they started a UBI that actually covered all the basics - food, housing, healthcare, etc... I would quit and I'm not even in a low paying job.
That is what I would considered as basic. It is suppose to keep you alive. Not for you to afford meat, fruit or coca cola. Housing enough to keep you warm and sleep. Not enough space ( hardly any at 6m2 ) to let you move around. And this means workers would have to be treated better now they have an option to quit without begging for food on the table.
It'd have to be some sort of partnership w/ govt and localities to workout making it so people who need homes the most have easier access to them, by freeing up the land, so they don't need to relocate across country or so it doesn't seem like they're being put in concentration camps or something horrible like that... If I live in a rural town, they need to do something to ensure there's homes for everyone who wants one there somehow. If they need to buy or lease land and throw up some 30k yurts, so be it...
On the bright side those who pay higher rents will probably pay less as there will be a lot more rentals available.
Even if the vast majority did make that decision (which I don't think is plausible under any UBI that would be sustainable in even the very short term in the near future) it would eliminate wage signals it would be a result of shifted wage signals, and the response of the market to those signals.
Basically, what we had during the pandemic was a mini-UBI experiment (even though it was not universal). Wages at the low end went up - exactly what you would want to see under a successful UBI program (because of giving people alternatives). Unfortunately, we funded this one via deficits (hence why the rich also got richer). If it was funded via a tax, we'd see the lower end wages increase, and the upper middle/upper class get squeezed a bit (which is completely intentional).
The last effect would likely trigger a voting backlash (since upper-middle/upper class folks have lots of voting power), but it's still UBI working as intended
So, a classic means-tested benefit experiment?
Do you honestly believe that is not happening now in ghastly amounts?
That is basically the definition of market failure, which is of course an acknowledged problem with the current economic system we have. That's why people are discussing alternatives.
Compared to means-tested aid with duplicative bureaucracy to that which already exists for income taxation? Depends on a number of factors, including whether you find it by closing the gap between labor and non-labor taxes so that you aren't punishing people for hiring, whether and how you adjust minimum wage in light of it, how you set the level of basic income relative to productive capacity, whether you index it to a revenue stream divided among the eligible population, or target a constant real income level, or set the level by some other means, etc.