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The Case Against the Universal Basic Income

• hugh4 11y ago
  I have a proposition. How about anyone who wants to live in a society with a UBI can organise one privately between themselves, and the rest of us can avoid it? Start an organisation which takes from each member according to his means and shares it out equally, and see who wants to join. I wish you well.
• akshatpradhan 11y ago
  There were a lot of references that I couldn't understand.
  • stephengillie 11y ago
    It seemed intentionally obtuse.
• pj_mukh 11y ago
  tl;dr: UBI has a whole host of problems, instead, we should be strengthening the unions to increase wages to force the capitalists to invest in technology that makes us more productive
  • afarrell 11y ago
    But won't strengthening unions also mean that companies have to sign contracts that prevent them from implementing productivity-improving technology?
    • pj_mukh 11y ago
      I'm not entirely for this and I pinged the author about clarifying that exact point. But it seems his hypothesis is that the contracts mostly have wage increases which long term will force the companies to invest in productivity-boosting technology to scale instead of just getting more labour.
      • jdmichal 11y ago
        I'm even more confused now. The general point of a basic income AFAIK is to permit everyone to live somewhere and eat regardless of their employment status. Boosting unions and forcing companies to scale existing labor rather than invest in new labor, and thus increasing the number of people with no income, sounds like movement in the exact opposite direction.
      • pj_mukh 11y ago
        "scale existing labor rather than invest in new labor, and thus increasing the number of people with no income, sounds like movement in the exact opposite direction." Sorry, this was never suggested? "Scaling" existing labour is the same as investing in new labor, is it not? Or do you mean new "types" of labour? Either way, most new productivity boosters allow you to do more with the same labour force. Ideally. So you let the labour force collectively bargain higher wages so the company is forced to invest in new technology (exp(n) boost) to scale their operations instead of increasing the size of the workforce (n boost).
        • wmf 11y ago
          But what if companies overreact and develop technology that lets them employ, say, half as many people as they do currently? Then some people would have cushy union jobs and even more people would be unemployed?
  • kapnobatairza 11y ago
    I don't think the author adequately makes the case that a UBI has problems as a form of welfare. His argument seems to boil down to the following: 1) Labour being replaced by automation isn't going to happen because it is going to create more jobs than it displaces..... Not sure if I agree with this point. 2) That a basic income necessarily needs be IN PLACE OF existing welfare and labour protections... While some other forms of welfare may evaporate and some labour protections loosened, it doesn't have to. It provides flexibility for labourers and employers to negotiate without the looming threat of not having a basic living wage. It increases the labourers negotiating position more than the employers IMO. 3) Technology makes us more productivity, which means we can work less hours which means we can have more leisure time. The problem with this argument is that it assumes those "less hours" are equally distributed across the entire pool of laborers. What it just means is there are less hours for a limited pool of skilled labourers to fight over. Which means more unemployment. It does not mean that the taxi driver who has his 12 hour days eliminated by driverless ubers now gets to work 3 hours a day driving an uber or gets to work 3 hours a day programming those cars. 4) Instead of having a UBI, we should have a militant (violent) revolution against the rich where we demand increased welfare and labour protections. Increased welfare like a UBI? I'm not sure why the author feels like positive social institutions can't be a voluntary concession of the rich to satisfy discontent of the masses. Why do we have to get out our pitchforks to get bread if they are offering to hand out a livelihood to every citizen? This sounds like the sort of leftist rhetoric that comes from someone in a very comfortable position. Try telling someone in real need that they shouldn't accept a basic income because "it's just a bribe from the rich so we don't start some vague revolution!".
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      The problem with argument #3, and the one no one ever brings up, is the fact that people still need to be able to pay for stuff. And you could argue that one now has the time to go back to school, but how are they going to pay for it? How are they going to support their family while doing it? UBI can be an answer to this, but given the political climate, I don't particularly think it's a viable solution in the short to medium term.
    • pj_mukh 11y ago
  • fernly 11y ago
    But isn't automation the most effective way to higher productivity? The zero-sized workforce is clearly the most economical one for the employer, and where's the union then? And it is precisely the loss of a big percentage of available jobs to automation, that the OP article offers as the elite's best motive to support BI.
  • Chos89 11y ago
    Isn't that contradictory? Investing in technology that makes workers more productive would have a result of needing less workers?
  • nzp 11y ago
    I think you summarize well, and that's one of the main problems with this essay. The author clearly works from the perspective of Marxist theory of capitalism, and manages to miss one of the big points of the theory – that increased productivity always leads to more exploitation in the form of increased extraction of surplus work. The theory is explicit that increasing productivity is the capitalist's last mechanism to extract value out of human labour when constrained by physical and biological limits and organized labour.
  • afarrell 11y ago
    > technology has never reduced the amount of work. And then a couple sentences later... > At the end of the 18th Century, 90 percent of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. As of 2009 (the latest year for which there are figures), less than 0.7 percent are farmers. It’s not the case that now 90 percent of Americans are out of work; they’re now engaged in other, often less back-breaking labour. The percentage of people engaged in hard, dangerous and boring jobs has tumbled. That is a clear contradiction even if we had the same level of employment we did back then (which we don't when you account for child farm labor and low rates of retirement), "less back-breaking labour" is less labor.
• mshron 11y ago
  Interesting argued. I say: let's try it somewhere that is game, and see what happens. As Bob Reich says, we've been running an experiment in trickle down economics for the past 30 years and it hasn't done most of us much good. I'm not going to buy much in theory either way until I see some attempts in practice.
  • peteretep 11y ago
    > let's try it somewhere that is game Somewhere that's game, but also has very strict immigration rules, or a very low existing quality of life. I like the idea in principle (and I'm very pro immigration generally), but don't see how it can work without strict immigration controls. Eligibility controls will just cause a flood of cheap labour, and an artificial middle class made of those who were eligible in the first tranche.
    • eru 11y ago
      How do your concerns work out in the case of Alaska? Every American can move there, and they have something similar to basic income.
      • peteretep 11y ago
        $1,800 a year is not in the least bit similar to a basic income. I suspect it barely covers the extra costs in heating alone that living in Alaska entails.
    • vlehto 11y ago
      In Nordic countries you get state funded unemployment checks if you have permanent residence in the country. No citizenship needed. Any change in welfare should lessen the pressure of immigration or make immigrants more productive.
  • mattm 11y ago
    I really wish this was more the case. When it comes to economic systems, everyone has theories about what will work but most of the time it's just that. Instead we would be better off actually trying things on a small scale to see how it works rather than everyone bickering on their thoughts about how humans make decisions.
• ricardobeat 11y ago
  TL;DR How is it possible that the proposal of a couple of Marxian professors from the Benelux—riffing off some of the more utopian musings of Enlightenment dreamers in a brief outline of an idea that they themselves concluded was only “sketchy and tentative”—has been able to capture the imagination of politicos of every hue in recent years? Also to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive. And the only way for labour to become more expensive is for there to be a genuinely global and militant labour movement I don't even know what that means. Want to know a surefire way to make labour more expensive? Minimum income for everyone.
  • SilasX 11y ago
    I apologize for voting this up. Considering the rapid, popular support, I think skepticism and contrarianism regarding UBI are merited, and so it's great to hear good arguments against it to help readers be better grounded. So pretty much any essay to that effect is welcome in my mind. But if that's all it's offering, don't bother. The first summary is "appeal to he's-a-baddy", and the second is reasoning from a price change. Any good argument takes the form, "here is how an improvement in your worldmodel results in regarding conclusion X as correct/false". This isn't that.
  • applecore 11y ago
    It's even more ironic when you consider that a small group of political philosophers riffing off the musings of some early Enlightenment thinkers are essentially responsible for Western civilization as we know it.
  • kapnobatairza 11y ago
    Thank you. A basic income increases the negotiating power of the laborer because he now has an implicit price floor from where he can start his negotiations.
    • jameshart 11y ago
      Not so much a price floor as a better BATNA - the ability to walk away without having to go and live on the streets.
• Eridrus 11y ago
  While I'm a bit enamoured of UBI myself, a thought came to me while reading this: If we are going to be dismantling the welfare system at the same time we implement UBI, we will have absolutely no margin for error; if UBI turns out to be the wrong policy, then rebuilding the welfare system will be very difficult after having fired all the people who make it function. Living in Oakland, I also think his point about housing is particularly salient. The ideal of basic income is that employers should hold less power over employees, but that won't be the case if you need the wage to afford rent.
  • aidenn0 11y ago
    You become more mobile with basic income though. I don't live in the midwest, because the job market there is pretty poor; as a bachelor, I could have stayed on the couch of a friend's house while looking for jobs, but with a family of 6, that's less of a possibility. If my family got enough in UBI to support us in Indiana, then we could move there and I could take my time finding a job. UBI doesn't eliminate inequality, but it can open up more options. My bigger concern with UBI is that we may eliminate the parts of the welfare system that treats addicts, and a lot of sick people will get sicker under it.
    • Retra 11y ago
      The part of our welfare system that treats medical problems is already pretty awful at doing so. UBI sort of came onto the scene as a way of dealing with both public healthcare and loss of jobs to automation. In theory, UBI can pay for cheap treatments, and insurance (private or public) would pay for the rest.
    • JacobAldridge 11y ago
      The potential impact on education and healthcare was the only concerning element of this criticism that caught my attention.
  • skybrian 11y ago
    A big bang approach would be very disruptive. I think it would be better to start at a modest level, and increase it after people get used to the idea and can see some of the effects. There's no minimum to get started. Something like $100 a month might be hardly noticeable to most people, but it will make a difference to anyone living on the edge. Also consider that having a guaranteed income makes it that much more feasible to either move somewhere with a low cost of living (since it doesn't depend on a job), or alternatively, afford to move somewhere a bit more expensive. Hard to say how it would shake out.
• aidenn0 11y ago
  Do yourself a favor and change the font to not be a typewriter font. It may be bourgeois of me, but reading fixed-width font for prose to be sub-optimal.
• Eleutheria 11y ago
  Universal income? Sure why not. With your own money. My money stays in my pocket.
  • Frondo 11y ago
    You can keep your money. What you owe in tax is by definition not yours.
    • hugh4 11y ago
      In practice yes, but not in moral terms.
      • Retra 11y ago
        Maybe you should print your own money, then?
  • cbd1984 11y ago
    Tax is part of the social contract, and you can opt out at any time by leaving. Further, taxes are regulated through voting, which determines both how much is collected and how it is used. If the majority disagrees, well, most of the money is theirs, not yours, and you're free to go somewhere else.
    • fche 11y ago
      At least you're not even pretending that taxation is supposed to be good for him (by virtue of services or whatever). No, simply "you owe" the mob, however much they demand.
      • yarper 11y ago
        People always look at their tax expenditure in terms of services they are provided. It's not a product! It's a social contract that collectively binds us - we will provide a safety net for everyone, in terms of lifelong healthcare and making sure you always have shelter, food and water. So yes, we the mob have decided you will contribute - we simply cannot watch the less fortunate suffer when we have the capacity to stop it!
• sytelus 11y ago
  As long as human requires another human for providing services, universal basic income would only translate to inflation. In essence, money is simply an unit for purchasing slice of another human's life time. It is however possible to have a world where all mining, manufacturing, farming, construction and most form of services is provided by self-maintaining robots and then humans are truely free to pursue their interests as they see fit. In that form of society, price of basic food, clothing, housing etc would be near zero and value of humans would be accounted by their ability to entertain, explore and educate as opposed to their wealth. So universal basic income is absolutely possible as long as humans are not part of the supply chain all the way until final consumption.
  • darkmighty 11y ago
    That would be true only if wealth were equally distributed to start with. So basic income should bring some inflation, but it also brings some wealth redistribution.
    • WalterBright 11y ago
      Inflation is not caused by price increases. It is caused by an increase in the money supply relative to the value it represents.
      • a3voices 11y ago
        That's inaccurate. It's actually caused by an increase in median wages and number of people employed. Wage growth is affected by money supply growth.
        • MCRed 11y ago
          Inflation is growth in the money supply. It has nothing to do with wages or prices or any of that other stuff. Those are affected by inflation. But inflation, by definition is changes in the money supply. That is the economic definition of inflation. Redefining inflation is a common acting of politicians et. al who want to obscure what they are doing to the economy.
• yetanotheracc 11y ago
  This is a fine piece of writing but I have a problem with the following statement: With the introduction of a UBI, employers would have a powerful weapon to force wages down, as they good argue that they needn’t pay as much any more, because they already had enough to maintain their standard of living. If this was true, the employers would already be forcing the minimum wage down on everyone. The UBI would give the lowest paid workers a powerful leverage they currently lack: the ability to choose not to work instead of accepting whatever wage the market offers. For other workers, the minimum wage or any viable UBI is small compared to their earnings, so it is hard to see how it could be used by the employer in salary negotiations.
  • crdoconnor 11y ago
    That depends if it were enough to live on. If it was then it would give those minimum wage workers the freedom not to work. If not, then all it would likely do would be to let employers lower wages. IIRC there was actually a town in Canada that did this and this happened. Then it was taken away entirely and the poorest citizens ended up even worse off (wages did not go back up again).
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      What mechanism do you propose to explain this phenomenon? ISTM that if an employer is paying a market-clearing wage, and then she decides to just pay less, she's going to have either fewer employees, or less capable employees, or both.
      • asgard1024 11y ago
        I propose a mechanism of free market being the wrong model of reality. ;-) Some people are simply greedy and they will pay less at the expense of having less capable employees. These people will "poison the well", so to speak, for other market participants who actually wouldn't actually mind to pay higher wages. And as was eloquently put by Keynes - "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". In short, asymmetric information is the key problem of free markets.
• mark_l_watson 11y ago
  This is a nicely thought out essay but I largely don't agree with it. The author's basic premise that improvements in technology always bring an increase of employment will, I believe, not be true at all in the next few decades. I think the rich will look at something like universal basic income as something to keep society civil, avoiding large scale civil unrest.
• turkishrevenge 11y ago
  This is more of a historical survey of the idea UBI than a mediation on why it's good/bad thing. I get the arguments he makes from the perspective of the revolutionary Left. They are, however, not interesting or really acknowledging the role that robotics/computer vision/etc will play in the future. It's not really his fault though. Rather, I think many people are just ignorant of the profound impact that this kind of technology is going to have, simply because their direct exposure to it is so minimal. As someone that has had experience in the rev. Left for some years and saw developments with robotics in research at a well-regarded school as a grad student, I feel like I have some perspective on this article. What I saw in school really made me change my mind and re-evaluate how the future will play out. Things are going to change and the genie, so to speak is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back in. But as pretty much all most socio-enviro-economic problems, the impediments we collectively face generally aren't technological as much as they are political, and that's where the activist focus needs to be. But I digress. Mr. Phillips, doesn't seem to get that the technology isn't ready to displace humans from all work. The real threat (which is a threat until further notice) is that robotic technology is now "good enough" to do the kind of work that was just out of reach of automation in the past. It is not inconceivable to think robots will be able to perform the tasks of human garment workers soon. The gap between robots and semi-skilled labor are disappearing every year. The idea for calling for a stronger labor movement as a solution is frankly laughable. It isn't going to happen any time soon and the economic conditions (what Marxists would colloquially refer to as "super-profitability") that created things like a labor aristocracy (another term) and social democracy no longer exist. How does one recreate a strong labor movement when the industries that were unionized are structurally hollowed out by no-pay robotic "labor" (which isn't labor in the Marxist sense either)? I'd love to hear a non hand wavy answer (seriously!). UBI is actually a strong step on the road to the Marxist idea of communism (ironically enough) in that it does something special: it decouples the idea of compensation from labor, which is one of the long term goals of a society transforming from capitalism to a stateless, classless society. Lenin had a term for this too, which was "bourgeois right". Anyway, my 2 cents.
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• stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  More like "the case against state-guaranteed survival by someone who never experienced poverty". UBI is not about leisure, ideology and long disproved communist utopias. UBI is about asking from the state - that forcefully extracts work from us in the form of taxes - the guarantee of our survival. Our welfare systems will never solve the kind of poverty that pushes people to sleep under bridges. Our unions will never give the work force 100% occupation. It's easy to dream about revolutions and class warfare when you don't have to worry about next month's rent, but we're not talking about left vs. right here. We're talking about a paradigm shift in the human society: no longer having to worry about food and shelter on the sole basis of being human. That's the kind of society I want to experience in my life time and I don't care who wins ideological points over it.
  • zghst 11y ago
    No one really has to worry about food in our society with the plethora of welfare programs, churches, food banks, etc, as well as the many people such as myself who will routinely give the needy food or money. Shelter is tricky, however the majority of people have shelter security by proxy of family or friends. It is only recently that the proxy has been weakened because of the crumbling relationships and social structures. We are trying so hard to solve problems we have created. Sad we are trending toward valuing benevolent strangers than the network of those you know. What is so wrong with our society that we cannot stick together in tough times? We must be a very sick society to do all these mental gymnastics to treat our symptoms of deep cultural flaws.
    • quadrangle 11y ago
      You're mistaken in your assertions about our reality. Go watch the documentary "A Place At The Table"
    • stefantalpalaru 11y ago
      > No one really has to worry about food in our society with the plethora of welfare programs, churches, food banks, etc You'd think so, but no. There are a limited number of places at those tables and always less than the number of people in need of food in an Italy where the biggest problem in agriculture is overproduction. Then there's the little detail of catholic organizations like Caritas being used by the state to distribute food from EU sources. You don't want to deal with those that fucked you when you were a wee lad? Guess you're dining in a dumpster. Again. > the majority of people have shelter security by proxy of family or friends We're talking about the less fortunate minority here. Does the state need to guarantee their survival or not?
• Hytosys 11y ago
  While I found many of the author's assertions to be ideological predictions, this sentence made me happy: "So much depends on the balance of forces between capital and labour at the moment of its implementation." Historically speaking, economic change in favor of the massive people is only successful (even if fleeting) if it is demanded by millions of working people. UBI only plays with the ratios of capitalism; a UBI implementation would result in a different distribution of equality, so surely there would be historic social consequences. Those consequences are clearly up for endless debate by concerned reformists (a.k.a. fortune tellers; see the article's citations). So, the details are all up in the air. What a brief Marxian analysis would tell you regarding UBI and any other reform programs: since the control of the means of production and the subsequent control of the surplus labor remains in the hands of the capitalists, the capitalists will maintain their power and quickly destroy any of the proletarian benefits that the program seemed to promise. The best example in recent US history of this happening: the New Deal.
  • sageikosa 11y ago
    Both Marxist and Austrians agree: intermediate socialist policies are doomed to fail. Marxists would say because they weren't Marxist enough, and Austrians would say because all socialist systems must fail because they lack a means to calculate relative value sufficient for anything other than robbery, and certainly not sufficient for directing activity fit for an industrial society.
    • vidarh 11y ago
      > because they lack a means to calculate relative value sufficient for anything other than robbery, and certainly not sufficient for directing activity fit for an industrial society. That seems to me to be an argument against a planned economy, not against socialism. There's no requirement for socialism to remove markets as mechanism to determine value. There is a requirement to reject a market based on private ownership of the means of production as the means to determine the individuals return for work rendered, not to reject market mechanisms in general. In a sense you are right that Marxists and "Austrians" could agree that "intermediate" socialist policies that hamper the functioning of the market are doomed to fail. But some Marxists will believe that this is because an actual Marxist implementation could have freed the market from the limitations of the halfway house of social democrats. E.g. a problem with the social democratic model of Norway for example is exactly that the market is stymied by all kinds of regulations that are intended to cushion society from the effects of unrestrained capitalism. These clearly affect the ability of the markets to accurately price e.g. the actual cost of a product, because it ends up pricing in societal costs of dealing with labour issues unrelated to what this company actually does. But these are necessary to achieve a socialist programme under the constraints of capitalist modes of ownership, not because of the market. As a specific example, in Norway it is incredibly hard to make people redundant, and even normal notice periods are typicall 3 months. These protections were hard won successes of the labour movements. But they are there to safeguard employees in a system where long term unemployment is a risk leading to reduced earning ability - possibly for the rest of your life if you end up losing career progression. Consider a socialist system where the cost of employment are effectively borne by society whether or not there is currently work for you, and where you're not losing out on salary progression. In such a system you might want to strip most redundancy protections back to the bone, because they obscure the real costs of production and they obscure real unemployment. By stripping such protections, society would be able to see what the free labour pool actually is, and take measures on that basis - whether it would be to lower working hours, or offer more vacations, or encourage more education, or offer up resources to people wanting to start new projects. It is thus not the market that is a problem for Marxists, but a capitalist market under capitalist modes of ownership. That does not mean all socialists, or all Marxists, want market economies, but there certainly are Marxists who see the market as by far the best means to calculate relative value exactly in order to direct activity fit for an industrial society. At least some Marxists and Austrians will in fact agree to levels of regulation in many areas that would cause "intermediate" socialists like social democrats to have strokes.
• orionblastar 11y ago
  If we can't have a UBI how about creating work at home jobs for the disabled and people on welfare to do with a computer and an Internet connection? Most can't afford transportation to get to a job, and need more that welfare or social security needs. I'm sure some startup can handle the issue of providing work at home jobs for the poor, disabled, and people on welfare and the software for them to work the job where it has a GUI interface and they fill out forms and push buttons. Stuff like data entry, video captions, video transcripts, or even running something like a Bitcoin miner that attaches to a USB device that earns money and pays them some of it. There should be a way to create jobs using technology that don't require a lot of skill and training and that basically anyone can do. Even an app where they fill out surveys and get paid, or do small things like write a 500 word essay for money. Stuff that people can do that an AI can't do yet.
• transfire 11y ago
  "There is no capitalist road to communism. There is only, as ever, the calibre of the confidence of labour." Actually Marx himself thought that capitalism was a natural historic necessity proceeding communism. This issue was widely debated at the founding of USSR --whether they could skip this phase. Obviously they choose wrong.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
    "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy." - Source unclear, attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville and Elmer T. Peterson
    • eru 11y ago
      Democracies have been remarkably stable so far compared to other forms of government we've tried.
  • something123 11y ago
    I mean, it's only "necessary" because it would be a catalyst for the proletariat revolution. The Russians and the Maoists generalized on the idea and showed that it's more an issue of getting the disenfranchised organized - whether they be factory wage slaves or farmers that don't own the land they work
  • jqm 11y ago
    The interesting thing is that it seems to have happened in reverse. In China, Russia and Vietnam, for instance it appears that communism smashed the old systems of power which opened the door for capitalism.
• dschiptsov 11y ago
  In the long run it is like shifting zero on a scale. The market will react in exactly this way. The paid housing would be better idea, BTW.
• yummyfajitas 11y ago
  The actual case against basic income: it reduces work effort drastically (13%) in the experiment where this was measured. For comparison, the great recession reduced work effort by about 5% (near as I can tell, based on looking at the delta in unemployment rate). http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf We'd like to pretend everyone is a self-motivated software engineer who will create value for the world for personal fulfillment. The data shows this belief is false.
  • chias 11y ago
    Wouldn't this eventually balance out though? Productivity goes down, supply of goods goes down, price of goods goes up, pay for work producing such goods goes up, productivity goes up?
  • vidarh 11y ago
    Part of the reason basic income is bandied about more and more is that the amount of people who is starting to believe that capitalism is eventually becoming efficient enough to drive up unemployment is rising (though most of these people are probably unaware that this is a central part of Marx' thesis of how he believed capitalism will eventually give rise to its own demise). There is a growing fear amongst some that automation will finally overtake job creation, and that the resulting unemployment will be sufficient to throw masses of people back into poverty. If that actually happens, then a 13% reduction in work effort might very well be less than desirable if one wishes to prevent social unrest. There are two key benefits of basic income in that respect: Firstly, to ensure that if people are unable to find a job, they can still live a decent life. Secondly, to reduce the amount of people forced into unemployment by making more people choose to not work or work less, whether because they choose education or choose to stay home with their young children, or choose to retire earlier, or simply choose to make do with less. Of course, the pre-requisite for that to be viable is that society can make do with 13% less work effort (or whatever it ends up being, whether more or less).
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• chipsy 11y ago
  IMHO the basic fallacy of this essay is that ideology is not reality. It sets the goal to be communism as classically envisioned(worker's paradise), and only some people are absolutely convinced that that's the culture they want. We still largely have a strong belief in private property, for example. In making this case, the author raises a bunch of bogeyman images of everything else being sacrificed on the altar of UBI. This is a paranoia tactic. The real exchanges made are done at the level of individual politicians horse-trading against rivals and various interest groups. It's possible for something to be popular enough that capital is told to go get dunked, despite all its other advantages, because the alternative is political suicide. It doesn't happen often, but this is one of those issues that captures people's imagination in a big way.
  • jjoonathan 11y ago
    Not only that, but its primary objection is buried towards the end, receives a tiny fraction of the essay's length, and so thoroughly lacks originality that it has literally driven people in the opposite direction (I originally went searching for other schools of economic thought because I didn't believe the "jobs will appear" mantra, not the other way around). It feels like a student essay where the author has a word quota but no actual point so instead they just aimlessly wander along tangents until they pass the "finish line."
    • Absentinsomniac 11y ago
      Most of this thing reads more like an argument for than against.
  • Umn55 11y ago
    Perhaps you should look at the data... Correct. US distribution of wealth https://imgur.com/a/FShfb https://imgur.com/a/FShfb http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
• philwelch 11y ago
  Someone who describes, among other things, the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the world-historic defeat of the working class in the 70s-80s" is operating within a much different framework than the rest of us.
• basicplus2 11y ago
  because it will the super rich's cut
• joesmo 11y ago
  Partisan pieces like this are incredibly lame. He doesn't even address the issue properly. $10k is not a living wage in the US and I doubt it is on in Canada. Make it $30k and let's see if job wages get depressed (they won't). The funny part is that there is unfortunately a very good argument against UBI, the only good argument against UBI IMO, and that is that most countries cannot afford it. Let's take the US: $30 000 * 230 000 000 adults = $6 900 000 000 000 a year Now obviously, 100% of the adult workforce will not be on UBI, but even with 10% of adults on UBI, you're still looking at close to $700 billion a year. Even currently, I'd bet that way more than 10% of people would quit their bullshit jobs if they could get UBI (also causing a shortage of employees in certain industries and wages to go up) and that percentage will rise much higher in the future. I'm no economy expert, but somehow, I just don't think we're there yet with the numbers, though I think we possibly will get there at some point. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking because I'd like this to work, even in theory only. Maybe someone has better math than mine ... :)
  • lazyjones 11y ago
    > Now obviously, 100% of the adult workforce will not be on UBI, but even with 10% of adults on UBI, you're still looking at close to $700 billion a year Isn't the whole point of "Universal" Basic Income that everyone gets it without exception? A system for the poorest 10% is just another pricey welfare system similar to those in many countries.
    • joesmo 11y ago
      Yeah, you're absolutely right. In which case, the numbers simply do not work out. Makes the article's argument seem even less thought out as the author didn't even do some basic calculations. But this slightly different system I'm describing isn't the same as what we currently have. What I'm thinking is UBI (or whatever it might be called in this system) vs. wages. Pick one. This would automatically make the minimum wage > $30k, probably at least around $40-50k and wouldn't require paying every adult in the US, including ones who already have jobs. The key difference is that people would have a choice of going to this new Semi-UBI system anytime they wanted, no questions asked, with guaranteed income. I think that's one differentiator. Another differentiator would be removing the countless barriers that exist in today's systems. The many idiotic rules around welfare and Medicaid for example are so complicated and require so much time and paperwork, it's ridiculous. It would keep the state from trying to force people to look for jobs they don't want and waste time doing it. It would allow people to go to school full time while still receiving aid (not possible in many cases today). It'd be a real, living wage, albeit low, that could remove the stress and uncertainty of today's welfare systems. And finally, it would hopefully not carry the stigma it has today as artists and thinkers and all types of people might choose not to work at all, rather than have this be only a program for the poor. So yeah, it's not really UBI, but it could still be a lot better than current systems.
• codyb 11y ago
  I've always thought that with automation, increasing population, and globalozation we would need something akin to the universal basic income. The question becomes, does that just exist for Western societies or for the entire world? I didn't read the entire article but it struck me to point out that "The Captive Mind" by Czeslaw Milosz is extremely relevant here. While the USSR was no wonderful place to be, artists tended to be happy there, because even if they were forced to "art" in a particular sense, the USSR recognized art as a fundamental human right and dignity. Compared to capitalism where people were starving just to make it. I've had a few drinks, but I absolutely recommend "The Captive Mind" to anyone interested in this sort of sociatal interaction. The part where society collapses (the USSR) and all of the "secret" papers are spilling on to the street will open your mind. At least it did mine. When it comes to gold, silver, or secrets, if they can't feed you, clothe you, or shelther you, when things break down, they're not worth shit. This is my spurious comment of the night. Check that novel out. "A Captive Mind". I'm for a universal basic income. I'm a socialist for essentials, a libertarian for personal liberties, and a capitalist for the rest. I couldn't make it through that entire article. All downvotes are deserved. Cheers.
  • eru 11y ago
    European countries pay large amount of subsidies for art..
• systematical 11y ago
  That font is unreadable dude.
• paulsutter 11y ago
  TL/DR: technology will have no impact on employment, never trust a libertarian rat, let's just keep the programs we have. References (trying to enumerate his arguments against UBI): - “the supposed looming robot apocalypse...It’s just not going to happen” - "Taking even modest initial steps toward a guaranteed income is likely to further starve critically needed targeted cash transfers and diverse in-kind benefits" - "libertarian right ... has basically the motivation that this will undermine existing social welfare institutions" - "the money goes into one pocket and out the other—a taxpayer transfer to landlords." (???) - "The UBI is not only a subsidy to employers; it is a union-buster." (???) - "With the introduction of a UBI, employers would have a powerful weapon to force wages down" (???) I was hoping he'd propose an alternative to UBI, but he didn't. I did enjoy his extensive history of UBI.
  • vlehto 11y ago
    >"The UBI is not only a subsidy to employers; it is a union-buster." (???) This is true. This is also the main reason why I support UBI in Finland. Here unions are based on negotiating minimum wages for different jobs and paying unemployment money to laid of workers. (something like 9 months after lay off, then it's government responsibility.) The membership payments are tax exempt. Both of these things would be unnecessary with UBI. Why I don't like the unions? Because cleaning lady at paper factory gets 1,6 times the wage of cleaning lady at a hospital. They are practically fueling outsourcing more than anything else, because they penalize success. Also because whatever I vote in the general election, is not going to affect the job market in any way. Unions hold the power. They have cartel on labor and it's not illegal like other cartels. They have that cartel because they lobby shit more than anything else. It makes economic sense to belong to union. Your payments cost you nothing because government is basically paying them through tax exemption. If you have slightest possibility to be ever laid off, unions guarantee relatively high standard of living for that "in between jobs". Finnish social democrats are most against UBI in Finland. They have been accused of being the political wing of Unions.
    • dllthomas 11y ago
      You've established that you (and perhaps some others) believe that UBI hurts unions (and that you think that's desirable), but you've not really explained the mechanism by which they would be hurt.
• wtbob 11y ago
  You can see from this argument who the real losers in a system of universal basic income would be: not the poor; not the rich; not the productive middle classes; but the bureaucrats, both public (welfare workers) and private (labour organisers).
  • akshatpradhan 11y ago
    With Basic Income enabled, why would we need welfare workers? Just put the welfare workers and labour organizers on basic income!
    • wtbob 11y ago
      Yes, but right now they make more than that, which is why they're so opposed to the idea.
• danmaz74 11y ago
  Very interesting read about the history of UBI, even if you don't agree with the author's conclusions. One point that he doesn't mention, though, is where would the UBI money come from: taxes of course, but taxes on what? I think that is a very important point.