4 ms·

Somewhat off-topic, but I must ask: does UBI not depend on expected infinite economic growth? If the economy grows, then we assume the tax base supplanting the

Somewhat off-topic, but I must ask: does UBI not depend on expected infinite economic growth? If the economy grows, then we assume the tax base supplanting the UBI coffers will continue to match outflows. But if the economy does not grow, then... what happens? The starkest issue in my mind is what is happening in the EU and the US: social welfare is not looking sustainable from an economic perspective. And if we do implement UBI to such a degree that people are allowed to live a life completely without any physical need for traditional income... wouldn't that cause the collapse of the country's economy when its workers realize there is no longer a point to laboring? At that point, who exactly is going to pay for UBI?

dataflow 3y ago
> And if we do implement UBI to such a degree that people are allowed to live a life completely without any physical need for traditional income. I think you're forgetting the B in UBI. The idea is to guarantee basic necessities, not to maintain a high quality of life.
- financltravsty 3y ago
  I don't believe I have forgotten. I'm assuming it will be able to pay for not-great-but-liveable housing, sufficient food, and healthcare. That is a life that I consider to be completely without any physical need for traditional income. Granted, there are people that want more material things, and they would be motivated to labor for those things. However, my intuition tells me they're not a majority -- or enough to continue supplanting the UBI coffers.
  - nemomarx 3y ago
    I feel like a majority of people want to be able to afford new clothes, entertainment, and occasional luxuries like a dinner out or travel. Even if we have people who labor intermittently to save up for their next purchase like that you'd still see a pool of labor from that.
    - financltravsty 3y ago
      Now that I think about it, that is true. One quandary I have that might be interesting to explore is: are the material requirements of modern day people living in Western civilization something that is innate to humans' propensity for wanting more or something that has come about due to a variety of environmental factors that drove us to this outcome. And how will that shift if and when UBI is implemented? But I think I've replied too many times already; so I'll let someone else have at it, and stop my chattering.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    What do you consider "sufficient"? If it's paying you just enough so you can have milk and eggs and bread every day, is that sufficient? Do you really think people would be willing to live a monotonous life for the rest of their lives? The point of UBI isn't to make it rain so that nobody has to work anymore. It's to make it so that nobody ends up on the streets just because they lost their job for a while. And a pleasant side effect is people will be able to invest more time into finding better jobs, educating themselves in new areas, etc. without fear of going homeless or broke. I'm not claiming funding isn't an issue (it most definitely is, as are a bunch of other things), but you're mixing up the funding aspect with the motivation aspect, which need not be tied so strongly together.
great_psy 3y ago
I think one possibility is that the increase in technology is enough to cover our needs. For example forget money, but instead we just handed out a certain amount of food to everybody. We can get 1 person with an advance combine to collect enough grain for maybe 1000 people. If we can automate that, then 0 people collect enough grain for infinite people. The only limit is the area that we are farming. It would be reasonable to assume for ubi to work, we would need a reasonable amount of land to be farmed. Now apply the same concept to other things as well.
- theultdev 3y ago
  What you're suggesting sounds like bread lines. That's not really a step up from the current system that lifted millions out of poverty and hunger. The US has enough grain to pass it out to everyone, no magic technological leap needed, we already ship our massive amounts of excess grain across the world to developing countries. Noone in a developed country wants to eat just grain though! Also who gets to hand out the grain? That never really goes well when authoritarians control who gets to eat and how much and what. (some animals are more equal than others) And who gets / has to do the automating / maintaining? Are they compensated extra or is it forced? > It would be reasonable to assume for ubi to work, we would need a reasonable amount of land to be farmed. We have plenty of farmland. The thing you need most for "free food" is more ranchland in the US. Otherwise you will have to develop the natural grassland as farmland, killing every creature under the topsoil and using A LOT of water. As you can tell I have a few issues with this communistic approach, but I would like honest answers to these proses as they come up in history as "problems of implementation" to be generous. (killing millions via famine and force) Edit: downvote all you want, but questioning a proposed new system to govern humans should be scrutinized given the past failed experiments with millions of people's lives.
- financltravsty 3y ago
  This is an interesting thought. And at that point, if we have sufficiently advanced technology we can simply do away with money and dispense necessities as necessary. A bit like communism, if it hadn't been plagued by resource shortages (ignoring the human causes).
- 3y ago
valine 3y ago
You absolutely do not need exponential growth for UBI in a world with heavy automation. UBI is needed in a world where a large percentage of jobs have been automated, that implies everything in your supply chain is run by robots. When robots produce the goods, UBI is just a mechanism to distribute those goods evenly among society.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cosmojg 3y ago
> Somewhat off-topic, but I must ask: does UBI not depend on expected infinite economic growth? No, a Universal Basic Income need not depend on infinite economic growth, and in its simplest form, it is not guaranteed to be constant, only universal. Variable subsidies are no more difficult to accommodate than variable taxes when they are similarly grounded in the economy, and while economic growth would certainly contribute to the funding of UBI, stable revenue streams exist that could, theoretically, maintain its sustainability in perpetuity. In its original conception as the Citizen's Dividend[1], UBI was to be funded in its entirety by taxing price appreciation on rivalrous inelastic goods, or "land" in the economic sense[2], which includes things like electromagnetic spectrum, clean air, seignorage, and yes, physical land. (This is the infamous "Land Value Tax" that has been making the rounds lately[3].) As such, properly implemented, UBI can be entirely nondistortionary. > [...] wouldn't that cause the collapse of the country's economy when its workers realize there is no longer a point to laboring? At that point, who exactly is going to pay for UBI? The way the finances work out, by the time taxable economic rents are large enough to support most of Maslow's hierarchy via UBI for all of Earth's citizens, it won't matter. At that point, energy is likely abundant enough so as to be free, and the intergalactic market economy would be little more than a game we play to keep ourselves entertained. In other words, this is a problem so far down the road that we're guaranteed to have far bigger problems to worry about in the meantime, and elevating the standard of living for as many people as possible would only help in dealing with them. Also, keep in mind, few are happy with merely surviving, and there exist many definitions of thriving. These inherent disparities in human desire are more than enough to keep the game going. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
waveBidder 3y ago
ubi just shifts the income distribution so a larger fraction gets spent on the things the poor want than used to be the case. e.g. Fewer McMansions, more apartments. the incentive to work isn't suddenly gone, just no longer life threatening. compare to the standard conservative argument for inequality (a rising tide lifts all boats), which explicitly depends on economic growth.

dataflow 3y ago

> And if we do implement UBI to such a degree that people are allowed to live a life completely without any physical need for traditional income. I think you're forgetting the B in UBI. The idea is to guarantee basic necessities, not to maintain a high quality of life.

financltravsty 3y ago
I don't believe I have forgotten. I'm assuming it will be able to pay for not-great-but-liveable housing, sufficient food, and healthcare. That is a life that I consider to be completely without any physical need for traditional income. Granted, there are people that want more material things, and they would be motivated to labor for those things. However, my intuition tells me they're not a majority -- or enough to continue supplanting the UBI coffers.
- nemomarx 3y ago
  I feel like a majority of people want to be able to afford new clothes, entertainment, and occasional luxuries like a dinner out or travel. Even if we have people who labor intermittently to save up for their next purchase like that you'd still see a pool of labor from that.
  - financltravsty 3y ago
    Now that I think about it, that is true. One quandary I have that might be interesting to explore is: are the material requirements of modern day people living in Western civilization something that is innate to humans' propensity for wanting more or something that has come about due to a variety of environmental factors that drove us to this outcome. And how will that shift if and when UBI is implemented? But I think I've replied too many times already; so I'll let someone else have at it, and stop my chattering.
- dataflow 3y ago
  What do you consider "sufficient"? If it's paying you just enough so you can have milk and eggs and bread every day, is that sufficient? Do you really think people would be willing to live a monotonous life for the rest of their lives? The point of UBI isn't to make it rain so that nobody has to work anymore. It's to make it so that nobody ends up on the streets just because they lost their job for a while. And a pleasant side effect is people will be able to invest more time into finding better jobs, educating themselves in new areas, etc. without fear of going homeless or broke. I'm not claiming funding isn't an issue (it most definitely is, as are a bunch of other things), but you're mixing up the funding aspect with the motivation aspect, which need not be tied so strongly together.

great_psy 3y ago

I think one possibility is that the increase in technology is enough to cover our needs. For example forget money, but instead we just handed out a certain amount of food to everybody. We can get 1 person with an advance combine to collect enough grain for maybe 1000 people. If we can automate that, then 0 people collect enough grain for infinite people. The only limit is the area that we are farming. It would be reasonable to assume for ubi to work, we would need a reasonable amount of land to be farmed. Now apply the same concept to other things as well.

theultdev 3y ago
What you're suggesting sounds like bread lines. That's not really a step up from the current system that lifted millions out of poverty and hunger. The US has enough grain to pass it out to everyone, no magic technological leap needed, we already ship our massive amounts of excess grain across the world to developing countries. Noone in a developed country wants to eat just grain though! Also who gets to hand out the grain? That never really goes well when authoritarians control who gets to eat and how much and what. (some animals are more equal than others) And who gets / has to do the automating / maintaining? Are they compensated extra or is it forced? > It would be reasonable to assume for ubi to work, we would need a reasonable amount of land to be farmed. We have plenty of farmland. The thing you need most for "free food" is more ranchland in the US. Otherwise you will have to develop the natural grassland as farmland, killing every creature under the topsoil and using A LOT of water. As you can tell I have a few issues with this communistic approach, but I would like honest answers to these proses as they come up in history as "problems of implementation" to be generous. (killing millions via famine and force) Edit: downvote all you want, but questioning a proposed new system to govern humans should be scrutinized given the past failed experiments with millions of people's lives.
financltravsty 3y ago
This is an interesting thought. And at that point, if we have sufficiently advanced technology we can simply do away with money and dispense necessities as necessary. A bit like communism, if it hadn't been plagued by resource shortages (ignoring the human causes).
3y ago

valine 3y ago

You absolutely do not need exponential growth for UBI in a world with heavy automation. UBI is needed in a world where a large percentage of jobs have been automated, that implies everything in your supply chain is run by robots. When robots produce the goods, UBI is just a mechanism to distribute those goods evenly among society.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cosmojg 3y ago

> Somewhat off-topic, but I must ask: does UBI not depend on expected infinite economic growth? No, a Universal Basic Income need not depend on infinite economic growth, and in its simplest form, it is not guaranteed to be constant, only universal. Variable subsidies are no more difficult to accommodate than variable taxes when they are similarly grounded in the economy, and while economic growth would certainly contribute to the funding of UBI, stable revenue streams exist that could, theoretically, maintain its sustainability in perpetuity. In its original conception as the Citizen's Dividend[1], UBI was to be funded in its entirety by taxing price appreciation on rivalrous inelastic goods, or "land" in the economic sense[2], which includes things like electromagnetic spectrum, clean air, seignorage, and yes, physical land. (This is the infamous "Land Value Tax" that has been making the rounds lately[3].) As such, properly implemented, UBI can be entirely nondistortionary. > [...] wouldn't that cause the collapse of the country's economy when its workers realize there is no longer a point to laboring? At that point, who exactly is going to pay for UBI? The way the finances work out, by the time taxable economic rents are large enough to support most of Maslow's hierarchy via UBI for all of Earth's citizens, it won't matter. At that point, energy is likely abundant enough so as to be free, and the intergalactic market economy would be little more than a game we play to keep ourselves entertained. In other words, this is a problem so far down the road that we're guaranteed to have far bigger problems to worry about in the meantime, and elevating the standard of living for as many people as possible would only help in dealing with them. Also, keep in mind, few are happy with merely surviving, and there exist many definitions of thriving. These inherent disparities in human desire are more than enough to keep the game going. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_(economics) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

waveBidder 3y ago

ubi just shifts the income distribution so a larger fraction gets spent on the things the poor want than used to be the case. e.g. Fewer McMansions, more apartments. the incentive to work isn't suddenly gone, just no longer life threatening. compare to the standard conservative argument for inequality (a rising tide lifts all boats), which explicitly depends on economic growth.