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> An odd coalition of conservative, libertarian, and liberal intellectuals has advocated for Basic Income over the past 60 years. This, of course, is the (poli

> An odd coalition of conservative, libertarian, and liberal intellectuals has advocated for Basic Income over the past 60 years. This, of course, is the (political) downfall of UBI. That coalition will stand together right up until someone has to draft an actual Senate bill implementing the thing. Then, the liberals want to phase out existing social programs gradually, or implement it as a more-palatable negative income tax. The conservatives want to drug test applicants, and add a "family bonus" to promote two-parent homes. The libertarians want to set a low price-point to encourage work, and tie it to ending student loan programs. And so on. Basically, UBI has real value, but the current popularity is gained from being all things to all people. WIC and SNAP are concrete enough to hate, but UBI is still so ill-defined that people can 'agree' without having any overlap on what laws they would actually support.

twblalock 10y ago
It's worse than you think. Even if all politicians agreed on what they wanted for UBI today, there is no reason to believe it would remain that way for long. There are any number of reasons people would want to tinker with it in the future, and some of them will be valid and will deserve to be considered -- for example, should disabled people receive more money under UBI, because they have a higher cost of living due to the necessity of wheelchair purchases, a wheelchair lift for their vehicle, or other kinds of equipment? Should UBI payments be made to people who are incarcerated? There is no country in the world I am aware of that has passed a law that implements a simple, elegant concept, such as the ideal form of UBI, and resisted the urge to tinker with it over the years. Furthermore, our current welfare systems are the way they are for powerful reasons. WIC, SNAP, the EITC, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc. all exist the way they do for a reason, and those reasons won't go away if UBI is implemented. It's very likely that UBI will end up being a re-implementation of the same ideas behind WIC, SNAP, the EITC, and other programs, for the same reasons those programs existed in the first place. We will end up turning UBI into something similar to the welfare system we have now. Tyler Cowen has been very perceptive on this point: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This is a great summary. Your final paragraph actually brings to mind the famous Don't Rewrite Software essay. Specifically: "it's just a simple function... but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes." I imagine that as UBI goes to the table, someone will point out that unreliable mothers will squander the money and fail to feed their kids, and so we'll replay the same arguments that created WIC. Someone else will point out that UBI doesn't save the suddenly-unemployed from defaulting on their payments, so for stability's sake we should have payments scaled by lost income, and we'll reinvent unemployment insurance. Etc. Obviously the existing welfare program could be streamlined and improved, but you're exactly right that it exists as-is for a reason. All the little convolutions exist either to make it more politically viable, or to handle some objective more specific than "give money to the poor". That's not going to disappear because UBI looks pretty.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    From personal experience, unemployment scales terribly. It capped out for me at around $1,200 a month, pre tax. it's been a long time since I've tried to live on that little, and I hope it doesn't happen again.
dTal 10y ago
We need a word for this dynamic, which also surfaced in Brexit. You had the "dey turker jerbs" crowd, the sovereignty crowd, the free market crowd, and the racist crowd - and the only common element between them was "Brexit", rather than any kind of unified vision. And now we're stuck with an a priori decision with no idea how to go about implementing it in a sensible way. Cries of "shouldn't we have thought of this before?" abound. Yes, we should. I think a more successful democratic process should involve at least three steps: 1) Should we even consider doing this thing? 2) What's the best way of doing this thing we can think of? 3) Having given it our best, should we go ahead with it?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I hadn't made the connection, but you're right. This pattern comes up constantly when people become allies over some narrow point of convergence. In some cases, like UBI, the alliance will probably fall apart before anything gets done. In other, like Brexit, some huge change gets accomplished by a coalition that all wanted it for different reasons. At least in the case of Brexit, the awful error was giving a simple up/down referendum. If the option to leave had been tied to a clear next step, it would have shattered the coalition and probably failed. I'm not sure if you can regulate something like this, or if you just have to push the David Camerons of the world to not screw up so badly, but forcing people to put whole processes up at once would probably force a lot more movements to sort out whether they actually have any common ground.
  - gwright 10y ago
    This is one reason why representative forms of governance are better than direct democracy/referendum. Bureaucratic inertia can be a good thing.
- minikomi 10y ago
  Like a social fulcrum - a tiny point upon which large changes are made, yet really it's the lever and the force(s) behind it which make up the bigger picture.

twblalock 10y ago

It's worse than you think. Even if all politicians agreed on what they wanted for UBI today, there is no reason to believe it would remain that way for long. There are any number of reasons people would want to tinker with it in the future, and some of them will be valid and will deserve to be considered -- for example, should disabled people receive more money under UBI, because they have a higher cost of living due to the necessity of wheelchair purchases, a wheelchair lift for their vehicle, or other kinds of equipment? Should UBI payments be made to people who are incarcerated? There is no country in the world I am aware of that has passed a law that implements a simple, elegant concept, such as the ideal form of UBI, and resisted the urge to tinker with it over the years. Furthermore, our current welfare systems are the way they are for powerful reasons. WIC, SNAP, the EITC, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc. all exist the way they do for a reason, and those reasons won't go away if UBI is implemented. It's very likely that UBI will end up being a re-implementation of the same ideas behind WIC, SNAP, the EITC, and other programs, for the same reasons those programs existed in the first place. We will end up turning UBI into something similar to the welfare system we have now. Tyler Cowen has been very perceptive on this point: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...

Bartweiss 10y ago
This is a great summary. Your final paragraph actually brings to mind the famous Don't Rewrite Software essay. Specifically: "it's just a simple function... but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes." I imagine that as UBI goes to the table, someone will point out that unreliable mothers will squander the money and fail to feed their kids, and so we'll replay the same arguments that created WIC. Someone else will point out that UBI doesn't save the suddenly-unemployed from defaulting on their payments, so for stability's sake we should have payments scaled by lost income, and we'll reinvent unemployment insurance. Etc. Obviously the existing welfare program could be streamlined and improved, but you're exactly right that it exists as-is for a reason. All the little convolutions exist either to make it more politically viable, or to handle some objective more specific than "give money to the poor". That's not going to disappear because UBI looks pretty.
- falcolas 10y ago
  From personal experience, unemployment scales terribly. It capped out for me at around $1,200 a month, pre tax. it's been a long time since I've tried to live on that little, and I hope it doesn't happen again.

dTal 10y ago

We need a word for this dynamic, which also surfaced in Brexit. You had the "dey turker jerbs" crowd, the sovereignty crowd, the free market crowd, and the racist crowd - and the only common element between them was "Brexit", rather than any kind of unified vision. And now we're stuck with an a priori decision with no idea how to go about implementing it in a sensible way. Cries of "shouldn't we have thought of this before?" abound. Yes, we should. I think a more successful democratic process should involve at least three steps: 1) Should we even consider doing this thing? 2) What's the best way of doing this thing we can think of? 3) Having given it our best, should we go ahead with it?

Bartweiss 10y ago
I hadn't made the connection, but you're right. This pattern comes up constantly when people become allies over some narrow point of convergence. In some cases, like UBI, the alliance will probably fall apart before anything gets done. In other, like Brexit, some huge change gets accomplished by a coalition that all wanted it for different reasons. At least in the case of Brexit, the awful error was giving a simple up/down referendum. If the option to leave had been tied to a clear next step, it would have shattered the coalition and probably failed. I'm not sure if you can regulate something like this, or if you just have to push the David Camerons of the world to not screw up so badly, but forcing people to put whole processes up at once would probably force a lot more movements to sort out whether they actually have any common ground.
- gwright 10y ago
  This is one reason why representative forms of governance are better than direct democracy/referendum. Bureaucratic inertia can be a good thing.
minikomi 10y ago
Like a social fulcrum - a tiny point upon which large changes are made, yet really it's the lever and the force(s) behind it which make up the bigger picture.