Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society? | Hacker News Reader

Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society?

theguardian.com

45 pointsbookofjoe167 comments

I feel like treating UBI as a panacea has actually hindered its adoption, giving critics plenty of ammunition in the form of implementations that don’t quite live up to their proponents’ loftiest ambitions.

Can UBI transform society? Probably not! But why is that the bar? It can just be boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people’s lives easier. That’s still a good thing worth doing.

I don’t think anyone on welfare would say their lives are easy.

*easier than not having it

Actually, it's worse than that right now for many on welfare, as they face the "benefits cliff". Inflation is rampant and some low wage earners are getting modest increases to keep up with inflation, but this increase is subsequently pinching their benefits.

so... if would be better for them if they never had those benefits how?

This has been debated ad nasuem in America since at least the 60s. It depends on your philosophy both economic and political.

"easier" =/= "easy".

A lot of people on welfare would say that welfare makes their life easier. Very few would say it makes it easy.

Have you asked any of them how much "easier" it is, or are you assuming? I'm guessing you're assuming.

If someone continually applies for a welfare benefit, is that not prima facie evidence that it makes their life easier in some way?

I'd say that a "boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people's lives easier" would be transformative. Not utopian or anything, but a judgment-free welfare that just automatically happens without all the bullshit (in the U.S., anyway) would be amazing.

I'm of the exact opposite opinion. My view is that UBI will have a effect similar to minimim wages: it will raise prices by raising demand against a fixed (or falling supply), and it will do this by stealing from people that are productive.

All government welfare is bad. The "strings attached" versions tend to be better because they impose requirements before distributions are allocated. You want to do wjat you want without restriction? Fine. Pay for it.

All welfare should come from private charity. Strings are typically attached, the outcomes are better, and you don't have to steal from a single person to do it.

Cite sources as any Ive seen disagree with these points.

Any history pre-new deal shows how incorrect this standing is.

Also, taxes aren’t theft. It’s the cost of living in society and providing for societal, shared goods. “Streets are theft!! All roads should be toll roads!” Want a grand society…

My favorite eye-roll was a random YT short of a power washer dude driving down an interstate in his behemoth diesel (his equipment could've fit in a large sedan), complaining that he only pays taxes to the gov't but gets no benefit from it, streaming the video over cellular.

...drinking clean water, breathing in clean air, on his way to buy safe, disease-free food from the supermarket...

All of this could just as well be created by the private sector.

Fiduciury duty, and the lack of a regulatory body to ensure some semblance of actual competition means that that private industry would likely not act in the interests of the public

The public only has an interest in public goods. And those are still provided by the state. Private goods should be influenced by private transactions, and competiton guides those to optimal market-based outcomes.

You're advocating for the privatization of clean drinking water, breathable air, and disease-free food. Have you seen what has happened to the UK in the past 10 years? Do you still believe that privatization was a net benefit there?

The only way to guarantee competition is to punish predatory practices of large companies against small ones, which means, surprise, regulation.

> Also, taxes aren’t theft. It’s the cost of living in society and providing for societal, shared goods. “Streets are theft!! All roads should be toll roads!” Want a grand society…

How is UBI a shared good? It definitionally takes from some to give to others. That is the opposite of a shared good.

Taxes are theft when taxes are used for nonpublic goods. That means any good that is not both nonrivalous and nonexcludable. We tend to allow the bluring of nonpublic goods the more hyperlocal we get, since we can more accurately address needs. But such nonpublic goods are still funded via theft.

What's wrong with paying for that which you use? It's a consumption based model, and I do believe it would lead to better economic and societal outcomes.

> Taxes are theft when taxes are used for nonpublic goods. That means any good that is not both nonrivalous and nonexcludable.

No one else here seems to share this axiom. I appreciate that it’s important to your worldview but it’s also why you and everyone else are arguing past each other.

> My view is that UBI will have a effect similar to minimim wages: it will raise prices by raising demand against a fixed (or falling supply), and it will do this by stealing from people that are productive

We have a UBI program already running in America - Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend

It has been shown that "the dividend had no effect on employment and increased part-time work by 1.8 percentage points" [0] and has lifted 25,000 Alaskans out of poverty in 2015 alone [1]

[0] - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190299

[1] - https://iseralaska.org/static/legacy_publication_links/2016_...

> [0] Our preferred interpretation of the empirical patterns we observe is that the null em- ployment effect could be explained a by positive general equilibrium response offsetting a negative income effect. The unconditional cash transfer results in consumption increases that stimulate labor demand and could mitigate potential reductions in employment. While we do not directly test this channel, we do show indirect evidence for this general equilibium effect in two ways: first, we compare our empirical employment effect to the expected micro and macro effects of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend based on estimates from prior literature, and second we compare the impact of the cash transfer on the tradable and non-tradable sectors.

> Second, the impact on labor demand should be especially pronounced in the non- tradable sector. We show suggestive evidence consistent with this hypothesis — the esti- mated effects of the dividend on both employment and part-time work are sizeable in the tradable sector and suggest a reduction in labor, but are close to zero in the non-tradable sector. These estimates are only suggestive, but are consistent with a macro feedback effect on employment.

I enjoy data, so thank you for the studies. That said, I do not think these are adequate to generalize the impacts of UBI. Mostly this is because the Alaska-based UBI only contributes a mean of ~$4k/household. That seems wholly too small to make national conclusions; such a UBI amount is insufficient for life.

I do appreciate that the general equilibrium held. That is, the negative offsets of the opportunity cost of employment were offset by the new employment demand that the UBI stimulus had on the economy. But I think it's important to distinguish the tradeable vs nontradeable conclusion:

To me, it seems that the impact of PFD is akin to a stimulus check. The fungible money is utilized to buy luxuries[+]. I can think of no other reason that demand for nontradeable goods would spike. Thus, although people are lifted out of poverty, unless their nontradeble consumption is housing[+], then their consumption seems to be misaligned with general wealth building principles, such as saving and investing the difference.

More broadly, if the nation adopted UBI, tradeable offsets may be harder to come by, as they would be required to be imports, since the other states would face the same labor impact as AK.

Thank you for the data. I'll read more when I have some time, but my opinion seems to be generally unchanged, though I recognize the impacts may be lesser than my prior suggested.

Why do you think that? ~60% of consumption in the US is for goods that adjust supply relatively well: food, clothing, material goods, services et cetera.

The other 40% is the cost of housing. UBI could help tremendously here. The US has really cheap housing in places with no jobs and expensive housing in places with jobs. UBI would allow those without jobs to move to the cheap places. UBI is unlikely to be generous so if you want to live off UBI without a job it would almost force you to either supplement with a job or move to a place with cheap housing.

> ~60% of consumption in the US is for goods that adjust supply relatively well: food, clothing, material goods, services et cetera.

Any demand increase will lead to price increases against a fixed supply. You propose that supply will rise if demand does. Perhaps. But a lot of these industries rely on unskilled workers, and UBI would give those unskilled workers free money. I hypothesize unskilled workers would demand a higher wage to trade their freetime for worktime, and that would increase costs and therefore prices.

> The US has really cheap housing in places with no jobs and expensive housing in places with jobs. UBI would allow those without jobs to move to the cheap places

There is a reason some places are cheap: little economic opportunity. We saw the massive change some of these places underwent when covid sent many to remote only work amd they moved out of the city. The difference is that during covid those people brought private dollars to the cheaper places. UBI proposes to steal from wealthy to prop up cheap places. It creates economic deadweight.

> . I hypothesize unskilled workers would demand a higher wage to trade their freetime for work

I hypothesize the opposite. A UBI eliminates the need for minimum wage.

And small differences in income are very meaningful for the poor. For instance if somebody is making $1k/month from UBI, a $1/hour job increases income to $1160. That's very meaningful and some would take it if nothing else is available.

> A UBI eliminates the need for minimum wage.

We shouldn't have any minimum wage regardless of UBI.

But with regards to UBI, you didn't remove minimum wage. All you did was push minimum wage to all members of society regardless of their employment status. You state as much: a $1/hour job is fine if you already make $x, where $x is minimum_wage404.

It actually creates a larger burden on the private sector than if you just let minimum wage exist, as now you have to pay everyone minimum wage just for breathing.

This would create stimulus effects which are counteracted by inflation in time.

And what about necessary welfare that isn't covered by private charity? Have you ever seen or heard what life was like before WWII in developed countries? Do you think those people should just die in the street?

> Do you think those people should just die in the street?

I expect for this to be an available path but an unlikely one. People tend to give to those in need. Sometimes that comes with conditions: no drugs, get a job, etc. Historically we used religious institutions for this, which is largely why they are tax exempt.

Breaking poverty tends to require a shift in behavior. UBI by definition removes the requirement that someone makes EV+ decisions and lifestyle changes.

> I expect this to be... an unlikely one

On what basis? Do you know how many people die in poverty in countries with no social safety net?

It is irrelevant to the US federal government. Nowhere does S1A8 authorize Congress to act on starvation.

I don't think this comment makes sense. I'm not asking about your reading of the constitution. I'm trying to get you to admit that you don't care whether people die in poverty, and that you have no reason to think a small number of people would die if state assistance was removed. The moral claim (and your original argument was a moral claim) has nothing to do with whatever S1A8 is or does.

Just wait until you hear about wage theft and how common it is! You likely profit directly from stealing from people if you have any stock holdings.

Imo it should just be called a "Direct Benefits Transfer" instead of "Universal Basic Income".

The "income" terminology gets confused as "salary" by those who aren't well versed with these kinds of programs.

What's wrong with the word "income" for "a lump sum of money that everybody gets every month"?

The thing I’ve never understood about UBI is how it wouldn’t immediately be counteracted by inflation.

Money is like water or electricity; its only ability to do work is when it flows. Just like a water wheel can’t do any work without a river flow, or a motor can’t do any work with a potential difference, money is useless when everyone always just has the same amount. It is only the transfer of money from one entity to another that causes work to be done.

The difference between 9V and 12V is 3V. The difference between 12V and 15V is still 3V. The amount of work you can do is the same, but the bar to entry is higher. So somebody explain to me, when everyone gets the same baseline amount of money, how that does anything but raise the baseline?

You're cramming an analogy into your point. Systems like economy and people dont fit into an electrical diagram.

Am I? I don’t think so. Please describe for me a situation where the simple possession of money, absent any potential for that money to flow, causes work to happen.

If you can, you’ve described nothing less than perpetual motion.

The simple possession of money by a hungry person causes that money to flow by encouraging the person to spend the money on food. That causes work to happen at the food producers. Maybe even so much more work that they're willing to hire additional hungry people to do that work.

Universal Basic Water would be a great achievement!

I’ve had the same question. We saw this, to some degree with the stimulus checks during the pandemic. Initially people got all this money and reports were that savings rates had never been higher… but most of the world was also shut down. As things opened up, or people simply got bored at home, what did we see? People spent everything they were given, and more. Personal debt is now at an all time high, and we’ve seen a bunch of inflation (for various reasons). Most people are in a worse place now.

Financial literacy is extremely important. Giving more money to people who don’t know how to handle money, allows them to dig bigger holes.

That said, everyone’s investments and 401ks are reliant on this reckless spending to keep returns high.

A fiscally balanced UBI is one which increases taxes on the average taxpayer exactly the same amount as it pays to the average taxpayer. It would not increase the money supply and would have minimal impact on inflation.

No, what you’re describing is a “take from the rich and give to the poor” welfare program. The idea behind UBI is that everyone gets the same amount regardless of what they otherwise make. If those who make more are taxed more, and thus ultimately net less, how is that in any way “universal”? And for that matter, how is that any different from what we already have?

What you are describing as UBI is nothing more than disguised calls for increased taxes on the rich and greater welfare for the poor. Which, fine, if that’s what you want then why not be honest about it in the first place instead of couching it in misleading terms such as “UBI”?

This isn't some secret. Of course the wealthy are going to pay more into it than they get out from it. "Take from the rich and give to the poor" is the entire point. This should be understood by anyone with basic economic literacy, or even a modicum of logical reasoning. How else in the world are you to have any welfare program?

If you object to the existence of welfare programs on principle, then you should make that argument.

What I object to is the call for such programs under the guise of them being something other than what they are. If UBI is just welfare, why not just call it that?

Because it's a different approach than the welfare systems we have today. It's not the same thing. There are similar elements, but the structure is very different. The terminology difference helps reflect that they're different concepts.

From wiki: "Universal basic income (UBI) is a social welfare proposal..."

Perhaps this perceived deception is just in your own mind?

This is a misunderstanding of how a budget works when you can print money. You don't have to take from anyone to give to everyone when the money supply is only limited by your concern for inflation beyond the capacity of the economy to do more useful things with the money than would have been done without it.

If it is funded by taxation, it need not be inflationary.

If you think about it, the Fed only really has one "knob" they can turn to control inflation: they can either raise or lower the interest rates.

However, raising taxes is also anti-inflationary, and in stagflationary environments (like we had at the end of Trump's presidency), it lets the government control inflation without making borrowing more expensive.

If it’s funded by a flat tax, then yes, but then what’s the point? Seems like nothing more than a shell game.

If it’s funded by a progressive tax, then how is it anything more than a tax increase combined with increased welfare?

Either way, seems like nothing but a recipe for inefficiency and increased government bureaucracy.

Current welfare frameworks generate massive amounts of extra work for both government and those receiving assistance.

In the means-tested approach, the agencies administering welfare have to understand the means of the people receiving assistance. And monitor for changes that might push recipients outside the accepted range or cause a change to benefits.

The recipients carry extra load because they need to understand where they themselves are in that accepted range and organize their lives around that. The current system creates perverse incentives where an unemployed person receiving assistance may find themselves worse off if they get a job.

When the agency's job is "Send $X to every citizen" it's actually a lot simpler for everyone involved. There's no qualifications to verify, no changes to monitor. The recipients don't need to continually re-prove themselves or contort their lives. There's still some fraud potential but the attack surface is now far smaller.

There's still complexity on the tax side because progressive taxation is the way to go to make this work, but we have that already. IMO it'd be a net reduction in complexity and administrative overhead vs the current welfare system.

Sometimes, the means-testing apparatus itself costs more than the benefit that it is supposedly "protecting." Occasionally it costs multiples of the benefit.

Exactly! We're so concerned about someone getting something they don't "deserve" that we'll spend ourselves to death to prevent it.

These are good questions; I'll try to give you good answers.

// If it’s funded by a flat tax, then yes, but then what’s the point? Seems like nothing more than a shell game. //

yes.

// If it’s funded by a progressive tax, then how is it anything more than a tax increase combined with increased welfare? //

A couple of points:

1. We actually already have UBI and a single-payer health care system--you just have to be 63+ to get it :-) Social Security is the very paradigm of (as you put it), "A tax increase combined with increased welfare." And yet, everybody seems to love having it, or not having to pay for their parent's and grandparent's housing and medical bills.

2. If we had a UBI--say one that paid proportionally to our GDP--nobody would be fearing AI, robots doing the dirty work, etc etc. Every voter would be massively incentivized to vote for public policy which would have our GDP growing as fast as technological progress could let it. This alone, IMHO, is worth the price of admission.

3. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are a big fan of Hayak? :-) UBI is a cornerstone of Hayak's "road outta serfdom." Imagine driving an Amazon truck--and being told when you can and when you can't go to the bathroom. You probably don't have to imagine your employer putting key-and-mouse monitoring systems on your computer. If somebody can tell you not to go to the bathroom when you need to, and if somebody can punish you for not pounding your keyboard fast enough, lets face it, you don't have any freedom. UBI would give us the leverage we need to exercise our inalienable right to freedom even at our workplaces.

// Either way, seems like nothing but a recipe for inefficiency and increased government bureaucracy. //

As others have noted, it is quite the opposite. Think about how MANY different ways the government subsidizes things...sugar prices, corn prices, beef prices are all artificially high because farmers get subsidies. And we're just getting started--oil companies getting subsidies, subsidized student loans---and there are *square miles* of buildings staffed with people to administer them all.

Literally (not metaphorically, or hyperbolicly) literally *square miles* of bureaucracy would no longer be needed.

And if we had UBU--it would be OK to lay them off!

This is probably also a flawed analogy applying simple ideas to an extremely complex system / set of overlapping systems, but I see UBI as a sort of social and economic lubricant.

People at the bottom of the economy are not able to effectively participate in it. At the absolute bottom it's homeless people with no real path to employment or any real ability to improve their situation. You get above that layer and you've got people making constant compromises between competing necessities like housing, nutrition, and clothing.

Inconsistent and/or substandard nutrition can be massively impacting to adults and even more so to children. Their immediate and long term mental and physical capability is lessened compared to others. People who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy today have kids who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy tomorrow. This creates a persistent drag on the economy as a whole.

It's absolutely possible UBI causes some degree of price increases, but in exchange we get an economy with a larger number of effective participants and less drag at the bottom.

Unfortunately, this thinking is predicated on the idea that those at the very lowest tier of society would participate given the opportunity.

To be clear, this is not about the working poor. I don’t think this would ultimately help them. This is also not about those currently on welfare; I don’t think it would help them either.

The question is, would it help the homeless man living under a bridge or the homeless woman walking around naked at 7-Eleven? Sadly, I don’t think these people can be helped, at least not just by throwing money at them. Even if UBI were implemented, I don’t see them claiming it, and I don’t see them spending it on anything more than drugs and booze.

As far as I’m concerned, rather than implementing UBI, if we were to take that money and use it to implement prison reform and mental health care, it would be far better spent.

> this is not about the working poor. I don’t think this would ultimately help them.

I think you are generally right, but I strongly disagree on this specific point: the working poor would be the most benefitted. They are working, which means they are already taking good decisions and making efforts to improve their lives: money could not be spent in a more productive way than handling it to those gentlemen.

Perhaps, but the problem with UBI being, well, universal is that everyone gets it, including those that the working poor buy from. All of a sudden the suppliers see the purchasers having more money, and they have more money themselves, so where is the disincentive to raise prices? That’s how inflation works, and it’s well known that inflation screws the working poor most of all.

You seem to be putting all homeless people into a bucket where they're all equivalent to a crazy person walking around naked in a convenience store.

Yes, absolutely, we need to have a real function in our society that provides housing and care for those who are so impacted by mental health challenges that they will never be able to care for themselves.

I think it's a mistake to think of most homeless people as you seem to - that they're irredeemable and forever broken.

> As far as I’m concerned, rather than implementing UBI, if we were to take that money and use it to implement prison reform and mental health care, it would be far better spent.

This is kind of trickle-down-ish. When you put a dollar in the pocket of an individual, that dollar was fully spent on helping that individual (your point about what he does with it, and whether that counts as helping, still stands).

When you put a dollar in the pocket of a business or institution that "helps people", $0.50 goes to the executives and shareholders, $0.25 goes to all the bloated administrative staff, HR managers, Directors of Paperwork, and so on, $0.20 goes to sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors who, themselves have executives, shareholders, administration, and at the end of the chain, maybe $0.05 goes to the actual enterprise of helping people.

> The thing I’ve never understood about UBI is how it wouldn’t immediately be counteracted by inflation.

I think you are not wrong, but not completely right either! It's true that the income difference among people would not change, but the distribution would: homeless people begging on the street could afford something in a stable way, at last; people on minimum wage would double their income; medium class would see their disposable income increase; and rich people would not notice any difference.

Sure, the purchasing power of the UBI sum would be reduced the moment the UBI is introduced, but still poor people would see their situation get better: the poorer, the "more better"!

Furthermore, most of the money flowing to the poor people would be spent right away, boosting the economy, which is a very nice side effect. In the end, UBI would be a way to force the rich to take some of their money out of the vaults and spend it (1st benefit) for the poor (2nd benefit).

The only problem lies in how much money you'd need to take from the rich to implement UBI in a meaningful way.

>Money is like water or electricity; it's only ability to do work is when it flows.

Precisely.

"Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money" by James Buchan (1997) is a superb book that expands on your statement.

This argument seems to imply that if you had a big red button that would uniformly distribute all the world's resources, that we would be stuck in a steady state and unable to produce anything. This conclusion is obviously false, and I think if you work backwards you can probably find where the analogy breaks down.

One interesting thing about giving money to the poor is that when they have money, they spend it immediately because they have to. I don't think this addresses the inflation question, as there are guaranteed to be check cashing rackets and price gouging where thing costs 1 UBI unit all of a sudden.

> Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) learns from the collective intellectual and creative output of humans and uses this to dispossess workers of their livelihoods,

Has anyone actually lost their job to AI yet? At best it helps some workers do their jobs faster as many innovations in the past have. Historically, this increases the amount of work expected to coincide with the capacity for doing work.

For example, CAD software replaced hand drafting. This didn't remove jobs, clients just expected things to be designed faster and in greater detail than they were before.

Maybe before we start patting ourselves on the back and handing out free money we should have a concrete example of an AI doing actual useful work without any human intervention.

Are you arguing that technology never forces people out of their jobs?

Note that even if the total number of jobs stays fixed, it doesn't follow that the same people are doing them. They might end up doing something better, or something much worse, or just die and get replaced by a new generation with different skills. There are many examples from history going in either direction.

The total number of jobs increases. Logically, it has to. Population increases. There are more people now than there were in the past and there is not massive unemployment, so there must be more jobs than there were before.

What does that have to do with my comment? I said:

> Note that even if the total number of jobs stays fixed, it doesn't follow that the same people are doing them.

The fundamental problem that I see with UBI is that it basically means that we are just paying people to be passive consumers of resources.

It'll always be a hard sell as a result. People want their neighbours to pull their weight. Even if it's just sweeping the street, painting their fence, whatever. Paying people to sit about watching TV is never going to work.

If it's just the bare minimum to survive (e.g. food + roof), there's still quite a lot of self-interested incentive to pull your weight. Of course, some people would be satisfied with the bare minimum but my guess is it wouldn't be a large percentage of the population.

Not only do you steal from working people to give to tv watchers, you also structurally shift the market by forcing all jobs to pay more than the baseline minimum wage, which means that all would-be workers that cannot provide more than $x in value to an employer would never be hired. This tends to impact unskilled workers, who tend to need experience to increase the value they can offer employers.

I think you have it backwards.

Let's say somebody is making $1K/month from UBI. They might take a job that pays $1/hour because the difference between $1K/month and $1160/month is very significant.

And there'd be no reason to stop jobs from paying $1/hour because everybody already gets UBI.

That's a quite horrible outcome though. It basically means that this persons income is paid by fellow workers who happened to be more fortunate, so that the business owner can have an almost free workforce.

> persons income is paid by fellow workers who happened to be more fortunate

Yes, this is what happens in all welfare schemes. UBI is no different from any other welfare scheme in this regard.

> People want their neighbours to pull their weight.

This is not a universally held belief, although I'll admit that (at least currently) a great majority still do think this way. I am hoping we one day evolve past this idea that one's existence must be justified through arbitrary toil. We shouldn't have to invent hole-digging jobs and hole-filling jobs purely so people can "do something" to pull their weight.

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

― Buckminster Fuller

There's been no shortage of navel-gazing techno-optimists throughout recent history, that's for sure.

Without navel-gazers, we'd still be farming our feudal lord's land and sending our 4 year old children to work in coal mines. If anything, progress requires navel-gazing, and we need more of it.

I think that you're getting stuck on bullshit jobs.

There are real things that need to be done. As I mentioned - sweeping the street, pruning the shrubs, painting the fence. Care work. Childcare. Helping people navigate the metro. In my country there are huge shortages of police, military, and so on and so forth.

There are many many more examples.

The idea of giving someone money to do nothing is absurd in this context. Far better to just fund more paid work.

Annoyingly, the basic income pilot described in this article is not universal, and only helps people who could already afford to be artists. I'm sure the people working behind the counter in your local chipper would've liked to avail of it but they don't qualify as working "artists".

But being Ireland, I can't imagine they'd ever implement it without an enormous means test.

UBI makes most sense as a targeted way to increase wages by removing some people from the workforce.

It would be very good for society, for example, if we paid parents to stay home with the kids instead of sending the kids to day care and to homeschool their kids instead of sending the kids to school. We'd also benefit by paying creatives and scientists so they can pursue their calling without having to work a day job in the patent office like Einstein was infamously forced to and without having to work for a university where there are perverse incentives that discourage the most important work in favor of what is most likely to lead to publications and to governmental/corporate grants.

Of course UBI is only part of a plan to control the labor supply and thus drive up wages. We also need to preserve child labor laws, lower the retirement age (60 or maybe even 50 would be reasonable), tax outsourcing instead of subsidizing it and restrict the sort of immigration that takes our jobs instead of creating new jobs. In the case of immigration, that's why green cards for college graduates are preferable to guest worker visas because highly skilled immigrants seem to be disproportionately entrepreneurial but only if their immigration status isn't tied to a job. Prosperity for all rather than maximizing GDP needs to be the goal of economic policy.

The issue with most UBI proposals is that their supporters seem to have no understanding of economics and no bigger plan to achieve any real policy objective. So their proposals would just cause inflation unless corporations were able to automate away almost all jobs. In which case we'd basically have an imperial Roman style economy where most of the population is dependent upon the government for bread and circuses while a few accumulate great wealth from the machines (in the case of Rome, humans who had the misfortune to be born as "machines") that run everything. I don't think that's really the kind of future we should want.

The major issue I have with all the UBI studies is that it ends. If you know that UBI ends in say 2 years or 3 years, your actions will be different if it is a true UBI. That skews any of the results of people's behavior.

Oh it absolutely will. For the worse.

When you get something for nothing, you better believe that productivity will plunge.

Even a cursory glance at history will show this to be true. Argentina is a great example, of 'something for nothing'.

No.

The universal in UBI is key, it means everyone gets the same basic amount, no matter how rich (reframing on purpose to make a point). No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.

When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income. And that's effectively welfare, which we already have. So it becomes mainly a discussion about reducing barriers to access welfare.

Why is it key? What does it being truly universal unlock that being means tested does not?

> When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income.

No. A guaranteed minimum income means that you can make 500 Euros scrubbing toilets, and welfare bureaucracy will top that up to 1000 Euros after "means testing".

A UBI means that you get 1000 Euros from the government without bureaucracy. If you so wish, you can earn additional income by scrubbing toilets.

> No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.

There's nothing wrong with giving the rich 1000 Euros like everyone else, as long as tax rates are adjusted so that they effectively give the 1000 Euros back. This zero-sum effect may seem silly, but it's a simple implementation without any additional bureaucracy.

They rich would have to give more back than the 1k they take. Otherwise the program wouldn't be funded for those that give back less than 1k.

Sure. There is no magic source of free money.

My point was that, even if there were a magic source of free money for the UBI, "don't give money to the rich" would still be implemented in the most simple way as "do give money to the rich, then get it back".

UBI really does mean giving money to everyone, including people who don't really need it.

The problem is getting political support for it. I'd be in favor of if it could be done without increasing government spending (aka by massively reducing/eliminating other government programs). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to resonate well with progressive voters.

It can't be done without massively increasing government spending, the numbers doesn't even add up.

If you're thinking of a UBI that allows people to live a comfortable life without working, yeah that doesn't seem possible. But if you're thinking of a UBI that prevents homelessness and hunger, it seems possible.

Let's say we set the bare minimum at 1000$ per month.

That gives us 1000$ * 260,000,000 adults * 12 months ~= 3 trillion$ per year. That's around half of the federal government spending for 2023. I know 1000$ doesn't seem like a lot but if you live in a low density area with roommate(s) and eat a lot of rice[0], it's do-able. Of course, living in a costly area wouldn't be possible for people who solely survive on UBI. The UBI could even be upped to 1,500$ and still leave government with 1.5 trillion to spend.

[0] https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/

UBI in effect would clean the most degenerate and ignored few in society while at the same time liberating the masses from aimless drudgery. It will inject cash into the consumer market and lower risk to seeking credit. I see it as the ultimate form of capitalism when everyone has a means to acquire goods and services at a mutually agreed upon standard. I also see it as the only option to avert a cataclysmic economic event when we all get layed off and replaced by robots. Read this article from McMaster about UBI in action in the Province of Ontario, it is short and clears up many pre conceived notions against such a program.

https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/28173/1/southe...

Our scientific revolution was based upon a hundred idle wealthy individuals who chose science as their preferred toy.

UBI could make that happen again.

Why do you want to control the lives of others?

Not sure which way this post is arguing, but in my anti-UBI opinion, providing UBI does control the lives of others primarily by stealing from productive members to give to unproductive ones.

I have no problem if people want to personally finance folks to not work via private charity, but when it becomes a government program, you are definitionally controlling everyone.

Because control over lives of others is what makes a well functioning society. This is something that every single anarchist/libertarian is incapable of understanding, despite living in the developed part of the world.

It's just not personal control but institutional control.

It can transform society all right. Into a ghetto, most likely...

Can we just give everyone food, healthcare, and a place to live?

Do farmers just give away food? Do doctors give away healthcare? Do trade people who build houses do so for free?

The government provides many services already, and the cost of provision is not free, and they pay the providers of these things

This is not limitless. The government gets money by collecting taxes. In order to collect taxes, there have to be people doing paid work to collect taxes from. If the government takes over doing all the things that people currently get paid to do by engaging in commerce, then where is the government going to collect taxes from? Without collecting taxes, how is the government going to compensate all the workers providing the free food and healthcare?

This is a bit of a naive perspective, the military is massive in the US and they contract with hundreds of private companies and create thousands of jobs.

Rolling things into taxes and government services doesn't make jobs and money disappear. It's not a perfect system by any means, but there's no question of availability when it comes to national defense priorities... in fact there's a massive abundance and it feels like we sell arms to half the planet. We can do the same for healthcare.

It goes from net revenue to net loss.

If the government pays $100 billion in defense contracts they are necessarily collecting less than that in taxes from the employee income.

Spending $100 billion to collect $30 billion in taxes is not sustainable. It's not naive, it's simple arithmetic. The money has to come from somewhere.

and yet the US has been operating this way for 100 years

Yes, because there are large sectors of the economy that are not just government spending and the government taxes those to support the sectors it does spend on.

Every time you take a sector that is private and replace it with one provided by the government, you reduce government revenue and increase government expenses. How many times do you think you can do that?

The government is not a magic fairy godmother that produces things you want out of thin air.

> How many times do you think you can do that?

I mean, maybe a couple more times? privatizing healthcare specifically has been studying extensively and is very likely to save large sums of money

This is the opposite of privatizing. Publicizing I guess.

The government already spends more than it takes in and is $32 trillion in debt.

There are definitely a lot of inefficiencies in healthcare, many of them could be solved without the government taking it over.

This is a bad faith argument that isn't even logical, we get lots of things for "free" (paid for by taxes):

* most roads

* firefighting services

* policing

* public schools

* libraries

* parks

* garbage collection (more varied)

* national defense

We can do the same for housing, food, and healthcare... there's no reason you can light your house on fire and get people coming out to risk their lives to save it for free... but if you trip and break your ankle that's 100% your responsibility.

Especially in situations like food and healthcare, where massive federal subsidies are funneled into the pockets of middlemen who provide very little value, but have captured the market to funnel money into their own pockets.

No. Why do you think they would start?

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes, per usual.

Most of the arguments seem to be that UBI will reduce labor participation. That seems logically correct, but why is it morally correct?

In US (and in western countries), we have the capitalists benefit from the increase in productivity and the working people penalized. Maybe, it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way? Why should the the wealth generated by the society not go to the society (instead of a few wealthy people, as it happens today)?

For all the arguments about how it can increase the cost of labor, I would say so what? The profits of the corporation can go down a lot and go to people who make it work.

Oh no, think of the billionaires...

It can transform the society into a poor one with shortage of goods.

UBI can be mathematically equivalent to any other social welfare system. It's just a question of tax brackets and welfare brackets.

UBI makes 0 sense if one can calculate properly. Almost no nation can be able fund it with current debts they have. It brings cost of Trillions to budget, not possible with more crazy rich tax. It would make rich move. Exc. Norway, Qatar, UAE and maybe few small others. Only possible in these ones because their wealth funds are by far biggest in the world per citizen already.

A fiscally balanced UBI is simply one where the average taxpayer receives the same amount of UBI as they pay in extra taxes.

In the US the average taxpayer makes $40K, and currently pays $6K in taxes, for a net of $34K.

If we add a $1K/month UBI, then under a balanced plan that taxpayer would make $52K and pay $18K in taxes for a net of $34K. That's a tax rate of 35% and is obviously feasible since there are lots of people & places with much higher rates.

Similar calculations show that a UBI of $3K per month is not feasible.

$1K/month won't cover rent in most of the US but it might be possible to live on it if you live in shared housing and eat nothing but rice & beans.

I don’t understand this. If everyone is getting taxed to the point where they only make $34k, this UBI solution would make everyone poor with no way to work harder, or learn more, to get ahead. This is how black markets to get paid under the table start to form.

And if all the UBI is coming from the tax someone pays in, just lower taxes. It would have the same impact without all the extra overhead.

> . If everyone is getting taxed to the point where they only make $34k

Only the average taxpayer gets taxed that amount. It roughly means a 16% tax increase. Somebody making $1M a year would pay $160K extra and get $12K in UBI.

How is everyone not worse off under this plan? They are being bled dry by taxes and tossed a couple nickels back as UBI. No one would vote for this.

The only people who wouldn’t be worse off are people with no income to start with. I assume they’d get some base level $1k UBI.

I think Andrew Yang had the right idea, in the limited amount I heard. Tax the cooperations that are using AI or automation to reduce the need for workers. Their costs are going down, while their profits stay high, so capture that and give it to the people who were displaced. Bleeding the middle class, and people in general, doesn’t make sense.

The "B" in UBI demands that the income be sufficient for basic needs and other social welfare systems observably do not provide that unconditionally.

The "B" means that UBI is a welfare system where everyone in the relevant population group receives the same basic income (at least in some technical sense), regardless of their other income. The "U" means that "everyone" gets it. People sometimes distinguish between full and partial basic income, depending on whether the basic income is sufficient to cover most people's basic needs.

Does that really make sense to you?

You’ve identified the connection between basic income and basic needs; and even identified that there’s full basic income and partial basic income; but you think that the “basic” in universal basic income is just a redundant qualifier of the “universal” bit?

The B in universal basic income means everyone gets a basic income to cover their basic needs. Obviously.

Of course it does. There have been many basic income proposals over the decades, some of them universal and some not. It does not make sense to assume that UBI refers to any specific model.

In particular, there are some UBI proposals where the level of the basic income is intentionally too low to cover basic needs. Those proposals aim to dismantle the welfare traps that plague non-basic income models. Once your income grows high enough that you start losing welfare benefits, your effective marginal tax rate can be very high. Rates above 80% are common, and sometimes they rise above 100%.

Using your logic then, what’s the difference between a universal income and a universal basic income? There doesn’t seem to be any.

You seem to have confused yourself into thinking that since you could run a “universal partial basic income” scheme that the definition of the term UBI must refer to a general framework that can accommodate this. But that is semantically backwards.

UBI is universal full basic income. Partial UBI is a different thing.

It’s like saying you can do a 360 flip and then doing a “partial 360” where you turn 180 degrees.

“Full basic” means it meets your basic needs. It means basic. Binary.

“Partial Universal Basic Income” equates to “Universal Not Basic Income”.

The "basic" part is an accounting technicality. Everyone entitled to the benefit gets the basic income, but it's taxed away from those who earn enough. This is in contrast to traditional welfare benefits, which you only get if you apply for them.

There are also basic income proposals without the "universal" part. For example, only those who work get the basic income. (This is often called negative income tax.) This is supposed to give those in necessary but low-paying jobs a fairer share of wealth than what the market would give.

I've never heard of anything called "universal income".

There's no "demand". Basic means setting a base income level. That's it. It's disingenuous to assert that you can't have UBI below some threshold.

You could set UBI at $50 per month ($300 per year). By itself, this isn't enough to survive on in a developed country, and the amount would be negligible for almost everybody. But if you're in a situation where $50 per month is going to make a material impact to your life, then you really need it. UBI disproportionately helps the most desperate. That's the point.

The term UBI then doesn't mean a guaranteed income, sufficient to live on.

That's exactly what the proponents saying it would let people create art and other projects that they don't have time to do today argue for.

So, it's just a question of Congress passing the right rules and not messing it up? That's not very reassuring...

All gov welfare leads to the conclusion of the GP.

An objection I seldom see but I think is important to consider:

wouldn't it take us that much closer to "bread and circuses" i.e. that the State can even more easily buy (quite literally) favours from a subdued population. In a way we are already there, but UBI would really short-circuit the loop.

This is among the most frequent objections to UBI that I see. This is a legitimate concern, but we shouldn't blow it out of proportion. Just because there's a danger in pursuing a policy to it's logical extreme doesn't mean society shouldn't practice it in moderation.

just make it conditional: 21 hours of study and/or social work/field work per week.

- high school style tests, milestones and road maps to test study progress, good for citizen science but can be any subject, fugees start easy with the ABC

- social work including agriculture & farms, where the first year or two can count towards apprenticeship if combined with studies

solves low wages short-, mid-, long-term, increases buying power, creates jobs and tons of admin, org, bureaucracy work for those who dig it :)

make it enough to afford rent and healthy food and some culture per week. in Germany, that would be 1350 - 1500 per month, which is covered already, but the conditions are nonsense and lax.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

As long as it's not busy work I guess. I won't be surprised if those rules are poorly enforced though

I'd be okay with just giving people money, even if it's less than cost of living, since that will push some people back from the edge. It may be used as an excuse to stay in dying rural towns and vote against my freedom but hell that happens anyway...

> As long as it's not busy work I guess

Even digging holes in the ground and filling them up again is exercise.

So... for people who are overweight and out of shape (as measured by standardized fitness tests executed under the gaze of a well-trained A.I.), also require (say) two half-hour exercise sessions (also under the gaze of a well-trained A.I.).

this is why humanities matter

I am begging you to say psych (or sike).

Okay okay. Let's stick to digging ditches and filling them up again. WithOUT robotic assistance. Some sort of character-building exercise that keeps the Protestant Work Ethic -itarians happy.

what? I was referring to this part:

>as measured by standardized fitness tests executed under the gaze of a well-trained A.I.

Conditional social benefits are always a nightmare in practice. Look at the rules to qualify for that high school style test or prove that you actually achieve the milestone.

Assume they will be implemented by the most incompetent of bureaucrats (eg. months to get an appointment, buggy Oracle software).

Assume they will be implemented by the most nightmarish of your political opponents. Look for instance on rules for identification for voters in the southern USA. In theory that makes sense! In practice it's cynically implemented to systematically prevent certain demographics from voting.

The main advantage of UBI in practice is that it's no questions asked. Anything else about it can be replicated by fiddling with tax and welfare bracket numbers.

I agree, but a proper model and structure can be created. And voting for the right people won't be done if the voters aren't properly involved in increasing brain power and participating in social work/life.

What problem are you trying to solve with those conditions?

- increase of brain power

- smarter future voters

- increasing participation in productive and constructive society

- more voices and more discussion

- eliminating the bias and discrimination against people who receive basic income

- eliminating small scale opportunities to lazycheat

- eliminate the continued rise of the currently too easily abused right leaning parts of the population

- ...

it will take time, of course

Ok great. So every single minimum wage worker quits their job and decides to study for three hours per day for an hourly wage of over 2x the previous minimum.

Sounds to me like you've just created a massive labor shortage. What's next?

i doubt that min wage workers will all quit, the extra money is what they need to live properly

Right now workers do those jobs, because if they don't, they will die or become destitute. If you change their incentive to be they can work an unpleasant job while rent and food is guaranteed, you're going to find that the marginal value of that 12 euros an hour has plummeted. It's not worth it to work a terrible minimum wage job if your basic needs are satisfied

it's still not enough to raise children, for example, or buy a car, or get more culture. you need that extra money and it will be easier doing that shitty job if you get enough time for variety and your bank account statement doesn't raise your stress levels.

The same thing as any other labor shortage? Employers offer more money, and people who want that money apply for those jobs?

How is society supposed to function without an underclass of poor and unhealthy wage slaves?

Yeah! Who's gonna deliver my groceries?!

I recommend Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash ... tl;dr: guys with katanas and kids on skateboards with really cool tires and grappling hooks ^^

that's exactly how! self-interest. being lazy is always up there as an option. some people button-mash that shit the minute they wake up. and not all of them are poor, unhappy, unhealthy. it's usually only when other people feel the need to remind them that they can press pause and the check the list of available commands to which they usually answer something like: "no shit, sherlock", that they suddenly feel inadequate and stressed.

Yes, that’s a feature. But it’s also discussed in the context of AI creating a massive/total job shortage. The timing is the tricky part, as job shortage grows maybe it would even mean lower minimum wage.

That is a very bad idea, implementing this would result in a massive state apparatus that would be insanely expensive to run and most inefficient.

People down on their luck would have to go through months of tribulations to prove they have the right to not starve, losing time not actually trying to climb out of their hole.

Also the point of UBI is that it is unconditional (The U stands for Univeral). It is supposed to be a simpler, fairer welfare system that allows everyone to focus on improving their lives instead of trying to survive.

the state apparatus dealing with unemployment is already massive and it's resources can be reallocated. with hundreds of millions of refugees and immigrants from zones that will get fried by climate change, you really have no chance if you don't increase the efforts, capacity and variety of approaches of all state institutions.

Not exactly universal as such.

rebrand it then

Maybe you should read the definition of Universal Basic Income first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income - although it's actually already contained in the name. The proposal is to have less or no bureaucratic hurdles before being able to receive it, and here you are proposing even more bureaucracy...

I know. The point is that for the biggest part of people receiving money without conditions, does not result in a favorable outcome for society, themselves and only a moderately good outcome for the economy

> does not result in a favorable outcome for society

That's your respectable opinion, but the truth is: we don't know!

You may be right, you may be wrong, but this is the crux of the discussion and you cannot swipe it off by stating an opinion as a fact.

Agreed. Thnks for pointing that out. I still didn't get around studying all those fallacies and how to argue logically. I should learn about one per day and find an example when the fallacy becomes a non-fallacy.

But isn't it a measurable factor? ... people get free stuff, people don't question their benefactor, people agree to rely on him, people become dependent beyond the extent of constructive codependence

I’m going to study fascism instead of working.

you'll learn how it's just a tool for inferior men to abuse people in order to compensate for a very specific but acquirable lack of adaptivity to the real world, a growing world population and eventual colonization of space

So like communism?

nope. communism is when people do what must be done while criticizing each other for fun ... you know, like people who don't feel the need to pseudo-dominate. people rarely get to see communism in action.

what you know as communism is some early access pre-alpha where half the code is duck tape polished with spit.

there is a convention to ignore that communism never organized. it wouldn't have anyway. too many corrupt humans. it's too bad humans didn't learn in time about emotional and cognitive exploits, sabotage of bias and fallacies and pseudo-dominance. only because of that did so many good men die in pointless wars. 'member how the smartest scientist & engineers were all for communism back in the day? that's because they understood machines and wanted to build for eternity. then the magic-money guys, who always lose against honest competition, came around and established their pseudo-dominant financial hierarchies and threatened and scared people and now we have planned obsolescence, "the right to repair", influencers and make-up that will make you look mid-chemo 70 before you are 40. hoarder capitalism, fuck yeah

This sounds like an absolute nightmare to implement. The point of UBI is to have a safety net so that you can spread your wings and pursue passion projects and ventures. It's not supposed to be a ball and chain you bear so that you can eat while tech billionaires do everything they can to price you out of the job market. Not everybody has daddy's money to spend while they work on their startup.

your passion projects become paid studies and the implementation can be your social / civic / field work. it's still a guaranteed safety net, except with a growing level of accountability.

not everybody has passion projects, not everybody who had youth when he couldn't handle it, has money or peace of mind to go back to school, and a UBI won't hold you accountable. some people need to learn/ relearn how to take responsibility for themselves and a low end job where they learn the retarded rules of the hoarder-capitalist "we-run-on-magic-math-money" economy obviously isn't constructive or productive. if it was, the right / alt right wouldn't grow their follower base.

but yes, the implementation will need a huge bunch of devs and admin people who are technical, capable and, "under different circumstances, wouldn't work for so much less money than they earned during their previous employments"

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