7 ms·

I think the 2nd/3rd+ order effects of UBI needs to be understood better. Most arguments for or against UBI look no further than first order effects, and get mos

I think the 2nd/3rd+ order effects of UBI needs to be understood better. Most arguments for or against UBI look no further than first order effects, and get most of the 1st order effects wrong because they don't take into account the cascading ripples of the more indirect unknowns. A collection of second order effect questions that people don't really have a strong cohesive argument for or against: 1) What are the impacts of UBI on cost of labor, and how will businesses react or adapt? (will UBI ultimately lower cost of labor for businesses or will it raise it? Will it cause businesses to seek out investment into AI instead to replace manpower? etc) 2) Are there any situations where UBI's cost will spiral out of control? (Do we have smart enough people modeling out long term costs of UBI in a comprehensive, risk accounting way so it doesn't become another social security) 3) What is the change in percentage of people who will couch potato with UBI? How about percent change in entrepreneurial activity with UBI? (at the very least, is it in the single digits, double digits? A fraction of 1%?) 3rd order effects: 1) What will the economy look like 20 years from now with UBI? How will the structure of society change? 2) How will UBI change how the majority of people grow up and what they end up pursuing? 3) How will UBI impact the global economic climate? (My sci-fi dystopian vision of UBI's butterfly effects, not that globalization hasn't already done this: UBI will spur one country to develop so much AI due to lack of people in the workforce, and that AI is so good that it gets exported to all countries over the world, centralizing most of the money in the world to that one country, making that one country able to afford UBI while the rest of the world is jobless and has no money to take care of their own people.) I'm just scratching the surface of the complexity of the topic.

lidHanteyk 6y ago
Your questions aren't hard. 1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up a small income disparity and will gladly quit their part-time jobs. Labor might get more expensive, but given how long minimum wage has been depressed, I wouldn't count on it. 2) No, UBI is as expensive to administer as the existing tax code. Also, the fuck are you talking about? Social Security has gotten cheaper to administer over time [0]. 3) Who cares? Literally, it doesn't matter how many people "couch potato" or otherwise decide not to work when they already weren't in the labor market. Think about it for a bit. 4) Hopefully less wage slavery, less food insecurity, less homelessness, less wealth inequality. That is, UBI is hoped to do what it is marketed as doing. 5) In e.g. Sweden, the constant availability of funds from the government has enabled people to be more fully actualized, as they choose whether they want to go into secondary education, start a small business, buy a farm, or open an art studio. All of these are also subsidized in the USA, but poorly. UBI acts as an ideal prototype system for this sort of funding, without having to commit to a particular usage of funds. 6) Uh, we've had a global economy for centuries. All that has happened is that places with UBI and similar social programs have become well-known and globally visible. But UBI in Alaska exists [1] and does not draw people to move to Alaska, so I can easily conclude that it doesn't matter that much to the global economy. More generally, I think that you are afraid of nothing. [0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanent_Fund_Dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...
- spyckie2 6y ago
  most of your answers don't even address the questions. 1) impact on businesses? 2) not about administration, about the cost of UBI itself. cost of social security is ballooning, not administration of it 3) it's important to judge UBI's costs and impacts relative to other social programs 4) "Hopefully" it will end world hunger too and also discover the cure for cancer. 5) Sweden doesn't implement UBI though? How does looking at Sweden allow you to say how UBI will affect people growing up? 6) comparing Alaska, the 46th on the list when looking at the size of US state economies, with the US (#1 economy in the world) is not a good comparison. It's not fear that are motivating these questions. The larger the investment, the more robust the plan needs to be and it's common sense for anyone to want to know more detail about a LTV ~100s of trillions of dollar investment.
  - lidHanteyk 6y ago
    Okay, I think I see the root of the misunderstanding. UBI can be fully paid for by taxes [0], and the resulting system is administered using existing tax authorities. In the USA, this would mean that the IRS, which already administers taxes, would incur a one-time cost of setup but no additional ongoing costs. This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

lidHanteyk 6y ago

Your questions aren't hard. 1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up a small income disparity and will gladly quit their part-time jobs. Labor might get more expensive, but given how long minimum wage has been depressed, I wouldn't count on it. 2) No, UBI is as expensive to administer as the existing tax code. Also, the fuck are you talking about? Social Security has gotten cheaper to administer over time [0]. 3) Who cares? Literally, it doesn't matter how many people "couch potato" or otherwise decide not to work when they already weren't in the labor market. Think about it for a bit. 4) Hopefully less wage slavery, less food insecurity, less homelessness, less wealth inequality. That is, UBI is hoped to do what it is marketed as doing. 5) In e.g. Sweden, the constant availability of funds from the government has enabled people to be more fully actualized, as they choose whether they want to go into secondary education, start a small business, buy a farm, or open an art studio. All of these are also subsidized in the USA, but poorly. UBI acts as an ideal prototype system for this sort of funding, without having to commit to a particular usage of funds. 6) Uh, we've had a global economy for centuries. All that has happened is that places with UBI and similar social programs have become well-known and globally visible. But UBI in Alaska exists [1] and does not draw people to move to Alaska, so I can easily conclude that it doesn't matter that much to the global economy. More generally, I think that you are afraid of nothing. [0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanent_Fund_Dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

spyckie2 6y ago
most of your answers don't even address the questions. 1) impact on businesses? 2) not about administration, about the cost of UBI itself. cost of social security is ballooning, not administration of it 3) it's important to judge UBI's costs and impacts relative to other social programs 4) "Hopefully" it will end world hunger too and also discover the cure for cancer. 5) Sweden doesn't implement UBI though? How does looking at Sweden allow you to say how UBI will affect people growing up? 6) comparing Alaska, the 46th on the list when looking at the size of US state economies, with the US (#1 economy in the world) is not a good comparison. It's not fear that are motivating these questions. The larger the investment, the more robust the plan needs to be and it's common sense for anyone to want to know more detail about a LTV ~100s of trillions of dollar investment.
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  Okay, I think I see the root of the misunderstanding. UBI can be fully paid for by taxes [0], and the resulting system is administered using existing tax authorities. In the USA, this would mean that the IRS, which already administers taxes, would incur a one-time cost of setup but no additional ongoing costs. This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax