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eBay Founder Pledges $500,000 To Test Universal Basic Income Program In Kenya (mashable.com)
"Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept [of universal basic income]," reports Mashable. "His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wednesday that it will give nearly half a million dollars to a group testing the policy in Kenya." The money will come from the Omidyar Network and be doled out to people living in Kenya through a program called GiveDirectly. Mashable reports: Universal basic income is the notion that a government should guarantee every citizen a yearly sum of money, no strings attached. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor. Theories along these lines have existed for centuries, but their proponents have never had much luck convincing governments to give them a shot. Thus, the only data on real-world effects come from a few scattered experiments throughout the years. GiveDirectly is looking to add to that knowledge with one of the biggest trials of a basic income system in history. The group recently launched a 12-year pilot program in which it plans to give 6,000 Kenyans regular stipends for the entire duration. Around 20,000 more will receive at least some form of cash transfer. The Omidyar Network is hoping the study will help advance the debate around basic income from broad theoretical terms to more practical considerations. "While the discussion has generated a lot of heat, it hasn't produced very much light," wrote the Omidyar Network's Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams in a blog post announcing the pledge. "There is very little research and empirical evidence on how and when UBI could best be used."
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
cut full time down and have an X2 OT at 60-80 hours a week well salary as well
Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
So work as a justification for dessert becomes a convenient narrative, an easy excuse to say why they don't have to give anyone anything: you didn't work hard enough to deserve it. Never mind that as automation displaces human labor there increasingly comes a point where there's no such thing as "hard enough" because humans are simply incapable of providing the same value as robots; work remains the justification for why the haves get to keep having it all and don't have to share at all with the have-nots.
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Reducing full time will help the underemployed at the expense of only the middle class, rather than the expense of the capitalist class who really need to shoulder the burden. That in turn only further widens the gap between rich and poor, makes it harder and harder for someone to escape from dependency on the capitalists.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
No, if there is more money the money loses it's value.
If it's merely distributed differently, it retains the same value.
If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Because automation is a real threat to the economy in Africa...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They're more afraid that the have-nots find out that pulling a gun trigger isn't that hard to do and that they may be on the receiving end. So keeping them busy working in salt mines is sure a good idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I enjoyed watching Hans Rosling's TED talk and visiting his dollar street web application. It's so hard to get a feel for what it is like to live in another country, so I can't judge how much difference $40 per month per couple would make. But I believe people, goods and services are generally free to move around Kenya, so it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the economy outside of the target villages and how the demographics of each village changes during the experiment.
Nullius in verba
yeah, universal
Nope. You have to feed and shelter slaves. Try that on a single low-level income in the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $326/mo atop the UBI after that tax).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What is this heresy you talk about! Don't make me bring in the Texan Inquisition!
Rich having less money, isn't that outlawed yet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm glad for the experiment. However, I cannot see how Universal Basic Income would not simply lower the nominal value of money. Once everyone has X, that X is no longer worth anything. If you get $2,000 per month for nothing, and you rent an apartment from me, guess how much I'm going to charge you for it? More than $2,000.
You could make an interesting argument for a UBI policy where you pay people to only have at most one child. Over time it would reduce the population and would probably be cheaper to pay people not to have children than the expenses incurred by society should that person have been born. It also allows more resources to be directed at an individual child ensuring better outcomes. Having a guaranteed income and support would remove that natural human incentive to have more children when poor in order to ensure that some of them will be able to care for their parents in old age.
Because cost?
They're trying to fund 6000 people for 12 years. That's 864k months. If you tried to give everyone a thousand bucks a month, this project would need a billion to be funded.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That only works in a world where everything is abundant, the reality is many items and resources have scarcity and individuals having more money on average actually drives up inflation as the rarer items that many could not afford prior to that income now have to go up in price. It is a never ending cycle that really doesn't end as long as resource limitations remain.
The government creates no money. None. What happens when they run out? Who will pay the taxes? What happens when the govt needs more money than the amount they have to pay more citizens? What is going to stop more citizens from working, paying taxes, and just taking money?
This is nothing but a step to communism.
Interesting. Personally I think that the "obsolete human" has been predicted since the dawn of the industrial revolution but has yet to come to pass. For every innovation, several other new industries seem to pop up. Switchboard operators are (mostly) gone but now there's an army of people taking calls from irate telecom customers. Bank tellers are just about obsolete but now there's a bank of people manning customer service help lines, and on top of this is all the people providing the online services that made said operators redundant. This is the most automated time in history and yet unemployment doesn't seem to be all that high.
That said, if we ever do reach widespread human redundancy then I'd like to see the size of universal income tied to certain conditions, such as ability to work (or otherwise) and community work carried out, or maybe some sort of educational or artistic endeavor. I've seen the idle dependency culture first hand when I lived in an English slum surrounded by career unemployed dole junkies. It was not a pretty sight.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
How did you jump from not wanting to have to work to not deserving to live? I think that is a horrible revelation of your mind and nothing else. (See what I did there?)
Wrong. Taking money from the rich reduces their incentive to produce. The more you take, the more effort they'll put into protecting themselves from governmental theft, leaving less effort available for producing.
Poverty doesn't just pop up like mushrooms; people are poor because they're doing something wrong. Give them money, and they'll have no reason to do anything different. So while they may spend all the money they get immediately, a large part of that money will go to booze, cigarettes, drugs, lottery tickets, junk food, widescreen TV, fancy phone, etc.. Not education. Not shoes to walk to an interview with a potential employer.
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because a universal basic income is insanely expensive, doing a trial in a developed first world nation would add 3 or 4 zero's to the trials cost.
The problem with your idea is that now you've created make-work for people to evaluate
That said, if we ever do reach widespread human redundancy then I'd like to see the size of universal income tied to certain conditions, such as ability to work (or otherwise)
(why? no one needs it anymore)
community work carried out
(why? no one needs it anymore)
maybe some sort of educational or artistic endeavor.
(why? no one needs it anymore)
I've seen the idle dependency culture first hand when I lived in an English slum surrounded by career unemployed dole junkies. It was not a pretty sight.
UBI would be different, there would be no shame in it and so it would naturally lead to happy people free to engage in whatever activities they deem best for themselves. Your suggestion adds to the parasitic load for no reward other than some puritanical feeling that people really need to earn their life-given right to live. Due to UBI, these thankless nani-state-type jobs would have to be really well paid as, who wants to be the naggy bitch that everyone hates
If I read the article right then those 500k is just part of the whole project and there's actually other funding as well. Which makes me wonder why those 500k are apparently the story hook instead of the project itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This has something to do with Obama's background, although the tortuous mental process that gets from that to money for Kenya is beyond understanding.
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This is akin to socialism, which works very well... when everyone is from the same Tribe and are related going back 15 generations.
But it all falls apart when the neighbors are the wrong color, or religion, or accent, or we don't have the same great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
In summary: people in aggregate, suck.
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.
Kenya doesn't need any help in literally fucking itself to death. The population has quintupled since 1960.
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As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
Think about this, if robots do all the work, who will buy your products? You can't maintain factories with robots with no money and if no one works no one has money to buy your stuff.
Wrong. There is almost no evidence that people change their labor market supply in response to taxes. They will move money around if you change the tax system (e.g. owners will pay themselves more this year if taxes go up next year) but they don't change their actual work.
Admittedly, at 100% taxes you have problems. But when taxes were 92% prior to Kennedy the ultra rich were asked if they would work more or less if taxes were increased (yes, increased from 92%) and they answered more. So, we've got some headroom.
That would be fine, except that it's much harder (if possible at all) to mandate a one-time but permanent doubling of all wages, than it is to mandate fewer hours punishable by higher pay requirements at longer hours.
E.g. if you drop full time from 40 to 20 hours, and demand that everyone already working be paid twice as much, then the employers are going to replace everyone already working with two new hires getting paid "half as much" (i.e. what the old pay used to be) as quickly as possible.
About the only people you could save from this without the government suddenly dictating exactly what every single worker in the country must be paid are minimum-wage employees (i.e. you could double the minimum wage), which takes us back to the problem of helping the poor only at the expense of the middle class.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Wrong. What people want is social status, power, and sex. You can't give everyone these things, so even with no work, people are still going to be unhappy with no work and start working to get those three things.
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? I suppose we're going to outlaw private ownership of land too? All those copper mines and gravel pits are now belong to the State? This sounds like a good thing to you?
Except people don't have more money "on average", for the usual sense of average (mean). Same amount of money, same number of people, same amount of money per person on average.
Doing an UBI the sane way (give everyone some x% of the GDP per capita, fund it by a flat x% income tax) doesn't even move where (i.e. what percentile) that mean income falls. Right now the mean income is about the 75th percentile. Do a basic income the aforementioned way and the mean income will still/em? be the 75th percentile, and people making that much money won't even see a different in their income after UBI and taxes (they'll exactly cancel out at that point). Just the numeric income values (post UBI and tax) at all other percentiles will be closer to what that average (mean) income is.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
I emboldened one of your words to draw attention to it.
Curiously, as a group Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. Apparently Republicans are more caring and giving than Democrats in general on that score, so long as the giving is voluntary and not mandated.
Also curiously, the party with "free speech" as one of its core values has no problem smashing the venues of a controversial speaker.
This is my way of saying that there's evil on both sides of the aisle. Saying it's one side or the other is a misnomer, we need to identify the stupid bits on both sides and excise them like a cancer.
Come out against the stupidity instead of against the side. There are good Republicans and there are bad Democrats.
We need to stop turning everything into a tribal conflict.
On that point, instead of telling us what "they" actually want, tell us where we should be going.
People would actually support a good plan, if someone should propose it.
So, to sum up your view, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
That's an incredibly cynical point of view. It's also completely and frankly rather obviously bullshit. The increase of technology and the rise of human civilization has done nothing but vastly increase the dependency each human has on each other. It used to be every couple fed themselves and their children. Then humans banded into tribes and the hunter/gatherers did the feeding, and the others took care of the children/old/weak. Then we made cities, and one farmer fed three or four. Now we have combine harvesters, and one farmer feeds a hundred. There is maybe a few dozen humans alive today in the US who are truly self-sufficient, who do and could continue to survive with the help of no others, while even a few hundred years ago half or more of the human population could do so (at least for a few years). Technology has made specialization a requirement, and with that has come a level of interdependence unrivaled in human history, and that interdependence is if anything getting stronger (now entire countries rely on other countries, in a hundred years that could become entire planets).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
as the poor immediately spend all that money
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Remember this: Every dollar spent/wasted/squandered by someone is a dollar earned by someone else. Where would the poor people spend their money? On food? We, the rich, own the grocery stores and the agri business.
Would they squander it in beer and cigarettes? We, the rich, own brewing companies, distribution networks, and tobacco companies
Would they smoke themselves to emphazema and end up in hospitals? We, the rich, own pharma companies and hospitals and healthcare
There is nothing the government can do without profiting us. We, the rich, and even the middle class hoi polli investing in stock funds and 401K will get the money eventually.
This is the key. People sold their labor to earn money to spend it. The labor is getting lower and lower valuations and the poor are not able to earn enough to keep spending. This will shut off our profit stream. It is imperative for the government to fund the poor to keep the consumption up.
So where is the government going to get the money? Partly by taxation. We, the rich, should pay the tax because existence of government protects our property and our interests. Partly by Quantitative easing or printing money. It does not matter, the money taxed from us will come back to us.
It does not matter how wasteful the government spending is. All that waste is earning for Americans. Cut the government and send the profits to private companies, they will invest in Bangalore, Bangkok and Bermuda.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Still waiting on instructions rather than unsubstantiated anecdotes. How does someone living on welfare or in the projects leverage that into a big TV or a nice car?
(Possibly relevant: around where I live, "the projects" -- government-subsidized housing -- are a goddamn luxury in such short supply that most people who would qualify for them, destitute disabled veterans and mothers and the like, are on decade-long waitlists for them. Most of the poor people aren't lucky enough to live in "the projects", and instead spend the vast majority of their income sharing substandard housing at exorbitant rents with multiple other people in similar circumstances.).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Why do the factory-owners need money to maintain their factories when they own robots who will maintain the factories for them for free? And other robots who maintain the robots. The goal is to have robots just take care of everything for you, including mowing down the angry starving hordes storming your mansion, so you don't need money, because money is just a tool you use to get things out of other people, and who needs people when you've got robots.
You're absolutely right that in the process the whole economy will come screeching to a halt, but the fat pampered robot-owning overlords will have no need for it at that point.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If a town of 10,000 has about 300 people willing to buy pizza on any given night, that is the job creator right there. If one rich guy does not want to "create the job" by our rules, move along buddy, there are other rich people who would. The world is sloshing with 2 trillion dollars of money looking for a place to invest. There are no good investment opportunities anymore, I did not say it, CNBC is blaring it almost every quarter.
There is only one way to deal with the rich people. Call their bluff. They would do every trick in the book to scare us. They got rich by playing hardball. Being rational and reasonable with them is insane. They will play chicken and will win because, rational people always lose the game of chicken. The only sane, rational thing to do is to appear to be even more insane than they are. Scare them with communism, nationalization, eminent domain, till we instill a panic and fear in them. Then they will play by the rules.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or social status and power (and with it sexual desirability) will just become ossified into whatever arrangement it happens to be in, with only inheritance shifting the wealth = power = status = sex around. Just like the way things used to be in old feudal aristocracies, where the nobles owned hordes of flesh-bots (called "peasants" in Ye Olde Englishe) to do all the work for them.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
So take money from Musk so he can't build cars, and rockets and give it to a million people so they can upgrade their cable TV package... Maybe debt should be redistributed from government to poor people, so instead of government pretending to do something people can actually do something since they have to pay it back
You're going to have to spell out for me how vertically scaling the income distribution curve (which is all an UBI does in effect, move all points on that curve closer to the mean value, squashing it a bit in the y-axis) suddenly means nobody does any work and everything is free, and furthermore why that would entail the end of private property, and where I said anything about that sounding good to me.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It is known that if the income is substantial that it actually saves money foe a governmental system. My only reservation is that Kenya may not have an honest enough government to actually put the money in the hands of the intended recipient. In the US, in many areas, it is assumed that a person in deep poverty will work under the worst conditions or starve to death quietly in a dark corner. That is a fantasy. people in poverty will steal, sell drugs, commit armed robberies or even murder to get by. Things are so twisted that if a person is suffering enough poverty a smart move is to build some sort of history of addiction and by doing so get fed and sheltered in a rehab, hospital; or even a jail. Fort Lauderdale has seen the extreme edge of this with alcoholics who live in the jails. They get arrested quite deliberately. After a few weeks or months they are put out on the street. They will walk about, see the sites, smell the air and then walk into a restaurant, order a large meal and then not pay the bill in order to get a ride back to the jail. A variant is to walk into a liquor store twist open a bottle and chugalug as much as they dare and have the store owner call the PD to drive them back to the jail. Sometimes they even go back to the same cell or cell block and swap stories about what they did this time. Four arrests a year can get them food, shelter, and medical care for that year. It costs the city a fortune to play the game which pleases the drunks to no end. These folks belong in long term care in a hospital like facility where therapies known to achieve good results can be tried and the inmate protected from their own suicidal type of alcohol abuse. It would actually be cheaper than keeping them in jails with multiple trials etc.. When released these folks are often way too burned out to work and would only be able to survive with a realistic income from the state.
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Either way, the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves, and we've already seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.) Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods.
Where I think UBI is really going to sting (if implemented) is housing costs. San Francisco is a perfect example of how increasing the money supply in a given area doesn't actually solve homelessness, and instead just makes it that much harder and more costly to find a place to live, including for those that already have a place to live and have an actual job. The reason why is because if you suddenly give people more money, they'll start to outbid one another for the same real estate, and no amount of automation will solve that.
The same will also happen for less finite material goods, though it will be a little less obvious how this occurs. If everything really was automated and you eliminated labor from the equation from common goods (which UBI proponents assume will eventually happen,) then it will ultimately come down to who can pay the most for given raw materials (i.e. iron, gold, etc.)
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me, but all of that was exactly my point. Moving the money around into the hands of the poor accelerates the flow of money (and consequently economic activity). Money flows to the rich the way that water flows downhill, but when all the water has flowed down the waterfall stops turning the watermill. Redistributing money back to the poor is like pumping water uphill; it just makes more water flow back down more quickly.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Replacement parts are made by robots. From raw materials mined by robots, from mines owned by the same people who own the robots. And robots will put hackers out of a job sooner or later too, just like everyone else.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Reducing full time will help the underemployed
Reducing full time employment does NOT help the underemployed. That is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed amount of labor to be divvied up. Real economies just don't work that way. When someone is employed, they spend their earnings on goods and services, thus creating demand for more labor.
When France reduced standard working hours to 35 hours per week, proponents of the change were sure it would reduce France's persistently high unemployment. That didn't happen. Economists were not surprised.
Make full time 32 -35 hours a week also put a cap on OT so you don't jay working 80 hours a week to cover for jack and bill.
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
This. They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
The UBI is what you get IN ADDITION to your wages or salary.
The whole point of a UBI is EVERYONE GETS IT and there is no means test.
The reason why is because if you suddenly give people more money, they'll start to outbid one another for the same real estate, and no amount of automation will solve that.
The solution is easy, to build more housing. San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing. That's why it's so expensive to find a place here.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nobody really wants other people to have to work.
Really? You Americans seem to have this rather ridiculous religious shibboleth (if that's not a pleonasm in modern usage of that word) of "Protestant work ethics" that seems to be correlated with numerous right-leaning groups.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not all human jobs may be obsolete as groups, but the sizes of the groups necessary have definitely shrunk in many fields.
Ezekiel 23:20
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now* ...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of processing information were replaced by computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't have the statistics on that handy, but it was somewhere around half of middle class jobs - what a single computer does today used to take a room full of people.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of fear and debate about the issues you mentioned. You mentioned the book Manna - another book titled Manna was written in 1984, also a dystopian view of the industrial revolution. Because the change happened in the 1960s-1980s, today we get to actually see what the results were, we don't have to predict. What happened is that as people no longer needed to work on farms, food costs fell and they instead worked making Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters, and they spend their money on Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters. Most likely, you are employed in a job that didn't exist in 1960, or at least didn't exist in the same form. My job didn't exist in 1960. My grandfather was a bookkeeper - his position has been replaced by a computer. That computer needs to be secured, which created a new position for me making three times as much money as my grandfather made (inflation adjusted).
You're predicting the past. Spoiler because I've already seen it - it turns out pretty good.
Like all religion, it's just an irrational cover over the real motive. What people want is to not have to work and not have to give anybody else anything. Placing moral value on work gives them an excuse not to give anybody else anything unless those somebody else's work to deserve it, which in turn fulfills the desire to not have to work themselves (since they got someone else to do it). It's hard to fulfill both of those wants (until we get the robots working at least), but moralizing work lets the 'haves' pick at least one of them to get at the expense of the 'have-nots'.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How is this functionally different from unemployment insurance?
Would the stipends continue if the person is employed?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
It's still increasing the money supply just the same.
Think about it: If you were strapped for cash, would you be more inclined to move to a more expensive house? Of course not, you'd be more inclined to either stay where you are, or find a less expensive house. Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession. Bill Gates isn't likely to sell any of the properties he owns as a result of that, however now we have a lot more people in SF that might decide they want to upgrade their living conditions. The price of housing has now gone up because a lot more potential consumers now have more money.
Now imagine doing this with everybody in SF. And indeed, this isn't just going to happen with houses; this will also happen with more everyday things like the price of food. The fact is, you're more likely to buy more stuff when you have more money, and when the demand for goods increases, the price tends to go up with it. Meanwhile, the few wealthier people that you're taking this money away from probably aren't going to be consuming less, so it isn't balancing out somewhere else. This is primarily because wealthy people tend to sit on a lot of cash, and when somebody sits on cash, that cash isn't circulating and isn't being spent.
A perfect analogy is how the value of gold dropped when the conquistadors brought it over to Europe.
The solution is easy, to build more housing. San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing. That's why it's so expensive to find a place here.
I've got an even easier solution: Live about 100 miles away and commute.
Though honestly, that's not realistic. Sure, SF can alleviate the housing problem by building more dense housing, but that isn't going to solve the problem of one person wanting to live in the same place at the same time as somebody else. You can build more houses, and you might even be able to build houses on top of houses, but you just can't build more land.
Turning have-nots into haves is by no means the goal of UBI. Cannot even sensibly be achieved by a program that aims at providing a basic general income because that basic income can by its very definition not be higher than what is absolutely necessary to enable someone to survive. That's the fundamental flaw in your train of thought. You think about accumulation of wealth when essentially, all that will enable is consumption.
Your assumption seems to be that everyone just gets, say, 1000 bucks and that everything else will stay the same. This is most likely not going to be the case, and it would not make sense if it did. Instead, what will most likely happen, is that companies will get away with offering WAY less money as compensation for work. Work would probably be for the lower income bracket something they do if they plan to make some kind of purchase, a new TV, a bed, a fridge. Today, they can maybe put 50 or 100 bucks aside for this per month. So if an employer offered 200 for a month of work, this would be enough. It's more than they can put aside now, and it's way, way less than the employer would have to pay a worker now.
People will probably also have a very different attitude towards working. It will for some probably be something they do when they want to afford something special, and only for the time necessary to get that.
As for the argument for "finite material goods": Please. Our current main problem is certainly not a shortage of goods or services. Our problem is that nobody has the money to buy that shit. If anything, UBI would solve that problem rather than compound it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry I messed that up; ten thousand people rather.
San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing.
If you make more housing in SF then more people will just move there and then make it suck more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity because they spend it and then some of it winds up in their community, paying wages. And if you have UBI then you not only don't need welfare or food stamps or social security but you also don't need a minimum wage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone wants to live in San Francisco.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A lot of people do commute 100 miles to San Francisco, every work day.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? [...] This sounds like a good thing to you?
Does it matter whether it sounds like a good thing to me, or not? That appears to be the direction we are headed in, unless we are going to outlaw the development of robotics and AI. The only question is, what how are we going to adapt? If we do nothing and just retain the current system, then we still end up with robots doing all the jobs, but also with all of the humans starving (or perhaps living on welfare, if it's available).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone wants to live in San Francisco.
This may come as a shock to you, but there's enough humans on the planet that only a small percentage of them have to try to move there before it becomes a problem. In fact, it's already a problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's the fundamental flaw in your train of thought. You think about accumulation of wealth when essentially, all that will enable is consumption.
You don't understand my train of thought at all. See my previous post.
Our current main problem is certainly not a shortage of goods or services.
Until you increase the demand for both while reducing the supply of both, which is definitely possible under UBI.
That isn't the point; in fact, add another zero to that figure if you'd like.
It's only a problem for people who already live there and don't want things to change. Sadly, things will always change, you can't avoid it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...according to Universal basic income 'useless', says Finland's biggest union
Since January, some unemployed Finns have been receiving a stipend of e560 (L477) per month; amount isn't means-tested and is paid regardless of whether recipient finds a job
Of course there's back and forth -- you didn't test correctly, you're a union and afraid of losing power, your mother wears Army boots. Glad he's trying another test, more data is useful As Long As you write down and publish all of the variables you think you're testing As Well As exactly how you tested and how you derived your results.
"I'm testing to see if pigs can fly -- maybe I just need a lot more thrust."
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I can neither confirm nor disprove your idea but it sounds intriguing.
Ezekiel 23:20
Trying it in kenya seems strange.
But, the idea of universal income is that you can do away with all the other social security mechanisms and give people enough that they can survive. This means that then you CAN take extra jobs for a little less money.
Basically in Finland now you CAN NOT take a job that pays under a certain amount in the month because then you will be out of other benefits and you can't survive! but if you would have universal income then you COULD do another job for even 5 bucks / hour, making a lot more jobs viable.
the thing in finland is that the government is obliged ALREADY to provide basic social security to everyone through one way or another but the burocracy for that is very heavy. If you would roll up all the benefits into one, including housing benefits, and just give that to everyone it would be cheaper, easier and enable you to work at the same time.
also it would put pressure to provide housing in which you could live with that.
it would be feasible to take jobs like mowing your neighbors lawn for couple of bucks - right now it really isn't if you're unemployed as you would get kicked out of unemployment status(potentially, or get a quarantine).
Basically it enables a lot of smaller jobs to be done vs. just putting everyone in the social security/unemployment benefits which deny the possibility to take low paying jobs for couple of days every now and then.
as such it would enable manufacturing and service jobs that are not feasible right now, but more importantly you could just fire most of the burocrats out of a cannon into the moon.
why isn't this already being done fullscale in Finland? well duh the buros don't want to lose their jobs too(also in some cities the waiting time to get a social security hearing is longer than even legally allowed.. ).
it would be rather simple to implement too. just make the progressive taxing that finland has just a little bit more progressive, so that people earning (pre tax) 2700e / month or so would be sitting at the same income level of money to the hand (universal basic income would be given to _everyone_ - even those who have good jobs and don't need it. thats what makes it UNIVERSAL and makes it unnecessary to have the burocracy around it).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Thank you, though actually that 92% tax bracket comment was someone else, not me.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...and by "absolution" I meant "abolition", of course.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How can you have dessert if you don't eat your meat?
That is actually the literal opposite of Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good"), and also has nothing to do with redistribution because Gresham's law is about the nominal value of coinage compared to its commodity value, and fiat currency like we have now has zero commodity value (and hey look, fiat money has driven out gold scrip, just like Gresham's law said it would).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That is the exact comment I was replying to, and I've yet to get an answer as to how to do it. If everyone's doing it it must be easy, so tell me, how can my mom take her <$900/mo SSI and, after paying for rent and food and bus fare and phone bill, buy a nice fancy car with it?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
A lot of people do commute 100 miles to San Francisco, every work day.
If those people have UBI, why would so many of them commute 100 miles to SF every work day? The only function UBI might possibly have is to remove some people from the demand pool that is driving up the cost of real-estate. For those that choose to continue to play housing roulette, very little will change, for those that leave, they leave the SF bay area completely...
The truth is most people could leave the SF bay rat race today even w/o UBI (and make a great living elsewhere), but empirically they don't so I don't think UBI will change the SF housing situation much except for one way. I suspect since entry and mid level workers won't commute to fill those non-tech jobs that make SF actually SF it will only serve to accelerate the gentrification that might just reduce some of the demand by making the city less interesting, but is that actually something positive? I'm skeptical.
Without being too cynical (although one has to be given the long history of mankind):
- For the vast majority of people and during the majority of human history, work is a burden, not a pleasure
- People tend to love the output production of work more than work itself
- Humans working for other humans is a way of enjoying the output without the burden of working by yourself, if you are potent enough to afford that
- Everyone want to be at that position where you get the benefit without doing much for it, that's why human workers keep asking for higher wages
- Automation is a way to enjoy an increased output compared to human work, without the burden of having to share part of it with human workers
- Every automation that removes some humans lessen the part that you have to share with other humans, and is thus highly beneficial
Like the OP said, when technology has arrived to the point where there is no need for human work anymore, then 99% are just useless parasites and can safely be eliminated. The remaining society will resemble the utopia in The Dancers at the End of Time by M. Moorcock, which is good if you ask me. Now the problem is, you and I will probably not be part of it, unless your assets put you in the top 1%ers.
Thing also is, it wont be an on/off switch. Changes are gradual and the more technology progress, the more people tend to have zero value on the work market. In 5 to 10 years, the large majority of people working in transportation will be useless. In 10 to 20 years, the majority of people processing information (secretary, accountant, ...) will be useless. Depending on the field, people working in commercial fields will be useless in a shorter or longer time frame, starting with asset managers who are easier to replace. The question is not whether it exists some work that cannot be automated, be rather when you job will be automated. And believe me, it will be you our lifetime.
You have a ticking clock above your head and must enter the top 1%er before its final tick. If you don't, you will see what it was like 200 years ago and like you said, you don't have the knowledge to be self sufficient.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
In other words, you take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
Only the poor will notice a net benefit. The rest will have to pay into the scheme.
It does not matter how wasteful the government spending is. All that waste is earning for Americans.
Spoken like there is no trade deficit!
Thats not the job creator, thats a market opportunity. If someone comes along and builds a business to serve that market, that might create some jobs. At one point in time, that business might have needed 30 humans to operate. Today it probably needs 12. At some point in the very foreseeable future it will only need 2-3.
The challenge of future then becomes; what to do with all the extra humans?
In other words, you take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
That is exactly what UBI is. It is redistribution of wealth. In a world where the rich are getting richer, and goods and services will (supposedly) get cheaper and cheaper to produce because of robots and AI, yet require less and less labor, them some sort of redistribution will likely be needed to maintain social harmony.
India is probably most serious about UBI. They already have a huge welfare system that is badly corrupted, so they would benefit from just wiping it out and replacing it with something simpler.
UBI would be much harder to implement in America. There is little political support for redistribution, and there would be enormous resistance from people currently receiving entitlements that would be drastically reduced under any plausible UBI system.
Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free
There are plenty of people on welfare, doing just that.
live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work
Except that wages will drop. Current minimum wage takes into account that you lose your welfare benefits. If you don't lose your basic income, you don't need nearly as high a wage. So, the life will not be luxurious, just a little bit better.
But the trial is flawed, because it's funded by first world money. To show that it works, you'd have to rely on Kenyan taxes to fund it.
If robots do all the work, everything will still cost money. Robots still require energy, space, and materials, at least.
Let's hope the robots have fat wallets then, eh?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
1. Lowering birth rates doesn't make anyone of those who are already born less poor.
2. Kenya's birthrate is still significantly above average, but steadily decreasing since the nineteen-seventies.
3. Higher civilization standards correlate with lower birth rates. To increase civilization standards is the best way to lower birth rates.
3. Enabling more people to do other things than just struggling to get their food for the day is the best way, in the long run, to help increasing civilization standards, together with education and infrastructure, to which to contribute is one of the things more people will be enabled to through a basic income, too.
"Birth control instead of money" is just racist hogwash. "More money leads to more births, so give them even less money" may seem logical for some, but is a completely unsubstantiated assumption. In the long run, the facts give much reason to assume the exact opposite.
>the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves
No, it merely acknowledges that nothing ELSE has any chance at all. That said, every empirical study ever done confirms the hypotheses anyway.
> seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.)
Yeah... rightwingers always give the SAME examples - Weimer, Nero's Rome and Zimbabwe... and ignore thousands of times when the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR had radically different outcomes, In Weimar's case they EVEN ignore that the plan was working fantastically well - and it was only upset when the great depression happened- and that happened in America nothing the Weimar government could have done could have forseen or prevented that. But as with Rome and Zimbabwe - that was a special case anyway. Hyperinflation is IMPOSSIBLE in a recession - the reason it happened there was because there was not, in fact, a real recession. A recession is defined as the money supply being insufficient for the productive capacity of the economy. Printing more money in a recession CANNOT cause hyperinflation - at best it can prevent catastrophic deflation (as happened in the US where they refused to print money and turned a fairly minor stock market crash into the great depression). Those were not recessions - they look like it if you only say "growth declined" - but as a matter of fact what happened was that the productive CAPACITY was destroyed. There wasn't too little money to finance production - the ability to produce was lost. In Weimar's case it was destroyed by a war, in Nero's Rome by both a war and a plague and in Zimbabwe's case by a major civil rebellion. Printing money when the money supply already EXCEEDS productive capacity - now THAT causes hyperinflation. By the way - at no time did Weimar practise anything like UBI and the world sure didn't give the country money, in fact they were extracting most of it's production in the form of exorbitant war reparations. Weimar on every level is the exact OPPOSITE of the example you think it is -it's a great example of how you can make people poor by taking all their money away.
>Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods.
Let me guess... everything you know about economics come from the Austrian school ? That school which is the ONLY group of so-called economists who cult-like refuses to consider empirical evidence and data ? Or, to put it in the vernacular the school of economic bullshit, the homeopathy of economics. What you just said is flagrantly false, but a typical supply side argument.
No that's not the only way to get rich and, in fact, throughout history the richest people are the rent-seeking financiers - they will outearn the product-creators every day (on account of not having to spend money making products).
And real economies have demand side's too - all the products in the world won't produce a single penny of wealth if you don't have somebody who can afford to buy them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
depends on what they are actually trying to measure. But I would not try to make the claim that the trial isn't flawed as I don't believe in a Universal basic income.
If those people have UBI, why would so many of them commute 100 miles to SF every work day?
The same reason the commute now: San Francisco jobs pay more. They can find work in Modesto or Stockton, but it doesn't pay as much.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well no, not at least in the models currently being tested/speculated about. It depends on how the BI is arranged. I wrote about the BI experiment going on here in Finland in an earlier story here, quoting the relevant part:
Because in most models of BI the income is essentially created as a negative tax-bracket it means that not everyone will get a blank increase of X dollars which would lower wages. For me example under such a model my tax-rate would go down 5 %. meaning my pay could be cut by that amount without it affecting my level of income at all. Cutting any more than that would start to reduce the net income I get.
No, it wouldn't. If I was offered 200 instead of my current pay, my net income would drop 63 % under this model. People are not going to go "oh cool, you want me to keep doing what I've always been doing and get less than half the money I used to because they tweaked the taxation system slightly, I'm fine with this."
Besides, doing this would destroy the consumer base entirely. If the net incomes of the vast majority of people drop by over half, domestic consumption would come crashing down, in turn causing major issues for companies,
BIs are at their core tax-reforms which are meant to ensure people can accept part time and short-term jobs more flexibly without having to worry about the problems that causes for their benefits and the hassle of re-applying for them and in the process losing any source of income for the time that their application is reprocessed. The current bI models being discussed in western economies are not such that they could be used for massive pay-cuts. The models assume that pays stay the same, as the BI itself requires heavy taxation of income to be funded. Cut pays across the board and the tax-revenue will collapse, making the system immediately unsustainable.
In the long term, if and when automation proceeds to a stage in which nearly everyone is on BI, then the situation is different and the amount of BI will have to be increased to maintain domestic demand, but in that scenario, since nearly no-one will be generating income tax-revenue, the money for the higher BI will need to come from somewhere, which means corporate taxes and capital gains taxes will have to be tweaked to fund the higher BI.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
That's barely a drop in the bucket.
$500,000 over 6000 people over 12 years is almost $7 a year.
Now, assuming the money is allocated to a mutual fund with compounding interest... you can potentially double the payout.
Are they expecting this to fail on purpose?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Your fundamental problem is that you dont understand the fundamentals of UBI.
UBI isn't a new social security program, it's a complete replacement of social security.
The idea of both UBI and other social security programs isn't to turn have-nots into haves but to ensure that people aren't living on the streets and are in a position where they can better themselves. The idea of UBI is instead of only giving money to only those who are demonstrated to need it (which costs a small fortune to manage) is that we give UBI to everyone and what you earn on top of that is on top of that. UBI is about providing the basic needs of life, not a comfortable life (you'll still need to work for that).
UBI will not stop people from getting jobs or working hard to better their lives. It will stop people from turning to things like petty crime, selling drugs or prostitution to support themselves.
In fact UBI is going to increase the gap between haves and have nots by making popular cities impossible for those on UBI impossible to afford to live in. Basic housing will be out in Bumfuck, Alamama, not in the middle of San Francisco.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, you cant argue that UBI is going to make people who dont work wealthy. Not even Communism would have worked like that (if it worked of course).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's only a problem for people who already live there and don't want things to change.
Well, no. It's a problem for everyone in the state who used to enjoy San Francisco. But more and more self-unaware tools who claim to love it but actually want to ruin it keep moving there and complaining about fixtures of the city that made it great. Remember the Trocadero Transfer Club? Pepperidge Farms remembers. Shit, remember when you could drive up (or down, I guess) to the city and spend the day there and be able to park and shit? No, literally, to find a place to shit. That's so long ago, Pepperidge Farms doesn't even remember.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The basic income itself only allows people to subsist, but the presence of that cushion can have the secondary effect of enabling people to escape poverty. Right now, a poor person has to keep working their 60 hour a week factory job to support their family. With a UBI, that person gains the option of self-improvement -- they can afford to quit the job, study for something else, or even to try out their own business idea knowing they can still eat if they fail. Children of wealthy people go on to much higher incomes than everyone else in part because they know they have a cushion and can take risks and take their time, and the UBI gives everyone some of those advantages.
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When government spends it, we can make it spend in America. Even if those who take it from US govt imports it from abroad, there is a percentage left in the hands of Americans. If you cut the govt and give all the money as profits to private sector without low or no taxes, they spend ALL of it abroad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity. Debatable - at best. However most people who have studied this issue say direct handouts are not the best form of charity.
But it's really not much of a test of UBI is it?
The tricky part about all of these free money schemes isn't giving out the money, it's getting the money. Giving away money is dead simple, no one is doubting that the government can give money away, that's the easy part. The tricky part is making the scheme work in a closed system where the taxes supply all the free money you are giving away. All this is doing is taking outside money and pumping it into a small local economy. So of course it's going to work, its like winning a "cash for life" lottery.
I'll never understand why people keep pushing these useless UBI and mincome "studies". We have a huge source of data from the former communist block. The whole point of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". All this is doing is removing the first part and giving us "to each according to his needs", but from where does that money come? Who cares, free money! It's just playing the game of "if I won the lottery" at the whole society level.
>>...a huge welfare system that is badly corrupted Good luck wiping out the corruption. Those most corrupt tend to be the ones in power who stand to lose the most by wiping out said corruption.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
So, first you say "companies will get away with offering WAY less money as compensation for work," then you say that working "will for some probably be something they do when they want to afford something special, and only for the time necessary to get that."
So, how is it that companies will be offering "WAY less money" to incentivize work if people become less interested in doing work?
Those 200 were an example. C'mon, you can't be that dense.
Of course the difference in pay cannot be more than the UBI offers itself without having a negative impact on your income. If you have an UBI of 800 bucks and you now earn 1000, having a wage of 200 bucks would mean that you get equal pay. If you earn 5000 bucks a month, this of course means that you'd still have to be paid 4200 to come out equal.
In the end, yes, low paying jobs would get a LOT cheaper for employers. Paying 200 instead of 1000 is cutting the price tag of that employee to a fifth, essentially meaning that he could hire 5 people for the same price as one today. Of course that does not scale to high paying jobs, but we sure have no problem with unemployment in that area. Actually, we're currently looking desperately for senior consultants that are ... let's say not looking at minimum wage.
What every country does have a problem with, though, is keeping its lowly skilled (and hence lowly paid) population occupied. UBI could easily take care of that problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Exactly.
And before anyone comes in and claims the sky is falling in certain industries if it's no longer possible to essentially turn people into indentured servants who can be pressed into working 60+ hours a week for 2 bucks an hours, an UBI actually means that you can hire approximately twice or thrice the workforce for the same money. And they will come. UBI only means "existence", but anything that breaks down and needs to be replaced means that people will have to go and get a job, if only temporary.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free
There are plenty of people on welfare, doing just that.
At the moment, people get caught in the "welfare trap" where the marginal benefit of working is effectively zero, in which case it is illogical to work.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Let's say you need 800 bucks to survive. Any job you take will have to provide those 800 bucks now or else you're better off not taking it. So employers pretty much have to pay more than 800 to make people work for them.
If there's now a UBI of 800 bucks, people of course don't have to work to get by. But that 800 bucks don't cover anything above sustenance. If your TV or fridge breaks, you're out a TV or fridge. You now have to earn that money for a new fridge or TV.
Employers, though, can now get away with paying WAY less than before. 200 bucks is already a pretty good deal for a month of work, because that's already on top of your sustenance level, the equivalent of making 1000 now. It's already 200 bucks "more than you need".
And that in turn IS already more than most people have left when the month is over today.
Essentially, what UBI means is that you can go work for only 200 bucks and still get out ahead, while your employer gets away with paying only 200 instead of 1000 bucks for you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
I think OP meant "how can my non-criminal mother on welfare get a nice car". Otherwise, you might just as well say "become a crystal meth dealer".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
protecting themselves from governmental theft
If you start off by categorizing all taxation as theft, you can only logically conclude that there should be no taxation at all. Clearly in this libertarian nirvana UBI wouldn't exist, but then neither would civilization in general.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No, no it wouldn't the whole point of my reoply to you is that none of the BI models anywhere are tax-free, and a wide scale implementation of it requires changing the way taxes work to fund the model. Under the suggested model I used as an example someone would have to earn 637 euros to make a 1000 euros after the increased income tax of 41 % is rediced from their pay and the BI is added on top. So your math is off. Obviously my example was just one model, but your math does not work in any of the BI models being discussed, because they all swtich taxes around to make sure the model is funded, which means that you cannot calculate it in the way you did without getting a skewed result.
Not to a fifth. As I've been trying to say the de facto effect on employee costs is much smaller if similar income levels are to be maintained, as they should be.
Well, UBI will help to that end yes, but it's not as if the need for low-skilled labor is going up even with UBI in use. Manufacturing and storage and office jobs are fast being automated already. In 10-15 years, even if I can hire 1,5-2 employees at the price of one with an UBI backing them up, it's still more likely that an entirely electronic solutions will be more cost effective, and you need maybe 1-3 guys to oversee it.
UBI is needed because unemployment will keep creeping upwards, and skyrocket when general level AI hits in X number of decades. but to assume that UBI alone, just by making employees slightly cheaper to the employer, is going to generate demand for low-skill/no-skill jobs is not exactly something I'd agree with, because the point will come weherein the cost-benefit ratio of machines will simply make those human jobs obsolete. But at least with a UBI at a proper level, the unemployed masses will have money to live their lives and participate in society.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Because in Kenya they apparently care for people. In tax heaven The Netherlands, there is only a universal basic income for foreign multinationals.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
San Francisco is a bad example. The municipality constantly denies new housing permits. The only reason your logic works is because in this case the number of available housing stays the same, when it shouldn't.
It's true that the cost of higher end housing would probably increase in SF because everyone living there would now have more money, but most of the people who stay can probably afford it anyway. To put it another way, it doesn't matter if the cost of housing in SF increases because the people who can't afford it (right now even) would have greater opportunity to leave and spend time finding a job somewhere else. Moving and job searching take time and money. This is what UBI offers.
the important part is that redistribution increases the size of the pie.
False, innovation and invention increases the size of the pie.
So, basically, a tendency towards income equality means greater equality of opportunity. And greater equality of opportunity means that a huge amount of people who are just surviving can actually contribute meaningfully, adding extra value at the threshold. So, no, redistribution is not just increased economic activity. Its empowering those without opportunity to also become designers and engineers and raise living standards for all.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. UBI is an attempt to force equal outcomes which causes innovation and invention dry up. This has been proven over and over again. Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, and on, and on, and on.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not necessarily. For something like a welfare system, those with the power to replace it are the lawmakers, while those in a position to profit from corruption are the bureaucrats implementing it.
The lawmakers may of course be corrupt themselves, but if they benefit from corruption in the welfare system it's probably only in the form of kickbacks from the bureaucrats, and it's probably only one of many sources of corrupt income. So most of them are likely to be in a position where they're happy enough to look the other way for a piece of the action, but would also have no particular qualms about throwing it under the bus if it would benefit them in other ways - higher public approval, alternate systems that have fewer losses to corruption but bigger kickbacks for them, etc.
Corruption runs rampant in the world, but it's generally not well-organized corruption with large-scale networks of loyalty. Which means if you want to attack a particular branch of corruption, you may well find plenty of corrupt allies to aid you, *if* you can figure out how to make it benefit them to do so.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Either way, the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves
A UBI is a form of welfare. I use my own Universal Social Security as the primary example because of its superior design to contemporary plans--rather than throwing out arbitrary numbers like "$10k per year", it takes a fixed amount of taxable income as funding and divides it among adult citizens, which is essentially proportional to the per-capita income and proportional in buying power to the per-capita GDP--and can lead off of that to highlight the fundamental property of any type of income: it's a proportion of production.
Money itself has no intrinsic value. Money represents hours of labor, and is paid as a wage or salary tied to a unit of work (salaries expect a fixed number of hours, wages pay per actual hour worked). This is complicated by the dynamics of inflation interacting with debt and savings; the most simple and basic fact of the flow-through proportion--the continuous consumer expenditure--is that labor ties to money in such a way that the exchange of money facilitates the exchange of labor, with some labor having more weight than other labor (if you make $20/hr, you can induce a $10/hr worker to work twice as long as you).
That means a UBI can't create wealth out of nowhere: money isn't wealth, and throwing money at people doesn't add wealth to the economy by giving them money. UBI creates stability in an economy, which allows other economic factors to create wealth. A UBI may be more-efficient than contemporary welfare, meaning it creates wealth by diminishing waste. In any case, it doesn't create wealth by installing money.
It also means a UBI only works if we continue to produce. If nobody works, nothing gets made, and the purchasing power goes down. If nobody works and somehow machines produce exactly as much as we produce by our labors today, we actually don't get any poorer--the total purchasing power of all the money people are (somehow) receiving as income remains the same, and our economy's behavior in practice doesn't change so long as the hierarchy of incomes doesn't change.
That kind of post-scarcity economy isn't achievable at this time. The machines will simply diminish labor tied to products, reducing their costs and freeing that labor up for other products. With costs falling, prices fall; with prices falling, consumers can buy more; and with more purchasing, we require more labor. Welfare helps the displaced workers get from here to there. This is, of course, modulated by rate: if we unemploy 50% of our workforce in a month, we're going to experience an extreme recession from which no amount of UBI will save us (note the common line among UBI supporters is UBI will save us when none of us has to work--they're wrong).
Where I think UBI is really going to sting (if implemented) is housing costs
Unlikely, really. Shifting the money around as per my Universal Social Security would produce, in 2013, sufficient income for a non-working single individual to rent a 244sqft apartment. This on top of food, clothing, utilities, and personal care, and including a fair risk margin. Profit margins aren't factored in; I simply used retail prices as a model, and added risk controls on top of that. Housing was a particularly difficult problem because the USS model decreases landlord risk and so controls costs, yet that decrease can't be readily measured; the cost per sqft should be around $1.00-$1.06, and I gave $1.33 as my baseline so as to provide a wide risk reserve to cover my blind spot.
There are two issues here.
First, the USS model creates an entire new housing sector. These 244sqft apartments, when considered against the 1.6 million homeless (no income but USS), create a range of $102M-$128M of straight profits per month, out of $414M-$519M of revenue per month, using a range of $1.06-$1.33 per square foot. Th
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Why? Who needs money from robots? You need money to get other people to do things for you, but if you have robots to do things for you instead, there's no point in that.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
We can do it without taking more money from the rich than now, though.
In total, welfare services cost 55% of all income tax taken. That 39.6% the richest of rich pay? 21.78% of that is welfare. Do note that the welfare services procedurally account for their sources differently; if we pile all of the money together and take a count of what pays for those services, it amounts to 55% of all taxes taken as income taxes. That means if we change the accounting--if we get rid of those other procedural sources and source from income--then we can cut off 55% of the income taxes and do our manipulation from there.
In the end, the amount of money moving down in a Universal Social Security system (a particular type of UBI) is $1 trillion lower than the amount of money moving down today, yet more-effective at achieving the welfare goals of all current welfare services.
Do note that, as you observe, we are still taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Current system may take $18,000 from you and give it to poor people; USS may take $13,000 from you instead. The mechanism is fiddly, too: my Universal Social Security is designed to pay bi-weekly or semi-monthly--on the IRS terms for collection--and tends to take $20,000 from you and give back $7,000, so you end up with a net-tax-burden of $13,000. It's designed that way to tie it mathematically to productivity and per-capita purchasing power, meaning it never needs fiddling once set--it's agnostic to inflation and automatically adjusts fairly for standard-of-living.
Taking $13,000 rather than $18,000 is still taking. It's less, but it's still a thing.
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We're talking about the scenario where AI exists. If it takes a couple hundred years for that scenario to fully materialize, so be it, but that's the topic of the conversation.
And if the economy grinds to a halt on the way to full automation like that, and mine ownership is what makes all the difference between still needing money (= being dependent on other people) and full robotic independence, then it's the existing mine-owners who will end up the true robot-owning overlords. They won't need money. Everyone else might need money to try to buy mines from them, but they have no use for those other people's money and so no incentive to sell their mines.
Like how feudal lords didn't really buy and sell real estate, it was just owned by whatever lord owned it, inherited and merged in marriage or split between children, etc, but not really traded. Traded for what? In an agrarian society where labor is free -- from the peasants who trade you, their lord, labor for the right to live on your land -- and land is the only capital, what are you going to buy with the money you would get from your land? More land?
This hypothetical fully-automated future is the exactly the same, except the free labor comes from robots instead of humans, and the important quality to have in land is not just arability but mineral content.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Actually, it's the other way around.
In undeveloped nations, food can represent a significant part of labor. We expend 2% of our labor on the farm in the US; in developing nations, they expend anywhere from 18%-25% just on the farm, and as high as 60% of their labor in the total act of producing food. The USDA estimates you can readily feed a family of four in $146/week or $36.5 per person per week; that's $607 billion per year, about 4% of all income in the United States.
Imagine 60% of all work done is done to make food. 60% of the wage-hours paid are food. You're looking at roughly 60% of all income spent on food, although farmers might be low-wage workers so maybe it's 50%. Can you imagine taxing 50% just to provide enough food for 100% of the population?
When your middle-income family is only spending 30% on food, you can tax enough to feed that bottom 5%--1.5% of all income--and then have a SNAP program. If you want to spin up a Basic Income, you'll have to take 30% of all income just for food--then there's housing, clothing, personal care, utilities....
In a highly-developed nation, the amount of labor required to provide basic services will be lower. That means the fraction of total income required to provide those services will be lower. That mean the tax required to provide the money to buy those services to everyone will be lower.
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Think about it: If you were strapped for cash, would you be more inclined to move to a more expensive house? Of course not, you'd be more inclined to either stay where you are, or find a less expensive house. Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession. Bill Gates isn't likely to sell any of the properties he owns as a result of that, however now we have a lot more people in SF that might decide they want to upgrade their living conditions. The price of housing has now gone up because a lot more potential consumers now have more money.
I understand your concept and it is correct in general -- increase local cost of living -- but the example is actually misleading in order to support your another statement -- increase housing cost.
The reason that the housing cost wouldn't go up is because of the limit amount of UBI. The amount given should be just enough to live by with purchasing food and necessities (possibly help the accommodation cost). It should not be enough to "upgrade" or completely "change" the way of living for those who receive it, but rather, in hope, to eliminate their worries about where to find food to eat each day. As a result, again in hope, these people could have less struggle to get better (find a job or two) to finally get out of poverty. That's where your example is misleading.
I believe UBI would work for some, but there will always be those who abuse/exploit the system because we are humans (similar to SSN/SSI). I can't say would UBI really help because it is somewhat a new thing (even though it is not a completely new idea). Even with the experiment they are trying to do with Kenya may not really be an answer to my doubt. Why? Because they (people in Kenya) have different culture compared to most if not all western countries. So whatever result they obtained from there may not be able to apply to western culture...
Where "the poor" is about 75% of the American populace (below the mean income) and "the rest" is only 25%, and most of "the rest" are still not very far above the mean income and so pay for a very small part of it, most of the burden falling on those at the very top earning ridiculously, exponentially more than even "the rest", never mind "the poor".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession. Bill Gates isn't likely to sell any of the properties he owns as a result of that, however now we have a lot more people in SF that might decide they want to upgrade their living conditions.
My understanding of most UBI plans is that taxes would be levied such that most people wouldn't see much difference; Bill Gates would be paying a lot more, and some of the very poorest would be getting some more, but most people in the middle would net out about the same as now.
This differences would be that you'd no longer need a bureaucracy for means tested benefits since the UBI would set a floor, and there would likely be more people who choose not to work/work less. Now poor people do spend more of their income so you would indeed be increasing the money suppy, but not on the scale you're depicting.
Who knows for sure how it will pan out in reality? This sounds like an interesting experiment to get some data.
This isn't a new idea.
"The initial results are striking: the vast majority of Mincome participants kept working."
http://www.marketplace.org/201...
>If you have an UBI of 800 bucks and you now earn 1000, having a wage of 200 bucks would mean that you get equal pay.
>low paying jobs would get a LOT cheaper for employers. Paying 200 instead of 1000 is cutting the price tag of that employee to a fifth
You're ignoring one important factor for low paying jobs - maintaining equal pay isn't why people work, they work because it's the most cost-effective use of their time (in terms of return on hours spent).
If you were making 200 from your job, and 800 from UBI, then you're basically spending almost half your waking life in exchange for a 25% increase in income. It's a good bet that you could instead quit your job and spend that other half of your waking life finding ways to spend the 800 more effectively, and live a considerably richer and more pleasant life.
Basically, a UBI reduces the incremental benefit of having a low-paying job. A low-paying job that you hate is still attractive if the alternative is living on the street. But if you can survive comfortably enough without a job then the job (pay, satisfaction, etc) has to be a more valuable use of your time than the alternatives.
And of course, there's the fact that you can leave your job tomorrow, and still be making 800. That reduces the employer's leverage considerably, and will leave abusive employers in a world of hurt.
Taken alone, this half of the equation would tend to drive the wages of low-paying jobs *up*, because they're no longer a necessity, and are thus in direct competition not only with alternative low-paying jobs, but also all the more rewarding ways to spend your time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Good luck wiping out the corruption.
Corruption is not something that "just happens". Corrupt systems are usually designed to be corruptible. In America, when I go to the city to pay my business license, I do it at a counter in full view of other customers. When I did the same in Shanghai, I was always escorted to a private office, where various "facilitation fees" were discussed.
Those most corrupt tend to be the ones in power who stand to lose the most by wiping out said corruption.
This is not always true. In America, most corruption is at the top, with the revolving door system between government and corporations, and lobbyists funding campaigns. But in many other countries, including India, local corruption is a much bigger problem. India's current welfare system is mostly "in kind", so instead of getting money to buy rice, the government actually gives you a bag of rice. That requires a complicated system to buy, store, and distribute the supplies, with "leakage" at every step. If that is wiped out, and replaced with a single transfer of money to a debit card with a clear audit trail, it will be a far less corruptible system.
San Francisco is actually you know, somewhere where people shitting on the street isn't uncommon. This actually IS uncommon in middle America. That would literally make San Francisco an actual shithole. Just pointing that out for clarity.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Anyone who believes that so-called 'UBI' will work in a country of 300,000,000 people is ignoring the math or is just plain bad at math to start with, and that's all I have to say on the subject.
I'm not saying that UBI should provide everyone with a new car, I'm replying to someone claiming that existing welfare recipients all have fancy cars and TVs and things (though seriously? those things aren't even in the same category, cars are several orders of magnitude more expensive than TVs), and calling them out as I know people on existing welfare systems and they would LOVE to have fancy cars so if there's some way that's happening all the time I'd like to know how it works.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The article is about a first world entity giving handouts to some 3rd world town which proves exactly nothing.
When the cost of labor drops, the demand for labor rises. Not at the same level, but still. You can hire someone to do a job that you cannot today because the benefit added is lower than the cost, which isn't the case anymore when the price tag drops. This coupled with fewer people actually seeking employment because you will invariably have a lot of people who are completely happy with just surviving and wasting their life as a couch potato will have a huge impact on unemployment.
Should, what I can't really see, for some odd reason the workforce drop so drastically that there is more work than people willing to do it, you can always adjust the UBI levels to the point where everyone has to work every now and then to get by.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's already 200 bucks "more than you need".
In communism, maybe.
What UBI means is that I can tell an employer to take a flying fuck and I still have enough money to survive. But UBI money only permits survival. UBI money plus a pre-UBI basic minimum job still doesn't get me up to the 50th percentile. So while I might be able to get a little bit ahead on UBI + 200, even at UBI + 1000 I'm not going to be buying all the cool stuff I want to own. If I'm a good worker, employers are going to be in a bidding war for my services, because they're going to be getting exactly zero out of the lazy bunch. Those guys won't even come in. And, they aren't going to be hiring that dreamer, either, because UBI is going to let him survive until his home business gets enough of a reputation for him to start making money while being self employed. Employers could hire at below minimum wage because if there's UBI, there's no reason for the government to force them to pay a minimum wage. Market forces are a different story. UBI will reduce the number of employees interested in being in the job market, so the ones who remain will be worth more.
Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession.
The point of UBI is that you no longer has to live near a major city to make a living. More people can go live in lower cost of living parts of the country when they have a passive income.
Meh. My grandma complains, "San Francisco used to be such a nice and beautiful town." She's talking about the 40s or 50s. Things are always changing.
Really though, San Francisco doesn't need to change, we can largely keep San Francisco the same........as long as more housing is built in the region, like within public transportation of SF, that will bring down housing prices. Oakland, Richmond, San Bruno, San Mateo, or even San Jose.......surely in all that region you can find places to build housing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The biggest beef against UBI is that people who have opportunities to succeed are passing (laziness), meaning UBI is a waste for those individuals. In Kenya, the vast number of people over there likely have far less opportunities to succeed. The needy-to-wasteful quotient is WAY higher there. You need a first-world country for a reasonable test.
I was taking about personal tax rates. I am an economist so i'd prefer to have zero corporate tax and simply increase personal tax rates to compensate. The people I would like to increase it on is the rich--because that is where the money is.
It's true that the cost of higher end housing would probably increase in SF because everyone living there would now have more money, but most of the people who stay can probably afford it anyway. To put it another way, it doesn't matter if the cost of housing in SF increases because the people who can't afford it (right now even) would have greater opportunity to leave and spend time finding a job somewhere else. Moving and job searching take time and money. This is what UBI offers.
That would only apply if the person wants to stay there basically forever. And even then, that still wouldn't work if they are renting. Eventually other properties in the area will rent for higher and the landlord will likewise want to increase their rent. Depending on the tax situation, it could even apply to owners as well.
The reason that the housing cost wouldn't go up is because of the limit amount of UBI. The amount given should be just enough to live by with purchasing food and necessities (possibly help the accommodation cost).
This amount is supposed to go everybody, right? Because it's universal, right? If so, then let's suppose then that it's about $400 a month (even that wouldn't be enough in SF, but let's suppose it is.) The person already living there already makes more than enough to feed themselves, or else they wouldn't be living in such a high cost area. Meanwhile, they now have an additional $400 a month. Since they already have the basics, they'll spend that on whatever, including rent, everyday goods, etc.
Given a lot of people in California tend to like to live paycheck to paycheck, these people are likely spending every dime of income they have. That inevitably means the demand for goods (and housing costs) will inevitably increase.
Remember: If SF didn't already have such a high money supply, housing prices wouldn't be anywhere near as sky high as they are. And you are, without a doubt, increasing the money supply by doing this.
The point of UBI is that you no longer has to live near a major city to make a living. More people can go live in lower cost of living parts of the country when they have a passive income.
Nobody has to live near a major city to make a living as it is. Nobody, period.
The reason people do it is because you can be within close proximity of nice things. But as with all nice things, the nicer they are, the more people want them (and the more people want them, the more they pay for them.) This is why many people work in New York City on minimum wage, when it would be MUCH easier to live someplace like Houston, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and other low cost cities on their respective minimum wages.
Where I think UBI is really going to sting (if implemented) is housing costs. San Francisco is a perfect example of how increasing the money supply in a given area doesn't actually solve homelessness, and instead just makes it that much harder and more costly to find a place to live, including for those that already have a place to live and have an actual job. The reason why is because if you suddenly give people more money, they'll start to outbid one another for the same real estate, and no amount of automation will solve that.
Rhetorical questions: But why live in San Francisco? What is so special about San Francisco?
The only reason I see for living in San Francisco is because it allows you to live close to the place where you need to be to do the thing you need to do to live a decent human existence. In short, your job. Why do we have to presume that even with UBI, people will still choose to join the rat race of living in a crowded city. I see more people moving back to their home towns, or homesteading, buying plots of land somewhere cheaper, becoming gentleman or lady farmers or neighborhood artisans or shopkeepers, working for life's luxuries rather than the necessities already provided by their UBI.
Given the above scenario, instead of rising, real estate prices will fall and even out across the country, as San Francisco will be no more attractive than any other town or city within the same latitude (maybe except for the golden sunset but there are VR goggles for that). This, of course, presumes that the UBI is implemented right and is not just a souped food stamp program.
Deja vu: In the 80s we had a 70ish actor as POTUS, a woman PM in the UK, and a bald leader of that other nuke superpower
Yep, all the rent seekers who got there first should be able to just ban anyone else from coming. Maybe they should all chip in and build a big wall around it.
I have repeatedly argued that gentrification is not something which measures should be taken to stop — spread the culture around a bit! But at the same time, I don't see why anything should be done to hasten it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The whole problem faced by advanced economies is that the marginal utility of an untrained individual is approaching zero, though it's not there yet obviously. The more automated we become, the less value an untrained individual will be able to generate.
When talking about this subject many often bring up farming as an example of a field that was once heavily reliant on labor, became automated and the people didn't become unemployed. This is true because the skillset that the people who worked on farms could be transferred to other jobs at for example factories with relatively little cost (ie. no large amount of training required).
However now as more and more menial jobs are being performed better, faster and with less mistakes by a machine, the likelihood of an untrained or lowly educated individual finding a job is getting smaller and smaller. Invoicing and other data entry jobs are a good example of something that we know for sure will be gone in less than a couple of decades by and large, and there are people whose main function has been to operate a PC and enter data either from documents into the computer or from within one system to another etc. Once it becomes cheap to automate these tasks entirely, there simply is no point for companies to hire individuals to do it. The machine can handle varying workloads at tight schedules and does not require heavy monitoring, does not sleep, take days off, etc.
The data entry skill set will become worthless sooner or later, and in order to find a new job, these people need to retrain themselves, which obviously is not possible for everyone. But the core point to keep in mind that we're heading into a future in which machines can perform increasingly complicated tasks at a level equal to or better than low-skilled individuals. Transportation/logistics is another such example: once automated driving gets better and more widespread, there's simply no reason to have human drivers for most situations anymore; computers get into less accidents and can work 24/7, so even if a human truck driver offers his services at a reduced cost, he's not going to be able to compete in a market where the automated vehicles are driving non-stop without breaks using real time data from other vehicles and the internet to optimize its route around traffic jams etc. The initial investment required by a self-driving car/truck is obviously higher, meaning that at first human drivers can still compete against the machines with lowered salaries. But the closer the price of an automated unit comes to the costs of a manually operated unit, the less sense it makes to keep the human in the loop. Once the costs are on par the humans will lose their competitive advantage altogether and the job will become obsolete. That is, a point will come wherein even if the human driver works for free, the machine is a better choice because it does more work in less time, just like a tractor is a better choice than hiring people to manually work the fields with horses, even if they'd offer to work for no pay because the former is vastly more efficient and therefore way better for productivity,
So to clarify: I agree with you in part, but we cannot and should not assume there will always be a marker for low/no-skill jobs in advanced economies.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Want to see what UBI looks like, take the examples of the UAE and US Indian reservations. In one case, it builds dependency on oil wealth, in the other just dependency of the government. In neither case is it something humans were built for - we evolved as wild predators, not as crops.
As I understand the philosophy of the basic income experiments that came before, the idea is not to pay for everything in modern life. The payments are meant to reduce economic insecurity in an area, which then benefits everybody there. As a side benefit the people as individuals can turn their attention to living a bit better which may then have yet another side benefit in that they act better in and towards their communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will oppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
The only key to boost economy is to LOWER TAXES, not give handouts.
Lowering taxes has never boosted the economy by a measurable amount.
High taxes = less money in the hands of people, regardless of who they are, and as a result they buy less goods and do fewer investments.
Actually, that's wrong. What do think happens to money collected as taxes? The government spends it on people. They either give it to people or pay other people to do things for the government. So, usually high taxes (assuming a graduated system) means more money in the hands of a lot of people and less money in the hands of a few people. Generally, this results in a net gain for the economy because people with less wealth almost always spend more of their income than people with more wealth.
People buying more stuff = more jobs, more goods, happier society.
Generally true, but the approach you want to take is counter productive and results in fewer people buying stuff, fewer jobs, fewer goods, and an unhappy society.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is absolutely useless.
Actually, it's sound fiscally policy which is why every developed country in the world does it.
hey'll blow through all that money in a day, get alcohol poisoning and taxpayers will have to pay for their therapy.
If that were true, that money is then going to the liquor store clerk or bartenders, the brewers, the delivery truck driver, the hospital, the janitors, the doctors and the nurses. Plus lots of other people in a web of economic activity so vast I can't list all of the beneficiaries.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Depending on the BI level, wages may or may not drop (actually that's why BI is supported both by right-wingers and by left-wingers):
- With a low BI people will still need to work in order to go from survival to an acceptable life (being able to get married, have children, etc.) and so the pressure will be on job-seekers. Which means that wages dropping is a reasonable prediction, yes.
- With a livable BI (meaning one CAN live on BI, albeit frugally) the pressure with be more on employers, especially for shitty jobs, so wages may drop partially on some jobs but certainly not sharply. What will probably raise is rent, but again with a livable BI it will be possible, if rent is too high in cities, to go live in rural areas or small towns - renouncing workpay but enjoying higher quality of living, or maybe working from home, doing part-time jobs or volunteering for the community...
This amount is supposed to go everybody, right? Because it's universal, right? If so, then let's suppose then that it's about $400 a month (even that wouldn't be enough in SF, but let's suppose it is.) The person already living there already makes more than enough to feed themselves, or else they wouldn't be living in such a high cost area. Meanwhile, they now have an additional $400 a month. Since they already have the basics, they'll spend that on whatever, including rent, everyday goods, etc.
Again, that is the only part I agree with -- increase local cost of living -- but it does not completely change or upgrade the way they are. Even with your example, $400/month compare to let's say $7,000/month, that doesn't really change the way of living that much. Thus, housing cost shouldn't go up the same way you are thinking.
Outside of major cities it's pretty much impossible to make a career in anything requiring a degree. That's the primary reason people move there.