10 ms·

Why does this and general basic income generate so much anger?

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
People generally aren’t niave, especially the HN crowd. If there’s a sink (basic income) then there’s certainly a source (YOURE THE SOURCE).
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  That’s not how economies work. Money _circulates_. If you’re a sink, you’re also a source (as long as you don’t sink money into inflating some financial bubble instead of buying actual services) So in general it’s the opposite, taking money out of bubble sinks and giving to people who will spend it on services will cause more circulation, not less.
whytaka 7y ago
Angry people want other people to suffer and feel threatened by research and policy proposals that would invalidate their cruelty-as-a-policy.
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  This is not a good-faith argument, and strawmanning at best. If you cannot comprehend a view, implied malice is not the obvious fallback.
  - whytaka 7y ago
    With all due respect, for those people to construe taxation that suggests to actually improve neighbourhoods as "theft" is not good-faith either. It is clearly not theft but rather another means by which societies can invest in themselves. And often, these people wouldn't say the same about taxation that goes into funding the justice system - which is another means for society to improve stability and foster prosperity. But the justice they reach for is punitive, rather than rehabilitative, because again, it's their crab mentality that guides their policies. All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity.
    - rectang 7y ago
      > All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity. Whether malice or insecurity or something else at the root, animus is the result at the surface. I used to drive rideshare, and I heard perspectives on handouts to from my passengers that would peel paint. This just is not a forum where such resentments can be acknowledged.
Jamwinner 7y ago
It is seen by many as 'theft'. I worked for this, it is mine, and now it is being 'taken' and given to those that provided less obvious value. Its easy to see the issue many have. The argument is really around what denotes 'value' to the arguer. The devide is that some see value as easily tallied by value of work (capitolism), some feel that each human is equally 'valuable' reguardless of economic input. The problem is that both sides are correct in some sense.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I'm not sure most people on any side of this debate would agree with that assessment. IMO the more important disagreement is whether or not laissez-faire economics (for lack of a better term) will yield the best results for the most people, or whether some systemic inequalities exist that could be remedied to yield an overall increase in welfare.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    Does laissez-faire involve tax financed institutions such as a monopoly on violence to uphold a commonly decided rule of law, or would even such institutions be determined by the market? More to the point, who even decides the definition of “property” in a laissez-faire economy?
- telesilla 7y ago
  These same people conveniently forget that their wealth is provided in some part through social investment in them (public funding of education, security, transport, business-safe laws etc), and not acknowledging this is effectively 'pulling the ladder up behind them'
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    Things that everybody else also got.
    - kijin 7y ago
AlexB138 7y ago
Distributive Justice is a central topic of how societies are structured. The idea of fairness is important in pretty much every single culture (but with different ideas of what is fair, obviously). Your ideas of fairness likely just line up with what the article supports, but the people who feel angry about it feel exactly how leftists complaining about the 1% feel. A violation of fairness inducing anger is exactly what you would expect, it just seems odd to you because it's not your idea of fairness being violated.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  while it's true that opinions diverge, how disparaging people are towards cash redistribution compared to other forms of distributive justice is interesting. While there are people who hold extreme positions on redistribution, most people in general actually seem supportive of ameliorating the plight of the poor, and I would say broadly do believe that doing good for many at some expense of the few is justified. Many people even will go to great lengths and do charitable work among other things. However, cash redistribution which is arguably a very effective way to accomplish the same thing still faces huge opposition. Suddenly otherwise charitable people will start talking about 'welfare' in disparaging tone and so on. Paradoxically you were more likely to find support among people like Milton Friedman ("the thing poor people need the most is money") who was not exactly known for his left-wing views. there is something different going on with cash redistribution that is separate from general notions of fairness. My guess is that there is still way too much cultural emphasis placed on the notion of work. People would rather have poor people receive a salary for meaningless menial work rather than just flat out receiving cash assistance.
  - rebuilder 7y ago
    "Incentives are king." That seems to be the paradigm, doesn't it? Government is seen largely as the management of incentives to achieve the desired result. Now, start throwing around money with no strings attached - what incentives are there in that for the recipients. Of course UBI and helicopter money ruffle feathers. They directly contradict the basic assumptions our political systems are thought to work on.
ravenstine 7y ago
Because people are trained by the system to be pissed off at everything and see topics like UBI to be a fight between good and evil. I'm mostly against UBI if we can avoid it, but when I have this discussion with people who support it, both offline and online, they assume that I'm cruel and that I don't want to help people. (If only some of them understood the irony of their statements) Politics has always generated anger, but I think there'd be less visceral hostility if people stopped reading Twitter and didn't watch MSNBC day in and day out.
- thatcat 7y ago
  The greater inequality becomes the greater the anger there will be, media acts to redirect that anger into a million little grievances. UBI addresses the fact that we can't avoid it, power has been concentrated to the point that it will not diffuse by natural market forces.
pakitan 7y ago
What you call "anger" is probably just common sense that people express when proponents of basic income try to present such studies as a proof that basic income is the way. Of course a rich entity giving money to a limited number of poor people for a limited time will generate great results. Sure, a study is good but I would have guessed the correct outcome anyway. Now, compare this to a money transfer not from some rich external entity but from fellow citizens, countrywide, for generations. That's what basic income is. And it has very little to do with the study.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  No need to assume an income tax based financing if that’s what you mean. My own take on UBI is to finance it from land rent. In the way Henry George thought about it (or Thomas Paine, John Locke, or even John Rawls for that matter) See Geolibertarianism for good start to learn about the argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    Another word for "land rent" is "property tax". I know there are differences from the geolibertarianism view, but in the context of funding something like UBI they amount to the same thing.
    - sagarm 7y ago
      They're quite different, because improvements to the land (buildings, etc) are not taxed under a land value tax but are taxed under a property tax. The argument is that the value of the land itself is collectively created, so it is morally justifiable to capture this value for public benefit. On the other hand, improvements on a particular piece of land represent an individual's investment.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        There's a better-known argument that land itself is in fixed supply. (Even where land reclamation is a thing, say in the Netherlands, it's not the private sector doing it.) If you pay a tax on land rent, this doesn't alter your behavior compared to paying no tax, because you would've had to forgo that same rent anyway as part of holding that land for yourself. The fact that land rent correlates so well with locally-created value also makes it quite convenient as a source of funds for local government.
grok2 7y ago
People don't get pissed when income from a shared resource (petroleum for instance) is divided among people living on the land or in the country. People get pissed when the taxes they pay (for improving infrastructure and governance) is directed towards subsidizing the living of others (even though in the long run, it might be in many ways beneficial as a society). In many ways it is natural for them to be unhappy about this. I think, there needs to be more education on the benefits (as a social net, they themselves may be the beneficiaries) that alleviates people's fears on such UBI plans and shows the overall societal benefits. Also more longer-term experiments to confirm if it really helps. If society makes progress and does move to a model where machines are doing most of the work, and there is more free time for people and most people don't need to do any work for their living or will not be able to find work for their living, we will definitely need to look at this model or any other alternate model that may come about as a result of natural experiences with such progress.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts managed by GiveDirectly (a charity, and widely considered a highly efficient one), targeting households in extreme poverty. Much of this could be expected, BTW; since the grants were fairly large, the GDP-boosting effect was probably due to recipients acquiring some sorts of physical assets and kickstarting broader economic growth. These dynamics would only apply to a very limited extent in high-income countries where automation is a concern - even though UBI is quite likely to be a good idea for a variety of other reasons.
  - iguy 7y ago
    > This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts Sure, but it's being read as a pilot study for such things "at home", where it would most certainly have to be funded by taxes. Or at least this reading is GP's explanation for why people get angry. When people are only discussing how best to spend 3rd world development aid, then nobody gets all that angry.
    - 7y ago
sornaensis 7y ago
'Got mine' mentality. If you raise the floor you are by definition making everyone else less wealthy by comparison, and therefore threatening the status of middle class persons as being significantly better than those on the bottom of society. At least with means-tested welfare you can trap those people in a cycle of dependence and tell them what they can and cannot do in order to receive that help.
daenz 7y ago
Ask a well-off friend of yours for a dollar every single day and follow it up by explaining that they don't really need it and they've got plenty of dollars, and you need it more than they do. If you can begin to understand why they might start getting angry with you on that micro level, then you will start to understand why it makes people angry on a larger scale.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Consider that exactly the same argument applies to tax breaks for families and homeowners, who are effectively being subsidized by everyone else's money... and yet there's little to no political resistance to either.
jariel 7y ago
"Why does this and general basic income generate so much anger?" I find it hard to fathom why most people would not understand why it would 'generate anger' whether they agree with it or not. Most people work very hard for their income, it's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't want their taxes being distributed very arbitrarily to others. Arbitrary redistributions of wealth have some benefits, but some plainly obvious drawbacks, and a lot of not very obvious ones either. It's in some ways 'a trope' to suggest that people 'won't work' if they can live for free, but it's also to some extent a reality. I live in a very mixed/gentrifying neighbourhood with two very different classes of people who are 'poor': the working class, not very educated, wherein many people 'fall of the bandwagon' and a second class of fairly highly educated hipsters who absolutely would rather stay in 'free' University and on benefits for as long as possible because the alternative: serving coffee, is unpalatable. A 'young' lady I know who recently finished school at 28, having spent 2 years continuing her part-time job as quasi full time in the cafe ... has decided to go back to school at age 30 to pursue a 'second Masters', this time in Psychology (unfortunately a field which doesn't really generate people ready for the economy). Being 'Grad Student Poor' is a much more socially acceptable mode of existence, than 'Waitress Poor'. The availability of free education, healthcare and a variety of other social services enables that. It's not uncommon. The benefit of UBI is ostensibly that it saves a lot of money in overhead for the vast array of means-tested welfare programs, but I suggest that many people on the lower rungs often do need specific kinds of social interventions (crack is common around here) anyhow. I suggest that 'more efficient means-tested welfare' (as opposed to giving everyone a negative income tax/UBI, even the rich), in addition to possibly better minimum wage, at least very basic free healthcare, and higher education at 'accessible cost' might be better than UBI.
clairity 7y ago
it's not anger so much as dismay (for me, at least). the hearts of UBI proponents are often in the right place, but the solution is grossly ignorant and shortsighted. it won't lead to any meaningful long-term change, but rather a new equilibrium where the struggling have even less leverage and opportunity. and many proponents are really only trying to solve for "i don't want to experience poor people" rather than "i don't want people to be poor (especially if caused by automation i created)". you see this position a lot in comments here about homelessness in SF, for example. UBI tries to solve a complicated problem (inequity) with a simple solution (the simplicitiy of which is irresistably attractive to makers of all sorts). inequity needs to be solved by healing the thousand cuts we've endured over the last 50 years, not with the tiny little band-aid that is UBI. we need to fix the ways that plutocrats have tilted the economy in their favor. just around taxation: income tax rates, employment taxes, capital gains tax, depreciation, corporate loss-shifting, interest deduction, nearly every deductions actually, etc. moreso, lending (student loans, mortgages), insurance (healthcare), and real estate (literal rents) have become de facto ways of extracting rents out of the many for the few.
- post_below 7y ago
  I completely agree that one of the core problems we need to fix is the unbalanced influence of wealthy individuals and corporations on policy and lawmaking. However, potentially UBI does more than you imagine. There are measurable differences in both behavior and development when meeting basic needs is a struggle. Rutger Bregman did a great job touching on some of the basics in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash/ https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac... By giving low income people extra cushion (even a small one) you can improve their cognition and decision making, giving them a platform from which to improve their lives, pursue education, even innovate. All without complicated, difficult to implement and expensive social programs designed to achieve the same goals. Poverty squanders potential. And then, of course, there is the oft talked about, and in my opinion self evidently valid, concern about an increasing number of white collar jobs being replaced by automation. At some point we'll have no choice but to come up with a solution for a shrinking pool of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Conveniently the same process that will remove those jobs, will also make the production of the goods and services they relate to dramatically cheaper. UBI gives some of that surplus to the lower and middle classes, which is important given the danger that it would otherwise be absorbed by the rich.
dmos62 7y ago
I think it's fair to say that our society is divided to a large degree and the individual feels increasingly isolated from those around him. It is not incromprehensible that in this context extensive trust, cooperation and sharing are difficult to attain. You don't have to be leaning either way on the universal income subject to acknowledge that.
smabie 7y ago
Because conservatives think such an idea is morally wrong, while liberals don't actually trust or respect the people they want to help.
tomp 7y ago
Because it doesn’t make economic sense. If you give all people money, ostensibly to make them not poor, you’ll just cause inflation and they’ll be poor again. I’m not opposed to basic housing and/or food instead - those are much simpler, as there is finite demand (in contrast to money), which can be planned for and satisfied.
jimkleiber 7y ago
I think a lot of people may not like the work that they do and the number of hours they have to do it to earn the money that they do, and then get angry at people who can earn money either without doing that much work (eg people on welfare or people who own things that generate revenue) or people who like the work that they do. In a way, a form of "it's not fair, I have to work hard at a job I hate for my money, they should as well." I mean, I think there are plenty of other reasons as well, such as the effectiveness of such a program or trust that the people receiving the money won't use it on things the people giving the money deem immoral. But I think the big one is just that I believe most of us humans receive money by renting ourselves out for money and doing things we don't like, and instead of finding ways to receive money by renting out other things we own or by finding a thing we enjoy doing, we harp on those who do. (I think why Andre Yang is trying to frame a UBI as a dividend is that it reframes it into we as citizens own stock in the economy and should receive profit sharing...but that's a convo for another day)
gerbilly 7y ago
Because humans as a species have a strong bias to unmask 'cheaters.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

People generally aren’t niave, especially the HN crowd. If there’s a sink (basic income) then there’s certainly a source (YOURE THE SOURCE).

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
That’s not how economies work. Money _circulates_. If you’re a sink, you’re also a source (as long as you don’t sink money into inflating some financial bubble instead of buying actual services) So in general it’s the opposite, taking money out of bubble sinks and giving to people who will spend it on services will cause more circulation, not less.

whytaka 7y ago

Angry people want other people to suffer and feel threatened by research and policy proposals that would invalidate their cruelty-as-a-policy.

Jamwinner 7y ago
This is not a good-faith argument, and strawmanning at best. If you cannot comprehend a view, implied malice is not the obvious fallback.
- whytaka 7y ago
  With all due respect, for those people to construe taxation that suggests to actually improve neighbourhoods as "theft" is not good-faith either. It is clearly not theft but rather another means by which societies can invest in themselves. And often, these people wouldn't say the same about taxation that goes into funding the justice system - which is another means for society to improve stability and foster prosperity. But the justice they reach for is punitive, rather than rehabilitative, because again, it's their crab mentality that guides their policies. All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity.
  - rectang 7y ago
    > All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity. Whether malice or insecurity or something else at the root, animus is the result at the surface. I used to drive rideshare, and I heard perspectives on handouts to from my passengers that would peel paint. This just is not a forum where such resentments can be acknowledged.

Jamwinner 7y ago

It is seen by many as 'theft'. I worked for this, it is mine, and now it is being 'taken' and given to those that provided less obvious value. Its easy to see the issue many have. The argument is really around what denotes 'value' to the arguer. The devide is that some see value as easily tallied by value of work (capitolism), some feel that each human is equally 'valuable' reguardless of economic input. The problem is that both sides are correct in some sense.

rebuilder 7y ago
I'm not sure most people on any side of this debate would agree with that assessment. IMO the more important disagreement is whether or not laissez-faire economics (for lack of a better term) will yield the best results for the most people, or whether some systemic inequalities exist that could be remedied to yield an overall increase in welfare.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  Does laissez-faire involve tax financed institutions such as a monopoly on violence to uphold a commonly decided rule of law, or would even such institutions be determined by the market? More to the point, who even decides the definition of “property” in a laissez-faire economy?
telesilla 7y ago
These same people conveniently forget that their wealth is provided in some part through social investment in them (public funding of education, security, transport, business-safe laws etc), and not acknowledging this is effectively 'pulling the ladder up behind them'
- jtbayly 7y ago
  Things that everybody else also got.
  - kijin 7y ago

AlexB138 7y ago

Distributive Justice is a central topic of how societies are structured. The idea of fairness is important in pretty much every single culture (but with different ideas of what is fair, obviously). Your ideas of fairness likely just line up with what the article supports, but the people who feel angry about it feel exactly how leftists complaining about the 1% feel. A violation of fairness inducing anger is exactly what you would expect, it just seems odd to you because it's not your idea of fairness being violated.

Barrin92 7y ago
while it's true that opinions diverge, how disparaging people are towards cash redistribution compared to other forms of distributive justice is interesting. While there are people who hold extreme positions on redistribution, most people in general actually seem supportive of ameliorating the plight of the poor, and I would say broadly do believe that doing good for many at some expense of the few is justified. Many people even will go to great lengths and do charitable work among other things. However, cash redistribution which is arguably a very effective way to accomplish the same thing still faces huge opposition. Suddenly otherwise charitable people will start talking about 'welfare' in disparaging tone and so on. Paradoxically you were more likely to find support among people like Milton Friedman ("the thing poor people need the most is money") who was not exactly known for his left-wing views. there is something different going on with cash redistribution that is separate from general notions of fairness. My guess is that there is still way too much cultural emphasis placed on the notion of work. People would rather have poor people receive a salary for meaningless menial work rather than just flat out receiving cash assistance.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  "Incentives are king." That seems to be the paradigm, doesn't it? Government is seen largely as the management of incentives to achieve the desired result. Now, start throwing around money with no strings attached - what incentives are there in that for the recipients. Of course UBI and helicopter money ruffle feathers. They directly contradict the basic assumptions our political systems are thought to work on.

ravenstine 7y ago

Because people are trained by the system to be pissed off at everything and see topics like UBI to be a fight between good and evil. I'm mostly against UBI if we can avoid it, but when I have this discussion with people who support it, both offline and online, they assume that I'm cruel and that I don't want to help people. (If only some of them understood the irony of their statements) Politics has always generated anger, but I think there'd be less visceral hostility if people stopped reading Twitter and didn't watch MSNBC day in and day out.

thatcat 7y ago
The greater inequality becomes the greater the anger there will be, media acts to redirect that anger into a million little grievances. UBI addresses the fact that we can't avoid it, power has been concentrated to the point that it will not diffuse by natural market forces.

pakitan 7y ago

What you call "anger" is probably just common sense that people express when proponents of basic income try to present such studies as a proof that basic income is the way. Of course a rich entity giving money to a limited number of poor people for a limited time will generate great results. Sure, a study is good but I would have guessed the correct outcome anyway. Now, compare this to a money transfer not from some rich external entity but from fellow citizens, countrywide, for generations. That's what basic income is. And it has very little to do with the study.

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
No need to assume an income tax based financing if that’s what you mean. My own take on UBI is to finance it from land rent. In the way Henry George thought about it (or Thomas Paine, John Locke, or even John Rawls for that matter) See Geolibertarianism for good start to learn about the argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
- mdorazio 7y ago
  Another word for "land rent" is "property tax". I know there are differences from the geolibertarianism view, but in the context of funding something like UBI they amount to the same thing.
  - sagarm 7y ago
    They're quite different, because improvements to the land (buildings, etc) are not taxed under a land value tax but are taxed under a property tax. The argument is that the value of the land itself is collectively created, so it is morally justifiable to capture this value for public benefit. On the other hand, improvements on a particular piece of land represent an individual's investment.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      There's a better-known argument that land itself is in fixed supply. (Even where land reclamation is a thing, say in the Netherlands, it's not the private sector doing it.) If you pay a tax on land rent, this doesn't alter your behavior compared to paying no tax, because you would've had to forgo that same rent anyway as part of holding that land for yourself. The fact that land rent correlates so well with locally-created value also makes it quite convenient as a source of funds for local government.

grok2 7y ago

People don't get pissed when income from a shared resource (petroleum for instance) is divided among people living on the land or in the country. People get pissed when the taxes they pay (for improving infrastructure and governance) is directed towards subsidizing the living of others (even though in the long run, it might be in many ways beneficial as a society). In many ways it is natural for them to be unhappy about this. I think, there needs to be more education on the benefits (as a social net, they themselves may be the beneficiaries) that alleviates people's fears on such UBI plans and shows the overall societal benefits. Also more longer-term experiments to confirm if it really helps. If society makes progress and does move to a model where machines are doing most of the work, and there is more free time for people and most people don't need to do any work for their living or will not be able to find work for their living, we will definitely need to look at this model or any other alternate model that may come about as a result of natural experiences with such progress.

zozbot234 7y ago
This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts managed by GiveDirectly (a charity, and widely considered a highly efficient one), targeting households in extreme poverty. Much of this could be expected, BTW; since the grants were fairly large, the GDP-boosting effect was probably due to recipients acquiring some sorts of physical assets and kickstarting broader economic growth. These dynamics would only apply to a very limited extent in high-income countries where automation is a concern - even though UBI is quite likely to be a good idea for a variety of other reasons.
- iguy 7y ago
  > This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts Sure, but it's being read as a pilot study for such things "at home", where it would most certainly have to be funded by taxes. Or at least this reading is GP's explanation for why people get angry. When people are only discussing how best to spend 3rd world development aid, then nobody gets all that angry.
  - 7y ago

sornaensis 7y ago

'Got mine' mentality. If you raise the floor you are by definition making everyone else less wealthy by comparison, and therefore threatening the status of middle class persons as being significantly better than those on the bottom of society. At least with means-tested welfare you can trap those people in a cycle of dependence and tell them what they can and cannot do in order to receive that help.

daenz 7y ago

Ask a well-off friend of yours for a dollar every single day and follow it up by explaining that they don't really need it and they've got plenty of dollars, and you need it more than they do. If you can begin to understand why they might start getting angry with you on that micro level, then you will start to understand why it makes people angry on a larger scale.

crooked-v 7y ago
Consider that exactly the same argument applies to tax breaks for families and homeowners, who are effectively being subsidized by everyone else's money... and yet there's little to no political resistance to either.

jariel 7y ago

"Why does this and general basic income generate so much anger?" I find it hard to fathom why most people would not understand why it would 'generate anger' whether they agree with it or not. Most people work very hard for their income, it's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't want their taxes being distributed very arbitrarily to others. Arbitrary redistributions of wealth have some benefits, but some plainly obvious drawbacks, and a lot of not very obvious ones either. It's in some ways 'a trope' to suggest that people 'won't work' if they can live for free, but it's also to some extent a reality. I live in a very mixed/gentrifying neighbourhood with two very different classes of people who are 'poor': the working class, not very educated, wherein many people 'fall of the bandwagon' and a second class of fairly highly educated hipsters who absolutely would rather stay in 'free' University and on benefits for as long as possible because the alternative: serving coffee, is unpalatable. A 'young' lady I know who recently finished school at 28, having spent 2 years continuing her part-time job as quasi full time in the cafe ... has decided to go back to school at age 30 to pursue a 'second Masters', this time in Psychology (unfortunately a field which doesn't really generate people ready for the economy). Being 'Grad Student Poor' is a much more socially acceptable mode of existence, than 'Waitress Poor'. The availability of free education, healthcare and a variety of other social services enables that. It's not uncommon. The benefit of UBI is ostensibly that it saves a lot of money in overhead for the vast array of means-tested welfare programs, but I suggest that many people on the lower rungs often do need specific kinds of social interventions (crack is common around here) anyhow. I suggest that 'more efficient means-tested welfare' (as opposed to giving everyone a negative income tax/UBI, even the rich), in addition to possibly better minimum wage, at least very basic free healthcare, and higher education at 'accessible cost' might be better than UBI.

clairity 7y ago

it's not anger so much as dismay (for me, at least). the hearts of UBI proponents are often in the right place, but the solution is grossly ignorant and shortsighted. it won't lead to any meaningful long-term change, but rather a new equilibrium where the struggling have even less leverage and opportunity. and many proponents are really only trying to solve for "i don't want to experience poor people" rather than "i don't want people to be poor (especially if caused by automation i created)". you see this position a lot in comments here about homelessness in SF, for example. UBI tries to solve a complicated problem (inequity) with a simple solution (the simplicitiy of which is irresistably attractive to makers of all sorts). inequity needs to be solved by healing the thousand cuts we've endured over the last 50 years, not with the tiny little band-aid that is UBI. we need to fix the ways that plutocrats have tilted the economy in their favor. just around taxation: income tax rates, employment taxes, capital gains tax, depreciation, corporate loss-shifting, interest deduction, nearly every deductions actually, etc. moreso, lending (student loans, mortgages), insurance (healthcare), and real estate (literal rents) have become de facto ways of extracting rents out of the many for the few.

post_below 7y ago
I completely agree that one of the core problems we need to fix is the unbalanced influence of wealthy individuals and corporations on policy and lawmaking. However, potentially UBI does more than you imagine. There are measurable differences in both behavior and development when meeting basic needs is a struggle. Rutger Bregman did a great job touching on some of the basics in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash/ https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac... By giving low income people extra cushion (even a small one) you can improve their cognition and decision making, giving them a platform from which to improve their lives, pursue education, even innovate. All without complicated, difficult to implement and expensive social programs designed to achieve the same goals. Poverty squanders potential. And then, of course, there is the oft talked about, and in my opinion self evidently valid, concern about an increasing number of white collar jobs being replaced by automation. At some point we'll have no choice but to come up with a solution for a shrinking pool of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Conveniently the same process that will remove those jobs, will also make the production of the goods and services they relate to dramatically cheaper. UBI gives some of that surplus to the lower and middle classes, which is important given the danger that it would otherwise be absorbed by the rich.

dmos62 7y ago

I think it's fair to say that our society is divided to a large degree and the individual feels increasingly isolated from those around him. It is not incromprehensible that in this context extensive trust, cooperation and sharing are difficult to attain. You don't have to be leaning either way on the universal income subject to acknowledge that.

smabie 7y ago

Because conservatives think such an idea is morally wrong, while liberals don't actually trust or respect the people they want to help.

tomp 7y ago

Because it doesn’t make economic sense. If you give all people money, ostensibly to make them not poor, you’ll just cause inflation and they’ll be poor again. I’m not opposed to basic housing and/or food instead - those are much simpler, as there is finite demand (in contrast to money), which can be planned for and satisfied.

jimkleiber 7y ago

I think a lot of people may not like the work that they do and the number of hours they have to do it to earn the money that they do, and then get angry at people who can earn money either without doing that much work (eg people on welfare or people who own things that generate revenue) or people who like the work that they do. In a way, a form of "it's not fair, I have to work hard at a job I hate for my money, they should as well." I mean, I think there are plenty of other reasons as well, such as the effectiveness of such a program or trust that the people receiving the money won't use it on things the people giving the money deem immoral. But I think the big one is just that I believe most of us humans receive money by renting ourselves out for money and doing things we don't like, and instead of finding ways to receive money by renting out other things we own or by finding a thing we enjoy doing, we harp on those who do. (I think why Andre Yang is trying to frame a UBI as a dividend is that it reframes it into we as citizens own stock in the economy and should receive profit sharing...but that's a convo for another day)

gerbilly 7y ago

Because humans as a species have a strong bias to unmask 'cheaters.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task