52 ms·

Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

170 points by bobrenjc93 7y ago

ColonelSanders 7y ago
It's not UBI, it's a rolling stimulus package :) That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy. And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.
- tells 7y ago
  In a way very true but also subsidized by the wealthy's spending habits. To mention UBI without the accompanying VAT would not properly show how progressive this system can be with higher taxes applied to non essential goods. People concerned with it wiping out safety nets needs to understand how under equipped and under utilized they are for numerous reasons. The average benefits also average to only about $500/month. UBI is a new economic floor in which we can mobilize large swaths of the population and revitalize small towns that are falling apart. The shift in economic power will be massive and it's incredible to think about. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-may-not-know-about-us-social-safety-net https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-m... https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-people-in-poverty-are-disconnected-from-the-social-safety-net-most-of-them-are-white/2019/02/04/807516a0-2598-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...
  - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    If history is any indication, the recipients are likely to become just more complacent and detached. I fail to see how people would become “mobilized” and towns revitalized when they have even less incentive to leave the house. If anything, I see UBI shifting power even more into the hands of the elites, as massive numbers of the lower classes drop out of the workforce and no longer care about anything the politicians or big businesses do, so long as the cash keeps flowing. This could very well be the intent. Take a look at any Native American reservation, or any caged animal for that matter. Hardly vibrant.
sak5sk 7y ago
Great to see tech leaders get behind UBI. Now is the time and Yang is the candidate of a lifetime. I never understood how people buy into the whole "break up the tech giants" argument. It makes no sense, just a great platitude with no real accomplishment. Who wants to use the 2nd best Twitter or Facebook? Not a single person.
- nickpinkston 7y ago
  Usually "breakup" is a byword for regulate. However, it's possible to see how Amazon being broken into at least one online retailer, a web services company, and a logistics provider and how that may increase competition in each of those markets. Further, even in your social example, people used Instagram before Facebook bought them and likely still would if divested, and Snap, Tik Tok and more are going strong as independents.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    Amazon needs have it's retail side split into a marketplace operator and a retailer.
- ubiopinion 7y ago
  I still know people who love Instagram or WhatsApp but they hate Facebook. Little do they know both apps are owned by Facebook, and that's the problem Facebook keeps acquiring their threats, their competitors that's monopoly and seriously they're dangerous. Many people still don't know YouTube is owned by Google. This is a problem!
- danShumway 7y ago
  I'm assuming you're asking in good faith, so I'll point out three problems with your line of thought. First, you assume that having multiple competitors is pointless if one product is the clear winner. Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now, and the reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation. They would argue that even if breaking up Twitter just resulted in 2nd-best Twitter, the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now. Second, you assume that there would be a clear "best" product. In truly competitive fields, it's often difficult to point to one product and say, "that's the best, and everyone else is settling for a worse product." Take iPhone and Android. Why does anyone use the 2nd best phone operating system? Why don't we have one OS? Because there isn't a clear 2nd best operating system. The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases. It seems obvious to me that the smartphone market is broad enough that other niches could be served better by more targeted alternatives to the two major OSes, if those alternatives were allowed to mature to the point where they became competitive. Finally, you misunderstand what the proposals about breaking up tech companies often entail. Most commonly when people talk about breaking up big-tech, I find they're talking about Warren. Warren's proposals are (roughly speaking) about separating product offerings and platforms. Her plan isn't to take Apple and force them to split up and create a second iOS. Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store. It's not about blindly making a second Apple, it's about trying to remove conflicts of interest from platform maintainers. I'm not going to say whether or not I think that plan is good. I do think it's pretty unlikely to happen even if Warren is elected. But regardless, it's a very different, much narrower plan with very different goals and implications than what you're describing.
ubiopinion 7y ago
UBI is just an excuse to do the real fix, and that's tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share. It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.
- gnarbarian 7y ago
  Good idea. How about a flat tax with no loopholes? Seems fair to me.
  - realtalk_sp 7y ago
    What's the rationale for a flat tax over progressive? I believe that an ideal tax system should properly reflect that the value of a marginal dollar is inversely correlated with income/wealth in a nonlinear fashion. But I'm open to having my mind changed.
    - gnarbarian 7y ago
      One point is that "fairness" is highly subjective. One can perform many contortions to justify their own definition of what they perceive as "fair". Personally I like a flat tax because it drastically simplifies the tax system and removes the loop holes that wealthy people who can afford accountants use to achieve the lower effective tax rate stated in the root comment. It also deletes the tax prep Industry and a significant majority of the IRS, these Ultimately act as drag in our economy for arguably a net negative benefit.
      - fzeroracer 7y ago
        $10,000 of a million is worth less to the millionaire than $10 to the poor person with only a thousand to their name. A flat tax isn't fair unless every other form of expense was flat as well. Which means rent would have to be some percent of your income and the same for power, healthcare and so forth.
deleted 7y ago
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keiferski 7y ago
I haven’t read all of the literature on basic income, but my (admittedly semi-educated) impression is that one potential downside is that it fosters dependence on the state and is thus not anti-fragile. I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough food to sustain a family. Or a 3D printer that can turn raw materials into clothing or shelter. In terms of cash needs, you could create a sort of minimum-wage Uber-style online mechanical Turk system that allows one to put in work and generate cash. You would theoretically get the benefits of basic income without having them be controlled by an external actor. I don’t know enough about farming, 3D printing or biology to know whether this is feasible, but it seems within the realm of possibility. Have any economists explored options like this?
- pdonis 7y ago
  > what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs What if, instead of yammering about UBI, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, went out and started a company to make such technologies? The way to innovate is to innovate, not to try to milk money out of the government. The whole discussion about UBI misses this basic point: to make it easier for people to make a living, you don't give them more money, you make the basic needs of life cheaper. And why doesn't that happen? Because the government keeps putting its thumb on the scale and preventing people from doing it. For example, the government subsidizes large agribusinesses instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs find cheaper ways of providing people with food. The government prints money and gives it to banks for mortgage loans to keep home prices high while rigging building codes so the only method of construction that's feasible is two by fours and drywall, instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs figure out cheaper and more durable methods of construction for homes.
  - lalaland1125 7y ago
    One other important point: a cheaper cost of living is essential for UBI to be affordable. Right now most UBI proposals require around $1000 a month per person to enable people to live in a somewhat sustainable manner. Those proposals are simply unaffordable relative to our GDP and tax base. The only way we can make them work is by deceasing the cost of living so that we can decease the UBI. A UBI of $300 a month is much easier to fit in the budget.
hnbreak 7y ago
Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Do the Chinese YouTube’s have positive cash flow? I don’t even know if youtube has positive cash flow.
  - rococode 7y ago
    I was curious about Youtube too, apparently around 2015 they started breaking even. I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing. https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-leader-google/ https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le... I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      There's no law of nature that data/eyeballs-based monetization (including advertising) has to remain viable everywhere that it is today. I find it entirely plausible that 10 years from now people will have to directly pay for more of the services that they use. You're already seeing this with the increased number of paywalls around publication content. I expect we'll see more subscriptions and services just shutting down if people aren't willing to pay.
    - gruez 7y ago
      > 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. Why can't they start deleting old videos?
intuitionist 7y ago
Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).
- tempsy 7y ago
  Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI. Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.
    - harimau777 7y ago
      I'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting). It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs. It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.
root_axis 7y ago
My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
- darawk 7y ago
  Yes, prices will likely go up. However, they will not capture all of that money. And UBI will allow people to have more choice in where they live. UBI will give you the flexibility to move somewhere new and figure things out when you get there, rather than having to have a job lined up immediately. This should, at the margin, decrease the lock in effect of big cities, and maybe even cause rents to decline over time.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    I'm hoping UBI exists in 10-20 years. I could take on my parents' home on that kind of salary without thinking, and just dub along as a subsistence farmer/ occasional contractor.
  - deleted 7y ago
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- eric_cc 7y ago
  Is this an issue with UBI though? Of course the prices will go up because of supply/demand changes. And thus 12k/year won’t go as far as it does now. That’s not a bad thing though. The people who are at rock bottom still > 0. Leeches won’t be able to do nothing and exist off 12k. For most rent payers, their life will remain the same as it is today: the economy will reach a new equilibrium and their lives will be no better financially. But that’s by design- this isn’t meant to be a free ride through life.
  - mcntsh 7y ago
    A $3T program that doesn't "dramatically affect" the lives of "most renters" for the better will be a hard sell. In fact, it would make the lives of the middle/lower class worse off because the tax is in the form of VAT and the removal of welfare benefits.
baron816 7y ago
Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.
- tempsy 7y ago
  $12K/year is hardly a free ride to a life of no work. There will be a tiny minority that somehow game it and live off that, but for the vast majority it’s a cushion and not a replacement for work at all.
  - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    I wish for your assessment of human nature to be accurate, but I’m quite doubtful.
    - hacknat 7y ago
      What do you even mean? The average income in this country is ~45k. If that is what he was proposing than maybe we’d have an issue, I guess, but I doubt it. Everyone is so sure that people on UBI would stop working, and there is no evidence to back it up. In the studies that have shown people who stop working it is usually caregivers, which I would argue is a positive thing.
      - bostonvaulter2 7y ago
        The median US individual income ($31,099) is a better metric to use since the average is more weighted by extremes that don't represent the "typical" experience of people. [1] According to google from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
    - grecy 7y ago
      You should look into welfare payments in Australia. It's about the easiest to get and most generous on the planet, and a small percentage of people do choose to be lazy and life off it. But the very vast majority don't.
tells 7y ago
The most exciting thing about UBI is how versatile its benefits are for human resilience. Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income. Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money. Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every community is getting a massive cash injection Worried about a president like Trump cutting your SNAP benefits again? Opt-in to UBI and never worry about your funds getting cut without the entire country getting infuriated. People rarely feel this level of freedom. I've only felt this level of security recently but I believe everyone deserves this. I was only lucky to have made it this far from the opportunities given to me by my parents and the support I had when I couldn't stop fucking up. People need to be able to take risks and have retries. Without it, you get people working jobs they hate while envying lives they'll never have.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Right, I think this is the most underrated consequence of UBI. I think another is the creative boom it could create. People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success. That could create a whole new class of artists that couldn’t be possible otherwise.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > "People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success." We haven't exactly seen an explosion of creative works coming from those on public assistance already. When is this hypothetical wave of creativity supposed to kick in?
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  Yes, free money magically appearing would make life easier for the individuals receiving it (at least, in the short term). No one is arguing otherwise. The concern is that it may have even greater negative effects on the economy as a whole.
ALittleLight 7y ago
Yang's proposal doesn't seem like UBI to me. A key component of UBI being the U - i.e that it is universal. However, Yang wants to pay for it, in part, by adding new taxes. In order for some people to make money, others must, on net, lose money. To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not. Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.
- snidane 7y ago
  I agree, but about the part about nationalization of companies. Historically it tended to produce bad outcomes. People just don't put the same effort if they don't own it. What actually works is government stepping in by producing a competitor when it sees oligopolies developing and the participating companies not innovating further but just undermining each other or colluding to undermine interests of their customers. For example in the early railroads there were tons of companies building their own railroads instead of coopearing with others to reuse. Telecommunication networks tend to get stuck similarly. That's how AT&T was created to have a single infrastructure entity and lot of competition on top of that infrastructure. Similar situation can be observed in social networks today. The business model for them is not that great unless you infect them with advertisement. Twitter struggled a lot with monetization because it feels more like a infrastructure project similar to roads or phone lines. Perhaps it is time for government to create competing social network or just pump support money to a community created one.
j8014 7y ago
I find the concept of UBI and redistribution of wealth terrible to a free society. If wealth redistribution is what the rich and common both "want", why allow the wealthy to set the rules? It seems easier to string them all up by the neck and take it all so we have fair redistribution of wealth, why half ass it?
- solveit 7y ago
  > It seems easier Setting aside ethical issues as you clearly don't care, it really isn't at all easy. It's not like people haven't tried.
  - j8014 7y ago
    Ethics? If you agree with UBI, then ethics do not matter. Why negotiate a minority position, take it all.
    - petermcneeley 7y ago
      Your cryptic comments are confusing people. Just state you are an "American Libertarian" and not have people play 20 questions to find your non nuanced position.
- unrealhoang 7y ago
  If UBI still doesn’t exist when 2M drivers will be jobless because of technology then yes, what you described will
- carapace 7y ago
  First, FWIW: "These 14 billionaires just promised to give away more than half of their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/14-billionaires-signed-bill-gates-and-warren-buffetts-giving-pledge.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/14-billionaires-signed-bill-... Second, "eat the rich" is very different from "Please don't let me starve", eh? Third, UBI doesn't have to be Zero-Sum. "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."
kyledrake 7y ago
"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort of say billionaires are inherently evil,” he said. “I think it would be great to say, we as a society will allow trillionaires in exchange for a floor for everyone.”" The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many. UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing. Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration. Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.
- tells 7y ago
  this is very inflammatory and false. The VAT is not highly regressive. Money is power but poverty stricken people literally have zero money. How are gov't "programs" going to help? democrats love "programs" because it just gives them something to show off. it hardly solves any real problems. I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
  - kyledrake 7y ago
    It is not inflammatory or false. VAT taxes are regressive consumption-based taxes, and poorer people disproportionately bear the costs compared to the wealthy. It's very well established among economists https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive > I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play" The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.
moralsupply 7y ago
The government would need to get money somewhere for the UBI program. It can only do so either through taxation, or by printing money, as the government is not a value-generation enterprise. If UBI gets its funding by taxation, UBI can't work economically (not to say it wouldn't be "UBI"). Even if you tax all the rich people, it won't provide enough money for the program. Besides, you can't really tax the rich, the moment you declare an aggressive taxation regime on them, they fly their money out of the country (and possibly their businesses too, which would generate poverty). If the assumption is that it would tax "everyone but the poor" then it's not universal "income", it's just another "social program" paid by the middle class. If UBI is funded by printing money, then it's a debt generation engine. The USA is already heavily indebted due to at least 100 years of irresponsible governments spending a lot more than what they made through taxes. UBI would only make matters worse, and could easily lead to a currency crash within at most a couple decades (which would wipe out retirement funds, savings, etc. therefore generating poverty and causing social unrest)
- swiley 7y ago
  You tax coorperations, not rich individuals. Although if you sit down and work it out I’m not sure it makes sense quite yet. UBS though probably could.
  - moralsupply 7y ago
    When you tax corporations, they don't simply make less profits, they embed the tax losses in their prices and pay less to workers. You, as a consumer or employee, end up paying that tax.
    - charlesu 7y ago
      I think you're oversimplifying how companies determine prices and wages. Yes, corporate taxes are one consideration. There's also competition, regulations, distribution costs, and commodity prices. Passing along your costs directly to consumers is a great way to give up market share to a more efficient or creative competitor.
shafyy 7y ago
There are videos of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw
Unsimplified 7y ago
My problem with UBI is 1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it. 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month. I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  I have my own problems with UBI, but as far as 'fair work sharing', the presumption would be that the work is done 99% by machines, where you don't need to be 'fair' & the remaining 1% could be highly compensated.
  - Unsimplified 7y ago
    Consider absolute numbers. Suppose monthly food expenses drop to $100. That's 2-3 hours of work for each person to eat monthly. X 330M = 1 billion hours per month. And that's just food. In practice, fair work sharing still seems critical, unless you have a better example in mind.
- atq2119 7y ago
  > 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month. This isn't true, since the state can always just create more money. The real limitation is in real resources and production capacity, and if a UBI was implemented by creating more money than the existing production capacity can sustain, it would likely drive up the rate of inflation. If the UBI is set to a fixed nominal value, this would eventually balance out, possibly resulting in a corresponding UBI real value that is insufficient for people to live on. (What level of real value is sustainable is an empirical question.) I agree with you that creating demand for labor is a better approach if done well. Ideally, you'd create a conceptually infinite demand for labor to ensure there's no involuntary unemployment. Of course, there's then the risk of increasing the rate of inflation via that labor demand, which you can fix by fixing the price at which the labor demand becomes infinite. That's the direction that the "employer of last resort / job guarantee" proposals go in, though those also get flack from some people for being like workfare.
sethammons 7y ago
I like the idea of freeing people to be able to quit and get a new job any time, where quitting today means a real threat of losing one's home, transportation, or ability to eat (never mind fueling the cycle of debt that keeps so many down). I think it would be a net benefit if people could tell oppressive employers to fuck off without fear. However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month. This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land. There are a few elders who would like to teach the young how to do so, but they are not interested. Nobody wants to do better and there is high resentment towards the federal government. I've seen it in other places. When you are outside the balance of exchange with someone (or some organization), resentment breeds. I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers. Economically, we would have to produce enough "extra" that a full, regular distribution of that wealth could continue to work with producers continuing to produce, and a growing collection of people who would lose all interest in contributing. We would have to have a way to deal with a dramatic rise in apathetic people. We would have to have a way to deal with producers just leaving the country. In The Expanse, Earth has a UBI like thing. The whole planet. You get subsistence living, and if you want to be a producer, you start by doing menial work for a period of time to prove you are willing to work hard. It is also sci-fi for a reason :). Again, I would love to free people from tyrannical employers and the fear and stress of not knowing what next month brings due to finances (I've lived that the majority of my life). I don't see how UBI can work.
- charlesju 7y ago
  I completely understand where you're coming from, but perhaps you're looking at causation vs correlation. For example, there are many places in the world without a welfare state going through similar issues. The real question is whether that community would be better or exist at all without assistance.
- e40 7y ago
  Any time such a huge change is introduced into a complex system, it is extremely hard to see all the unintended consequences. I like the idea of UBI, too. Taking that leap worries me, though, we might be in for a worse time because of it.
pascoej 7y ago
Yang does have an interesting idea for campaign finance reform too. 100$ a year for any citizen to spend on political campaigns. In some ways I think this is bigger than the UBI. If everybody spent this voucher it would be ~23B, almost 4x what was spent on federal races in 2016. I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust. While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Yeah I really like that you could support what you want as it gives more control to the citizens.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    How? It does literally nothing for special interests buying politicians, it just adds MORE money into the system. No thanks. Side note... not many people here would like the never ending series of populist presidents this would bring if it did work.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      Let's say lobbyists pull funding from one sector and push it into another, such as the endless funding for military pulling funding away from other sectors like education, then you as a citizen that wants to support education can decide to put your $100 towards that.
- zpallin 7y ago
  As you pointed out, special interests will just raise the value of a politician so the $100 disappears in value. That or buy out ads to convince people to spend on their corporate sponsored candidates rather than the ones seeking direct support from voters. Both of these already happen, so why wouldn't they happen more? Solving this issue of corruption in campaign finance requires a solution that only publicly financed campaigns can give. Make it so that voting is all that matters in deciding an elected official and sterilize campaign funding so it's not easy to corrupt.
banads 7y ago
How can a US Dollar based UBI solve the problems of automation when the Super Admins of the US Dollar are explicitly pursuing the opposite goal? According to the Federal Reserve website, 2/3 of their main goals are: 1. Seeking to maximize employment 2. Maintaining stable prices https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does-federal-reserve-seek-to-achieve-through-monetary-policy.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does... Automation and ephemeralization minimize employment and prices, but the money system seeks the opposite. Until these contradictions are reconciled, how can a US Dollar based UBI not fail?
- wyxuan 7y ago
  You're right that it probably will lead to inflation. The only question is how much, because the fed right now is having a hard time providing inflation into the economy. The fed just pumped 500 billion in not QE, QE in the last month; but you wouldn't have noticed based on consumer price inflation.
  - banads 7y ago
    Automation should naturally lead to deflation for many goods and services
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Simple proposition, but the Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government. Perhaps it’s time that system be re-evaluated?
  - banads 7y ago
    Indeed, the Federal Reserve is over 100 years old. However, I fear the Fed is such a powerful and entrenched legacy system that it is extremely unlikely for it to be politically re-evaluated unless there were some sort of catastrophic system failure.
nixpulvis 7y ago
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Welfare is a tax, and a much needed one since the alternative costs even more. I don't really see how a universal basic income (UBI) solves much of anything that other welfare programs couldn't solve more effectively. If the argument is that it's easier to just give everyone $1,000, then I think you're a lazy policymaker.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Welfare programs are horribly inefficient and full of perverse incentives. But I doubt UBI is any better overall. In the U.S. native tribes have effectively had UBI for years and years, whether from government settlements, or casino windfalls (granted, sometimes with limitations on mobility...but hopefully this system would work without just giving it to urban landlords). The economies of many native tribes are notorious troubled.
  - carapace 7y ago
    > many native tribes are notorious troubled Victims of genocide have additional complicating factors, eh?
- Reedx 7y ago
  Giving people the money directly, for them to use where it's needed in their particular case, is far more efficient than any program could ever possibly be. It's just the math and physics of it. Programs have all sorts of overhead and need to be generalized. They introduce inefficiency by default. And the larger it is, the more inefficient it becomes. That's just how it works with any organization. Even in the private sector (startup vs corporation). With UBI, are they a citizen and 18+? Send check. Not much overhead there.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    I'd love to know exactly how you figure it's more efficient. Sure, it's more efficient for the bureaucrats, but for the market as a whole? If you give me $1,000 a month, I can promise you I won't just be spending it on my needs every month. Even people in massive debt don't always spend towards their needs effectively.
wufufufu 7y ago
Using a concept from software engineering, why can't they just partially roll this out by percentage or by state? Try swapping current benefits w/ equivalent UBI in a handful of states and study what happens?
mensetmanusman 7y ago
If instead of the federal government paying the Egyptian military millions of dollars, or building billion dollar buildings in Iraq, they were were giving out micro payments to citizens, I don’t see how that could be worse than our current model of spending.
gonational 7y ago
I’m confident that we can all agree that large corporations are efficient at extracting value from the economy (not to suggest that they don’t also add value). If we were to take the current system, with no changes made to the rules, and send it forward 100 years in a time machine, I’m confident we can also agree that consolidation by large corporations will have increased significantly during this period of time. If we can increase the velocity of the economy, I’m confident we can agree that this would have a similar effect as the aforementioned time machine scenario. Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy. If you’re with me this far, then you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that UBI will increase the velocity of the economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of large corporations. Has it not occurred to you that there could be reasons, other than philanthropy, that many of the proponents of UBI are millionaires/billionaires, large corporations, and both of these in their roles at economic think tanks?
- PudgePacket 7y ago
  Multiple parties can benefit from UBI. You also handwave and make a load of assumptions in each of your statements.
  - gonational 7y ago
    What are the statements I’ve made that are not A) rooted in generally accepted economic theories or B) syllogism based on the other statements? I don’t expect you’ll reply :]
    - PudgePacket 7y ago
      Of course not, you made so many statements it's not worth my time at all. Care to provide sources for all your generally accepted economic theories ?
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy. Only if you get it from the same place that provides free lunches.
Larrikin 7y ago
Everything I've read about UBI in experiments sounds great. But I've never heard anyone address the idea that when everyone is getting it, my landlord or some other rent seeker also knows this information, and simply raises my rent by however much I'm getting from the government because they know I can pay it and everyone else in the industry has done the same.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The solution to that is remove the rent seeking by introducing new supply of housing. Or regulating it like utilities.
outlace 7y ago
There is already a UBI in place for veterans who suffered one of a number of qualifying disabling conditions during as a result of military service. Veterans can receive nearly $4000/mo if they are 100% service connected. Some veterans have significant disabilities like missing limbs and others qualify for things like arthritis or tinnitus. Many (in my estimation most) of them could work but choose not to once they get this basic income.
- deleted 7y ago
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- bostonvaulter2 7y ago
  Do they lose that income if they start to work?
  - outlace 7y ago
    I don't believe so
DoreenMichele 7y ago
UBI is not going to fix our problems. You would do more good rebuilding the million SROs we've torn down in recent decades. Small, affordable residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods mostly don't exist in the US. Injecting funds won't change that fundamental fact. Most likely, passing out UBI will actually make it harder to solve underlying problems of that sort because rich people, who have zero need of UBI, will have a new excuse to ignore such problems. UBI will become a reason to say "Quit your bitching!" without having fixed anything.
carapace 7y ago
Is anyone interested in starting a member-owned "General Automation Corp" to just go ahead and UBI ourselves without waiting for politics? I'm seriously you guys. Bootstrap off some desert land, convert it into e.g. Village Homes[0] (but up to date) using Permaculture, et. al. including local carbon-neutral fuel production integrated into the ecosystem[1], lease/sell units, rinse and repeat. Alongside that, develop a kind of super-RepRap[2] to manufacture e.g. the contents of a Daiso store[3]. (BTW, no cult shit, no radical new lifestyles, just a small town built as if the last few centuries of progress actually happened: food production, power capture & storage, automation, etc... You know: Star Trek TNG sans fictional technology.) Anybody? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes [1] http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ [2] https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap [3] Not all human problems can be solved by a few ounces of plastic or metal, but those that can, can be solved at Daiso for $1.50.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  If you invent a time machine, go back to places like Taos in the 1960s, lots hippy communes that are now weird architecture AirBNBs. History repeats itself, reality always wins.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Sorry, I have no idea how your comment connects with what I wrote.
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      It’s been tried before. Lots of times. The reality of “let’s form our own utopia town/city/commune” always loses out to reality of primal human interests.
      - carapace 7y ago
        Ah, no, that's exactly what I don't want to do, more-or-less for just that reason. Just riffing... It would be a kind of vertically-integrated real estate development company, along with some manufacturing and tech/software company-ish. Essentially, it's a terraforming company and the eco-cities it makes are the product. We have the technology: Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language" et. al.; Permaculture (applied ecology if you prefer), including carbon-neutral integrated alcohol fuel production (also, tug on this thread: "New Alchemy Institute" "living machines" [1] ); Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution" for inspiration and large-scale efficiency[0]; etc... (Those are just my own "favorite hits".) The idea is both 1) sell/lease cheaply ("affordable housing") to alleviate economic pressure, and 2) provide a steady income to members to offset economic obsolescence. (I maintain that UBI makes sense only in the context of wide-spread inability for the "average person" to compete in the job market. And I think that's already happening. I mean, if I wasn't good at computers I don't know wtf I could do to make a living. I'd probably be homeless!) I don't want this hypothetical company to be political or ideological (not even Hippie ideology) just economic (to the extent that that's realistic, eh?) We can work out the politics of everything once people have a place to live and a steady "three square meals a day", and it's ecologically harmonious, which is another way to say cheap and bountiful. Frankly, I'm not qualified to run this sort of thing. I'm a recluse, with ways different than your own. But it seems to me that it would be sooooo easy, and that there are enough people and enough "free-floating" capital to make it happen. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project > It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile (1.6 km)-diameter geodesic, quarter-sphere transparent umbrella mounted high above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1,000 feet (300 m) high. The bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet (150 m) above the surrounding terrain Some more information and a couple of pictures of the model at: https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/ https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/ [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22living+machines%22&atb=v60-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22li...
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babycake 7y ago
What's to stop companies from just upping their prices to absorb the $1k given to us? We need a real UBI scheme, this policy won't solve anything.
- bostonvaulter2 7y ago
  All companies won't do this because they're looking to maximize their profits. One of the key factors that consumers look at is the price of a product, so if 3 competitors raise prices (due to UBI) and one keeps it the same or lowers their prices, in a well functioning market I would expect that competitor to start to take over more marketshare.
dublidu 7y ago
With unemployment rate at below 4%, where is the evidence that we have enough automation to warrant UBI?

170 points by bobrenjc93 7y ago

It's not UBI, it's a rolling stimulus package :) That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy. And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.

tells 7y ago
In a way very true but also subsidized by the wealthy's spending habits. To mention UBI without the accompanying VAT would not properly show how progressive this system can be with higher taxes applied to non essential goods. People concerned with it wiping out safety nets needs to understand how under equipped and under utilized they are for numerous reasons. The average benefits also average to only about $500/month. UBI is a new economic floor in which we can mobilize large swaths of the population and revitalize small towns that are falling apart. The shift in economic power will be massive and it's incredible to think about. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-may-not-know-about-us-social-safety-net https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-m... https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-people-in-poverty-are-disconnected-from-the-social-safety-net-most-of-them-are-white/2019/02/04/807516a0-2598-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  If history is any indication, the recipients are likely to become just more complacent and detached. I fail to see how people would become “mobilized” and towns revitalized when they have even less incentive to leave the house. If anything, I see UBI shifting power even more into the hands of the elites, as massive numbers of the lower classes drop out of the workforce and no longer care about anything the politicians or big businesses do, so long as the cash keeps flowing. This could very well be the intent. Take a look at any Native American reservation, or any caged animal for that matter. Hardly vibrant.

sak5sk 7y ago

Great to see tech leaders get behind UBI. Now is the time and Yang is the candidate of a lifetime. I never understood how people buy into the whole "break up the tech giants" argument. It makes no sense, just a great platitude with no real accomplishment. Who wants to use the 2nd best Twitter or Facebook? Not a single person.

nickpinkston 7y ago
Usually "breakup" is a byword for regulate. However, it's possible to see how Amazon being broken into at least one online retailer, a web services company, and a logistics provider and how that may increase competition in each of those markets. Further, even in your social example, people used Instagram before Facebook bought them and likely still would if divested, and Snap, Tik Tok and more are going strong as independents.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  Amazon needs have it's retail side split into a marketplace operator and a retailer.
ubiopinion 7y ago
I still know people who love Instagram or WhatsApp but they hate Facebook. Little do they know both apps are owned by Facebook, and that's the problem Facebook keeps acquiring their threats, their competitors that's monopoly and seriously they're dangerous. Many people still don't know YouTube is owned by Google. This is a problem!
danShumway 7y ago
I'm assuming you're asking in good faith, so I'll point out three problems with your line of thought. First, you assume that having multiple competitors is pointless if one product is the clear winner. Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now, and the reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation. They would argue that even if breaking up Twitter just resulted in 2nd-best Twitter, the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now. Second, you assume that there would be a clear "best" product. In truly competitive fields, it's often difficult to point to one product and say, "that's the best, and everyone else is settling for a worse product." Take iPhone and Android. Why does anyone use the 2nd best phone operating system? Why don't we have one OS? Because there isn't a clear 2nd best operating system. The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases. It seems obvious to me that the smartphone market is broad enough that other niches could be served better by more targeted alternatives to the two major OSes, if those alternatives were allowed to mature to the point where they became competitive. Finally, you misunderstand what the proposals about breaking up tech companies often entail. Most commonly when people talk about breaking up big-tech, I find they're talking about Warren. Warren's proposals are (roughly speaking) about separating product offerings and platforms. Her plan isn't to take Apple and force them to split up and create a second iOS. Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store. It's not about blindly making a second Apple, it's about trying to remove conflicts of interest from platform maintainers. I'm not going to say whether or not I think that plan is good. I do think it's pretty unlikely to happen even if Warren is elected. But regardless, it's a very different, much narrower plan with very different goals and implications than what you're describing.

ubiopinion 7y ago

UBI is just an excuse to do the real fix, and that's tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share. It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.

gnarbarian 7y ago
Good idea. How about a flat tax with no loopholes? Seems fair to me.
- realtalk_sp 7y ago
  What's the rationale for a flat tax over progressive? I believe that an ideal tax system should properly reflect that the value of a marginal dollar is inversely correlated with income/wealth in a nonlinear fashion. But I'm open to having my mind changed.
  - gnarbarian 7y ago
    One point is that "fairness" is highly subjective. One can perform many contortions to justify their own definition of what they perceive as "fair". Personally I like a flat tax because it drastically simplifies the tax system and removes the loop holes that wealthy people who can afford accountants use to achieve the lower effective tax rate stated in the root comment. It also deletes the tax prep Industry and a significant majority of the IRS, these Ultimately act as drag in our economy for arguably a net negative benefit.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      $10,000 of a million is worth less to the millionaire than $10 to the poor person with only a thousand to their name. A flat tax isn't fair unless every other form of expense was flat as well. Which means rent would have to be some percent of your income and the same for power, healthcare and so forth.

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keiferski 7y ago

I haven’t read all of the literature on basic income, but my (admittedly semi-educated) impression is that one potential downside is that it fosters dependence on the state and is thus not anti-fragile. I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough food to sustain a family. Or a 3D printer that can turn raw materials into clothing or shelter. In terms of cash needs, you could create a sort of minimum-wage Uber-style online mechanical Turk system that allows one to put in work and generate cash. You would theoretically get the benefits of basic income without having them be controlled by an external actor. I don’t know enough about farming, 3D printing or biology to know whether this is feasible, but it seems within the realm of possibility. Have any economists explored options like this?

pdonis 7y ago
> what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs What if, instead of yammering about UBI, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, went out and started a company to make such technologies? The way to innovate is to innovate, not to try to milk money out of the government. The whole discussion about UBI misses this basic point: to make it easier for people to make a living, you don't give them more money, you make the basic needs of life cheaper. And why doesn't that happen? Because the government keeps putting its thumb on the scale and preventing people from doing it. For example, the government subsidizes large agribusinesses instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs find cheaper ways of providing people with food. The government prints money and gives it to banks for mortgage loans to keep home prices high while rigging building codes so the only method of construction that's feasible is two by fours and drywall, instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs figure out cheaper and more durable methods of construction for homes.
- lalaland1125 7y ago
  One other important point: a cheaper cost of living is essential for UBI to be affordable. Right now most UBI proposals require around $1000 a month per person to enable people to live in a somewhat sustainable manner. Those proposals are simply unaffordable relative to our GDP and tax base. The only way we can make them work is by deceasing the cost of living so that we can decease the UBI. A UBI of $300 a month is much easier to fit in the budget.

hnbreak 7y ago

Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Do the Chinese YouTube’s have positive cash flow? I don’t even know if youtube has positive cash flow.
- rococode 7y ago
  I was curious about Youtube too, apparently around 2015 they started breaking even. I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing. https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-leader-google/ https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le... I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    There's no law of nature that data/eyeballs-based monetization (including advertising) has to remain viable everywhere that it is today. I find it entirely plausible that 10 years from now people will have to directly pay for more of the services that they use. You're already seeing this with the increased number of paywalls around publication content. I expect we'll see more subscriptions and services just shutting down if people aren't willing to pay.
  - gruez 7y ago
    > 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. Why can't they start deleting old videos?

intuitionist 7y ago

Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).

tempsy 7y ago
Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI. Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.
  - harimau777 7y ago
    I'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting). It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs. It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.

root_axis 7y ago

My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.

darawk 7y ago
Yes, prices will likely go up. However, they will not capture all of that money. And UBI will allow people to have more choice in where they live. UBI will give you the flexibility to move somewhere new and figure things out when you get there, rather than having to have a job lined up immediately. This should, at the margin, decrease the lock in effect of big cities, and maybe even cause rents to decline over time.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I'm hoping UBI exists in 10-20 years. I could take on my parents' home on that kind of salary without thinking, and just dub along as a subsistence farmer/ occasional contractor.
- deleted 7y ago
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eric_cc 7y ago
Is this an issue with UBI though? Of course the prices will go up because of supply/demand changes. And thus 12k/year won’t go as far as it does now. That’s not a bad thing though. The people who are at rock bottom still > 0. Leeches won’t be able to do nothing and exist off 12k. For most rent payers, their life will remain the same as it is today: the economy will reach a new equilibrium and their lives will be no better financially. But that’s by design- this isn’t meant to be a free ride through life.
- mcntsh 7y ago
  A $3T program that doesn't "dramatically affect" the lives of "most renters" for the better will be a hard sell. In fact, it would make the lives of the middle/lower class worse off because the tax is in the form of VAT and the removal of welfare benefits.

baron816 7y ago

Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.

tempsy 7y ago
$12K/year is hardly a free ride to a life of no work. There will be a tiny minority that somehow game it and live off that, but for the vast majority it’s a cushion and not a replacement for work at all.
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  I wish for your assessment of human nature to be accurate, but I’m quite doubtful.
  - hacknat 7y ago
    What do you even mean? The average income in this country is ~45k. If that is what he was proposing than maybe we’d have an issue, I guess, but I doubt it. Everyone is so sure that people on UBI would stop working, and there is no evidence to back it up. In the studies that have shown people who stop working it is usually caregivers, which I would argue is a positive thing.
    - bostonvaulter2 7y ago
      The median US individual income ($31,099) is a better metric to use since the average is more weighted by extremes that don't represent the "typical" experience of people. [1] According to google from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
  - grecy 7y ago
    You should look into welfare payments in Australia. It's about the easiest to get and most generous on the planet, and a small percentage of people do choose to be lazy and life off it. But the very vast majority don't.

tells 7y ago

The most exciting thing about UBI is how versatile its benefits are for human resilience. Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income. Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money. Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every community is getting a massive cash injection Worried about a president like Trump cutting your SNAP benefits again? Opt-in to UBI and never worry about your funds getting cut without the entire country getting infuriated. People rarely feel this level of freedom. I've only felt this level of security recently but I believe everyone deserves this. I was only lucky to have made it this far from the opportunities given to me by my parents and the support I had when I couldn't stop fucking up. People need to be able to take risks and have retries. Without it, you get people working jobs they hate while envying lives they'll never have.

tempsy 7y ago
Right, I think this is the most underrated consequence of UBI. I think another is the creative boom it could create. People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success. That could create a whole new class of artists that couldn’t be possible otherwise.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > "People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success." We haven't exactly seen an explosion of creative works coming from those on public assistance already. When is this hypothetical wave of creativity supposed to kick in?
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
Yes, free money magically appearing would make life easier for the individuals receiving it (at least, in the short term). No one is arguing otherwise. The concern is that it may have even greater negative effects on the economy as a whole.

ALittleLight 7y ago

Yang's proposal doesn't seem like UBI to me. A key component of UBI being the U - i.e that it is universal. However, Yang wants to pay for it, in part, by adding new taxes. In order for some people to make money, others must, on net, lose money. To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not. Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.

snidane 7y ago
I agree, but about the part about nationalization of companies. Historically it tended to produce bad outcomes. People just don't put the same effort if they don't own it. What actually works is government stepping in by producing a competitor when it sees oligopolies developing and the participating companies not innovating further but just undermining each other or colluding to undermine interests of their customers. For example in the early railroads there were tons of companies building their own railroads instead of coopearing with others to reuse. Telecommunication networks tend to get stuck similarly. That's how AT&T was created to have a single infrastructure entity and lot of competition on top of that infrastructure. Similar situation can be observed in social networks today. The business model for them is not that great unless you infect them with advertisement. Twitter struggled a lot with monetization because it feels more like a infrastructure project similar to roads or phone lines. Perhaps it is time for government to create competing social network or just pump support money to a community created one.

j8014 7y ago

I find the concept of UBI and redistribution of wealth terrible to a free society. If wealth redistribution is what the rich and common both "want", why allow the wealthy to set the rules? It seems easier to string them all up by the neck and take it all so we have fair redistribution of wealth, why half ass it?

solveit 7y ago
> It seems easier Setting aside ethical issues as you clearly don't care, it really isn't at all easy. It's not like people haven't tried.
- j8014 7y ago
  Ethics? If you agree with UBI, then ethics do not matter. Why negotiate a minority position, take it all.
  - petermcneeley 7y ago
    Your cryptic comments are confusing people. Just state you are an "American Libertarian" and not have people play 20 questions to find your non nuanced position.
unrealhoang 7y ago
If UBI still doesn’t exist when 2M drivers will be jobless because of technology then yes, what you described will
carapace 7y ago
First, FWIW: "These 14 billionaires just promised to give away more than half of their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett" https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/14-billionaires-signed-bill-gates-and-warren-buffetts-giving-pledge.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/14-billionaires-signed-bill-... Second, "eat the rich" is very different from "Please don't let me starve", eh? Third, UBI doesn't have to be Zero-Sum. "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."

kyledrake 7y ago

"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort of say billionaires are inherently evil,” he said. “I think it would be great to say, we as a society will allow trillionaires in exchange for a floor for everyone.”" The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many. UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing. Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration. Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.

tells 7y ago
this is very inflammatory and false. The VAT is not highly regressive. Money is power but poverty stricken people literally have zero money. How are gov't "programs" going to help? democrats love "programs" because it just gives them something to show off. it hardly solves any real problems. I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
- kyledrake 7y ago
  It is not inflammatory or false. VAT taxes are regressive consumption-based taxes, and poorer people disproportionately bear the costs compared to the wealthy. It's very well established among economists https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive > I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play" The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.

moralsupply 7y ago

The government would need to get money somewhere for the UBI program. It can only do so either through taxation, or by printing money, as the government is not a value-generation enterprise. If UBI gets its funding by taxation, UBI can't work economically (not to say it wouldn't be "UBI"). Even if you tax all the rich people, it won't provide enough money for the program. Besides, you can't really tax the rich, the moment you declare an aggressive taxation regime on them, they fly their money out of the country (and possibly their businesses too, which would generate poverty). If the assumption is that it would tax "everyone but the poor" then it's not universal "income", it's just another "social program" paid by the middle class. If UBI is funded by printing money, then it's a debt generation engine. The USA is already heavily indebted due to at least 100 years of irresponsible governments spending a lot more than what they made through taxes. UBI would only make matters worse, and could easily lead to a currency crash within at most a couple decades (which would wipe out retirement funds, savings, etc. therefore generating poverty and causing social unrest)

swiley 7y ago
You tax coorperations, not rich individuals. Although if you sit down and work it out I’m not sure it makes sense quite yet. UBS though probably could.
- moralsupply 7y ago
  When you tax corporations, they don't simply make less profits, they embed the tax losses in their prices and pay less to workers. You, as a consumer or employee, end up paying that tax.
  - charlesu 7y ago
    I think you're oversimplifying how companies determine prices and wages. Yes, corporate taxes are one consideration. There's also competition, regulations, distribution costs, and commodity prices. Passing along your costs directly to consumers is a great way to give up market share to a more efficient or creative competitor.

shafyy 7y ago

There are videos of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw

Unsimplified 7y ago

My problem with UBI is 1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it. 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month. I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.

AsyncAwait 7y ago
I have my own problems with UBI, but as far as 'fair work sharing', the presumption would be that the work is done 99% by machines, where you don't need to be 'fair' & the remaining 1% could be highly compensated.
- Unsimplified 7y ago
  Consider absolute numbers. Suppose monthly food expenses drop to $100. That's 2-3 hours of work for each person to eat monthly. X 330M = 1 billion hours per month. And that's just food. In practice, fair work sharing still seems critical, unless you have a better example in mind.
atq2119 7y ago
> 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month. This isn't true, since the state can always just create more money. The real limitation is in real resources and production capacity, and if a UBI was implemented by creating more money than the existing production capacity can sustain, it would likely drive up the rate of inflation. If the UBI is set to a fixed nominal value, this would eventually balance out, possibly resulting in a corresponding UBI real value that is insufficient for people to live on. (What level of real value is sustainable is an empirical question.) I agree with you that creating demand for labor is a better approach if done well. Ideally, you'd create a conceptually infinite demand for labor to ensure there's no involuntary unemployment. Of course, there's then the risk of increasing the rate of inflation via that labor demand, which you can fix by fixing the price at which the labor demand becomes infinite. That's the direction that the "employer of last resort / job guarantee" proposals go in, though those also get flack from some people for being like workfare.

sethammons 7y ago

I like the idea of freeing people to be able to quit and get a new job any time, where quitting today means a real threat of losing one's home, transportation, or ability to eat (never mind fueling the cycle of debt that keeps so many down). I think it would be a net benefit if people could tell oppressive employers to fuck off without fear. However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month. This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land. There are a few elders who would like to teach the young how to do so, but they are not interested. Nobody wants to do better and there is high resentment towards the federal government. I've seen it in other places. When you are outside the balance of exchange with someone (or some organization), resentment breeds. I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers. Economically, we would have to produce enough "extra" that a full, regular distribution of that wealth could continue to work with producers continuing to produce, and a growing collection of people who would lose all interest in contributing. We would have to have a way to deal with a dramatic rise in apathetic people. We would have to have a way to deal with producers just leaving the country. In The Expanse, Earth has a UBI like thing. The whole planet. You get subsistence living, and if you want to be a producer, you start by doing menial work for a period of time to prove you are willing to work hard. It is also sci-fi for a reason :). Again, I would love to free people from tyrannical employers and the fear and stress of not knowing what next month brings due to finances (I've lived that the majority of my life). I don't see how UBI can work.

charlesju 7y ago
I completely understand where you're coming from, but perhaps you're looking at causation vs correlation. For example, there are many places in the world without a welfare state going through similar issues. The real question is whether that community would be better or exist at all without assistance.
e40 7y ago
Any time such a huge change is introduced into a complex system, it is extremely hard to see all the unintended consequences. I like the idea of UBI, too. Taking that leap worries me, though, we might be in for a worse time because of it.

pascoej 7y ago

Yang does have an interesting idea for campaign finance reform too. 100$ a year for any citizen to spend on political campaigns. In some ways I think this is bigger than the UBI. If everybody spent this voucher it would be ~23B, almost 4x what was spent on federal races in 2016. I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust. While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)

hanniabu 7y ago
Yeah I really like that you could support what you want as it gives more control to the citizens.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  How? It does literally nothing for special interests buying politicians, it just adds MORE money into the system. No thanks. Side note... not many people here would like the never ending series of populist presidents this would bring if it did work.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Let's say lobbyists pull funding from one sector and push it into another, such as the endless funding for military pulling funding away from other sectors like education, then you as a citizen that wants to support education can decide to put your $100 towards that.
zpallin 7y ago
As you pointed out, special interests will just raise the value of a politician so the $100 disappears in value. That or buy out ads to convince people to spend on their corporate sponsored candidates rather than the ones seeking direct support from voters. Both of these already happen, so why wouldn't they happen more? Solving this issue of corruption in campaign finance requires a solution that only publicly financed campaigns can give. Make it so that voting is all that matters in deciding an elected official and sterilize campaign funding so it's not easy to corrupt.

banads 7y ago

How can a US Dollar based UBI solve the problems of automation when the Super Admins of the US Dollar are explicitly pursuing the opposite goal? According to the Federal Reserve website, 2/3 of their main goals are: 1. Seeking to maximize employment 2. Maintaining stable prices https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does-federal-reserve-seek-to-achieve-through-monetary-policy.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does... Automation and ephemeralization minimize employment and prices, but the money system seeks the opposite. Until these contradictions are reconciled, how can a US Dollar based UBI not fail?

wyxuan 7y ago
You're right that it probably will lead to inflation. The only question is how much, because the fed right now is having a hard time providing inflation into the economy. The fed just pumped 500 billion in not QE, QE in the last month; but you wouldn't have noticed based on consumer price inflation.
- banads 7y ago
  Automation should naturally lead to deflation for many goods and services
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Simple proposition, but the Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government. Perhaps it’s time that system be re-evaluated?
- banads 7y ago
  Indeed, the Federal Reserve is over 100 years old. However, I fear the Fed is such a powerful and entrenched legacy system that it is extremely unlikely for it to be politically re-evaluated unless there were some sort of catastrophic system failure.

nixpulvis 7y ago

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Welfare is a tax, and a much needed one since the alternative costs even more. I don't really see how a universal basic income (UBI) solves much of anything that other welfare programs couldn't solve more effectively. If the argument is that it's easier to just give everyone $1,000, then I think you're a lazy policymaker.

paulddraper 7y ago
Welfare programs are horribly inefficient and full of perverse incentives. But I doubt UBI is any better overall. In the U.S. native tribes have effectively had UBI for years and years, whether from government settlements, or casino windfalls (granted, sometimes with limitations on mobility...but hopefully this system would work without just giving it to urban landlords). The economies of many native tribes are notorious troubled.
- carapace 7y ago
  > many native tribes are notorious troubled Victims of genocide have additional complicating factors, eh?
Reedx 7y ago
Giving people the money directly, for them to use where it's needed in their particular case, is far more efficient than any program could ever possibly be. It's just the math and physics of it. Programs have all sorts of overhead and need to be generalized. They introduce inefficiency by default. And the larger it is, the more inefficient it becomes. That's just how it works with any organization. Even in the private sector (startup vs corporation). With UBI, are they a citizen and 18+? Send check. Not much overhead there.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  I'd love to know exactly how you figure it's more efficient. Sure, it's more efficient for the bureaucrats, but for the market as a whole? If you give me $1,000 a month, I can promise you I won't just be spending it on my needs every month. Even people in massive debt don't always spend towards their needs effectively.

wufufufu 7y ago

Using a concept from software engineering, why can't they just partially roll this out by percentage or by state? Try swapping current benefits w/ equivalent UBI in a handful of states and study what happens?

mensetmanusman 7y ago

If instead of the federal government paying the Egyptian military millions of dollars, or building billion dollar buildings in Iraq, they were were giving out micro payments to citizens, I don’t see how that could be worse than our current model of spending.

gonational 7y ago

I’m confident that we can all agree that large corporations are efficient at extracting value from the economy (not to suggest that they don’t also add value). If we were to take the current system, with no changes made to the rules, and send it forward 100 years in a time machine, I’m confident we can also agree that consolidation by large corporations will have increased significantly during this period of time. If we can increase the velocity of the economy, I’m confident we can agree that this would have a similar effect as the aforementioned time machine scenario. Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy. If you’re with me this far, then you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that UBI will increase the velocity of the economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of large corporations. Has it not occurred to you that there could be reasons, other than philanthropy, that many of the proponents of UBI are millionaires/billionaires, large corporations, and both of these in their roles at economic think tanks?

PudgePacket 7y ago
Multiple parties can benefit from UBI. You also handwave and make a load of assumptions in each of your statements.
- gonational 7y ago
  What are the statements I’ve made that are not A) rooted in generally accepted economic theories or B) syllogism based on the other statements? I don’t expect you’ll reply :]
  - PudgePacket 7y ago
    Of course not, you made so many statements it's not worth my time at all. Care to provide sources for all your generally accepted economic theories ?
paulddraper 7y ago
> Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy. Only if you get it from the same place that provides free lunches.

Larrikin 7y ago

Everything I've read about UBI in experiments sounds great. But I've never heard anyone address the idea that when everyone is getting it, my landlord or some other rent seeker also knows this information, and simply raises my rent by however much I'm getting from the government because they know I can pay it and everyone else in the industry has done the same.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
The solution to that is remove the rent seeking by introducing new supply of housing. Or regulating it like utilities.

outlace 7y ago

There is already a UBI in place for veterans who suffered one of a number of qualifying disabling conditions during as a result of military service. Veterans can receive nearly $4000/mo if they are 100% service connected. Some veterans have significant disabilities like missing limbs and others qualify for things like arthritis or tinnitus. Many (in my estimation most) of them could work but choose not to once they get this basic income.

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bostonvaulter2 7y ago
Do they lose that income if they start to work?
- outlace 7y ago
  I don't believe so

DoreenMichele 7y ago

UBI is not going to fix our problems. You would do more good rebuilding the million SROs we've torn down in recent decades. Small, affordable residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods mostly don't exist in the US. Injecting funds won't change that fundamental fact. Most likely, passing out UBI will actually make it harder to solve underlying problems of that sort because rich people, who have zero need of UBI, will have a new excuse to ignore such problems. UBI will become a reason to say "Quit your bitching!" without having fixed anything.

carapace 7y ago

Is anyone interested in starting a member-owned "General Automation Corp" to just go ahead and UBI ourselves without waiting for politics? I'm seriously you guys. Bootstrap off some desert land, convert it into e.g. Village Homes[0] (but up to date) using Permaculture, et. al. including local carbon-neutral fuel production integrated into the ecosystem[1], lease/sell units, rinse and repeat. Alongside that, develop a kind of super-RepRap[2] to manufacture e.g. the contents of a Daiso store[3]. (BTW, no cult shit, no radical new lifestyles, just a small town built as if the last few centuries of progress actually happened: food production, power capture & storage, automation, etc... You know: Star Trek TNG sans fictional technology.) Anybody? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes [1] http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/ [2] https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap [3] Not all human problems can be solved by a few ounces of plastic or metal, but those that can, can be solved at Daiso for $1.50.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
If you invent a time machine, go back to places like Taos in the 1960s, lots hippy communes that are now weird architecture AirBNBs. History repeats itself, reality always wins.
- carapace 7y ago
  Sorry, I have no idea how your comment connects with what I wrote.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    It’s been tried before. Lots of times. The reality of “let’s form our own utopia town/city/commune” always loses out to reality of primal human interests.
    - carapace 7y ago
      Ah, no, that's exactly what I don't want to do, more-or-less for just that reason. Just riffing... It would be a kind of vertically-integrated real estate development company, along with some manufacturing and tech/software company-ish. Essentially, it's a terraforming company and the eco-cities it makes are the product. We have the technology: Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language" et. al.; Permaculture (applied ecology if you prefer), including carbon-neutral integrated alcohol fuel production (also, tug on this thread: "New Alchemy Institute" "living machines" [1] ); Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution" for inspiration and large-scale efficiency[0]; etc... (Those are just my own "favorite hits".) The idea is both 1) sell/lease cheaply ("affordable housing") to alleviate economic pressure, and 2) provide a steady income to members to offset economic obsolescence. (I maintain that UBI makes sense only in the context of wide-spread inability for the "average person" to compete in the job market. And I think that's already happening. I mean, if I wasn't good at computers I don't know wtf I could do to make a living. I'd probably be homeless!) I don't want this hypothetical company to be political or ideological (not even Hippie ideology) just economic (to the extent that that's realistic, eh?) We can work out the politics of everything once people have a place to live and a steady "three square meals a day", and it's ecologically harmonious, which is another way to say cheap and bountiful. Frankly, I'm not qualified to run this sort of thing. I'm a recluse, with ways different than your own. But it seems to me that it would be sooooo easy, and that there are enough people and enough "free-floating" capital to make it happen. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project > It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile (1.6 km)-diameter geodesic, quarter-sphere transparent umbrella mounted high above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1,000 feet (300 m) high. The bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet (150 m) above the surrounding terrain Some more information and a couple of pictures of the model at: https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/ https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/ [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22living+machines%22&atb=v60-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22li...

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babycake 7y ago

What's to stop companies from just upping their prices to absorb the $1k given to us? We need a real UBI scheme, this policy won't solve anything.

bostonvaulter2 7y ago
All companies won't do this because they're looking to maximize their profits. One of the key factors that consumers look at is the price of a product, so if 3 competitors raise prices (due to UBI) and one keeps it the same or lowers their prices, in a well functioning market I would expect that competitor to start to take over more marketshare.

dublidu 7y ago

With unemployment rate at below 4%, where is the evidence that we have enough automation to warrant UBI?