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Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca)
Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.
i'd be mad as hell if i lived in one of these places and was subsidizing experiements to give people money without them contributing in any way
The liberal in me wants to react very strongly to this, but I did spend four years as a student in an English city called Salford. That place was infested with vast numbers of people who lived out their lives on the dole, many of them with no family tradition of work going back a few generations. They were generally troublemakers who got their kicks from attacking students (physically and verbally) on a regular basis. Crime levels were very high. One good thing is that there wasn't much gun crime since guns are so rare and hard to get in England, but instances of burglary, auto theft, shoplifting and anti-social behavior was just off the charts.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of these experiments, but I'm not optimistic about them.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
I very much doubt it will because it is implemented in a way which directly undermines the arguments for universal basic income which is normally taken to mean that everyone gets a fixed income regardless of circumstances. Instead this project reduces that income at the rate of $1 for every $2 earned. Unlike the real deal this provides a reasonably strong motivation NOT to take low paying jobs since you only get a benefit of half the wage you earn. It also means that you now have to start means testing people to see how much they earn which requires bureaucracy and officials and incurs expense.
The whole point of basic income is to cut the administration expense because everyone gets it regardless while also preventing the disincentive to work of typical unemployment schemes by clawing back money when people get even a low paying job. The Ontario scheme fails to achieve either aim and so seems unlikely to work or provide any data about whether such type of schemes could work.
Seconded.
I've been on this site since about 2001. The 'This site has gone to shit' arguments have been around that long too. However, in the past 2 years (since around the /. Beta fiasco it seems) most of the quality comments have all but left. 'Conservative echo chamber' kinda hits the nail on the head. The libertarian dog whistle / talking points get trotted out so often it's just boring now to read. Arm-chair economists with such deep insights as 'Don't like your job, move and get another one, dummy!' seem to be about the best the site has to offer now.
Why am I still here then? Habit mostly, I gave it up (and read Soylent) for a good while, and now I come back, thought not as often as before. As for reading comments, I guess I still do out of some hope that they might get better again...though my tolerance is lower I spend only a fraction of the time trying to sift through the Randian garbage.
"Is there even any point in getting an education if you know that the state will provide everything - and that there probably won't be any jobs for you anyway?"
I think that the point of these programs isn't to entirely replace the income that you would get by working an average job. I think it's more along the lines of softening the crushing experience of having to live on US-level unemployment benefits if you lose your job. Going down from your current salary to $410/week for what could be an extended period of time is something most people can't just cover out of savings, etc. Once you lose your income and access to credit, then start losing your possessions, life starts getting much harder.
What will be even more interesting is seeing what the plan is for dealing with the people who are just useless and can't be retrained for another "hip, modern" industry. You're not going to take a factory worker who's spent 20 years assembling the same set of parts and teach them to be a software developer, even a code monkey position isn't attainable without at least some aptitude. I'd say the humane thing to do would be to put them on the equivalent of Social Security Disability income for the rest of their lives. Many 50 year olds who are experiencing age discrimination are having to fake disability claims to bridge the gap between the "unhireable" phase of their work life and retirement, so this would provide them the same benefits and reduce fraudulent claims for the actual disability program.
Wealth is an abstract concept. In nature noone owns anything. Its society which gives rise to law which gives rise to property and money which gives rise to wealth. if its not working for most people society has the right to decide to try another way. Given that more and more economic value is being created by machines whose income accrues only to the owners of the machines and not to entire society (though without society we would still be hunting and wearing skins so no machines would have been invented); we may need a new system. A star trek kind of society where people's basic needs are taken care of by the output created by machines (which are owned by society as a whole) and people work for prestige and luxuries. This can work in a society where 90% of the economic output can be provided by machines and you only need humans for 10% of the creative jobs. For such jobs a human who doesnt have to work but wants to do the work will be much more productive. The humans who dont want to work will be bored and eventually stop reproducing so the problem will solve itself over 5-10 generations in a humane manner.
**Life is too short to be serious**
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
Pilots like this are useless. They have no predictive power because an actual universal basic income is qualitatively different from an "income you and a few of your neighbors will get for less than a handful of years and then it goes away." We already know what people do in circumstances like that. It's called graduate school.
For the timid politicians among us, I have bad news. UBI is untestable. You can't pretend to have it for a while and then discontinue it. But it doesn't matter. No country is ever going to just decide to have an actual UBI. When it happens, it will have happened organically, by easy stages over the course of decades. Social Security and the equivalents around the world are the beginning of that. The amazing ease with which a person qualifies for disability nowadays is another part of that. That's probably how the US will deal with all the unemployed truckers in 20 years' time. You were a trucker? Ok, now that robots do that job, you're "disabled." Because of the kidney damage you suffered due to all the vibration. Wink wink, nudge nudge, sign here.
What will happen is gradual, targeted expansions of social security/welfare that slowly absorbs sections of the population that are unemployable (just as they already do), and then gradually the means testing of those groups will go away, and in 60 years, if there is still such a thing as the developed world, it will have UBI. The rabid libertarians among us see this coming and are having screaming meamies about it because they think people who used to work in factories who then went to work in construction who then went to work driving trucks who now have nowhere to go should definitely die in the street because they can't become software developers. Not a straw man. I've had a person literally say that to my face within the past year, using the actual phrase "die in the street." A person who self-identifies as Christian, by the way, and who attends church every single Sunday. Yes, these are real people who do exist and do think that way.
I believe Marxism is inevitable, but Karl Marx was way ahead of his time, just as this silly "pilot" is. Capitalism is a reasonable system for dealing with scarcity. It does not deal at all well with super-abundance. Marxism deals well with super-abundance, but except for the idle rich, we do not have super-abundance. I believe it's possible that we will sometime before the end of the century, but I strongly expect it will be much nearer the end of the century than the beginning. And "pilots" like this are a waste of time.
Wars have been fought over a magical sky being who only exists in stories, and over the decayed slime of plants and animals that lived before humans existed. Humans will find any reason at all to go about and kill one another en masse.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm a pretty standard red state republican but I'm having a hard time arguing against some kind of fundamental change like basic income. You have to consider that a good percentage of the population has an IQ just barely above being considered mentally disabled. A larger percentage is just slightly above that. When burger flipping and warehouse jobs go away, those people won't be effective maintenance for the robots and anyway those maint positions would be some super low ratio to the number of jobs lost... Those people will not be artists.
I don't know that universal basic income is the way to go but we'll need to do something. Maybe some kind of beautification work force that essentially cleans and maintains things. Creates bike paths and plants landscaping. That would allow people to still work and get some fulfillment out of life.
Convicted felon, here.
I disagree with almost everything you said.
I didn't rob a bank until I was 40 years old. Was I a moral person for the first 39 years, and then an immoral one after? Pretty simplistic. I postulate that you will abide by your morality right up until your kid says "Daddy, I'm hungry" and you have nothing to feed her. (I'm not saying this is what happened to me, but to a lot of bank robbers I met inside.) Maybe you're different. Kudos to you, if so, I guess.
The biggest cause of poverty is not government regulation, that's ridiculous. I suspect it's poor understanding of money by parents and peers, causing poor behavior modeling. There's a reason college graduates' kids go to college and the working class poors' kids go to the payday loan shop when things go south. Did your parents launch you on a positive trajectory? How did they know how to? Maybe they didn't. Again, maybe you're different. Kudos to you.
Mine wanted to, but didn't know how.
Sure, socialism is always doomed to failure, if you reduce everything down to a false dichotomy. Look how much better the outcomes were in the 1800s for the robber barons. Not so much for normal people.
Anyway, they're TRYING it. Let's at least wait and see.