Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent
artnews.com
artnews.com
Everyone who would _like_ to be an artist, but can't afford to be one, is disqualified. Meanwhile, the acquaintance of mine who sold his house in London at a large profit and retired to a cottage in Westmeath to live off his gains and noodle around on the guitar a bit is a recipient of funds from this program.
Tellingly there's very little information about how to _become_ an artist with this program.
Edit/addendum: Worth noting they've produced some _very_ dubious numbers to claim this program is a net gain economically. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2025/0923/1534768-basic-income-fo...
""" A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million. In addition, the report estimates that audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences. """
And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program. I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being.
I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself).
Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
How is that different than being an “artist” whose art isn’t consumed by anyone willing to pay for it.
I kind of see the reasoning to some extent but then also e.g. “full time gardeners” if their yards are visible from the sidewalk should be paid.
It's a cultural norm. Extending it to other generally penniless artists is too.
When universities in other countries start running courses on Irish food service workers we can reasonably expect them to be included.
There is no numerical value of UBI that makes any sense in Canada. Rent is expensive and toys are cheap.
You need universal basic services with income being a thing you use for toys and vices. So this hypothetical artist should instead get paid what other people are willing to pay but need $0 in pay for basic food, water, healthcare, and housing.
It's possible. It's possible that there can be a similar gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount I need to live on while I pursue my career in snail sniffing". So what? That's why my snail sniffing is purely a hobby.
This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.
This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.
If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
Plenty of artists become very, very wealthy.
[0] https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/art-world-statistics-ev...
Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point.
So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time.
Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
Human nature dictates that, while there may be "many", they would never even get close to being a majority. Hardly anyone wants to "just scrape by".
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
The only one of those that's justifiable for UBI is some sort of ID requirement to prevent double-claiming.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
That said, the random person buying grocery is paying a corp here.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Source: happened in a city near me.
Jesus, talk about a strawman
If your can't afford to feed your kids in school you don't deserve to be called a first world country.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
Funny enough, I _did_ build a house in the countryside, and as an immigrant, but only by buying a very old house and refurbishing/extending it. I hardly view this as a claim on the public purse; I imported my job (by working remote for a US company), dumped hundreds of thousands of Euro in to Ireland (half a million just in taxes), then built a house after working with asinine planners and finally sold it at a huge loss. So Ireland got a bunch of money and another house. They're welcome.
As far as Ireland's demography, I don't see how people immigrating (mainly to the cities) changes what I said? Ireland is noteworthy in that it _also_ has a huge problem with emigration; it treats nurses terribly and more or less pushes them out the country, for instance.
Personally, I have some sympathy with these types of laws. As someone whose home town in the UK became greatly gentrified before I was able to get on the housing ladder, I find myself living a little way out from where I want to be. Some people are "Anywheres" whilst others are "Somewheres". I am very much a "Somewhere" and need to be based around where I grew up and where my early memories reside. My sister is an "Anywhere" and lives in sunnier climes, apparently with no sentiment for where she grew up.
What "Anywheres" tend to take for granted is they usually have a somewhere they can go back to, but the displaced "Somewhere" does not.
BTW, I certainly did not mean to imply anything about your use of a public purse.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
Or at least that's the reason they claim.
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/refundabl...
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
There is little control.
About that kind of fraud I never heard anything like that in Sweden, but I would assume social services checks if children are attending school and if they are not, they investigate the parents. So this kind of fraud shouldn't be possible long-term. Social services would get called if a child doesn't show up for school or is not registered in any schools pretty quickly.
I also think that home-schooling is illegal, but not sure on the specifics.
The thing with these kind of benefits is that the bureucracy involved in dispensing them often costs close (or more) than the money dispensed. The system is more efficient if you just let everyone have it. It is one of the core arguments of UBI vs Welfare.
In this case the benefit still counts as welfare, not UBI obviously. However since the dispensing of the benefit is so simple (registered with tax agency, which is required to have an ID) it carries the same argument. If UBI was a thing in Sweden it would work the exact same way sans a check for parent-child relationship.
Also the amount per child grows slightly with every child up to 4 I think.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the scam of collecting benefits via fake or stolen identities?
Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.
In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
Don't they always? As much as I despise the modern Republican party and Trump in particular, I think they're much better at messaging and group consensus. Considering Bernie Sanders' electoral performance, there were (are?) definitely opportunities.
If your only concern is people who are scamming the system, UBI ensures they are not scamming by definition. (we can debate if that is a good solution or not - a very different topic). However the main concern should be people who need help, and a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
This is true, but there is plenty of evidence in the disability sphere that it's more cost-effective to give people with disabilities money up front because they can spend it on their own needs better than government programmes.
Think of it like a business that wants to make sure WFH is comfortable for its employees. Many companies now just give a grant up front for monitors, chairs, etc.
If they don't do that they need someone to admin/spreadsheet what monitor is best value for the company, what chairs, and investigate perhaps all the accessibility needs that might need to become a matter of policy for the firm. Updates to employee contracts. List goes on. And at the end, people will still complain because they think the company chose the wrong chair for them.
Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.
This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.
It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Per the same USA Spending .gov site, military spending by year has been:
2024: $1,358,253,371,219 14.03%
2023: $1,297,012,666,574 13.90%
2022: $1,160,975,500,606 12.85%
2021: $1,117,832,172,120 11.11%
2020: $1,098,916,637,102 12.03%
2019: $1,060,561,779,405 15.97%
2018: $995,628,286,613 15.77%
2017: $931,355,381,711 15.39%
One obvious scam in this case would be to convince the system you are more than one person.
I think you underestimate people's greed and inventiveness.
I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment.
Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.
Medicaid
FY 2023 Budget: $900.3b ($620b federal, $280b state) [1]
FY 2023 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): 5% ($45b) [2]
SNAP
FY 2024 Budget: $100.3b [3]
FY 2024 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): $6.5b [3]
TANF
FY2024 Budget: $31.5b ($16.5b federal, $15b state) [4]
FY2023 Budget spent on program overhead: %10.1 ($3.2b) [5]
Total Admin Spending $54.7b -> $169 per person in the US
So not totally negligible but also not exactly a basic income
[1] (https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending)
[2] (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640) See figure 4
[3] (https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...)
[4] (https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf)
[5] (https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tan...)
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
Public or private? I've never seen "the left" criticize admin overhead in public services.
McKinsey estimates healthcare profit pools will reach $819 billion in 2027.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Politicians need to win elections every 2-6 years, and honestly most of them aren't that bright.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
Two mitigations would be gradual adjustments, and a willingness to delay reductions a bit.
People shouldn't be sweating bullets about help being pulled prematurely as a direct result of trying to get past the need for it. Or have the marginal impact of increasing their earned income actually reduce total help+income.
I know somebody in an extremely bad health situation, and dealing with both of those perverse issues. Attempting employment would carry a lot risk. And with kids to be cared for, playing roulette in an already challenging situation is a real barrier. (In this case, it isn't government help, but a situation with similar logic.)
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.
Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.
Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.
Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.
Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.
Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
The Clintons writing books and giving lectures is also irrelevant.
They don't cater heavily to poor people for votes. They use lies and misinformation to get poor to vote against their interests.
If the poor were actually being catered to like you seem to think they are, they'd actually have their basic needs met.
Why are we stuck with Medicaid and Medicare instead of having universal healthcare? It's not cost. We're currently paying more than other rich countries (which answers your 'domonating government expenditures' comment). Because the status quo helps the rich.
Single payer means perverse incentives endemic to socialism.
It's actually easy to prove that this isn't true. Not even close.
What do you define as a "true UBI"? Take that annual number and multiply it by the population of the United States. That's how much a "true UBI" program would have to spend annually.
If we took a poverty-level wage of $15.5K annually and gave it to every person, that would require $5.4 Trillion, excluding any overhead of sending out the money.
That's more than all of the federal tax revenue combined. Even if we took every dollar paid in federal taxes and gave it to every person in the United States with 100% efficiency, divided evenly, it would still be below what's considered poverty-level wages.
I think a lot of people have "feel it in my bones" beliefs about UBI that they haven't stopped to check with some simple math. Actually giving everyone a lot of money is extremely expensive.
If US GDP is ~30 trillion, the program would have to capture ~20% of that to achieve your target.
Do check my math, I’m not sure I’ve got this right.
That's correct.
You'd have to raise taxes across the board. There is a lingering assumption that we can tax billionaires and get UBI, but more simple math shows that won't work either. Even if you seized 100% of the net worth (not just cash in the bank) of all US billionaires, you couldn't provide poverty-level wages to everyone for very long.
In practice, this means that a UBI program would turn into a tax rate program. You might "receive" $15K in UBI, but your middle-class taxes would go up by $20K per year. So you're technically getting UBI, but your taxes have gone up to pay for it to go to people in lower tax brackets.
If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
Perhaps you could try paying them more?
Seriously, I can do this all day.
To address your question as why this is allowed to continue, you'd have to ask those within the US and countries that allow it to happen.
Australia addressed this in 1907 or so with the Harvester decision and other related law cases that became foundation to working conditions.
https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...
> that said, I'd only support it for natural/born citizens.
directly in contradiction to the spirit of UBI that you endorsed immediately preceding it?
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things
There are a LOT of problems with this programme, but personally, I think associating a costed economic benefit with "psycholigical wellbeing" seems good. It may make a pretty good precedence argument for other beneficial-to-society programme pilots to point to when selling their merits. The idea of a government programme appearing to prioritise psychological wellbeing seems net positive.
Making Tuesday free ice cream day would also improve psychological well-being, but that doesn't help pay for the program.
My taxes pay for the programme. That is why I pay them. If the programme benefits psychological wellbeing, then it is worthwhile for me to pay for it.
Whether you choose to quantify this in terms of monetary net contrib to the economy as a broad concern, or as direct public benefit, is splitting econ hairs.
Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
Regarding your second assertion, the construction of local amenities is in fact often paid for by the property tax. And in any case, what has actually driven the strong increase in the prices of houses nationwide is their relative scarcity now that the population has swelled so dramatically.
To me, a tax of under 0.1% is pretty close to 0. If only ETF's enjoyed the same treatment, it might be easier to save up for a deposit!
We agree that scarcity is what makes houses more expensive.
Edit: I can't reply to below but ETF's suffer from deemed disposal, where even unrealized gains are taxed at 41% after holding them for 8 years. https://irishfinancial.ie/how-you-calculate-deemed-disposal/
Isn't the annual property/wealth tax on an ETF €0?
ETF's suffer from deemed disposal, where even unrealized gains are taxed at 41% after holding them for 8 years. https://irishfinancial.ie/how-you-calculate-deemed-disposal/
Weirdly, individual stocks are not affected by this, which encourages riskier behaviour on the part of investors. I really don't understand it.
- Who decides who gets the valuable land (high rent value) and who gets the land no one wants to use?
- What happens when the population changes due to birth/death/immigration? Do you rebalance every 10 years? Can children inherit their parents' land?
- If we rebalance regularly, how do we protect people who built a business on land they had been renting but which is no longer available?
The other thing that usually goes with this proposal is that there would be no land costs other than tax. Land allocation would be like this: Everyone would bid how much they want to pay for the land; the winning bidder pays that much into the tax pool, and gets to use the land. The details of this idea wildly vary depending on who you ask - it's an extremely difficult problem to figure out what exact rules would work well to stop, e.g. Elon Musk outbidding some elderly lady's family farm just because he hates her (yet still balancing that with the need to stop her heirs from blocking development in that area forever). Maybe it necessitates human judgement in such cases. That's getting into the weeds though. You can see how that general kind of system would work, from a bird's eye view.
This kind of thing is much more common in continental Europe, but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
Unless it's sports or films, naturally; those can get essentially unlimited money.
So, who would you fund as an artist? Who would you tell "no, you're not an artist, you don't qualify." Can you acknowledge that this is a difficult question without calling people argumentative?
If you show up and say, "this random obscure software thing I'm doing is art," without any effort at portraying yourself as an artist, working in the arts, writing about your work, showing it in galleries or online, etc., then no, you probably aren't going to get funding. But you'd have to be pretty clueless about the entire process to think this is viable in the first place. These organizations are funding people that are socially "artists", and are not interested in some abstract debate about the meaning of art and then funding people that fit that definition.
There are plenty of people doing obscure software-related things (usually described as digital art) that are absolutely considered artists for programs like this. But they are deliberately engaged with the process, so the supposed problem alluded to here doesn't really exist in practice.
You’d learn more by actually researching them yourself and not having arguments here.
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
I don't interpret this action by the government as bestowing virtue upon artists. It's just a way to fund something considered important culturally. It's not supposed to be fair or just, it's just a way to ensure that culturally-valued things are maintained without having to rely on the market to fund them.
Why do people remember fairness and frugality only when money are spent to directly help those in need?
I didn't see anyone complaining when money are funnelled to industries (e.g. Big Ag) instead of individuals.
My point is that somehow it is always some modest direct relief initiative that will spark endless discussions, while multi-million (or shall I say billion?) subsidies directed to already filthy-rich corporations go with zero public discussion and scrutiny.
If you want taxes to fund art, chop off 5% of everyone's taxes and tell them it's mandatory that they have to donate it to an artist. It's still bad, because people will have to register as artists and the state will have to say "yes, you are an artist" and "no, you are not an artist." But at least the state won't be saying "we've chosen you to be an artist!"
The state should not be intervening in or restricting art or journalism (i.e. expression in general.) Or any other form of expression. It should not be licensing artists, or licensing journalists. You're Zimbabwe when you start doing that.
edit: note that this is separate from intervening in trade and sales. You can still enforce antitrust, restrictions on content (e.g. copyright), or rules around fraud and deception on commercial art or journalism. One of the main purposes of government is to regulate trade, that's why they print the money, and why you get to go to court when a trade goes bad.
UBI is a way to manage a social security system. It is not a way to manage cultural heritage. Giving artists free money is also not a way to manage cultural heritage. If you want to do that you should pay artists for their works, hire them, commission from them, buy their artwork, all of that is more effective then just giving them money, which, again, is not the point of UBI.
Weird line. The point of UBI is that it goes to everyone. Which allows people to choose to be a Deliveroo worker for some extra cash, an artist if that fancies them or work a traditional job for that extra moolah.
Surely it's an €80m saving in something like health care costs or productivity?
Edit:
You've really ignored a lot in that RTE article.
>> measurable decline in reliance on social protection, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average
>> Participants were also 38 percentage points less likely to be receiving Jobseeker’s payments
>> income from arts-related work increase by over €500. At the same time, their earnings from non-arts employment fell by approximately €280
Finally, your complaint that there's no information on how to join the program - it's a pilot. People were selected, the pilot was run, and these are the results of it. Either they'll continue with the pilot to gather data, end the scheme altogether, or open it widely based on the data they've gathered.
""" The original cost of the pilot was €105 million, but after accounting for tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, the net fiscal cost dropped to just under €72 million. """
The values you cite just seem like really small amounts overall compared to the cost of the program.
Again, though, my core issue here is that I _want_ UBI, and what this gives us is empty tokenism (if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists?) at the same time the government has managed to produce a catastrophically bad housing crisis and a collapsing health system.
>> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists
It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
UBI (which I consider not feasible) is not meant to make it easier for freeloading companies. If they want delivery personnel, they should pay them sufficiently. The "gig economy" is a large step back, right to the 19th century/ It is not the goal of UBI.
I don't like how these reports speak with such certainty. How do you measure "total benefits"? For one, it includes income of the artist. Yes, giving money to people generally increases their income, so it would be weird if any amount given would not be break even to the expense, unless that person decides to do less of some other activity, which I guess is possible but unlikely at least for these amounts.
Then the study counts public facing artistic activity. Kind of hard to measure the value of that. I guess you could by saying "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
Then satisfaction and well being. I would certainly be happy with more money.
I personally don't think we have a lack of culture and art. If Ireland is at all like the US, they have more art majors (as a proxy for art creation). All artistic majors have grown considerably over the last few decades:
> A new analysis from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators finds that bachelor’s degree conferrals in the arts have remained substantially above average for the past 30 years. The data also show recent growth in the number of arts degrees conferred to traditionally under-represented racial/ethnic groups. As of 2015, departments and programs in the fine arts and performing arts awarded 80,360 bachelor’s degrees, with another 7,087 awarded for the “humanistic” study of the arts (subfields such as art history, musicology, and film studies, which the Indicators tabulate along with the humanities). This figure is down slightly from the historic peak of 82,778 degrees awarded in 2013 (or 90,543, when humanities subjects are included), and above the annual figure recorded at any point before 2011.
So the question is, what problem is this program trying to solve? Give rich kids that can afford to do art more money to support their lifestyle?
https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/taking-note-how-about...
I also doubt that's what they're getting at, because if they were, there's a fairly straightforward way to, you know, pay the artist who created the art.
If it’s not only open to indigenous people engaged in art of the indigenous cultures, i.e., in this case Irish doing indigenous Irish cultural things whatever those may be, you could have some perverse injustices where, e.g., some Asian engaged in hentai pornography, living off the taxes taken from some old indigenous Irish lady who gets €500/month in old age support.
But since “discriminating” in favor of survival by preserving your own culture and insisting on your own people’s survival in the west anymore, things are going to get extremely perverted, in the sense of grotesque distortion and corruption, even more than already exists.
Unfortunately, it seems that all European ethnic groups all around the world have seemingly lost any and all ability to project actions into future effects or evaluate their outcomes, and seemingly have also been totally brainwashed into simply facilitating their own eradication and lost any survival instinct or will to live.
This kind of wedge of using other people’s money in a system where you are not allowed to discriminate in favor of your own survival, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the civilized world, i.e., civilization itself.
It’s the problem of the fat smoker, the ironic inability of the civilized world to see the inevitable long term outcomes of their self-harming behaviors… so they keep killing … only this time themself … and only slowly.
I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.
The bottom line is that in most countries all the basics are taken care off one way or another. Nobody really starves. There's shelter and housing of some sorts for anyone. Healthcare is taken care off as well. And if you grow old and needy you typically don't end up on the streets either. That of course costs money and is in practice fully funded mostly.
True to some extent in most countries. The US is notably a bit harsh on this. And people do end up on the streets there. But by and large even there people are taken care off.
My view is that society could be a lot fairer if we just formalized the status quo of all that a bit and just guaranteed it. It doesn't have to be super comfortable or amazing. But just provide some basic promise to people that, no matter what, starvation is not something you need to worry about. We'll keep you warm, sheltered, healthy, educated, protected, etc. If you want to have nicer versions of that, go and work for it and earn those things. Most people that can do that of course already do that anyway. This is not a massive change in many countries. We already have these guarantees. It's just all super complicated, wrapped in stigma, and hopelessly bureaucratic.
So bureaucratic in fact that many countries actively dis-incentivize work. Work literally doesn't pay if you are on benefits. You could go out and work for a few hours but you'd just get cut on your social security and lose your benefits. When accepting work becomes risky like that, something is wrong.
Germany has a great name for their social welfare benefits: "Bürgergeld". Literally citizen money. It's what you get if you are not entitled to anything else. It comes with lots of restrictions and caveats. But it's a great name. If you are a citizen, that's what you can fall back to if you have nothing else.
UBI would be taking that notion and just giving it to everyone while reducing their other income by the same amount. It would add up to about the same cost. It's a bookkeeping trick. The fear of course is that people would stop working. But the positive effects would be a reduction in cost of labor for employers and a vast reduction in bureacracy needed to police the whole thing. Germany spends almost as much on unemployment bureaucracy and programs as it does on the actual benefits.
UBI simplifies social security, taxation, unemployment insurances, pensions, etc. You never go all the way to zero. You might still want to insure something extra of course. But that's your choice. What we have right now is the opposite: a lot of cost and no choice. But you are taken care off either way.
What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness.
And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity.
Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
Good lord, how do I get that job?
* Wednesday evening mass
* Thursday morning mass (this was attended by the school kids, as well as a collection of retirees)
* Saturday evening mass
* Sunday 7am mass
* Sunday 10am mass
There was also a weekly or maybe biweekly Confession.
That was serving quite a small congregation too, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bigger parishes have more frequent masses (although in my experience larger parishes often have more than one priest).
Also, the job of a Catholic priest is definitely not limited to performing Mass. They're essentially on call for Last Rites 24/7, but apart from that there's also just various parish events they'll be involved with.
So anyway, I don't want that job, I want the one where you give out vaguely mystical advice and listen to problems once a week, and then during the rest of the week you're like a cool side character at the local pub.
This is especially true in rural areas, where the density of churches was established in the pre-car era.
Which is expected, since every adult was expected to go to church every Sunday, and many people, especially elderly, went during the week. Also there were four or five priests, and only Sunday masses has more than one attending at once, so the load probably wasn't that large as I make it sound.
Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.
Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..
You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..
I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
Other nights featured smaller study groups, athletic activities (a lot of casual adult sports like softball are organized by churches), or special events like musical performances, choir practice, etc. And then there's the daily pastoral care (officiating funerals, visiting the sick, etc.). But in the absence of Eucharist as a frequent component of worship, and where confession and last rites aren't even considered sacraments, there's little fundamentally different between a well-run Bible study and a full service except the scale. The actual things done aren't really different.
Note: Episcopal services would be much more familiar in structure to a Catholic mass, and I believe Lutherans are similar (but, y'know, not a ton of Lutherans in the South, so I can't speak with any authority on the matter).
More usefully, GPs point, or something adjacent to it, might be stated like this: in our modern age, certain roles that were previously fulfilled by religious groups are now either being commercialised, taken on by the government, or left to fall by the wayside. As we navigate modernity it's important to understand the larger context so we can make better decisions about how we handle the resulting changes in our social support structure, and what we might need to intentionally add back in.
But yeah, don't become a priest if you're looking for an easy job. I didn't mean to imply that.
Right, the Catholic Church doesn't pay any attention to its finances. It doesn't have regularly financial reports full of numbers that are carefully reviewed by several levels of leadership. It doesn't zealously protect its tax exemptions and press people for donations each week. It just kinda wings it and hopes the checks don't bounce, which they magically don't because the Church does good work in the world?
Gp then sarcastically pointed out that they are, in fact, extremely obsessed with numbers and money and asking for money and growing that money.
I don't want to speak for gp too much but when I read that I thought it did a great job of pointing out why the implied causality of the church longevity wasn't correct (or at the very least wasn't enough of the picture).
To conflate this with UBI very much misses the point. This isn't some experiment in post-capitalist utopia, it is basically a subsidy for the arts. Societies often subsidise things they want more of and that the market, for one reason or another, cannot or will not provide. As someone who paid taxes in Ireland for many years I never had any issue with subsidies for the arts. I would be happy for the government to subsidise FOSS development, too, for what it's worth (and in fact the EU does this to an extent).
I'm not so sure. There's an element of pride in working to support oneself, rather than indolence.
In the USA, all kinds of things are subsidised too, EVs, oil drilling, NFL teams.
Every country makes it choices.
But as others have said, this has nothing to do with the UBI, as this is not universal. The main thing that makes this fellowship unusual, and not in a good way, is the fact that the selection criteria are shrouded in mystery.
[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
Because this competes with existing companies.
You are clearly employable - while not as amazing as it used to be, there is a clear market for software developers. Your job is not at risk of disappearing.
Musicians, though, have it tough - "we" as a society [1] accept that we want to have art but its economic value has been plummeting for a while. And while no one shed a tear when (for instance) stables had to close due to the scarcity of city horses, we do want to try and keep local artists around. And it's not like it's a waste either - if the program costed "€72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits for the Irish economy", that's not even a bad deal.
There's of course an argument of "I bet software developers could generate more benefits than artists", which is probably true, but I'd argue artists need it more right now. And nothing stops the program from expanding eventually.
[1] Well, "they" - I'm not Irish.
But what about the vloggers, are we so short on them? Same for clowns, I sorta feel we are in a huge surplus.
the accounting for the value generation is dubious at best.
Not to mention that my personal belief is that art should be patronage based, not taxation based. If the art has sufficient impact, it should be able to gather patrons to fund it. Otherwise, it's not artistic enough and naturally the artist would have to quit.
But we do already have lots of art. Centuries of it in fact. Maybe the focus should be on making that art available to all, including for the purpose of using it to create new art, instead of pissing away money on select "art" that few people will see.
I imagine you would have no trouble finding a well paying job to write software which is not the same situation for artists.
Of course they can, just like an OSS maintainer can go be a waiter.
Imagine how easy it would be to start businesses, startups non-profit projects if you had UBI. Bunch of guys come together and everyone knows $1,500 per month each "funding secured forever." Many people people dealing with burnout, mental or physical problems, could ease up and work part time.
EDIT: I’d genuinely appreciate it if you could explain why you disagree, instead of just mindlessly downvoting as though I’d said something offensive or inappropriate.
That said the point of UBI is to supplement, get a part time easy going job and with UBI you can chill.
Probably the solution for when AI takes over. So 2075.
Housing benefits must be spent on housing. People can use UBI any way they want. With UBI, people can more easily move from expensive cities if housing is not affordable, and then rents and prices must adjust.
The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand. Every urban economist agrees that the solution is to build more housing. Rent controls don't increase the number of housing units; only building more increases the housing supply. It does not have to be affordable housing; just build more housing units and all price points eventually get an affordable house.
Japan is an island like the UK, but they built the infrastructure and enough housing. At the height of its asset price bubble around 1990, the value of real estate in Japan was higher than that of the entire United States. But they built enough to match the demand. Now their population is in decline, and there are empty houses at the edge of the cities.
The _excellent_ IrishVernacular.com had a great website showing how to build a modern, comfortable house for 25k (make it 50k now with inflation), but when I talked to planners in Offaly (yech) about the idea of a pier foundation or a metal roof they got visibly angry. (The site is gone but archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210216212333/https://www.irish... ) Interestingly, metal roofs are cheaper and last longer (and can look perfectly nice, I'm not talking about tin roofs here). But planners are threatened by anything that makes housing more affordable.
As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago. If you're curious, the book "Whittled Away" is a really good examination of this, and how ecologically barren Ireland really is - https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/. And rural homes don't need to be car-dependent monstrosities, I made a video about how we could improve active transport in rural areas at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew (of course, even the greens think bikes are only toys outside the city, and my cllrs from FF/FG/SF practically laughed at me when I suggested bike infrastructure where we lived in the midlands).
Of course, the real galling bit is that Ireland has peak "rules for thee and not for me" energy, by saying you can opt out of all that so long as you're a true native son and have parents from the area (the EU has rightly pointed out that this is discriminatory, but Ireland just... breaks the law. And nothing happens) - https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/locals-only-planning-r... . So apparently one-off houses are great, but only for culchies.
Love this comment so much. And it's true!
I grew up in Ireland and was immersed in the "everything in Ireland is the best" mentality. I think it was when I started regularly visiting the Hudson Valley in New York, which is mostly still wooded, that I really realized the "countryside" in Ireland is just manmade. It's not natural. The whole island was trees.
My understanding is that you've left Ireland; hope you're making your peace with the problems of the country now that you don't have to deal with them as much!
I really like Ireland. I think it's an amazing place. But it's really, really, really badly run. And it seems like most policymaking (like this, or rent control, or help to buy, etc) was built on vibes instead of logic.
It is almost impossible to receive housing benefit in Ireland. Legally all landlords must accept it, practically few to none in major cities do.
> The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand.
About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds, another huge (difficult to specify) percentage are bought to rent by small to medium sized landlords. The Irish state Land Development Agency build around 3.5k homes per year, meanwhile Davies estimate the state needs around 93k new homes per year. Investing in any kind of investment fund or ETFs is taxed at 41% under the exit tax in Ireland. In addition, the “deemed disposal” rule means investments are taxed as though sold every eight years, even if they haven't been.
These are all artificial extreme pressures on housing in Ireland specifically, that mean that this is not a simple 'supply and demand' problem. It's a supply and demand of people who need housing vs entities who require profit - and have concomitant class affiliations and monies to spend on political influence problem.
What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.
The only place in the developed world where housing prices have declined (or even remained stagnant) over the long term is Japan, a country in long term recession.
I wrote about this in detail here - https://garethstack.com/2015/10/28/by-believing-passionately...
That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.
Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/02/05/republic-need...
The issue is as much a legacy of lack of investment as growth, as for a number of decades the state built no houses at all, forcing a generation into rental poverty.
It does not matter who owns them. If there is enough housing, investments funds will lower rents to match the demand. Investment funds can do excessive rent seeking only if the supply is limited. It's good if foreigners invest in housing, because hoses can't be moved overseas.
Anyone disagreeing, argue against this statement:
Exess rent seeking is possible only when there is scarcity.
When people don't have choises, they must pay what is asked. If you have 100 people needing a house and 101 houses available, prices will decline. Maintaining empty house is a running loss and house prices and rents will decline to prevent that.
and I wonder how much of Europe's problems is caused by AirBnB enabling wealthy people to extract riches from rental units, while causing suffering to normal renters...
There's also the matter of funding it, but I agree with you. Making it universal and consolidating other programs into it would create some savings as well.
I look forward to the results.
UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
A good portion of my salary is already taken by Tax and the government wastes it. I've seen the waste first hand when contracting for both Local, Nation Government. I was so disgusted by this, I have made every effort to avoid working with them.
I've also seen this waste happen in large charities and ossified corporations. The former also disgusting me as I know they would simply piss away a few thousand on complete BS, that took a whole village to collect and for it not to go towards the stated purpose of the charity. As a result I don't donate to any charities that aren't local.
Every-time someone suggests a tax increase, I know for a fact they haven't seen the waste happen first hand.
> UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
Giving everyone a safety net will require giving people money that is taken from others. To the people that benefit it is seen as "free" and will become "expected" and won't be treated as a safety net.
Being a responsible adult is about reducing the amount of risk you are taking, not increasing it.
So what you will be doing it teaching people to essentially gamble and people did similar during COVID. Some people took their cheques and put it into crypto, meme stocks or whatever. Some won big, most didn't.
I've met people in my local area that have lost huge amounts of money on risky investments, everything from property developments, to bitcoin. Creating an incentive for risk taking without the consequences is actually reckless, a massive moral hazard and will simply create perverse incentives.
> The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
You will be taxing those people more and they will have less to invest. The reason why many people invest is because they have disposable income that they can afford to risk.
By taxing people more (which you admit would have to happen), they will have less disposable income and will be inclined to invest less as a result.
We have three awesome control groups currently:
(1) Retirees with skills don't suddenly decide to become entrepreneurs when they reach 65.
(2) people on the dole don't suddenly become entrepreneurs. We even used to have a specific programme in New Zealand for the unemployed to start their own business . . . I'm fairly sure it didn't work.
(3) mothers on the DPB get a good whack of money even with kids that don't need Hyde time investment. It is rare to see them do anything more entrepreneurial than an under-the-table job.
I love your optimism, but it isn't realistic.
For the economy as whole nothing is added. The money just flows different route that gives people more power.
This is precisely why UBI (also known as socialism) is unsustainable. Most people don't want to work. If you disincentivize them from working, many of them will stop. And then there will not be enough taxpayers to support the government handouts anymore.
food commodity trading? idk sounds speculative and ignoble to me, probably don’t need it - more money for the artists!
Some things need funding despite being unprofitable. Not everyone will agree, but I believe art/culture (including often unprofitable forms thereof) are worthwhile, and should thus receive public funding (to some degree). I believe the same about justice, policing, education, research etc.
None of this rules allowing a freeish market to operate where doing so "delivers the goods".
art is relatively low on my list of positive externality activities to subsidize, after stuff like ensuring everyone has food to eat, home, etc. at least in the US, we are already running a deficit so we do not even have the money to do this - let alone some broad UBI for artists.
and how do we agree on what jobs are undercompensated? every person will have their own hobbyhorse
What would also be much more valuable than creating art is making that art available to everyone including for the purposes of producing more art. If the art subsidies came with a condition to release the art to the public domain then I would be much more for domain-specific funding.
I feel like this is not a good rate of return. For example, in the USA, 1 dollar spent on SNAP generates 1.52 dollars of economic benefit: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...
People generally won't prefer the fairest method of selection, but that doesn't mean it's not the best.
The government is just blatantly lying about these results. There is simply no way 97% of the population (most of whom pay into this system yet receive nothing from it) supports this.
Very, very hard for me to believe this.
Doesn't get much more two-faced than this.
That's ok, you can have this idea for free.
Oh wait... https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3737
A) For the most part, scientists do research because they are curious and enjoy it, not because they plan on making money out of it. Getting a salarys allows them to do what they like, they don't it do for the salary.
B) If there's a little slippage due to lazy, misaligned, or fraudlent people, it might still be worth it. Consider two proposals: "I'll give you money every month if you're a scientist and just hang around studying whatever you like" vs "I'll give you money every month if you hit research metrics XYZ as a scientist" - the former will allow you to pay way less and sciensists will still be happy. It's just getting them for cheap.
C) I'm skeptical that you personally can tell whether the paper linked is pointless or not. Many ideas seem pointless when they first appear. Some are, and some contribute a tiny bit to the progress of understanding.
Have you heard of the Golden Goose Awards? The first paragraph on their history page (https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history) can be applied directly to your comment:
“From 1975 to 1988, Senator William Proxmire issued monthly “Golden Fleece Awards,” which targeted federal spending Proxmire considered wasteful. Unfortunately, the awards often targeted federally-funded scientific research for ridicule. Science that sounded odd or obscure was easily singled out, but the awards reflected fundamental misunderstanding of how science works, and how such research can turn out to be extremely important regardless of whether it makes sense to non-scientists. Indeed, such research can have a major impact on society. The nature of scientific research is that its impact is hard to predict.”
Don’t be a Proxmire.
This person literally uses his own name as HN username. Very imaginative use of the word tho.
EDIT: Even though I think that point of view is idiotic, I now worry that if you think like that, other people will too. Would you please report that comment so that a mod can edit it/delete it (I can no longer edit it).
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-report-shows-nasas-75-...
https://www.sciencecoalition.org/2025/04/29/sparking-america...
https://sciencetechaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The...
I don’t know why trying to ridicule funny sounding science papers is still such a popular thing to attempt, when the Golden Goose awards exist, and when people who do it have been shown repeatedly for many decades to fail to understand either science or money, yet here we are. Luckily science won’t stop, even with our current administration’s chaos.
Because it was written 11 years ago and has 2 citations, both from papers which have no citations at all.
You’re demonstrating the fundamental misunderstanding of science the Golden Goose page refers to. It’s expected - and a necessary part of science - that not all papers succeed.
The funny thing about this is that, unlike UBI or whatever, the societal returns on investment in science research are huge and indisputable. Nothing else in human history has improved our condition or knowledge or quality of life as much or as fast. You’re typing your opinions into a box that came out of large numbers of papers, some of which were criticized for their pointlessness. You’re absolutely barking up the wrong tree.
You might interpret an uncited dead end as a substantial contribution to evolution of science, but I see it as it is; a dead end.
Let's end this thread because I don't see any chance of finding any agreement.
You simply don’t know that. It’s not even relevant whether your uninformed prediction turns out to be correct later, that would be random luck. You cannot tell what will happen in the future.
And why don’t you understand that having research and papers in the system that don’t lead to anything is actually a good thing, both expected and necessary?
Read a little more about the Golden Goose awards, about research that was ridiculed and languished until it didn’t. There are lots of papers that seemed like a dead end until long after they were published. The entire field of Neural Networks is now combing prematurely presumed dead end research from 40+ years ago.
Maybe you can fix it, but you do seem to be completely missing the point of what science is. Investment in science, and the associated research and experiments, aim to increase knowledge. Science doesn’t necessarily aim for utility, and doing science is always taking a risk that the knowledge gained might not be useful. You can’t actually do science without taking that risk, and we can’t have papers that make huge progress without papers that make no progress.
You can’t tell what investments will pay off until they do. You can only be sure the technology in your computer wasn’t pointless because it already worked out, despite lots of naive people like you claiming it was pointless at the time.
The good news is that our investments in science are paying off big time, and those investments include all the dead end papers ever written. The sum total, even with all uncited papers in the world, is that we are much better off having spent the money on science than not.
Government research grants isn’t exactly a terribly innovative idea.
That's ok, you can have this consulting for free as well.
I would love to see a list of the artists with links to their work, some of which, presumable, would be for sale.
Let's say its fine now, and in 5-10 years also. But in a sense, it is a lifetime commitment to a payment that can sustain people's basic living needs with no output from them.
Because if suddenly you cannot afford this, what do you do? You tell people, after assuring them they can live their life free from fear of hunger death, that suddenly they have to fend for themselves.
We kind of have "universal income" for old people in Europe - it's called pensions. And it's a massive ticking time bomb in exactly this way. They are increasingly unaffordable in the aging society, and chances are sooner or later governments will start curtailing these benefits.
That's bad, but what makes it tragic is you first assured people they are safe and can rely on this.
I think I see what you're arguing but I am not following the logic. It would seem to be a general argument that can apply to any form of assistance to anyone in need. Don't provide it, because one day you might be bankrupt, and not be able to provide it anymore, but now they'll be dependent on you and so they'll suffer more than they would have otherwise if they'd never been dependent on you.
But one factor I think you maybe haven't considered: poverty often diminishes capacity to function, and to earn income. I realize this is well into just speculative economic philosophy but my own intuition seems to be the exact opposite of yours: assistance of this kind probably improves capacity to be independent, should it one day be withdrawn.
Further, people on retirement or disability benefits typically don't have much choice. Due to age or circumstances, they cannot really earn a living, or a sufficient one. It's not a choice. We're not promising them an alternative to a productive lifetime. UI is different. If it is to be worth anything, it is surely a promise that you can take economically unsound or risky choices, and if they don't work out, the state has your back. If it doesn't, it's just pocket money. It is actively encouraging people to outsource the financial responsibility for their lives to the state, even as governments globally are struggling to make ends meet.
What is even trickier is that pensions and disability benefits go to people who are generally not very economically active. Extending universal income to everyone kind of expands this to everyone else, i.e. the very people who need to work to make the society work.
We have seen in many places in Europe structural decline of industries, and in various cases, the people affected were given long term unemployment benefits, a little bit like UI. It was probably the right approach - certainly the decent thing to do - but the areas where it happened tended to decrease in productivity and creativity, rather than the other way round. The ones that bounced typically got extensive investment rather than just relied on the improved creativity and industriusness of the people on unemployment benefits.
So, overall a neutral-to-good outcome, from a financial point of view. I think we can debate about whether it’s necessary for the government of Ireland to fulfill this funding role, but I’m not sure this is the most wasteful thing that a government can do.
Some people might speculate that the arbitrary multiplier on happiness-to-euros for the second half was chosen to make it look like a slightly profitable endeavour on superficial examination.
Approximately 75% of the “benefits” is by the WELLBY framework, which considers each “wellbeing point” to be equivalent to €13,000 a year additional income. This could be a valid metric, but it feels a bit iffy, and without this evaluation it would be a significant cost to the Irish economy, so I do not think this UBI can be considered truly a positive return to the economy
[1] https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/b87d2659/20250929_BIA... - goto ‘Results’
This new initiative has had a lot of critics, but 2,000 spots annually is at least a bit of an improvement over the weird clique that admits 5 new people every 2 years.
(Aosdána is being retained alongside this new programme)
The arguments for UBI are that it effectively requires no bureaucracy and can not be gamed, while providing basic needs for all people. If you are doing needs based analysis, you are just back to a regular social system, which requires bureaucracy and will be gamed.
If some government decides to do UBI, than it actually has to do UBI and not just add another layer of social spending on top of an already sprawling social system.
Why artists? And how "universal" it is actually?
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
Some people hate it some abuse it and some do not qualify despite living in the street. But if you know how to navigate the system the income is guaranteed.
It is a bit sad though that some clerks like to abuse the receivers of such payments though, e.g. by inspecting your bank statements and questioning your expenses (true story). So making this whole thing closer to dejure is welcome as it avoids possible abuse.
NONE of them can make a living solely off their art.
Personally, if I wanted to subsidize someone who could bootstrap their talent and efforts into self-sufficiency, I'd never pick an artist.
Like in Sweden you pay 60-80% taxes as a sole trader - you're better off just trying to find some way to claim a disability benefit or subsidies like this.
Just do UBI. Politicians just can’t help hanging conditions on it and making it complicated.
“But some people will sit around and do nothing!” Yes and they already do, including at bullshit jobs pretending to work. The punishment for a life sitting around doing nothing is a life wasted doing nothing.
It would have been so great.
Across the ocean, Peter Thiel recently did a private lecture on the anti-christ and how that is connected to how hard to hide your money and "escape from global taxation if you're a U.S. citizen." He has dual citizenship in New Zealand. And, the following article conjectures that "prophesies about a society where an individual's ability to engage in commerce is contingent upon brandishing the mark of the beast on one's body."
Is this a criticism of swag? I love free t-shirts at tech conferences, is he calling me out for taking them?
https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-...
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/peter-thiel-antichrist-san...
After squinting at it, this Irish action feels like paying off a few court jesters, nothing more.
They all are now involuntary patreons.
1) will never vote against it (and politicians will use it as a weapon against anyone that suggests it). 2) It's ever expanding and will become unaffordable and unsustainable 3) inflation will destroy its value over time
I also believe that if universal income becomes common, you forfeit your right to vote while accepting it.
Now that I'm back to my normal office coding job, I feel like I'm actually saving less money because I have rent, and general city life to spend money on. It's all about the comforts one is used to.
The story of artists not having enough money is probably about people that are used to too many comforts. I've seen people complain they didn't have money to go by, whilst living in an apartment close to a densely populated city and having a car... get rid of those comforts if you want to make it!
What an utter, totally disconnected from reality measure.
Tax payers need to go to work everyday to support more and more unproductive members of society and have the state take by force more than half their income.
Society never needed to hand out money to every self-proclaimed artist for art to thrive.
But the idea that art / artists don't require money isn't my read of history.
When you go to an art museum in, say, London, you'll find lots of fantastic paintings depicting religious themes. Were artists of the time fixated only on the religious aspects of life? No doubt religion was more important, but the real consideration was that patronage came once from the Church.
Patronage chooses the best artists available to produce art for the patron. This measures grant money to self-proclaimed artists and are not based on merit.
With the democratization of art that followed the subsidizing with public money of artists an all new class of people was born. One that didn't really have that same "skin in the game" but had at their disposal money that wasn't theirs to distribute as they saw fit.
I believe that gave rise to situations like you mention. Yes, there are a lot of excellent movies that were destroying by early critics (not saying that didn't happen before, I'm very well aware of great music compositions being ruined because some monarch didn't like the opening concert). The thing is, why do we let (and keep letting) those critics to be some kind of gate keepers of art?
Here is some interesting read about the history of art critics: https://www.artrewards.net/editorial/the-evolution-of-art-cr...
If I had a choice between some of my tax money supporting artists versus lighting my money on fire to pay an army of bureaucrats doing not much of anything, I'll always choose the artists. I've seen contracts for more money that do a lot less for society.
The choice is whether or not you want your taxes raised by a small amount so that other people can live their dreams while you sit in a cubicle for 40 years.
But I still am down with paying a little more to support people that are providing to our overall culture. I'm friends with many artists here in NYC, and in most cases everyone is broke. You'll see profiles written about them in the NYT, or see them on panels at major cultural institutions, but that's just the outward appearance. In reality, they're struggling to pay rent. Sometimes they're sleeping in cars when out on tour doing work because they can't afford a motel.
Many of us don't have the courage to do what they do. It's not like they're sitting around, flush with cash, day dreaming all day. They're doing extremely difficult work (personal, spiritual, cultural), and we all benefit from it. I'm down with supporting it. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in taxes every year, an extra $40 isn't a big deal.
Then do that, no one is stopping you, I didn't vote for it, and I don't support it. It's blatant discrimination.
But don't worry, making art is not always a joyride, it can be hard work. For me pesonally, writing software is a breeze compared to writing an orchestra score or the last days of a theatre production.
Also, the idea of the poor and suffering artist is a cliché. Many famous artists actually came from wealthy families or had generous financial support from friends or patreons. It doesn't make them lesser artists.
I also enjoy playing computer games and browsing the web all day. How would you feel about a tax to pay for my lifestyle?
Enjoyment doesn't pay bills. As an aspiring artist you typically can't make a living with your art, so you have to work a day job. This means there is significantly less time for creating works and practicing your craft. (Again, creating art takes time and energy!) That's why there are grants and fellowships: they (temporarily) relieve artists from financial pressures and allow them to focus on their artistic practice.
> I also enjoy playing computer games and browsing the web all day. How would you feel about a tax to pay for my lifestyle?
In case you really don't know the difference: Artists produce works that are received and valued by other people: concerts, shows, books, movies, sculptures, installations, etc. This is not the case with playing computer games and browsing the web.
Same goes for many other enjoyable activities. I mean that's one of the main reasons we pay other people - so we don't have to do the things they do for us in return. If the activity itself is enjoyable then that reason no longer exists and it's only natural that you'll have a harder time making a living wage from it. Society doesn't owe it to you to make your dream job a reality, especially when that comes at the expense of people doing the dirty jobs you don't want to do.
> Artists produce works that are received and valued by other people
If they don't earn enough from those people the perhaps the value they produce isn't as great as you think.
> This is not the case with playing computer games and browsing the web.
Then why are you here replying to my comment if you get nothing out of it? Sure, the value is tiny but that is also true for most art.
Not all human activity needs to be a viable career. We're much better off making sure everyone has enough leisure time to do the culturally enriching activities they want to instead of taxing everyone so a few chosen special people are exempt from the market crushing everyone else.
This doesn't make any sense. People have jobs because someone has to do them. (This includes art and culture.) Whether that job is enjoyable or not is not really relevant. Just because someone finds a job enjoyable doesn't mean that they should work for less money or for free...
Also, not everything about being an artist is enjoyable. For example, nobody enjoys writing grant applications, booking gigs, organizing rehearsals, accounting, typesetting scores, etc. Not to mention the financial insecurity.
> If they don't earn enough from those people the perhaps the value they produce isn't as great as you think.
Art and culture cannot work in a purely capitalistic logic. Most art is subsidized in one way or another. Just like many other parts of society.
There are many things that you personally may not need, but society as a whole still wants to support.
> Then why are you here replying to my comment if you get nothing out of it? Sure, the value is tiny but that is also true for most art.
Sorry, but this is just dumb.
> so a few chosen special people are exempt from the market crushing everyone else.
If you think that people become artists because it's a cozy life, you are mistaken. It's a lot of work for little money.
I don't necessarily want the artists to bleed and sweat. But when they do, their art is so much better! Giving artists universal income seems counterproductive, if your stated goal is good art...
But is this really true? If you have financial struggles or need to work a fulltime dayjob, you simply have very little time and energy for creating art. As an artist myself, I don't see how financial problems could possibly improve my creative output...