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What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

• foolzcrow 7y ago
  Fact: The plan is about replacing you with robots at work so they can rake in more profits. In return you get to go on welfare rebranded as UBI. Look it up UBI is about automation AI replacing humans for profit. (see geordie rose) So your 40k job becomes 10k to 15k welfare. MegaCorps pocket the rest of your wage as reward for selling you out to UBI and AI.
  • jasonvorhe 7y ago
    Labelling opinions as fact doesn't make them facts.
  • chewz 7y ago
    Well, you also get FB, YT and legalized recreational drugs. panem et circenses [1]. Never, ever forget circenses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
    • kyuudou 7y ago
      All part of the modus operandi of the Plato's Republic crowd, IMO.
  • Kaiyou 7y ago
    That's very nice of them. If I had the means towards that end, I wouldn't hand out welfare like that. In fact, I would probably tend towards the future scenario that was painted in Terminator, only with me controlling the AI, while pretending towards humanity that the AI went out of control. More profits that way. Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live?
    • philipkglass 7y ago
      An army of Terminators can't keep you safe from retaliation. Anyone who tries to take over the world with killer robots will be fought by other people. You might be able to provoke World War III by unleashing killer robots against all the world's governments and their militaries, but you won't be able to prosper or even (probably) survive.
      • Kaiyou 7y ago
        You use the Terminators to pretend to be real people and than vote for other Terminators. You take over every country in the world without anyone noticing it even happened.
    • kyuudou 7y ago
      > Seriously, if you have that kind of power, what's the incentive to let everyone else live? Ethics and morals, maybe? Basic human empathy? I think I get where you're going with this. There are those, sociopaths and psychopaths for example, who would go to any length to get that kind of power and... what, when they have their T-3000s they're suddenly gonna have a come-to-Jesus moment? Unlikely, yeah.
      • Kaiyou 7y ago
        Ethics and morals are traits that prevent people from raising to power, which is why people in power tend to be sociopaths.
  • alipang 7y ago
    "MegaCorps" in any kind of healthy market will still compete on price, so simply stating that they will "pocket the rest" of AI-related productivity improvements is ridiculous. The more likely outcome is that prices on a whole lot of things are about to drop drastically. Of course this does nothing to help the people who are left out of a job and can no longer contribute as they are no longer cost-effective. UBI is one option to address this, at least partially. Do you have a better one? Ban AI? Do you happen to be an anti-capitalist, and your convenient solution is (big surprise) to remove capitalism as an economic system? I'm not saying the effect of more people being outcompeted from the job market will never be a problem. Perhaps parts of it will be solved with income redistribution being increased. Perhaps part of the effort will be in creating new jobs where humans can not be replaced. Some cookie cutter "anti megacorp" rhetoric ain't likely to help much.
  • deepsun 7y ago
    Well MegaCorps still need customers who can pay. Otherwise we have Great Depression again, when there was a lot of production, but public simply didn't have any money to buy it. The solution last time was to basically distribute money to poor, e.g. fund mega-projects with tax money. I feel like UBI sounds pretty much like that as well.
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      You're stranded on an uninhabited island and got a robot army fulfilling your every wish. ...why again do you need customers?
    • iso947 7y ago
      There were major benefits of things like the new deal - massive road systems, parks, etc which allowed America to prosper for the next century. Mass infrastructure investment would be great, trouble is we need educated workers now, not day labourers, so we need to combine the infrastructure building with education both formal and on the job, ideally at a part time rate, say 3 days a week
  • Jupe 7y ago
    Doesn't your 40K job become a 30K salary + 10K UBI? I never thought UBI meant communism. If you want more out of life, get a job that pays over-and-above UBI.
    • anticensor 7y ago
      No, it becomes 20k-40k salary + 10k UBI depending on your employer.
  • TrackerFF 7y ago
    Megacorps will still have competition (other megacorps), along with customers (you, I). Automation will bring down costs all over the supply chain, so margins will be thinner. But - they still need customers. No customers, no product.
  • meddlepal 7y ago
    So invest heavily in the stock market and when these megacorps start automating all the jobs ride the likely massive gains?
    • Roboprog 7y ago
      Have any recommendations on where to put the money from that payday loan so John Q Workingman can retire early?
• Pfhreak 7y ago
  I'm glad we are having this conversation about ubi, but I see a lot of proposals that are basically "just give everyone $X,000 a month and turn off other social services". My big concern with that approach is that we'd see landlords immediately bump rents, or we'd cut medical support for people (when medical bills can clearly be many multiples of ubi). But I'm very pro ubi if we can figure out how to protect the people who rely on it (maybe with some sort of rent control?), support it with other social programs like healthcare, and build some educational resources about how to effectively use it.
  • Kaiyou 7y ago
    You've pointed out why UBI makes no sense. As the saying goes, if everyone is a millionaire, nobody is. Likewise, if you give everyone $X that amount becomes the new baseline. This is also the reason why it makes no sense to fight wealth inequality. Without wealth inequality, there wouldn't be wealth, only a baseline. What UBI tries to solve isn't a bug, but a feature.
    • adambyrtek 7y ago
      Sure, but it's a very different baseline when you can afford basic needs instead of being homeless and hungry. The fact that some other people might feel "less rich" as a result shouldn't really be considered an issue.
      • peteradio 7y ago
        I think maybe OPs point is that current prices for basics are based on some sort baseline ability to pay. If you increase that baseline then whats to stop basic prices to rise leaving everyone at that same point or maybe worse since other social services would get turned off?
        • Pfhreak 7y ago
          Rent control. Keeping other social programs like food stamps. There are ways to protect these dollars. They might not be popular, but they aren't inconceivable.
• dana321 7y ago
  One method of paying for UBI isn't listed - "Printing Money" (Don't say they aren't thinking about it)
  • 1996 7y ago
    The europeans are thinking about that: I read an article where the head of the ECB explored this as an alternative to negative inflation
  • anticensor 7y ago
    That way of paying UBI conflicts their interests (pun intended). But it has an upside too: You could target exactly zero inflation in a UBI-based monetary system without adverse effects.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    Printed money just gets given to banks (for free, effectively), I don't see the issue with just giving it to somebody else instead.
• seibelj 7y ago
  Is this AI revolution ever going to happen? Siri and Alexa still hear the wrong thing half the time, even when I speak and enunciate very clearly. What jobs have been eliminated by this revolution that I’ve been hearing about for the past decade? The self driving cars are not picking me up and not delivering my packages. I have a better solution than airdropping everyone welfare money so we can laze around all day - make it easier to start businesses. It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. It’s extremely difficult for me to give massages, cut hair, sell retail products in a physical location, and innumerable useful services that require licenses, bureaucracy, tax forms, inspectors, and on and on. Even worse is that whatever the poor saves is immediately lost to inflation - education, healthcare, housing, and literal inflation to the fed printing money. Rather than bandaid government-created problems with more government and a disincentive to create value for society, I wish we would let people other than CS majors become entrepreneurs organically.
  • ilammy 7y ago
    > It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users. That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares. If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box. While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.
    • endtime 7y ago
      > people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. Oh, the humanity! > And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products Airbnb, Uber, etc. run into safety issues too. Other big tech companies can have privacy issues, and even data integrity issues. I'd much rather find a new barber than have Google or Facebook accidentally delete my account.
• kingkawn 7y ago
  Other social services should not be cut to pay for ubi
• eanzenberg 7y ago
  Its all nice and hand holdy to think about utopias but utopias don’t have the best track record for the human race
• RivieraKid 7y ago
  The prevailing view seems to be: robots will take our jobs, therefore we will need UBI, which allows people to live without work. The way I see it, the main problem that UBI is solving is inequality, it's a rich to poor transfer. Excessive inequality is bad because the aggregate utility goes down (rich people don't gain much from an additional dollar, so it's more effectively used by a poor person). Transfering cash directly is the most efficient way of decreasing inequality, so UBI is the right approach. At this time, the amount of UBI should be below what allows a comfortable life, because it would lead to a feedback loop in which people would be increasingly demotivated to work. And what about robots? There is a danger that automation will further exacerbate income inequality, so redistribution is a natural response, because it would increase the effective wages of low income jobs. It seems unlikely that robots will literally take our jobs, you can probably always be someone's slave (not literally) for $5 / hour.
  • nightski 7y ago
    I find it hard to believe that it would be effective at reducing inequality. It would make the lives of the poor better for sure, but it will not reduce inequality. When Jeff Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a day as it did this past Friday, giving the poor enough money to purchase food and bare essentials isn't going to make much of a dent in their net worth. I'm not saying it won't help them out, just that it really won't tip the scales as far as inequality is concerned. It's a more fundamental issue with how the current state of capitalism is structured in the U.S.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      In what way will the direct transfer of money from people who have more to people who have less not be effective at reducing economic inequality?
      • nightski 7y ago
        Because of how they utilize that money. The poor will spend it, because they need to. The rich invest their money since they do not need it all. Those investments are continuing to grow. Even if you transfer some of that money to the poor, they are spending it where? At Amazon etc...
• ZhuanXia 7y ago
  If automation will truly do all jobs, then by definition we have human-level AI. As labour supply enormously limits economic growth, we would have economic growth that is unimaginably large in this scenario. Imagine how quickly a startup could scale if they could clone their best engineer. Now imagine that applied to the economy as a whole. We would get economic doubling times on the order of months. If we truly get automation as flexible as any human, economic growth would be truly insane. Even mild redistribution would be effective in such a scenerio. Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs. But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.
  • dpflan 7y ago
    I think a point to consider is that for jobs for "tasks only humans can do", the precise job/opportunity for employment may not exist, but I agree that some opportunity will be created that utilizes that human skill that hasn't been displaced yet. This lag between human-replaced and human-finds-job could be problematic to the structure of society (also, consider the current human-job-search). A UBI here could be a shim (also, government welfare/unemployment support) to help support society during the lag - a buffer against the unknown which can help with the necessities (imagine having to find a job and deal with the prospect or being homeless because your were replaced and couldn't pay rent, that will exacerbate the problem.)
  • mLuby 7y ago
    The number of human jobs will shrink over time as the machines approach human intelligence. Fewer jobs with more people seeking them will drive wages down. So the last gasp of human labor will look like a few excessively educated, qualified and well-connected people competing fiercely for the few remaining low-paying (but still paying!) jobs. The rest live on government benefits or rely on the charity of the trillionaires. Those with pre-existing capital use it on automated businesses to multiply their fortunes. (And I bet they'll also automate personal security, a necessity when a trillionaire can still be killed by any of the other 10 billion humans. That's how you get private armies.)
• naveen99 7y ago
  Imagine a mandatory allowance for your kids... like you are required to feed them and cloth them. Add a requirement to give them some cash too... otherwise the state takes them away for negligence. (Not actually suggesting we do this..., just a shower thought).
  • iso947 7y ago
    We have that in the uk - £20 a week for the first child, £13 each for the rest You are required to feed clothe them and deliver them to school. If you don’t do that you’ll get social services on your back very quickly and eventually they’d be taken into care.
• austincheney 7y ago
  That article isn’t about UBI in much the same way that capitalism isn’t about money. Capitalism is primarily about obtaining advantage and money is one measure among many. The supposed goals of capitalism are great: competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others. The problem is that those are goals they teach school children. They aren’t the primary goal that actually matters in practice. If capitalism could be refocused to these more ideal goals it would be better, perhaps more utopian. The difference is that the primary goal is highly exclusive while the ideal goals are highly inclusive.
  • Treegarden 7y ago
    Im not sure I agree. These things are relative, and I would argue that "Capitalism" is an environment that is beneficial to "competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others" relative to other things. Im not sure about what the "thing" is. Rule system? Laws? Societal norms? But I hope you get the idea. Things are obviously not universally perfect, but what are they in relation to other comparable things? Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade? Some argue that capitalism is more specifically about gaining rent (money) through capital alone, and they criticize that this is undeserved and to the cost of others. But in my view, such criticism ignores risk of loss and potential long term changes.
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      The University of Chicago propagandized about free markets, but we see what was really going on in the modern economy: Cartels and Monopolies. Everywhere. Almost all sectors are down to a 1-4 dominant companies that simply entrench themselves with regulatory protections and rent seek for revenue generation. Even seemingly pure free market commodity markets like frozen concentrated orange juice have shadow cartels like ADM and Cargill, and billions of government assistance and price manipulation.
    • kyuudou 7y ago
      >Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade? The core concept of capitalism, multiple individuals pooling their financial resources together for a unified purpose, seems quite logical and noble to me and certainly not inherently evil in and of itself. I think the real problem that anti-capitalists (who I find often do not understand even what money is and where it comes from) have is that they conflate the problems resulting from corporate personhood with relatively free-market capitalism. The concepts of private property ownership, the rule of and due process of law and habeas corpus are dramatic improvements overall in the human condition and are part of the core that makes the US in particular and as well as other "Western" countries the enviable result of such concepts. I'm of the opinion that corporate personhood is, along with money printing outside of the scrutiny of the general populace and guided by multinational origins, an insidious "backdoor" that overrides the freedoms that result from those concepts. I am not an economics law or political science professor or anything remotely close to that, though. I could be barking up the wrong trees but giving abstract concepts like corporations the same rights as humans seems like it screws up so many things - take political election financing as one of many examples. This is a really great discussion thread, though.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  I think the idea is that with automation and capital concentration, we need a model where the masses can be like modern medieval serfs. Basic needs are taken care of, and the ultra rich get to accumulate their wealth.
• crdrost 7y ago
  Oh goodness, this thing has only been up for 40 minutes and it's already got 20 comments... I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal. In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory. If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it. But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income. One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.
  • iso947 7y ago
    Tax in the Uk pays no attention to your marriage or other domestic situation* A house with a £55k earner and a £5k earner will pay more in tax than a house with two £30k earners (about £2400 a year more, even without student loan repayments) *(There is an odd £200 tax break for people on lower tax brackets who can apply for a transfer from one person to another, but I think it’s going away)
  • PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    I do not see how a flat tax is any more or less agnostic about family structure. Unless by "flat tax" all you mean "no deductions/credits for particular aspects of family life", which is not even close to what is usually meant by a "flat tax". "Flat tax" generally means that any income above whatever the standard deduction is (even if that is zero) is taxed at the same rate. That removes progressivity from the tax, which in turns is a reflection of the fundamental observation about the marginal value of income - the notion that an extra $1000 to someone who earns $20k a year means something very different than an extra $1000 does to someone who makes $20M a year. So if you're just arguing for "let's stop using the tax code to promote and inhibit certain kinds of behavior", then you should probably say that. If you're actually arguing for a conventional "flat tax", then I don't see what that has to with either UBI or "family structure".
• Anka33 7y ago
  Communism
• screye 7y ago
  I don't see how UBI will be any better than food-stamp-esque social welfare. If a person is poor enough to need UBI, then their major concerns will be housing, food, education and medicare. All 4 of these are taken care off (to varying degrees) by social welfare structures in place in various western economies. I do not see why UBI would be a better alternative to instead directing funding towards welfare programs for the above 4 amenities instead ? I dislike UBI, because it pretends the problems are not of total free-market capitalism's own making. UBI won't solve the problem by addressing the symptom. Centralized regulation and collective bargaining instead address the problem head on. Thus, I find them to be better solutions.
• aklemm 7y ago
  I like to think of it as a dividend paid out in proportion to our collective success in terms of productivity/efficiency.
• imtringued 7y ago
  Align incentives. Trickle down economics basically means that the more unequal society is the better society is off. This is trivial to prove wrong. When a business invests in automation workers lose their job while corporate profits soar. The success of a company isn't tied to how well it treats its employees. If one could reverse this situation and somehow make workers look forward to losing their jobs only then can we truly say that increasing inequality makes everyone better off. UBI is one way of achieving that. As a country's GDP grows so does its UBI.
• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I simply don’t think UBI can survive long term even if it ever gets introduced. The same people who advocate for tax cuts now will also be advocating against UBI and the “lazy parasites” the “job creators” have to feed. People are already complaining about welfare recipients and in the eyes of the people who work full time people who live on UBI will be exactly the same. Unless we totally restructure society this won’t work long term. Also all proposals I have seen are way too low. They will create slums where people will barely survive. How about doing some pragmatic stuff like universal health care and increasing the supply of low cost housing dramatically? They are pretty much prerequisites for UBI. If we can’t pull that off forget UBI.
  • paulgb 7y ago
    > [...] increasing the supply of low cost housing dramatically? They are pretty much prerequisites for UBI. Yes, I'm sort of surprised that fixing housing costs is not the first priority of people who want UBI ASAP. As I see it, if you don't start adding supply to the housing market quickly, a UBI would actually become a regressive policy where a tax on consumption (VAT) is effectively transferred to land owners. On the intended effect of reducing inequality, it might be counterproductive.
    • falcolas 7y ago
      Supply exists. Surplus exists. It’s just reserved for the wealthy, since homebuilders can make more profit off one luxury home than a hundred affordable homes, even if they have to leave the luxury home vacant for years before finding a buyer.
      • paulgb 7y ago
        Suddenly having an extra $1k/month isn't going to bump many people into the bracket where the can suddenly afford the luxury housing, though. It goes back to the housing supply needing to be fixed, UBI itself does not fix it.
    • Ididntdothis 7y ago
      “a UBI would actually become a regressive policy where a tax on consumption (VAT) is effectively transferred to land owners.” Since UBI is mainly pushed by wealthy people I wouldn’t be surprised if this was intended.
• knowtheory 7y ago
  It's very strange to call a proposal (negative income tax) made by economists as orthodox and central to 20th century conservative politics as Milton Freedman as _utopian_. But even beyond the aspirations of a UBI/negative income tax, the real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all. Will UBI be counted as income? How will this interact with other programs such as SNAP, healthcare subsidies, HUD housing subsidies, or any number of state operated programs? Will they be mutually exclusive? Will existing policies or laws need to be modified in order to accommodate such a proposal?
  • akvadrako 7y ago
    > real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all. They do talk about this, you just haven't been listening. Yang proposes a voluntary switch between needs-based welfare and UBI combined with a national VAT. https://ubicalculator.com/ https://ubicalculator.com/ provides a good amount of detail about how various UBI plans will be funded.
• pjc50 7y ago
  To me, it's the other way up: without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income. Usually not direct starvation, but exposure-related due to homelessness, or issues such as not being able to afford insulin. There are basically three kinds of response to this: a) they deserve it, all of them b) it's sad, but it's not our problem c) this is not acceptable and something should be done about it by the state People who believe (a) and (b) are not going to support UBI. Once people accept (c), only then can we start talking about how to deal with it, and the disadvantages and distortions of the current means-tested system. Liberating the system from means-testing means completely giving up on (a) and accepting that trying to sort the poor into deserving and undeserving is both intractable and hostile to human dignity. But it's a very long way to get there.
  • lixtra 7y ago
    > without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income If workers spend a few days per year to pay for your ubi that takes away that time of their life. If they spend 1% of their life working for ubi it’s 1% of workers life lost. That’s asking quite a lot.
    • brockmuellers 7y ago
      One could instead think of social programs, such as UBI, as insurance. People gladly pay >1% of income for insurance. I believe that nearly everyone has the potential to end up in the financial dumps (no one is above drug addiction, serious health problems, mental disorders, lawsuits etc). If a worker ends up there, they'll be glad to have the "insurance coverage" of UBI.
      • lixtra 7y ago
        If that is so, why don’t you form an ubi society, whose members pay an ubi for everyone that wants to join (and net pay). According to you it won’t be difficult to find people that are glad to join. To the downvoters of my initial comment: I don’t want people to die on the street. But I doubt ubi is an adequate cure either.
• k__ 7y ago
  We need UBI with good education. I don't think robots will steal all jobs, but people will have to do new types of jobs. If we can't give them a save space to learn these new jobs we are doomed in the long run.
• mwkaufma 7y ago
  The "why not UBI" section misses the most salient critique: what will landlords do when they learn all their tenants have an extra 2k in the pocket a month?
  • sornaensis 7y ago
    Despair, as people are now able to move freely to areas with cheaper land values and buy houses for themselves instead of remaining rent slaves.
• Proven 7y ago
  > UBI Alternatives He forgot "do nothing". > Rather, we need a fitting policy framework to guide utopian energy back into mainstream economic thought. It looks like certain leftists are looking for a way to create a collapse of (what's left of) free markets so that the State can completely take over.
• CRUDite 7y ago
  There is considerable reportage of food stamp usage on for e.g sugar soda based drinks, and whether even restrictions on usage such that vegetables should be purchased and soda banned to inhibit diabetes. Inference being ' its our money and 'they' dont know whats good for them'. Ubi would be distributed as some credit ( not 'money' ) , and in an era where everything is tracked, its usage and your monitoring by the 'state' (or whatever apparatus is used) does not paint a pretty picture of utopian freedom. It may also be an exercise in converting money to a digital format to enable negative rates and forced expenditure. The poorest will likely not resist such a change, it will seem a bargain. Cash would abolished for all and 'banks' and 'bankers' would be permanently entrenched. Certainly automation will potentially free up some labor, and the currently underway automation of thought processes will take out some (or all) middle class roles. Until there is some sort of direct democratic methodology i would not trust any of these utopian policy makers. A future where you own nothing, and timeshare a place of living, transport etc strikes me as one with zero social mobility and is a prime candidate for corruption. Its a place you need the stainless steel rat to visit and disrupt. Otoh i guess i could be wrong and it could be just super.
• platz 7y ago
  UBI is fine as a technical tool. But it is a political disaster. It creates a fundamental divide in society. Are you tired of hearing about folks receiving undeserved 'handouts' for things like food stamps today? UBI would supercharge that and cement it as a fundamental understanding of ones status in society
• patja 7y ago
  I think this misses one of the social benefits of UBI, or maybe glosses over it in the umbrella of "addressing poverty and income inequality", which is that it gives people on the margin the safety net to reboot their career/job into something more productive rather than destructive behavior they might otherwise fall into. I got this insight from the end chapters of the book "Ghettoside", where the author describes US social security payments to those who are "disabled" as the closest the US has today to a non-universal basic income. Coal miners who are no longer able to work because the coal mine shut down and they have no other skills get this "disability" income, and in Ghettoside the author describes former gang members also qualifying under the rationale that they are unsuited to the formal workforce and are therefore "disabled" as well. But what it can serve to do is break the cycle of criminal behavior: when the former drug dealer gets out of jail, absent other opportunities or a safety net source of funding to cover life's basics, they quickly fall into the path of least resistance and return to their criminal behavior. The social security disability payments give them another option to turn things around. Now, if they transform themselves into a legal entrepreneur or productive employee, they sure don't seem disabled any longer, which is part of the problem with this being a non-universal BI. It is akin to the downsides of a negative income tax: it gives only to some, and when you do that you have opportunities to abuse the system, and you have more process costs/friction and barriers to entry which keep some who should get it from getting it. Social security disability is an abused program, with attorneys advertising their ability to get you qualified, which is the irksome aspect of this being a non-universal basic income: it is only available to the savvy or those willing to engage an unscrupulous attorney to qualify. So it is a flawed comparison to UBI, but I think the social benefits described in Ghettoside deserve more attention.
  • foxyv 7y ago
    A common way to seek social security money is to get a bogus diagnosis of autism for your children. This makes life a living hell for people with children that actually have autism and depend on SSA to allow them to act as caretakers. I think the current system in the US is designed to degrade and abuse people for being poor. People who depend on welfare and disability payments are constantly treated with suspicion as grifters and fraudsters because so many others actually are. They spend most of their time fighting with the government to keep their benefits while having little to no hope of replacing them. A UBI would allow them to go out and get a job without being afraid they will just have their other benefits cut. There is no means testing or degrading requirements to "Prove" you or your dependent is disabled. The government has no reason to investigate you or pry into your personal life.
• gumby 7y ago
  Absurdly so many supposedly “capitalistic” essays on this topic misunderstand macroeconomics. At the macro level money functions more as a signalling mechanism than anything else (which is why there is such a struggle to match the money supply to aggregate “size of the economy”). UBI allows otherwise non-participants to signal demand for t-shirts vs phones. At The micro level sure, money has other roles like reservoir of wealth, but as the marginal cost of production drops precipitously “wealth” becomes less and less useful.
• Shivetya 7y ago
  The point? Theoretically provided a floor upon which you cannot fall below but one from which you can grow up from. However, there are so many caveats that it requires compromise both on part of those who wish to create such a system and those who wish to participate in such a system. It requires changing society in such that acceptance of a minimal life style is normal and not something to rebel against. It will require acknowledging that this minimal lifestyle may not be in a location you truly desire but it will never be in a location you cannot survive. No UBI based society will survive long as purveyors of jealously and envy prey on it. This pretty much tanks the idea as long as current political methods are employed which extort both to gain power and authority over others. Look how much political effort is expended in making people dislike others simply for what they have. Worse is the idea insinuated that many did not get what they have by fair means. All this will doom any society trying to move to UBI because there cannot be any floor that would be acceptable. The complex problem is that in such a large population base the numbers of people who will seek to take advantage of it can outstrip those who want to improve upon it. This is exaggerated as many succumb to this thinking because of the near constant bombardment of envy pushed by those with political aims.
• deleted 7y ago
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• fulafel 7y ago
  This pits UBI on a weird utopian pedestal whereas it's just mostly a normal income transfer among others, like most western countries already have many of. The experiments so far have been encouraging but not dramatic.
• ww520 7y ago
  Currently new money is injected into the economy via the banks. The hope is that banks lend out the money to create new jobs. But that route is increasingly difficult because more money goes into assets to inflate them instead of creating jobs and services. UBI is another way to inject money into the system, giving it to the people who would most likely spend it, creating demand and this spurring the economy.
  • mindslight 7y ago
    Exactly! I do agree that UBI is a step up from only giving handouts to the financial industry. However, they're both from the same vein of continually creating new money to sustain ever-growing price inflation. A policy which is utterly nonsensical in the face of rapid technological progress where most prices should be continually trending downwards like we see for computing technology itself. Insistence on continual inflation is precisely what has created the current rent treadmill most everybody is on, via only being able to pay interest-rent on skyrocketing assets. A real alternative would be to simply stop printing all that money in the first place, let interest rates actually rise, curtail much of this speculative waste-investment (eg the VC's paying to put electric scooters in rivers), and let workers actually get ahead by saving and not having their wages erode. Ideally workers could save up enough to demand lower working hours, but inflationism has gone on for so long its disastrous results need to be addressed directly - eg redefine "full time" employment to be 25 hours a week, with overtime after that (it should have been directly halved to 20 after dual-income households became the norm). Of course this itself would do nothing immediate to help the poorest members of society. Some balanced-budget UBI would still certainly help them, and should not be ruled out. But we need to untangle the problems of the poor (which can be solved by direct help), with the problems of the working class (who actually have income, but it's being vacuumed up by rent-seekers).
• akvadrako 7y ago
  There are several points of UBI according to me: 1) It simplifies the social support system and makes it more market oriented. Maybe it doesn't eliminate needs-based support totally, but that's a good goal. Need-based support creates bad incentives because it encourages people to be needy. 2) It gives people freedom to take risks and pursue what they find important. Right now many people do pointless work; sometimes this is even supported by society. All work should be meaningful, otherwise it shouldn't be done. 3) Personally, I would like to spend my time developing open-source software. That isn't sustainable without a UBI. UBI could fix the open-source funding model.
  • danaris 7y ago
    > Need-based support creates bad incentives because it encourages people to be needy. This needs some unpacking, I think. Though there is a way in which this is true, it's not the way that most right-wing pundits would have us all believe. The commonly-sold myth of welfare is that there are people for whom welfare (or whatever other "needs-based support") is something they desire, so they kick back and don't try to improve themselves, so that they stay needy—essentially, they deliberately become moochers leeching off the system. The research I've seen indicates that if people like that exist, they are a rounding error on the books. What's much, much more common is people who desperately need their support being forced to avoid bettering themselves, lest they fall into the hole between "the government admits that you need this" and "you can actually provide for yourself." (One particular example I've heard of is a disability system where owning more than $2000 in assets of any kind results in you getting kicked out of the system permanently.) Now, what's also much more common is people who genuinely need the support being unable to get together the wherewithal to prove that they do need it. (For instance, a form must be submitted in person, or an in-person interview is required, but the person doesn't own a car, or the disability they're trying to prove made them unable to drive, or the office that they have to get to is only open during the hours they work and missing a shift will get them fired...) Needs-based support is bad, and we need to move away from it as much as possible to universal support, but it's not really because of malicious people preying on the system.
• exabrial 7y ago
  Forced UBI is theft. You have no right to demand the services of another person.
  • exabrial 7y ago
    Nothing that requires the labors of others is a basic human right.
• ksec 7y ago
  Let us forget about whether UBI or Negative Income Tax works or not. Let's just say we will implement it by 2025. Who is to decide the amount of that? How will it be decided when living cost is greatly ( or literally ) dependent on property pricing? Hence different location will have different living cost. Food, as in raw material assuming you cook yourself which is the cheapest option, could varies from state or even countries, but even if there is a 50% difference between the same items, the total amount spent on food will still be minimal. If you are allowed $4 per day and a 50% increase is only $2 increase, or $60 per month difference. Where as housing prices, rent will differ. Does UBI assumes I am going to live in remotely in small village? I dont have to live in a Citi, but I need somewhere to live while having the opportunities to find a job. And the future is heading towards megacities. Basically what I am suggesting is, it is sort of pointless to discuss UBI or basic income guarantee without discussing housing. Which is not only the biggest expenses for living, but also the biggest asset class in our economy, and also the biggest problem. I dont have an answer to those questions, but it just seems every time people discuss UBI or NIT ( Negative Income Tax ) or other BIG ( basic income guarantee ), we tends to ignore housing, or suggest hosting is not what BIG is hoping to solve. That is on the assumption with BIG people could basically live with sufficient food and water without dying if they are without jobs.
  • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    Who is to decide the amount of that? Presumably the same people who decide what your taxes are right now. You are right about housing though.
  • aqi 7y ago
    The US doesn't have a shortage of land or housing. Rather, the concentration of jobs in big cities induces localized shortages. UBI would actually make it feasible to move to areas with lower living costs, decentralizing demand for housing and pushing rent down in big cities while stimulating the economies of less densely-populated regions.
  • Beached 7y ago
    I know this is a late reply, but you ask a lot of questions lots of people ask. And since im passionate about the subject...: Q: Who is to decide the amount of that? There are two main aspects to this. A: The goal is to eliminate or at least severly reduce the number of individuals living in poverty, or a basic needs package of sorts (emphasis on basic needs). So the povertly line is usually used as a guide. The first prevailing thought here is to peg it to the povertly line, which is already calculated annually by HHS. The second is to have a fixed rate that roughly equals the povertly line, but to periodically reassess it to bring it back up to par, sort of how we handle social security rates / minimum wage, etc. lastly, there is an equal distrobution of revenue. 2019 UBI tax generates 2.5T in revenue? the 250m adults get 10k in 2020. I personally prefer the pegging to the poverty line. HHS sets the poverty line, and therefore the rate yearly, IRS dishes out the checks monthly. But thats just my opinion. Q: How will it be decided when living cost is greatly ( or literally ) dependent on property pricing? Hence different location will have different living cost. Food, as in raw material assuming you cook yourself which is the cheapest option, could varies from state or even countries, but even if there is a 50% difference between the same items, the total amount spent on food will still be minimal. If you are allowed $4 per day and a 50% increase is only $2 increase, or $60 per month difference. A: The intent is not to completely replace your needs, so this concern is not usually a factor taken into consideration when calculating a UBI. Your assumption that UBI would be more valuable or less valuable depending on where you live is correct, however is not a concern as the UBI should theoretcially be able to allow you to live _at_ the poverty line somewhere in the country, and therefore the choice to continue to live in poverty realative to your location is _theoretically_ a choice to continue your state. A second answer to this is that states, and cities can adjust the UBI. A federal UBi is set to the federal poverty line, states can opt to charge an additional tax, and suppliment federal UBI with the tax revenue to only members of the states. Same for cities. So someone living in high plains of Wyominig may only receive the federal UBI, someone in LA could be receiving 3, Federal, Cali, and LA ubi's. Q: Where as housing prices, rent will differ. Does UBI assumes I am going to live in remotely in small village? I dont have to live in a Citi, but I need somewhere to live while having the opportunities to find a job. And the future is heading towards megacities. A: Assuming we live in the Federal Only UBI, the assumption is that your day to day will not change. If you currently live and work in the city, you will continue to. You may see some modest inflation in items like rent, however, you should be no _worse off_ than you currently are, but hopfully better off. UBI's goal is not to make it so no one ever has to work. That would be detrimental to society as we know it. The goal is to reduce the number of individuals living in poverty. So, UBI should _allow_ individuals who are forced into cities to leave, since many people follow the jobs as it were, those individuals that are content to live in BFE are welcome to, without the pressure of work. It should also allow individuals to reduce hours / be a single income family. Many parents would like to stay at home with the kids, but are unable to do so, or at least for a period of time. UBI will help reduce the income pressures we face today. But once again, COL in the city is not usually considered in factoring the UBI. If you live in a city, and you receive a UBI, there would likely be very little expectations of change for you. The individuals who it is suppsoed to help (homeless) should see a huge gain. They could pay for food, theoretically afford a buss ticket to a new town outside of the city center since they no longer need to beg, and get cheap rent to get their feet under them. In a year or two, they could choose relocate back to the cities with a career if they so choose, etc. If we assume a local UBI to supliment the federal UBI, it is possible that you could quit working for an income and keep your current situation. But then agian, there would be less tax revenu to pay for the local UBI, which would mean Statement: Basically what I am suggesting is, it is sort of pointless to discuss UBI or basic income guarantee without discussing housing. Which is not only the biggest expenses for living, but also the biggest asset class in our economy, and also the biggest problem. Statement: I dont have an answer to those questions, but it just seems every time people discuss UBI or NIT ( Negative Income Tax ) or other BIG ( basic income guarantee ), we tends to ignore housing, or suggest hosting is not what BIG is hoping to solve. That is on the assumption with BIG people could basically live with sufficient food and water without dying if they are without jobs. Comment: Housing costs are a huge part of the discussion, and are frquently discussed in the UBI circles. It is not ignored, however not the primary driver, and often not addressed in commentaries or summaries of the hugely complex subject. UBI is a wellfare program, full stop. Just as most of our wellfare programs are not designed to be an income replacement, but rather a suppliment, UBI is the same thing. For those of us who currently live in a high COL area, and shoose to do so, we will see very little difference in our day to day. Our bills will mostly stay the same, our jobs the same, and our expenses the same. We can expect that local price inflation, especially in the rent area, will most likely erase any gains we see from UBI. And that is OK, as we are not the ones UBI is implimented for. UBI is for the homeless, the overworked, and those who teeter at the povertly line. Its goal is to prevent a household from spiraling into a hole they cannot ever climb out of if they lose a job for a month. Like other wealfare programs, individuals may choose to use it as their sole means. There are housholds that use foodstamps as their sole source to purchase food with, or use the housing suppliments as their full rent checks. While the programs are not designed to be full replacements for these, some people make it work that way, and thats fine (depending on who you ask). UBI is simply a proposal to replace the many different and complicated and sometime unreliable wellfare programs with a single universal one. Some people may find a way to make UBI be their sole income source, and i look forward to seeing the creative things frugality will impliment. However for the overwhelming vast majority of us, nothing much will change. UBI should allow someone more mobility in the job market, should allow those in poverty a little more breathing room, should reduce the risk of starting your own business, could allow a household to leave the city if you wish since jobs dont keep them there. But for those of us living in a city apartment, (a little over half the country) we will see an additional ~$1k in our checking account each month, and probably an additional $500-$750/m in localized inflation (mostly in rents).
• ilaksh 7y ago
  There is a small chance that someone viewing the comments won't be aware that a presidential candidate named Yang is running on UBI. Please consider not burying my comment.
  • Roboprog 7y ago
    I assume the Yang Gang is downvoting the comments against UBI Yes, this is article is very politically timed given the upcoming primaries.
• Simulacra 7y ago
  I always thought it was about votes at Election time.
• christiansakai 7y ago
  I think the scariest part of UBI for me is, that it attempts to have an universal solution that’s acceptable for everyone regardless of social status, productivity, freeloader tendencies, etc and the fact that this is a Pandora’s Box. We don’t know what we are going to get, and we can’t reverse it once it is out.
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  There is a guiding Utopian goal of modern economics: a utopia for the rich. Unfortunately, a utopia for the rich involves slave labor, inequal enforcement of law, and large class differences and privileges. A true Utopia is very democratic to the point of communism. Then came Communism, and the rich and powerful said "no thanks" and then usurped the civilization struggle of the cold war to undermine all socialist movements from the New Deal/Great Depression and value the rich and powerful above all. Anyway, it's funny because the point of UBI to me is pretty obvious in our highly hockey-sticked wealth distribution. Fundamentally: don't let people starve or go homeless, let them get reasonable health care, and that will trigger enough GDP goods/services exchange that the economic impact shouldn't actually be that negative. Although globally this is just sheltering Americans from the economic class they are all headed toward, the same economic class that the Chinese factory worker is: disposable worker bee, and constructing an intermediate global class for first world citizens, but it's kind of been like that informally for decades now. The difference is the free trade economists can't keep saying with a straight face that free trade will be good for American workers as their jobs disappear, they retreat to opioids and suicide, and the rest of the global workforce get a couple cents an hour raise. Well, at least the rest of the world has universal healthcare.
• dchyrdvh 7y ago
  It's to prevent armed riots when millions of people have no means to exist. It's definitely not to empower people to let them take more risk, start a business or anything like that. For this reason, UBI will be just enough to pay for cheapest food and cheapest housing. And if someone dares to take risks, start a business or just work, that someone will be stripped from UBI, only to prevent such activity. In the era of automation and AI, the rich don't need these millions of hyper active men who have a lot of spare time, and since they can't just eliminate them, they'll create a system in which any activity is discouraged. Call me cynical, but I'll be really surprised if I happen to be wrong.
• nojvek 7y ago
  Rather than UBI, I think UBS (Universal Basic Services) is of far more significance. They’re not mutually exclusive. The idea that you can give $X to everyone solves a lot of problem breaks down when the basic necessities are owned by capitalistic oligarchical corporations that resort to rent extortion. Like US healthcare will suck in all the UBI money. It’s optimized to serve healthcare at the highest cost it can get away with. Same with rents in most part of big cities. No new construction means money is sucked by the landlords who get ever wealthier. The idea of universal basic services is that you can get access to most basic necessities within a reasonable capped price. Like electricity, water, cell internet connection, trash collection, groceries, transport, healthcare, education, basic housing etc. So if the govt hands out $X00/month to every citizen, one can be guaranteed to receive the basics of their choice per their lifestyle. As in money by itself doesn’t solve the problem, what you can buy with money solves the actual problems.
• GoToRO 7y ago
  UBI is a must as long as printing your own money is illegal. I mean having your own currency. If you are forced to participate in an unique economy, then that economy is responsible to give everybody a job and an income. If there are not enough jobs, then you just have the income anyway.
• foxyv 7y ago
  My only objection to UBI is that it would become a political bone that would be endlessly chewed on by politicians. Cutting UBI would be akin to cutting SSA or Alaska Permanent Fund payouts right now. IE: Political Suicide. I would like to see some objective standard on which the UBI would be set. Similar to how the Fed sets interest rates.
• Unsimplified 7y ago
  Which is better? Basic income or guaranteed jobs? Are we ok if Alex works 40hrs/wk for 50K/yr total income while Brett and his girlfriend work 0 for 30K/yr? If robots do actually everything prices are zero. No need for BI or GJ.