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Universal Basic Income and the threat of tyranny

141 points by empath75 9y ago

dontreact 9y ago
So which way is it? Non-workers will be disenfranchised politically, or tyrannously use democracy to assert their power over people who do work? The fact that even in this article both sides are argued points to the fact that there will be some counteracting forces that will stabilize things for at least a while if basic income is implemented. I think that getting concerned about what will happen 10 steps down the line when things could really go either way is a type of premature optimization. I believe it's pretty clear that people _with_ money will have that power, but at some point that money will have to make its way into the hands of more citizens in order to avoid societal collapse. Then when political power needs rebalancing, there will still be a massive amount of people fighting for political power if things go too far one way, and people with a massive amount of wealth to counterbalance them.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
Interesting observation. Societies where large numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have lots of freedoms. Societies in which small numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have fewer freedoms. UBI, by definition, takes more and more people out of active participation and makes them just consumers of the economic "product" of government. ...And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government.... The conclusion, if I understand the author, is that UBI postulates that a few really rich and successful people need to worry about the money and how to get it to the masses. The masses are there for consumption, to find their true meaning in life, and so on. Not to create economic value for others, which is a critical part of a healthy state. Beats me. I'm looking forward to more data from the experiments YC and others have going. I'm also looking to narrow down exactly what UBI is. So far it looks far more like a slogan to me than an actual policy. The experiments should help with that.
- jjawssd 9y ago
  UBI is a technique the state can use to entrench its influence by encouraging the people to become increasingly dependent on the government for basic needs.
platz 9y ago
Instead of basic income, which has the danger of creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people, economist richard d wolff suggested (since he is an avowed socalist, amusingly, appearing in a Fox Business interview) that instead of basic income, we put everyone to work, while at the same time reducing everyone's hours. Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).
- chrisco255 9y ago
  This is not practical. Many folks are salaried. And many jobs take being on the job a certain number of hours to build up to maximum productivity.
  - platz 9y ago
    In a world where all the current solutions are impractical, we'll have to find a way to make one of them practical. Also, no need to be overly categorical—certain jobs should stay the same as they are and of course be paid more. What we're talking about here is the bulk majority. Less hours could simply mean less days.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people I can't imagine how you would arrive at this idea. Unemployment benefits create a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people. Basic Income creates a continuum. You can have BI + leisure, BI + freelance, BI + 10 hr workweek, BI + regular load, BI + burning out. Whatever works for you.
  - platz 9y ago
    When we sell "BI + burning out" to mainstream, who currently despise "Unemployment benefits", i'll be on board. Until then i'm skeptical that narrowing to just "Unemployment benefits" is the true underlying psych phenomenon at work here. c.f. quote from article which provides example of divisions that could from between working and non-working people which has nothing to do with unemployment benefits: > "How many working people would vote against taking universal basic income rights away from Nazis and terrorists? And once that is done, can we be sure they will not get an appetite to take them away from more and more people they dislike?"
mikeash 9y ago
I don't buy it. In a democracy, the government cares about votes, not people refusing to pay their taxes. The government has a lot of ways to compel you to pay taxes, but not your vote. The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.
- DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  I don't believe you understand what he's saying. His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption. In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.
  - jjawssd 9y ago
    Is it possible that the USA already has a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses?
    - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
      I was more interested in understanding what the author was saying than debating it, but yes, it's quite possible. I'm a firm believer that the jury is still out on UBI, but if you ask me, this is the best cautionary argument I've read so far. It's a simple mental experiment: if 90% of the people receive money and 10% make it, what forms of stable government could you have? There's only two. The first is where the government looks after consumption at the expense of production -- with runaway debt and a debt default spiral. The other is an oligarchy where people are "tended to" I believe the UBI folks are all in the second camp, whether they realize it or not. There are real structural issues at play here, and modernization should produce much more leisure time than it has. Kudos to folks trying to experiment to make a difference. Doing nothing is not very enlightening. But what this author seems to be getting at is something like this: our individual struggles inside the economic system we've created to provide value to others makes us better participants in a representative republic. These experiences are based on real-world conditions and billions of little experiments we all perform daily. Basing our voting decisions on all of this anecdotal and irrational data sucks, but it sucks much less than simply picking whatever meme turns us on the most at the moment all around the theme of more consumption. It sucks, but it's a workable system. The other way, not so much. Never thought of it like that. Iteresting.
thriftwy 9y ago
We already have tyranny without any income :(
2noame 9y ago
According to the logic used in this, Alaska is an autocratic regime. But when I look at Alaska, I see a state with the lowest poverty, lowest inequality, and highest well-being of almost all 50 states. I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on. It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example: > "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?" Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction. I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express. Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects. With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens. Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented. Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others. Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  Alaska is a state, not country. The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000. The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3. I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be. Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News. And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.
jlebrech 9y ago
Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. make it a universal parachute. free money will just raise the prices of essentials.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  > Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. There's already a myriad of government programs and safety nets that provide all of these and more.
  - _jal 9y ago
    ...Which, in the US, are fragmented, varyingly difficult to access, varyingly generous, and nowhere nearly universal. In other words, a 'universal basic shelter' program would look very different.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  In a way that buying essentials and handing them out does not?
- ashark 9y ago
  Why would directly paying for those essentials have a smaller effect on their prices than giving people money to pay for the same?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. Because that traps people in he bare minimum, since improvements are often necessarily replacements rather than supplements. UBI lets small amounts of outside income provide tangible improvement.
- rad88 9y ago
  The whole point is to eliminate social programs.
at-fates-hands 9y ago
The major issue with basic income is what to do with all the government programs that provide safety nets for low income folks. Will a basic income supplant those programs or be another addition to those programs?
- zlynx 9y ago
  The only way universal basic income even approaches making sense is if it replaces _everything_ else. No housing benefits, education benefits, welfare, unemployment or social security. Dump it all. Yes, instead of living in large urban centers, unemployed poor people would have to move to smaller places with low costs of living. This is a good thing, really. And without price supports through unlimited government loans, schools will have to become cheaper. Those associate professors of English lit who are so abused by the current system can live on BI plus cheap tuition in addition to online classes. But of course it's all politics and I'm sure it will be impossible to pass a reasonable, cost neutral plan. Instead people will find ways to pile on the bureaucracy until it is less annoying to just go to work and get paid than it is to fill out all of the BI paperwork and file it with six different agencies. The easy idea of just creating a virtual bank account at birth linked to a SS number or equivalent is so simple it's just a non-starter. And I've tried to convince people that means-testing and such is a waste of money and time but no, plenty of people see BI as welfare and want drug testing and means testing for it. Bah! Give Bill Gates his $20K per year. Who cares if he doesn't need it!?
  - usrusr 9y ago
    I'd say "almost everything", since UBI would never pay for serious disability care and the like. But there should be heavy, even unfair consequences for relying on that kind of extra support, so that people self-select instead of being admitted or rejected by some authority. Replacing some or all of the UBI stipend with goods and services might be a way. I think that a similar programme could also be necessary for people who can absolutely not trust themselves with money, and strong rules against abusing future UBI as collateral in loans (as in "if you lend to a non-earner you are out of luck", not as in "if you promise someone your future UBI you not only owe them, but also a hefty fine to the state").
skrebbel 9y ago
I love articles like these. That said, I think they miss a core point: there is very little precedent of functional democracies, which have been functional democracies for more than a few decades, turning into autocracies [0]. In the grand scheme of things decent democracies are a pretty new idea and we simply lack the data. The author's list of awful fuel-exporting countries has a nice exception in it: Norway. Apart from a WWII hiccup, Norway was pretty much a functional democracy for a long time when they started exporting oil in the sixties. And they did not turn into an autocracy, even though Norway's government does not need its people to stay financed. I feel like this single case undermines the author's entire argument. I'm willing to buy that an autocracy turning to universal basic income won't make it any less autocratic. But a functioning democracy (for a sufficiently great value of "functioning") has no incentive to turn into an autocracy merely because its median citizen increasingly depends on the government. That needs a much stronger argument and I haven't read it in the article. [0] Some people might point to Turkey, Hungary and the US right now, but a) those stories haven't played out yet and b) none of those countries fit the author's bill.
geofft 9y ago
This would be a much better argument if it had data and citations instead of just references to things that of course everybody knows (and, in practice, not everybody knows). Here are a couple of my objections, that could be answered by data or references to serious studies: > In the suggested world of universal basic income, what puts pressure on the government to maintain democracy and political rights? Will they be afraid of a popular uprising? The people have nothing to threaten them with. A person who does not pay taxes cannot threaten to stop paying them. Violent revolution? History shows that governments tend to be significantly better than common people in using violence. Who puts pressure on the government now to maintain democracy and political rights? For example, are the governments of the US or Australia really feeling today that if they fail to allow gay couples to marry, the people might stop paying taxes or engage in violence? There is, certainly, a mechanism whereby the sentiment of the people puts pressure on democratic and even sorta-democratic governments. But the assumption that that mechanism is tax is a huge and undefended one, and seems pretty central to the argument. > It has often been taken for granted that as societies advance, fertility drops, but this has only been happening for a short time and in societies where having children requires hard work to provide for them. Isn't the main factor here the availability of birth control (which depends on scientific advancement/knowledge and industrial practice in mass manufacture of birth control, not on hard work)? I'm surprised not to see birth control mentioned at all in this argument. The strawman pleasure-seekers would be motivated to spend their free time figuring out better forms of birth control, because (again as a strawman) sex is fun and childbirth isn't. > The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens? A huge number of those countries have been ravaged by external political interference, in part because of the fuels in those countries. I don't think it's honest to can leave that out of the analysis and make a direct correlation between natural resources and despotism. We know that warlords and strongmen rise in politically unstable places, and we know in several cases that warlords and strongmen are propped up by other countries who are trying to gain favorable exports, to the extent of populist revolutions being suppressed. (To be clear, I am not an unreserved proponent of UBI. I just think that this argument is a bad argument against it, and in particular I worry that this argument leads in short order to positions I actually disagree with "Economic inequality is inherently good" or "Lazy people shouldn't eat.")
otakucode 9y ago
Similar to the ethical and philosophical basis of things like universal health care, a universal basic income could not work if done partially. If you adopt universal health care without enshrining in your society the utter importance of taking care of everyone because of their fundamental value as human beings absent all other factors - the outcome will be tyranny. If there is an ability for someone to say 'oh, but perhaps we shouldn't take care of person X because they made bad choices and it would save us money to do so' then you will rapidly see the definition of various health-related regulations created with the goal of reducing the cost burden of health care. While one might be tempted to say 'that would just result in people living healthier lives', that would be a very superficial and unstudied evaluation. Behavior modification on a society-wide scale like that is radically dangerous. It might actually be the most dangerous thing in history, I'm not sure. I'd need to run some numbers, but I think there is a good chance that the unintended consequences of well-intentioned behavior modification like that has killed more than all wars combined. Basic income is an interesting idea, but requires social support. It cannot succeed in a society which has been accustomed to seeing other people suffering less than themselves as the worst thing possible. This is a necessary legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic which dictates that a persons virtue is measured by the degree of suffering they endure for the benefit "of society" (in truth only for employers, not society at large). In that mindset, asking for reward is itself immoral and can only reduce a persons virtue. Either to receive or provide such rewards is an act of immorality, and though many can not actually recognize or admit it, this underlies how they see the world. The poor deserve their lot because they contribute little. The rich must be moral because they are rich (this is predicated on a fantastical delusion that riches are awarded only when a person has benefitted many). This is why so many people hate punitive damage judgements. They're not concerned with the well-being of the corporation being fined tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for acting harmfully. They are obsessed, to the point of willful self-destruction, with ensuring that some individual does not get a "payday" legal settlement. Without a philosophical backing that justifies a universal basic income, it would continuously be under threat, with people from all sides attempting to reduce the income to the point that few could survive on it alone, attempting to push people to 'be productive' in a world that doesn't need productive people. It's not a situation you can simply ignore and hope people wake up to. It has to be discussed and justified and explained. Why should society at large provide for those who do not produce material products? At what level should they be supported? Should drug addicts and criminals be supported? When someone feels slighted that someone who has not suffered as much as they gets the same amount, how will you answer them?
clavalle 9y ago
UBI isn't meant to be a full replacement for an individual's economic activity. It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities. The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity. I think the opposite will happen: once people have the basics taken care of they will become more economically active. They will take risks they couldn't before because of the overhanging risk of complete destitution. They will negotiate for better wages because everyone will know they have a perfectly viable alternative. They will invest time in themselves because they won't have to worry about how they will live if they don't have a job while they study or launch a business. Further, there will be more money sloshing around and creating broad-based demand for goods and services that these self-same people can try to capture through their own industriousness. I strongly believe that we have as many on welfare right now because we have a huge sector of our population that have the following choice: live in poverty on welfare with lots of free time or live in poverty while working your ass off treading water. And the reason they remain in poverty is that their employers know that there isn't a great alternative for those marginal employees so they pay just enough to keep their employees afloat but not enough that they can get ahead. UBI or negative income tax (my personal preference) would deeply change this calculus. People could spend their time and energy to truly better their situation rather than merely not lose everything. We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution. There isn't a lot of democratizing of economic power in those regimes.
- joeblow9999 9y ago
  "The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity." Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.
  - clavalle 9y ago
    Such as?
fallingfrog 9y ago
This author makes some good points. But I think he's making a crucial mistake. He posits that political power comes from the ability to withhold something; in this case work. That seems correct to me. But, I think the mistake is in assuming that the majority of people today even in countries like the US do have that power. If you are working a job that doesn't require credentials or a long period of training or education, then you don't really don't have anything to threaten the powers that be with, aside from a massive general strike, which has not happened in a long time. So the danger scenario he posits is really already here, for most people. UBI wouldn't really change that, except inasmuch as it would make it plausible for working people to go on strike much more painlessly, which would really increase their bargaining power, not decrease it. And that's why we'll never get it.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
Slightly off-topic: only read part of the article, but just want to say thank to the OP for turning me onto the website. I've already read several of their other articles and am pleasantly surprised at the balance and clarity with which the authors approach the issues. These kinds of publications are an extreme rarity, especially nowadays.
forkLding 9y ago
I've seen this happen in Bahrain in the past, wherein the government relies heavily on selling oil and uses the profits to subsidize living costs in Bahrain, making Bahrain bearable so that people don't complain/protest all the time. I can see the UBI argument of tyranny. However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario yet in a much similar strain of a with-UBI world, isn't tyranny still inevitable because those that need UBI are powerless and hold no sway on opinions or even angry and gain enmity against those who hold power such as in the Tea Party and Alt-right movement? (Recently, however with oil prices falling, subsidization isn't happening as much and Arab Spring has brought on protests and govt. repression)
- Kadin 9y ago
  > However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario [...] I think this is a pretty good point. It's possible that UBI basically just delays the inevitable, if you believe that there really is a possible future in which most people are just economically irrelevant due to mechanization, etc. With UBI, you get a few more years before the small number of people at the levers of power harden their attitudes enough to stop the handouts; without UBI you just starve immediately. Either way, it doesn't look good. Personally I don't think that the premise, of large-scale, structural unemployment due to automation, is really likely -- I think that "work" can expand to fill the available labor pool, with some amount of incentivizing, and a large pool of unemployed workers is threatening enough to most governments that they'll pursue economic policies to employ people, even if it's WPA-type projects, rather than endue the destabilization of having them just sit around. As various others have pointed out, if you look at "work" today, it would be largely unrecognizable to someone from the mid-19th century. The amount of modern labor necessary to live a reasonable lifestyle by mid-19th century standards is quite low (it's hard to do this on an individual basis, but if you were to take a bunch of people and modern technology, particularly agricultural machines, but reduce expectations for standards of living to that of the 19th century, you end up with a whole lot of spare time). But yet few people do this. In fact the only people I know of living 19th century lifestyles by choice are people who actively reject modern labor-saving technology (e.g. Amish and other orthodox Mennonite traditions). Someone from that era might justifiably question why people are still working 40 hours per week, rather than just working, say, 10, and adjusting their needs downwards accordingly. It's a fair question (and there are a lot of barriers to doing it, e.g. provisioning of health insurance). I do know a few people who have done that, in fact, and they seem to like it. But I have doubts that it will ever be an especially popular choice. So my guess is that while automation will be disruptive, and if not managed correctly it may result in some (perhaps many) people finding that what they've spent a lifetime training themselves to do is no longer necessary -- an outcome that I think government should work to avoid, the economy will figure out ways to use the surplus human capacity freed up by automation as it always has. There are lots of automation-resistant fields where people can essentially pay each other for services, sloshing money around and keeping everyone employed, even as a smaller and smaller fraction of people actually work in "primary industry", extracting resources from the environment or growing food. That's a transition that's ongoing already in many developed countries, and it doesn't seem grossly unsustainable except where it runs up against opportunities for arbitrage against less-developed economies at the expense of both sets of workers.
dnautics 9y ago
> And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government. I'd be more worried that a UBI makes citizens unnecessary to each other.
jotjotzzz 9y ago
In my opinion, UBI should be earned not freely given away. Perhaps it is earned through education coupled with community service. This ensures that those who are rewarded UBI know that they are expected to produce something of value (to give back) to society and their communities. In return, we are given valuable education (it could include entrepreneurship, computer science/programming, cooking, personal finance, communication -- stuff that should be taught in schools!). In the end, UBI serves as a reward for completing this rites of passage to become part of society through education to better ourselves for our communities. If given freely -- based on our current society where the poor gets the lowest amount of education -- it will help in some cases, in most it will not. It is very hard to wean yourself of a mindset without education.
- daemonk 9y ago
  Isn't that just really standard employment? Or maybe similar to an academic tenure position? I think UBI is meant to be "universal", with no prerequisites.
  - jotjotzzz 9y ago
    Something freely given becomes less valuable versus something given through being earned. It is really not a standard employment, because you have no employer except perhaps your community or city who pays you the UBI. But being paid means you give something first. What you give is contributing to society, your tribe. This is similar to the notion of tribes. If you want to be part of the tribe, you better contribute, by hunting for food or making something for the tribe.
    - mattnewton 9y ago
      One of the key efficiencies that UBI is supposed to bring over welfare is in cutting out the bureaucracy of determining who is worthy.
pagutierrezn 9y ago
This has nothing to do with UBI. Fewer and fewer people will be necessary to cover everybody's needs regardless of the existence of a UBI. The Future here presented could happen anyway without a basic income. But what will we do with billions of people without any income?

141 points by empath75 9y ago

So which way is it? Non-workers will be disenfranchised politically, or tyrannously use democracy to assert their power over people who do work? The fact that even in this article both sides are argued points to the fact that there will be some counteracting forces that will stabilize things for at least a while if basic income is implemented. I think that getting concerned about what will happen 10 steps down the line when things could really go either way is a type of premature optimization. I believe it's pretty clear that people _with_ money will have that power, but at some point that money will have to make its way into the hands of more citizens in order to avoid societal collapse. Then when political power needs rebalancing, there will still be a massive amount of people fighting for political power if things go too far one way, and people with a massive amount of wealth to counterbalance them.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

Interesting observation. Societies where large numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have lots of freedoms. Societies in which small numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have fewer freedoms. UBI, by definition, takes more and more people out of active participation and makes them just consumers of the economic "product" of government. ...And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government.... The conclusion, if I understand the author, is that UBI postulates that a few really rich and successful people need to worry about the money and how to get it to the masses. The masses are there for consumption, to find their true meaning in life, and so on. Not to create economic value for others, which is a critical part of a healthy state. Beats me. I'm looking forward to more data from the experiments YC and others have going. I'm also looking to narrow down exactly what UBI is. So far it looks far more like a slogan to me than an actual policy. The experiments should help with that.

jjawssd 9y ago
UBI is a technique the state can use to entrench its influence by encouraging the people to become increasingly dependent on the government for basic needs.

platz 9y ago

Instead of basic income, which has the danger of creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people, economist richard d wolff suggested (since he is an avowed socalist, amusingly, appearing in a Fox Business interview) that instead of basic income, we put everyone to work, while at the same time reducing everyone's hours. Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).

chrisco255 9y ago
This is not practical. Many folks are salaried. And many jobs take being on the job a certain number of hours to build up to maximum productivity.
- platz 9y ago
  In a world where all the current solutions are impractical, we'll have to find a way to make one of them practical. Also, no need to be overly categorical—certain jobs should stay the same as they are and of course be paid more. What we're talking about here is the bulk majority. Less hours could simply mean less days.
thriftwy 9y ago
> creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people I can't imagine how you would arrive at this idea. Unemployment benefits create a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people. Basic Income creates a continuum. You can have BI + leisure, BI + freelance, BI + 10 hr workweek, BI + regular load, BI + burning out. Whatever works for you.
- platz 9y ago
  When we sell "BI + burning out" to mainstream, who currently despise "Unemployment benefits", i'll be on board. Until then i'm skeptical that narrowing to just "Unemployment benefits" is the true underlying psych phenomenon at work here. c.f. quote from article which provides example of divisions that could from between working and non-working people which has nothing to do with unemployment benefits: > "How many working people would vote against taking universal basic income rights away from Nazis and terrorists? And once that is done, can we be sure they will not get an appetite to take them away from more and more people they dislike?"

mikeash 9y ago

I don't buy it. In a democracy, the government cares about votes, not people refusing to pay their taxes. The government has a lot of ways to compel you to pay taxes, but not your vote. The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago
I don't believe you understand what he's saying. His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption. In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.
- jjawssd 9y ago
  Is it possible that the USA already has a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses?
  - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
    I was more interested in understanding what the author was saying than debating it, but yes, it's quite possible. I'm a firm believer that the jury is still out on UBI, but if you ask me, this is the best cautionary argument I've read so far. It's a simple mental experiment: if 90% of the people receive money and 10% make it, what forms of stable government could you have? There's only two. The first is where the government looks after consumption at the expense of production -- with runaway debt and a debt default spiral. The other is an oligarchy where people are "tended to" I believe the UBI folks are all in the second camp, whether they realize it or not. There are real structural issues at play here, and modernization should produce much more leisure time than it has. Kudos to folks trying to experiment to make a difference. Doing nothing is not very enlightening. But what this author seems to be getting at is something like this: our individual struggles inside the economic system we've created to provide value to others makes us better participants in a representative republic. These experiences are based on real-world conditions and billions of little experiments we all perform daily. Basing our voting decisions on all of this anecdotal and irrational data sucks, but it sucks much less than simply picking whatever meme turns us on the most at the moment all around the theme of more consumption. It sucks, but it's a workable system. The other way, not so much. Never thought of it like that. Iteresting.

thriftwy 9y ago

We already have tyranny without any income :(

2noame 9y ago

According to the logic used in this, Alaska is an autocratic regime. But when I look at Alaska, I see a state with the lowest poverty, lowest inequality, and highest well-being of almost all 50 states. I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on. It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example: > "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?" Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction. I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express. Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects. With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens. Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented. Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others. Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.

stretchwithme 9y ago
Alaska is a state, not country. The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000. The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3. I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be. Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News. And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.

jlebrech 9y ago

Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. make it a universal parachute. free money will just raise the prices of essentials.

at-fates-hands 9y ago
> Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. There's already a myriad of government programs and safety nets that provide all of these and more.
- _jal 9y ago
  ...Which, in the US, are fragmented, varyingly difficult to access, varyingly generous, and nowhere nearly universal. In other words, a 'universal basic shelter' program would look very different.
WalterSear 9y ago
In a way that buying essentials and handing them out does not?
ashark 9y ago
Why would directly paying for those essentials have a smaller effect on their prices than giving people money to pay for the same?
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Instead of giving people money, why not have bare minimum shelter, food and education that's available for everyone. Because that traps people in he bare minimum, since improvements are often necessarily replacements rather than supplements. UBI lets small amounts of outside income provide tangible improvement.
rad88 9y ago
The whole point is to eliminate social programs.

at-fates-hands 9y ago

The major issue with basic income is what to do with all the government programs that provide safety nets for low income folks. Will a basic income supplant those programs or be another addition to those programs?

zlynx 9y ago
The only way universal basic income even approaches making sense is if it replaces _everything_ else. No housing benefits, education benefits, welfare, unemployment or social security. Dump it all. Yes, instead of living in large urban centers, unemployed poor people would have to move to smaller places with low costs of living. This is a good thing, really. And without price supports through unlimited government loans, schools will have to become cheaper. Those associate professors of English lit who are so abused by the current system can live on BI plus cheap tuition in addition to online classes. But of course it's all politics and I'm sure it will be impossible to pass a reasonable, cost neutral plan. Instead people will find ways to pile on the bureaucracy until it is less annoying to just go to work and get paid than it is to fill out all of the BI paperwork and file it with six different agencies. The easy idea of just creating a virtual bank account at birth linked to a SS number or equivalent is so simple it's just a non-starter. And I've tried to convince people that means-testing and such is a waste of money and time but no, plenty of people see BI as welfare and want drug testing and means testing for it. Bah! Give Bill Gates his $20K per year. Who cares if he doesn't need it!?
- usrusr 9y ago
  I'd say "almost everything", since UBI would never pay for serious disability care and the like. But there should be heavy, even unfair consequences for relying on that kind of extra support, so that people self-select instead of being admitted or rejected by some authority. Replacing some or all of the UBI stipend with goods and services might be a way. I think that a similar programme could also be necessary for people who can absolutely not trust themselves with money, and strong rules against abusing future UBI as collateral in loans (as in "if you lend to a non-earner you are out of luck", not as in "if you promise someone your future UBI you not only owe them, but also a hefty fine to the state").

skrebbel 9y ago

I love articles like these. That said, I think they miss a core point: there is very little precedent of functional democracies, which have been functional democracies for more than a few decades, turning into autocracies [0]. In the grand scheme of things decent democracies are a pretty new idea and we simply lack the data. The author's list of awful fuel-exporting countries has a nice exception in it: Norway. Apart from a WWII hiccup, Norway was pretty much a functional democracy for a long time when they started exporting oil in the sixties. And they did not turn into an autocracy, even though Norway's government does not need its people to stay financed. I feel like this single case undermines the author's entire argument. I'm willing to buy that an autocracy turning to universal basic income won't make it any less autocratic. But a functioning democracy (for a sufficiently great value of "functioning") has no incentive to turn into an autocracy merely because its median citizen increasingly depends on the government. That needs a much stronger argument and I haven't read it in the article. [0] Some people might point to Turkey, Hungary and the US right now, but a) those stories haven't played out yet and b) none of those countries fit the author's bill.

geofft 9y ago

This would be a much better argument if it had data and citations instead of just references to things that of course everybody knows (and, in practice, not everybody knows). Here are a couple of my objections, that could be answered by data or references to serious studies: > In the suggested world of universal basic income, what puts pressure on the government to maintain democracy and political rights? Will they be afraid of a popular uprising? The people have nothing to threaten them with. A person who does not pay taxes cannot threaten to stop paying them. Violent revolution? History shows that governments tend to be significantly better than common people in using violence. Who puts pressure on the government now to maintain democracy and political rights? For example, are the governments of the US or Australia really feeling today that if they fail to allow gay couples to marry, the people might stop paying taxes or engage in violence? There is, certainly, a mechanism whereby the sentiment of the people puts pressure on democratic and even sorta-democratic governments. But the assumption that that mechanism is tax is a huge and undefended one, and seems pretty central to the argument. > It has often been taken for granted that as societies advance, fertility drops, but this has only been happening for a short time and in societies where having children requires hard work to provide for them. Isn't the main factor here the availability of birth control (which depends on scientific advancement/knowledge and industrial practice in mass manufacture of birth control, not on hard work)? I'm surprised not to see birth control mentioned at all in this argument. The strawman pleasure-seekers would be motivated to spend their free time figuring out better forms of birth control, because (again as a strawman) sex is fun and childbirth isn't. > The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens? A huge number of those countries have been ravaged by external political interference, in part because of the fuels in those countries. I don't think it's honest to can leave that out of the analysis and make a direct correlation between natural resources and despotism. We know that warlords and strongmen rise in politically unstable places, and we know in several cases that warlords and strongmen are propped up by other countries who are trying to gain favorable exports, to the extent of populist revolutions being suppressed. (To be clear, I am not an unreserved proponent of UBI. I just think that this argument is a bad argument against it, and in particular I worry that this argument leads in short order to positions I actually disagree with "Economic inequality is inherently good" or "Lazy people shouldn't eat.")

otakucode 9y ago

Similar to the ethical and philosophical basis of things like universal health care, a universal basic income could not work if done partially. If you adopt universal health care without enshrining in your society the utter importance of taking care of everyone because of their fundamental value as human beings absent all other factors - the outcome will be tyranny. If there is an ability for someone to say 'oh, but perhaps we shouldn't take care of person X because they made bad choices and it would save us money to do so' then you will rapidly see the definition of various health-related regulations created with the goal of reducing the cost burden of health care. While one might be tempted to say 'that would just result in people living healthier lives', that would be a very superficial and unstudied evaluation. Behavior modification on a society-wide scale like that is radically dangerous. It might actually be the most dangerous thing in history, I'm not sure. I'd need to run some numbers, but I think there is a good chance that the unintended consequences of well-intentioned behavior modification like that has killed more than all wars combined. Basic income is an interesting idea, but requires social support. It cannot succeed in a society which has been accustomed to seeing other people suffering less than themselves as the worst thing possible. This is a necessary legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic which dictates that a persons virtue is measured by the degree of suffering they endure for the benefit "of society" (in truth only for employers, not society at large). In that mindset, asking for reward is itself immoral and can only reduce a persons virtue. Either to receive or provide such rewards is an act of immorality, and though many can not actually recognize or admit it, this underlies how they see the world. The poor deserve their lot because they contribute little. The rich must be moral because they are rich (this is predicated on a fantastical delusion that riches are awarded only when a person has benefitted many). This is why so many people hate punitive damage judgements. They're not concerned with the well-being of the corporation being fined tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for acting harmfully. They are obsessed, to the point of willful self-destruction, with ensuring that some individual does not get a "payday" legal settlement. Without a philosophical backing that justifies a universal basic income, it would continuously be under threat, with people from all sides attempting to reduce the income to the point that few could survive on it alone, attempting to push people to 'be productive' in a world that doesn't need productive people. It's not a situation you can simply ignore and hope people wake up to. It has to be discussed and justified and explained. Why should society at large provide for those who do not produce material products? At what level should they be supported? Should drug addicts and criminals be supported? When someone feels slighted that someone who has not suffered as much as they gets the same amount, how will you answer them?

clavalle 9y ago

UBI isn't meant to be a full replacement for an individual's economic activity. It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities. The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity. I think the opposite will happen: once people have the basics taken care of they will become more economically active. They will take risks they couldn't before because of the overhanging risk of complete destitution. They will negotiate for better wages because everyone will know they have a perfectly viable alternative. They will invest time in themselves because they won't have to worry about how they will live if they don't have a job while they study or launch a business. Further, there will be more money sloshing around and creating broad-based demand for goods and services that these self-same people can try to capture through their own industriousness. I strongly believe that we have as many on welfare right now because we have a huge sector of our population that have the following choice: live in poverty on welfare with lots of free time or live in poverty while working your ass off treading water. And the reason they remain in poverty is that their employers know that there isn't a great alternative for those marginal employees so they pay just enough to keep their employees afloat but not enough that they can get ahead. UBI or negative income tax (my personal preference) would deeply change this calculus. People could spend their time and energy to truly better their situation rather than merely not lose everything. We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution. There isn't a lot of democratizing of economic power in those regimes.

joeblow9999 9y ago
"The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity." Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.
- clavalle 9y ago
  Such as?

fallingfrog 9y ago

This author makes some good points. But I think he's making a crucial mistake. He posits that political power comes from the ability to withhold something; in this case work. That seems correct to me. But, I think the mistake is in assuming that the majority of people today even in countries like the US do have that power. If you are working a job that doesn't require credentials or a long period of training or education, then you don't really don't have anything to threaten the powers that be with, aside from a massive general strike, which has not happened in a long time. So the danger scenario he posits is really already here, for most people. UBI wouldn't really change that, except inasmuch as it would make it plausible for working people to go on strike much more painlessly, which would really increase their bargaining power, not decrease it. And that's why we'll never get it.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

Slightly off-topic: only read part of the article, but just want to say thank to the OP for turning me onto the website. I've already read several of their other articles and am pleasantly surprised at the balance and clarity with which the authors approach the issues. These kinds of publications are an extreme rarity, especially nowadays.

forkLding 9y ago

I've seen this happen in Bahrain in the past, wherein the government relies heavily on selling oil and uses the profits to subsidize living costs in Bahrain, making Bahrain bearable so that people don't complain/protest all the time. I can see the UBI argument of tyranny. However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario yet in a much similar strain of a with-UBI world, isn't tyranny still inevitable because those that need UBI are powerless and hold no sway on opinions or even angry and gain enmity against those who hold power such as in the Tea Party and Alt-right movement? (Recently, however with oil prices falling, subsidization isn't happening as much and Arab Spring has brought on protests and govt. repression)

Kadin 9y ago
> However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario [...] I think this is a pretty good point. It's possible that UBI basically just delays the inevitable, if you believe that there really is a possible future in which most people are just economically irrelevant due to mechanization, etc. With UBI, you get a few more years before the small number of people at the levers of power harden their attitudes enough to stop the handouts; without UBI you just starve immediately. Either way, it doesn't look good. Personally I don't think that the premise, of large-scale, structural unemployment due to automation, is really likely -- I think that "work" can expand to fill the available labor pool, with some amount of incentivizing, and a large pool of unemployed workers is threatening enough to most governments that they'll pursue economic policies to employ people, even if it's WPA-type projects, rather than endue the destabilization of having them just sit around. As various others have pointed out, if you look at "work" today, it would be largely unrecognizable to someone from the mid-19th century. The amount of modern labor necessary to live a reasonable lifestyle by mid-19th century standards is quite low (it's hard to do this on an individual basis, but if you were to take a bunch of people and modern technology, particularly agricultural machines, but reduce expectations for standards of living to that of the 19th century, you end up with a whole lot of spare time). But yet few people do this. In fact the only people I know of living 19th century lifestyles by choice are people who actively reject modern labor-saving technology (e.g. Amish and other orthodox Mennonite traditions). Someone from that era might justifiably question why people are still working 40 hours per week, rather than just working, say, 10, and adjusting their needs downwards accordingly. It's a fair question (and there are a lot of barriers to doing it, e.g. provisioning of health insurance). I do know a few people who have done that, in fact, and they seem to like it. But I have doubts that it will ever be an especially popular choice. So my guess is that while automation will be disruptive, and if not managed correctly it may result in some (perhaps many) people finding that what they've spent a lifetime training themselves to do is no longer necessary -- an outcome that I think government should work to avoid, the economy will figure out ways to use the surplus human capacity freed up by automation as it always has. There are lots of automation-resistant fields where people can essentially pay each other for services, sloshing money around and keeping everyone employed, even as a smaller and smaller fraction of people actually work in "primary industry", extracting resources from the environment or growing food. That's a transition that's ongoing already in many developed countries, and it doesn't seem grossly unsustainable except where it runs up against opportunities for arbitrage against less-developed economies at the expense of both sets of workers.

dnautics 9y ago

> And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government. I'd be more worried that a UBI makes citizens unnecessary to each other.

jotjotzzz 9y ago

In my opinion, UBI should be earned not freely given away. Perhaps it is earned through education coupled with community service. This ensures that those who are rewarded UBI know that they are expected to produce something of value (to give back) to society and their communities. In return, we are given valuable education (it could include entrepreneurship, computer science/programming, cooking, personal finance, communication -- stuff that should be taught in schools!). In the end, UBI serves as a reward for completing this rites of passage to become part of society through education to better ourselves for our communities. If given freely -- based on our current society where the poor gets the lowest amount of education -- it will help in some cases, in most it will not. It is very hard to wean yourself of a mindset without education.

daemonk 9y ago
Isn't that just really standard employment? Or maybe similar to an academic tenure position? I think UBI is meant to be "universal", with no prerequisites.
- jotjotzzz 9y ago
  Something freely given becomes less valuable versus something given through being earned. It is really not a standard employment, because you have no employer except perhaps your community or city who pays you the UBI. But being paid means you give something first. What you give is contributing to society, your tribe. This is similar to the notion of tribes. If you want to be part of the tribe, you better contribute, by hunting for food or making something for the tribe.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    One of the key efficiencies that UBI is supposed to bring over welfare is in cutting out the bureaucracy of determining who is worthy.

pagutierrezn 9y ago

This has nothing to do with UBI. Fewer and fewer people will be necessary to cover everybody's needs regardless of the existence of a UBI. The Future here presented could happen anyway without a basic income. But what will we do with billions of people without any income?