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> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in w

by mattdw 13y ago

> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one. Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.

dantheman 13y ago
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
- argonaut 13y ago
  No. It does not mean no one will ever work as a dishwasher/etc. It just means that the market rate for dishwashers/etc. will be higher. This would be due to the supply curve for labor shifting. Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor. The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
  - Someone 13y ago
    You still have to find the money to pay that universal basic income. IIRC, the idea is to get that money by taxing capital and making it cheaper to hire people. As you indicate, getting it by taxing labor leads businesses to automate away labor, making it even harder to get that money from taxes on labor. Think of it: that $5 an hour job currently costs a company $10 an hour or so. Without taxes on labor, they could pay $7 for a win-win situation. Even paying $5 would still be win-win, as the employee would have his basic income plus the $5 an hour.
    - argonaut 13y ago
      Have you considered taxing both capital AND labor?
  - thelogos 13y ago
    But it's getting to the point where dishwashing might not even be available as a job. Right now, that's not the case yet. But it's not hard to imagine a future where it is. Many menial jobs are getting automated and it's just getting worse and worse. Soon, we will have to do something about it. These protests and revolutions are spreading like the plague. And social unrest is bad for everyone, including business. One day, it will become a necessity. Just look at countries like Japan and Korea. Too many over-qualified people and not enough jobs. People are hired to do menial task like tearing tickets out of machines and handing it to people in a car. Suicide in these countries are skyrocketing because of hyper-competition. In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. There is definitely enough money to make work. The goverment just has to be smarter about allocating its budget.
    - ahomescu1 13y ago
      > In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. In the Eastern Europe protests (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey), people are protesting political corruption and abuse of authority, not poverty (in fact, I'll go as far as to say that many of the protesters are well-off middle class people, not the starving poor).
- EliRivers 13y ago
  "Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever..." Unless they want more money, of course. Hands up everyone who might want more money than the minimum needed to survive.
  - gaius 13y ago
    This is where the theory collides unpleasantly with the real world. The "minimum needed to survive" will be ratcheted up by every politician courting votes, and the people will happily play along. F'rinstance I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but right now in the UK it is causing an enormous political storm trying to roll back "... with a spare bedroom or two, in the postcode of your choosing" getting tacked onto this basic right somewhere along the line.
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      You agree with the principle; you're just arguing over where to draw the line. That argument will always exist.
- scotty79 13y ago
  Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
  - dctoedt 13y ago
    > Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work. And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of cheap human work"? If we simply ignore it, there'll be hell to pay. The old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop, is based on millennia of human experience. Suppose that all the dishwashers in the U.S. were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families. Now consider that for some of these people, retraining them to seek out and hold other jobs might not be much of an option. There are some people who, for whatever reason, simply can't learn the necessary skills / behaviors / motivations. (If you're inclined to scorn that notion, or such people, consider how little we really know about human learning abilities and motivation; such people are more common than you perhaps imagine.) Are our unemployed dishwashers going to sit around passively and accept their fate, watching their families do without while they see others around them prospering? Not bloody likely --- they're going to try to do something about it. And some percentage of them are going to make trouble, e.g., by robbing or cheating others, dealing drugs, rioting, etc. From a purely-pragmatic perspective, if we want to keep our vaunted social order intact, then we're going to have to figure out how to keep people (A) occupied in reasonable contentment, and (B) reasonably-well fed, -clothed, -housed, etc. This is a brute fact, which we can like or not, but which we disregard at our peril.
    - scotty79 13y ago
      > were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their familie. That's only true if you give things to people only on condition that they do something, anything, useful, harmful, obsolete, whatever you can call a job. Food is cheap, housing can be cheap if it gets detangled from financial speculation and protected against rent seeking behavior. That's not excessive burden to keep all the people fed, clothed and housed and even entertained at minimum standard without making them do stuff. Only obstacle is the mental one. Hate towards freeloaders, that makes people pretend they do useful things and makes other people create schemes that help to pretend. People hate the idea that young father could get food or other things for free. He should be given at least a pretend job where he can simulate doing useful stuff away from his growing up kids. Interestingly people don't mind the freeloading descendants of rich people. They didn't contribute themselves but their ancestors contributed so much. Unlike the ancestors of young poor father. He should be severely scorned for any of his attempts at freeloading.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  The idea is that technology makes doing anything undesirable totally optional. We made horses obsolete for transport, and now nobody HAS TO ride a horse (99%). You can do it for fun. I would argue that today, most people who ride horses enjoy doing so, where the same could not be said for times before modern transportation.
  - brazzy 13y ago
    No, that is not the idea, because automatability and undesirability of tasks are largely unrelated. We will habe to find a way to deal with tasks that are unpleasant but can't be automated.
    - Kliment 13y ago
      Compensate them appropriately, how about?
      - pekk 13y ago
        Or find people to do them who are sufficiently desperate and low in status, compensate them just enough, make sure they don't have enough savings to walk, convince them they can't be hired elsewhere, collude with other employers to set wages, make harsh examples of anyone who pushes back, and do anything to prevent workers from organizing. This is much cheaper and considered socially acceptable or even laudable (depending on the country, certainly in the US). Businesses with a large share of their costs in unpleasant labor either do this or get destroyed by the competition. That's capitalism.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        Obviously that should only ever happy for CEO, golden parachute type of jobs, never blue collar stuff...
- mattdw 13y ago
  The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. That's untrue. Switzerland is having a national referendum on whether to offer one, and stipends from oil or casino money, while not enough to live on at this point, already exist in a few places. You may be correct that there's not enough money to give everyone enough to live on, but it's far from sci-fi. (There is plenty of money in the world, it's just tied up in things like insane finance industry salaries, or $500k/yr/person for imprisonment, etc.) And historically? People looked after their own menial tasks, where they were small enough, and where the tasks were too big for individuals (like roads, or building a town hall) the community got together and did it.
  - dantheman 13y ago
    In switzerland it was voted down because it doesn't make economic sense. Look at the numbers, they don't work.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      What numbers, specifically? You didn't cite any and there haven't been many real-world studies or experiments to produce data on the costs/results of a basic income program. Something this complicated isn't going to be accurately modeled by a couple economists purely using estimates...
      - chiph 13y ago
        Caveat: Not a professional analysis, and not the OP. There's 248 million people ages 16 and older in the US, of which 63% are in the labor force[1]. So 156 million people are available for work (not all of whom are employed). Total population is about 330 million. If each of them were to get a basic monthly stipend (this is everyone, including infants) of $1200, that's $396 billion per month in payments. Per working individual, that's a tax burden of $2538 per month. And that's just for this program - there's also the rest of government to pay for. Military, roads, police + fire protection, and so on. This also assumes that the basic stipend replaces all other existing entitlement and welfare programs. Which isn't likely, because politics. Yes, the working individual will also receive a stipend payment, reducing their net tax burden to $1338. But for an hourly employee, that comes out to about $8.35 per hour worked that goes to tax. Even with the new $10.10 minimum wage proposal, that leaves them just $1.75/hr as incentive to work, vs. just staying home and living off the stipend. [1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_1YR_S2301&prodType=table http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
- kevingadd 13y ago
  I don't understand how 'there just isn't that much money' is a meaningful statement in a world where governments can issue more currency. How much money do you propose we need to offer a basic income system?
  - pekk 13y ago
    Generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes up too. Printing money isn't a panacea.
    - dualogy 13y ago
      True for all national currencies but hardly for the world-reserve-currency. Here you have the following reality instead: > generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes hardly up in any noticable way, financial assets / Silicon Valley valuations / houses go up significantly (so the country thinks they got "wealthier"), and bread-loaf prices in USD-aligned weak-currency/underdeveloped/perpetually-"emerging" economies go up quite significantly Not to worry, dollar supply inflation greatly delays consumer price inflation on your shores thanks to the massive oversupply of USD already circulating all over the globe, looking to find a way "home" ;)
      - pekk 13y ago
        Not really, since there was no historical time when USD were being printed with wild abandon
        dualogy 13y ago
        Partly true, but we're also talking hypothetical here, as in "why don't we just print the basic income" -- "bread would get pricier" -- "in a normal national currency, yes very quickly, but in a global reserve currency, with substantial delay". Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
- dualogy 13y ago
  Last I heard, instead of paying taxes, Brunei citizens all get an annual $30k outright. Isn't that real-world, non-sci-fi Basic Income?
  - tomp 13y ago
    Source?
    - gaius 13y ago
      Oil.
  - krrrh 13y ago
    That's sort of the exception that proves the rule no? Not every country can be tiny and make piles of cash selling resources to large countries, while paying low wages to guest workers from poor countries to do the work that none of the citizens want to do. I'm not saying that being born a citizen of Brunei is a raw deal, but their wealth is pretty dependent on the needs of much larger countries.
- ansimionescu 13y ago
  > The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Sorry, but that last part is utterly dumb. There is enough of everything for everyone, money is just one of the abstractions we built for convenience's sake. Most of these abstractions for power have gone out of hand, but I assure you that there exists a theoretical parallel universe where basic income is implemented at a global scale.
  - gaius 13y ago
    No, post-scarcity is what is dumb. Some things just are scarce. Let's say we agree a basic human right that everyone gets a house. Who decides who gets houses on the beach? You can actually see this in practice if you visit Cuba. In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live. And how is that different from the US? Besides "party types" being Ivy Leaguers and silver-spoon fed people?
      - gaius 13y ago
        Because the US doesn't even claim to adhere to any notions of egalitarianism.
        coldtea 13y ago
        No, but it has a claim to the "american dream" of hard work ending with success, a white picket fence and the like. Whereas in real life you see people working their ass off all their lives still working at Walmarts at their 70s, while heirs, privileged slobs and frauds who haven't actually worked a day in their lives are living the dream...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  >There just isn't that much money. A $10k/yr income for every American would cost $3T. Current US gov't spending is over $6.4T.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. Actually you could support UBI by just taxing 1-2 people in the whole US.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Could you crunch the numbers and explain how? A back of the envelope calculation will suffice.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Well, it might be a slight exaggeration to just tax 2 persons. But it's based on the extremely skewed power-law distribution. The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today. Even $1000 are more than the yearly income for billions of people in places with far less physical resources than the US (and close enough food prices). Heck, 200 million Pakistanis live with a national GPD of around 250 billion dollars for comparison ($1300 per person). And the richest 400 share around 2 trillion between them. We haven't even touched the trillions they save from off-shore accounts, shady accounting etc. And that's for private citizens, one would also want to extent it to corporations. Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year). Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.
      - yummyfajitas 13y ago
        The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today. Lets say you tax away that 2 trillion, which is mostly illiquid productive capacity rather than easily redistributable liquid cash. That'll provide a $7,200 basic income for about 275 million Americans for one year. Then what? Of course, in real life, you can't redistribute Zuckerberg's wealth as cash. The most you could do is give every American a few shares of FB, a few shares of MS, etc. Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year). We already do that. It's called "welfare", not "basic income". Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto. You are confusing consumption and investment. Buffet and Trump invest the bulk of their income. Buffet invests in railroads and insurance companies, Trump invests in condos. Peter Thiel invests his money in companies like Facebook, Linkedin and Deep Mind. Consumption is when you spend the money on stuff like big screen TVs or food.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  >Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. Absolutely disagree. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean that undesirable jobs (such as the ones you describe) will have to increase pay and conditions to correctly reflect the job's undesirability. To me, that's an awesome result! In the specific case of being a doctor: it's possible (but unlikely) that desirable jobs such as doctors may have to take a relative paycut to cover other expenses. I don't see that as the worst thing. Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand. This effectively limits a desirable career to the already-privileged and means the system is not necessarily accurate at identifying the most skilled candidates. If poor, skilled people are more securely able to fund themselves through medical school, that would also be great!
  - FLUX-YOU 13y ago
    > Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand. I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter. Sometimes I also wonder how much work has gone into keeping MDs an exclusive club by national societies and the gatekeeper schools for no other reason than to maintain exclusivity and prestige (and money). Do the requirements have studies to back them up, or did a council just decide with an informed opinion? Both are respectable, but I'm still suspicious there's artificial supply limiting going on. Apart from that, you'd have to rewire America's litigious tendencies and opportunities, or else a flood of new doctors would make malpractice insurance skyrocket. That'll change the 'worth it' formula for sure.
    - lgieron 13y ago
      > I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter. I'm also not a doctor, but I imagine that large part of doctor's paycheck is for staying alert when treating a hundredth patient with "obvious" cold/indigestion symptoms, which are actually masqueraded symptoms of a serious disease.
- AngrySkillzz 13y ago
  The U.S. currently spends about 2.3 trillion dollars on social welfare every year. That's around $9,500 per adult per year, a pretty good starting point (and cheaper to administer since you aren't means testing and can collapse all of those other programs into one). Combined with small tax increases or a cut in some of the U.S.'s other massive expenditure programs (i.e. the military), we can pretty easily afford to pay every adult U.S. citizen above the poverty level to do nothing.
  - harryh 13y ago
    Cutting social security benefits that pay the retired 10s of Ks per year in order to give everyone, most of whom are by no means poor, 9.5k/yr absolutely is sci fi level crazy talk.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      You get it back as tax from the non-poor so you don't actually spend the money. Though if they have a bad year or decide to start a business, or write a novel they are assured that I'll be there for them.
      - harryh 13y ago
        AngrySkillzz proposed funding BI by eliminating other programs (including Social Security). You're saying we don't eliminate those programs and instead fund BI by raising taxes?
        ZeroGravitas 13y ago
        I'm sure you can find a basic introduction to the idea you're arguing against somewhere on the web but basically, instead of giving money to the poor and needy, you give it to everyone and those that earn a little give some of it back in tax, at some point you earn enough to give it all back. Those in the latter group cost you nothing, even though you've "given" them x thousand dollars, so dividing (or multiplying) a dollar figure by population isn't accurate.
- lotsofmangos 13y ago
  The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. I don't think you understand how money works. If there are available resources then there can be available money.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  There just isn't that much money. There's as much money as the regulator of the currency cares to create. Money is fungible. Money isn't real wealth, and you cannot create more resources than you have simply by creating new wealth tokens. However, if what's ailing you is that the exchange tokens aren't equitably distributed, that does turn out to be a problem that can be addressed, directly, by creating and distributing more money. The incentive effects are an interesting case to contemplate, but the more I think about it, the more that chasing revenue-generating opportunities of themselves seems to be more a part of the problem than of the solution.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  > There just isn't that much money. Sorry, but the idea scales from almost zero spending into infinity. You can not claim that there isn't enough money. Our future looks very interesting because our machines promise to make goods very, very cheap. But they also promise to put almost everybody out of work. Left to a market, most of the population will starve, and very few become very rich. But almost any level of basic income will solve this, even if today it's too little.
- mistercow 13y ago
  >There just isn't that much money. How much money? Basic income doesn't imply a specific amount. >Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant... This is probably false. Even if the basic income is enough to live off of, people will still want more money for luxuries. But instead of having to work 50 hours a week to scrape by, they'll be able to work 20 hours a week and live comfortably, even at low wages. And if you get to the point that you actually have more jobs than people to work them? You either lower the basic income, or you let inflation do it for you. Better yet, automation ceases to be a bogeyman for unskilled workers. If jobs get automated away, we can increase the basic income to compensate. On the flip side, we can actually incentivize automation by increasing the basic income, leading to a future where we stop making humans do dumb jobs just so they can be employed.
- _delirium 13y ago
  A reasonable number of social-democratic countries have basically an overly bureaucratic, somewhat perversely-incentivized version of a basic income already, and it works ok. For example, the last-line social welfare system in Denmark, which you qualify for if you have no assets and don't qualify for a "better" system (like jobseeking assistance), known as kontanthjælp ("cash assistance"), is about $24k/yr. If you're a citizen there is basically no way you can be disqualified for this system, so it functions as an income floor. This isn't properly a basic income, because you don't get it if you work, and in addition you need to exhaust all your assets first. This provides some perverse incentives, along with some bureaucracy to keep it all organized. But when it comes down to it, once you exhaust your savings and unemployment benefits, there's an income floor of $24k/yr, which is like a basic income except you lose it if you save money or find a job... which if anything worsens the disincentive problem. I'm not sure just extending it to a proper basic income would be worse for finances, and suspect it could be better.
Jach 13y ago
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)
- scotty79 13y ago
  That's the only thing I can see that can go wrong with basic income. I'd counter that with progressive property tax. So that if you own 5 accomodations, of which each can house a family, you might be better off with selling the sixth one than holding it, paying exorbitant tax and risking it might stay empty for too long. I would pump money earned from this tax back into basic income. Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
- mattdw 13y ago
  An alternative to fixing prices would be just to compete. The government could start building its own housing, recouping the costs straight back from UBI rents, and simultaneously holding privately-owned market prices to a more reasonable level.
  - Jach 13y ago
    Would this work for utility companies too? How about mega food corps (http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg as an example), who probably have very good statistics about what percentage of the population in an area regularly buys (and "can't live without") their products, and thus figure out the optimal price increases for each area? Gas? Cars? And what about the partners of all these other companies whose customers are other businesses not individuals, but are going to start charging more and expecting the customer business to pass it along to their individual customer -- refineries, mines, mills, graineries, farms, storage warehouses... (As I mentioned before, everyone who has anything to sell will want as big a piece of this new income that they can get and will raise prices to try and find out how much they can capture without starting to make less profit than before. Over infinite time and with everyone having perfect information of the market, I think $x/yr would become the new $0/yr.) Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.
djrobstep 13y ago
Here is an interesting basic income calculator: http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  That's far too simplistic and cannot be taken seriously. One of the first serious issues you'd have to consider is migration from other countries to your model country with basic income. There's billions of people out there who'd happily live on basic income in some first world country and I'd absolutely encourage them to do so, given what the first world's riches are built on (but I digress...).
yourapostasy 13y ago
We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a diabetes epidemic with low socioeconomic groups, and the obesogenic environment is not well studied enough to know if giving those groups more access to free time will improve outcomes. Will those groups on average use a soft UBI to improve their overall health, or will they choose poorly and the benefits of UBI blowback into exploding healthcare costs? No one really knows yet. I would like to believe that soft UBI would lead to better health outcomes, but that might simply be my own socioeconomic background speaking. The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there. We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.
slurry 13y ago
> (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.) It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement. The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.

by mattdw 13y ago

dantheman 13y ago

The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.

argonaut 13y ago
No. It does not mean no one will ever work as a dishwasher/etc. It just means that the market rate for dishwashers/etc. will be higher. This would be due to the supply curve for labor shifting. Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor. The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
- Someone 13y ago
  You still have to find the money to pay that universal basic income. IIRC, the idea is to get that money by taxing capital and making it cheaper to hire people. As you indicate, getting it by taxing labor leads businesses to automate away labor, making it even harder to get that money from taxes on labor. Think of it: that $5 an hour job currently costs a company $10 an hour or so. Without taxes on labor, they could pay $7 for a win-win situation. Even paying $5 would still be win-win, as the employee would have his basic income plus the $5 an hour.
  - argonaut 13y ago
    Have you considered taxing both capital AND labor?
- thelogos 13y ago
  But it's getting to the point where dishwashing might not even be available as a job. Right now, that's not the case yet. But it's not hard to imagine a future where it is. Many menial jobs are getting automated and it's just getting worse and worse. Soon, we will have to do something about it. These protests and revolutions are spreading like the plague. And social unrest is bad for everyone, including business. One day, it will become a necessity. Just look at countries like Japan and Korea. Too many over-qualified people and not enough jobs. People are hired to do menial task like tearing tickets out of machines and handing it to people in a car. Suicide in these countries are skyrocketing because of hyper-competition. In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. There is definitely enough money to make work. The goverment just has to be smarter about allocating its budget.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    > In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. In the Eastern Europe protests (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey), people are protesting political corruption and abuse of authority, not poverty (in fact, I'll go as far as to say that many of the protesters are well-off middle class people, not the starving poor).
EliRivers 13y ago
"Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever..." Unless they want more money, of course. Hands up everyone who might want more money than the minimum needed to survive.
- gaius 13y ago
  This is where the theory collides unpleasantly with the real world. The "minimum needed to survive" will be ratcheted up by every politician courting votes, and the people will happily play along. F'rinstance I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but right now in the UK it is causing an enormous political storm trying to roll back "... with a spare bedroom or two, in the postcode of your choosing" getting tacked onto this basic right somewhere along the line.
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    You agree with the principle; you're just arguing over where to draw the line. That argument will always exist.
scotty79 13y ago
Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
- dctoedt 13y ago
  > Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work. And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of cheap human work"? If we simply ignore it, there'll be hell to pay. The old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop, is based on millennia of human experience. Suppose that all the dishwashers in the U.S. were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families. Now consider that for some of these people, retraining them to seek out and hold other jobs might not be much of an option. There are some people who, for whatever reason, simply can't learn the necessary skills / behaviors / motivations. (If you're inclined to scorn that notion, or such people, consider how little we really know about human learning abilities and motivation; such people are more common than you perhaps imagine.) Are our unemployed dishwashers going to sit around passively and accept their fate, watching their families do without while they see others around them prospering? Not bloody likely --- they're going to try to do something about it. And some percentage of them are going to make trouble, e.g., by robbing or cheating others, dealing drugs, rioting, etc. From a purely-pragmatic perspective, if we want to keep our vaunted social order intact, then we're going to have to figure out how to keep people (A) occupied in reasonable contentment, and (B) reasonably-well fed, -clothed, -housed, etc. This is a brute fact, which we can like or not, but which we disregard at our peril.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    > were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their familie. That's only true if you give things to people only on condition that they do something, anything, useful, harmful, obsolete, whatever you can call a job. Food is cheap, housing can be cheap if it gets detangled from financial speculation and protected against rent seeking behavior. That's not excessive burden to keep all the people fed, clothed and housed and even entertained at minimum standard without making them do stuff. Only obstacle is the mental one. Hate towards freeloaders, that makes people pretend they do useful things and makes other people create schemes that help to pretend. People hate the idea that young father could get food or other things for free. He should be given at least a pretend job where he can simulate doing useful stuff away from his growing up kids. Interestingly people don't mind the freeloading descendants of rich people. They didn't contribute themselves but their ancestors contributed so much. Unlike the ancestors of young poor father. He should be severely scorned for any of his attempts at freeloading.
hayksaakian 13y ago
The idea is that technology makes doing anything undesirable totally optional. We made horses obsolete for transport, and now nobody HAS TO ride a horse (99%). You can do it for fun. I would argue that today, most people who ride horses enjoy doing so, where the same could not be said for times before modern transportation.
- brazzy 13y ago
  No, that is not the idea, because automatability and undesirability of tasks are largely unrelated. We will habe to find a way to deal with tasks that are unpleasant but can't be automated.
  - Kliment 13y ago
    Compensate them appropriately, how about?
    - pekk 13y ago
      Or find people to do them who are sufficiently desperate and low in status, compensate them just enough, make sure they don't have enough savings to walk, convince them they can't be hired elsewhere, collude with other employers to set wages, make harsh examples of anyone who pushes back, and do anything to prevent workers from organizing. This is much cheaper and considered socially acceptable or even laudable (depending on the country, certainly in the US). Businesses with a large share of their costs in unpleasant labor either do this or get destroyed by the competition. That's capitalism.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Obviously that should only ever happy for CEO, golden parachute type of jobs, never blue collar stuff...
mattdw 13y ago
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. That's untrue. Switzerland is having a national referendum on whether to offer one, and stipends from oil or casino money, while not enough to live on at this point, already exist in a few places. You may be correct that there's not enough money to give everyone enough to live on, but it's far from sci-fi. (There is plenty of money in the world, it's just tied up in things like insane finance industry salaries, or $500k/yr/person for imprisonment, etc.) And historically? People looked after their own menial tasks, where they were small enough, and where the tasks were too big for individuals (like roads, or building a town hall) the community got together and did it.
- dantheman 13y ago
  In switzerland it was voted down because it doesn't make economic sense. Look at the numbers, they don't work.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    What numbers, specifically? You didn't cite any and there haven't been many real-world studies or experiments to produce data on the costs/results of a basic income program. Something this complicated isn't going to be accurately modeled by a couple economists purely using estimates...
    - chiph 13y ago
      Caveat: Not a professional analysis, and not the OP. There's 248 million people ages 16 and older in the US, of which 63% are in the labor force[1]. So 156 million people are available for work (not all of whom are employed). Total population is about 330 million. If each of them were to get a basic monthly stipend (this is everyone, including infants) of $1200, that's $396 billion per month in payments. Per working individual, that's a tax burden of $2538 per month. And that's just for this program - there's also the rest of government to pay for. Military, roads, police + fire protection, and so on. This also assumes that the basic stipend replaces all other existing entitlement and welfare programs. Which isn't likely, because politics. Yes, the working individual will also receive a stipend payment, reducing their net tax burden to $1338. But for an hourly employee, that comes out to about $8.35 per hour worked that goes to tax. Even with the new $10.10 minimum wage proposal, that leaves them just $1.75/hr as incentive to work, vs. just staying home and living off the stipend. [1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_1YR_S2301&prodType=table http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
kevingadd 13y ago
I don't understand how 'there just isn't that much money' is a meaningful statement in a world where governments can issue more currency. How much money do you propose we need to offer a basic income system?
- pekk 13y ago
  Generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes up too. Printing money isn't a panacea.
  - dualogy 13y ago
    True for all national currencies but hardly for the world-reserve-currency. Here you have the following reality instead: > generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes hardly up in any noticable way, financial assets / Silicon Valley valuations / houses go up significantly (so the country thinks they got "wealthier"), and bread-loaf prices in USD-aligned weak-currency/underdeveloped/perpetually-"emerging" economies go up quite significantly Not to worry, dollar supply inflation greatly delays consumer price inflation on your shores thanks to the massive oversupply of USD already circulating all over the globe, looking to find a way "home" ;)
    - pekk 13y ago
      Not really, since there was no historical time when USD were being printed with wild abandon
      - dualogy 13y ago
        Partly true, but we're also talking hypothetical here, as in "why don't we just print the basic income" -- "bread would get pricier" -- "in a normal national currency, yes very quickly, but in a global reserve currency, with substantial delay". Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
dualogy 13y ago
Last I heard, instead of paying taxes, Brunei citizens all get an annual $30k outright. Isn't that real-world, non-sci-fi Basic Income?
- tomp 13y ago
  Source?
  - gaius 13y ago
    Oil.
- krrrh 13y ago
  That's sort of the exception that proves the rule no? Not every country can be tiny and make piles of cash selling resources to large countries, while paying low wages to guest workers from poor countries to do the work that none of the citizens want to do. I'm not saying that being born a citizen of Brunei is a raw deal, but their wealth is pretty dependent on the needs of much larger countries.
ansimionescu 13y ago
> The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Sorry, but that last part is utterly dumb. There is enough of everything for everyone, money is just one of the abstractions we built for convenience's sake. Most of these abstractions for power have gone out of hand, but I assure you that there exists a theoretical parallel universe where basic income is implemented at a global scale.
- gaius 13y ago
  No, post-scarcity is what is dumb. Some things just are scarce. Let's say we agree a basic human right that everyone gets a house. Who decides who gets houses on the beach? You can actually see this in practice if you visit Cuba. In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live. And how is that different from the US? Besides "party types" being Ivy Leaguers and silver-spoon fed people?
    - gaius 13y ago
      Because the US doesn't even claim to adhere to any notions of egalitarianism.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        No, but it has a claim to the "american dream" of hard work ending with success, a white picket fence and the like. Whereas in real life you see people working their ass off all their lives still working at Walmarts at their 70s, while heirs, privileged slobs and frauds who haven't actually worked a day in their lives are living the dream...
deleted 13y ago
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alexeisadeski3 13y ago
>There just isn't that much money. A $10k/yr income for every American would cost $3T. Current US gov't spending is over $6.4T.
coldtea 13y ago
>The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. Actually you could support UBI by just taxing 1-2 people in the whole US.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Could you crunch the numbers and explain how? A back of the envelope calculation will suffice.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Well, it might be a slight exaggeration to just tax 2 persons. But it's based on the extremely skewed power-law distribution. The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today. Even $1000 are more than the yearly income for billions of people in places with far less physical resources than the US (and close enough food prices). Heck, 200 million Pakistanis live with a national GPD of around 250 billion dollars for comparison ($1300 per person). And the richest 400 share around 2 trillion between them. We haven't even touched the trillions they save from off-shore accounts, shady accounting etc. And that's for private citizens, one would also want to extent it to corporations. Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year). Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today. Lets say you tax away that 2 trillion, which is mostly illiquid productive capacity rather than easily redistributable liquid cash. That'll provide a $7,200 basic income for about 275 million Americans for one year. Then what? Of course, in real life, you can't redistribute Zuckerberg's wealth as cash. The most you could do is give every American a few shares of FB, a few shares of MS, etc. Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year). We already do that. It's called "welfare", not "basic income". Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto. You are confusing consumption and investment. Buffet and Trump invest the bulk of their income. Buffet invests in railroads and insurance companies, Trump invests in condos. Peter Thiel invests his money in companies like Facebook, Linkedin and Deep Mind. Consumption is when you spend the money on stuff like big screen TVs or food.
ronaldx 13y ago
>Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. Absolutely disagree. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean that undesirable jobs (such as the ones you describe) will have to increase pay and conditions to correctly reflect the job's undesirability. To me, that's an awesome result! In the specific case of being a doctor: it's possible (but unlikely) that desirable jobs such as doctors may have to take a relative paycut to cover other expenses. I don't see that as the worst thing. Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand. This effectively limits a desirable career to the already-privileged and means the system is not necessarily accurate at identifying the most skilled candidates. If poor, skilled people are more securely able to fund themselves through medical school, that would also be great!
- FLUX-YOU 13y ago
  > Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand. I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter. Sometimes I also wonder how much work has gone into keeping MDs an exclusive club by national societies and the gatekeeper schools for no other reason than to maintain exclusivity and prestige (and money). Do the requirements have studies to back them up, or did a council just decide with an informed opinion? Both are respectable, but I'm still suspicious there's artificial supply limiting going on. Apart from that, you'd have to rewire America's litigious tendencies and opportunities, or else a flood of new doctors would make malpractice insurance skyrocket. That'll change the 'worth it' formula for sure.
  - lgieron 13y ago
    > I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter. I'm also not a doctor, but I imagine that large part of doctor's paycheck is for staying alert when treating a hundredth patient with "obvious" cold/indigestion symptoms, which are actually masqueraded symptoms of a serious disease.
AngrySkillzz 13y ago
The U.S. currently spends about 2.3 trillion dollars on social welfare every year. That's around $9,500 per adult per year, a pretty good starting point (and cheaper to administer since you aren't means testing and can collapse all of those other programs into one). Combined with small tax increases or a cut in some of the U.S.'s other massive expenditure programs (i.e. the military), we can pretty easily afford to pay every adult U.S. citizen above the poverty level to do nothing.
- harryh 13y ago
  Cutting social security benefits that pay the retired 10s of Ks per year in order to give everyone, most of whom are by no means poor, 9.5k/yr absolutely is sci fi level crazy talk.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    You get it back as tax from the non-poor so you don't actually spend the money. Though if they have a bad year or decide to start a business, or write a novel they are assured that I'll be there for them.
    - harryh 13y ago
      AngrySkillzz proposed funding BI by eliminating other programs (including Social Security). You're saying we don't eliminate those programs and instead fund BI by raising taxes?
      - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
        I'm sure you can find a basic introduction to the idea you're arguing against somewhere on the web but basically, instead of giving money to the poor and needy, you give it to everyone and those that earn a little give some of it back in tax, at some point you earn enough to give it all back. Those in the latter group cost you nothing, even though you've "given" them x thousand dollars, so dividing (or multiplying) a dollar figure by population isn't accurate.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. I don't think you understand how money works. If there are available resources then there can be available money.
dredmorbius 13y ago
There just isn't that much money. There's as much money as the regulator of the currency cares to create. Money is fungible. Money isn't real wealth, and you cannot create more resources than you have simply by creating new wealth tokens. However, if what's ailing you is that the exchange tokens aren't equitably distributed, that does turn out to be a problem that can be addressed, directly, by creating and distributing more money. The incentive effects are an interesting case to contemplate, but the more I think about it, the more that chasing revenue-generating opportunities of themselves seems to be more a part of the problem than of the solution.
marcosdumay 13y ago
> There just isn't that much money. Sorry, but the idea scales from almost zero spending into infinity. You can not claim that there isn't enough money. Our future looks very interesting because our machines promise to make goods very, very cheap. But they also promise to put almost everybody out of work. Left to a market, most of the population will starve, and very few become very rich. But almost any level of basic income will solve this, even if today it's too little.
mistercow 13y ago
>There just isn't that much money. How much money? Basic income doesn't imply a specific amount. >Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant... This is probably false. Even if the basic income is enough to live off of, people will still want more money for luxuries. But instead of having to work 50 hours a week to scrape by, they'll be able to work 20 hours a week and live comfortably, even at low wages. And if you get to the point that you actually have more jobs than people to work them? You either lower the basic income, or you let inflation do it for you. Better yet, automation ceases to be a bogeyman for unskilled workers. If jobs get automated away, we can increase the basic income to compensate. On the flip side, we can actually incentivize automation by increasing the basic income, leading to a future where we stop making humans do dumb jobs just so they can be employed.
_delirium 13y ago
A reasonable number of social-democratic countries have basically an overly bureaucratic, somewhat perversely-incentivized version of a basic income already, and it works ok. For example, the last-line social welfare system in Denmark, which you qualify for if you have no assets and don't qualify for a "better" system (like jobseeking assistance), known as kontanthjælp ("cash assistance"), is about $24k/yr. If you're a citizen there is basically no way you can be disqualified for this system, so it functions as an income floor. This isn't properly a basic income, because you don't get it if you work, and in addition you need to exhaust all your assets first. This provides some perverse incentives, along with some bureaucracy to keep it all organized. But when it comes down to it, once you exhaust your savings and unemployment benefits, there's an income floor of $24k/yr, which is like a basic income except you lose it if you save money or find a job... which if anything worsens the disincentive problem. I'm not sure just extending it to a proper basic income would be worse for finances, and suspect it could be better.

Jach 13y ago

Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)

scotty79 13y ago
That's the only thing I can see that can go wrong with basic income. I'd counter that with progressive property tax. So that if you own 5 accomodations, of which each can house a family, you might be better off with selling the sixth one than holding it, paying exorbitant tax and risking it might stay empty for too long. I would pump money earned from this tax back into basic income. Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
mattdw 13y ago
An alternative to fixing prices would be just to compete. The government could start building its own housing, recouping the costs straight back from UBI rents, and simultaneously holding privately-owned market prices to a more reasonable level.
- Jach 13y ago
  Would this work for utility companies too? How about mega food corps (http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg as an example), who probably have very good statistics about what percentage of the population in an area regularly buys (and "can't live without") their products, and thus figure out the optimal price increases for each area? Gas? Cars? And what about the partners of all these other companies whose customers are other businesses not individuals, but are going to start charging more and expecting the customer business to pass it along to their individual customer -- refineries, mines, mills, graineries, farms, storage warehouses... (As I mentioned before, everyone who has anything to sell will want as big a piece of this new income that they can get and will raise prices to try and find out how much they can capture without starting to make less profit than before. Over infinite time and with everyone having perfect information of the market, I think $x/yr would become the new $0/yr.) Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.

djrobstep 13y ago

Here is an interesting basic income calculator: http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.

lazyjones 13y ago
That's far too simplistic and cannot be taken seriously. One of the first serious issues you'd have to consider is migration from other countries to your model country with basic income. There's billions of people out there who'd happily live on basic income in some first world country and I'd absolutely encourage them to do so, given what the first world's riches are built on (but I digress...).

yourapostasy 13y ago

We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a diabetes epidemic with low socioeconomic groups, and the obesogenic environment is not well studied enough to know if giving those groups more access to free time will improve outcomes. Will those groups on average use a soft UBI to improve their overall health, or will they choose poorly and the benefits of UBI blowback into exploding healthcare costs? No one really knows yet. I would like to believe that soft UBI would lead to better health outcomes, but that might simply be my own socioeconomic background speaking. The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there. We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.

slurry 13y ago

> (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.) It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement. The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.