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Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then pric

Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then prices will go up. When you have 200 million apples and 300 million people then UBI won't get the 100 million people an apple. Growing more apples does. And this same process would apply to virtually every good and service people consume. You might be right on rent, but that would probably exacerbate the price of goods problem further since there would be fewer people willing to do those jobs. UBI will only make people better off if more goods and services are produced as a result of it. Or alternatively, if goods and services are somehow moved from excessive consumption by the rich to the poor. But that last part is probably a drop in the bucket. Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.

dtech 5y ago
This argument is usually countered by pointing out that a lot of our production is mechanized nowadays, and this percentage is only increasing. Currently capital owners take the overwhelming majority of the gains from that, UBI tries to shift that more to everyone. UBI won't prevent more apples from being produced. You rightly point out that that does not apply to supply-inflexible goods like housing in cities.
dgb23 5y ago
We already have that productivity and more, but we waste it. Artificial scarcity is created by producing machines that intentionally break, bunkering and throwing away stuff, patent trolling and so on. UBI alone likely won’t fix this though.
enaaem 5y ago
The Saudi Arabia way is to bring in third world country workers. They have tons of natural resources per capita though, so I don’t think this luxury applies to most countries in the world.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Except that repeated experiments have found that raising wages and improving working conditions raises productivity and efficiency. Costs of good sold doesn't go up, so there's no need to raise prices. People who are able to focus on their work because they can pay their bills, have good working conditions, are healthy and able to care for their families work better. Big surprise. Of course there's an upper limit to this - if you're paying your apple pickers more than the retail price of the apples then you're going to be in trouble. But in those cases, the price of apples needs to be higher so that apple pickers can have some basic human dignity. Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.
- LunaSea 5y ago
  No large scale experiment exists for UBI.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    But the experiments that have been done support it. There's this set of objections to UBI based around "yes, ok, it works in the small scale, but it'll never work on a large scale". If we did a large scale experiment, and it confirms that it works, the objections will move to "sure, OK, but it'll never work on a national level". So let's just implement it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      > But the experiments that have been done support it. They really, really don't. All the experiments on a small scale show is the trivial conclusion that if you give people some central government funds for a year or two, they tend to be slightly less poor at the end. None of them come remotely close to suggesting that people are so much more productive that they can cover the costs of UBI to people already out of the labour force by choice, never mind those that may choose to exit it in future.
    - LunaSea 5y ago
      > If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve. Only if the country still has the ability to change and the economy isn't permanently damaged.
      - efaref 5y ago
        I think we can always manage to let people starve.
        dbsmith83 5y ago
        Disingenuous argument which completely ignores the ramifications of severe economic downturn on a global stage.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn’t address that point. “UBI” isn’t actually a specific plan, its a broad concept within which there are many specific plans. But the broad concept itself does address this, though many of the more detailed plans do so in…more detail. At a high level, one of the central points of UBI as a replacement for traditional means-tested welfare (and why some of its earliest advocates were right-libertarians, not lefties, such as Milton Friedman who advocated “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI) is that it eliminates the disincentives to earning outside income that come with the sharp (sometimes greater than 1:1 when aggregated across all benefit programs a person qualifies for) funding reductions for outside income that come with means tested benefit programs, increasing the marginal reward (and thus incentive) to work. > Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner. No, they generally don’t. Oh, sure, that might be true by mass, or even by calories; but not by labor-hours of work that went into it, or dollar cost, which is what is relevant here. And that’s true across all categories of consumption.
- compressedgas 5y ago
  > “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income. They are the same; both have the effect that benefits are “drawn down” through marginal taxation of outside income, though Friedman’s specific NIT proposal had an exceptionally high (though still lower than the effective drawdown rates often faced by means-tested benefit recipients) marginal rate (50%) for the the below-break-even bracket (essentially, the bracket whose outside income was less than “Effective UBI”/(bottom tax rate)), which most UBI proponents would reject in favor of consistently progressive rates. But this isn’t an inherent feature of generalized negative income tax.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
cryptica 5y ago
Whether or not individuals benefit from UBI isn't the point. The point is that it changes the nature of money printing in our economy from being top-down to being bottom-up and it changes the dynamics of how companies operate to get those dollars. The effects on individuals and prices hardly matters at all. Right now we have a trickle-down economy which caters primarily to the needs of institutions and big capital holders. This is why our society is so politically charged and divided and why we have such fast growing inequality. We're already essentially giving institutions and capital holders free money through capital appreciation. We need to give some free money to those at the bottom too or else it's not fair and it will lead to a revolution sooner or later.
dagw 5y ago
Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then prices will go up. An alternative is to greatly increase temporary work visas, and make those immigrants exempt from getting UBI as a clause in their immigration visa. Of course this might lead to other issues.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Ok, this actually proves why it cannot work. UBI as a unemployment benefit replacement cannot apply to immigrants (to prevent abuse) thus we get a two class system where people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back. However, UBI funded by taxes on bad behavior can still work but it would not act as a replacement for unemployment benefits.
  - dagw 5y ago
    people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back. They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. That seems to worth a lot to a lot of people. You are of course right about the very obvious two class system it will create and the long term social consequences of such a system are tricky to predict. Edit: The US birthright citizenship rules might actually make this harder to implement.
    - foogazi 5y ago
      > They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. If this is so good why the need for a UBI for citizens in the first place?
      - dagw 5y ago
        Because the US should want to provide a better quality of life for its citizens than what those people feeling and risking everything in a desperate attempt to get into the US have in their home countries.
Stranger43 5y ago
Yes according to the textbooks, production should go down if you remove desperation as a motivator to work, in the real world however almost every data point collected shows the opposite effect on the overall productivity, ie societies with extensive welfare schemes outproduce those who don't allow people an exit from the rat-race. Nobody have gone full UBI yet but the economies that have gone the closest to actually implementing UBI(say Scandinavia) is among the most productive and healthy economies around. What does tend to happen when a system is put in place to provide support for those who refuses to accept any employment, is that the ability for wealth hoarders to use their hoards as a lever go gain more wealth and power declines as the bargaining power gets more even. One of the benefits of universal(non-means-tested) welfare project is that the graft and administration overhead of those systems tend to be much lower then "charity" based welfare projects and UBI is the ultimate in low overhead universal welfare. And when you look at the structure of most post-industrial economies admin overhead and graft is more then 50% of the economy, i.e. it's by no means a given that we cannot keep up production of goods and services with even 60% of the population of UBI.
jacobr1 5y ago
This is only a fundamental problem if UBI is so high there is no incentive to work whatsoever. Every UBI proposal I've seen puts the income level at, or some small fraction above, the poverty line. The majority of adults (currently) earning more than that are unlikely to want to lower their standards of living. Some will, sure, but not most. And likewise many of those in poverty would be willing to work to raise their standing of living beyond UBI, especially if they have more of an economic cushion to find a better position. So I don't think we need worry about everyone stopping working. What we need to consider is the marginal effect of the small population that does. If the unemployment rates doubles, what impact would that have on the economy? There is a lot to figure out with a problem like that, but it is a different caliber of problem from total economic meltdown.

dtech 5y ago

This argument is usually countered by pointing out that a lot of our production is mechanized nowadays, and this percentage is only increasing. Currently capital owners take the overwhelming majority of the gains from that, UBI tries to shift that more to everyone. UBI won't prevent more apples from being produced. You rightly point out that that does not apply to supply-inflexible goods like housing in cities.

dgb23 5y ago

We already have that productivity and more, but we waste it. Artificial scarcity is created by producing machines that intentionally break, bunkering and throwing away stuff, patent trolling and so on. UBI alone likely won’t fix this though.

enaaem 5y ago

The Saudi Arabia way is to bring in third world country workers. They have tons of natural resources per capita though, so I don’t think this luxury applies to most countries in the world.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Except that repeated experiments have found that raising wages and improving working conditions raises productivity and efficiency. Costs of good sold doesn't go up, so there's no need to raise prices. People who are able to focus on their work because they can pay their bills, have good working conditions, are healthy and able to care for their families work better. Big surprise. Of course there's an upper limit to this - if you're paying your apple pickers more than the retail price of the apples then you're going to be in trouble. But in those cases, the price of apples needs to be higher so that apple pickers can have some basic human dignity. Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.

LunaSea 5y ago
No large scale experiment exists for UBI.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  But the experiments that have been done support it. There's this set of objections to UBI based around "yes, ok, it works in the small scale, but it'll never work on a large scale". If we did a large scale experiment, and it confirms that it works, the objections will move to "sure, OK, but it'll never work on a national level". So let's just implement it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    > But the experiments that have been done support it. They really, really don't. All the experiments on a small scale show is the trivial conclusion that if you give people some central government funds for a year or two, they tend to be slightly less poor at the end. None of them come remotely close to suggesting that people are so much more productive that they can cover the costs of UBI to people already out of the labour force by choice, never mind those that may choose to exit it in future.
  - LunaSea 5y ago
    > If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve. Only if the country still has the ability to change and the economy isn't permanently damaged.
    - efaref 5y ago
      I think we can always manage to let people starve.
      - dbsmith83 5y ago
        Disingenuous argument which completely ignores the ramifications of severe economic downturn on a global stage.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn’t address that point. “UBI” isn’t actually a specific plan, its a broad concept within which there are many specific plans. But the broad concept itself does address this, though many of the more detailed plans do so in…more detail. At a high level, one of the central points of UBI as a replacement for traditional means-tested welfare (and why some of its earliest advocates were right-libertarians, not lefties, such as Milton Friedman who advocated “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI) is that it eliminates the disincentives to earning outside income that come with the sharp (sometimes greater than 1:1 when aggregated across all benefit programs a person qualifies for) funding reductions for outside income that come with means tested benefit programs, increasing the marginal reward (and thus incentive) to work. > Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner. No, they generally don’t. Oh, sure, that might be true by mass, or even by calories; but not by labor-hours of work that went into it, or dollar cost, which is what is relevant here. And that’s true across all categories of consumption.

compressedgas 5y ago
> “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income. They are the same; both have the effect that benefits are “drawn down” through marginal taxation of outside income, though Friedman’s specific NIT proposal had an exceptionally high (though still lower than the effective drawdown rates often faced by means-tested benefit recipients) marginal rate (50%) for the the below-break-even bracket (essentially, the bracket whose outside income was less than “Effective UBI”/(bottom tax rate)), which most UBI proponents would reject in favor of consistently progressive rates. But this isn’t an inherent feature of generalized negative income tax.
- sokoloff 5y ago

cryptica 5y ago

Whether or not individuals benefit from UBI isn't the point. The point is that it changes the nature of money printing in our economy from being top-down to being bottom-up and it changes the dynamics of how companies operate to get those dollars. The effects on individuals and prices hardly matters at all. Right now we have a trickle-down economy which caters primarily to the needs of institutions and big capital holders. This is why our society is so politically charged and divided and why we have such fast growing inequality. We're already essentially giving institutions and capital holders free money through capital appreciation. We need to give some free money to those at the bottom too or else it's not fair and it will lead to a revolution sooner or later.

dagw 5y ago

Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then prices will go up. An alternative is to greatly increase temporary work visas, and make those immigrants exempt from getting UBI as a clause in their immigration visa. Of course this might lead to other issues.

imtringued 5y ago
Ok, this actually proves why it cannot work. UBI as a unemployment benefit replacement cannot apply to immigrants (to prevent abuse) thus we get a two class system where people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back. However, UBI funded by taxes on bad behavior can still work but it would not act as a replacement for unemployment benefits.
- dagw 5y ago
  people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back. They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. That seems to worth a lot to a lot of people. You are of course right about the very obvious two class system it will create and the long term social consequences of such a system are tricky to predict. Edit: The US birthright citizenship rules might actually make this harder to implement.
  - foogazi 5y ago
    > They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. If this is so good why the need for a UBI for citizens in the first place?
    - dagw 5y ago
      Because the US should want to provide a better quality of life for its citizens than what those people feeling and risking everything in a desperate attempt to get into the US have in their home countries.

Stranger43 5y ago

Yes according to the textbooks, production should go down if you remove desperation as a motivator to work, in the real world however almost every data point collected shows the opposite effect on the overall productivity, ie societies with extensive welfare schemes outproduce those who don't allow people an exit from the rat-race. Nobody have gone full UBI yet but the economies that have gone the closest to actually implementing UBI(say Scandinavia) is among the most productive and healthy economies around. What does tend to happen when a system is put in place to provide support for those who refuses to accept any employment, is that the ability for wealth hoarders to use their hoards as a lever go gain more wealth and power declines as the bargaining power gets more even. One of the benefits of universal(non-means-tested) welfare project is that the graft and administration overhead of those systems tend to be much lower then "charity" based welfare projects and UBI is the ultimate in low overhead universal welfare. And when you look at the structure of most post-industrial economies admin overhead and graft is more then 50% of the economy, i.e. it's by no means a given that we cannot keep up production of goods and services with even 60% of the population of UBI.

jacobr1 5y ago

This is only a fundamental problem if UBI is so high there is no incentive to work whatsoever. Every UBI proposal I've seen puts the income level at, or some small fraction above, the poverty line. The majority of adults (currently) earning more than that are unlikely to want to lower their standards of living. Some will, sure, but not most. And likewise many of those in poverty would be willing to work to raise their standing of living beyond UBI, especially if they have more of an economic cushion to find a better position. So I don't think we need worry about everyone stopping working. What we need to consider is the marginal effect of the small population that does. If the unemployment rates doubles, what impact would that have on the economy? There is a lot to figure out with a problem like that, but it is a different caliber of problem from total economic meltdown.