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Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator will give 100 randomly-selected families in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 each month as a test, continuing the payments for between six months and a year. And The Guardian reports that Finland and The Netherlands also are preparing pilot programs to test Universal Basic Income, while Switzerland will vote on a similar program this week. One Australian site is now also asking whether the program could work in Australia, noting that currently the country spends around $3 billion on their Centrelink welfare system, "so simplification can offer huge potential savings."
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
I wonder how this is supposed to work. A lot of the prices people pay are set by the market. Let's assume the rent in a city is at a specific level. Now suddenly everyone in in this city gets +$1000, so people can 'afford' more. As a consequence, landlords will be able to ask for more and prices will rise and the benefit of the pay rise will disappear.
In the end the benefits from the basic income will disappear through inflation and in the process the existing incomes and savings lose in value.
As a former academic (i.e., from a system where money was handed out based on `membership in a club', at least theoretically), I find it highly doubtful that this is going to happen on a large scale. I do think that it would be a great experiment-- the benefits of being able to eliminate toxic elements of the workforce without having to worry about their livelihoods alone might more than pay for this, from the perspective of improving the world we live in, and I also believe that we need a new economic model to deal with a world in which either technological progress outpaces the learning abilities of the average human, or otherwise the capabilities of `artificial intelligence', divided by cost, exceed those of the intelligence of a substantial subset of humans in economically important areas.
However, my impression is that the majority of people in power do not model the world in this fashion, but instead on ideas of power dynamics: who can decide what for whom. The prestige that comes with power is important to many members of that class, and (abstractly speaking) it needs to be reflected somewhere to satisfy their needs.
Universal basic income now has the problem that it substantially reduces the power inherent in today's real-life hierarchies. For technology people and artists, this sounds great, but for managers, politicians, and other "power people", this is worrisome, if not downright terrifying, as it reduces their leverage and prestige. Thus, I rather expect that anti-universal basic income propaganda will start reasonably soon if the idea is ever adopted on a larger scale (Finland and the Netherlands seemingly being the most likely candidates for that, at present, since the Swiss proposal seems a bit too ambitious to pass the voters' filter).
I've heard one of the justifications for a Universal Basic Income as: if there is a huge welfare state paying out entitlements, there may be such a huge overhead cost for administrating the programs that it may more efficient to eliminate the administration and use the money instead to simply pay out the Universal Basic Income. Everyone will get $X each month for rent/food/medicine. What happens if someone spends their money poorly, such as blowing it on drugs or gambling, and then they have nothing left at the end of the month to eat or pay their rent. As a society what do we do then? Do we just shrug and let them die in the street? Or do we restart the bureaucracy and have a UBI plus an extra welfare program for irresponsible spenders?
So UBI is just a new name for money redistribution. You take it away from people who have it (tax) and give it to people who don't (assuming that the number of tax payers is lower than the number of UBI receivers, the tax payers will lose money even after accounting for UBI).
My bet would still be on inflation. Let's stay with the rent example. Today, there are some rich people who could afford to pay more for rent but as they are few this does not increase rent prices for everyone. If everyone has more money there is no reason why rents should not increase overall.
IMHO it has nothing to do with robots or anything like that. Barring a full-fledged singularity where robots become better than humans at everything, humans will always end up moving into whatever fields robots are worse at. It's happened with every wave of automation throughout history.
Universal basic income is simply about efficiency. Human societies have by and large, for right or for wrong, decided that they don't like the idea of people starving and dying in the streets. And so have built these mishmash patchworks of programs all with the goal of preventing one or more aspects of this for one or more specified groups of people. Often with disincentives to people bettering themselves because then they could end up off one system or another, and almost always with huge bureaucratic overhead costs.
It's much simpler just to accept the basic premise, pay for it, and be done with it. That premise being "Okay, we don't want people starving and dying on the streets, but we don't want people freeloading either, so we're going to give some minimal support to everyone - but if you want a better life than that, you have to work for it." The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away, there are no gaps for unfortunate people to fall through... everybody wins.
You probably don't want a single, fixed payment for every adult - you probably want something extra for each dependent a family has, maybe more for people who are disabled and can't work to better their lives, maybe some variation based on local costs of living, etc. But overall you end up with a vastly simpler system. And you simplify the political debates vastly, down to conservatives saying that the minimal standard of life is too generous vs. liberals saying that it's too austere - just a simple fight over the numbers.
It shouldn't even be that terribly difficult to implement. You can start rolling it in without cutting anyone's benefits, but at the same time make any benefits they receive from Basic Income automatically be deducted from their potential aid from all existing welfare programs, at all levels of government. They get their basic income payment, but all of their other payment are automatically reduced or eliminated by a net corresponding amount. Including big-ticket items like national pension programs (Social Security, etc). So many smaller programs quickly end up in a situation where the vast majority of their enrollees no longer collect anything - and with scaleup, the big-ticket ones as well. With the right policies in place, anyone who doesn't collect anything for several years gets automatically booted from the rolls. As the rolls shrink, the overhead costs drop. When a welfare program gets small enough, it gets killed altogether, with the eventual goal of only Basic Income remaining.
The extra costs for the universal basic income program (aka, the new people who are getting support, which wouldn't be fully paid for by the reduction in welfare-program overheads) are paid for by new corporate taxes. In turn, however, in addition to corporations not having to separately pay for pensions/social security and the like (since it's now rolled into universal basic income), minimum wages would also classified a government-required benefit (because they are), and what minimum a company has to pay a person is reduced by the individual's basic income. Wages would get to reflect the actual supply/demand for a given field. Just like all other welfare programs, minimum wages would eventually be eliminated altogether. Bookkeeping for companies would become simpler as well.
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
Marxism was about the state owning the means of production and the complete abolition of private property. A Universal Basic Income is nothing more than shortcutting complicated welfare schemes by just paying eveyone a minimal survivable wage by default, something which the richest and most powerful nations on earth can easily afford, and which they will inevitably have to do now that there are permanently more people than jobs.
Either you create a permanent underclass of eternally unemployed people, annihilate the middle class and return to the ways of the Gilded Age where workers were paid pennies and lived dozens to a house while still starving, or you finally let go of the sickening darwinian idea that people must toil to earn their right to live even well into the age of automation and artificial intelligence.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
continuing the payments for between six months and a year
How is that an experiment on basic income? Nobody is going to really change anything in their lives for getting $1000 for six months. You would have to provide a lifetime commitment for it to be comparable to the basic income situation. Even then, you would need to make it a couple of generations, to see the effect in children that grow up with the knowledge that they won't really need to work, ever.
There was, if I remember correctly, a coffee company that offered a lifetime "salary" to the winners of a raffle. That was a long time ago. Surely there are more people in this situations, with some kind of unalienable lifetime stipends of one kind or another. Finding these people and asking them about the changes in their lives would be easier and more productive, in my opinion.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
1: Since unemployment will be common and permanent, people won't have cash for a roof and food, so they can go starve. Well, when this happens, and people have nothing to lose, revolts happen, blood runs in the streets, and a government either exists like Syria, propped up by a superpower, or it collapses, winding up belonging to the most brutal faction. A more civilized nation can hire mercs for shooting at civilians, blockade cities so people starve (as a way to "pacify" an area), or just lob a few Sarin gas canisters at gathering places. However, this is a costly affair, and it requires a lot of tanks, soldiers, POGs, weaponry, people to maintain that, prisons, and many other resources.
Throughout human history, you've been correct...
You may be wrong this time...
Atlas, The Next Generation
https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY
Take that, advance it another 20 years, then give it a gun. Then build 1 million of them. Then the rich and powerful will have a heartless 100% loyal robot army.
No, I don't think they'll go all Terminator on us, rather I think they will be what keeps the powerful... powerful...
There's no assurance it would happen again: People can only want so much stuff. The environmental consequences of a society where everything is disposable are also quite bad enough as things are.
Take a look at rich people, their mansions and vacations and other extravaganza. I very much doubt there's any real upper bound on what people want. The environmental consequences are another matter, but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first and becoming "greener" second, a hundred billion people will pollute more than one billion.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Moreover, people working the minimal wage jobs often ARE the most hard-working employees. Yet somehow conservative are against minimal wage increases...
Population growth is determined solely by the amount of resources available to a species (Food, Water, Waste disposal, and amount of usable Land).
Japan has plenty of food and water, yet their population is declining. Niger is the poorest country in the world, does not have enough food, and is rapidly losing land to desertification. They also have the highest birthrate in the world. Your assertion that population is bounded "solely" by resources is nonsense, and is the exact opposite of what is actually happening in the real world. Population is growing fastest in the poorest countries, and has stopped growing (or soon will) in most rich countries.
The idealist sees this kind of future as obvious: the Star Trek economy, where there's no money and people 'work' to better themselves (lol). This sounds great but does not account for human nature, namely greed and to a lesser extent, cruelty.
The pessimist (realist?) sees the future as it was depicted in the 2013 movie 'Elysium', where the ultra-rich have just about everything, are completely corrupt & nearly completely useless, and walled off from the majority of the population. Meanwhile, 99.999% of the population lives in squalor. Sound familiar?
It's possible we'll have both realities, but unfortunately we'll need to get through the 'Elysium' economy before arriving at the 'Star Trek' economy. TBH, I don't think anything resembling a Star Trek economy is possible because of human nature... As bad as this sounds, I'd put my money on 'Elysium'...
Japan's population is declining because so many of them live to work instead of working to live.
If you spend all your time in the office and on business trips, what's the point of having children? So other people can raise them? Too expensive, salarymen can't afford that.
Many people are tired of owning crap. You can go to WalMart and fill your house floor to ceiling with crap for modest prices (I've seen children's bedrooms stacked 4 feet deep in plastic toys). If you're in the upper 50% of income and lower 50% of U.S. real-estate markets, you can afford a new 4000 square foot home in the 'burbs with rooms that serve no other purpose than to store stuff (and I've known stay-at-home moms who spend years of their life managing empires of junk this way.)
At some point, many people mature and get over it. Especially those who have had it all and discovered how little "all" really does for them.
I hope that children of parents who have matured past the accumulation of junk stages can get over it at a younger age.
They'll just have to adapt, like the rest of us. Because there ARE bounds, upper and lower, and we need to start paying more attention to raising the lower bound and lowering the upper bound, even just a little.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not only that but a consumer driven economy needs consumers. And those consumers need money. It does not matter whether what you want to sell is priced at 100 or at 10 if your potential consumer has nothing to buy with, and those that could buy already have bought.
For a consumer driven economy you cannot accumulate the whole capital in the hands of a few, that does not work out. The net result is what we experience today, lots of capital available for investment and nothing to invest in because there is no viable business you could open, lacking the ability to sell to anyone because nobody who would buy can, lacking the funds. This leads to the currently observable insanely low interest rates which in turn leads to low inflation which leads to people clinging to their assets, which in turn grinds the economy to a halt.
Producing makes you poor, only selling makes you rich. And to sell, you need someone willing AND ABLE to buy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, free money. But not much of it. Enough to tide you over, enough to get by on, and if you're happy being a couch potatoe and spend your time watching court TV and Jerry Springer (is he still on? I honestly don't know), that should be doable on that "income". Your value for society would probably be that you're a pair of eyeballs watching the commercials.
If that's all you want, more power to you. Some people want more than that. A car. A vacation. Seeing places and people. Experiencing something. Not sitting there when they're 70, thinking they wasted their life.
Hey, freedom of choice, remember? What the Reps always claim they're about. Oddly they're usually not the ones that would give you that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
After reading this and assuming it correct, the only logical explanation is that I am not human.
There was a time when I was not working. I did not "fall apart". I enjoyed it. Tremendously. Could have continued it for the rest of my lifetime. Sadly at some point the money was gone and I was forced to reenter the treadmill.
A real pity. How many countless hours I wasted at jobs that I could have spent sensibly...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Producing first and foremost makes you poorer. You have to spend time, money, effort and raw materials and so on to produce something. Unless you can somehow monetize this product by selling it to someone, you're out money, time, effort and material and gained nothing.
Only when you manage to sell your product you will recover your investment. Hopefully with profit. If you cannot sell your product, your company will perish.
If producing made you rich, we'd have no problem finding worthwhile investment opportunities. It's trivial in this economy to produce something. Selling it is the hard part today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I certainly had no problem finding something to do with my life. I learned a lot about electrical engineering in that time, and I started building my own hardware. Far from what's currently cutting edge, mind you, but I built a few tools and gadgets that made my life easier or at least more fun. It was satisfying and inspiring.
It was at least ten times more meaningful, stimulating and interesting than most of what is considered "work" today. And, bluntly, even if Joe Lowlife is lying on the couch, stuffing his face with chips and watching reruns of soaps and reality TV all day, I could hardly say that this is any more meaningless than the "you want fries with that" job he now holds down.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
40 hours work each week to add 20-30% to your purchasing power isn't worth the loss of time.
Low pay employees will need a higher cash incentive to do the shitty jobs.
Consuming is trivial if you have the means to consume. If you do not, it's not trivial or hard, it's impossible. The question is also not whether something is easy or hard, but whether it has any value. I'm fairly sure reciting the Gilgamesh epos by heart is nontrivial, but I do question the value of such a feat.
And no, producing only produces a good or service that you might sell. And only then, only when you can somehow sell it, you will get wealthy. Until you can sell your product, you have nothing. Actually depending on the product, you have worse than nothing because you have to store it, your product depreciates due to age, it might deteriorate or perish, it might go out of fashion and style, it might get surpassed by technological development, and even if it is non-perishable, never goes out of style and can't be surpassed by technology, you have to dedicate real estate for storage. If and only if you manage to sell your product you actually have a chance to recover your investment. Until then it's dead capital that can only decrease in value.
But if your view is the prevailing one I somehow understand how the great depression could happen. And why we're in this one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Population growth in poor countries is for three or four reasons: ... sometimes just custom, sometimes religious
a) children are supposed to care for parents and grantparents, as 'pensions' don't exist there
b) contraception is not available, either literally, or it is to expensive
c) distraction is not available. Believe it or not, the biggest decline in birth all over the world came when the TV was introduced
d) children are considered a sign of luck
As soon as people have helthcare, rents, available contraception, no one is having absurd amounts of children. Actually meanwhile so many couples decide to have none at all, that pensions in countries like Germany are facing troubles.
Food (availability) is not dictating birth rates. Poverty, as in the opposite of being rich, is!
If you have not learned such simple stuff in school, perhaps you should at least start reading books?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Excuse me, but before I answer, are we living in the same world?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Today Robin Hood is evil. Under a supposed equality under law, Robin Hood is evil. Is Robin Hood evil under slavery (inequality of people under law), that is an interesting question.
Wage slavery is certainly better than 1800s Southern US slavery, but it still amounts to a similar fate. While wage slaves can choose their master, the free market is not making the masters treat them any better, and never has. Today's masters give their wage slaves so little compensation (30 hours a week of minimum wage) that they end up on government assistance programs for housing and nutrition - they get to spend their hard earned dollars on clothes from WalMart. I'd rather give the people a more simply (fairly) distributed UBI and take away minimum wage guarantees, that would put "masters" like WalMart in competition with churches, schools, and many other places where people might rather volunteer their time.
Some one has to fix the robots and kiosks when they break. Some one has to write the base program, someone has to key in the inventory and set the prices, someone has to debug and QA test it to make sure it does not give out free stuff. The problem you have is that none of those are unskilled minimum wage labor. I guess you dont think that people can better themselves, or learn new skills that will be in demand.
The Car eliminated the horse as transportation, thus eliminating the blacksmith, farrier, and may other jobs related to horses as transportation. Yes, they were put out of work but new jobs came in, such as auto mechanic, machinist, production workers for the auto plants, part houses, and tire manufacturers.
throughout history new inventions and methods have been created to replace old ones and for all of history it has created more work and new positions. If you think that paradigm has changed, then I say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have seen nothing that would even suggest we are loosing more jobs than the ones being created.
The concern is not that there will be zero jobs or that people cannot improve themselves. The concern is that there will be too few jobs period.
Money is irrelevant to the equation. In fact if you try to route a UBI through money, it's doomed to fail. All you'll do is inflate prices to where stuff becomes unaffordable despite everyone getting a UBI, just like the widespread availability of student loans has inflated the price of college tuitions to where you can't afford if despite the loans.
UBI is not comparable to student loans. Tuition inflation happens because students are not paying with some finite amount of income, they are paying with a virtually unlimited amount of credit, because student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. There is no downward pressure on the price, because credit is treated as an unlimited resource (in practice it is of course limited -- the limit is lifelong indentured servitude).
When you increase people's ability to pay (demand-side economic fix), prices just rise to compensate. It's like trying to climb out of quicksand by pulling one foot up, then putting your weight on that foot to pull your other foot up. Then someone says "let me help you" and pulls one foot up even further. The net effect is no change in your position, except you and the person trying to help did a lot more work for the exact same results.
You're making a vague, qualitative statement about a quantitative question, the Deepak Chopra of economic arguments. The question isn't whether UBI would increase prices, the question is how much and of what. If what you say was true, there'd ultimately basically be no point in any welfare program from food stamps to medicare. UBI is wealth distribution. Translating dollars into "percent ownership of total existing wealth", what UBI does is take some percent from everyone above a certain threshold of wealth and gives it to everyone below that threshold. Would that cause some amount of price increases in some goods? Yeah, of course. But prices are still dictated by the market. Since we don't currently have people starving in the streets in developed nations (quite the opposite, in fact), one can safely assume that the consumption of, for example, staple foods like bread and milk would not change with UBI, at least not much. There's only so much milk you can drink. Whatever price increases happened would be 1) as a result of overall decreased productivity due to people choosing not to work (which is an unknown quantity, but there are arguments why it would be a manageable amount), and 2) to price out UBI dependents out of goods that are currently near the threshold of what the poorest people can afford. Neither of these are anywhere near as catastrophic as what you claim. A lot of people seem to miss the "basic" part of "universal basic income." This isn't an amount of money that's supposed to be enough to live like Kanye West. It's supposed to be enough to not be homeless and not starve.
Am I certain that UBI is a good idea and won't result in catastrophe? Hell no I'm not. What I am certain of, however, is that if your handwavy little argument was enough to prove UBI so obviously unworkable, there wouldn't be any real-life, grownup economists willing to consider it, but there are.
weinersmith