6 ms·

any reason or evidence for why you think it doesn't work?

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Yeah, lots of reasons and lots of what I believe is evidence, but nothing most people think makes sense. The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat." This was also basically what communism was supposed to be and that went spectacularly badly. We do have a few places where people get their share of a local natural resource. Both Alaska and at least one Middle Eastern country give all residents a check from their oil wealth. But it's tied to something in specific: Oil. So we have a good idea of how to make adjustments to the payout and under what conditions it would end. It isn't a promise of "forever." Historically, we had nuclear families with one primary breadwinner and benefits for others through that person. That's largely dying out for various reasons. We need a new system that allows for some people to work (for pay) and some to not and more or less everyone to get access to housing, health care, etc. We mostly aren't talking about that. UBI sounds like a rich persons fantasy of hush money. "We'll just cut a check and the problem will go away." Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea. Maybe some kind of expanded earned income credit would make sense. In the US, we would benefit tremendously from fixing our health care system. But I think just passing out money/resources to "everyone" has a long history of failing every time it has been tried in some fashion. It actively undermines a lot of social contracts that are the very basis for civilized life and replaces it with "You and all your friends just won the lottery and the rules don't apply to you anymore." From what I gather, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt in five years. This is another piece of evidence that you can't fix life, the universe and everything by just throwing money at it.
- celticninja 7y ago
  Norway have done a similar thing, except they reinvested their oil income and use that to find social services for the population, prevents the money being pissed up the wall by one or two generations. I think there will be free loaders, but those exist now. Anywhere a welfare scheme exists someone will want to take advantage of it. but not the majority. I don't know the solution but I think it's worth investigating.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I'm trying to agree that, in the near future, we probably need to do something to give people financial relief because of coronavirus. Hopefully most people can agree on that whether they are believers in UBI or not. I don't really like arguing about UBI. If I had realized you were pro UBI and basically looking for an excuse to tell me I'm wrong, I wouldn't have bothered to answer you.
    - celticninja 7y ago
      I'm not pro or anti it. I know very little about it. what I have read has always been pro UBI because it is being pushed by people wanting to bring it about. my response to you was just an off the cuff reply. it was not meant to argue your point, but maybe more to formulate my thoughts a little.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- geofft 7y ago
  > The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat." UBI/welfare works very differently in a scarcity economy like the Pilgrims' and in a close-to-post-scarcity economy like ours. In fact, I wonder to what extent we're already post-scarcity, we just don't have the logistics worked out to make it realistic. I think that's a much more interesting question than whether UBI is a good idea in the abstract. It seems to me it's an obviously bad idea when the risk of people not working is an existential threat to your society, and an obviously good idea when it's not. For instance, if wizards showed up tomorrow with the ability to create unbounded amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medicine, it would make little sense to deny those resources to everyone who needed them. > Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea. I agree with that, but I also think that this already applies to the rich. Once you own a certain amount of money, our existing systems already discourage human labor and encourage you to spend your time re-investing your money, paying other people for labor, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems discourage even that and encourage you to spend your time moving your money to offshore banks, lobbying the government, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems encourage you to spend money trying to just be the government. So we need to figure out how to cope with a society of people who are disconnected from money in that way, independent of whether UBI is a good idea or not. Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor - no engineers with windfalls from their employer's IPOs, no business magnates, no trust funds or inheritances enough to pay for more than your college education, etc. Everyone needs to keep working until retirement, and nothing you do will let you retire early. I suspect that option is too politically distasteful to everyone (probably even to myself) to make it viable. (That said, most obvious way to do it is extremely heavy taxation, at which point you can afford a generous welfare state.)
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor Just for the record: This is not something I'm suggesting and I absolutely don't agree with it. This is part of my mental framework: Americans are slaves to the grind in part because cheap housing options simply don't exist anymore and our health care system has very serious problems with regards to the financial end of things. Addressing those two issues would give Americans real relief. Instituting UBI in the US without first addressing those things would actively discourage the US from trying to address those issues. If you don't address them, no amount of "free money" fixes our problems. This is not argument. I just don't want other people to come through here, read what you have said and go "well, that must be what she means and I'm not for a system that denies people leisure time and retirement." If people want to know what I think, they can ask me what I think (or read my writing elsewhere in some cases). Please don't rely on other people's mental models to decide what I supposedly think.

Yeah, lots of reasons and lots of what I believe is evidence, but nothing most people think makes sense. The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat." This was also basically what communism was supposed to be and that went spectacularly badly. We do have a few places where people get their share of a local natural resource. Both Alaska and at least one Middle Eastern country give all residents a check from their oil wealth. But it's tied to something in specific: Oil. So we have a good idea of how to make adjustments to the payout and under what conditions it would end. It isn't a promise of "forever." Historically, we had nuclear families with one primary breadwinner and benefits for others through that person. That's largely dying out for various reasons. We need a new system that allows for some people to work (for pay) and some to not and more or less everyone to get access to housing, health care, etc. We mostly aren't talking about that. UBI sounds like a rich persons fantasy of hush money. "We'll just cut a check and the problem will go away." Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea. Maybe some kind of expanded earned income credit would make sense. In the US, we would benefit tremendously from fixing our health care system. But I think just passing out money/resources to "everyone" has a long history of failing every time it has been tried in some fashion. It actively undermines a lot of social contracts that are the very basis for civilized life and replaces it with "You and all your friends just won the lottery and the rules don't apply to you anymore." From what I gather, about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt in five years. This is another piece of evidence that you can't fix life, the universe and everything by just throwing money at it.

celticninja 7y ago
Norway have done a similar thing, except they reinvested their oil income and use that to find social services for the population, prevents the money being pissed up the wall by one or two generations. I think there will be free loaders, but those exist now. Anywhere a welfare scheme exists someone will want to take advantage of it. but not the majority. I don't know the solution but I think it's worth investigating.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I'm trying to agree that, in the near future, we probably need to do something to give people financial relief because of coronavirus. Hopefully most people can agree on that whether they are believers in UBI or not. I don't really like arguing about UBI. If I had realized you were pro UBI and basically looking for an excuse to tell me I'm wrong, I wouldn't have bothered to answer you.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    I'm not pro or anti it. I know very little about it. what I have read has always been pro UBI because it is being pushed by people wanting to bring it about. my response to you was just an off the cuff reply. it was not meant to argue your point, but maybe more to formulate my thoughts a little.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
geofft 7y ago
> The short version is that every time humans have ever tried a "share and share alike" scheme, it's inevitably been ruined by freeloaders taking advantage of the system. The pilgrims tried this before the US was a country. They had to move to "you don't work, you don't eat." UBI/welfare works very differently in a scarcity economy like the Pilgrims' and in a close-to-post-scarcity economy like ours. In fact, I wonder to what extent we're already post-scarcity, we just don't have the logistics worked out to make it realistic. I think that's a much more interesting question than whether UBI is a good idea in the abstract. It seems to me it's an obviously bad idea when the risk of people not working is an existential threat to your society, and an obviously good idea when it's not. For instance, if wizards showed up tomorrow with the ability to create unbounded amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medicine, it would make little sense to deny those resources to everyone who needed them. > Money is generally a proxy for the value of other things and one of those things is human labor. UBI actively discourages human labor and cuts the ties between money and the creation of actual value. I think this is enormously dangerous and a bad idea. I agree with that, but I also think that this already applies to the rich. Once you own a certain amount of money, our existing systems already discourage human labor and encourage you to spend your time re-investing your money, paying other people for labor, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems discourage even that and encourage you to spend your time moving your money to offshore banks, lobbying the government, etc. Once you own a bit more, our systems encourage you to spend money trying to just be the government. So we need to figure out how to cope with a society of people who are disconnected from money in that way, independent of whether UBI is a good idea or not. Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor - no engineers with windfalls from their employer's IPOs, no business magnates, no trust funds or inheritances enough to pay for more than your college education, etc. Everyone needs to keep working until retirement, and nothing you do will let you retire early. I suspect that option is too politically distasteful to everyone (probably even to myself) to make it viable. (That said, most obvious way to do it is extremely heavy taxation, at which point you can afford a generous welfare state.)
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Alternatively, we need to find a way to prevent people from exiting the state of being dependent on their labor Just for the record: This is not something I'm suggesting and I absolutely don't agree with it. This is part of my mental framework: Americans are slaves to the grind in part because cheap housing options simply don't exist anymore and our health care system has very serious problems with regards to the financial end of things. Addressing those two issues would give Americans real relief. Instituting UBI in the US without first addressing those things would actively discourage the US from trying to address those issues. If you don't address them, no amount of "free money" fixes our problems. This is not argument. I just don't want other people to come through here, read what you have said and go "well, that must be what she means and I'm not for a system that denies people leisure time and retirement." If people want to know what I think, they can ask me what I think (or read my writing elsewhere in some cases). Please don't rely on other people's mental models to decide what I supposedly think.