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France already has something that smells a lot like UBI, except it's not Universal (RSA). France also has free education and health. Now if you judge by the nu

France already has something that smells a lot like UBI, except it's not Universal (RSA). France also has free education and health. Now if you judge by the numbers, it's not really a success: high unemployment and low people satisfaction... plus even higher expectations about "the State". Administration is huge, costs a lot, and imposes a very rigid barrier between people and "the State": it's a country of bureaucrats. Employers and businesses are designated as "ennemies" in peoples minds, and the USA represents the ultimate Boss in the game. In addition to RSA, France has every social benefits you can imagine... because RSA can't adjust to each situation: disabled? single mother? 6 kids? tough job? So if you want to imagine your country with UBI, study France first. Then ask yourself if you'd like your country to be even more like France than France itself. A country where equality is the buzz word, and Liberty is totally absent of every speech. I made the decision to leave this country because what I have in mind for my life is not 5 kids with no job... I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Good you bring up. I guess France should be studied as a potential failure mode of UBI, but I don't think it torpedoes the idea itself. > I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible. > I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people. Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... [1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.
- wyager 10y ago
  >I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value Then who is paying them? Unless they are being payed by the government, they are obviously creating value for someone (their customers). If the government gets involved, it's a different story; you have to pay for all government services whether you like them or not, and then the government (which doesn't efficiently respond to market demands) pays for a lot of things that aren't really worth as much to anyone as they cost, but the government buys them anyway because it's someone else's money.
  - weddpros 10y ago
    Indeed, government spending represents 55% of GDP in France (#2 worldwide)... so most money is spent by the state (ie badly).
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Well, let me clarify my statement, because we're hitting the "meaning of word 'value'" problem here. I believe that quite a lot[0] jobs and companies do not create value for society, nor that they do create any value that is needed for anything else than perpetuating the market corner they're in. This is the kind of value that I personally care about. Take marketing, which is my go-to example of industry that's increasingly a "loopy" kind. A lot of money goes into companies trying to outmarket one another, fighting over the same pool of customers. This here is a negative feedback loop that eats up increasing amount of resources for zero gain for the participants. Money for this often comes from marginal temporary gains (i.e. a company manages to sell more widgets before their competitors cancel out their marketing) and borrowing. The industry is big, so that the feedback loop is subdivided into many links forming a chain, one type of company doing work for another. Think about the graphic design studios that do work for on-line and off-line advertising. Their work is valuable to their direct customers (companies that run advertising for other companies), even though the whole value chain loops around and create little value outside of itself. (Now add to that a lot of new adtech companies playing support roles, for which the business model is bullshiting their clients into believing their solutions actually make marketing more effective...) The thing is, if most of the advertising industry suddenly disappeared, the world would not be worse off in any way except lots of people who suddenly found themselves unemployed. That kind of points out that a lot of those jobs were of the bullshit kind - a loops within the market that contribute nothing to society except providing employment. Maybe in a perfect, efficient free market with no information asymmetry and spherical cows, such things would not be possible. But in real world, market is inefficient, and those inefficiencies is what lets such "loops" exist and grow. [0] - I initially wrote "most", but I might be undercounting the amount of small businesses that support local communities; those are companies/jobs providing real value to a limited, local market, and there's probably very many of them.
ucaetano 10y ago
[Expat living in France, leaving soon] France is a very bad example of UBI. I see it as a society where everyone expects their rights, but no one sees anything as their duties. People see all public (as in owned by the society) assets as responsibility of someone else, not themselves. In other words, it is a terrible place to implement UBI. It is the worst type of selfishness: instead of "everyone should take care of themselves" it is "someone should be forced to take care of others, but not me". It is easy to see how that leads to the very bad Nash equilibrium of the tragedy of the commons. Is that a product of the social support system, or is the social support system a product of that? That being said, there is a lot that worked in the French system, specially around making maternity economically sustainable: France has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world, while maintaining a high female workforce participation rate. This should be copied by other countries, specially ones (such as Germany) facing a population crisis. I agree on your point about innovation, I see France as a country far too worried about protecting its past: every tradition is sacrosanct and protected by law. When you protect the past, you outlaw the future.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- weddpros 10y ago
  When you expect your very subsistance from the State, when you start to believe that "it costs nothing, because the state is paying" (said french president lately), then you lose what the french have lost: responsibility. As for maternity, it has to be seen if population growth is better than prosperity for happiness. The Swiss are at the other extreme: prosperity and aging population... yet they are the happiest in the world.
  - ucaetano 10y ago
    We all know that having no babies isn't sustainable in the long term. Having babies is an extremely important social function, that most developed societies are leaving behind. I'm not advocating for the French model (I do advocate the Swiss model), but to dissect it and try to adopt what works, ignoring what doesn't. Of course, sometimes they're two sides of the same coin, so you can't have the cake and eat it too.
hrktb 10y ago
RSA is extremely limited and France's social help generally vanishes the second you have a something ressembling a serious job. This is also a reason why it can be safer for a while to stay unemployed with no revenue than to work a low pay part time job. Having plenty of kids might be the closest to a guaranteed financial help, except you actualy have plenty of kids and it's a workload and life style that you have to bare, and you still need to stay below a revenue limit. I think not working in France requires a special set of skillset in itself. You need to be OK with a low cost life, stay away from any official and decently paid job, navigate the administration to find the right niche for you, and follow up with all the changes to stay in the sweet spot. People with those skills will thrive in France, but most people are better off working and that's what they do.
- weddpros 10y ago
  Actually 5.3M adults have RSA in France(pop 66M) [1] Of them, about 1/4 receive it as a supplement to their low wage job. Yes, the bureaucracy is daunting... and I don't pretend it's a life I'd like. I'm just saying it looks a lot like UBI and doesn't lead to prosperity nor happiness. [1] http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/le-scan-eco/dessous-chiffres/2016/03/29/29006-20160329ARTFIG00011-la-france-compte-desormais-plus-de-25-millions-de-foyers-au-rsa.php http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/le-scan-eco/dessous-chiffres...
  - RobertoG 10y ago
    That statistic by itself is a little meaningless, is'n it? For instance, I could say: " In 2013, child poverty reached record high levels in the U.S., with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households. Many of the neighborhoods these children live in lack basic produce and nutritious food. 47 million Americans depend on food banks, more than 30% above 2007 levels." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) That doesn't sounds like prosperity or happiness..
    - weddpros 10y ago
      I wrote this in reaction to "RSA is extremely limited": almost 10% of a population is not "extremely limited". And I didn't say these statistics say anything about prosperity or happiness, but look higher in the thread: France has all sorts of UBI-like social benefits, and it doesn't bring happiness nor prosperity (that's what I wrote).
hx87 10y ago
The problem with France isn't RSA, it's dirigisme. Regulation kills business and productivity far more than taxation and government spending ever do. If UBI were combined with a repeal of all but the most essential labor regulations so anybody can be hired and/or fired at any time for any reason, then we will see all its advantages without the disadvantages evident in France.
- weddpros 10y ago
  I didn't say the problem in France is RSA. But both RSA and UBI need dirigisme. UBI is definitely a form of central planning, with a very wide reach, to shape the society, the people. So UBI will never come with less dirigisme, but with more of it.
  - aptwebapps 10y ago
    One of the arguments for UBI is that it is not means-tested so the administrative overhead is much lower as compared with things like France's RSA (if I understand what that is properly).
    - weddpros 10y ago
      I think it's one of the problems of UBI: it can only exist in addition to all other social benefits, because it can't solve every situation appropriately. Disabled people will need more help than a fit 22yo guy for instance. Social benefits are individualized: UBI can't be the same for everyone and erase existing social benefits. Also, governments HATE destroying public jobs ;-)
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > I think it's one of the problems of UBI: it can only exist in addition to all other social benefits, because it can't solve every situation appropriately. UBI probably for some extended time into the future would require some other social benefits, but to say that it requires "all" other social benefits is simply wrong. It wouldn't take a very high level of UBI to completely displace the need for existing General Assistance programs in the US, it would take a higher level to replace SNAP and TANF.
darawk 10y ago
France is doing it all wrong though. The whole point of UBI is to eliminate all of the red tape around employment and other social welfare programs. Give people a UBI/healthcare cushion to fall back on, and then employers hire/fire people at will. Eliminate the minimum wage. Create a vicious job market with zero protections (other than safety, of course) that is geared entirely towards efficiency. This will work out ok because a minimum wage will then occur naturally, because people will be able to make free decisions about whether it's worth it for them to work or not. The real goal of UBI ought to be to collapse every other form of social welfare under its umbrella. Give people the basic resources they need to live: money and health insurance. After that, the name of the game is economic efficiency and productivity.
- refurb 10y ago
  So you pay a healthy 20-year old the same as a bed-bound disabled 60 year old? I don't think the needs are the same. You have no choice to maintain some of the other social welfare programs since not everyone can live off just UBI (unless it's really high).
  - darawk 10y ago
    The bed-bound 60 year old's expensive needs would presumably be covered by the universal health insurance. His non-health-related costs would actually probably be lower than a 20 year old's, since he of course doesn't do anything and probably doesn't eat as much.
    - refurb 10y ago
      That would work well if all of the support needed by the disabled person fell under a single universal healthcare program, but it often doesn't. Disabled people often need non-medical assistance as well. Those are often separate social programs.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Good you bring up. I guess France should be studied as a potential failure mode of UBI, but I don't think it torpedoes the idea itself. > I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible. > I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people. Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... [1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.

wyager 10y ago
>I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value Then who is paying them? Unless they are being payed by the government, they are obviously creating value for someone (their customers). If the government gets involved, it's a different story; you have to pay for all government services whether you like them or not, and then the government (which doesn't efficiently respond to market demands) pays for a lot of things that aren't really worth as much to anyone as they cost, but the government buys them anyway because it's someone else's money.
- weddpros 10y ago
  Indeed, government spending represents 55% of GDP in France (#2 worldwide)... so most money is spent by the state (ie badly).
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Well, let me clarify my statement, because we're hitting the "meaning of word 'value'" problem here. I believe that quite a lot[0] jobs and companies do not create value for society, nor that they do create any value that is needed for anything else than perpetuating the market corner they're in. This is the kind of value that I personally care about. Take marketing, which is my go-to example of industry that's increasingly a "loopy" kind. A lot of money goes into companies trying to outmarket one another, fighting over the same pool of customers. This here is a negative feedback loop that eats up increasing amount of resources for zero gain for the participants. Money for this often comes from marginal temporary gains (i.e. a company manages to sell more widgets before their competitors cancel out their marketing) and borrowing. The industry is big, so that the feedback loop is subdivided into many links forming a chain, one type of company doing work for another. Think about the graphic design studios that do work for on-line and off-line advertising. Their work is valuable to their direct customers (companies that run advertising for other companies), even though the whole value chain loops around and create little value outside of itself. (Now add to that a lot of new adtech companies playing support roles, for which the business model is bullshiting their clients into believing their solutions actually make marketing more effective...) The thing is, if most of the advertising industry suddenly disappeared, the world would not be worse off in any way except lots of people who suddenly found themselves unemployed. That kind of points out that a lot of those jobs were of the bullshit kind - a loops within the market that contribute nothing to society except providing employment. Maybe in a perfect, efficient free market with no information asymmetry and spherical cows, such things would not be possible. But in real world, market is inefficient, and those inefficiencies is what lets such "loops" exist and grow. [0] - I initially wrote "most", but I might be undercounting the amount of small businesses that support local communities; those are companies/jobs providing real value to a limited, local market, and there's probably very many of them.

ucaetano 10y ago

[Expat living in France, leaving soon] France is a very bad example of UBI. I see it as a society where everyone expects their rights, but no one sees anything as their duties. People see all public (as in owned by the society) assets as responsibility of someone else, not themselves. In other words, it is a terrible place to implement UBI. It is the worst type of selfishness: instead of "everyone should take care of themselves" it is "someone should be forced to take care of others, but not me". It is easy to see how that leads to the very bad Nash equilibrium of the tragedy of the commons. Is that a product of the social support system, or is the social support system a product of that? That being said, there is a lot that worked in the French system, specially around making maternity economically sustainable: France has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world, while maintaining a high female workforce participation rate. This should be copied by other countries, specially ones (such as Germany) facing a population crisis. I agree on your point about innovation, I see France as a country far too worried about protecting its past: every tradition is sacrosanct and protected by law. When you protect the past, you outlaw the future.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
weddpros 10y ago
When you expect your very subsistance from the State, when you start to believe that "it costs nothing, because the state is paying" (said french president lately), then you lose what the french have lost: responsibility. As for maternity, it has to be seen if population growth is better than prosperity for happiness. The Swiss are at the other extreme: prosperity and aging population... yet they are the happiest in the world.
- ucaetano 10y ago
  We all know that having no babies isn't sustainable in the long term. Having babies is an extremely important social function, that most developed societies are leaving behind. I'm not advocating for the French model (I do advocate the Swiss model), but to dissect it and try to adopt what works, ignoring what doesn't. Of course, sometimes they're two sides of the same coin, so you can't have the cake and eat it too.

hrktb 10y ago

RSA is extremely limited and France's social help generally vanishes the second you have a something ressembling a serious job. This is also a reason why it can be safer for a while to stay unemployed with no revenue than to work a low pay part time job. Having plenty of kids might be the closest to a guaranteed financial help, except you actualy have plenty of kids and it's a workload and life style that you have to bare, and you still need to stay below a revenue limit. I think not working in France requires a special set of skillset in itself. You need to be OK with a low cost life, stay away from any official and decently paid job, navigate the administration to find the right niche for you, and follow up with all the changes to stay in the sweet spot. People with those skills will thrive in France, but most people are better off working and that's what they do.

weddpros 10y ago
Actually 5.3M adults have RSA in France(pop 66M) [1] Of them, about 1/4 receive it as a supplement to their low wage job. Yes, the bureaucracy is daunting... and I don't pretend it's a life I'd like. I'm just saying it looks a lot like UBI and doesn't lead to prosperity nor happiness. [1] http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/le-scan-eco/dessous-chiffres/2016/03/29/29006-20160329ARTFIG00011-la-france-compte-desormais-plus-de-25-millions-de-foyers-au-rsa.php http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/le-scan-eco/dessous-chiffres...
- RobertoG 10y ago
  That statistic by itself is a little meaningless, is'n it? For instance, I could say: " In 2013, child poverty reached record high levels in the U.S., with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households. Many of the neighborhoods these children live in lack basic produce and nutritious food. 47 million Americans depend on food banks, more than 30% above 2007 levels." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) That doesn't sounds like prosperity or happiness..
  - weddpros 10y ago
    I wrote this in reaction to "RSA is extremely limited": almost 10% of a population is not "extremely limited". And I didn't say these statistics say anything about prosperity or happiness, but look higher in the thread: France has all sorts of UBI-like social benefits, and it doesn't bring happiness nor prosperity (that's what I wrote).

hx87 10y ago

The problem with France isn't RSA, it's dirigisme. Regulation kills business and productivity far more than taxation and government spending ever do. If UBI were combined with a repeal of all but the most essential labor regulations so anybody can be hired and/or fired at any time for any reason, then we will see all its advantages without the disadvantages evident in France.

weddpros 10y ago
I didn't say the problem in France is RSA. But both RSA and UBI need dirigisme. UBI is definitely a form of central planning, with a very wide reach, to shape the society, the people. So UBI will never come with less dirigisme, but with more of it.
- aptwebapps 10y ago
  One of the arguments for UBI is that it is not means-tested so the administrative overhead is much lower as compared with things like France's RSA (if I understand what that is properly).
  - weddpros 10y ago
    I think it's one of the problems of UBI: it can only exist in addition to all other social benefits, because it can't solve every situation appropriately. Disabled people will need more help than a fit 22yo guy for instance. Social benefits are individualized: UBI can't be the same for everyone and erase existing social benefits. Also, governments HATE destroying public jobs ;-)
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I think it's one of the problems of UBI: it can only exist in addition to all other social benefits, because it can't solve every situation appropriately. UBI probably for some extended time into the future would require some other social benefits, but to say that it requires "all" other social benefits is simply wrong. It wouldn't take a very high level of UBI to completely displace the need for existing General Assistance programs in the US, it would take a higher level to replace SNAP and TANF.

darawk 10y ago

France is doing it all wrong though. The whole point of UBI is to eliminate all of the red tape around employment and other social welfare programs. Give people a UBI/healthcare cushion to fall back on, and then employers hire/fire people at will. Eliminate the minimum wage. Create a vicious job market with zero protections (other than safety, of course) that is geared entirely towards efficiency. This will work out ok because a minimum wage will then occur naturally, because people will be able to make free decisions about whether it's worth it for them to work or not. The real goal of UBI ought to be to collapse every other form of social welfare under its umbrella. Give people the basic resources they need to live: money and health insurance. After that, the name of the game is economic efficiency and productivity.

refurb 10y ago
So you pay a healthy 20-year old the same as a bed-bound disabled 60 year old? I don't think the needs are the same. You have no choice to maintain some of the other social welfare programs since not everyone can live off just UBI (unless it's really high).
- darawk 10y ago
  The bed-bound 60 year old's expensive needs would presumably be covered by the universal health insurance. His non-health-related costs would actually probably be lower than a 20 year old's, since he of course doesn't do anything and probably doesn't eat as much.
  - refurb 10y ago
    That would work well if all of the support needed by the disabled person fell under a single universal healthcare program, but it often doesn't. Disabled people often need non-medical assistance as well. Those are often separate social programs.