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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 think that universal basic income is inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.
Simple fact of the matter is, that you're not going to be training an average 45-year-old factory worker in how to write the AI for the robot that took his job. And even if you did, after the AI's in place, he might not have much work. While some people have cited that every technological revolution has ended up producing jobs to replace the ones lost to the automation, they are increasingly other jobs, for other people, and "other people" will often include people who are not in a position to acquire the necessary skills.
I'm pretty certain that there would be very negative consequences for society overall if the population is left to starve because of increasing automation. As such, basic income will be required just to keep the country stable and productive.
NOTE: I am generally conservative in my views on a lot of things. and I am definitely not a socialist. But this is how I see things playing out, and I can see that there may be some very negative consequences that accompany it. But still, at this point it seems inevitable.
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).
Economics took a turn which the luddites did not anticipate. They thought that greatly increasing the productivity of an individual worker would allow the demand for labor to be satisfied with a fraction of the number of workers. Instead the increased productivity lead to a decline in the price of goods that greatly increased consumption - it lead to the consumer age, where many people lived lives that would be the envy of any pre-industrial king. The mass purchasing of wanted-but-not-needed tat fueled the new economy.
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.
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?
That's the idea.
The UBI is a response to a feared future where there just aren't enough jobs to go around due to increasing automation. Fast food places are already introducing automated ordering systems so they don't need to hire cashiers, and just think how many drivers will be put out of work once self-driving vehicles are introduced on a large scale. If there aren't enough jobs, then some people by necessity will have to sit around doing fuck-all. The options are either to shame them with welfare payments and demands that they go apply for some jobs along with the thousand other candidates, or not pay them and see them forced into crime to keep food on the table, or try some sort of universal basic income scheme.
Except that only happens in a very small portion of cases. Basic income is just that. Basic. Just because I can "live" without working, doesn't mean I want such an incredibly shit-house "life".
Appeal to authority: I'm actually already in that position. I could quit my job tomorrow and be just fine from various investment income, but just fine doesn't get me to Vienna to visit my sister in July, or to the tip of Norway for a hiking trip like I'm doing in September. Fine doesn't let me go out to a wonderful Brazilian steakhouse for dinner. Fine won't upgrade my shitty video card which is struggling under the weight of Fallout 4, assuming that fine even pays for Fallout 4.
Yes there are bottomfeeding leeches in the world content with poverty and blowing all their welfare on booze while watching their shitty all TVs on a couch that smells of beer, sweat and vomit. But they are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Now a question for you: Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
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."
The benefits are reduced costs to administer support services, eliminating negative incentives to work (UBI doesn't decrease when you work), increased mobility, improved economy. People can take more risks starting businesses or going to school or trying something new.
Maybe rents go down because people can move to less crowded places, which increases building and new business elsewhere.
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It has a long history, you might try reading about its conservative roots.
They ran an experiment many years ago in Canada, called Mincome. Some of the results:
"Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school."
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
Yes, a slight decrease in people in the workforce, but that were the young generation that attended school longer and mothers that stayed home longer to take better care of the children.
If those are be the results on a largest scale we've tried it so far then I don't see the problem (yet).
New things are always on the horizon
You're a slave to that toxic meme "Protestant Work Ethic".
People like to be social, and people like to be involved, and people like to accomplish things. That has nothing to do with "having a job". In many cases, "having a job" interferes with all of that. It's only this increasingly outdated idea that unless you suffer and work hard, you don't deserve anything, that perpetuates the system we have.
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.
It also generally slows down *drastically* if you improve women's education, women's rights and general sex education.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Money is not wealth. Money is a bookkeeping tool we've invented to represent wealth. Actual wealth is productivity - the goods and services which are actually produced by the labor we do (or the labor the machines we operate do). As a representation of productivity, its value fluctuates to equalize the cost (in productivity) to produce something, and the value (how much productivity someone is willing to swap in exchange for it). If people you give people money for free (no productivity needed), then that decreases the value of money, leading to increased prices, but the wages of people doing productive things (working) rises in lockstep with those prices. So even though prices go up, wages go up the same amount, and the affordability of stuff remains the same if you're working.
Not so if you're receiving a basic income - since the amount of money you receive (for free) is fixed by some government decision, the amount of stuff you can buy decreases against this inflation. The market is literally adjusting prices and wages to represent the true amount of productivity that went into the money you're receiving. People who receive a UBI are affected because they aren't doing productive work, and the market adjusts prices to reflect that. People who do productive work and receive wages are unaffected because they're being productive, and the market adjusts their wages to offset the higher prices.
To make UBI work, you must decouple it from your market currency. Make it a supply-side fix, instead of a demand-side one like with student loans. You can allocate rations (government buys a bunch of food, gives everyone a card each month which entitles them to pick up x pounds of it from a distribution center). Or you can create a parallel currency which trades in only UBI goods (no steak and lobster dinners for sale). There will be leakage - some people will sell their UBI food ration for cash, or convert the parallel currency into the primary currency. But it won't be anywhere near as bad as if you just distribute UBI in your primary currency.
That's not what happens. Since money is just the representation of wealth, if it becomes so concentrated that it actually impedes people's productivity, it doesn't stall the economy. What happens is the market sees that inefficiency and attempts to correct it - by creating a new form a money to add fluidity to trade. A black market pops up. At first it'll start with bartering and I scratch your back, you scratch mine
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