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Basic income is the worst response to automation
- gcorneu 10y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but isn't the concept of universal basic income based on the idea that everyone who is a citizen, regardless of earnings/wealth/background, gets a set amount of money? Rather than the scaling mechanism based on earnings as stated in this article.
- atemerev 10y ago"Scaling mechanism" is based on progressive and/or implicit taxation for financing basic income, not on the amount to be received.
- Rekaiden 10y agoYou are correct. The article is flatly wrong when it suggests that people would lose the UBI as they start making money elsewhere. It is not global unemployment insurance.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoYes, the article is flatly wrong. It's conflating this situation: +100k earnings +0 UBI ------ +100k with this mathematically equivalent situation: +100k earnings +20k UBI -20k taxes ------ +100k
- cderwin 10y agoThere are certainly UBI proposals in which at some point UBI does scale back. I don't see a good reason why it scaling back would disqualify it from being a UBI, and I certainly see little likeness to unemployment insurance.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoI guess the justification for not scaling it back would be that it makes it more palatable for the people paying for it. If someone received $10,000 in UBI and payed $10,000 in tax it would be neutral but their attitude to other recipients might be different.
- tynpeddler 10y agoThere are several suggested implementations of UBI, one of which is based on negative income tax. In that case, the amount of money you get from the government is based on how much money you make.
- mcguire 10y agoIf every citizen gets a check for $30,000 every year, where does the money come from? If you make more than the basic income, at some point you have to go from getting a check to writing a check.
- olegkikin 10y agoThe author makes a classical mistake, thinking that the displaced low-skill workers can and will gain high-tech skills. I think that's a complete pipe dream. Yes, millions are employed in IT and engineering, but we're talking about billions of uneducated or barely educated people who will lose their jobs very quickly. If you want to see what happens when people go into IT out of necessity, look at the Indian IT market. It's full of "programmers" who can't solve the simplest problems, who hate what they do, who produce really low quality code. (And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys, but the average case is rather bad). Not only that, we don't have the IT jobs, even if all of them did learn to code. As far as I can see, welfare state is inevitable, as much as I'm against it. It's still better than to let people lose their homes and/or starve.
- atemerev 10y agoThe answer is that there is no solution. Basic income is economically unsustainable. Social crisis is inevitable (like in previous two installments, agricultural -> industrial and industrial -> knowledge economy), and there is nothing that can be done about it except of surviving through it. Any possible basic income solutions will only make the problem worse.
- elsurudo 10y agoIn the current economic ideology, sure. But there is a lot of surplus (profit). What makes you think it's economically unsustainable? People would have to readjust their expectations, for sure. I'm not saying I know that it _is_ economically sustainable, but I haven't done the math. Have you?
- newyankee 10y agoIf you think of giving everyone 6000 $ per mth it may be unsustainable , but i think 1500 $ per mth + a reformed healthcare is very much doable, it is less than 1 standard deviation from the mean per capita income
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y agoIt seems clear to me that there is an IQ cutoff below which one cannot be an effective programmer. And this cutoff is actually quite high, comparatively. I'd be very surprised if more than 5 percent of the population, with the current distribution of intelligence, could become effective programmers, even if highly motivated. All psychometric evidence points to IQ being largely genetic, and the environmental components irreversible after after a very young age. It's odd, but my very "conservative" view on intelligence and heredity, that of agreeing with the scientific consensus, leads me to support some forms of wealth distribution.
- henrik_w 10y agoAnother critical voice: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sellout-of-the-american-dream/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sel...
- sauronlord 10y agoYes and another ignorant one that presents little evidence for its position.
- henrik_w 10y agoHaven't read yet - only open in a tab, but I thought I'd add it to further the discussion :-)
- sauronlord 10y agoData driven decisions please, all others are opinions and emotion. If there is a greater (measurable) net benefit to society with Universal Basic Income vs. our socialist agenda of getting into peoples lives more directly (food stamps, healthcare, low income and child subsidies)... then who gives a damn? If you are unaware, or lacking a deep appreciation, of what money is (fractional reserve banking) then you have little, if anything at all, to contribute to this "debate"
- Oletros 10y agoWhat is the difference between providing UBI and Healthcare? If there is a net benefit for the society if Healthcare is provided, will you agree with the government providing it?
- bonniemuffin 10y agoOne difference is that UBI allows individuals to spend the money on whatever they need most, rather than requiring central planning to decide what they need. There's some evidence to indicate this may make it more efficient in delivering life-improving value to the recipient.
- wyager 10y agoNot the GP, but yes I would. The problem is that this is very hard to demonstrate for several reasons. First, most analyses assume that healthcare is fungible, so anyone who "has healthcare" is considered to be in the same boat. This is untrue. Most government-provided healthcare systems rank quite poorly in terms of wait times, fatality rates, etc. compared to private healthcare. Second, it's hard to distinguish the benefit of government medical systems from the benefit of freeing the private medical system from legal red tape. For example, many people cite lower drug costs as a benefit of government medicine. This is not an intrinsic feature of "single-payer" healthcare, but rather a result of the fact that drug agencies in the US have the full weight of the patent system behind them in order to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. In other countries, since the government both buys drugs and controls IP, the government always has the threat of removing IP rights to a drug if a company fails to provide a "reasonable" price, which simulates actual competition. One could get the same effect by changing the nature of medical IP rather than taking the drastic measure of publicizing drug purchases. That is a utility analysis I'd really like to see. Third, one must include the utility of having a choice. There are both psychological and practical components to this, but it's better when you're not forced to pay for a service you don't want. I know how good private healthcare can be; just go to a tourist hospital in Mexico or India. Truly an awesome experience. A super easy way to get all the alleged benefits of socialized healthcare (especially affordability) is just to deregulate the shit out of hospitals. A lot of Americans are scared about that because they think deregulation is synonymous with the triangle shirtwaist factory, but it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in medically deregulated countries.
- majewsky 10y ago> The average annual income for tech industry workers is about $100,000. Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here? > If the basic income will pay you $30,000 a year to do nothing, and that subsidy goes away as you make more money, so at an income of $100,000 your government subsidy disappears, you are paying an implicit tax rate of 30% on top of the taxes you are already paying to support everyone else's basic income. The fallacy here is that not all taxes have to be on someone else's income. > Officially, the poverty rate has only declined from 19% to about 16%—but by the admission of the War on Poverty's own defenders, "If government benefits are excluded, today's poverty rate would be 29 percent." That's what it means to make the poor more secure in their poverty. Uhm... what? I think the author has a wildly different definition of poverty than I do. In my book, poverty means "not having enough money to afford the basic means of living and participation in society and culture". It's quite irrelevant if that money comes from a state subsidy or from a loan. It just means that I'm dependent on the state rather than on an employer. But for him, state money seems to be non-existent as far as poverty is concerned.
- sp332 10y agoYup, the "poverty rate" is periodically adjusted to match about 20% of the population.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago"Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?" Yeah, that's so vague it's almost meaningless. You could argue that the guy who unboxes stuff at Best Buy is a "tech industry worker", but there's a pretty significant gap between him and the guy who creates market models for a hedge fund.
- beat 10y agoOf course, there are a lot of jobs that aren't done because they're economically unviable - from dance to ministry to full-time parenting. The author is working from a hidden assumption in most economic discussion - that all value can be measured in dollars. If you can't put a dollar value on it, it has no value. That is, of course, bullshit. But it doesn't stop them. Beyond food, shelter, health care, communication, transportation... what are our needs, exactly? What problem do we solve by having most adults devoting the majority of their waking hours to something they actively dislike?
- criddell 10y ago> The author is working from a hidden assumption in most economic discussion - that all value can be measured in dollars. Can you have an economic discussion without measuring things in dollars? Aren't value measurements intrinsic to economics?
- beat 10y agoIf you go that direction, then you have to acknowledge that there is work that can't be measured economically. That there is value that can't be measured in dollars. This deliberate exclusion is already happening. I'm suggesting we should acknowledge the deliberate exclusion, or start including it, even if it makes the arguments more complex.
- FussyZeus 10y agoThis is always the problem. I get it, activity that generates additional wealth is always preferred but it's not the only way a given person can contribute to society. There's a economically solid argument to pay people to sit at home and not commit crime, start riots, devalue property by being homeless, or anything else vast numbers of people with no options currently do. Paying for someone's apartment and living expenses is FAR cheaper than the economic value lost by them devaluing property and tying up Emergency Services.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoIf the purpose of a BI is to protect productive members of society from destructive bandits, why not just wall ourselves off from them? That seems far cheaper. Newark, NJ causes a lot of harm to taxpayers who are forced to funnel resources to it. As far as I'm aware, bandits from Newark do not generally stage raids into Hoboken to steal resources from the productive folks living there. Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how an economically solid argument might work?
- sp332 10y agoThis article is just relentlessly wrong. People did die of starvation and exposure after each of the revolutions mentioned. Working days did become shorter and welfare expanded massively after each one. Best line: "The future doesn't come that fast". How wrong can you be? It's hard enough to predict the outcome of multiple nonlinearities interacting. But it's impossible if you're not even looking. You definitely can't assume that things are going to turn out like last time.
- eximius 10y agoThis article makes a few false assumptions, I think. 1. That everyone can transition into new jobs. Whether it be lack of education, intelligence, or just being at an age where the brain isn't as plastic as it used it, it is hard to find a new job if your field ceases to exist. 2. He correctly assesses that this will be a slow transition (if at all). This will actually inhibit people from trying to learn new skills because they won't realize their job sector is dead until its too late. 3. He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.
- judah 10y ago>> He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work. And that's probably a good assumption. There's wisdom behind the old adage, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools." Experience tells us that people who don't work tend to spend their time not in beautiful creative ventures, but in frivolous (TV, gaming, entertainment) or destructive acts (drugs, crime, violence...). A person who works is likely more well-rounded (better at handling responsibility, working with others, contributing to society in some small way, etc.) than a person who instead spends his day watching day-time television.
- wrsh07 10y agoI heard a proposal that UBI should provide 85% of a solid living wage, people taking it may need to work some (or sell art etc) to reach their desired level of comfort. Then people pursuing education would receive 115% of aforementioned baseline. The conceit here is that educating oneself is always good. This would, at least, provide some impetus to develop new employable skills.
- mcguire 10y agoBe careful making education to attractive; you risk creating a cadre of an equivalent of otherwise unhappy religious studies graduates.
- wrsh07 10y agoI don't understand your point, but my point was that there are benefits to education even if you're not being trained for a specific job.
- equalunique 10y agoI'm not a fan of UBI. Whatever this proposal is, I do not like it. What incentive is there for real employable skills when sitting back in a classroom is going to give one more than what is needed for survival? People are more likely to take bullshit classes. Real employable skills come from actual employment. If we're going to blindly trust that actual employment will magically provide 85% or even 115% of the cost of living, then we're making a dangerous mistake.
- wrsh07 10y agoI don't think you understand that the proposal for ubi comes from the futurist idea that humans won't need to work anymore. If you take issue with that idea: fine. Let's hash it out not in a basic income thread. If you accept the above premise, then the notion of humans needing employment is absurd.
- matt4077 10y agoJust because the predictions in the past were wrong doesn't mean they can't ever be right... I'd argue that when machines replaced the most menial tasks in the past, people always had the opportunity to move upwards (in terms of required skills). Up until now, they were replacing either animals (horse->tractor, mule->truck) or people who were overqualified for the work they did. The animals couldn't move to greener pastures, except for a few extremely well-adapted creatures who found new jobs as pets, or in sports. Humans in general were versatile enough to find something better, and the machines added enough free productivity to the system to allow us to consume what they were producing on top of the necessities previously consumed. It seems plausible to me that we're getting to the point where algorithms start to replace people actually operating at the limit of their capacities.
- mcguire 10y ago"Yes, the transition can be harsh for some workers. But let's be more specific: it is harsh for those who are unable or unwilling to adapt and develop the new skills required for the new work." Aye, and there's the rub. The problem isn't economic, though, in the sense that economics can be separated from politics; it's political. No one really cares about the poor. The fact that people are unemployed is unimportant. What is a problem is social and political instability. A large class of poor are going to cause problems, from crime to religious extremism to good old fashioned bomb throwing socialists. Those transitions cause that kind of instability, in spades. Unfortunately, hand waving that away with a minimum income probably won't work any better than retraining does.
- holydude 10y agoGlobalised world makes services and goods cheap but at what price ? I see people and countries wanting self sufficiency and heavily taxing or even banning mega corps. If production of goods will be so cheap that it will make 90% of workforce obsolete that will effectively leave countries at the mercy of mega corps that can afford r&d and servicing the automation machinery. People are already fed up with eating meat that has been transported from the other part of the globe or just buying nails or some other basic commodity items that could have been produced locally.