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Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide
by DarylZero 5y ago
Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water.
[*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an absolute level -- but only in theory.
Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category that does not exist.
UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of starvation itself.
Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's no question about whether it would work. The remaining question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a negative incentive much like it depends on prison.
- jesusofnazarath 5y ago
- tomp 5y agoYou explained why UBI wouldn't work in your own answer! "Money is just a relative advantage in the market." If everybody has $x, then competitive products/services will increase by $x in cost! (By "competitive" I mean those than cannot be easily scaled, like housing, education, medicine.)
- DarylZero 5y agoThat doesn't make any sense at all. You need to do some thinking.
- hattmall 5y agoAll of those can be easily scaled though. They are all simply protected industries with entrenched incumbents weilding political power to maintain their status quo at the expense of everyone else. We could easily have 10x more doctors, houses, and quality educators if the artificial barriers to entry were lowered or removed.
- endominus 5y agoThat's irrelevant to the matter at hand. Scaling them has nothing to do with implementing UBI, and would be a good idea whether or not UBI is implemented. UBI simply does not solve the problem of poverty, or the poor having access to those goods and services.
- naasking 5y agoScaling them does have to do with UBI, because the argument above is that UBI would not work because the price of some goods and services will rise to compensate because they don't scale. If supply for these critical goods and services is instead increased alongside a progressive UBI deployment, then this wouldn't happen and we'd presumably in a better position afterwards.
- tomp 5y agoWhen those are scaled, I'll gladly support UBI. But then UBI won't be needed, as all these will be dirt cheap, like phones ($50 Motorola, not $1500 iPhone).
- hattmall 5y agoBut there are poor people who work and have money already, most of them in fact. I am for UBI, but it's nothing like food to the starving. It's a safety net.
- DarylZero 5y agoPoverty is literally defined as a lack of (low level of) income. You don't ever have poor people who have above-poverty income. That would be like having short people who have above-average height.
- inglor_cz 5y agoOnly if price levels stay the same. If they don't, now you have 1000 dollars every month of UBI, but perhaps rent has jumped to 3000 dollars. UBI would work ceteris paribus, but I am with Georgism on this one: the entire UBI would be eaten by landlords.
- DarylZero 5y agoSuch poor thinking. Really disturbing when you think about the idea of democracy and requirements for informed public etc.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoNot if you have a land-value tax, where landlords are literally paying for UBI, and even tying UBI amounts paid out to the amount of LVT raised, the higher the rent the more they pay in taxes, therefore the less they charge for rent the more they keep and it balances out... This is literally part of Georgism philosophy.
- inglor_cz 5y agoTrue, but I rarely see UBI proposals coupled with land value tax. This combo could work.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI see it quite often but anyone against Ubi for reasons... usually stops responding when it does actually come up because it's an actual solution that might work and they don't want to even entertain the thought that it could be done... it they're rent seekers and would be hurt by it themselves...
- inglor_cz 5y agoIt might. I am generally skeptical towards UBI being touted as a social panacea [0] [1], but I would be open towards trying to pull it off in combination with Georgist LTV. [0] My main reason: there are countries such as Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms where the citizens get free money or a least well paid jobs-just-in-name that someone else is actually doing, but there wasn't any explosion of personal freedom, social progress or artistic creativity there; a lot of the free money is sunk into drugs and conspicuous consumption. [1] My next reason: you would have to exclude freshly arrived people, because if any place in the world becomes known for giving significant money to anyone for free, it will become a target of worldwide UBI tourism on an unsustainable scale. Already the people smugglers in Libya etc. are very good at presenting themselves as the "bridges" towards life in the richest parts of Europe.
- mrep 5y ago> Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water. Not true. Every single software team I have worked on wanted to hire more workers but when they are paying me $350K a year, it limits how many people they can hire. If you doubled the supply of SWEs, you'd probably have 2 175k jobs instead of the one.
- DarylZero 5y agoYou can't double the supply by giving people more money for education. You still have the same number of people being bid for, no matter how many people get educational funding.