8 ms·

I don't think it'll work. UBI is a dole. The Romans had that-- when they acquired enough slaves so that the farmer class were no longer running many little farm

I don't think it'll work. UBI is a dole. The Romans had that-- when they acquired enough slaves so that the farmer class were no longer running many little farms it turned the core the empire-- their capable farmers, into clients. I think however, that UBI may be worse than the Roman bread doles. Those were after all only food, but money are every kind of resource. There was also still a need for the client class, since they were in fact still a source of soldiers of the empire. The change that UBI makes in modern times is that it changes people who are important and who co-operate in order to make things and get them to others are turned into just a cost which never produces anything. Consequently it'll always be appealing to get rid of them. The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it. Consequently I don't see how UBI can be a solution. It must be something else. I believe a reduction in working hours could work for a while, at least a decade, but won't be enough in the long run and I'm far from certain that there is a solution. Another problem we've had here in Sweden is that people try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners etc., so it's a rebalancing within the working class while the genuinely rich are unaffected. Because any rebalancing of tax from ordinary people to the rich will cause inflation and reduced investment due to the fact that ordinary people spend a larger fraction of their incomes on consumer products it'll always be appealing to make this purely a rebalancing between workers. Thus there isn't just one failure mode, but two.

coldtea 2y ago
>The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it. The problem is not much that the rulers can end it, but that they'll continue it in perpetuity. Or if you wish, that they will only selectively end it, or threaten to end it, for some - as a punishment of disobedience. UBI's allure from the point of view of those in power is it turns citizens into dependents. So people not working, and not having power, thus turning into "clients", is kind the whole point. So, yeah, the version of UBI that doesn't have that drawback, is UBI in a society where the masses have seized the control and are actively exercizing it too (not eager to give it back).
- lo0dot0 2y ago
  All power originates from the people.
viraptor 2y ago
> are turned into just a cost which never produces anything. The whole premise here is incorrect. Every time UBI is tried, this scenario does not happen. You can find study after study that finds the same thing. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer... > Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.
- DamnYuppie 2y ago
  They have never tried on a large scale over a large timeline. Behavior changes will not happen over night.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Not only that, but behaviour change depends on whether you expect the thing to last forever.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    You mean like the one across Iran running from 2011? Yeah, I agree at this point we should just run it globally for over a decade to see if the result is in any way different than almost every single test done so far.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    "This paper has two purposes. First, it documents the historical context of MINCOME, a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment (1974 to 1979). Second, it uses routinely collected health administration data and a quasi experimental design to document an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate for participants relative to controls, particularly for accidents and injuries and mental health. We also found that participant contacts with physicians declined, especially for mental health, and that more adolescents continued into grade 12. We found no increase in fertility, family dissolution rates, or improved birth out comes. We conclude that a relatively modest GAI can improve population health, suggesting significant health system savings" https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283 https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283 All in about 4 years.
kzurell 2y ago
UBI has already worked. We hunt and forage food and water, but air and gravity are supplied for free, the latter being inescapably mandatory (good luck ending it, rulers). They're not nothing, not "but that's different", there's wattage in all. We talk about tax and money like they're natural theories, when we could easily pursue compatible, interoperable regimes that meet the UBI design brief. If price is value then change in price is a proxy for externalities, so tax transactions based on change in instantaneous price. The power to do so is in divide and conquer, between rentiers who value stability and those who cultivate volatility. The Not-In-My-Back-Office corporate leadership creates gigahertz iPads but never seems to buy their way out of overnight transaction clearing and filing labyrinthine returns for some reason. I hate being livestock in the "incentive" farm. We almost all do. And while I appreciate insights about the Roman Empire as much as any white male...it's less the done thing these days. :)
petre 2y ago
> try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners The capital will just flee to other places if they do that. In fact it already does. But I agree, UBI will never work. It will just generate inflation and drive prices up, like the Biden Administration's America Rescue Plan did by giving away $1400 checks to people.
- timschmidt 2y ago
  "While labor and nonlabor input costs have played a role in price increases, corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic. Comparatively, over the 40 years prior to the pandemic, they drove just 11 percent of price growth." https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24.01.17-GWC-Corporate-Profits-Report.pdf https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/...
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  Yes, but I believe that this can be solved if capital comes from wages-- i.e. large-scale mandatory savings as a fraction of wages, set by each country's central bank and raised in times of inflation, lowered in times of deflation.

coldtea 2y ago

>The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it. The problem is not much that the rulers can end it, but that they'll continue it in perpetuity. Or if you wish, that they will only selectively end it, or threaten to end it, for some - as a punishment of disobedience. UBI's allure from the point of view of those in power is it turns citizens into dependents. So people not working, and not having power, thus turning into "clients", is kind the whole point. So, yeah, the version of UBI that doesn't have that drawback, is UBI in a society where the masses have seized the control and are actively exercizing it too (not eager to give it back).

lo0dot0 2y ago
All power originates from the people.

viraptor 2y ago

> are turned into just a cost which never produces anything. The whole premise here is incorrect. Every time UBI is tried, this scenario does not happen. You can find study after study that finds the same thing. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer... > Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.

DamnYuppie 2y ago
They have never tried on a large scale over a large timeline. Behavior changes will not happen over night.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  Not only that, but behaviour change depends on whether you expect the thing to last forever.
- viraptor 2y ago
  You mean like the one across Iran running from 2011? Yeah, I agree at this point we should just run it globally for over a decade to see if the result is in any way different than almost every single test done so far.
- timschmidt 2y ago
  "This paper has two purposes. First, it documents the historical context of MINCOME, a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment (1974 to 1979). Second, it uses routinely collected health administration data and a quasi experimental design to document an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate for participants relative to controls, particularly for accidents and injuries and mental health. We also found that participant contacts with physicians declined, especially for mental health, and that more adolescents continued into grade 12. We found no increase in fertility, family dissolution rates, or improved birth out comes. We conclude that a relatively modest GAI can improve population health, suggesting significant health system savings" https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283 https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283 All in about 4 years.

kzurell 2y ago

UBI has already worked. We hunt and forage food and water, but air and gravity are supplied for free, the latter being inescapably mandatory (good luck ending it, rulers). They're not nothing, not "but that's different", there's wattage in all. We talk about tax and money like they're natural theories, when we could easily pursue compatible, interoperable regimes that meet the UBI design brief. If price is value then change in price is a proxy for externalities, so tax transactions based on change in instantaneous price. The power to do so is in divide and conquer, between rentiers who value stability and those who cultivate volatility. The Not-In-My-Back-Office corporate leadership creates gigahertz iPads but never seems to buy their way out of overnight transaction clearing and filing labyrinthine returns for some reason. I hate being livestock in the "incentive" farm. We almost all do. And while I appreciate insights about the Roman Empire as much as any white male...it's less the done thing these days. :)

petre 2y ago

> try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners The capital will just flee to other places if they do that. In fact it already does. But I agree, UBI will never work. It will just generate inflation and drive prices up, like the Biden Administration's America Rescue Plan did by giving away $1400 checks to people.

timschmidt 2y ago
"While labor and nonlabor input costs have played a role in price increases, corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic. Comparatively, over the 40 years prior to the pandemic, they drove just 11 percent of price growth." https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24.01.17-GWC-Corporate-Profits-Report.pdf https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/...
impossiblefork 2y ago
Yes, but I believe that this can be solved if capital comes from wages-- i.e. large-scale mandatory savings as a fraction of wages, set by each country's central bank and raised in times of inflation, lowered in times of deflation.