This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something useful.
I don’t think it’s unpopular. That’s part of the reason why people like me support things like UBI. I mean, let’s be real here. I’m a mid-40s, above-average-IQ nerd millionaire, but if I graduated college today, I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t make it as well economically. And, I’m really certain that if I was born less-lucky in mental capacities (or other factors) I’d be pretty screwed, no matter how hard I worked.
> what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that
What are you talking about. People on HN say that all the time; it's one of the core premises underlying the feeling that UBI will eventually be necessary? Indeed, that seems to be the prevailing view even though it flies in the face of the evidence that gains from automation are far away from replacing human workers.
Decent comment, good point about the evidence. I downvoted this because it opens with “what are you talking about.” In spite of being reasonably insightful, the presentation makes the comment negative value add IMO. Being nice makes these discussions much more productive.
Apart from so-called "bullshit jobs" that are spreading in the richest countries, how much work is mostly unnecessary, easy to avoid or to automate away?
With "unnecessary" I mean that don't add much to the human experience.
We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the meaning of these types of terms).
My mom is an example. She works a highly menial and thankless job at a rural county courthouse in the Midwest, where she is paid an extremely small salary, given very few benefits, very little vacation time, and has no prospect for retirement, regular raises, career growth, etc. The courthouse could operate with probably 25% of the current staff, but they keep headcount artificially high because state funding and other programs depend on how many employees they have.
Largely, my mom is paid money to endure slight sexual harassment from small town attorneys and judges, and to do a tiny workload of clerical work. And the amount of money is barely enough for basic living in her area, even after accounting for the lower cost of living there.
It seems bang obvious that her employment is inefficient. The same exact thing happens for thousands of people in her area, whether in government, school jobs, private companies. There's just a ton of excessively meaningless work that companies or employers have ulterior reasons to sponsor with a paycheck even fully knowing that the labor itself is not productive or necessary at all.
I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people, do more productive labor around her own home or through child care provided to my siblings and their children, perhaps create craft works to sell online, etc.
The net result could easily be that her overall labor productivity in the big picture sense would go way, way up after she is free to quit the essentially pure loss menial job and focus on things where she knows she can add actual, obvious value for people.
Unfortunately, I think most developed nations suffer this problem. Lots of jobs exist because of weird misaligned incentives on the part of the employer, who could truly not care less about the actual labor productivity of a bunch of employees and has them on the payroll for totally separate reasons.
Maybe your mom would, I'm sure she's a lovely woman.
But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser".
I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best.
Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.
I've had long-term unemployment as well (over 18 months) and I think that is an entirely different phenomenon that's not connected to what people would do if they had some financial security of a basic income.
Long term unemployment creates a type of inaction/depression for some people (this happened to me, and it sounds exactly like what happened to your ex partner). Because so much of my identity was bound up in what job I had, what career goals, how much money, etc., it made the feeling of being unemployed severely distressing. I really wanted to do things like volunteering, or even basic self-care like exercising, but I could not due to the distress of unemployment and the feeling like I absolutely had to find an "acceptably good" job (for social status) and neurotically do nothing but dedicate all my efforts towards that.
If the status of having a basic income is a positive thing, like framing it as an opportunity to pitch in with civic duty and give back, I think it would satisfy the status and "sense of accomplishment" requirements for a lot of people.
But either way, the extremely distressing feeling of long-term unemployment is really not comparable. I would say, for example, that what you observed from your ex partner does not give you any capability of predicting what your ex partner would have done with basic income during that unemployment period. The situations are just too drastically different.
> My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed
Typical optimistic UBI visions would see a person like that stop looking for a job so hard and start some form of UBI-enabled self employment as the closest simulacrum of that fancy middle class job (that may turn into a full replacement or not, but even just keeping the business net positive could already feel like a small success). Easy to say from a distance, but surely more of an incremental path than job hunting could ever be.
> I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people...
If everybody had a reasonable guaranteed basic income those people would be able to pay her for her services, so it wouldn't need to be voluntary.
"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you.
We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.)
Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.
Ok... back in reality, lots of people are unemployed or underemployed, our markets aren't that free, and again, capital is not the best way to decide whether someone is worth keeping alive (e.g. with universal healthcare).
To your example, a life of complacency is fine. (Edit: I guess you were commenting about someone else, but I still wanted to make the point.)
Interesting thought, I'd wager that our economy isn't as efficient as it should be with respect to the labor force. For instance there are tons of men in their prime age working years who are dropping out of the labor force, and the teen employment rate is low compare to previous years. You also have older Americans who may be physically unable to do manual work but could be hired in a sort of a human + software augmentation role (think humans looking at Facebook content that is flagged to double check the algorithm).
Since most people can be self-sufficient, there shouldn’t be anything stopping a person from being at least worth their own weight unless there is a lack of natural respurces or energy for each person (as of yet not true). AI and robotics will simply make the cost of self sustenance even cheaper, which means at some point literally any contribution a human can make will be a positive one, even if all they do is identify and pick up a piece of garbage the robo trashman missed.
There's another way to frame that: What if it's a coincidence that the rent of labor has afforded a tolerable lifestyle for the masses and lavish lifestyles for capital owners for nearly 200 years? And, what if this coincidence that has supported a social order (explicit or de facto capitalism) is coming to an end?
I'm fond of Zizek's remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It seems apposite, here.
> what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context?
I agree with you, at the same time I believe that this is a failure of the educational system. The current educational system is fucked up. One of the main problems is that it creates "good students" as opposed to people who grow up to contribute to society.
I hated this about high school and university. You are forced to regurgitate what someone said as opposed to developing your own opinions.
I contend its not that there are people "have nothing economically worthwhile to offer" its that the jobs that are being presented are not what they want to do or in their interest (i.e. pay what they think is enough). UBI makes sense if all the jobs are taken or jobs being automated away but if there are jobs that are out there that people don't want to do for whatever reason that shouldn't be an excuse to implement it.
We can either ask people with money/power to support those without -- which I don't think will ever be a good or even stable solution -- or we solve the hard technological problems currently preventing self-sufficiency. The difficulty in the latter is not to be underestimated, but there's also more potential upside if we figure it out.
>uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context?
Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks -- they all have a role in society and are economically worthwhile -- it's just that nobody has had a raise since the 90's and income inequality is the highest it has ever been in history while the cost of essential needs for humans continues to rise. When's the last time you've seen rents go down?
In my opinion, UBI is a band aid on the problem of late capitalism. Simply guaranteeing health insurance, implementing full employment, would raise the country economically (but not for the poor shareholders!) enormously but our current corrupt system of crony deregulating late capitalism won't allow this at the expense of the middle & lower classes. I keep saying this here: workers really need to see the surplus value they create instead of just their wages; the surplus value goes into the pocket of the shareholder and benefits absolutely nobody.
> won't allow this at the expense of the middle & lower classes. I keep saying this here: workers really need to see the surplus value they create instead of just their wages; the surplus value goes into the pocket of the shareholder and benefits absolutely nobody.
So, tax capital income at non-preferential rates and use the funds as part of the funding stream for UBI.
Alternatively, mandate labor cooperatives as the exclusive form of business entity granted artificial personality with liability protection, but UBI is probably an easier political sell and less risky.
I think GP's argument is that we won't need them too much longer. The jobs you mention don't need to disappear completely for there to be problems; if the demand for that class of fungible unskilled labor drops by 20% (not hard to imagine in the next decade or so), what happens to those tens of millions of people who have no way to provide for themselves and their families?
Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.
>what happens to those tens of millions of people who have no way to provide for themselves and their families?
In our current system of late capitalism, they probably get told to pull up their boot straps and work more/different jobs with no help at all. You won't hear about it on the news, you won't see it in the paper, you won't see it on TV because there are only 5-6 corporations that own almost all media, but people will be struggling and in poverty no doubt. We've been continuously taking away SNAP benefits, taking away medicaid benefits, adding work requirements, and now HUD wants to raise rent on people receiving federal rent assistance. I have absolutely no faith USA will do anything beneficial for its people anymore, only for the benefit of corporations and now with full Republican control we're probably going to see a Lochner Era 2.0.
>Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.
Wages aren't rising because 4.0% unemployment[1] is still 15 million people unemployed, and not all people out of work are included in the official US unemployment numbers. That's a huge reserve of employment that doesn't allow workers to really have any control in their workplace because they have absolutely no job security, and it doesn't allow them to bargain for higher wages. It turns the tables and gives workers control instead of bosses & corporations, it gives the power to the people who do the work.[2]
Wages are actually falling. This shouldn't happen if unemployment is extremely low.[3]
Cooking has become vastly more efficient over the past 10,000 years, especially recently with labor-saving kitchen equipment. Yet there are still cooks. And we eat fancier food.
I view society as "spending" people, rather than "employing" them. We used to spend a huge chunk (35%?) of our population on agriculture. Then we industrialized agriculture, and now we spend something like 2% of our population on it. The rest could go make that farm equipment, and washing machines, and thousands of other things. Society as a whole became better off.
As a society, we need to find useful things for these people to do. Maybe we'll have to train them. But just leaving them where they can't do anything useful is a huge waste. We're leaving an enormous amount of progress on the table here.
But who is "we", and who is anyone to decide which of the 35% should be retrained, or which new field to retrain them in, or how to allocate resources to such retraining?
Those are the difficult questions that are most deftly answered by the Dead Hand when we grant each "35-percenter" the responsibility for their own retraining; they either retrain ("evolve"); figure out how to stay relevant in their old field (also "evolve"); or fail, and in doing so, demonstrate that they were unwilling to be "spent" in any way that society was willing to spend them ("perish").
Which is to say, I do not quite understand how you are disagreeing with me.
I suggest that we should grant each "35-percenter" (wherever that term came from) not only the responsibility for their own retraining, but the resources to do so, and maybe even some suggestions (not orders!) as to what direction they should go in. Just giving them the responsibility without the resources sounds like the worst kind of "Social Darwinism".
"We" is society as a whole. (Moderately careful reading of my first post should have made that clear, but you seem more interested in arguing than in understanding.)
How do we decide? The process wasn't specified. (How does society as a whole make decisions? These kind of decisions it makes through the political process.) The point wasn't the mechanics of the decision-making process. The point was that we should view these people as an under-utilized asset rather than a liability, and figure out how to use them for the progress of our society.
> Steal from the productive and call it "taxation"?
You want to let people starve (judging by your posts in this thread) rather than pay taxes, which you regard as theft? You need to replace your moral compass; it's a bit defective...
Do you feel the same way about taxes to pay for, say, highways and airports? Or do you give those a pass because it's infrastructure, from which you benefit?
If we can get these people able to contribute to society, we'll benefit, in at least two ways. One is that they'll pay more taxes, which could lower yours. Second, they'll do things that are useful, and some of it we'll personally use.
> Do you feel the same way about taxes to pay for, say, highways and airports? Or do you give those a pass because it's infrastructure, from which you benefit?
I don't give them a pass. Not by a long shot.
Right now I'm only benefiting from one particular nearby highway, and even then only a few miles of its vast length. Of the two nearest airports (both of which are at least an hour's drive away), I have never used one, have not used the other in at least a year, and have no intention of using either for at least a couple decades; yet I am still forced to pay for them, beyond the length of any "professional's retainer" term that I might have voluntarily chosen. (I correctly predicted which airport usage would be my last, several years prior to it.)
But of course there are others who feel differently - they'd like to have a different stretch of that highway, a different highway, an airport with nonstop roundtrips to Podunk, Alabama, you name it. And I do not wish to quarrel with them.
In a properly-functioning free market, when there is a selection of alternative goods available and different people have different preferences, the result is that the people who prefer one good purchase it, and the people who prefer another good purchase it instead of the previous. Both goods end up being sold to the people who prefer them.
The anomalous situation in any of certain markets (e.g. infrastructure of a given kind; security; morals; laws) wherein people must coercively prohibit the sale of all goods except one, the one to be chosen by all manner of unpleasant quarrels - be they the heated vitriol before an election, or the cold hard bullying might of dynasties and coups d'etat ... it only results when there is a localized monopoly on the use of unprovoked force - also known as a government.
You are mistaken about what you use and what you don't.
You only really consider what you personally, directly use, but seem to be ignoring all of your indirect use.
Those other miles of highway are used by the transportation to deliver goods to your town. That benefits you. Those airports are also used in such a manner.
There's also the twice removed use. In order for your community to function, you need a certain population density. Providing service to just you is cost prohibitive for any utility. The last mile is a bitch when it's really the last 100 miles. So, all of those other people in the nearby towns also need to be able to subsist in the area. In order to provide you with service, in order to make it cost effective to run shops, etc.
The way I've begun to see it, the government is like a buffet or club and taxes are what we pay for access.
Sure, you may not like crab legs, but some portion of what you paid is going to those crab legs. Or maybe you use the pool at the club every day, but Joe can't swim so he never uses it. But the same percentage of your dues go to paying for it. It all comes down to the fact that in order to make the things you want accessible and affordable, you will have to kind of pay for things you don't want.
Taxes are the dues you pay to be in the club that is the U.S.A. (or whatever country you're in, but it rhymes with U.S.A.).
What if the store I frequent happens to use one highway, but its competitor across the street uses another? I'd rather pay the "true" price of whatever goods I actually buy - transportation included - than be forced to subsidize the competitors' transportation too.
Everything would have to use those separate streets. All of the customers couldn't use the "competing" store's highway. The two distribution centers have to use only the highways "owned" by the respective store. It gets to the point of the absurd. There must be some property shared by the two stores and the community surrounding them.
They couldn't sell the same products because there would be no way to isolate all of that. At some point, there will be a convergence.
If you want to pay the "true" price of your goods, you can't use anything that uses a common good for any part of the supply chain. Which is basically everything.
And you aren't really subsidizing anything. You are getting a deep discount by virtue of leveraging economies of scale. This is a case where cooperation makes things better for all involved. It's not a zero-sum game. Sometimes trying to be cheap costs you more.
So this is getting somewhat afield from the original topic, but... have you ever lived somewhere where there is not a monopoly on the use of unprovoked force? (I have never done so, but some who have state rather eloquently why having the government having a monopoly on this is really beneficial compared to the alternative.)
Me neither; and such a place does not (yet) exist, and to my knowledge humans have never truly created such a place since the dawn of agriculture, if not earlier. It's entirely in the realm of theory, for now. I'll even admit: we barely have the information-technology today with which to conduct business as quickly, frequently and frictionlessly as it could theoretically need to be conducted in such a place.
In places where there is not only a monopoly on the use of unprovoked force, but where the same entity also monopolizes everything else, there is another collection of people who eloquently state why that was a bad idea.
If you're wondering what is the difference between an area with all markets free; and an area whose governments merely don't call themselves as such, and tend to compete via (expensive) violence instead of advertising - then this tome should provide a much more eloquent description (albeit as theoretical as ever) than I could ever hope to achieve: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
I was thinking of, e.g., Somalia. There wasn't a monopoly on violence, but there was still violence, and lots of it. There were competing warlords, not a nice smoothly-running anarchist market. It's... not a pleasant environment. It's closer to hell than to paradise.
The government monopoly on violence has problems (much worse when the government goes off the rails), but in the absence of that monopoly, anyone who wants to do violence can. As that strategy turns out to work against those who would prefer not to do violence, more people turn to violence either for gain or for defense against the violence of others.
In a way that is true - it merely happens to be that when you don't have the near-infinite resources of a large taxpayer population at your disposal, violence's expensiveness actually becomes relevant.
You mean, others assume a logical impossibility and proceed from there. Violence is not an eradicable part of humanity, even in prisons. It doesn't go away if you get rid of the violent government, you simply have unrestrained violence (anarchy), which is not a stable state, but an unstable local minimum. Ultimately, might does make right, in the sense that the irresistible (violent) power of the collective does dictate what the rights of the individual are. I'm sorry if you don't like that.
Any implementation ideas for that perishing? Starvation? In the streets or organized in ... camps? Or something quicker, the arena perhaps? Suicide booths? "Perish" is such a comfortably abstract term...
Personally, I suspect that one day, unlikely within our lifetime, ethics will evolve to the point where it becomes acceptable to pay people for getting sterilized. This could turn into the biggest boost to average education since mandatory schooling.
> Any implementation ideas for that perishing? Starvation? In the streets or organized in ... camps? Or something quicker, the arena perhaps? Suicide booths? "Perish" is such a comfortably abstract term...
If a given person is smart enough, they will see that their strategy isn't working, sell their tools and use their remaining resources to learn something new. Not-so-smart types will try out crime; that's what police, courts and prisons are for. Even-less-smart types will indeed starve.
Thing is, anyone who reaches this point is clearly incapable or unwilling to perform any valuable task.
(Or in the meta-sense, to learn how they can perform a valuable task... w.l.o.g.)
At which point the obvious question arises: what is gained by doing anything more than getting such people out of society's way as efficiently as possible?
Or: why are you loading your question in exactly the wrong direction? The obvious answer is "whatever method is most efficient". Perhaps whoever runs an arena can collect enough admissions fees to offset cleanup, land, and other expenses. But it's all - as are so many things - a question of facts-we-don't-have.
> Personally, I suspect that one day, unlikely within our lifetime, ethics will evolve to the point where it becomes acceptable to pay people for getting sterilized. This could turn into the biggest boost to average education since mandatory schooling.
I already hold these beliefs; I merely lack the resources to do this and everything that is more important. (Which is quite significant, really; "improve society-at-large, effective after I am dead" is about as far down the priority list as I can think of.)
Provided that the exchange is voluntary, mind you - if this scheme were to be conducted via government then dystopia could easily follow suit.
But in the absence of such a downfall, this is the only form of "danegild" that I think is really feasible.
The author makes a false equivalence between the RSA in France and the typical UBI proposal. An individual's RSA benefit decreases as their work income increases. This has the effect of making an individual weakly indifferent to working, since it will provide no marginal increase in income. Most UBI proposals involve a benefit that doesn't phase out with income (or phases out at an income level so high that it doesn't matter). The RSA, in both design and implementation, is a lot like the already-existing EITC in the US.
The whole point of guaranteeing income is to try to avoid the distortion of incentives that comes from means-testing benefits. When the author claims that a UBI (like the RSA) would create a permanent class of non-workers, he is basing his argument on an elementary misunderstanding of policies involved.
No, I think it's a reasonable comparison. Yes, phasing out benefits creates an incentive not to work.
But even many UBI proposals have some phase out, if only because the taxpayer paying money to a millionaire feels fundamentally wrong on so many levels.
And the bigger problem is more basic. The idea of UBI is that freed from the need to work, people will form utopian societies full of volunteering and self improvement and art projects etc. But France and realistically most welfare systems show that isn't true. People don't engage in self-improvement en-masse. They sit around watching TV or scrolling through Instagram all day, feeling useless and depressed.
> But even many UBI proposals have some phase out, if only because the taxpayer paying money to a millionaire feels fundamentally wrong on so many levels.
UBI has no phase out, by definition. Something with a phase out can not be called "universal".
You can decide it's reasonable or not as you wish (but those millionaires pay more taxes than they receive). Just try to criticize the correct program.
Our culture ties self-worth to work. From CEOs to social workers, people get fulfillment and create their sense of self by seeing the impact they have while at their jobs, and we judge others based by the same metrics.
UBI can help people pay their bills, but poverty is a lot more than a financial problem. The communities where work is drying up are the communities most heavily affected by opioid addiction at the moment. Drugs are expensive--people don't get addicted because they lack money, they get addicted because they feel hopeless or lack a sense of purpose. Maybe government assistance can help hopelessness, but it sure as hell won't give people a sense of purpose.
It going to take a big shift in culture before UBI can really work out.
As I understand it an RSA recipient who switches to a full-time minimum wage job more than doubles their annual post-tax income even with some (not all) of their benefit being cut back. If that still disincentives work, UBI probably will too.
UBI advocates do tend to overplay the marginal income incentives. And don't forget that UBI, which would be paid to far more people than current social programmes, requires taxes to cut in somewhere (probably at a lower bound and steeper rate)
What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution.
It’s not like UBI was created just to have fun, there are legitimate problems facing our society and our current trajectory is that the problems are getting worse.
Maybe I am just missing some part of the article but what’s the point of saying something is bad without even talk about ways it could be implemented better or alternatives.
> What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution.
You're falling for the politician's fallacy. You see a problem, you see a proposed solution, and not hearing any other solutions, you've determined that this solution will fix the problem.
Recognizing that a solution is bad is worthwhile in and of itself. If he's right and we accept that UBI is the wrong solution to the problem then we can stop funneling time and effort into trying to implement that solution and instead look for a solution that may work. Just because he doesn't have that solution doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to his reasons why UBI won't work.
It's like if two non-mechanics were trying to fix an engine and one proposes to slap the engine with his dick until it works again. Just because the other guy doesn't know how to fix the problem doesn't mean he's wrong when he says that slapping the engine with a dick isn't going to fix the problem.
The fallacy runs even deeper than that. There might be no solution at all, by the construction of the problem.
The correct response to "this will not solve the problem you want to solve" is not "ok so you give me a better solution then", unless the problem is so existential that even doing something horribly wrong is still better than doing nothing.
The correct response may well be, "this will not work, therefore we should do nothing".
I've noticed over time that "doing nothing" is scary to most people on a subconcious level. It breaks the illusion that we have total control over our world.
I am one of those people. My productivity has improved greatly by gritting my teeth and forcing myself to do it(nothing), though. For instance, rather than commenting here right now, I should be doing nothing and figuring out which of my many tasks I should be doing.
That is true. It's like the Jurassic World movie that just came out. The dinosaurs are in danger of dying because the island is about to explode. Some characters are trying to figure out a way to save the dinosaurs, but, to paraphrase the original Jurassic Park, they're so preoccupied with how to do it they're not even stopping to think whether they should.
It's also very likely that the issues with this fall into the category of a "wicked problem".
"Most of them [the people living on RSA] indeed live out of poverty, but they are no incentivized whatsoever to get any extra training or even to find a job." This is a plain lie and, besides, has nothing to do with UBI. Regarding, the RSA, it diminishes more slowly than labor earnings (as you can see simply by reading the chart on its short Wikipedia page), so the more money you earn, the more money you get to spend. So there is an incentive to get training and a job. But in any case it has nothing to do with UBI proposals: the UBI idea is that your benefit wouldn't diminish at all as you earn more money, so the incentive to get a job and earn more is even stronger under UBI than under RSA. I think the reason this guy is surrounded by unemployed people living off RSA is that he lives next to defunct villages with high unemployment; these people can't get jobs because they aren't available. Thank god for the benefits then.
"I doubt they ever drove a couple of days in the backcountry." Blah blah some ad hominem about tech people being elite nerds that doesn't relate to the efficacy of UBI. I love the implicit claim that this dude gets it because he spends time at his summer home in the rough and tumble "backcountry" of the Loire Valley.
"To do so, it must take the long view and start to care about its stakeholders and not only about its shareholders. " Blah blah some word salad that doesn't mean anything specific about policy.
For the working class, tech is disrupting faster than it's creating value, the results are more distributional then they are enriching. The self driving car removes the human behind the wheel but does nothing to reduce the cost of the average car. Transportation does not become too cheap to meter - it costs about the same, minus the human salaries, and also minus the cab city tax that was typically redistributed into infrastructure for all.
There is almost no venture investment into say nuclear, too cheap to meter electricity. There is no investment into radically new and automated ways to build cheap, quality housing from locally available materials, or refine more, cheaper ore with less impact on the environment, or manufacture more durable, upgradable goods.
The supply of stuff is not disrupted by massive abundance, just the social rules about who gets what. It used to be the guys building the stuff in every community who were rewarded; now, all their paychecks go to a single dude in San Francisco that wrote a marginally better algorithm for doing stuff and the next day it spread around the world over the Internet. It turns out, there's nothing unique or special about a human body, just a soon-to-be-outdated type of 3D printer - with a software update latency measured in years and limited write cycles.
A basic income capable of lifting people from survival and into knowledge building is on the order of $5000 at current purchasing parity - impossible to finance by any tax or industry unless we radically alter the actual supply of goods.
"That’s why I remain fascinated by smart people in the United States being so misguided about the implications of the UBI in a country that has no decent healthcare system, a poor primary education complemented by a horrendously expensive higher education system. A state in which having more than two children is a mark of social status and in which any life crisis can lead to a social precipice."
It's not. I honestly can't even imagine where the author would get this idea.
If anything, having fewer/no children is a mark of status, both globally (higher income countries tend to have lower birth rates) and in the US (vaguely implies both parents are working and have access to contraceptives, etc).
To be clear, I don't think that there's much of a status signal either way.
Anecdotally I see that too. Almost all of my children's classmates come from 2 child families with the occasional single; almost all of my wife's surgeon friends have 0 or >2 children.
You may be right. Although I'd claim that a trend piece + a modest change in demography aren't quite the same as a "mark of social status".
I'm applying the following standard: if someone told me that their friend had 3 kids, would I infer something about their social status? At least for me, not really? Like you said, the poor and rich both have >3 children. ymmv of course
> Education is ripe for disruption. There’s a commonly believed fallacy right now that technology companies, specifically VC-backed technology education companies, are going to disrupt education. That’s bullshit. Instead, Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford are the favorites to disrupt education when they fall under heavy and sustained government pressure over the irrational and immoral hoarding of their mammoth endowments. Harvard claims it could have doubled the size of its freshman class last year with no sacrifice to its educational quality. Good. Do it. More students, paying no tuition, at the best schools will disrupt the system.
Harvard matriculates a teeny, tiny fraction of all university students. Doubling that number is not a solution. Even doubling that number at all ivies and elite universities is not even remotely close to a solution.
UBI may not be the correct solution, but even UBI isn't this out of touch.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I have a tough time believing that the preference for graduates from "top" colleges is entirely because they produce the best results rather than just a way to (necessarily) artificially limit access to a scarce resource. Just for the sake of round numbers, let's say there are enough quarter-million-dollar-a-year jobs for 1% of the population, but 10% of the population, with a bit of training, could step in and do those jobs. What do you do? You set up some semi-artificial, but still realistic, hurdles to limit the applicant pool. Doubling the applicant pool isn't going to solve the "problem" (if you even see it as a problem); it'll just necessitate an extra hurdle.
> Maybe I'm just cynical, but I have a tough time believing that the preference for graduates from "top" colleges is entirely because they produce the best results rather than just a way to (necessarily) artificially limit access to a scarce resource.
This is not really relevant. The author of this piece suggests that the path to affordable higher ed in the US is elite institutions doubling their full-rides. But that's a drop in the bucket; "everyone go to an ivy on a full ride" is not a sustainable or realistic way of decreasing the cost of college.
> Just for the sake of round numbers, let's say there are enough quarter-million-dollar-a-year jobs for 1% of the population, but 10% of the population, with a bit of training, could step in and do those jobs.
This is also not a problem. Most people who go to college would be perfectly happy with a stable 80k. Or even 60k. The problem is not that folks can't get 250k. The problem is the massive amount of money they have to spend to get certain jobs that pay those wages, even at lower-tier universities. And more Harvard scholarships aren't going to solve that problem.
Perhaps UBI does require thinks like universal health coverage but that would not make it "deeply flawed" that would mean tweaking is needed.
And that UBI requires low unemployment is directly contradicted by the head of the article where UBI is described as a potential solution for loss of jobs due to automation.
But either way theorizing beforehand why it will or won't fail is comparatively unproductive; we can actually experiment and see if it works.
And interestingly two conditions of the article; a sort of universal heath care and low unemployment, currently apply in the US. So the article should be predicting success there.
Actually, we can’t test UBI without enormous risk.
If the number of people involved isn’t close to 100%, it isn’t universal. Any societal effects for good or ill cannot be reasonably extrapolated to the full population. What might “work” for 5% of the population getting UBI might cause the next Great Depression at 100%.
> Actually, we can’t test UBI without enormous risk.
Yes we can.
> If the number of people involved isn’t close to 100%, it isn’t universal.
Right, so your test has 100% coverage but not at a level that completely displaces all other means tested benefit programs. Maybe it initially just displaces, say, General Assistance type programs. Then you can gradually scale it up and continuously evaluate.
I'm not sure that's a valid test. UBI at $10/month is absolutely worthless. UBI at $500/month is probably worthless. UBI at $1000/month is barely adequate. If you start the test at small amounts, you're going to experimentally decide that it doesn't work. But that only means that it doesn't work at those amounts. It could still work at larger amounts.
Of course, it could bankrupt the country at larger amounts, too...
As animalMuppet said, if you’re not providing a “basic income” level to nearly everyone, your experiment is invalid.
I also think UBI would simply cause massive inflation to the point where $X/month was no longer a sufficient “basic income”. It would turn into a subsidy for landlords, grocery stores, and predatory lenders at the very least.
There's a fellow I follow on Tumblr who got tired of all the talk about UBI without any concrete specifics, and so took it upon himself to look at actual, real UBI proposals with serious analysis. There are fewer than you'd think, considering how much talk there has been about it:
To be honest, the results are sobering. There are depressingly few proposals to begin with, and they all seem to be fundamentally flawed: they either have a lot of fuzzy math to handwave away problems, or they are politically impossible. Each of his posts ends with "If this is the most serious UBI proposal, there are no serious UBI proposals" and it's a hard point to argue with. I was a strong UBI supporter even six months ago, but between this analysis and questions like "With a $2,000/month UBI payment, won't landlords just simultaneously raise rent by $2,000/month?" with no obvious answers, I'm really pulling back.
IMO the central thesis is that society should have a negative view of tech companies and tech workers. That's the only thesis that each argument made in the post actually justifies. So if that's not the true thesis, then I guess the article is just a sequence of incoherent and poorly constructed arguments about UBI, education, corporate taxation, etc.
A counter-argument to the "you should hate tech people" thesis might be the pronounced support among tech workers for fixing the problems their industry helps create. The author argues that this is actually yet another reason why we should have a negative view of tech companies and tech workers, because UBI won't work and because we could fix college affordability by forcing Harvard to fund a few more full rides.
Any UBI program that doesn't take basic living expenses ( housing, healthcare, bandwidth, food ) into account is just a fancy detour for the money to go back into the pockets of the ownership class rather than creating lasting wealth for society at large.
At best UBI is one element of a comprehensive restructuring of society towards one that actually tries to be a knowledge economy where unique individual talents are cultivated and useful knowledge is discovered and disseminated as widely as possible for the maximum benefit of society as a whole.
The author seems to believe that UBI proponents are opposed to single payer healthcare, and this could be his central beef. He never criticizes UBI itself, he's yammering on about big tech's "view". But it's hard to tell, I had to dig for a while to find an identifiable point.
> Yep, but not with five hundred bucks a month, Marc. At least not in your country, where 44% of the population can’t afford a $400 medical emergency.
Everything about this post is based on supposition, speculation, and a fundamental misunderstanding of UBI. No, Mr. Filloux, nobody is advocating for a $500/mo dole in which recipients have to pay out of pocket for emergency room visits.
Nor, dear Sir, is the Revenue de Solidarité Active anything even remotely close to Universal Basic Income, because it is not universal.
The straw men are piled so high it constitutes a fire hazard.
Sneering about $500-$1000/month and talking about being able to afford a medical emergency[1] tips the author's hand: He's not worried about the actual poor, he's worried about the losers, mid-income aspirational types that will never be able to afford the lifestyle they're intensely integrated into and aware of.
UBI would make their misery even worse, asserting their status over people who "flip burgers for a living" is all they've got.
[1] If you're in the US and poor enough that UBI would be life-changing, you're almost certainly either on Medicaid or in a place where the first-line medical treatment is going to an emergency room and skipping out on the bill.
> Universal Income yields some results in two types of countries: ultra-poor nations when it lifts entire families from the street, or in affluent ones like Finland who already have a generous social safety net, free healthcare, a good education system and a low unemployment rate.
So, the author says that it works when the country has almost nothing (and then any money will make a huge difference) and in countries where the population already has a good return for their taxes, and then receiving that money can provide some incentive to do other things.
This seems like a strawman screed. It seems like this guy literally created an argument out of what he thinks the general "big tech" consensus on UBI is and then attacks it.
His argument seems to be the amount suggested (which he suggests) isn't enough and that tech companies need to pour lots of money into helping people.
I have a working theory that the fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals include the following:
(1) While both groups would like an accurate understanding of human nature, conservatives tend to be pessimistic and liberals tend to be optimistic.
(2) While both groups would like to be compassionate and charitable, they're riled by different problems: Conservatives especially hate the idea of freeloading / abuse of charity, but liberals especially hate the idea of anyone not receiving the charity.
It sounds like Filloux would consider himself a conservative, and the VCs liberals, according to my theory.
I'm a libertarian, and don't support a welfare state in general. I view UBI as a great replacement for current welfare programs including food stamps. It largely eliminate the "welfare gap", where when people earn more money, their benefits start dropping off, resulting in a reversed incentive structure leading to trapping people in poverty.
UBI implemented as a negative income tax would result in much less waste and more freedom to the beneficiaries. It's also politically viable as it could be seen as more "fair" since technically everyone receives it.
Edit: I think the "automation displacing human jobs" argument is easily the weakest in favor of implementing a UBI, especially since it's not necessarily economically realistic.
I keep forgetting that UBI, implemented properly as you describe, in a nation with pre-existing Robin-Hooding ... is a net-gain for liberty.
Yet, given history, I doubt that the median-minus-one politician could have the courage to end the current welfare programs if and when a UBI system is enacted. So I'm ... ambivalent ... about what to think of UBI.
Since you probably can't implement a sufficient UBI to provide an income
floor that removes the need for other programs initially (at least, anytime soon), but instead need to start low and ramp up with productivity gains, you need a phase-in mechanism.
You can do this in a way that avoids forcing politicians to have the will to eliminate existing means tested programs but achieve that in effect by simply, add party of the phase in, specifying that UBI income counts as income in applying benefit formulas for existing programs.
It'll be much easier to kill each of the programs when no one has a low enough income to qualify for it.
My preferred argument in favor is that depression can render government form-filled disability bureaucracy into an unnavigable hellscape and since it's one of the most common disabilities, a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible.
> a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible
You don't honestly think that those of us who have doubts about UBI are actually cackling and rubbing our hands together gleefully over all the human misery we're causing by denying living income to the miserable, do you? Of course that would be nice - and I do believe that humanity will eventually get to that point, but we're not there yet. We'll have flying, self-driving cars long before we have the level of automation we need to let everybody kick back and pursue whatever intellectual interests they find.
