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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.
Automation has been going on since the industrial revolution, yet new jobs seem to keep on being created. My current job didn't really exist twenty years ago.
People keep predicting the obsolescence of humans but unemployment these days in most rich world economies is not that high. That said, it would be good if we had better ways of measuring employment beyond the binary employed/unemployed states. If someone's not claiming unemployment benefit and working then it's assumed that they're doing okay, but they might be working three minimum wage jobs and barely getting by. That should be as worrying to policy-makers as someone not working at all. Then we might be in a better position to see if we're at the point where we need a universal basic income.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
start by lowering full time hours / making OT cost alot.
Why should jay have to work 60-80+ hours a week doing the work of 3 people for the pay of 1?
When we can fill that job with 3 people working about 30 hours each?
"with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families."
Q: So why are you filing for divorce?
A: Irreconcilable financial differences.
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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.
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.
They already did a basic income experiment back when Prime Minister Trudeau was called Pierre.
In short... Most everyone kept working or didn't start working as early but stayed in school longer.
Also, hospitalizations went down, particularly for mental health problems.
But if you want a real Twilight Zone mindfuck - look up Nixon's basic income experiment.
Run by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Granted... they saw it as a way to eliminate social programs instead of to expand them. But even they found that there was no change to "work ethic" - everyone still kept working.
Apparently, being "at or just above the poverty line" is simply not enough for most people.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"How about we just go back to capitalism and let shit fix itself?"
That's the problem -- this time, it can't. The average level of intelligence doesn't support full employment of people for the jobs that are left over after automation fully takes hold. For those that make it over this hurdle, the business owners controlling access to the few remaining jobs are going to realize their position and work to keep employment as low as possible, increasing their profits.
Businesses are greedy - they don't want to employ anyone. Fast food restaurants would happily replace all of their employees with robots and kiosks if they could, and this is the low end (minimum wage level) of employment. It gets even worse for knowledge workers -- this is why businesses offshore or push for visa programs that allow for cheaper labor.
Umm... you think "bored" humans will stop reproducing?
Yes. The premise of TFA is that in the future we will have robots that can do anything that humans can do. I don't know how much an anatomically functional interactive sexbot will cost, but it will likely be way cheaper than alimony and child support, and it won't get headaches. If it has a "mute" button and can make sandwiches, that is even better.
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.
In what insane world is businesses "pushed away" by people having money to spend ?
And I am prepared to bet when the results come in you'll be proven wrong - because we've been doing experiments like this for decades and you've been wrong EVERY OTHER TIME.
What WILL happen ? A tiny reduction in the workforce: caused by mothers taking extended maternity leave and young people who otherwise couldn't afford it going to get a college education. A massive drop in the unemployment rate as people who could never DARE risk it before suddenly are able to open their own businesses - and employ their neighbours. Increases in the people's average healthcare (with subsequent reduced costs for Canada's single payer healthcare) and a thousand other good things. Bad outcomes: none.
They did this exact same experiment, in Canada in the 1960s under the name MinCome. We know what the results were. There is no reason to believe they won't be replicated YET AGAIN as in all the the hundreds of other experiments that have been done in this regard for over 200 years now.
In all that time - there was exactly ONE experiment where a failure was reported, the report claimed an 'increase in sloth, lack of willingness to work, increased abuse of the bottle and sexual immorality'. It's an interesting case - since it was the first ever UBI experiment and it happened in England almost 200 years ago now to deal with the massive poverty the Industrial Revolution caused. It was also the very first example of a government commissioning a massive piece of research (over 15000 interviews) to build up a huge stack of big-data from which to draw a report in order to smartly evaluate a policy.
There's just one problem: the report was a complete fraud and fabrication. In fact, it was written BEFORE the interviews were even done by a bunch of fraudsters who just wrote what they thought probably would happen based on their own puritan belief systems. They never even READ the data they claimed their report was based on.
It would take over a century before anybody ever actually did. When they did - they discovered the exact OPPOSITE in the data from what the report said was in there - yet another resounding success.
That report even blamed the UBI for the worker's protest marches of 1821 - ignoring that these happened ALL OVER England, not just in the one little town where the UBI experiment happened.
The only experiment where UBI was EVER reported as anything but a massive economic and social success -was a flagrant fraud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *