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'We Could Fund a Universal Basic Income With the Data We Give Away To Facebook and Google' (thenextweb.com)
Tristan Greene reports via The Next Web:
A universal basic income (UBI), wherein government provides a monthly stipend so citizens can afford a home and basic necessities, is something experts believe would directly address the issue of unemployment and poverty, and possibly even eliminate hundreds of other welfare programs. It may also be the only real solution to the impending automation bonanza. According to AI expert Steve Fuller, the problem is, giving people money when they lose jobs won't fix the issue, it's a temporary solution and we need permanent ones. Sounds fair, and he even has some ideas on how to accomplish this end: "We could hold Google and Facebook and all those big multinationals accountable; we could make sure that people, like those who are currently 'voluntarily' contributing their data to pump up companies' profits, are given something that is adequate to support their livelihoods in exchange."
It's an interesting idea, but difficult to imagine it's implementation. If the government isn't assigning a specific stipend value, we'll have to be compensated individually by companies. One way to do this, is by emulating the old coal mining company scrip scams of early last century. Employees working for companies would be paid in currency only redeemable at the company store. This basically created a system where a company could tax its own workers for profit. Google, for example, could use a system like that and say "opt-in for $10 worth of Google Play music for free," if they wanted to. Which doesn't help pay the bills when machines replace you at work, but at least you'll be able to voice search for your favorite songs. Another idea is to charge companies an automation tax, but again there's concerns as to how this would be implemented. A solution that combines government oversight with a tax on AI companies -- a UBI funded by the dividends of our data -- may be the best option. To be blunt: we should make Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other such AI companies pay for it with a simple data tax.
It's an interesting idea, but difficult to imagine it's implementation. If the government isn't assigning a specific stipend value, we'll have to be compensated individually by companies. One way to do this, is by emulating the old coal mining company scrip scams of early last century. Employees working for companies would be paid in currency only redeemable at the company store. This basically created a system where a company could tax its own workers for profit. Google, for example, could use a system like that and say "opt-in for $10 worth of Google Play music for free," if they wanted to. Which doesn't help pay the bills when machines replace you at work, but at least you'll be able to voice search for your favorite songs. Another idea is to charge companies an automation tax, but again there's concerns as to how this would be implemented. A solution that combines government oversight with a tax on AI companies -- a UBI funded by the dividends of our data -- may be the best option. To be blunt: we should make Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other such AI companies pay for it with a simple data tax.
Send Google and Facebook the bill, NOT the taxpayers.
UBI is ultimately pointless because the problem right now isn't that people don't have money. It's that the market adjusts itself to maximize profits which will always price some people out. Consider this: A person makes $100 a month and only wants to spend $10 on an apartment. But there is another person willing to spend $15 on that apartment, so that's what the market sets it's price at, which causes a lot of financial strain on the person. Good news! The government passes a UBI law, and provides everyone with a minimum $15 salary, bringing the persons monthly income to $115. The person can now easily afford the apartment, right? Well no. You see, that person gets the salary, but so does the other person competing for the same apartment. The second person is now willing to pay $20 for that apartment. So that's where the market says the price. So ultimately, all the UBI does is raise the prices on everything for everyone.
Until people realize that any kind of universal basic income scheme will never do what it's intended to do. Money isn't the endgame of what an economy does; it never has been, rather it is all about creation and allocation of resources. If you just give people money, you just give them money, and at the end of the day they'll just outbid one another for those same resources. If nobody builds anymore housing in say SF, then guess what? No amount of UBI is going to solve the shortage of available housing.
Minimum wage increases won't work either. This is such a dead simple concept that so many people seem to spectacularly fail.
Our economic system is first built on land ownership and natural resources, then on services extracting, processing, and delivering product from those resources. Everything else is just moving little green pieces of paper around when those first two groups are done with them.
You can't take something like 'mining personal data for sales and marketing' and turn it into an economy-driving primary natural resource, and any economic scheme that isn't ultimately rooted in property and natural resources is doomed to fail before it is even implemented.
In america, at least according to the constitution, the people *are* the government.
Google and Facebook provide services in exchange for user information. Of course it's questionable as to whether or not this is a good idea - I'd say a very bad idea - but that's the deal. There is no compensation due.
The reality is that the data of a single user would be near worthless. A stipend for any given user would be near worthless assuming an even division of the money. How would you even calculate the value data down to an individual except in the extreme outliers?
It's a nonsense idea that reeks of socialism's sense of entitlement and lack of real world application in anything but cautionary tales. Universal basic income may have applications, but paying for it this way is a crazy person's idea.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
We throw away enough food to feed entire countries, there are millions of properties that sit vacant,
You have unused food and unused property, and yet you think adding in "free money" will solve things. Why not start by redistributing that excess food that gets thrown away?
If you think the current system provides for efficient allocation of resources, you are well and truly mistaken.
If you need to take control of the entire government in order to make your idea work, then your idea is not workable. Start on a small bit of the problem - try giving away the free food that gets thrown away.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Yes, but people by and large are not starving to death in the US. Starvation isn't what the basic income claims to solve in the US. You also mention homelessness. While certainly a problem in the US, it is mostly a transient problem for most. The exceptions tend to be people with mental illness who eschew the kind of help that would get them off the street, and any claims that UBI would solve this type of homelessness should be met with skepticism.
The current system certainly does not meet any kind of efficiency benchmark, but it's important to note that the system is not a free market. We have deep government interference in ways that tend to reinforce the cycle of wealth: Limited liability (and corporate structure in general), IP laws (government-enforced monopolies on ideas), tax laws which favor the rich, an education system that shepherds poor kids into poor schools and rich kids into rich schools, a safety net that encourages people to stay in shitty areas with no jobs, etc.
I favor experiments with UBI - I've donated to charities experimenting with UBI. I hope it works out, because to me it represents a step back in government's ham-handed attempts to solve societal issues with over-complicated rules solutions. Someone's poor? Give them money. Simple. Unfortunately, I think we'll discover that it fails for all but the most impoverished societies. In, say, Kenya, almost everyone is poor and so dumping some money on them gives them a place to start. The overwhelming cause of poverty (same word, much different circumstance than in Kenya) in the US has much deeper roots and will not be solved by cutting a check, IMHO.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
All of US corporate profit is running around 1500 billion / year right now.
1500 billion ($) / 330 million (Citizens) is $4,545 per citizen per year.
Leaving aside the issue of what corporations would do if they could not keep their profits, which does not seem likely to be a good thing, it's pretty clear that all corporate profits in the current economy would not suffice to do anything useful.
However, the idea of UBI, or at least, the sane version, is that it would be implemented in an "economy of plenty" where automation was producing goods and services at much lower costs and much higher availability. Those conditions are hand-wavey; we can't quantify them yet, so it's problematic to try and predict the costs of living, etc. But that's why UBI or similar will be required; workers will be out and automation will be in. It's not today's landscape that defines the need.
The current economic model will almost certainly be unsustainable with pervasive automation and the number of citizens we have. That's pretty clear. We also know that although distribution of wealth right now is very uneven, there's enough of it to keep everyone eating and sheltered (which is not to say that always happens... but money in, goods and services out, the numbers work.) So given an economic sea change - a very, very painful one, I'm guessing - UBI or something along those lines should be feasible.
The problem comes when we try to see how it would work today, in the current economy. It wouldn't; it can't. Tests can work - certainly the extra income is welcome and used by recipients - but that's only because such tests are far less costly compared to the amount of money available to fund them. When you count everyone in, suddenly the available funds aren't there. But that's today. The future holds the potential for massive change. "Funds" may not even be the operative mechanism; because if survival is no longer pendant upon an exchange of value, it may not be reasonable to try to quantify and structure it that way any longer.
It's still worth talking about.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No we're not.
The US Federal government is given its power by the individual States, not the people. It's State government which gets its power from the people.
The question comes down to incentive .
For our culture, does the incentive for most Americans to exceed, grow and find a way to show that they are better then their neighbor is higher then the incentive to be able to survive a mediocre comfortable life.
With Basic Income, I do see a number of people who work to live, quitting their job. These are not bad or lazy people, they are just not ambitious, they would prefer to use their time doing things they like to do. I can see also a number of people more willing to take risks to be more successful, as the cost of failure is much less. They may be more likely to stand up to their boss, when something is wrong, or take charge of an activity, because the risk of failure is much less.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The People may collectively delegate their individual authorities to an organization called "government"; the American philosophy is that rights existed before government (they were "endowed by their Creator"), and that government can merely act as a delegate for the attendant authorities of those rights.
However, no individual ever had the right to walk into his neighbor's pub, smash his beer bottles, and declare that his 100-year-old family business may no longer operate.
Yet, that's precisely what the United States Government did during Prohibition.
They promised to protect "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", but they have done nothing of the sort. Your government is a fraud; your government is a bait and switch.
The main problem with communism is the efficient distribution of limited resources. It's basic information theory - you have a complicated set of interdependent production units that have varying needs for resources on each other. To make steel you need water, to move water around water you need pipes pumps, to make pipes pumps you need steel... and on and on ad infinitum.
A market system works pretty well at distributing these resources. If you make steel you don't need to know anything about demand other than the price of steel.
A planned / communist economy relies on meetings to figure out what gets made. The problem is nobody has all the information needed to plan out production, especially on a large scale. This is why you have perpetual shortages of goods in countries with planned economies.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
It's interesting. In the US, people generally trust corporations rather than their government. In Europe on the other hand, it's exactly the opposite, people rather trust their governments than corporations.
I don't trust either, but there's a distinct difference between the two. I can decide to opt out of dealing with any corporation. If I want to opt out of the government, eventually men with guns will come to force me to deal with the government.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That's not enough to drive an economy. Let's imagine I have 900 and you, along with 9 other people, each have 10. Our whole economy has a purchasing power of 1000.
Let's say that we could all be happy with "stuff" for 100. That's basically what someone would sensibly spend, at the most. Sure, you can somehow survive at 10, be ok with 20, feel satisfied with most your needs spending 50, but if you can spend 100, pretty much all you could sensibly want is paid for. We're talking Ferrari in your garage on the mansion on the hilltop with the private air strip and the private Learjet. The point where there's simply no more spending that could fill any kind of void.
So you spend your 10, because that's all you can spend. I spend the 100, because I can afford it and there isn't really anything left to buy. Now I sit on 800 that ... well, what do I do with it? I want to invest it of course but what should I invest in? There's nothing to invest in because there is no viable business able to open, there wouldn't be anyone to sell to. I have what I want, and you have no money.
Let's spread the money differently. You and those other 9 people now each have 50, I have 500. Our total economy still has a purchasing power of 1000, but a lot more money now changes hands. You'll probably spend 20-30 of your 50, either because you want to retain some purchasing power "in case", or simply because there is no supply to match your demand anymore, because so far there was simply no demand. I still spend my 100, with 400 sitting here, ready to be invested in the businesses that now have a potential customer, i.e. you. And those other 9 people like you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You obviously never tried to build something somewhere.
It's by no means simply putting a house somewhere. You need to get more permits than for owning a damn gun if you wanted to build a house somewhere, twice so if you plan to rent it out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nice straw man. The other poster said nothing of the sort.
What he said was, "Fundamentally, there is no difference between... a dictator, and a representative democracy." That's very much "of the sort."
Even if you're a well-dressed, well-fed slave in the Big House, you're still a slave.
Yes, yes, taxation is theft and we're all slaves... Why don't you move to that country that provides everything you need without charging anyone taxes and doesn't require anyone to work "for the Man." That's the only way we'll be "free" of this terrible American oppression.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Stock market at an all time high, unemployment lowest in years, new tax bill igniting the economy, deregulation across the board and a fine group of level headed honest folks in Washington. Who needs a UBI. In a couple years you'll all be tired of winning. Lucky bastards ;^)
You can opt out of every government. Unless you're in North Korea or something like it. At the very least you can vote what government you prefer, and if that doesn't work out, move to a place where the government is more to your liking.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Your last example provides a great illustration of my point. If I don't like Coca Cola, or Comcast or any other corporation, I don't have to move. I just don't give them my money. If I don't give the government my money, they will send men with guns to put me in a cage.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The only reason for UBI is to pay useless people enough money that they can afford enough drugs to get so stoned that the don't bother going out to commit crimes, because that's cheaper than a bigger police force.
I think your attitude is pretty representative of what people think of unemployed today, if you're not working there's something wrong with you. You have physical health problems, mental health problems, alcohol problems, drug problems, attitude problems or something that keeps you from holding a job. But the reality is that in a depression you don't have to be any of those, if you don't have a stellar resume or inside connections there's a thousand people trying get the same jobs and from society's point of view it's like a giant game of musical chairs, if there's a lot fewer jobs than workers somebody's going home empty-handed. Take something like Greece with >25% unemployment and >50% youth unemployment, you think one in two are just addicts looking to get stoned?
I'm not sure the automation doomsday scenarios are correct, we have an incredible creativity in creating new services. But that's roughly what they claim, that it'll be like a global, permanent depression for workers. Burger flipper? We have a burger flipping machine for that. Taxi driver? We have a self-driving car for that. There won't be enough chairs to go around and many will be like brain surgeons and rocket scientists, jobs that'll be totally out of reach for many people. So what do you do when you've looked everywhere, tried everything but nobody wants to hire you and you can't make rent? Live in the gutter? Let your kids live in the gutter? It's no wonder that even good people turn to crime and prostitution if they get really desperate.
I don't think living on just UBI would be pretty, unless you think playing WoW all day and eating Ramen noodles is what life is all about. Maybe for total slackers but they're probably the kind of employees every employer wants to get rid of anyway, it's more like a last resort so good people don't have to hit rock bottom. Who knows, maybe it'll help the hood rat problem too but that'd just be a bonus. I have seen some documentaries where it seems seems like a shitty life peddling drugs on a street corner or doing petty crime, but they don't really have any alternatives because they got shit education and shit work history and a criminal record and probably couldn't get a job at McDonald's if they tried. If they could simply stop, maybe some more actually would.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Are you really equating feeding the hungry with tying their shoes for them? And equating being poor with being in kindergarten? You're a fucking idiot.
So, you thing the "country" should provide you with everything you need...
Yes. I "thing" that we as tax payers should ensure that every last person in America has food, shelter, and healthcare. Civilized societies shouldn't leave the weak to die.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If you are a Republican you trust corporations more than government. If you are a Democrat you trust government more than corporations.
If you aren't an idiot you don't trust either of them. You realize the people who occupy the high positions in both are part of the same class. Nor do you trust those people who are partisan, as they are obviously deeply flawed and compromised in their ability to dispassionately observe reality.
The system that works best is when The People know the dangers of government and corporations getting in bed together, and understand the closer government and corporations get, the more closely the collective system resembles fascism. The historical kind of fascism mind you, not the hysterical kind of fascism.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
According to reality, the "people" who make less than $200,000 a year "are" less than 10% of the government. The other 90% is made up of a comparatively few corporations, PACs, and people who work for those corporations and make over $200,000 a year. That's about how campaign money falls out. It costs around $11,000,000 to run for Senate, on average. Well over $100,000,000 to run for president. It costs a bit less than $2,000,000 to run for the House of Representatives. The oligarchs who own and manage (at a high level) the large, often multinational corporations that contribute tha vast bulk of this money have de facto veto power over who gets to run in the first place. By the time the "choice" is presented to the voters, it is reduced to the Whore of Babylon vs the Antichrist -- we the actual people are a loser either way, and no matter who wins, their soul will be owned by the people that bought and paid for their campaign an who they KNOW will have to continue their support for them to hold on to power.
That's the interesting thing. You see, the Constitution doesn't identify "the corporation" as a political entity at all. Unsurprisingly, as "corporations" in the modern sense almost didn't exist in America at the time and there wasn't that much by way of "old money" oligarchy in a country that had just thrown OFF the overseas monarch and his oligarchs that ran it immediately before. They also had no concept of the modern "political campaign" with its ever shifting base of paid advertisement, rumor, fake news, sly innuendo, attack ads, sound bites, billboards, and massively printed and distributed posters. They would have been shocked by the idea that someone running for president would target just a handful of "battleground" states for the bulk of their campaign activity and spending on the basis of pre-election "elections" by a tiny fraction of the people plus statistical extrapolations, neglecting to even show their face in dozens of other states full of the very people they would represent but that were supposedly "solidly" behind one candidate or the other.
Unless and until we muzzle the oligarchy that effectively controls the US electoral process from the ground up by the simple expedient of contributing money equally to BOTH candidates in many races -- if they avoid vocalizing things like the need to muzzle the non-constitutional oligarchy itself, if they both appear equally compliant and smart enough to understand what will happen if they ever vote to alter the situation -- we'll continue to have politicians effectively sell their votes on things like net neutrality for the contributions from the big telecoms and their executives. In North Carolina (where I live) for example, Burr got around $600,000 of his last election budget from households that make under $200,000. He got around $1,200,000 from communications companies and their top executives. Hmmm, you can talk about "votes" all you want, but money talks, bullshit walks, and telecommunications paid for almost 10% of his campaign, twice as much as he raised from the ordinary voters in the state combined.
Plutocracy, oligarchy, the recreation of a de facto feudal "nobility" in the form of the very rich (Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, etc) who control the jobs and livelihood of millions of voters with their billions of dollars -- they are not our forefather's democracy. Either we the people wake up and smell the shit in our Starbucks (metaphorically speaking) and alter from the ground up the way elections are funded and run -- banning outright ALL forms of corporate support for candidates, eliminating lobbying (all forms, the good, the bad, the ugly), eliminating PACs, maybe eliminating the need to obtain campaign contributions altogether -- something that is ENTIRELY within our capabilities in the Internet age -- or we will continue to yield complete control over who emerges as candidates to be voted on in the first place as well as the length and strength of the campaigns they run to the wealthy few at the expense of the ordinary American.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Well said, sir! No mod points today, though, sorry, as I'm already commenting and don't do the AC swaparoo to do both.
I always liked it as a sound bite "Taxes buy me civilization", much as the liberty I give up -- such as the freedom to kill my neighbor, steal his sheep, and rape his daughter if I'm stronger than he is and can get away with it -- buys me freedom from murdering, raping, sheep rustlers in turn who just happen to be stronger than I am or who have a few more friends.
It is surprising how quickly the religious principles of the rabid libertarian evaporate, though, when confronted with the plain old bad luck of life that nobody ever insures against. Having any sort of public health care system is an insult to democracy and the freedom to die a pauper if you actually get sick -- right up to the day they have a single "accident" and find out the hard way that the emergency room, surgery, and two weeks in the ICU plus two weeks on the wards of the neighborhood hospital has left them backrupt and -- if it were not for the corrupt bankruptcy laws and social support network -- would leave them living under an overpass somewhere and panhandling on corners. Then you have things like Ayn Rand, the poster child for libertarianism, using medicare/medicaid when (after a lifetime of smoking and NOT buying insurance or saving money) she gets cancer.
What it really comes down to is a mix of spite and the kind of world you want to live in. If you want to live in a world dominated by the wealthy, the strong, and the ambitious, where the poor, the weak, the sickly, and the stupid are left to struggle, starve, and die young, by all means, rant on about the evils of taxes and the virtue of selfishness. Just remember that the real Midas Mulligans of the world, when confronted with an upstart who tries to start a bank to compete, hire some unemployed layabouts and have them pitch bottles of gasoline in through your new bank's windows, kidnap your children, and leave you notes pinned to your gutted Alsatian suggesting that you might want to sell out at 10 cents on the dollar to Mr. Mulligan. Or, in the case of the energy oligarchs, lean on the government so that they send in the army to take by force the right of way of a long oil pipeline.
Taxes do indeed buy me civilization, but the real problem with our current system is that "democracy" has been completely undermined by the absurdly wealthy who own the very restaurant where the menu of "column A and column B" is presented to the voters. It doesn't matter. Vote for either side. They all belong to the rich and powerful either way, or they wouldn't be on the menu in the first place.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The crime rate isn't that great in the larger cites but the UK, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain aren't in the top 100 lowest crime rates either. ... most certainly not a gun)? It is December 6th now ... definitely not this year. And I can not remember a case last year.
Obviously I talk about violent crime. Not about shoplifting.
When was the last robbery in Germany that involved a weapon (knife or a stick
I'm not really sure what education situation you are talking
Weapon controls at the school entrance.
Low level education.
Long ways to school.
No way for kids to walk to school (because of laws that directly forbid it - or to long distances)
No free universities.
On top of that absurd "tenures" for universities. Or call it colleges.
And then "rules" like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com... Not sure if that is true, it sounds absurd or at least bizarre from an european point of view.
In basically all European countries education to the level where a pupil graduates and can go to an university: is free
Going to an university is free beyond a kind of $100 fee for re-registering every semester.
On top of that you can get a state given credit to pay your expenses (rent, energy etc.) in case your parents can not pay for you (in some countries, like scandinavia you get the credit regardless of your parents situation)
You are automatically in healthcare till age of 25 or 27 (or so), payed by your parents employer and your parents (and if they had no kids, they would pay the same price anyway).
Sure, if you prefer you can pay for private education in private schools and private universities. If you extend the typical study time of about 4 - 5 years it might be a fee of about $500 per semester is due (in public universities).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.