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Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit

Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.

anonporridge 5y ago
I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.
- nickpp 5y ago
  You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index. No need to wait for the State to do it for you.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index No, you can't get an equal share with every other citizen that way, especially if you are a lower-class worker without substantial surplus income.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today. I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
        nickpp 5y ago
        The greatest mass-pulling out of poverty I personally witnessed in my lifetime was when the communist states of Eastern Europe moved to capitalism. More of that, please.
        yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Capitalism is very good at allocating capital and as a result innovating to increase the "ceiling" of the human experience. Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor". UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees). If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc. [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-home/#:~:text=However%2C%2034%25%20reported%20not%20having,not%20available%20in%20their%20area https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-ho.... and this is in the USA in-spite of charity, government subsidies and regulations for getting more access to the internet.
        e4e78a06 5y ago
        The floor of the human experience is not what got us to the moon and invented the transistor. > Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Assuming you're not living as a poverty level wage slave and regularly have to choose between buying food and medicine, then sure.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Indeed, getting people out of poverty is a different issue, an issue no redistribution system has solved yet.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        That's just objectively not true - welfare systems stop people from becoming homeless or starving in the street all the time. Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
        nickpp 5y ago
        It’s not about caring, it’s about results. Capitalism is the only system that pulled both countries and people out of poverty, because it’s the best system at motivating people to create value. Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Social democracy is still capitalism, it just redirects some taxes into a welfare program. If eliminating poverty is the end goal then we need a safety net for those who fail.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Social democracy is still capitalism It's still capitalism in much the same way that capitalism is still feudalism.
  - sharkjacobs 5y ago
    > every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state > buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index There are some pretty big differences between these
    - nickpp 5y ago
      There is an even bigger difference in that one exists and works today while the other requires a huge experiment in the way modern society works.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      A better analogy is that you already an ownership share in the nation state with citizenship - you have voting rights, a court system that works for you, you benefit monetarily by having a secure military and police force (thus not needing to directly pay for bodyguards or protection from some sort of mafia).
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  I conceptualize it as a cryptocurrency w/ single identity, a max wallet amount (10 million perhaps -the rest is taxed 100%), and a utilization score...basically where those who make more transactions and hold less in their wallet get more UBI paid into it... then there just needs to be a mechanism to make the coin 'stable' to where 1 coin is about a loaf of bread... it'd need to maybe have separate account types though and gets a little murky around how businesses accept the coin.... and how that plays into the max-limit (goal being to limit inequality..and basically have a max un-equalness, where you've essentially "won the monopoly game" and now you can go out and help others win too...).
giantg2 5y ago
How does the economics look for that? It would seem many would be disincentivized to work, which would raise wages in order to attract work, which would make the basic income worth less.
- yunwal 5y ago
  Wages would presumably raise prices only in industries that can't be heavily automated. As a result, industries that are automatible will have lower prices, while industries that require human labor will have inflated prices. In the end, those who make close to minimum wage are probably better off, since they can afford more of the automated things, and those who automate things are probably better off since they have more people to sell to. Those who are well off but don't automate things will probably be about even, since they'll need to pay more for human labor, but will receive UBI and automation benefits.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    This doesn't make sense to me. Rising wages means more competition over the same resources, leading to inflation. Even inflation in some industries/products will affect the CPI. Where would the UBI come from? Presumably it would be from those who automate. This means your claim of lower prices will likely be marginal - the people need to support themselves whether they or a robot does the work. So UBI would mostly offset.
    - gremlinsinc 5y ago
      UBI would hopefully come from land-value taxes. This has been debated a lot and seems to be one of the best methods. Another would be making every American turn in their bank accounts into a single account, and slap a limit on how much you can have in there.... whether that's 50 million or 20 billion... piss off the billionaire class for sure, but who cares. Inequality shouldn't be that out of whack anyways and having a max speed on it could encourage better equality. Personally if I had UBI I'd work more on side-projects and try to get some recurring income coming in...I'm still trying to do that but it's harder w/ all the distractions of doing client/freelance work..and the depression when I can't meet bills because I'm having a ADHD poor-motivation month, or anti-social-can't be bothered w/ marketing to find new clients month... both of which seem like every month since the Pandemic began... I'd hope a lot more people would actually go into science fields and do research when they can afford to go to school and have a guaranteed home and basic necessities... Honestly a utopia to me would see 95% of kids becoming scientists and technologists, the rest in the arts... and everything else being automated and we work on solving things like aging, space travel, and climate change.
mountainriver 5y ago
I donno, we already have automation doing a lot of things today. Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination and tools like this make us more capable than ever. The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination" How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    I think he's saying something approximately like: there are likely jobs we can't think of yet that will pop up. They always have. Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      To a certain extent that is true. But it matters where those jobs are eliminated. Usually the jobs that replace lower jobs or offset the automation are higher level. Do we actually believe that everyone in society is able to work the higher level jobs? I would think the jobs would need to align to the population's potential.
      - pizza234 5y ago
        To a certain extent, high level jobs of today are low level jobs of tomorrow. Imagine what one can do today with just a mobile phone, compared to what could be done 50 years ago. Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners. With basic income, that's still true. With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
0xy 5y ago
This would be a plausible argument if automation of farming agriculture resulted in 90% of the population being destitute (the vast majority of humans used to work in agri). On the contrary, extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever since agricultural automation was introduced. So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers. This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free. That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
autoexec 5y ago
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners. The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment. I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority

Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.

anonporridge 5y ago

I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.

nickpp 5y ago
You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index. No need to wait for the State to do it for you.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index No, you can't get an equal share with every other citizen that way, especially if you are a lower-class worker without substantial surplus income.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today. I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        The greatest mass-pulling out of poverty I personally witnessed in my lifetime was when the communist states of Eastern Europe moved to capitalism. More of that, please.
        yazaddaruvala 5y ago
        Capitalism is very good at allocating capital and as a result innovating to increase the "ceiling" of the human experience. Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor". UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees). If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc. [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-home/#:~:text=However%2C%2034%25%20reported%20not%20having,not%20available%20in%20their%20area https://usafacts.org/articles/internet-access-students-at-ho.... and this is in the USA in-spite of charity, government subsidies and regulations for getting more access to the internet.
        e4e78a06 5y ago
        The floor of the human experience is not what got us to the moon and invented the transistor. > Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Assuming you're not living as a poverty level wage slave and regularly have to choose between buying food and medicine, then sure.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Indeed, getting people out of poverty is a different issue, an issue no redistribution system has solved yet.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      That's just objectively not true - welfare systems stop people from becoming homeless or starving in the street all the time. Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        It’s not about caring, it’s about results. Capitalism is the only system that pulled both countries and people out of poverty, because it’s the best system at motivating people to create value. Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Social democracy is still capitalism, it just redirects some taxes into a welfare program. If eliminating poverty is the end goal then we need a safety net for those who fail.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Social democracy is still capitalism It's still capitalism in much the same way that capitalism is still feudalism.
- sharkjacobs 5y ago
  > every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state > buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index There are some pretty big differences between these
  - nickpp 5y ago
    There is an even bigger difference in that one exists and works today while the other requires a huge experiment in the way modern society works.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    A better analogy is that you already an ownership share in the nation state with citizenship - you have voting rights, a court system that works for you, you benefit monetarily by having a secure military and police force (thus not needing to directly pay for bodyguards or protection from some sort of mafia).
gremlinsinc 5y ago
I conceptualize it as a cryptocurrency w/ single identity, a max wallet amount (10 million perhaps -the rest is taxed 100%), and a utilization score...basically where those who make more transactions and hold less in their wallet get more UBI paid into it... then there just needs to be a mechanism to make the coin 'stable' to where 1 coin is about a loaf of bread... it'd need to maybe have separate account types though and gets a little murky around how businesses accept the coin.... and how that plays into the max-limit (goal being to limit inequality..and basically have a max un-equalness, where you've essentially "won the monopoly game" and now you can go out and help others win too...).

giantg2 5y ago

How does the economics look for that? It would seem many would be disincentivized to work, which would raise wages in order to attract work, which would make the basic income worth less.

yunwal 5y ago
Wages would presumably raise prices only in industries that can't be heavily automated. As a result, industries that are automatible will have lower prices, while industries that require human labor will have inflated prices. In the end, those who make close to minimum wage are probably better off, since they can afford more of the automated things, and those who automate things are probably better off since they have more people to sell to. Those who are well off but don't automate things will probably be about even, since they'll need to pay more for human labor, but will receive UBI and automation benefits.
- giantg2 5y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. Rising wages means more competition over the same resources, leading to inflation. Even inflation in some industries/products will affect the CPI. Where would the UBI come from? Presumably it would be from those who automate. This means your claim of lower prices will likely be marginal - the people need to support themselves whether they or a robot does the work. So UBI would mostly offset.
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    UBI would hopefully come from land-value taxes. This has been debated a lot and seems to be one of the best methods. Another would be making every American turn in their bank accounts into a single account, and slap a limit on how much you can have in there.... whether that's 50 million or 20 billion... piss off the billionaire class for sure, but who cares. Inequality shouldn't be that out of whack anyways and having a max speed on it could encourage better equality. Personally if I had UBI I'd work more on side-projects and try to get some recurring income coming in...I'm still trying to do that but it's harder w/ all the distractions of doing client/freelance work..and the depression when I can't meet bills because I'm having a ADHD poor-motivation month, or anti-social-can't be bothered w/ marketing to find new clients month... both of which seem like every month since the Pandemic began... I'd hope a lot more people would actually go into science fields and do research when they can afford to go to school and have a guaranteed home and basic necessities... Honestly a utopia to me would see 95% of kids becoming scientists and technologists, the rest in the arts... and everything else being automated and we work on solving things like aging, space travel, and climate change.

mountainriver 5y ago

I donno, we already have automation doing a lot of things today. Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination and tools like this make us more capable than ever. The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.

giantg2 5y ago
"Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination" How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  I think he's saying something approximately like: there are likely jobs we can't think of yet that will pop up. They always have. Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    To a certain extent that is true. But it matters where those jobs are eliminated. Usually the jobs that replace lower jobs or offset the automation are higher level. Do we actually believe that everyone in society is able to work the higher level jobs? I would think the jobs would need to align to the population's potential.
    - pizza234 5y ago
      To a certain extent, high level jobs of today are low level jobs of tomorrow. Imagine what one can do today with just a mobile phone, compared to what could be done 50 years ago. Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners. With basic income, that's still true. With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.

0xy 5y ago

This would be a plausible argument if automation of farming agriculture resulted in 90% of the population being destitute (the vast majority of humans used to work in agri). On the contrary, extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever since agricultural automation was introduced. So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers. This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free. That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.

autoexec 5y ago

> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners. The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment. I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority