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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 governme

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
> Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels? You might also ask: Once corporations get a taste of increasing the national debt, how do we prevent them from lobbying politicians to push it to unsustainable levels? As to your actual question, don't worry, the wishes of voters have very little effect on US government policy. > Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, ... Removing UBI from that equation doesn't lead to a better outcome in terms of motivation and purpose, unless you include the motivation and purpose of the unemployed masses fighting an (unwinnable) war against the elites who control the economy and the killbots. Perhaps we need to accept that jobs are just leaky abstractions for motivation and purpose, and governments should be trying to create positive outlets for people's talents and social instincts, rather than constructing ever more dehumanizing ways of punishing people for being poor as incentive to work in pointless jobs.
somethoughts 6y ago
Re: 2 - It'd be kind of interesting if the UBI was tied to a 30 hour work week or 4 day work week. A bit like ok we want to give you money to pursue your dreams but we also want to make sure you have your act together with some cadence so you don't drift off into nowhere-ville. And before you downvote - I'm coming off reading this story which is on the HN front-page where the guy basically created his own UBI and then fell off the map: https://www.wired.com/story/unsettling-truth-mostly-harmless-hiker/ https://www.wired.com/story/unsettling-truth-mostly-harmless...
- rapind 6y ago
  Let’s assume forcing people to work for UBI is a good thing (something I completely disagree with) and focus on the practicality of it instead. As soon as you put in qualifiers it is no longer universal. Inevitably with gatekeepers you will have corruption (controlling who qualifies gives you power) as there is always an incentive. On the flip side you incentivize cheating (loopholes in the qualifiers, lying, etc.) and then all the $ spent staffing and building tools to enforce those qualifiers, then the staff who regulate them, etc. So with good intentions you’ve completely ruined what could have been a very simple, fair, and efficient system. Basically what government does every day (usually with good intentions).
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> 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. You're forgetting the other side of the coin. The money comes from somewhere. Suppose you can fund a $12,000 UBI with a flat 25% tax rate. So now the breakeven point is at $48,000 in income. If you make more than that you don't want to increase the UBI amount because it'll cost you more than it gets you. Whereas you could fund a $15,000 UBI with a flat 35% tax rate. The rate has to be more than proportionally higher because of the negative impact of higher tax rates on economic activity. Now the breakeven point is at ~$43,000 in income. It's lower, so fewer people want to increase it more than that. When the breakeven point has more than half of the population on the other side, you don't have the votes to raise the amount any more. > Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, what percent of humanity will be able to meaningfully contribute? Imagine a world with widespread automation and general or close-to-general AI without a UBI.
- hwbehrens 6y ago
  > you don't want to increase the UBI amount because it'll cost you more than it gets you I think this is an oversimplification, because in practice, there will be a gradient of people around the inflection point who would be willing to take less in order to stop working, and that gradient will vary by the individual and by the job. Additionally, I can also imagine politicians promising increases to the UBI without concomitant tax increases, funded by bonds or other kind of financial mechanisms for monetary injection whose long-term negative externalities would be easy to obfuscate from voters. > Imagine a world with widespread automation and general or close-to-general AI without a UBI. This is the key point. UBI is (in my current opinion) a necessary tool for smoothing an economic transition to a highly-automated level. However, I am concerned that it might induce other economic instabilities such as in tax rates, voluntary or involuntary unemployment, underemployment, inflation, borrowing, minimum wage, and so on -- these instabilities could then spread to social or political disruption that would undermine progress towards the transition that UBI was originally meant to support. Since the size of the UBI would roughly correlate with the size of its influence economically/socially/politically, then as the UBI increases, the variance of these potential instabilities would also increase. As such, increases to the UBI should be carefully controlled, for example by gating them to developmental milestones. Of course, that opens a whole can of worms on who sets the milestones and so on, so I suppose it's really just shrugging and hand-wringing all the way down.

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

> Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels? You might also ask: Once corporations get a taste of increasing the national debt, how do we prevent them from lobbying politicians to push it to unsustainable levels? As to your actual question, don't worry, the wishes of voters have very little effect on US government policy. > Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, ... Removing UBI from that equation doesn't lead to a better outcome in terms of motivation and purpose, unless you include the motivation and purpose of the unemployed masses fighting an (unwinnable) war against the elites who control the economy and the killbots. Perhaps we need to accept that jobs are just leaky abstractions for motivation and purpose, and governments should be trying to create positive outlets for people's talents and social instincts, rather than constructing ever more dehumanizing ways of punishing people for being poor as incentive to work in pointless jobs.

somethoughts 6y ago

Re: 2 - It'd be kind of interesting if the UBI was tied to a 30 hour work week or 4 day work week. A bit like ok we want to give you money to pursue your dreams but we also want to make sure you have your act together with some cadence so you don't drift off into nowhere-ville. And before you downvote - I'm coming off reading this story which is on the HN front-page where the guy basically created his own UBI and then fell off the map: https://www.wired.com/story/unsettling-truth-mostly-harmless-hiker/ https://www.wired.com/story/unsettling-truth-mostly-harmless...

rapind 6y ago
Let’s assume forcing people to work for UBI is a good thing (something I completely disagree with) and focus on the practicality of it instead. As soon as you put in qualifiers it is no longer universal. Inevitably with gatekeepers you will have corruption (controlling who qualifies gives you power) as there is always an incentive. On the flip side you incentivize cheating (loopholes in the qualifiers, lying, etc.) and then all the $ spent staffing and building tools to enforce those qualifiers, then the staff who regulate them, etc. So with good intentions you’ve completely ruined what could have been a very simple, fair, and efficient system. Basically what government does every day (usually with good intentions).

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> 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. You're forgetting the other side of the coin. The money comes from somewhere. Suppose you can fund a $12,000 UBI with a flat 25% tax rate. So now the breakeven point is at $48,000 in income. If you make more than that you don't want to increase the UBI amount because it'll cost you more than it gets you. Whereas you could fund a $15,000 UBI with a flat 35% tax rate. The rate has to be more than proportionally higher because of the negative impact of higher tax rates on economic activity. Now the breakeven point is at ~$43,000 in income. It's lower, so fewer people want to increase it more than that. When the breakeven point has more than half of the population on the other side, you don't have the votes to raise the amount any more. > Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, what percent of humanity will be able to meaningfully contribute? Imagine a world with widespread automation and general or close-to-general AI without a UBI.

hwbehrens 6y ago
> you don't want to increase the UBI amount because it'll cost you more than it gets you I think this is an oversimplification, because in practice, there will be a gradient of people around the inflection point who would be willing to take less in order to stop working, and that gradient will vary by the individual and by the job. Additionally, I can also imagine politicians promising increases to the UBI without concomitant tax increases, funded by bonds or other kind of financial mechanisms for monetary injection whose long-term negative externalities would be easy to obfuscate from voters. > Imagine a world with widespread automation and general or close-to-general AI without a UBI. This is the key point. UBI is (in my current opinion) a necessary tool for smoothing an economic transition to a highly-automated level. However, I am concerned that it might induce other economic instabilities such as in tax rates, voluntary or involuntary unemployment, underemployment, inflation, borrowing, minimum wage, and so on -- these instabilities could then spread to social or political disruption that would undermine progress towards the transition that UBI was originally meant to support. Since the size of the UBI would roughly correlate with the size of its influence economically/socially/politically, then as the UBI increases, the variance of these potential instabilities would also increase. As such, increases to the UBI should be carefully controlled, for example by gating them to developmental milestones. Of course, that opens a whole can of worms on who sets the milestones and so on, so I suppose it's really just shrugging and hand-wringing all the way down.