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1) Everyone, even those with extreme wealth, can be helped to see the benefit of raising the floor for everyone. There is a non zero possibility that anyone can

1) Everyone, even those with extreme wealth, can be helped to see the benefit of raising the floor for everyone. There is a non zero possibility that anyone can lose their wealth, or their children or grandchildren end up losing it. In a world increasing ravaged by automation, UBI is an insurance policy not only for those in need now, but possibly for you and your progeny. 2) Wealthy elites will end up just as poor and desperate if there's no one to buy the output of their companies, rent their properties, or do the real work that keeps civilization running because we fall into a social death spiral as more and more people get left behind and the rumblings of violent revolution grows.

wyager 5y ago
Free handouts don't "raise the floor" in a sustainable, long-term, or asymptotically effective way. Every dollar spent on UBI would yield better returns being invested in essentially any kind of R&D, unless your time preference is very high.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mlyle 5y ago
  Right now, there's welfare cliffs and other problems with benefits that make it difficult to climb out of benefit dependency. In turn, current programs incentivize people to not do things that increase their income. https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/advancing-careers-for-low-income-families/what-are-benefits-cliffs https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/... A UBI, instead, eliminates these problems and ensures there's always a reason to increase your income. This in turn removes deadweight costs, improves economic efficiency, and can be expected to produce gains that will compound over time. Yes, letting the poor starve to death might be more fiscally efficient, as long as they don't riot or anything. But most don't view this as a reasonable policy option.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >current programs incentivize people to not do things that increase their income. At what point do they have "enough" income? At what point can we stop chasing more money? The USA already has a really high average income. Why do we need more?
    - wyager 5y ago
      I want the standard of living to increase. What is hard to understand about that?
    - wonderwonder 5y ago
      When the top 1% makes more income than the entire bottom 50% that average can look pretty skewed.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        If you are going to compare income of different people, can you please indicate the geographical region you pick, and how you decided on the size? For instance, the income distribution of people within Beverly Hills is probably pretty OK - no need to redistribute anything there! But if you zoom out, you can look at the entire world and realize that the poorest of the USA are richer than many people around the world and should pay their welfare
        tacitusarc 5y ago
        As a US citizen, I feel my first duty is to my country. There are enough problems at home without trying to fix the world.
        wonderwonder 5y ago
        Since we are speaking about the US, the numbers I provided were us specific and anything that is done would be financed via us taxes, I'm pretty confident everyone knows I'm referring to the US as a whole. "realize that the poorest of the USA are richer than many people around the world and should pay their welfare" Why should us taxes subsidize world welfare (not that it already doesn't)?
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  Doesn't this argument justify stopping ANY spending that is not R&D? For example, a dollar spent on healthcare keeping a chronically sick person alive is a dollar that could instead have improved the welfare of all future generations. Is there a version of this argument that doesn't throw grandpa under the bus?
  - wyager 5y ago
    Yes, for any given time preference there exist capital allocations with equilibrated marginal returns between consumption vs capital investment. I'd argue we're not in one of those allocations, and if we are it must be associated with an extremely high time preference, and UBI would make it worse.
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      I agree your statement is logically correct from a utilitarian standpoint. There's a little bit of "spherical cow" involved though. A more detailed model would recognise that R&D spend is not pure investment, and UBI would not be pure consumption. Whether non-zero UBI today would good policy or not depends on an enormous number of facts about the world that I think it would be very difficult to come to an agreement on. For example, at what level diminishing returns from R&D spending kick in, and whether UBI apart from increasing immediate welfare has any compounding benefits (human capital, civil cohesion, education, business starts, citizen science) vs mostly benefiting landlords and netflix. I expect our priors are quite different.
      - wyager 5y ago
        I think we mostly agree except on our level of optimism about how UBI will realistically be spent. I would argue that my pessimism is extremely well-founded because present material conditions are an extremely strong (if noisy) indicator of an individual's capital allocation efficiency. If someone is in a position to start a successful business, or engage in productive citizen science, they are overwhelmingly less likely to be a net beneficiary of any welfare scheme. I think there is a pessimistic utilitarian argument for welfare just because people have concave/risk-averse utility functions (of wealth) and it's possible that the dollar-cheap utility gains for people close to zero might outweigh the higher-order costs, but it strikes me as somewhat fantastical to imagine that there might be meaningful financial gains from a welfare scheme, because people with more welfare money might use the money to read a book or start a successful business or something.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Don't think of it as a free handout. Think of it as a dividend on your citizenship. Every person a shareholder of the nation.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    Which is pretty much Alaska.
  - CMCDragonkai 5y ago
    Wouldn't that mean UBI should divided a proportion of annual GDP?
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      Sure, pegging it to GDP sounds like not a bad idea. As the nation gets more productive, everyone's effective UBI goes up. If the real value of the UBI gets to be too high and too many people stop working in balance with automated labor, then GDP starts to decline and people start getting worse off and increasingly incentivized to find some productive work to do. Seems like it could end up being a self balancing system.
      - tacitusarc 5y ago
        In fact instead of lending Fed inflation dollars to big banks, we could partially fund a UBI with those same dollars!
  - wyager 5y ago
    The US isn't a corporation, it doesn't own my productive output, and random UBI recipients never paid for their shares. If you set up a country with this idea from the start (a profit-seeking corporation with transferable shares), it might be a good idea, but probably no net beneficiaries of UBI would have shareholder status.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    That analogy only works if we get UBI paid by profit of weapons sales, not taxes. Otherwise UBI is like your employer keeping half your paycheck and distributing 30% of the money to everybody, whether they earned it or not, while keeping 20% to administer the redistribution.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 5y ago
  Citation needed. Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills - which could have a much higher return than the centrally-planned kind.
  - wyager 5y ago
    > Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills Common sense. Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI will use additional marginal cash to do things like smoke weed and watch cartoons. Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). > which could have a much higher return than the centrally-planned kind. I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting me invest it myself. My suggestion is not to increase taxes and give the money to R&D departments - my suggestion is to not take more of my money at all. The fact that R&D is better than UBI only tells us that if we were to increase central planning at the margins, UBI is almost certainly not the utilitarian way to do it.
    - lmm 5y ago
      > Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI > Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary. > I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting me invest it myself. The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically than unstructured ones suggests you're wrong.
      - wyager 5y ago
        > The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary. If I get a check for $1,000 every month and I lose $5,000 on taxes every month, I'm not really a beneficiary. This is a wealth redistribution scheme. The wealth is being redistributed from people who are self-evidently efficient capital allocators to people who are self-evidently not. (That's a Bayesian judgement, not an absolute one.) > The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically Please, I'd love to hear how "organized society" is synonymous with "welfare programs".
- austhrow743 5y ago
  What kind of returns?
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  Economist Michael Hudson likes to remind people that Hammurabi created debt jubilees to increase overall wealth at the expense of debt. The more I think about the more I think there are some lessons there.

wyager 5y ago

Free handouts don't "raise the floor" in a sustainable, long-term, or asymptotically effective way. Every dollar spent on UBI would yield better returns being invested in essentially any kind of R&D, unless your time preference is very high.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mlyle 5y ago
Right now, there's welfare cliffs and other problems with benefits that make it difficult to climb out of benefit dependency. In turn, current programs incentivize people to not do things that increase their income. https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/advancing-careers-for-low-income-families/what-are-benefits-cliffs https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/... A UBI, instead, eliminates these problems and ensures there's always a reason to increase your income. This in turn removes deadweight costs, improves economic efficiency, and can be expected to produce gains that will compound over time. Yes, letting the poor starve to death might be more fiscally efficient, as long as they don't riot or anything. But most don't view this as a reasonable policy option.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >current programs incentivize people to not do things that increase their income. At what point do they have "enough" income? At what point can we stop chasing more money? The USA already has a really high average income. Why do we need more?
  - wyager 5y ago
    I want the standard of living to increase. What is hard to understand about that?
  - wonderwonder 5y ago
    When the top 1% makes more income than the entire bottom 50% that average can look pretty skewed.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      If you are going to compare income of different people, can you please indicate the geographical region you pick, and how you decided on the size? For instance, the income distribution of people within Beverly Hills is probably pretty OK - no need to redistribute anything there! But if you zoom out, you can look at the entire world and realize that the poorest of the USA are richer than many people around the world and should pay their welfare
      - tacitusarc 5y ago
        As a US citizen, I feel my first duty is to my country. There are enough problems at home without trying to fix the world.
      - wonderwonder 5y ago
        Since we are speaking about the US, the numbers I provided were us specific and anything that is done would be financed via us taxes, I'm pretty confident everyone knows I'm referring to the US as a whole. "realize that the poorest of the USA are richer than many people around the world and should pay their welfare" Why should us taxes subsidize world welfare (not that it already doesn't)?
xyzzy123 5y ago
Doesn't this argument justify stopping ANY spending that is not R&D? For example, a dollar spent on healthcare keeping a chronically sick person alive is a dollar that could instead have improved the welfare of all future generations. Is there a version of this argument that doesn't throw grandpa under the bus?
- wyager 5y ago
  Yes, for any given time preference there exist capital allocations with equilibrated marginal returns between consumption vs capital investment. I'd argue we're not in one of those allocations, and if we are it must be associated with an extremely high time preference, and UBI would make it worse.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    I agree your statement is logically correct from a utilitarian standpoint. There's a little bit of "spherical cow" involved though. A more detailed model would recognise that R&D spend is not pure investment, and UBI would not be pure consumption. Whether non-zero UBI today would good policy or not depends on an enormous number of facts about the world that I think it would be very difficult to come to an agreement on. For example, at what level diminishing returns from R&D spending kick in, and whether UBI apart from increasing immediate welfare has any compounding benefits (human capital, civil cohesion, education, business starts, citizen science) vs mostly benefiting landlords and netflix. I expect our priors are quite different.
    - wyager 5y ago
      I think we mostly agree except on our level of optimism about how UBI will realistically be spent. I would argue that my pessimism is extremely well-founded because present material conditions are an extremely strong (if noisy) indicator of an individual's capital allocation efficiency. If someone is in a position to start a successful business, or engage in productive citizen science, they are overwhelmingly less likely to be a net beneficiary of any welfare scheme. I think there is a pessimistic utilitarian argument for welfare just because people have concave/risk-averse utility functions (of wealth) and it's possible that the dollar-cheap utility gains for people close to zero might outweigh the higher-order costs, but it strikes me as somewhat fantastical to imagine that there might be meaningful financial gains from a welfare scheme, because people with more welfare money might use the money to read a book or start a successful business or something.
anonporridge 5y ago
Don't think of it as a free handout. Think of it as a dividend on your citizenship. Every person a shareholder of the nation.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Which is pretty much Alaska.
- CMCDragonkai 5y ago
  Wouldn't that mean UBI should divided a proportion of annual GDP?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Sure, pegging it to GDP sounds like not a bad idea. As the nation gets more productive, everyone's effective UBI goes up. If the real value of the UBI gets to be too high and too many people stop working in balance with automated labor, then GDP starts to decline and people start getting worse off and increasingly incentivized to find some productive work to do. Seems like it could end up being a self balancing system.
    - tacitusarc 5y ago
      In fact instead of lending Fed inflation dollars to big banks, we could partially fund a UBI with those same dollars!
- wyager 5y ago
  The US isn't a corporation, it doesn't own my productive output, and random UBI recipients never paid for their shares. If you set up a country with this idea from the start (a profit-seeking corporation with transferable shares), it might be a good idea, but probably no net beneficiaries of UBI would have shareholder status.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  That analogy only works if we get UBI paid by profit of weapons sales, not taxes. Otherwise UBI is like your employer keeping half your paycheck and distributing 30% of the money to everybody, whether they earned it or not, while keeping 20% to administer the redistribution.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lmm 5y ago
Citation needed. Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills - which could have a much higher return than the centrally-planned kind.
- wyager 5y ago
  > Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills Common sense. Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI will use additional marginal cash to do things like smoke weed and watch cartoons. Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). > which could have a much higher return than the centrally-planned kind. I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting me invest it myself. My suggestion is not to increase taxes and give the money to R&D departments - my suggestion is to not take more of my money at all. The fact that R&D is better than UBI only tells us that if we were to increase central planning at the margins, UBI is almost certainly not the utilitarian way to do it.
  - lmm 5y ago
    > Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI > Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary. > I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting me invest it myself. The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically than unstructured ones suggests you're wrong.
    - wyager 5y ago
      > The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary. If I get a check for $1,000 every month and I lose $5,000 on taxes every month, I'm not really a beneficiary. This is a wealth redistribution scheme. The wealth is being redistributed from people who are self-evidently efficient capital allocators to people who are self-evidently not. (That's a Bayesian judgement, not an absolute one.) > The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically Please, I'd love to hear how "organized society" is synonymous with "welfare programs".
austhrow743 5y ago
What kind of returns?
arminiusreturns 5y ago
Economist Michael Hudson likes to remind people that Hammurabi created debt jubilees to increase overall wealth at the expense of debt. The more I think about the more I think there are some lessons there.