7 ms·

An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

47 points by tchalla 6y ago

m1117 6y ago
People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.
- gumby 6y ago
  > People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.
  - cassianoleal 6y ago
    I know quite a few people who have either not looked for jobs because it would have meant less income overall, or refused promotions / higher salary for the same reasons. This is a well known phenomenon known as the welfare trap [0]. This may not be the case if you have the opportunity to go from unemployed directly to a higher salary but most unemployed people have minimal wage as a best prospect, many times not even that. UBI evens it out in that if you do get a job you'll make more money instead of downright trading your free time for busy time with no financial gain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
  - dx87 6y ago
    As an anecdote, my wife used to work in the front office of a low income apartment complex, and she said it was common for tenants to purposefully stay on welfare/unemployment, while getting paid under the table for stuff like landscaping and handyman work. Getting a normal job would have effectively been a pay cut for them.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Unemployment is only a minor part of this simply because it expires after a fixed duration. Housing and healthcare are much bigger factors. For many people, getting a job means losing their state funded healthcare and housing, but the income from the job is not enough to make up the difference.
- rocketpastsix 6y ago
  >People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment hasn't this been debunked repeatedly? While yes, Im sure there are some people who do their hardest not to work to collect money, most people want to be out there working. I dont think youre correct per se, but I do think that part of the reason people linger on unemployment is because jobs that they are able to get dont pay nearly enough as unemployment, thus there is no incentive to get back to work.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I know someone who is fighting this. It's not so much they don't want to work, but the fact that with our current system there are places where working causes you to earn less. Unemployment is one piece, but food stamps and other benefits get cut off as well. Working costs money. Commuting, child care, uniforms, etc. For a person with children, a minimum wage job is tough to justify. A system where government help was tapered until people were above the poverty line would eliminate these perverse incentives.
  - hnrodey 6y ago
    >People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that a non-trivial percentage of people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and only then pursue work opportunities.
    - adkadskhj 6y ago
      And in traditional fashion many people (mostly just one group, lets be honest..) throw out the baby with the bathwater on social safety nets. Because some people exploit it, the people who need it get damned. edit: Edited to be a bit less pointed... A bit.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It seems weird to be criticizing a group for identifying a problem that actually exists (welfare traps / phase out cliffs / perverse incentives) while proposing a solution to it that would actually work better (NIT/UBI). There are proponents of a negative income tax on both sides, e.g. conservative economist Milton Friedman.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  >People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that some people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and then pursue work opportunities.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Much of this has to do with well understood welfare cliffs. Sure, some people won't work if they have the option for a menial existence on welfare. Many more would like to increase their income, but would suffer loss of healthcare, housing, or other necessities if they do.
armagon 6y ago
Here's the google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWlJlrgoGIwJ:https://www.scottsantens.com/engineering-argument-for-unconditional-universal-basic-income-ubi-fault-tolerance-graceful-failure-redundancy+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWlJlr...
tengbretson 6y ago
I think a good place to start would be to not have the average American be 6 figures in debt.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  Yes, that would be nice. What policy would you suggest to get there?
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    State-enforced debt jubilees.
    - wfhpw 6y ago
      Does this not discourage lending? Who would issue a loan the year before a debt jubilee?
      - tengbretson 6y ago
        > Does this not discourage lending Yes. The goal is to reduce debt.
        gumby 6y ago
        Why? Buying a house or car through debt is not a bad way to match your payment stream to the usable lifetime of the asset. Even if you can pay cash, unless you have a huge cushion this could make a lot of sense (taking your savings to 0 is worse than taking your savings to n months of cost of living, including the loan payments). I am lucky enough to be a cash buyer but I can still see the logic of using debt in this way.
        clairity 6y ago
        from an economic perspective, it doesn't make sense to buy a depreciating asset, like a car, with debt. a house, on the other hand, is generally considered a stable asset, so debt is appropriate there.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
This is a naive engineering argument in that it assumes a simple closed system when in reality it is an open system that does not even usefully approximate as a closed system. There are material tradeoffs being made that are not even acknowledged as a consequence. Several failure modes have simply been placed outside the system by definition to make the problem seem easier. I am sympathetic to the idea of UBI but there is no trivial engineering argument for it. It is a system with many poor characteristics from an engineering perspective that would need to be addressed in any design that makes a claim of robustness.
- tharga8616 6y ago
  It's the same principle as in a buckle belt, everyone has one in case is needed, because accidents occur.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
danenania 6y ago
It feels like the combination of Yang's presidential run and covid has broken the seal on the idea of UBI in the US. After having the experience of the government sending everyone direct payments, I think it's all but inevitable that we'll arrive at some level of formal UBI in the future. Given its sky high bipartisan popularity, it's hard to imagine how any non-UBI supporting politician will be able to compete with a UBI supporting politician going forward. I'd speculate that this was the deciding factor in the Democrats' recent Georgia runoff victory. Nothing motivates voters like the prospect of money placed directly in their pockets. While I'm strongly in favor of UBI and think we are basically doomed without it, there are a couple things in particular that I worry about: 1 - As the Frédéric Bastiat quote goes: "the state is the great myth that everyone can live at the expense of everyone else". Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels? It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher. 2 - Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, what percent of humanity will be able to meaningfully contribute? If the number is, say, 50% or less, how do we maintain any semblance of purpose and opportunity under these circumstances?
- xienze 6y ago
  > It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher. Exactly. Every president's platform is going to be centered around "the UBI is too damn low!" And if it gets high enough you're going to find lots of people who you could otherwise depend on for the tax dollars that keep this scheme afloat deciding to retire and live off UBI the rest of their lives. I mean I make six figures and have a modest, paid-off house in a relatively low COL area. Get UBI up to say $4K per month and I'll sure as hell think hard about dropping out of the workforce. And don't say UBI will never get past $1K per month... Also, there will also have to be a reckoning on immigration of unskilled workers if UBI came to pass. The whole argument around UBI is that there's so many unskilled workers in the US who are going to find themselves automated out of a job, so we need to pay them UBI. Meanwhile we... continue to import huge numbers of unskilled workers who are destined to do soak up UBI? Something's gotta give.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
steve76 6y ago
Sam Little has 30 women in his home at $2,000 a month each. That's $60,000 a month funding the worst human behavior imaginable. You will gift the world to bullies and murderers.
Geminidog 6y ago
The author misunderstands science, math and engineering. He says "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong," then uses this argument to cite the need to use UBI as "fault tolerance" and cites examples of planes and safety systems. The irony here is that his statement of whatever "will go wrong" applies to fault tolerant systems as well. You can't deploy redundant safety features without testing that it works. Is UBI tested to a degree of verifiability that it will always work? No. Also "testing" and "making arguments" is not strictly the case of engineering. These two things are the domain of science and while engineering can in many cases use "science" this is not what's going on in this article. Engineering is mostly about using what we already know about in science and mathematics to solve problems. This article neither uses Engineering, math or science to say anything. It's just a qualitative argument demonstrating an arbitrary point using a bunch of analogies to cast an illusion that this is an "engineering argument." You need to run a scientific experiment with a control group or observe real world examples to make this argument at all "scientific" or "engineering" related. Until then it's just an opinion. Whatever your political stance on this policy is... nothing substantial was said here. Just a regurgitation of things we all already know that may or may not be true.
- tharga8616 6y ago
  And economics nowadays have nothing to do with mathematics, because, where is the rational use of resources to provide for everyone's basic needs? So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around.
  - Geminidog 6y ago
    You can't rationally predict the outcome of complex systems anymore than you can rationally predict the weather or the stock market. In general you need to run something called "tests" to verify certain hypothesis. And even then you may not get a definitive answer given the complexity of the situation. This is not "math" this is the scientific method. >So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around. Communism was an alternative solution to UBI. In fact if you squint enough communism is UBI taken to the extreme, where all forms of income become UBI. Communism in theory works, but in practice there is no working example of a communist utopia in existence today. So you want to turn all of society into some UBI utopia because it fits your political ideology? How about let's not be stupid and run some experiments first.
jkingsbery 6y ago
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement..." - Frederick Hayek Whether or not UBI is a good idea, a useful idea, or a moral idea is an interesting question (I generally think not, but it seems that position is losing the debate). Arguing for UBI (or any other aspect of the economy) from an engineering perspective is a mistake though. An economy is not an elevator. When we put failsafes in to elevators, we know what they do. When we put failsafes in to economies, they behave in bizarre, unpredictable ways. A lot of things went in to the 2008 financial collapse, but at least part of it was due to a large group of smart (but in retrospect, unwise) people assuming that a math equation accurately represented the financial system.
- codekilla 6y ago
  I think it's worth bearing in mind that Hayek lived before the information age, and that there are real limits to the validity of the idea that design isn't useful (and especially in economics/finance). UBI may not be a good idea, but the reason being that it's likely not the best design (I would say Minsky had it largely correct [0]). [0] http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/ending-poverty-jobs-not-welfare http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/ending-poverty-job...
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  I agree with your overall point, but I don't think it has unlimited applicability, and ever since Hayek first published on this topic, even liberal economists and philosophers have been critical that it fails to take into account the evolution of government as part of that anarchy of the market. Some suggest the tension between rational constructivism and spontaneous order is a false dichotomy in the real world. It's worth noting that Hayek's conception of the economy as spontaneous order may run into something of a paradox[0], and in the view of some, the emergent and unconscious shaping of the market as we see it today can certainly conflict with other goals - in particular justice. I think most people are interested in at least asking about what can be done rather than sitting down at the command of "don't touch that, who knows what may happen!". [0] Assuming that some intervention in the economy is permissible (i.e. anything but anarcho-capitalism), see section "When Would Hayek Pour The Cement?" here: https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf
Proven 6y ago
> We have engineered a life support system without fault tolerance, and we did it because engineers didn't design the system. Politicians did. Special interests did. And it's built on antiquated job-centric moralism instead of contemporary life-centric realism. You're wrong, nature built it and it works. One is supposed to fail safe by getting help from family and then community (if they weren't kicked out). If both of those fail, you probably go down in a fail safe manner, without taking down others with you. It's worked very well until engineers and progressives took over. Read The Fatal Conceit.
xibalba 6y ago
Whatever happened to the "large scale" UBI pilots that were being conducted over the last few years? I believe some were being conducted by Altman/et al. Instead of (very) poorly fit conceptual models (this article), let's just look at the data. From what I recall from other UBI pilots around the world, results have been mixed to outright disappointing.
- toolslive 6y ago
  Your memory is biased. https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN08GY2nIrZo/content/results-of-the-basic-income-experiment-small-employment-effects-better-perceived-economic-security-and-mental-wellbeing https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN...
nrclark 6y ago
Site is hugged for me, so I can't check to see if the author addresses this. I've been wondering - wouldn't UBI tend towards an inflationary spiral? I'm sympathetic to the goals of UBI. But without price controls, what would prevent rent/mortage/food/entertainment prices from just rising to absorb everybody's newfound income? College tuition has been going up exponentially since the introduction of federal student aid. Is there any reason to assume UBI wouldn't do the same thing (albeit without the debt)?
- nyghtly 6y ago
  > The Social Security Administration sends out checks each month to 64 million people, mostly the elderly and disabled. Unemployment Insurance programs send out checks each month to 2.1 million people. In other countries, the government, in addition to paying these kinds of old-age, disability, and unemployment benefits, also pays out a monthly benefit to every child. In the US that would mean checks going out to the families of around 74 million children. > None of this leads to any inflation problems because, as mentioned in the very first section above, taxes are used to fund these programs, just as they would be for any other permanent welfare state expansion. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/18/understanding-claims-about-basic-income-and-inflation/ https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/18/understandin...
  - fiftyfifty 6y ago
    There are roughly 209 million adults in the US. Providing a $1,000/month UBI (which seems to be what's commonly proposed) will cost us $2.5 Trillion every year. That is a lot of tax to collect. If we are not careful it will be become a debt burden and it will cause inflation. I'm not saying that it can't be done but I think we would all like to see a very careful plan on where exactly that much money is going to come from.
    - adkadskhj 6y ago
      While i am very pro-tax and pro-support nets, i don't think we can have UBI - an insanely high tax social program - without a tax overhaul. Most specifically, the more social programs you provide the more transparent taxation becomes. Right now our tax programs are not only lacking in transparency but are straight obtuse. This exists, i assume, because they had to work around peoples aversion to taxes and sticker shock when paying taxes. A massively increased tax spend will only serve to illustrate the sticker-shock problem more. I just don't see UBI happening until people can learn to pay for the common good, recognizing what they're getting out of it and how the common good has material impacts on their self - even if entirely selfishly motivated (as most Americans seem). Unfortunately the only way i see UBI (or similar) happening is in the face of mass layoffs and lack of work due to a large technology change - like various forms of automation. Until then, it's a problem people can't see, aren't directly affected by, and won't want to pay for.
ouid 6y ago
I have a simpler argument. The necessity of being fed, clothed, and housed, comes with a monthly price tag. The price of an annuity which pays for these things is the amount of debt that you are born with. That debt is completely undischargeable in bankruptcy, and is, in fact, the zero value to which you are set should you declare bankruptcy. The (inflation adjusted) price of that annuity varies wildly with the economic circumstances, even if the monthly payout does not. Being born in a time with low annuity rates could mean that you intrinsically owe hundreds of thousands of dollars more than someone born in a period of high annuity rates. This is obviously a knob that should be turned.
- NoZZz 6y ago
  I can make that even simpler, parents should pay it up front. Eugenics! yay!
- tharga8616 6y ago
  Debt and money are invented abstract objects. Pure ideas. The question is, do we have the resources to feed, clothe and house everyone? Yes we do. UBI is just another formal tool to wake you up to this truth. Ephemeralisation. We can each day do more with less, but our irrational economic system is impeding adequate distribution of resources.
bluGill 6y ago
It won't help. Too many people will fall for schemes that just take all the UBI payments. They will apply the UBI plus their income to get the amount of mortgage they can afford, and then when (not if - bad things will happen, though how bad differs!) bad things happens they can't afford their payments. Or worse they will get involved in some sort of scam which takes all their UBI for some reward that never happens.
- greysphere 6y ago
  Your argument makes no meaningful differentiation between UBI and any other forms of income.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Kbelicius 6y ago
  Replace UBI with "income" and nothing about your statements change (apart from UBI/income switch and the "UBI plus their income" becomes "their income"). Do you also think that having income doesn't help?
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  By that argument we shouldn't have any safety nets at all.
nevi-me 6y ago
The argument works, but is too simplistic as other comments mention, and only looks at an ideal-state. It's unfortunate that politicians are often responsible for making this decision, because most of the time they fail to understand the economics, and make decisions that optimise their term in office or other selfish interests. I live in South Africa. Last week the governing party made a resolution to "look into" UBI/basic grants. [0] Today, thousands of disabled and old people were queuing for their basic grants, in inhumane ways, during a pandemic + a South African virus variant that's more aggressive. The Minister in charge of social development, said "there's no money" [1]. Revisiting the engineering argument. It talks about fail-safes if the elevator stops working. This partly assumes that the elevator is maintained, because it not plunging is less of a concern than it being stuck for weeks at a time. If governments fulfilled their social duties, the overall cost of living would remain low, those in need of social services would regularly get them (without the strong need to pay people money). This reduces the bang-bang effect mentioned. Productive labour forces also minimise the length of elevator failures. If we look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with a view of universally solving them; we'd be incentivised to optimise for food production (reduce hunger), providing basic + better shelter (reduce homelessness). Play fair with resources to improve safety (colonialisation, domination, creating wars, displacing people, increasing crime). Doing a lot of these things, and addressing the ills of capitalism, become the fail-safes that diminish the preconditions that allow people to argue for basic income (where the recipient is an able-body who is not being productive by choice or circumstance). [0] https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/459738/government-to-look-at-basic-income-grant-for-south-africa-ramaphosa/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/459738/government-to... [1] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/auntie-theres-no-money-in-here-sassa-beneficiaries-sleep-on-pavements-to-apply-for-grants-20210115 https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/auntie-theres...
rubycon22 6y ago
My philosophy is that basic income will be ultimately a good in the long run, even if there are some amount of people who take advantage of it and ultimately do nothing productive for the rest of their lives. Because I don't want people like that in the workforce anyway. I believe only people who are actually motivated to work, and enjoy their jobs or duties should be there. I really do not want some sadsack of a person who hates their job serving me at a restaurant, who will mess with my food if he feels slighted by me. He should go rot away in a small apartment and leave that position for someone who actually cares. Society should gladly pay these people to keep them away. It's sad that someone who is happy to work, must compete with hundreds of people who dont give a shit, for the same job. I hope that basic income would get rid of much of the competition for jobs like this, which would also mean business owners can no longer take advantage of a big labor pool to pay poor wages.

47 points by tchalla 6y ago

People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.

gumby 6y ago
> People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  I know quite a few people who have either not looked for jobs because it would have meant less income overall, or refused promotions / higher salary for the same reasons. This is a well known phenomenon known as the welfare trap [0]. This may not be the case if you have the opportunity to go from unemployed directly to a higher salary but most unemployed people have minimal wage as a best prospect, many times not even that. UBI evens it out in that if you do get a job you'll make more money instead of downright trading your free time for busy time with no financial gain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
- dx87 6y ago
  As an anecdote, my wife used to work in the front office of a low income apartment complex, and she said it was common for tenants to purposefully stay on welfare/unemployment, while getting paid under the table for stuff like landscaping and handyman work. Getting a normal job would have effectively been a pay cut for them.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Unemployment is only a minor part of this simply because it expires after a fixed duration. Housing and healthcare are much bigger factors. For many people, getting a job means losing their state funded healthcare and housing, but the income from the job is not enough to make up the difference.
rocketpastsix 6y ago
>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment hasn't this been debunked repeatedly? While yes, Im sure there are some people who do their hardest not to work to collect money, most people want to be out there working. I dont think youre correct per se, but I do think that part of the reason people linger on unemployment is because jobs that they are able to get dont pay nearly enough as unemployment, thus there is no incentive to get back to work.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I know someone who is fighting this. It's not so much they don't want to work, but the fact that with our current system there are places where working causes you to earn less. Unemployment is one piece, but food stamps and other benefits get cut off as well. Working costs money. Commuting, child care, uniforms, etc. For a person with children, a minimum wage job is tough to justify. A system where government help was tapered until people were above the poverty line would eliminate these perverse incentives.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  >People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that a non-trivial percentage of people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and only then pursue work opportunities.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    And in traditional fashion many people (mostly just one group, lets be honest..) throw out the baby with the bathwater on social safety nets. Because some people exploit it, the people who need it get damned. edit: Edited to be a bit less pointed... A bit.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      It seems weird to be criticizing a group for identifying a problem that actually exists (welfare traps / phase out cliffs / perverse incentives) while proposing a solution to it that would actually work better (NIT/UBI). There are proponents of a negative income tax on both sides, e.g. conservative economist Milton Friedman.
hnrodey 6y ago
>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that some people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and then pursue work opportunities.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Much of this has to do with well understood welfare cliffs. Sure, some people won't work if they have the option for a menial existence on welfare. Many more would like to increase their income, but would suffer loss of healthcare, housing, or other necessities if they do.

armagon 6y ago

Here's the google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWlJlrgoGIwJ:https://www.scottsantens.com/engineering-argument-for-unconditional-universal-basic-income-ubi-fault-tolerance-graceful-failure-redundancy+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uWlJlr...

tengbretson 6y ago

I think a good place to start would be to not have the average American be 6 figures in debt.

mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
Yes, that would be nice. What policy would you suggest to get there?
- tengbretson 6y ago
  State-enforced debt jubilees.
  - wfhpw 6y ago
    Does this not discourage lending? Who would issue a loan the year before a debt jubilee?
    - tengbretson 6y ago
      > Does this not discourage lending Yes. The goal is to reduce debt.
      - gumby 6y ago
        Why? Buying a house or car through debt is not a bad way to match your payment stream to the usable lifetime of the asset. Even if you can pay cash, unless you have a huge cushion this could make a lot of sense (taking your savings to 0 is worse than taking your savings to n months of cost of living, including the loan payments). I am lucky enough to be a cash buyer but I can still see the logic of using debt in this way.
        clairity 6y ago
        from an economic perspective, it doesn't make sense to buy a depreciating asset, like a car, with debt. a house, on the other hand, is generally considered a stable asset, so debt is appropriate there.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

This is a naive engineering argument in that it assumes a simple closed system when in reality it is an open system that does not even usefully approximate as a closed system. There are material tradeoffs being made that are not even acknowledged as a consequence. Several failure modes have simply been placed outside the system by definition to make the problem seem easier. I am sympathetic to the idea of UBI but there is no trivial engineering argument for it. It is a system with many poor characteristics from an engineering perspective that would need to be addressed in any design that makes a claim of robustness.

tharga8616 6y ago
It's the same principle as in a buckle belt, everyone has one in case is needed, because accidents occur.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

danenania 6y ago

It feels like the combination of Yang's presidential run and covid has broken the seal on the idea of UBI in the US. After having the experience of the government sending everyone direct payments, I think it's all but inevitable that we'll arrive at some level of formal UBI in the future. Given its sky high bipartisan popularity, it's hard to imagine how any non-UBI supporting politician will be able to compete with a UBI supporting politician going forward. I'd speculate that this was the deciding factor in the Democrats' recent Georgia runoff victory. Nothing motivates voters like the prospect of money placed directly in their pockets. While I'm strongly in favor of UBI and think we are basically doomed without it, there are a couple things in particular that I worry about: 1 - As the Frédéric Bastiat quote goes: "the state is the great myth that everyone can live at the expense of everyone else". Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels? It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher. 2 - Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, what percent of humanity will be able to meaningfully contribute? If the number is, say, 50% or less, how do we maintain any semblance of purpose and opportunity under these circumstances?

xienze 6y ago
> It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher. Exactly. Every president's platform is going to be centered around "the UBI is too damn low!" And if it gets high enough you're going to find lots of people who you could otherwise depend on for the tax dollars that keep this scheme afloat deciding to retire and live off UBI the rest of their lives. I mean I make six figures and have a modest, paid-off house in a relatively low COL area. Get UBI up to say $4K per month and I'll sure as hell think hard about dropping out of the workforce. And don't say UBI will never get past $1K per month... Also, there will also have to be a reckoning on immigration of unskilled workers if UBI came to pass. The whole argument around UBI is that there's so many unskilled workers in the US who are going to find themselves automated out of a job, so we need to pay them UBI. Meanwhile we... continue to import huge numbers of unskilled workers who are destined to do soak up UBI? Something's gotta give.
dane-pgp 6y ago

steve76 6y ago

Sam Little has 30 women in his home at $2,000 a month each. That's $60,000 a month funding the worst human behavior imaginable. You will gift the world to bullies and murderers.

Geminidog 6y ago

The author misunderstands science, math and engineering. He says "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong," then uses this argument to cite the need to use UBI as "fault tolerance" and cites examples of planes and safety systems. The irony here is that his statement of whatever "will go wrong" applies to fault tolerant systems as well. You can't deploy redundant safety features without testing that it works. Is UBI tested to a degree of verifiability that it will always work? No. Also "testing" and "making arguments" is not strictly the case of engineering. These two things are the domain of science and while engineering can in many cases use "science" this is not what's going on in this article. Engineering is mostly about using what we already know about in science and mathematics to solve problems. This article neither uses Engineering, math or science to say anything. It's just a qualitative argument demonstrating an arbitrary point using a bunch of analogies to cast an illusion that this is an "engineering argument." You need to run a scientific experiment with a control group or observe real world examples to make this argument at all "scientific" or "engineering" related. Until then it's just an opinion. Whatever your political stance on this policy is... nothing substantial was said here. Just a regurgitation of things we all already know that may or may not be true.

tharga8616 6y ago
And economics nowadays have nothing to do with mathematics, because, where is the rational use of resources to provide for everyone's basic needs? So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around.
- Geminidog 6y ago
  You can't rationally predict the outcome of complex systems anymore than you can rationally predict the weather or the stock market. In general you need to run something called "tests" to verify certain hypothesis. And even then you may not get a definitive answer given the complexity of the situation. This is not "math" this is the scientific method. >So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around. Communism was an alternative solution to UBI. In fact if you squint enough communism is UBI taken to the extreme, where all forms of income become UBI. Communism in theory works, but in practice there is no working example of a communist utopia in existence today. So you want to turn all of society into some UBI utopia because it fits your political ideology? How about let's not be stupid and run some experiments first.

jkingsbery 6y ago

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement..." - Frederick Hayek Whether or not UBI is a good idea, a useful idea, or a moral idea is an interesting question (I generally think not, but it seems that position is losing the debate). Arguing for UBI (or any other aspect of the economy) from an engineering perspective is a mistake though. An economy is not an elevator. When we put failsafes in to elevators, we know what they do. When we put failsafes in to economies, they behave in bizarre, unpredictable ways. A lot of things went in to the 2008 financial collapse, but at least part of it was due to a large group of smart (but in retrospect, unwise) people assuming that a math equation accurately represented the financial system.

codekilla 6y ago
I think it's worth bearing in mind that Hayek lived before the information age, and that there are real limits to the validity of the idea that design isn't useful (and especially in economics/finance). UBI may not be a good idea, but the reason being that it's likely not the best design (I would say Minsky had it largely correct [0]). [0] http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/ending-poverty-jobs-not-welfare http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/ending-poverty-job...
claudiawerner 6y ago
I agree with your overall point, but I don't think it has unlimited applicability, and ever since Hayek first published on this topic, even liberal economists and philosophers have been critical that it fails to take into account the evolution of government as part of that anarchy of the market. Some suggest the tension between rational constructivism and spontaneous order is a false dichotomy in the real world. It's worth noting that Hayek's conception of the economy as spontaneous order may run into something of a paradox[0], and in the view of some, the emergent and unconscious shaping of the market as we see it today can certainly conflict with other goals - in particular justice. I think most people are interested in at least asking about what can be done rather than sitting down at the command of "don't touch that, who knows what may happen!". [0] Assuming that some intervention in the economy is permissible (i.e. anything but anarcho-capitalism), see section "When Would Hayek Pour The Cement?" here: https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf

Proven 6y ago

> We have engineered a life support system without fault tolerance, and we did it because engineers didn't design the system. Politicians did. Special interests did. And it's built on antiquated job-centric moralism instead of contemporary life-centric realism. You're wrong, nature built it and it works. One is supposed to fail safe by getting help from family and then community (if they weren't kicked out). If both of those fail, you probably go down in a fail safe manner, without taking down others with you. It's worked very well until engineers and progressives took over. Read The Fatal Conceit.

xibalba 6y ago

Whatever happened to the "large scale" UBI pilots that were being conducted over the last few years? I believe some were being conducted by Altman/et al. Instead of (very) poorly fit conceptual models (this article), let's just look at the data. From what I recall from other UBI pilots around the world, results have been mixed to outright disappointing.

toolslive 6y ago
Your memory is biased. https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN08GY2nIrZo/content/results-of-the-basic-income-experiment-small-employment-effects-better-perceived-economic-security-and-mental-wellbeing https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN...

nrclark 6y ago

Site is hugged for me, so I can't check to see if the author addresses this. I've been wondering - wouldn't UBI tend towards an inflationary spiral? I'm sympathetic to the goals of UBI. But without price controls, what would prevent rent/mortage/food/entertainment prices from just rising to absorb everybody's newfound income? College tuition has been going up exponentially since the introduction of federal student aid. Is there any reason to assume UBI wouldn't do the same thing (albeit without the debt)?

nyghtly 6y ago
> The Social Security Administration sends out checks each month to 64 million people, mostly the elderly and disabled. Unemployment Insurance programs send out checks each month to 2.1 million people. In other countries, the government, in addition to paying these kinds of old-age, disability, and unemployment benefits, also pays out a monthly benefit to every child. In the US that would mean checks going out to the families of around 74 million children. > None of this leads to any inflation problems because, as mentioned in the very first section above, taxes are used to fund these programs, just as they would be for any other permanent welfare state expansion. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/18/understanding-claims-about-basic-income-and-inflation/ https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/18/understandin...
- fiftyfifty 6y ago
  There are roughly 209 million adults in the US. Providing a $1,000/month UBI (which seems to be what's commonly proposed) will cost us $2.5 Trillion every year. That is a lot of tax to collect. If we are not careful it will be become a debt burden and it will cause inflation. I'm not saying that it can't be done but I think we would all like to see a very careful plan on where exactly that much money is going to come from.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    While i am very pro-tax and pro-support nets, i don't think we can have UBI - an insanely high tax social program - without a tax overhaul. Most specifically, the more social programs you provide the more transparent taxation becomes. Right now our tax programs are not only lacking in transparency but are straight obtuse. This exists, i assume, because they had to work around peoples aversion to taxes and sticker shock when paying taxes. A massively increased tax spend will only serve to illustrate the sticker-shock problem more. I just don't see UBI happening until people can learn to pay for the common good, recognizing what they're getting out of it and how the common good has material impacts on their self - even if entirely selfishly motivated (as most Americans seem). Unfortunately the only way i see UBI (or similar) happening is in the face of mass layoffs and lack of work due to a large technology change - like various forms of automation. Until then, it's a problem people can't see, aren't directly affected by, and won't want to pay for.

ouid 6y ago

I have a simpler argument. The necessity of being fed, clothed, and housed, comes with a monthly price tag. The price of an annuity which pays for these things is the amount of debt that you are born with. That debt is completely undischargeable in bankruptcy, and is, in fact, the zero value to which you are set should you declare bankruptcy. The (inflation adjusted) price of that annuity varies wildly with the economic circumstances, even if the monthly payout does not. Being born in a time with low annuity rates could mean that you intrinsically owe hundreds of thousands of dollars more than someone born in a period of high annuity rates. This is obviously a knob that should be turned.

NoZZz 6y ago
I can make that even simpler, parents should pay it up front. Eugenics! yay!
tharga8616 6y ago
Debt and money are invented abstract objects. Pure ideas. The question is, do we have the resources to feed, clothe and house everyone? Yes we do. UBI is just another formal tool to wake you up to this truth. Ephemeralisation. We can each day do more with less, but our irrational economic system is impeding adequate distribution of resources.

bluGill 6y ago

It won't help. Too many people will fall for schemes that just take all the UBI payments. They will apply the UBI plus their income to get the amount of mortgage they can afford, and then when (not if - bad things will happen, though how bad differs!) bad things happens they can't afford their payments. Or worse they will get involved in some sort of scam which takes all their UBI for some reward that never happens.

greysphere 6y ago
Your argument makes no meaningful differentiation between UBI and any other forms of income.
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Kbelicius 6y ago
Replace UBI with "income" and nothing about your statements change (apart from UBI/income switch and the "UBI plus their income" becomes "their income"). Do you also think that having income doesn't help?
cecilpl2 6y ago
By that argument we shouldn't have any safety nets at all.

nevi-me 6y ago

The argument works, but is too simplistic as other comments mention, and only looks at an ideal-state. It's unfortunate that politicians are often responsible for making this decision, because most of the time they fail to understand the economics, and make decisions that optimise their term in office or other selfish interests. I live in South Africa. Last week the governing party made a resolution to "look into" UBI/basic grants. [0] Today, thousands of disabled and old people were queuing for their basic grants, in inhumane ways, during a pandemic + a South African virus variant that's more aggressive. The Minister in charge of social development, said "there's no money" [1]. Revisiting the engineering argument. It talks about fail-safes if the elevator stops working. This partly assumes that the elevator is maintained, because it not plunging is less of a concern than it being stuck for weeks at a time. If governments fulfilled their social duties, the overall cost of living would remain low, those in need of social services would regularly get them (without the strong need to pay people money). This reduces the bang-bang effect mentioned. Productive labour forces also minimise the length of elevator failures. If we look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with a view of universally solving them; we'd be incentivised to optimise for food production (reduce hunger), providing basic + better shelter (reduce homelessness). Play fair with resources to improve safety (colonialisation, domination, creating wars, displacing people, increasing crime). Doing a lot of these things, and addressing the ills of capitalism, become the fail-safes that diminish the preconditions that allow people to argue for basic income (where the recipient is an able-body who is not being productive by choice or circumstance). [0] https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/459738/government-to-look-at-basic-income-grant-for-south-africa-ramaphosa/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/459738/government-to... [1] https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/auntie-theres-no-money-in-here-sassa-beneficiaries-sleep-on-pavements-to-apply-for-grants-20210115 https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/auntie-theres...

rubycon22 6y ago

My philosophy is that basic income will be ultimately a good in the long run, even if there are some amount of people who take advantage of it and ultimately do nothing productive for the rest of their lives. Because I don't want people like that in the workforce anyway. I believe only people who are actually motivated to work, and enjoy their jobs or duties should be there. I really do not want some sadsack of a person who hates their job serving me at a restaurant, who will mess with my food if he feels slighted by me. He should go rot away in a small apartment and leave that position for someone who actually cares. Society should gladly pay these people to keep them away. It's sad that someone who is happy to work, must compete with hundreds of people who dont give a shit, for the same job. I hope that basic income would get rid of much of the competition for jobs like this, which would also mean business owners can no longer take advantage of a big labor pool to pay poor wages.