7 ms·

The Toothpaste Argument for Universal Basic Income

22 points by 2noame 4y ago

ThePadawan 4y ago
The toothpaste analogy really points out quite insidious thought schemes. I catch myself thinking about this when I see a pineapple or some meat at the supermarket about to expire. Surely it would be a good deed to buy that item - otherwise it would go to waste entirely, even if it is plain overconsumption on my part. But then the supermarket's metrics will show they sold all their stock and will order the same amount again next time - so in the end the overconsumption feeds itself. I'm really glad that a lot of supermarkets around here (in Switzerland) put products on the edge of (legally speaking) hitting their expiry date on sale and then on apps like Too Good To Go (where you can pick up an assortment of food that would otherwise get thrown out for a low price). I do hope that internally, the analytics are accurate enough to capture the actual margin on each product to reduce the amount of stock ordered ahead of time.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  The problem is that demand has variance, both temporally, and quantitatively. They don't sell exactly 12 pineapples each week. One week, they sell 9 and the next week they sell 15. And someone is having a fun Pacific Island-themed party and buys 12 in one day. So they generally used weighted averages coupled with seasonality to order, but even then, demand is not predictable. It's within a certain range, and they generally aim for the middle of that range when ordered. That's assuming infinite supply, which obviously isn't the case. And no, AI isn't any better at it than humans, because AI is just trying to predict the behavior of humans, which is fundamentally chaotic and prone to variance.
alexb_ 4y ago
>When you get that first paycheck, it’s not paying for what you already did, because you already did it. It’s paying for you to continue doing what you’re now doing. It’s fueling your work. It’s providing you the freedom to continue that work. It’s an unleashing of potential. What? This makes zero sense to me. I work for money. I do not work because I like working, and the money is just "unleashing potential". Similarly, Colgate makes toothpaste because they know the supermarket will buy it. There is risk they won't, which they accept in return for a profit margin. >the money doesn't matter. Money you can print. We have experienced that in this financial crisis. You can arbitrarily increase it. The question is, whether the corresponding goods are present. The poverty in our society isn't a precariat problem. It is an elite problem. This is insane.
- sp332 4y ago
  There are many jobs that you could be working at. Why are you doing your job and not some other job? It is because this company created the prerequisite environment for you to be able to do this job - an agreement to pay you for the work. If you don't like doing the work, then you are doing it because you don't have the required resources to be able to stop working.
- Superleroy 4y ago
  I think the argument is not that you are not working for money, it's that within the first two weeks that you worked you already payed bills. In a way that means you provided the capital before you did the work. So the money always comes first, which is the basis for his argument. The company then pays you which allows you to keep paying your bills but you cannot pay your bills with future income, hence money always comes first and thus allows you to work in the first place
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    Except until you get the money, you haven't paid the bill - you've at best shifted it. If you put it on a credit card, for instance, until you pay off the credit card, you haven't paid what you owe. The credit card company has paid the bill, and now you owe the credit card company (plus interest for them assuming your debt). When you get that paycheck, only then can you actually pay your bills, to whomever holds your debt at the time. To put it another way - you can't pay someone if you don't have any money in hand.
    - Superleroy 4y ago
      You are not arguing against his point though, you are shifting it. His point is that it has been paid and you are saying the same thing. His argument is not about who paid the bill (if it was you or the bank) the argument is that it was paid and you seem to agree with that I think? € A different way of putting it is to imagine you had 0$ and a job that pays you in two weeks. Now you cannot take any credit since that means the bank pays for you (so the money comes first then the work). What do you do now to survive two weeks? The answer is that you need money to be able to work, not the other way around.
skybrian 4y ago
It's true that if sales are good, then production can continue. But it's not clear to me how this is a good argument for basic income. (And I say that as a supporter of UBI.) Anyone thinking about the timing of production should also be thinking about credit and finance. Investment and borrowing are how businesses fix the timing problem. Someone with money needs to believe that the sales will happen, and then the business can buy stuff on credit and pay after the sales happen. To say that "because we have income, we can work" seems like a garbled version of more conventional economics, which is that savings allows for investment? But it doesn't seem like a shortage of credit is any real bottleneck for profitable ventures. Interest rates have gone up a bit, but that's because central banks think that there is too much credit in the system. That's the opposite problem. The bottlenecks seem to be in the physical supply chain nowadays. In a chip shortage, for example, businesses can pay for what they need; the problem is that they can't find a seller. So how do you connect that back to UBI? Sure, if more people have a reliable income then they will spend more, but this isn't the Depression and lack of demand doesn't seem to be the issue. (Here's a sketch of a better argument: UBI gives poor people spending power, which will cause businesses to anticipate more sales to them and cater more to their needs.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"They are already produced. There isn’t a shortage of food. There’s just a shortage of ability to buy food. So just create the money people need to buy food, and provide it to them so they can tell businesses to keep making the food they prefer to eat." This whole article feels like it is written by someone who is elated to think they've figured out that we've been doing economics wrong this whole time, and the solution to scarcity is actually super simple!
- prometheus76 4y ago
  To put a fine point on your point: if there are 10 foods that cost 1 each and 10 people who want 1 food each who also have 1 money each, that system is in balance. However, if you give everyone 2 moneys each, but still only have 10 foods, the person selling the foods is either going to raise the price to 2 moneys, or will run out quickly because now the 10 people want to buy 2 foods instead of one food. More demand on same supply: either price goes up or item is no longer available for all 10 people. It's artificial demand which leads to shortages and to black markets, where people buy and sell secretly and move the items to where they are in demand more quickly than the markets can respond.
  - a_shovel 4y ago
    If everyone had the same amount of money, then yeah, we wouldn't need UBI. UBI is made for a world where we don't all have the same amount of money. There's not 10 people with 1 money each, there's a ton of people, some of who have 1 money, while others have a billion money, and others have a couple hundred money, and some have 0 money and are at risk of starving.
    - prometheus76 4y ago
      Most of the people with a billion money don't have a billion money in a bank account. They own a company that some accountants say is worth a billion dollars, but there are a LOT of presuppositions built into that evaluation by those accountants. But that's a side point. UBI causes inflation, which hurts the lower class the most. How is this a win? If everyone gets UBI, then the prices adjust and no one effectively gets UBI anymore. this is what happened to college tuitions in the US because of government grants and government-guaranteed student loans.
exabrial 4y ago
Who is going to pay for UBI? Just curious? Are you going to take money from one person against their will?
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  No, don't you see? They said you can just print more money! That's never had any downside, like the current inflation problem we're dealing with and that is drying up everyone's savings. Money is just paper, dude, and paper you can make as much as you want! (I feel like it's sad I have to put this disclaimer, but history has shown I need to say it, so here it is: the above is sarcasm).
  - renox 4y ago
    Also the theory behind the U in UBI is that it's less expensive to give it to everybody. But won't 'everybody' includes illegal immigrants from other countries too? Well, it will unless you increase a lot the budget of the border police..
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      I question how much money the government would actually save in administration costs compared to how much more they would have to pay out. I also question how enthusiastic the UBI proponents would be when it actually comes time to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare programs. Are they really going to tell someone with disabilities "tough luck" when the normal UBI amount is not sufficient for their medical care? I'm sure they would respond with some kind of adjustment for special needs, but at that point we loop right back around to having a bureaucracy administer payments with different amounts for different levels of need.
      - renox 4y ago
        I think that why so many supports UBI is that there are different UBIs for some it is a replacement for welfare programs, for it is a complement to these welfare programs..
someluccc 4y ago
To me the best argument for UBI is that it would obliterate a bunch of economic disincentives that are dragging down on societal progress. To be clear I’m working from two assumptions: 1) I have no issue with people being completely dependent on government support. 2) I have no issue nor do I partake in our glorification of work for work’s sake. Having said that, the most important economic aberration UBI would do away with is the need for government and most public policy in general being run as de-facto job programs for the otherwise unemployable. If UBI were a reality there would be no rationale for bloated agencies, over-staffed infrastructure projects, tax schemes for factories, you name it. In that world, we could potentially turbocharge governance, as well as governmental and policy efficiency and efficacy. A secondary, yet also important benefit of UBI is that it would unleash a ton of capable people who are otherwise bound to jobs or arrangements far below their capacity, for the simple fact that the fear of starvation or homelessness is too great. Think of all the human potential we could release if capable people felt safe enough to get an education or start a business. Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. However we struggle with the idea of some people just doing nothing when in fact the best possible outcome is for them to do just that. Some people are just not capable enough to do stuff at the level required in an advanced society, and saddling some institutions with employing them for charity does more harm than good.
- Vaslo 4y ago
  > Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. Or they could just work and do all those things that only interest them but can't earn money in their free time like everyone else?
  - imtringued 4y ago
    But there are already people who earn money in their free time like land owners and people must work and give up some of their income so that the landowner gets paid for something that was already there and whose biggest benefits are provided by the community surrounding the land. The free loaders that you seem to criticize already exist and nobody seems to have the desire to stop them. Honestly I am so pissed off by people like you. If it was as easy as just working then we wouldn't have any problems whatsoever in our economies. The fact that there is structural unemployment due to how money works and that full employment reveals that there are rent seeking entities in the form of accelerating inflation should already tell you that the current system isn't working.
mabbo 4y ago
> But when you recognize that income is the fuel that makes work possible, it’s easier to see that basic income will enable far more work for multiple reasons. For one, having basic income means that people can choose unpaid or paid work. It also means that people are more able to choose self-employment. I think there is a cognitive bias in play here that the author has not realized: a bias towards believing people will think and act like they will. I like to use the analogy of a moving walkway or escalator. Some people get on it and use it as an opportunity to go faster- I walk and it moves, so together I move really fast and get where I'm going sooner. Other people step onto it and stop. Usually it's moving even slower than they would be walking otherwise, but their goal isn't to get places faster, it's to do the least amount of work possible. Those two extreme attitudes can apply to how people react to something like UBI. Some people will use it to accomplish more. Others will use it to put in less effort. And most people will be somewhere in the spectrum between those two. I still think UBI is a good idea. I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.
- silicon2401 4y ago
  It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical. Having an ideal and working towards it is a great way to make progress, but setting expectations based on ideals is a recipe for disaster
  - pooper 4y ago
    > It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical. It is interesting how people can follow the same path and reach different conclusions. To me, UBI makes sense BECAUSE of decreased production. I do not want people who do not want to work a particular job to have to work at that job. I think we have enough food that nobody in this country has to go hungry, even if they choose to not work. Having these people at work does not help productivity (even though it might help production) where I define productivity as production per worker. In fact, I'd say if you reduce the worker base by a lot and only decrease production by a little, you have raised productivity.
    - 4y ago
MarkSweep 4y ago
I won’t argue for or against UBI. But it is not necessarily true that products on the shelf have already been paid for. The company that produced the toothpaste may have borrowed money to finance the production of toothpaste. The retailer might have net-30 payment terms, which is effectively a loan from the producer to the retailer. So when you are buying the toothpaste, you are helping pay off the debt of the retailer and producer. The lenders see the profitability of the toothpaste and extend credit to make the next tube.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  I suspect you and the author are using different definitions of "paid for". To rephrase, in order for the tube of toothpaste to be on the store shelf, all the resources required to create it must have already been expended. The workers got their paychecks last week, the ingredients were already purchased. No further resources are required to put the tube on the shelf, and your payment cannot influence whether it gets there, because it's already there. Your payment can only influence whether there will be another tube of toothpaste to replace it later.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    See, that explanation makes sense. I don't agree it leads to an argument in favor of UBI, but at least it makes sense.
eesmith 4y ago
> Payment doesn't balance out, but when you are buying something, you are ordering its continued production and sale Here's a counter-example - the last legal sale of a product about to be banned. In July 1989, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule (overturned in 1991 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans). The rule banned the manufacture, import, and processing of asbestos product in three stages. The stage one ban included asbestos/cement flat sheet, like asbestos shingles, starting on August 27, 1990. However, sales of existing stock were allowed to continue until August 25, 1992. (See https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf for full details.) People bought existing stock because, for example, replacing a few broken shingles is a lot cheaper than replacing all of the siding. Yet clearly the purchase was not an order for continued production. And the last legal sale (assuming the ban had stayed in place) would not have been an order for continued sales. Since that last payment isn't ordering the continued production and sale of asbestos shingles, according to the Toothpaste Argument, what is it doing? There are other banned products, like the prohibition of "Methylene Chloride in Paint and Coating Removal for Consumer Use" https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/final-rule-regulation-methylene-chloride-paint-and https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t... where the ban went into effect after November 22, 2019. Someone was the last consumer to buy paint with methylene chloride.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  You don't even have to go to that level to know it's all nonsense. Someone had to pay to put that toothpaste on the shelf. In capitalist societies, it's the person who provided the capital to the business and what you're doing is repaying that investment when you buy the tube of toothpaste. In modern socialist societies, you don't have to worry about it because there is no toothpaste on the shelf. Just kidding. You are paying the workers for the labor that went into the production of the toothpaste. In arrears. I didn't read much past that because I started seeing how we are not working for money or something like that.
  - eesmith 4y ago
jschveibinz 4y ago
Milton Friedman, the noted libertarian and rather conservative economist, wrote about this topic in the 1960’s. It actually had a lot of support from the left and the right. Here is a link to what he called “negative income tax” as a solution: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-income-tax-explained https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...
- imtringued 4y ago
  A negative income tax is pretty much as good as it gets if your economy is so messed up it needs micromanaging everywhere which is the case for every modern economy. I will take the bandaid while fully understanding its flaws and tradeoffs until we become sane and make it redundant.
exabrial 4y ago
The US government has absolutely 0 reputation for delivery _anything_ on time, under budget, without pork, and at a great value to the taxpayer. Why do relatively smart people on HN believe strange fantasies like UBI? Why do they ignore mountains of evidence and past performance of the government?
kthejoker2 4y ago
Based on the title I thought this article was going to be a much more straightforward argument for "basic" income: That toothpaste (or broadly preventative dental care) is a collective benefit (combining thr basic principles of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and Bastiat's broken window parable) and that because we should optimize opportunity costs around creation not repairing destruction we should all happily provide "universal basic toothpaste" to whoever wants it. And if you extend this accordingly up the first 2 or 3 steps of Maslow's hierarchy of needs you can find some equilibrium of "universal" "basic" income to satisfy those needs. The article I imagined would certainly make a lot more sense than this one, which is just dorm room economic philosophy.

22 points by 2noame 4y ago

The toothpaste analogy really points out quite insidious thought schemes. I catch myself thinking about this when I see a pineapple or some meat at the supermarket about to expire. Surely it would be a good deed to buy that item - otherwise it would go to waste entirely, even if it is plain overconsumption on my part. But then the supermarket's metrics will show they sold all their stock and will order the same amount again next time - so in the end the overconsumption feeds itself. I'm really glad that a lot of supermarkets around here (in Switzerland) put products on the edge of (legally speaking) hitting their expiry date on sale and then on apps like Too Good To Go (where you can pick up an assortment of food that would otherwise get thrown out for a low price). I do hope that internally, the analytics are accurate enough to capture the actual margin on each product to reduce the amount of stock ordered ahead of time.

prometheus76 4y ago
The problem is that demand has variance, both temporally, and quantitatively. They don't sell exactly 12 pineapples each week. One week, they sell 9 and the next week they sell 15. And someone is having a fun Pacific Island-themed party and buys 12 in one day. So they generally used weighted averages coupled with seasonality to order, but even then, demand is not predictable. It's within a certain range, and they generally aim for the middle of that range when ordered. That's assuming infinite supply, which obviously isn't the case. And no, AI isn't any better at it than humans, because AI is just trying to predict the behavior of humans, which is fundamentally chaotic and prone to variance.

alexb_ 4y ago

>When you get that first paycheck, it’s not paying for what you already did, because you already did it. It’s paying for you to continue doing what you’re now doing. It’s fueling your work. It’s providing you the freedom to continue that work. It’s an unleashing of potential. What? This makes zero sense to me. I work for money. I do not work because I like working, and the money is just "unleashing potential". Similarly, Colgate makes toothpaste because they know the supermarket will buy it. There is risk they won't, which they accept in return for a profit margin. >the money doesn't matter. Money you can print. We have experienced that in this financial crisis. You can arbitrarily increase it. The question is, whether the corresponding goods are present. The poverty in our society isn't a precariat problem. It is an elite problem. This is insane.

sp332 4y ago
There are many jobs that you could be working at. Why are you doing your job and not some other job? It is because this company created the prerequisite environment for you to be able to do this job - an agreement to pay you for the work. If you don't like doing the work, then you are doing it because you don't have the required resources to be able to stop working.
Superleroy 4y ago
I think the argument is not that you are not working for money, it's that within the first two weeks that you worked you already payed bills. In a way that means you provided the capital before you did the work. So the money always comes first, which is the basis for his argument. The company then pays you which allows you to keep paying your bills but you cannot pay your bills with future income, hence money always comes first and thus allows you to work in the first place
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Except until you get the money, you haven't paid the bill - you've at best shifted it. If you put it on a credit card, for instance, until you pay off the credit card, you haven't paid what you owe. The credit card company has paid the bill, and now you owe the credit card company (plus interest for them assuming your debt). When you get that paycheck, only then can you actually pay your bills, to whomever holds your debt at the time. To put it another way - you can't pay someone if you don't have any money in hand.
  - Superleroy 4y ago
    You are not arguing against his point though, you are shifting it. His point is that it has been paid and you are saying the same thing. His argument is not about who paid the bill (if it was you or the bank) the argument is that it was paid and you seem to agree with that I think? € A different way of putting it is to imagine you had 0$ and a job that pays you in two weeks. Now you cannot take any credit since that means the bank pays for you (so the money comes first then the work). What do you do now to survive two weeks? The answer is that you need money to be able to work, not the other way around.

skybrian 4y ago

It's true that if sales are good, then production can continue. But it's not clear to me how this is a good argument for basic income. (And I say that as a supporter of UBI.) Anyone thinking about the timing of production should also be thinking about credit and finance. Investment and borrowing are how businesses fix the timing problem. Someone with money needs to believe that the sales will happen, and then the business can buy stuff on credit and pay after the sales happen. To say that "because we have income, we can work" seems like a garbled version of more conventional economics, which is that savings allows for investment? But it doesn't seem like a shortage of credit is any real bottleneck for profitable ventures. Interest rates have gone up a bit, but that's because central banks think that there is too much credit in the system. That's the opposite problem. The bottlenecks seem to be in the physical supply chain nowadays. In a chip shortage, for example, businesses can pay for what they need; the problem is that they can't find a seller. So how do you connect that back to UBI? Sure, if more people have a reliable income then they will spend more, but this isn't the Depression and lack of demand doesn't seem to be the issue. (Here's a sketch of a better argument: UBI gives poor people spending power, which will cause businesses to anticipate more sales to them and cater more to their needs.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

BitwiseFool 4y ago

>"They are already produced. There isn’t a shortage of food. There’s just a shortage of ability to buy food. So just create the money people need to buy food, and provide it to them so they can tell businesses to keep making the food they prefer to eat." This whole article feels like it is written by someone who is elated to think they've figured out that we've been doing economics wrong this whole time, and the solution to scarcity is actually super simple!

prometheus76 4y ago
To put a fine point on your point: if there are 10 foods that cost 1 each and 10 people who want 1 food each who also have 1 money each, that system is in balance. However, if you give everyone 2 moneys each, but still only have 10 foods, the person selling the foods is either going to raise the price to 2 moneys, or will run out quickly because now the 10 people want to buy 2 foods instead of one food. More demand on same supply: either price goes up or item is no longer available for all 10 people. It's artificial demand which leads to shortages and to black markets, where people buy and sell secretly and move the items to where they are in demand more quickly than the markets can respond.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  If everyone had the same amount of money, then yeah, we wouldn't need UBI. UBI is made for a world where we don't all have the same amount of money. There's not 10 people with 1 money each, there's a ton of people, some of who have 1 money, while others have a billion money, and others have a couple hundred money, and some have 0 money and are at risk of starving.
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    Most of the people with a billion money don't have a billion money in a bank account. They own a company that some accountants say is worth a billion dollars, but there are a LOT of presuppositions built into that evaluation by those accountants. But that's a side point. UBI causes inflation, which hurts the lower class the most. How is this a win? If everyone gets UBI, then the prices adjust and no one effectively gets UBI anymore. this is what happened to college tuitions in the US because of government grants and government-guaranteed student loans.

exabrial 4y ago

Who is going to pay for UBI? Just curious? Are you going to take money from one person against their will?

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
No, don't you see? They said you can just print more money! That's never had any downside, like the current inflation problem we're dealing with and that is drying up everyone's savings. Money is just paper, dude, and paper you can make as much as you want! (I feel like it's sad I have to put this disclaimer, but history has shown I need to say it, so here it is: the above is sarcasm).
- renox 4y ago
  Also the theory behind the U in UBI is that it's less expensive to give it to everybody. But won't 'everybody' includes illegal immigrants from other countries too? Well, it will unless you increase a lot the budget of the border police..
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I question how much money the government would actually save in administration costs compared to how much more they would have to pay out. I also question how enthusiastic the UBI proponents would be when it actually comes time to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare programs. Are they really going to tell someone with disabilities "tough luck" when the normal UBI amount is not sufficient for their medical care? I'm sure they would respond with some kind of adjustment for special needs, but at that point we loop right back around to having a bureaucracy administer payments with different amounts for different levels of need.
    - renox 4y ago
      I think that why so many supports UBI is that there are different UBIs for some it is a replacement for welfare programs, for it is a complement to these welfare programs..

someluccc 4y ago

To me the best argument for UBI is that it would obliterate a bunch of economic disincentives that are dragging down on societal progress. To be clear I’m working from two assumptions: 1) I have no issue with people being completely dependent on government support. 2) I have no issue nor do I partake in our glorification of work for work’s sake. Having said that, the most important economic aberration UBI would do away with is the need for government and most public policy in general being run as de-facto job programs for the otherwise unemployable. If UBI were a reality there would be no rationale for bloated agencies, over-staffed infrastructure projects, tax schemes for factories, you name it. In that world, we could potentially turbocharge governance, as well as governmental and policy efficiency and efficacy. A secondary, yet also important benefit of UBI is that it would unleash a ton of capable people who are otherwise bound to jobs or arrangements far below their capacity, for the simple fact that the fear of starvation or homelessness is too great. Think of all the human potential we could release if capable people felt safe enough to get an education or start a business. Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. However we struggle with the idea of some people just doing nothing when in fact the best possible outcome is for them to do just that. Some people are just not capable enough to do stuff at the level required in an advanced society, and saddling some institutions with employing them for charity does more harm than good.

Vaslo 4y ago
> Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. Or they could just work and do all those things that only interest them but can't earn money in their free time like everyone else?
- imtringued 4y ago
  But there are already people who earn money in their free time like land owners and people must work and give up some of their income so that the landowner gets paid for something that was already there and whose biggest benefits are provided by the community surrounding the land. The free loaders that you seem to criticize already exist and nobody seems to have the desire to stop them. Honestly I am so pissed off by people like you. If it was as easy as just working then we wouldn't have any problems whatsoever in our economies. The fact that there is structural unemployment due to how money works and that full employment reveals that there are rent seeking entities in the form of accelerating inflation should already tell you that the current system isn't working.

mabbo 4y ago

> But when you recognize that income is the fuel that makes work possible, it’s easier to see that basic income will enable far more work for multiple reasons. For one, having basic income means that people can choose unpaid or paid work. It also means that people are more able to choose self-employment. I think there is a cognitive bias in play here that the author has not realized: a bias towards believing people will think and act like they will. I like to use the analogy of a moving walkway or escalator. Some people get on it and use it as an opportunity to go faster- I walk and it moves, so together I move really fast and get where I'm going sooner. Other people step onto it and stop. Usually it's moving even slower than they would be walking otherwise, but their goal isn't to get places faster, it's to do the least amount of work possible. Those two extreme attitudes can apply to how people react to something like UBI. Some people will use it to accomplish more. Others will use it to put in less effort. And most people will be somewhere in the spectrum between those two. I still think UBI is a good idea. I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.

silicon2401 4y ago
It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical. Having an ideal and working towards it is a great way to make progress, but setting expectations based on ideals is a recipe for disaster
- pooper 4y ago
  > It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical. It is interesting how people can follow the same path and reach different conclusions. To me, UBI makes sense BECAUSE of decreased production. I do not want people who do not want to work a particular job to have to work at that job. I think we have enough food that nobody in this country has to go hungry, even if they choose to not work. Having these people at work does not help productivity (even though it might help production) where I define productivity as production per worker. In fact, I'd say if you reduce the worker base by a lot and only decrease production by a little, you have raised productivity.
  - 4y ago

MarkSweep 4y ago

I won’t argue for or against UBI. But it is not necessarily true that products on the shelf have already been paid for. The company that produced the toothpaste may have borrowed money to finance the production of toothpaste. The retailer might have net-30 payment terms, which is effectively a loan from the producer to the retailer. So when you are buying the toothpaste, you are helping pay off the debt of the retailer and producer. The lenders see the profitability of the toothpaste and extend credit to make the next tube.

a_shovel 4y ago
I suspect you and the author are using different definitions of "paid for". To rephrase, in order for the tube of toothpaste to be on the store shelf, all the resources required to create it must have already been expended. The workers got their paychecks last week, the ingredients were already purchased. No further resources are required to put the tube on the shelf, and your payment cannot influence whether it gets there, because it's already there. Your payment can only influence whether there will be another tube of toothpaste to replace it later.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  See, that explanation makes sense. I don't agree it leads to an argument in favor of UBI, but at least it makes sense.

eesmith 4y ago

> Payment doesn't balance out, but when you are buying something, you are ordering its continued production and sale Here's a counter-example - the last legal sale of a product about to be banned. In July 1989, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule (overturned in 1991 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans). The rule banned the manufacture, import, and processing of asbestos product in three stages. The stage one ban included asbestos/cement flat sheet, like asbestos shingles, starting on August 27, 1990. However, sales of existing stock were allowed to continue until August 25, 1992. (See https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf for full details.) People bought existing stock because, for example, replacing a few broken shingles is a lot cheaper than replacing all of the siding. Yet clearly the purchase was not an order for continued production. And the last legal sale (assuming the ban had stayed in place) would not have been an order for continued sales. Since that last payment isn't ordering the continued production and sale of asbestos shingles, according to the Toothpaste Argument, what is it doing? There are other banned products, like the prohibition of "Methylene Chloride in Paint and Coating Removal for Consumer Use" https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/final-rule-regulation-methylene-chloride-paint-and https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t... where the ban went into effect after November 22, 2019. Someone was the last consumer to buy paint with methylene chloride.

readthenotes1 4y ago
You don't even have to go to that level to know it's all nonsense. Someone had to pay to put that toothpaste on the shelf. In capitalist societies, it's the person who provided the capital to the business and what you're doing is repaying that investment when you buy the tube of toothpaste. In modern socialist societies, you don't have to worry about it because there is no toothpaste on the shelf. Just kidding. You are paying the workers for the labor that went into the production of the toothpaste. In arrears. I didn't read much past that because I started seeing how we are not working for money or something like that.
- eesmith 4y ago

jschveibinz 4y ago

Milton Friedman, the noted libertarian and rather conservative economist, wrote about this topic in the 1960’s. It actually had a lot of support from the left and the right. Here is a link to what he called “negative income tax” as a solution: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-income-tax-explained https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...

imtringued 4y ago
A negative income tax is pretty much as good as it gets if your economy is so messed up it needs micromanaging everywhere which is the case for every modern economy. I will take the bandaid while fully understanding its flaws and tradeoffs until we become sane and make it redundant.

exabrial 4y ago

The US government has absolutely 0 reputation for delivery _anything_ on time, under budget, without pork, and at a great value to the taxpayer. Why do relatively smart people on HN believe strange fantasies like UBI? Why do they ignore mountains of evidence and past performance of the government?

kthejoker2 4y ago

Based on the title I thought this article was going to be a much more straightforward argument for "basic" income: That toothpaste (or broadly preventative dental care) is a collective benefit (combining thr basic principles of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and Bastiat's broken window parable) and that because we should optimize opportunity costs around creation not repairing destruction we should all happily provide "universal basic toothpaste" to whoever wants it. And if you extend this accordingly up the first 2 or 3 steps of Maslow's hierarchy of needs you can find some equilibrium of "universal" "basic" income to satisfy those needs. The article I imagined would certainly make a lot more sense than this one, which is just dorm room economic philosophy.