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UBI is impossible to work for two reasons: 1) We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists, wages will need to rise until people are willing to do the

• thedorkknight 4y ago
  You're missing the point. At SOME point, even YOU won't be able to find a job, due to robotics and automation, compounded by extremely high unemployment making even basic jobs like plumbing impossible to get. If that happens, we either just let everyone starve until the population drops to equilibrium, or restructure society to support people when there's no jobs for 99% of us.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    That's great, but we're nowhere near that point. That is basically a post scarcity society.
    • dmitriid 4y ago
      For all intents and prepared we already live in a post-scarcity society. We're just too shitty to make an effort to distribute the wealth, the food, the products etc.
      • dmitriid 4y ago
        s/prepared/purposes Curse autocomplete/swipe keyboards
      • spywaregorilla 4y ago
        Not even close. Producing enough total food to feed everyone is not post scarcity. A massive energy crisis in europe is plenty evidence for this.
        • dmitriid 4y ago
          We produce significantly more food that is needed to feed everyone. Energy crisis in Europe is entirely man-made because, as I said, we are shitty.
    • diputsmonro 4y ago
      If our enormous economic engines were devoted towards efficiency rather than profit motive, I think we would be there. How many appliances do we build to last for a few years and then break? How many economic resources could we save by building fewer products to last longer? If the economic engine were tilted towards quality rather than churn, we could be much more efficient about our use of resources.
      • spywaregorilla 4y ago
        No, we're nowhere near it. Last mile labor needs are unavoidable at this time and energy and materials are still very much scarce. Durable products would be nice.
      • incrudible 4y ago
        The profit motive promotes efficiency by driving all prices towards marginal cost, as long as competition exists. Highly durable goods are not per se an efficient use of resources, but we probably disagree on the meaning of that word anyway.
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      If you wait until a post-scarcity to implement a UBI you will have violent collapse of society long before you reach post-scarcity. We walk a razor's edge of oppression - too little and society doesn't have enough peasants to grind into the machine to make the gears work, too much and the peasants destroy the machine.
      • spywaregorilla 4y ago
        And if you implement UBI now, you'll just shoot yourself in the foot and become less economically competitive because you're in a globalized economy. You cannot do this while you're still dependent on trade with other countries, which we are. You can do UBI when it really wouldn't matter if we didn't employ people in low wage jobs.
  • robotresearcher 4y ago
    On the other hand we currently have the highest levels of automation and AI ever experienced, and near-record-low unemployment. Is the idea that it suddenly tips?
    • ckw 4y ago
      It tipped decades ago: in the United States, the labor force participation rate for men has been in secular decline since 1950 (and perhaps earlier—-the Fred data only goes back to 1948): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 For women, since about 2000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 Combined: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
      • robotresearcher 4y ago
        What's the large gap between labor force participation rate and unemployment rate? Is it the rising number of elderly people? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
        • ckw 4y ago
          Here’s the graph limited to ages 25-54: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 The shape is the same, with a peak at ~1999. There is a large difference between the labor force participation rate and the unemployment rate because the LFPR can’t be gamed. A stark way to think about it is to consider that, if every person currently looking for work were to fail to such an extent that they just gave up, the unemployment rate would drop to zero.
          • robotresearcher 4y ago
            OK, makes sense. Using your preferred metric, we have about the same LFPR we had in 1980. It has gradually varied since then between about 81% and 85%. > The shape is the same, with a peak at ~1999. The trend is up since 2015, apart from the Covid dip. Automation and AI have not had a dramatic effect yet on LFPR. Maybe there's a tipping point to come.
  • astrange 4y ago
    The idea that high unemployment is likely is just an artifact of bad monetary policy in 2010. The entire time, automation people like Yang have been claiming unemployment was already happening, and yet it was constantly going down. Unemployment in the US is now lower than it’s been in decades.
    • thedorkknight 4y ago
      It's not so much that it's a bad artifact of something in the past, it's more speculation about what will happen to employment of humans if/when companies can just create human-level AI that operates 1000x faster than fleshy humans for digital/white collar work, and just buy a Boston Dynamics style robot with a similar AI in it for blue collar work
• jedberg 4y ago
  The assumption of UBI is that it is a wealth redistribution from automation, so > We need people to do low level jobs Is solved through automation and immigration (only citizens get UBI). Of course this is a major downside, because you end up with a slave class unless you make sure those immigrant workers are well protected. Your point 2 has already happened. But the wealth still remains here in the US. So if that wealth were redistributed to the poor it would actually make things better.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    > Is solved through automation Orders of magnitude more than we have now > and immigration (only citizens get UBI). Of course this is a major downside, because you end up with a slave class unless you make sure those immigrant workers are well protected. ... Uh... yeah I would prefer not to have a slave class
    • NomadicDev 4y ago
      > ... Uh... yeah I would prefer not to have a slave class What do you think we have now, where lower class people need to work to survive? If slavery is having the option between work or death, then I don't see how our current economic setup is not producing slaves. Sure, we don't treat the lower class as property (at least not normally), but they are definitely forced to work under any reasonable definition.
      • incrudible 4y ago
        The distinction with slavery is being property. Moreover, it is certainly not the case that people who do not work will die in our society. Being forced to do something to survive is not slavery in any meaningful sense of the word. It is the natural state of affairs.
        • fsflover 4y ago
          Except your "something" is very limited, leaving almost no real choice for many people.
• yellowapple 4y ago
  > We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists, wages will need to rise until people are willing to do them. Andrew Yang's premise is that those low level jobs are increasingly being automated away anyway - meaning that no, we don't need people to do them. Even without that premise, this argument presupposes that people receiving UBI will do so in exclusion to working. That doesn't really logically or practically follow; it's just as possible that people will work anyway because extra spending money is extra spending money. They'll work because they want to work, not because they're being actively coerced to work. > This will happen along with price raises until an equilibrium is found where poor people need to work in order to survive. With Yang's proposal, the "price raises" part is probably true, yes. However, that has nothing to do with UBI; instead, it has to do with VAT. VAT advocates oft insist that it's somehow "not a sales tax" and therefore "totally not regressive like a sales tax", but at the end of the day consumers are paying more than they otherwise would for goods - and since consumer spending is disproportionately higher (relative to income/wealth) for the working class than the ownership class (or low/middle v. high, if that's the terminology you prefer), that's going to have the same regressive tax effects. However, a VAT ain't the only way... > No need for narratives about landlords raising rent, though it is possible. Not if the UBI is instead funded by taxing the unimproved value of land - a.k.a. a land value tax, or LVT. We Georgists tend to call that a "citizen's dividend", but it's just a special case of UBI: a basic income intended to compensate citizens for occupying less than their equal share of land value within a given jurisdiction. There are a lot of implications of this (I could go on and on about the economic efficiency and ethical justifications), but relevant to this conversation is that the lack of deadweight loss means replacing other taxes with LVT would if anything reduce the consumer-facing cost of goods by reducing the effective tax burden of those producing said goods. > Anything that is outsourceable is now more appealing to outsource than before. That has already happened, without UBI. UBI is if anything necessary because of outsourcing - again, because we don't need local people doing those particular low level jobs, because they're now being done overseas. UBI also might even help correct outsourcing; it's a lot easier to start a business if you know that if it fails (like most businesses do) you won't be homeless and starving as a result, and that's exactly the sort of safety net that UBI enables.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
• jostylr 4y ago
  Why would the wages need to increase? UBI is additive to wages. It is not like welfare where one loses the money when one starts working. For the welfare state, you absolutely have to raise the wages to be above whatever the government is giving to those without money. UBI is explicitly intended to do away with that problem. In other words, if someone is willing to work for 20k a year now and we roll out a UBI that gives everyone 12k a year, then the 20k job is still an attractive option and would net them 32k. Now, it may be the case that the wage goes down to 8k which effectively leads to a UBI subsidizing the employers. That would be unfortunate and is a risk, but it certainly does not lead to a disadvantage compared to other countries in terms of employers though it may lead to disadvantages for attracting high earners. A UBI also opens up the possibility of removing the minimum wage which not only allows for more people to obtain jobs, but also raises the competitiveness with other countries, potentially (it depends on whether the minimum wage is actually effective in raising wages above the market rate).
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Doing a grueling low wage job because you need those wages to survive makes sense. Doing low wage jobs for the extra cash is not, because it's not a lot of cash. Money, like everything, has a diminishing marginal value. The first bunch of money is keeping you alive. If the government provides you that first bunch, your employer is providing much less value to you. Everyone preaches about how UBI will allow people to start businesses and learn skills. Well yeah, but that means they're dropping out of the labor force because they don't need to do those jobs. How do you incentivize people to work? Pay them more.
    • immibis 4y ago
      In other words: We have to keep the slaves in poor conditions or else they'll quit working. The only thing we are able to provide to make them work, is a threat of death if they don't. No carrots, only sticks.
      • spywaregorilla 4y ago
        If you're in a globalized economy that has scarcity, yes. That is the unfortunate truth of it. And you're mostly deluding yourself if you manage to outsource your need for slaves to other countries and think you've done anything particularly good. It's a prisoner's dilemma over and over.
• Thorentis 4y ago
  I'm not necessarily a UBI proponent, but the interesting thing to point out here is that if a job is so essential that it is required for society to function, maybe it should be paying a whole lot more.
• ckw 4y ago
  It is essential that the poor earn as little as possible so as to incentivize their labor, and it is essential that the rich earn as much as possible (by, for example, reducing their tax burden) so as to incentivize their labor.