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Slashdot Asks: Which is Better, a Basic Income or a Guaranteed Job? (timharford.com)
Barack Obama said this month that AI research is accelerating, making it harder to find jobs for everybody, and concluding "we're going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income."
But a Financial Times columnist adds that "an intriguing debate has broken out over how to look after disadvantaged workers both now and in this robot future. Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job?" An anonymous reader quotes some of the highlights: Psychologists have found that we like and benefit from feeling in control. That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control. The money would be ours, by right, to do with as we wish. A job guarantee might work the other way: it makes money conditional on punching the clock. On the other hand (again!), we like to keep busy. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (UK) (US) have found that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". And social contact is generally good for our wellbeing. Maybe guaranteed jobs would help keep us active and socially connected.
The truth is, we don't really know... It is good to see that the more thoughtful advocates of either policy -- or both policies simultaneously -- are asking for large-scale trials to learn more.
He titled the column "The secret to happiness after the robot takeover." But what say Slashdot readers?
Is it better to be given a basic income -- or a guaranteed job?
But a Financial Times columnist adds that "an intriguing debate has broken out over how to look after disadvantaged workers both now and in this robot future. Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job?" An anonymous reader quotes some of the highlights: Psychologists have found that we like and benefit from feeling in control. That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control. The money would be ours, by right, to do with as we wish. A job guarantee might work the other way: it makes money conditional on punching the clock. On the other hand (again!), we like to keep busy. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (UK) (US) have found that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". And social contact is generally good for our wellbeing. Maybe guaranteed jobs would help keep us active and socially connected.
The truth is, we don't really know... It is good to see that the more thoughtful advocates of either policy -- or both policies simultaneously -- are asking for large-scale trials to learn more.
He titled the column "The secret to happiness after the robot takeover." But what say Slashdot readers?
Is it better to be given a basic income -- or a guaranteed job?
Doing a pointless task or showing up to do nothing in order to earn a living is soul-crushing.
In a low-job boom economy we may need to encourage people to get out and socialize, but there are many better ways to do this.
I'm definitely in Camp Universal Income. Everyone gets enough to live comfortably enough on, and if you want more income on top of that, you can work. Guaranteed jobs for everyone on the face of it doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it will wind up being the case that a lot of people are given pointless makework. As much as people do like to keep busy, no-one respects being given work that exists only for the sake of keeping them busy.
The principle behind both options is marxism.
Marxism means death, hunger and mass violations of personal freedoms.
To quote a German comedian, I need money, not an occupation. I can keep busy all right myself, no need for that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Paying people not to work destroys the ability to achieve.
How does eliminating a demeaning "you want fries with that" job and leaving the person to pursue something they consider worthwhile "destroy the ability to achieve"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Slavery. Slavery is a guaranteed job. As long as I don't have to pay for it, any work you do is making me richer, so I will employ you. And that's also the only way you can guarantee a job, because as soon as I have to pay you for it, it has to be something I can sell for more than I pay you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But who will evaluate the housing/care/food provided?
If everyone has a guaranteed room, you can be sure that the government will be quite happy to pay 10$ a month to Hovel Towers to provide them, although a much better room could be rended for 11$.
The same will be true for medical care and food - the cheapest provider will be picked. And the people relying on these services won't have the ability to work a few hours a month to afford something better - if they want an upgrade they have to the entire expense on their own.
On the other hand, giving them money and letting them make their own choices means that the providers still need to compete on both price and performance and upgrades are not an enormous cliff, just a slope.
There will be some people that spend all the money on alcohol and drugs, but that is their choice - just stop preventing them from commiting their slow suicide with charity.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
The guaranteed job has problems but fewer problems than a guaranteed income. The job has a potential of you doing SOMETHING of value to the system. You finding it meaningful is not the issue. Things need to be put in boxes. Inventory has to be checked. There are lots of jobs held by billions of people on this planet that are hard to cite as "meaningful".
The job concept at the very least has you doing something. It need not be dig a ditch and then fill the ditch in with the same soil.
That said, EVEN IF the job is that bad it is at least motivating you to get another job. If I give you income there is no motivation for you to do anything. You got your income. If I require that you do something annoying to get the money then you'll be interested in finding a less annoying way to get the money... perhaps getting a better job.
We can iterate on the problems these these concepts quite deeply. Entire books have been written on these issues from many angles... moral, logistical, social, political, ethical...
However, many seem to take the complexity as meaning it is arbitrary and thus "there is no wrong answer" because its complicated.
This is why I like to keep it simple.
The simple inescapable point here is that the goods and services that people want to obtain in exchange for money must be produced by someone. And if you're not producing stuff... then where is it coming from?
Someone else? Magical fairy land?
A wealthy society can afford a certain amount of wealth spent on non-productive things. But that account is FINITE... not IN-FINITE. Which means there is a limit. The amount you can blow will be relative to the wealth of the society. So you have a paradox where the richer a society is the more money you can throw at welfare but... you have to be very careful with your taxation and regularitory policies otherwise you'll make the society poorer... not richer.
Its the goose and the golden eggs. And you have to be very careful that you eat ONLY golden eggs and no geese.
This balance is inherently unsustainable. It requires wisdom and restraint to the point of personal political self sacrifice on the part of politicians to maintain this balance. There will be a short term personal benefit to exceeding the balance and eating geese for the politician. He can promise the moon and the stars... and deliver it for a year or two at the price of economic collapse after five or ten years.
Do you trust your politicians to sacrifice their political power by not over promising, slaughtering the geese that lay the golden eggs, and then leaving their nation to rot after the politician retires to a private island somewhere?
This is not cynicism... the examples of this happening are easily accessible.
All of these concepts people are coming up with to slight of hand the magical money into pockets... it... is short term thinking. And the difference between short and long term... the difference between small and big picture is the difference between good and evil.
Literally.
Good and evil is a matter of scope.
Every act of evil seems like a good idea to the man that does it. And every act of evil seen from a wider perspective is seen for what it is.
Take every act of theft, murder, battery, abuse... etc... and contract it to a moment and the man doing it... and the act will have a "rightness" to it. I'm excluding literal insanity... consider acts of theft, revenge, etc. It all can be justified if you collapse the entire world to the man doing the action.
Then expand the perspective out... to include friends, family, community, strangers on the street... expand it in time as well as space by not merely considering a moment but days, months, years, and generations. The act takes on a different character in different contexts.
Guaranteed income seems like a good idea from a limited perspective over a short period of time. If you look at it in the context of millions or
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You shouldn't be rewarded for being part of the system. That's retarded. You should be rewarded for *contributing* to the system. (And yes I am aware that there are a great many rich people who are a net drain on the system. If we can figure out how to get them separated from their weather I highly favor it)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Health care works pretty well for the purpose of UBI, outside of the US. Of the developed countries, only the US lacks public health care. Given the results on a population basis, as well as the actual cost as part of GDP (the US is 50% higher than #2) the non-US approach seems to be dramatically better.
"Free" and relatively cheap healthcare are achievable, just look at, well, pretty much any other western nation that's not the USA. Yes, it's paid for via taxes. Just like unemployment benefits (in Australia, very easy for an employer to set up, as it's paid for via taxes, so there is nothing to set up).
Sure, there are problems, but that's the case with anything.
I agree with what you are saying, but this is just one suggested implementation of a socialist idea. It's not like socialism as a platform is 100% flawed just because communism, which I assume you are eluding to, as an implementation of extreme socialism is fucked up. In fact plenty of socialist ideas are implemented by the US government and work just fine. NB: I'm not referring to the now defunct Affordable Care Act although it was a great boon for many US citizens despite some flaws in it's implementation.
others _must_ work and have their money taken without any kind of compensation or benefit.
That's an unpreventable cost of maintaining a civilization. Either pay these people not to go out and commit crimes, or pay police to clean up after. I much prefer the former myself, because it results in the least deaths and violence and is probably cheaper.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If there's no work, it's because efficiency has gone so high that very few people need to work in order to provide for all.
Rather than leave all the wealth (= control of resources) in the hands of the lucky few who ended up on top, a UBI ensures everyone can participate. There's still plenty of room for people to excel, and through hard work be rewarded. It's very much a free market idea, without the coercion of "you'll do this shitty job for low pay because we can make you miserable or dead if you don't", or the "congratulations, you were born rich, you can be a total zero and still have a great life" inequity that's an alternative.
Wake up idiot. It's the corps that already have you enslaved, not the government.
Also people don't choose slavery, by definition.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
I also disagree that it is a more fair system. Someone who is sick and unable to work has much greater need than someone who has a good job. Why would they receive the same sum?
Because it is both fairer and bureaucratically cheaper to pay them both and tax it back from the one who is doing well enough to contribute.
If you simply give everyone a basic amount, there is no niggling, maneuvering, or fraud about eligibility for fifty-three different entitlements. And if you (actually) tax everyone based on their real income -- including said basic amount -- then you eliminate much of the niggling, maneuvering and fraud about seventy-one different tax loopholes and exemptions.
It might even wind up being approximately the same result as we have now, just with 80% fewer bureaucrats and 50% less fraud.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
The funny of it is, if you add up how much we pay administering the current welfare system--the thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who administer things like Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, who determine what items you are allowed to buy, who determine if you qualify, who police the system--we could provide a reasonably generous UBI to everyone with nearly no administrative overhead.
Remember: a proper UBI replaces EVERYTHING, including tax deductions normally enjoyed by higher-income individuals, such as tax deductions for children (as children also receive a UBI), mortgage tax deductions, tax deductions for retirement savings, tax credits for paying for college. The idea is to eliminate the unfairness that is intrinsically tied into all of these separate programs, each which have their own target audiences, administrative bureaucracies and qualifications.
The UBI would also replace Social Security--both the OSADI and SSI disability funds.
Imagine how much smaller the administrative state becomes when your tax return is essentially four lines: A: gross income, B: tax (from tax tables), C: UBI D: Tax owed (or refund due).
This is why I don't think we will ever have a proper UBI. Because there are just too many people--both working for the government, and private companies (like Intuit, who constantly lobby against simplifying the tax code) whose jobs rely on the massive administration of hundreds of government programs which would all be wiped off the map by a properly designed UBI.
Tthat's part of the problem: we pay nearly as much in administrative overhead administering the current welfare state and the current tax code as we do paying out benefits. If you consider those bureaucrats as beneficiaries of the welfare state, that's a lot of jobs which would be wiped off the map. And they make a very powerful lobbying group--which is why in government corners, "UBI" is always reframed as yet another program for them to administer, rather than a new program that would cost them their job.
The chinese already have such "social credit score". You would not like it.
But Americans don't wait an average 2 weeks for care. Those who can afford it wait 2 weeks, the rest just die
Point somewhere, anywhere, where a guaranteed job or income has worked. The answer is nowhere. There is always a difference between a hand out and a hand up. The Socialists want you to believe they are the same thing because it makes them feel good to do so.
We're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
The one nice thing, I guess, about concentrating all of this into a single simple system is that it would crystalize the debate over wealth redistribution into a debate over the two aspects of the UBI system: the marginal rates of the tax tables and the size of the UBI payout itself.
As I noted elsewhere, we're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
Certainly UBI cannot replace medical aid (Medicaid), since the cost of health care for someone on dialysis (for example) far exceeds what any but the wealthiest individuals could pay out of pocket. (As I recall, the cost of dialysis out of pocket is in the low six figures annually.)
But this hits on a core philosophical difference about the poor and about people in general: are people too God-damned stupid to manage their own affairs, and thus must have their affairs managed for them?
It's not to deny the fact that there are demonstrably people out there who lack the logical or social skills necessary to function in our current society. And certainly we need to have social workers out there who can help them.
But when you make the de-facto assumption that all poor people are stupid and require their lives to be managed by those of us who are "better" than them--you walk right into an aesthetic argument. (At what point does your inferiority require us to treat you as a ward of the state? Does being poor mean you must be a de-facto ward of the state? What's the threshold? Is it abject poverty? Is it just being lower-middle class? Do we by default assume you're making poor decisions because you're barely scratching out a living? Do we pass judgement because in our opinion you drink too much for your socio-economic class? Drink too many empty calories in the form of fast food soft drinks? Eat too often at McDonalds? Should you become a "de-facto" ward of the state because you live in the wrong area? And I'm not being snarky; I've heard each of these given as a reason why those "less than us" need to make "better decisions", or who should have their rights limited.)
Worse, you walk head-first into an authoritarian argument: if "those people" can't "make the right decisions" that are made by "their betters"--how far away are you from simply taking away all of their decisions?
As a Native American I've seen these arguments play out over history on the reservations.
They never end well.
So your statement "UBI recipients will inevitably mismanage their funds and safety nets" strikes me as overly authoritarian. And distasteful.
Me, I'd rather just hire a bunch of social workers (and we may not need to hire any more since we have a lot of them already), and task them with the job of helping people who seek help, or who are referred to them by police officers, with making better decisions. Kinda like what we do today, but without the "nanny state" authoritarian bullshit.
Remember: from where you stand, unless you're Warren Buffet, there are people at a higher socio-economic level than you looking down at you as part of the hoi-polloi--part of the unwashed masses, an uncouth individual who can't seem to manage your life to the level they can.
Your argument essentially is an argument for taking away individual freedom.
I mean, consider the statistic that only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now. By your implication, this suggests that 61% of all Americans lack the sufficient wherewithal to be making their own financial decisions.
And if they can't make their own decisions for themselves, who make it for them? The State?
Ultimately I find arguments like your an aesthetic one, because often, when you explore the boundaries you find arguments like "he shouldn't eat at McDonalds because those are empty calories" or "she shouldn't spend her time out partying because she isn't spending enough time making home-cooked meals."
And down that rabbit hole is authoritarianism--one where only 39% of Americans are trusted with their own money.
If UBI is too good it will turn into a lifetime subsidy for do-nothings.
This statement pretty clearly shows your philosophy. You define a person's worth by the work they do, and look down on people who don't satisfy your criteria. This puritanical mind set is slowly becoming incompatible with the modern world.
First, as productivity advances, more and more wealth is being created with less and less human effort. We're at the cusp of producing enough to provide basic living support to everybody with almost 0 human effort.
Second, as technology advances and things change more and more rapidly, the requirements for jobs are starting to grow beyond the average human's capabilities. New jobs need a lot of adaptability, enough intellectual capacity and a lot of study. There are quite a few people that simply won't be able to find meaningful jobs. What then? Would you have us revive the workhouses for the poor?
when was the last time you saw benefits decreased? Almost never. Increased? Almost always.
And this is exactly the way things should be. Not, as you seem to imply, because the "do nothings" are clawing more and more from the worthies (whichever way you define them), but because global productivity has been growing continuously, because more and more wealth is being created, and it makes perfect sense to use this extra wealth to increase programs that benefit the most people.
We've heard that claim before. When, for example, a cotton gin could replace a year of work every single hour it runs, people panicked. Instead of that being a problem, it freed-up people to do more productive jobs.
To answer your question, for a country like the US, 90% or more can be on UBI. The country is only 2% farmers, yet produces more than enough food for it to be a major export. Of the remaining needs, water, clothing and electricity production are almost completely automated. The only need not automated yet is shelter, but that's not a consumable like the others.
Now that's not to say it would be a nice place to live with 90% of the people on UBI, but in reality that won't happen. Most people don't want to merely survive, they want to live in luxury.
Nobody will contribute, people will not work, will steal, will drink themselves to death.
Are you telling me that you had a UBI, you'd quit your present job, steal, and drink yourself to death?
I'll guess no.
Okay, then your family? Your friends?
Again, I'll guess no.
Usually when claims like this are made, it's because there's this huge mysterious, shadowy mass of humanity who we've never really met (but read about in blog posts or seen in movies) who apparently are lazy, shiftless, and awful (and probably have a different skin colour). The people we actually *have* met are, on the whole, reasonably hard-working, reasonably decent people.
I'll go with making pronouncements based on observed data. My measurement of all the people in my life (and that encompasses a number of different walks of life, many different colours, many different cultures) indicates that the *vast* majority are, when given the opportunity, contributors. Again, mostly to benefit themselves, but because of forced contributions, benefiting their fellow citizens as well. Some unfortunates aren't in a position to contribute due to health or other issues. Most wish they were.
I've no doubt you can cherry pick for awful people - they do exist in small numbers. But the idea of basing my society solely around the awful people? That sounds like a recipe for... well... awfulness.