17 ms·

UBI and the Anti-Work Vibe Shift

51 points by Suncho 2y ago

JohnMakin 2y ago
> Unsurprisingly, the study participants became less inclined to work jobs. while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.
- kfarr 2y ago
  Agreed too much emphasis placed on a small data point from one study. Oddly enough my response was the opposite — only 2%??
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
seydor 2y ago
Doesn't UBI equate to lowering the prices for everything? Isn't it more feasible to pursue the latter?
- _heimdall 2y ago
  UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market. Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true. The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
  - Retric 2y ago
    It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc. UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove. Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy. Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy. According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
      - Retric 2y ago
        Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources. As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population. That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically? Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
        Retric 2y ago
        > Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically? I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions. Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
  - diffeomorphism 2y ago
    It sounds like you are talking about some very different thing also abbreviated "UBI"? Here it stands for universal basic income.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government. For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
      - diffeomorphism 2y ago
        No
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing. I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.
- zepton 2y ago
  The US doesn't have a centrally planned economy, so the government can't lower the prices of everything. UBI is much more feasible to implement than communism.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Not centrally planned, except the humongous federal government, the central bank, the interstate highway system, even things like corn subsidies. There are a lot of centrally-planned areas.
  - vinyl7 2y ago
    It's centrally planned by all the monopolies we have
- Apreche 2y ago
  We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it. Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around. With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
  - blfr 2y ago
    We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. ... What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it. Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage. Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      > ...I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage. That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However: What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve? What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure? [0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
- Jedd 2y ago
  I don't think you can usefully equate 'UBI' to a single outcome of UBI. One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero. And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong. Why should it cost to live? (You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Surely cost of living, expressed as hours of labour, remains the same regardless. Anyone can reduce their cost of living by reducing the standard of living.
    - Jedd 2y ago
      Your premise is patently not true.
  - slowmovintarget 2y ago
    > Why should it cost to live? Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us. A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom... There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit. "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  No it doesn't, you can't multiply a zero income by any number and put people out of poverty. You can't redistribute wealth by multiplying everybody's income either. But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
_heimdall 2y ago
The author seems to effectively argue for UBI as a solution to bullshit jobs. People waste a lot of time today in jobs that produce no real value, instead the government should pay people a similar wage to not do those jobs. > There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI. More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis. What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.
- frankharv 2y ago
  Don't we already have Marxism-Socialism though? It been called many things from social safety net to welfare. You can look at Social Security and its money woes as an example. That system is going insolvent with people contributing. It is mandatory to contribute if you are gainfully employed..
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Programs that truly are needs based don't really fit into the Marxist approach. UBI is much closer to, or just is, Marxism because its universal. You get the money simply because the government decided that is the amount of money everyone needs and deserves.
- jeltz 2y ago
  UBI is not at all based in Marxism. The idea is older than Marxism and almost entirely unrelated to it. That's probably why you never see it mentioned.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    My point isn't that Marx invented the idea of a UBI, I don't actually recall him specifically writing about the concept. My point is that the idea of a UBI is rooted in very much the same arguments as what Marx wrote so much about.
blfr 2y ago
The world is increasingly complex making it seem to many people that their work is unproductive (bullshit/make-work jobs). This and lack of agency in many jobs is what leads to massive frustration with work* but it's not actually an incisive observation about the economy as a whole. it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea. * Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.
- kolinko 2y ago
  There are things that work and couldn’t be piloted - Postal System for example.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    How so? The first postal systems certainly didn't cover entire kingdoms and didn't serve the entire population.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      They did work at smaller scale though. It's not dependent on psychological dynamics like UBI.
  - blfr 2y ago
    Couriers have existed since the beginning of civilization. With many famous examples, like Pheidippides in keeping with the Olympic spirit. It was obviously valuable and workable from the smallest scale possible: a verbal message carried by a runner.
dade_ 2y ago
So this explanation is neat and tidy. The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. So they start demanding exorbitant wages, show up late, if at all. This is productive work, and productive work that frees higher skilled resources to be more productive. Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
- simoncion 2y ago
  > The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. We've uh, we've known this for millennia. "When no longer required to do something that they hate, people will often choose to stop doing that hated thing." is not even a little bit surprising. > ...and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done. Nah. Most folks don't give a shit about whether or not their work has "meaning". They work to fund their hobbies and fun, they don't work to find "meaning". Terminally-management-brained middle managers sure THINK that it's important for rank-and-file people to understand that their work has "meaning", though. They can't fuckin seem to shut up about it.
  - jeltz 2y ago
    That's not my experience at all. Most people I know and have worked with care a lot about if their work has meaning. The people who do not are the outliers.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      So, most people you know live to work, rather than work to live? Just out of curiosity, are most people you know what would generally be called in the US "white-collar" workers?
petermcneeley 2y ago
The article revolves around the responses of Noah Smith but it is my opinion that Noah is not really a genuine actor. Noah to me just represents the system (as opposed to non-system [0]). His role is not to make radical conclusions but simply to provide a counter reactionary voice for the neo liberal order. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition
- booleandilemma 2y ago
  What would a non-system actor look like? Can you give some examples?
  - petermcneeley 2y ago
    I have read through your comments until 2018. I think you just need to follow through on your instincts. As to why the situation is not clear or why the answers are not easy to present: "I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670
cladopa 2y ago
It seems people forget the most obvious thing: A government powerful enough to give everybody a salary is powerful enough to REMOVE everybody's salary. It is also a monopoly of power. That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well. UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor. And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.
- codr7 2y ago
  Exactly, the list of conditions to keep what is now your only available source of income happy will keep growing. Hesitant about the latest gene therapy, no money for you.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    The government can already tell you to do things.
    - codr7 2y ago
      Of course, but they don't have the same means to force me. Look, I think taking care of everyone is a great idea, about time too. But giving centralized government even more power is likely a very, very bad idea.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work Can you explain what you mean by "confiscatory" and how it differs from normal income tax?
UweSchmidt 2y ago
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices. The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  It's a creeping expansion of social benefits...society will adapt around it I think this will never happen (in the US). The modern political environment in the US won't allow it. If it appears that there will be an expansion of social benefits, the wealthy class will work to sabotage it (a la ACA; not that there weren't benefits, but net-net the shareholders and executives of insurance companies won). There's nothing stopping them. What's more likely to happen, IMO, is that as the cost of existing increases, the birth rates will continue to decline. Rather than address this population crisis, the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc. With their left hand, they'll import cheap labor. With their right, they'll pit the rest of us against this cheap labor to distract from reality. The corporations want this cheap, imported labor -- they just don't want to pay the taxes to support social services for anyone. The wealth gap will continue to widen without a voting base willing to increase taxation. And to suppress this, the wealthy will use a narrative that is driven by the media consolidated and owned by these mega-rich. There are increasingly few politicians on either side that feel like they are genuine about solving this issue. The flood of money in politics feels like it's broken the system.
  - UweSchmidt 2y ago
FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do. At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end. And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job. But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset. This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief. But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work. So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless. Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
wavemode 2y ago
> When we create jobs for a purpose other than the product of the labor, we’re paying people to waste their time unproductively. This is what happens under full-employment policy. This is what happens when we use expansionary monetary policy to boost consumer demand. Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"? Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I believe it's the bullshit jobs argument. You could point to Twitter though, or really any sizeable corporate layoff that isn't driven by entirely getting rid of departments or products. Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
  - Timon3 2y ago
    > Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job. I don't see how this idea holds up to scrutiny. People who do actual work need time off regularly to keep concentration and motivation up, especially over long periods of time. These factors don't matter for bullshit jobs - who's gonna notice if their output is reduced? The impact of time off is instead directly related to quality of management. People will need time off for various reasons. You can either work together and plan around this, or you can act like it's not the case and have a) less chance of properly planning, b) greater risk of the full team being affected (e.g. when sick colleagues come into work), and c) less happy workers with higher turnover.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Sure, I wasn't meaning to argue that any person who can be out sick or on leave without hurting the team is in a bullshit job. I was just pointing to it as a potential indicator, an example of where we may be paying people to waste their time (that was the GP question). If a team handles leave well due to management that's going to be very clear to the team, it's intentional and takes active work. If a person can be out unexpectedly for a meaningful amount of time and there's no noticeable impact with that role going undone, it may be that it's a bullshit job. It also may not be, people often exagerate how many bullshit jobs there really are.
harryf 2y ago
From the post... > the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed. To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc. Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society. It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way. We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies. The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
- hypercube33 2y ago
  Sure maybe 20% can run the basics but what about building or growing society?
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That's not required. So long as it's not falling apart (which it currently is, by the way).
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Unless you can provide some hard figures, that number is probably not really accurate. I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food. I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions. We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.
_heimdall 2y ago
One problem not called out in any UBI arguments I've read, including this one, is how we even consider this while also arguing about how poorly our borders are managed. Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

51 points by Suncho 2y ago

> Unsurprisingly, the study participants became less inclined to work jobs. while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.

kfarr 2y ago
Agreed too much emphasis placed on a small data point from one study. Oddly enough my response was the opposite — only 2%??
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

seydor 2y ago

Doesn't UBI equate to lowering the prices for everything? Isn't it more feasible to pursue the latter?

_heimdall 2y ago
UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market. Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true. The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
- Retric 2y ago
  It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc. UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove. Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy. Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy. According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
    - Retric 2y ago
      Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources. As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population. That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically? Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
        Retric 2y ago
        > Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically? I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions. Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  It sounds like you are talking about some very different thing also abbreviated "UBI"? Here it stands for universal basic income.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government. For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
    - diffeomorphism 2y ago
      No
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing. I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.
zepton 2y ago
The US doesn't have a centrally planned economy, so the government can't lower the prices of everything. UBI is much more feasible to implement than communism.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Not centrally planned, except the humongous federal government, the central bank, the interstate highway system, even things like corn subsidies. There are a lot of centrally-planned areas.
- vinyl7 2y ago
  It's centrally planned by all the monopolies we have
Apreche 2y ago
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it. Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around. With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
- blfr 2y ago
  We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. ... What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it. Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage. Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    > ...I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage. That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However: What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve? What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure? [0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
Jedd 2y ago
I don't think you can usefully equate 'UBI' to a single outcome of UBI. One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero. And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong. Why should it cost to live? (You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Surely cost of living, expressed as hours of labour, remains the same regardless. Anyone can reduce their cost of living by reducing the standard of living.
  - Jedd 2y ago
    Your premise is patently not true.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  > Why should it cost to live? Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us. A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom... There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit. "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
marcosdumay 2y ago
No it doesn't, you can't multiply a zero income by any number and put people out of poverty. You can't redistribute wealth by multiplying everybody's income either. But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.

_heimdall 2y ago

The author seems to effectively argue for UBI as a solution to bullshit jobs. People waste a lot of time today in jobs that produce no real value, instead the government should pay people a similar wage to not do those jobs. > There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI. More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis. What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.

frankharv 2y ago
Don't we already have Marxism-Socialism though? It been called many things from social safety net to welfare. You can look at Social Security and its money woes as an example. That system is going insolvent with people contributing. It is mandatory to contribute if you are gainfully employed..
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Programs that truly are needs based don't really fit into the Marxist approach. UBI is much closer to, or just is, Marxism because its universal. You get the money simply because the government decided that is the amount of money everyone needs and deserves.
jeltz 2y ago
UBI is not at all based in Marxism. The idea is older than Marxism and almost entirely unrelated to it. That's probably why you never see it mentioned.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  My point isn't that Marx invented the idea of a UBI, I don't actually recall him specifically writing about the concept. My point is that the idea of a UBI is rooted in very much the same arguments as what Marx wrote so much about.

blfr 2y ago

The world is increasingly complex making it seem to many people that their work is unproductive (bullshit/make-work jobs). This and lack of agency in many jobs is what leads to massive frustration with work* but it's not actually an incisive observation about the economy as a whole. it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea. * Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.

kolinko 2y ago
There are things that work and couldn’t be piloted - Postal System for example.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  How so? The first postal systems certainly didn't cover entire kingdoms and didn't serve the entire population.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    They did work at smaller scale though. It's not dependent on psychological dynamics like UBI.
- blfr 2y ago
  Couriers have existed since the beginning of civilization. With many famous examples, like Pheidippides in keeping with the Olympic spirit. It was obviously valuable and workable from the smallest scale possible: a verbal message carried by a runner.

dade_ 2y ago

So this explanation is neat and tidy. The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. So they start demanding exorbitant wages, show up late, if at all. This is productive work, and productive work that frees higher skilled resources to be more productive. Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.

simoncion 2y ago
> The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. We've uh, we've known this for millennia. "When no longer required to do something that they hate, people will often choose to stop doing that hated thing." is not even a little bit surprising. > ...and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done. Nah. Most folks don't give a shit about whether or not their work has "meaning". They work to fund their hobbies and fun, they don't work to find "meaning". Terminally-management-brained middle managers sure THINK that it's important for rank-and-file people to understand that their work has "meaning", though. They can't fuckin seem to shut up about it.
- jeltz 2y ago
  That's not my experience at all. Most people I know and have worked with care a lot about if their work has meaning. The people who do not are the outliers.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    So, most people you know live to work, rather than work to live? Just out of curiosity, are most people you know what would generally be called in the US "white-collar" workers?

petermcneeley 2y ago

The article revolves around the responses of Noah Smith but it is my opinion that Noah is not really a genuine actor. Noah to me just represents the system (as opposed to non-system [0]). His role is not to make radical conclusions but simply to provide a counter reactionary voice for the neo liberal order. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition

booleandilemma 2y ago
What would a non-system actor look like? Can you give some examples?
- petermcneeley 2y ago
  I have read through your comments until 2018. I think you just need to follow through on your instincts. As to why the situation is not clear or why the answers are not easy to present: "I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670

cladopa 2y ago

It seems people forget the most obvious thing: A government powerful enough to give everybody a salary is powerful enough to REMOVE everybody's salary. It is also a monopoly of power. That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well. UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor. And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.

codr7 2y ago
Exactly, the list of conditions to keep what is now your only available source of income happy will keep growing. Hesitant about the latest gene therapy, no money for you.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  The government can already tell you to do things.
  - codr7 2y ago
    Of course, but they don't have the same means to force me. Look, I think taking care of everyone is a great idea, about time too. But giving centralized government even more power is likely a very, very bad idea.
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work Can you explain what you mean by "confiscatory" and how it differs from normal income tax?

UweSchmidt 2y ago

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices. The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
It's a creeping expansion of social benefits...society will adapt around it I think this will never happen (in the US). The modern political environment in the US won't allow it. If it appears that there will be an expansion of social benefits, the wealthy class will work to sabotage it (a la ACA; not that there weren't benefits, but net-net the shareholders and executives of insurance companies won). There's nothing stopping them. What's more likely to happen, IMO, is that as the cost of existing increases, the birth rates will continue to decline. Rather than address this population crisis, the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc. With their left hand, they'll import cheap labor. With their right, they'll pit the rest of us against this cheap labor to distract from reality. The corporations want this cheap, imported labor -- they just don't want to pay the taxes to support social services for anyone. The wealth gap will continue to widen without a voting base willing to increase taxation. And to suppress this, the wealthy will use a narrative that is driven by the media consolidated and owned by these mega-rich. There are increasingly few politicians on either side that feel like they are genuine about solving this issue. The flood of money in politics feels like it's broken the system.
- UweSchmidt 2y ago

FooBarBizBazz 2y ago

I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do. At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end. And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job. But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset. This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief. But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work. So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless. Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.

wetpaws 2y ago
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wavemode 2y ago

> When we create jobs for a purpose other than the product of the labor, we’re paying people to waste their time unproductively. This is what happens under full-employment policy. This is what happens when we use expansionary monetary policy to boost consumer demand. Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"? Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."

_heimdall 2y ago
I believe it's the bullshit jobs argument. You could point to Twitter though, or really any sizeable corporate layoff that isn't driven by entirely getting rid of departments or products. Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
- Timon3 2y ago
  > Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job. I don't see how this idea holds up to scrutiny. People who do actual work need time off regularly to keep concentration and motivation up, especially over long periods of time. These factors don't matter for bullshit jobs - who's gonna notice if their output is reduced? The impact of time off is instead directly related to quality of management. People will need time off for various reasons. You can either work together and plan around this, or you can act like it's not the case and have a) less chance of properly planning, b) greater risk of the full team being affected (e.g. when sick colleagues come into work), and c) less happy workers with higher turnover.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Sure, I wasn't meaning to argue that any person who can be out sick or on leave without hurting the team is in a bullshit job. I was just pointing to it as a potential indicator, an example of where we may be paying people to waste their time (that was the GP question). If a team handles leave well due to management that's going to be very clear to the team, it's intentional and takes active work. If a person can be out unexpectedly for a meaningful amount of time and there's no noticeable impact with that role going undone, it may be that it's a bullshit job. It also may not be, people often exagerate how many bullshit jobs there really are.

harryf 2y ago

From the post... > the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed. To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc. Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society. It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way. We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies. The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.

hypercube33 2y ago
Sure maybe 20% can run the basics but what about building or growing society?
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That's not required. So long as it's not falling apart (which it currently is, by the way).
bamboozled 2y ago
Unless you can provide some hard figures, that number is probably not really accurate. I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food. I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions. We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.

_heimdall 2y ago

One problem not called out in any UBI arguments I've read, including this one, is how we even consider this while also arguing about how poorly our borders are managed. Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.

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