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It's not a UBI study if it only studies whether people like getting money they don't have to do anything for. I'm repeating it every time: these kinds of studi

It's not a UBI study if it only studies whether people like getting money they don't have to do anything for. I'm repeating it every time: these kinds of studies are the same as measuring the output of "free energy machines" that supposedly work by breaking physics... while ignoring that they are plugged into a wall-socket. To prove that they work, you'd have to unplug them, otherwise you don't need the sophisticated machine and the fancy theory, an extension cord will do the same much cheaper and more efficiently.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
So let's unplug them then? If the theory says that it works and the small scale trial says that it works, it's time for the large scale trial.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale. We don't want to order a billion free energy machines before we know that they actually work without being plugged in. Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits? Once that's answered, we'll have a better idea of the feasibility and requirements. If people want to avoid the increased taxes so much that they'll move, we'll know that we need to close the borders to force them to stay, for example.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits? But then you have exactly the same problem -- a small scale experiment doesn't tell you that. If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community. But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely. You also need a certain amount of scale to encompass a realistic level of diversity. If I want to disprove your point I could do a UBI experiment in East LA where there are no rich people to move out, or in Newport Beach where the cost of living is too high for someone to be able to afford to move in just to receive the UBI. The real question is whether it would work at the state level, which you can only tell by actually implementing it at the state level. And your concerns wouldn't even apply to doing it at the national level because we do have national borders and citizenship.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community. So it has to be world-wide immediately? Of course, if you only do it in e.g. Denmark, the Danish might escape to Northern Germany or Southern Norway or Sweden, while still living broadly in the same region. Anything that's "we can't really show how great it will be until all of humanity has been convinced to go all-in, but trust us, it'll be great" has a super high risk: it might not be great at all, but since we've all committed to it, the damage isn't even contained. > But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely. For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure. Given that their peers are usually similar to them and will also look to emigrate, you might see whole communities leave... at which point you'll need the tried & tested barrier of building literal walls with armed guards on top to keep people from escaping the utopia you've created. It's not like we haven't tried that before, and it's not like it ended with people being shot for trying to leave. And, once the regimes fell, we've generally considered their actions crimes against humanity. Do we really need to repeat that once every other generation?
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > So it has to be world-wide immediately? It has to be at the scale you want to know if it works in order to see if it works at that scale. If you want to know if it works at the state level, you try it at the state level. > For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure. You're forgetting about the counterbalance. If you make somewhat more than average then you pay $16,000 in taxes and receive a $12,000 UBI. On net you're paying $4000, not $16,000. And you don't have to pay taxes to fund welfare anymore, so you were already paying most or all of the $4000 to begin with, and still would be in the place without the UBI. > It's not like we haven't tried that before There was a country that tried a national UBI before? Which one?
  - salawat 6y ago
    >Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale. Not a bad idea, but wouldn't that essentially degenerate into a capital allocation business with a functioning taxation/wealth redistribution system? Let's be honest here. There's nothing "magic" about UBI. UBI is just what happens when you successfully tax the top of the wealth accumulation frustrum such that overall the distribution of wealth is less a pyramid and more a recognizable trapezoid. Less triangular, more quad. The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes. Fix the international taxation scene/arrangement, cut down on the viability of tax evasion via legal fiction engineering, fund the capability to track down and successfully audit examples of gratuitous tax evasion (or implement bug bounties for those who help flesh out corner cases in tax law) and actually implement decent social safety nets and we could be on to something. I get it isn't easy, that there is a lot of difficulty in getting things just right, but I dare say that in terms of seeing actual credible attempts at implementing what needs to be implemented to make it work I've seen astonishingly little; especially given that these measures would be largely deleterious to the beneficiaries of the current status quo, and would greatly shift the calculus around capital allocation away from billion/trillionaires funding personal space programs to actually enabling national scale endeavor coordination; which also brings with it the absolutely critical aspect of getting the political operating smoothly again to unlock that newly collected capital potential by keeping it flowing back into the input layers of the economy. I can't be the only one seeing the economy as a massive NN, in which individual people are the input nodes, legal fictions are hidden layers, and government/taxation are the feedback/error propagation mechanism am I?
    - luckylion 6y ago
      I agree, it's essentially a large redistribution scheme that requires those that are supposed to be giving not having a chance to just leave. Tax havens and loopholes are a problem even today, but hard to fix. Germany or France would (ostensibly) love to fix them, but can't make Luxembourg or Switzerland stop offering deals and havens. Introducing UBI (and higher taxes that provide even more incentives to leave) in France or Germany won't change anything on that front. Anything that requires global cooperation seems outside of current possibilities. Building something on the basis of "that'll work, no worries" sounds like leaving out authentication of a bank system and saying "no worries, we'll convince everyone not to cheat and log into their neighbors' account". Sure, in theory that's a great concept, but practically I'd personally avoid using that bank.
pwinnski 6y ago
Any test that doesn't involve full nationwide UBI is subject to the same criticism, and I predict that even a large-scale three-year-long test that involved every western state will still be dismissed as unworkable for the same reasons: no barrier between eastern and western states, and everyone knew the test would end in three years.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Any test that doesn't involve full nationwide UBI is subject to the same criticism No, not really, unless the money for the experiment comes from outside the region. The problem is that the argument for UBI is either that "it'll pay for itself" or "it doesn't cost more than today's system". So we'll need a test that actually tests that. Maybe it doesn't work and we'll see "okay, it'll be 10% more expensive than today's systems". That can be achieved by raising taxes, and the result of doing that can be seen in the experiment as well: do people leave the region because they don't want to pay an extra 10%, or do they find UBI's benefits to society at large to be so large that they don't mind? Maybe we'll see that UBI does what the proponents promise: free human innovation and productivity and easily more than pay for itself. Once that result is proven, you'll have no issue to convince anyone. Not trying to test that at all and then saying "well, even if we would, nobody would accept that" isn't the right approach in my opinion. And it feels like there's something left unsaid: that the proponents also don't believe that it would work and therefore don't want to actually test it, because they're convinced the test will prove that it doesn't work. And as long as it's not tested, they can claim that it totally would work (in theory) without having to prove it.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    So how do you propose a better test? It seems like you slid easily past that point. To determine whether or not it requires 10% higher taxes, as you suggest, we would have to conduct a test large enough to have an appreciable impact on tax allocation, which seems like it would need to be a really wide test, like state-wide, that lasts for a at least a few years, no? I guess that's what I'm not seeing: any tests done so far are too small and not long enough and are known ahead of time to be a test. Okay, fine, let's conduct a test that's larger and long-term, with an eye toward permanence. How large, though?How do we avoid the criticism seen on this very page that limiting the number of people involved distorts things? How do we avoid the converse, which is that unless you're Alaska, letting it be known that everyone in a certain area gets free money means an artificial boom in that area?

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

So let's unplug them then? If the theory says that it works and the small scale trial says that it works, it's time for the large scale trial.

luckylion 6y ago
Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale. We don't want to order a billion free energy machines before we know that they actually work without being plugged in. Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits? Once that's answered, we'll have a better idea of the feasibility and requirements. If people want to avoid the increased taxes so much that they'll move, we'll know that we need to close the borders to force them to stay, for example.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits? But then you have exactly the same problem -- a small scale experiment doesn't tell you that. If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community. But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely. You also need a certain amount of scale to encompass a realistic level of diversity. If I want to disprove your point I could do a UBI experiment in East LA where there are no rich people to move out, or in Newport Beach where the cost of living is too high for someone to be able to afford to move in just to receive the UBI. The real question is whether it would work at the state level, which you can only tell by actually implementing it at the state level. And your concerns wouldn't even apply to doing it at the national level because we do have national borders and citizenship.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community. So it has to be world-wide immediately? Of course, if you only do it in e.g. Denmark, the Danish might escape to Northern Germany or Southern Norway or Sweden, while still living broadly in the same region. Anything that's "we can't really show how great it will be until all of humanity has been convinced to go all-in, but trust us, it'll be great" has a super high risk: it might not be great at all, but since we've all committed to it, the damage isn't even contained. > But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely. For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure. Given that their peers are usually similar to them and will also look to emigrate, you might see whole communities leave... at which point you'll need the tried & tested barrier of building literal walls with armed guards on top to keep people from escaping the utopia you've created. It's not like we haven't tried that before, and it's not like it ended with people being shot for trying to leave. And, once the regimes fell, we've generally considered their actions crimes against humanity. Do we really need to repeat that once every other generation?
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > So it has to be world-wide immediately? It has to be at the scale you want to know if it works in order to see if it works at that scale. If you want to know if it works at the state level, you try it at the state level. > For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure. You're forgetting about the counterbalance. If you make somewhat more than average then you pay $16,000 in taxes and receive a $12,000 UBI. On net you're paying $4000, not $16,000. And you don't have to pay taxes to fund welfare anymore, so you were already paying most or all of the $4000 to begin with, and still would be in the place without the UBI. > It's not like we haven't tried that before There was a country that tried a national UBI before? Which one?
- salawat 6y ago
  >Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale. Not a bad idea, but wouldn't that essentially degenerate into a capital allocation business with a functioning taxation/wealth redistribution system? Let's be honest here. There's nothing "magic" about UBI. UBI is just what happens when you successfully tax the top of the wealth accumulation frustrum such that overall the distribution of wealth is less a pyramid and more a recognizable trapezoid. Less triangular, more quad. The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes. Fix the international taxation scene/arrangement, cut down on the viability of tax evasion via legal fiction engineering, fund the capability to track down and successfully audit examples of gratuitous tax evasion (or implement bug bounties for those who help flesh out corner cases in tax law) and actually implement decent social safety nets and we could be on to something. I get it isn't easy, that there is a lot of difficulty in getting things just right, but I dare say that in terms of seeing actual credible attempts at implementing what needs to be implemented to make it work I've seen astonishingly little; especially given that these measures would be largely deleterious to the beneficiaries of the current status quo, and would greatly shift the calculus around capital allocation away from billion/trillionaires funding personal space programs to actually enabling national scale endeavor coordination; which also brings with it the absolutely critical aspect of getting the political operating smoothly again to unlock that newly collected capital potential by keeping it flowing back into the input layers of the economy. I can't be the only one seeing the economy as a massive NN, in which individual people are the input nodes, legal fictions are hidden layers, and government/taxation are the feedback/error propagation mechanism am I?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I agree, it's essentially a large redistribution scheme that requires those that are supposed to be giving not having a chance to just leave. Tax havens and loopholes are a problem even today, but hard to fix. Germany or France would (ostensibly) love to fix them, but can't make Luxembourg or Switzerland stop offering deals and havens. Introducing UBI (and higher taxes that provide even more incentives to leave) in France or Germany won't change anything on that front. Anything that requires global cooperation seems outside of current possibilities. Building something on the basis of "that'll work, no worries" sounds like leaving out authentication of a bank system and saying "no worries, we'll convince everyone not to cheat and log into their neighbors' account". Sure, in theory that's a great concept, but practically I'd personally avoid using that bank.

pwinnski 6y ago

Any test that doesn't involve full nationwide UBI is subject to the same criticism, and I predict that even a large-scale three-year-long test that involved every western state will still be dismissed as unworkable for the same reasons: no barrier between eastern and western states, and everyone knew the test would end in three years.

luckylion 6y ago
> Any test that doesn't involve full nationwide UBI is subject to the same criticism No, not really, unless the money for the experiment comes from outside the region. The problem is that the argument for UBI is either that "it'll pay for itself" or "it doesn't cost more than today's system". So we'll need a test that actually tests that. Maybe it doesn't work and we'll see "okay, it'll be 10% more expensive than today's systems". That can be achieved by raising taxes, and the result of doing that can be seen in the experiment as well: do people leave the region because they don't want to pay an extra 10%, or do they find UBI's benefits to society at large to be so large that they don't mind? Maybe we'll see that UBI does what the proponents promise: free human innovation and productivity and easily more than pay for itself. Once that result is proven, you'll have no issue to convince anyone. Not trying to test that at all and then saying "well, even if we would, nobody would accept that" isn't the right approach in my opinion. And it feels like there's something left unsaid: that the proponents also don't believe that it would work and therefore don't want to actually test it, because they're convinced the test will prove that it doesn't work. And as long as it's not tested, they can claim that it totally would work (in theory) without having to prove it.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  So how do you propose a better test? It seems like you slid easily past that point. To determine whether or not it requires 10% higher taxes, as you suggest, we would have to conduct a test large enough to have an appreciable impact on tax allocation, which seems like it would need to be a really wide test, like state-wide, that lasts for a at least a few years, no? I guess that's what I'm not seeing: any tests done so far are too small and not long enough and are known ahead of time to be a test. Okay, fine, let's conduct a test that's larger and long-term, with an eye toward permanence. How large, though?How do we avoid the criticism seen on this very page that limiting the number of people involved distorts things? How do we avoid the converse, which is that unless you're Alaska, letting it be known that everyone in a certain area gets free money means an artificial boom in that area?