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> 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 every

• 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".
    • lmm 5y ago
      > This is a wealth redistribution scheme. At first order it is, but at first order virtually any policy involves moving wealth around, and at first order any such thing is zero-sum. > from people who are self-evidently efficient capital allocators to people who are self-evidently not. Given that the biggest factor affecting income is parental class, that seems far from self-evident. More importantly, if we want to encourage the kind of higher risk tolerance that increases overall productivity on average, taking a chunk of upside to eliminate the downside makes sense. Putting $1m into a 50-50 chance that will produce $10m of value if it works out but leave you destitute if it doesn't is a positive for society, but irrational at an individual level; a tax system that leaves you with $5m if it works out and $50k if it doesn't aligns the incentives better. We already see that people who are lucky enough to have that kind of safety net by coincidence (e.g. rich families/friends) tend to be more entrepreneurial and willing to take the risks that do pay off than people who don't. > Please, I'd love to hear how "organized society" is synonymous with "welfare programs". I mean you can go right back to the Roman Empire and "bread and circuses". Organised society has always meant some level of support for those on the bottom.
      • wyager 5y ago
        > Given that the biggest factor affecting income is parental class This isn't actually true; it's one possible explanation that seems OK under cursory examination of the evidence, and it's compatible with American university social "science" dogma, but it falls apart under careful inspection. The overwhelmingly more likely (but incompatible with field political dogma) explanation is that income is most strongly mediated by intelligence, which is mostly genetically heritable. This is why people tend to have similar incomes to their parents. (This persists through adoption; try to explain that as a socially mediated effect.) Now, that said, this has nothing to do with the fact that people who would most benefit from welfare schemes are the least likely to be efficient capital allocators. We can make the observation that they are not allocating efficiently independently from asking why they are not allocating efficiently. > Putting $1m into a 50-50 chance that will produce $10m of value if it works out but leave you destitute if it doesn't is a positive for society, but irrational at an individual level The market already efficiently addresses situations like this which actually exist, using schemes like business loans and outside investment. There is no way in hell some financial knob the government can blindly turn would do as good a job at performing this function as banks and investors who are actually making a conscious decision and putting their own money on the line. In other words, for every marginal good bet this scheme enables, it's going to enable 1000 marginal stupid bets. > (e.g. rich families/friends) tend to be more entrepreneurial You've made the same (understandable) inversion of causality as before. In reality, the latter tends to drive the former. Obviously the causality is bidirectional to some degree, but I think people tend to vastly underweight the primary direction. I agree that society could do a better job enabling outsized performers without means to get access to capital, but we already do a pretty good job and there is no way that some simple welfare system would do a better job than the intentional systems we have now. > Organised society has always meant some level of support for those on the bottom. This may or may not be true (I'm not much of a historian), but I do know that "some level of support" doesn't mean "far-reaching government welfare infrastructure". It can mean churches, waqfs, and so on.