Slashdot Mirror
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.
That isn't to say people need jobs, but even with basic income (or especially with, depending how you look at it) you need something to do. DIY/hobby/maker culture more or less has people most suitable for basic income, but a lot of people simply aren't thinking in those terms. Chances are basic income would be great for some segment of the population while the other segment would spiral into opiate and alcohol fueled depressions while trying to find some meaning to fill their spare time. Personally, I'd say go with basic income because the people who can fill their time are inherently worth more as people and shouldn't suffer due to the needs of those soulless automatons meant for fast food service. Given enough time even helping people who can't think find things to do will likely become a hobby in itself.
I think post like this should be careful not to present a false dichotomy.
The principle behind both options is marxism.
Marxism means death, hunger and mass violations of personal freedoms.
This is the thing I don't understand. Socialists (and especially americans who believe us northern europeans countries are socialist) talk about guaranteed jobs, but what the fuck is a guaranteed job?
Guaranteed to do what?
Is the government supposed to just create jobs out of nothing?
If one person is too productive they tell him to stop working, because he is making others look bad?
Never understood this bullshit.
Maybe they all just get government jobs sitting around playing cards all day like they do back in my home country.
I've got to warn you libs, it doesn't work and just bankrupts the country.
Guaranteed job mean more or less many people will have to dig hole to fill back them again. With automation there won't be many job left in a few decades that people without high level education can do without being easily replaceable. that leave "keep busy" guaranteed job. And you know what's worst ? Having a job you know is USELESS but given to you to a pittance to keep you busy. That is why UBI is better. Then it is your choice of what you do. Many people would simply wallow in their sweat before a tube box (being old tv or youtube). But many (and I do belong to that group) would rather do something creative and productive on their own rather than get a "keep busy" occupation.
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Both are "shit sandwich" choices.
Paying people not to work destroys the ability to achieve.
Putting people into do-nothing jobs destroys the desire to work.
Both damage the economy.
One by raising cost of living to compensate for unearned payouts.
The other by depressing wages.
So, which shit sandwich will YOU take a bite of?
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Yes, a 'guaranteed job' pretty much means 'YOU better find a job you like, or we will find one you DONT'
Its just renamed 'work for your unemployment benefit', which it most definitely a stick, not a carrot.
Of course the powers that be LIKE people to be at their behest, and LIKE to have to control, so why am I not surprised they will try and sell that as a solution.
A real UBI system (and nearly every time we see those in power talking one it is NOT, it is just another benefit for people who 'need' it) is very different from that.
It is a reward for being part of a system, that is not dependent on your position in the system.
And, almost as importantly, it REPLACES most of the other parts.
It replaces benefit for unemployment, sickness (but not necessarily medical), old age, education, and many many more, thus removing the HUGE beuraucracy that is wrapped around operating and policing those.
Why do those in power hate it? because it reduces their control, and their ability to sell themselves as 'helping us' by endlessly making slight changes for how they give our own money back to us when they decide we need it.
But no, they must sell UBI as being a form of benefit for people who failed, because they think that will help keep it from ever happening, because they are sure the silent majority hate such things. That is why pretty much every proposed UBI 'trial' is not UNIVERSAL.
It will take a big change in the political systems before we ever see anything like UBI (and no, i don't mean to some kind of socialist nirvana, such people generally hate anything equal and universal with a great passion).
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.
It is a bit of a stupid qestion. At that level, people are working to live, not living to work.
So I rather have enough money given to me that I would not die than slave away 16 hours per day with the risk of losing it all, just so I do not die.The sole reason I have a job is so I can get an income. The moment I do not have an income, I am not going to work. I will be doing other things.
That said, giving people a purpose is good for their mental health. At this moment we still think that somebody standing in a factory many hours per week is a more worthwhile human that a person who does it half time and is with the kids the rest of the time. Neglecting your family is seen as a good thing by many. Loyalty to the company is see as loyalty to a king. Yet where the king provided some form of protection as much as he was able to give, the company does no such thing. These are just resources, ok human, yet still resources and managed by a human resource manager.
The people here are generally are just a bit better of than the average person/ We are just a bit more equal than the rest.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A basic income empowers people, it doesn't prevent those who are able to work from working and earning money on top of that income. A guarantee of a job is just a guarantee of minimum wage in a different form.
People aren't begging for a handout, they have built the technology that enables you to replace their jobs. Ideally they should be given stock in the companies that automate their workforce without regard to "new employment" created by importing workers on student visas and other scams.
All the experiments with universal income consisted of using ordinary tax money, where the bulk comes from the middle class, i.e. normal working people who don't suck the government's tit. It does not come from the 1% where increasingly the bulk of the money goes to, nor shall they give it up. Thus in effect UI is very bad news for the working people. They might as well stop working. In which case UI breaks.
And also less cruel to the people. I can really see a lot of jobs that violate the eighth amendment, and the people subjected to it didn't even break a law to deserve it.
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.
You're not getting either one.
Neither would ever be enough.
As automation becomes cheaper and better, a greater proportion of human jobs will be 'bullshit jobs'. Technically most countries already have a system where persons can get free food and housing; it's called 'prison' and an alternative 'solution' is to put more people into that system. The question is how long people put up with that 'solution' until they have their Bastille Day.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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
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The question itself is irrelevant. Deeper societal changes are in order.
Industrialization and mass production is starting to deliver on its promise that we won't have to work to satisfy our basic needs. But it is landing in a sick, post-Calvinist ideological context, in which we don't have a right to life unless we "contribute" in some way through our paid work, and in which the measure for that "contribution" is income: you're as much worth as you earn.
This sick frame of mind (especially in the U.S. and Western Europe, but it's quickly infecting other places) is what we have to take care of, unless we want our post-industrial society to develop into a serious dystopia.
Whether that particular thing is called "basic income" or "guaranteed job" becomes irrelevant.
For an example: I don't care if I get some money sent from heavens to pay my (expensive) rent, or if the rent becomes so cheap that it doesn't matter. The important part is the dwelling.
Instead of agonizing over the shed's name: what about, simply, taking "human rights" seriously?
A wide majority of people – many economists included – seems to not understand that the real value of the money that goes around depends on the amount of work that is spent in producing wares which can be sold for more money than what was invested in producing them. So the less people have work, the less monetary value will be there to be distributed as either wages or basic income (or welfare, for that matter).
If the predicted loss of jobs comes, which I'm quite sure it will, and it won't just affect unskilled labor either, we need better ideas than just job guarentees or basic incomes for keeping up a modest prosperity even in those places where we have it right now.
There are not enough rational persons to make this a worthwhile argument.
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People of retirement age have been asking this same question on a personal level since time immemorial. Do I take my pension/investments and quit this mind numbing job, or do I keep working because I donâ(TM)t know what Iâ(TM)d do with myself outside of work. Some people are creative and independent, other people need a structure applied from externally. Some people make their best contributions to society outside of the structure of a paycheck, and some people have no internal motivation to accomplish anything unless forced to. Would Tesla have invented as prolifically without wealthy patronage giving him a basic income for free, outside of the structure of a paycheck? Would Jeff Bezos have created the second biggest company in the history of the known Universe had he not quit his job? ... Would Ford have created the assembly line system as an abstract thing without doing it for profit? Would Eisenhower have found leadership skills outside of the structure of the Army?
Different strokes for different folks. But we shouldnâ(TM)t demonize one or the other group just because we reside in the other one.
This of course sets aside the moral proposition of prioritizing spending in ways that may or may not minimize suffering.
That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control.
Nothing the government gives you is truly yours. They can withdraw your benefits, if enough people vote for that to happen. For example, to cut their taxes or to divert the money to themselves.
Whereas a job that is based on actually providing a necessary or useful service, does provide security. Since the function the employee performs truly is needed. This doesn't hold for most office jobs, for example, as most of them create no value and fulfill no function except empire-building.
The big problem is to identify job functions that really are necessary. While it could be possible to automate them away, if a society is wealthy enough (through automation) there would be little need to save the cost of eliminating manual work by installing more machines.
The other side is that if everyone is dependent on a fixed, basic, income where would the discretionary spending power come from to buy all the goods made by the robots? There would be no incentive to give them away for free, so the motivation to produce more than just "the basics" would still have to be profit-driven.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Obviously, it would be better if everyone could just go to school, study whatever they wanted for however long they desired and then afterwards always be able to find job waiting for them somewhere, preferably not too far away. Unfortunately, things just don't work that way in a market economy.
As the world economy continues to develop and an ever increasing number and types of jobs are automated, governments do not seem to be making any plans for what to do with the legions of unemployed that will inevitably result from this trend. The corporations are only investing in all of this automation because their primary responsibility is always to make more money, in this case by saving money. Unfortunately, these kind of investments will eventually cause consumer spending to fall and thus their profits to do the same. Like with the production of greenhouse gasses, perhaps there is a point of balance, but without some kind of global economic incentive to make them hone in on it naturally, I fear it will become another crucial point in history that will pass without any notice.
Therefore, unless we want to accept a Luddite revolution of some kind, possibly triggering a global economic collapse, I figure that taxing the corporations and introducing a universal basic income (UBI) is the only option that governments have open to them. And it should be quite a reasonable income as well: one that will only allow people to afford the barest of necessities is not going to help the corporations either.
In my view of the future, education would always be free and the UBI would afford everyone a comfortable life. For those wanting to lead more luxurious lifestyles, however, there would be no choice but to be smarter (possibly by investing wisely) and/or to study harder for longer. Those lucky enough in the job market would then have the privilege of working something like 4x6 hours a week on some really cool project, or just taking pride in doing something that's essential to everyone, but which is not (yet) possible to automate. Or they could work in a restaurant, or play in a band, or write books, or teach: whatever. Some of these people may end up earning tens of times more than anyone else, but not hundreds or thousands of times more like we often see today -- the kind of inequality that would make such a post-scarcity economy impossible.
With UBI I can go look for real problems to solve rather than sitting in a job I consider pointless just because it pays.
I just was swimming in a lake. The shores definitely need some cleaning and me and my sweetheart were collecting garbage. With UBI I'dv'e stayed a little longer to collect more and perhaps repair the signs among the shore. Yeah, sure, normal people don't leave garbage at the Lakeshore in the first place, but the cleaning up need to be done, So this is a problem that needs solving.
I'd expect most people to go and look for something useful to do when they start recording UBI. If robots do most of the tedious dirty work by then, all the better.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A hybrid system might be best. The UBI provides for the base level expenses, but only just. If you want a more comfortable lifestyle, you will be able to work for it.
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
If you want UBI, go work a job and/or invest what you earn. It's Universal, it's Basic and it's Income.
Automation/AI isn't going to change things, it hasn't in the past it won't in the future.
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"The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable." does not always have to be true.
Sure, while human labour is needed the premise holds true. But once machines are doing all the work then there is no-one to pay money for work ... then money ceases to have a purpose.
At some point along that road the big problem becomes what will humans do to each other when we no longer depend on one another for our comforts.
we cannot provide meaningful jobs to people.
We could provide stupid and sensless jobs, but that would only be cruel and have no use.
People will have to deal with the fact that they have much free time and nothing important to do, such as develop a personal philosphy to deal with life.
Find a purpose outside of work and being "useful".
It isn't easy, but there is no alternative.
I can't stand paternalistic politicians that keep telling that we need full employment, otherwise people don't know how to spend their time and start behaving destructively. It all starts with eductation, mainly before the age of 8... We have to prepare our children for a much different future, as the first generation that won't have to struggle for survival, will soon be here.
Unless climate change and other self-made disasters bring down civilization, then it is back to normal for mankind (or extinction).
Question to select between basic income or guaranteed job is of the same realm of asking which arm do you prefer to be chopped off: right or left. Basic income and guaranteed job are based on immoral and unethical grounds thus do not need to be considered by ethical people.
So what is your proposed solution?
There are already more people alive than useful work that they can do. We're already paying hugely over the odds for massive make work programs (e.g. the military, farming subsidies).
The current political clusterfuck is because the average person can no longer have afford to meet their basic needs in exchange for 40 hours of their labor. They look at those of us who - through hard work, skill and chance of birth - can afford to live in relative luxury, and wonder why we deserve it and they don't. Luckily for us our current batch of politicians has them convinced that it's immigrants and the poor who have stolen the fruits of their labours, but if they should wise up, or if a different flavour of shit-stain takes office, then they're coming for us.
Sure, we can jump ship to some country where we don't have to pay business/income taxes, but where do our profits come from? What's stopping them from slapping tariffs on us? We might have a few years where we can exploit emerging economies, but they're understandably very protectionist and we don't have the same control over their leaders and laws as we do here.
I'm pretty well of, but not "private island" rich. Speaking as someone whose taxes would probably take a significant hike, UBI is actually a pretty good deal compared to the collapse of western society.
It's not like they're mutually exclusive... If you have to force a dichotomy, then it's clear the question isn't thought out in the first place. Perhaps they're both good options and should both be implemented.
Same applies if neither should be selected, in favor of something that actually fixes the problems, or if both options are actually a bad thing to implement.
I tend to think that something like a UBI (perhaps including food and housing credit) is the best solution. My reasoning is as follows:
Suppose there comes a time when there is a huge population of employable adults, but only a relatively small of highly technical, highly complicated jobs to be done (commanding robot swarms or whatever, to make enough basic supplies of everything, for everybody).
And so there is only jobs for 1% of everybody...
You don't want everybody applying for those jobs, just because most people probably are not qualified for them.
It's much more efficient to pay everyone a UBI and offer the jobs for a higher-than-UBI pay rate, and then only the people who think they might be qualified ( and interested ) will bother to apply.
A person's interest level in their job is a big factor in how well they do it; it relates to how much attention they maintain and how willing they are to try to improve their performance.
The more critical a given job is, the better off a company is hiring someone that really enjoys doing it, and doing it well. You don't want to hire someone who is just there for the money.
--Also, the UBI works better for all of the "lower achievers", since they can pursue any particular interest as they please.
For example:
Let's say a guy on the UBI decides that he wants {one certain thing} more than anything else in the world. Say, a BMW sedan, for an example.
And let's say that the highest-paying jobs pay millions of dollars a year, but the lower-paying ones only pay $25K a year.
He can take any lower-paying job to save money towards {that one thing he desires}, while being able to depend on the UBI to cover anything else.
He can't afford everything on his UBI+lower-wage working income, but he gets to work straight toward the one thing he has decided that he wants.
I think that we are still quite a few years away from any broad-based situation such as this however. At least 50 years, maybe 100+. Or more.
Also a lot of society would need time to adjust to the concept of being the "idle class". Japanese are famous for their dedication, but many other people around the world consider their job to be a measure of their self-worth. "Being a bum" would take some time to get used to...
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.
Guaranteed jobs have been tried before, in communist states like Czechoslovakia. Workers would show up drunk, do nothing, and get paid. Shit doesn't work.
The issue with universal basic income is of course who gets to define what "basic" is. Our political system is not up to the task of deciding this question. Shit, it can't even manage to pull off pretty easy and obvious solutions to similarly large problems (eg implementing carbon taxes to combat global warming). Our political system is controlled by a small number of very powerful people, most of which are leveraging their financial power into political power. If UBI comes about, and we have the same political systems in place, it'll be a "Let them eat cake" scenario where their definition of what constitutes "basic" does not afford much in terms of dignity or freedom.
If we're really going to address this problem, we have to fix what's fundamentally broken first. Our political decision making model is corrupt and can't scale to solve global problems. We need to fundamentally rethink how we govern ourselves, how we resolve conflict, and how we organize. But before we can do that, we have to identify *what* is the fundamental flaw in our political system, the core of which were designed when the fastest way to communicate was to tell someone something and have them run to the next town over. I believe what is limiting us from going is our information sharing/management strategy: delegation. Delegation is ultimately a bottleneck for sharing information (the messenger has very limited bandwidth). Delegation of political decision making power is also extremely shaky, and success in that regard largely seems to come down to luck. Just look at how many developing countries fall as their the political structures, built on delegation, prove themselves to be fragile and brittle. We in the west don't like to acknowledge this - we like to blame the people, rather than accept that we just got lucky. We write off instances where corruption and the concentration of power has led to horrific destruction, blaming the people rather than the system.
The problem is that getting people to accept that the strategy that has gotten us this far has its limits. Once you do that though, you can do something pretty amazing. If you're a crypto programmer, or are interested in discussing this further, shoot me a message.
A Job is what you do to make money. A Career is what defines who you are. Sometime a Career may contain Jobs, some that you like and some that you don't.
Most jobs doesn't have you doing pointless tasks because that are paying you money to do them, so they should have some sort of value to doing the job. However many jobs are not really utilizing your full potential which makes them boring and at the end of the day you do not feel good with yourself.
You have to find meaning in your work vs. work giving you meaning. No matter what job you do in your career it will feel meaningless.
I work in Health Care I see Brain Surgeons and Cardiologist who do a fine job, but are worn down to the world, because for them it feels like they do the same thing every day, only to have the patients leave and abuse their bodies again. They are actually saving lives every day but they just don't feel meaning, because they have stopped looking for it.
The real problem I see is the lack of Empowerment in the modern work culture. I am stuck in a meeting with 2 VP yelling at me, because both of them Got yelled at by the CIO and CFO. Which in tern call me to often have to yell at the vendor because there isn't anything I can do about what they are yelling at me to do, Because the CIO and CFO chose the vendor and the product and passed it down to me to implement, then the Vendor just points to the contract conditions, which then I express back to the VPs which get angry with me, but afraid to to express their problems with the CIO and CFO because that product is their baby. So most everyone is unhappy, because no one has power to do anything to really fix it. And the ones who do done agree on a course of action.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
despite the fact the premise of OP put it out there as a false dichotomy. AI is the new industrial robot. The 80s called and wants its blue collar scare tactics back.
Money is the root of all evil?
Nobody has mentioned one of the biggest flaws and that's inflation. Things cost what they do because that's what the market will bear. Things that poor people buy will simply get more expensive when more dollars are chasing the same goods and services and they'll still be begging at intersections. It would be worse if governments create new currency rather than borrow or tax to get those dollars to redistribute.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
If the choice is between basic incomes and basic jobs, there are a number of massive problems with a basic jobs program which don't exist for a basic income program. Specifically:
1. Basic jobs don’t help the disabled
2. Basic jobs don’t help caretakers for sick family members, or parents of children
3. Jobs require massive personal expenses - transportation, rent in desirable areas with manageable commutes, babysitting for when you're away from home - wiping out much of the salary received
4. Basic jobs may not pay for themselves by doing useful work
5. Private industry deals with bad workers by firing them; nobody has a good plan for how basic jobs would replace this
6. Private employees deal with bad workplaces by quitting them; nobody has a good plan for how basic jobs would replace this
7. Basic income could make private jobs better to work in; basic jobs could make private jobs worse to work in
8. Basic income supports personal development; basic jobs prevent it
9. Work sucks, and basic jobs would make huge numbers of people's lives suck
Full discussion here
A guaranteed job is a job that is make-work and just burns money. The advantage of an UBI is that you can do with your time as you see fit. The disadvantage is that many people cannot do that. But economically speaking, a guaranteed job is even somewhat more expensive, as you need to provide work, a place to work and administrate the whole thing.
Personally, I favor the UBI, as I have a lot of things that interest me and that I can do. But I predict that putting a lot of people on an UBI is a recipe for disaster. They will get bored to tears, feel worthless and start doing stupid and dangerous (to themselves and others) and destructive things.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nice try assholes. You want us to choose between a job or money? I'm not gonna fall for that trick. You think I want to be guaranteed a job without being guaranteed the money? I'll take the money instead, thanks.
There are already more people alive than useful work that they can do.
This is true *only if* you define "useful work" as only the stuff that currently exists.
A ton (most?) of the work that is done today didn't exist 200 years ago. A ton of the work that people will be doing 200 years from now doesn't exist yet.
Automating away current jobs isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. The real problem to solve is how to quickly refocus and train people for the developing jobs - shifting them away from the jobs that are no longer needed to the new ones.
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Welfare should be available for a short period to help you survive until you can get your shit together and support yourself. It should not be a means of living for your entire life as it is for a lot of the people on it. Term limits on everything! Including welfare!
"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.
Healthcare is not what I'm worried about.
With housing, government would be able to build a lot of it. But how would the free market landlords/builders compete with it? If the cost difference between a government provided 20m^2 apartment and a private 20.5m^2 apartment is a few hundred dollars a month, few people will choose to move. The same would be true with food.
The only solution I see is if the government is willing to provide an apartment/food OR provide the money for them - in this case a person that has a bit of extra income can use it to supplement their regular choices, rather than having to 'give up' everything that the government provides and be left entirely on their own.
So while the idea of universal income sounds nice in theory I don't think we are responsible enough to handle it properly. I mean where I live the country will take care of you. A person who simply doesn't want to work won't end up on the street, but then again he or she won't have a great income or be free to live wherever they want. Don't get me wrong you won't be thrown into communal housing, but you can't rent a flat in the middle of the city centre because you want to either. For the people who hates this lack of control and/or wants something more than the basic amenities of life it's not an issue because they will strive to get out of this situation, but what about those who don't mind it? I can only imagine universal income will cause more people to become stagnant and happy with just getting by with what they have. In my experience this leads to a very unproductive for society. It's not like it will make people harmful to society it just means that they focus more on self realisation and self reward rather than things we can all benefit from. There are some Arab countries who have implemented universal income (although it's not exactly similar to what I assume Obama had in mind) and in my experience a lot of the people from these countries have some grand delusions about their own self worth compared to others. These nations are also somewhat backwards with a lot of almost segregated foreign workers who live and work in slave like conditions. I don't know what came first. The universal income or the weird sense of superiority and slave labour. Personally I would rather have more flexibility in terms of work hours. Where I live I earn more than I need to live comfortably even if I worked 80% of the time with the same hourly wage I currently have. I would much rather work 80%, even with the pay reduction, than have a society where I just receive benefits from the state. Because for me happiness is just as much the ability to pursue the things you want as the ability to buy the things you want. So if I could spend 1-2 hours each day exercising (i have a desk job btw) without this stealing time from my social life or spend a long weekend back with my parents now and then without having to work extra hours this would be far more valuable to me than money considering that I'm already getting by fine financially. I'm not sure if this is equally applicable to the US though.
What makes you so sure you can train people faster than an AI robot can train itself to do the same job you just invented?
It's not realistic now, but eventually it could be. That is the problem, eventually people just won't be useful enough to employ.
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.
This need not be an either/or question, rather one where all who are able are ârequiredâ(TM) to work, but are guaranteed a livable income. This could allow for a number of advantages over current state, wherein jobs that are often underfilled or unfilled could be robust (e.g. daycare/school support, elder care, after school tutoring/reading programs, etc). It could have interesting implications for boutique startups in arts and crafts (think Kelmscott, not preschool).
Whether we like it or are comfortable with it or not, we are coming to a monumental tipping point...as destructive to our post-industrial/information age as industrialization was to feudal/Medieval age. Either we approach it with care and planning or we resist and fight and...most likely...wipe out a large portion of the population as we dogmatically cling to centuries old concepts of wealth, power, ownership, and nationstate. Iâ(TM)m hoping for the former...but not holding my breath...
So the Communist idea of the government offering education and a pathway to career success? Then some sort of guidance into the correct and needed job for decades somewhere in the USA?
Grow up in NY and the "government" gives you one approved job in Florida? The pay will be good but the location is set by the government.
Live in CA and the "government" demands skilled workers for a project in New Hampshire?
Thats what a guarantee job will be like. Say no too many times when the government asks and the "decently-paid" part stops.
The next government job is an offer to work for food and rent.
A company would then be flooded with average and mediocre staff as the government says the company has to hire and support a set number of approved "workers"
Tax problems if they don't take in a set number of people who need "work".
Who would want to start a company in the USA needing the very best workers and get told by a gov to take in a number of random people with no ability to work?
Whats the other idea?
Tax everyone working to give an extra payment to everyone who can work and is working?
Want to give a payment to people not working?
Try a means text for citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Create a list of all citizens not working. Given them a set payment until they find work again and pay taxes again.
Working citizens get to enjoy their full wage.
Citizens not working get a support payment until they find work again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Neither are good economics and involve stealing from others. Socialism is evil, prove me wrong...
There's a difference between "cheap government housing" and "free government housing".
Cheap government housing should still require people to pay an actual cost, it shouldn't be subsidized housing, but paid for out of each person's UBI. An argument can also be made for access to food, communication, education, libraries, health care. Some should be universal, some should be by choice to spend some of your UBI on the cheap option or spend more on a "better" option.
If someone has an addiction or mental health issue, there still might need to be some level of intervention, but I don't need you telling me what I can use my UBI for, based on your concepts of what I "should" be doing.
A UBI can be funded with a flat tax combined with a VAT, and can be gradually implemented (e.g. at 5% implementation of a 50% flat tax, 25% VAT, $2000/month UBI, you'd have a 2.5% flat income tax, pay 95% of your regular income tax, pay 1.25% VAT, receive $100/month in UBI (not taxed), receive 95% of other benefits, minimum wage reduced to 95% of original value. Raise it to 15% implementation, then 25%, then 50%, 75%, and 100% once every 2 years, tuning numbers as necessary.
Why bother creating things if there are no buyers?
If you give people money, they can buy things. There will be more buyers, because there will be more people with money.
Basic Universal Income must come from somewhere, via wealth redistributuon (taxes) or inflation.
Obviously it comes from wealth redistribution. Workers get an ever-smaller share of the profits, even though technology makes them ever-more productive. The obvious solution is to tax the people who are claiming all the profits, since they apparently never learned to share.
a job guarantee is the better choice, but just as bad.
Which is it? Better, or just as bad?
And when a job is given, how is it taken away?
With UBI, in the usual way. With a job guarantee, with great difficulty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The basic flaw in your premise is that there is a job out there for every one.
And that everyone can get any job.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
As automation continues to take more and more jobs and as the the population increases there will be even less jobs to go around.
Capital will be basically paying for it. All those machines producing things and services will be taxed one way or another to pay for it.
And everywhere there has been universal basic income, it allowed people to spend more time with their families, go back to school and enrich their lives.
What people need to realize that an economy needs to serve people and we need to get over this living to work nonsense.
And when you think about it, most jobs are completely meaningless.
Because if things keep going the way they're going, as the wealth disparity continues to increase, well; there are over 300 million guns floating around the US alone. The poor have a tendency to rise up.
The election of Trump was largely due to people being sick and tired of our current system. Unfortunately, we worship Capitalism and have been brainwashed into thinking that is the best and only viable economic system.
There is no way 'guaranteed jobs' can work. There are many people that simply don't want to work. What do you do? Send the police after them and force them to be present? Then it becomes a problem for whomever is charged with making sure they are productive. The only thing you can be sure of is that people will take free money that they don't have to do anything for, UBI is the only way to go.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The basic fundamental problem with work is that it is predicated upon resource consumption, the problem with which is that much of it is unsustainable. This is what makes a job guarantee fundamentally unworkable. Even if you could solve all the other problems with it (hint: you probably can't) you would still have the problem that capitalism is burning through natural capital faster than it can be replenished. This ongoing destruction of the biosphere is going to make life unsustainable on this planet, assuming it hasn't doomed it already (through runaway effects like methane release due to warming.) We not only don't need to do so much work, we need to do less work.
A job guarantee either amounts to wasting many people's time by having them do sustainable make-work, or to destroying the planet's ability to support us by having them do unsustainable make-work.
With that said, there is a middle position — job guarantee now, UBI later. The jobs we do need to do involve ecological remediation. Either way, though, the money is going to have to go through the government, because the so-called "job creators" are unable or unwilling to create the kind of jobs that will permit humanity to continue to exist. They can only manage to make extractive ones that will kill everyone, sooner or later.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Worked on a Indian reservation doing IT for years. The native american peoples have a higher than average suicide rate even though they receive millions from welling meaning people outside the reservation. The money basically says that they are infants and cannot take care of themselves. We get to feel good about themselves while they feel like children. I have seen res houses that have 3 flat screens in the front room and a hole in the roof. Work gives a person a sense of agency. It reminds the mind that if they push they can take care of themselves. When we stop pushing, we die. A rolling stone collects no moss. A person relegated to the side lines of society will feel useless. Suicide rates will go up. Drug use. etc. They stop believing they can make their life better and instead sit around in a stupor waiting for someone else to do it for them.
There's no way either of these can work on their own. The money from universal income has to come from somewhere. The community agency that pays out that income should also be in charge of scheduling simple jobs for the community to perform. The only way for everyone to profit is for everyone to do their part. Even children and the elderly can perform some kind of simple work that will support their family or their own future. But when we're having to continually feed the US monetary system to keep the our billionaires satisfied, we naturally focus on greedy profit making over forging stronger local economies.
Wait, doesn't this sound like a "guaranteed job" scenario? Well, kind of. The capitalists would never agree to a true universal income unless they profited from it.
If robots are doing all the important jobs, I don't think it matters whether people get paid to dig holes or paid to sit on their arses, it's pretty much the same degree of usefulness!
Why is AI and robotics expected to dominate?
We can already stop here, as it is quite obvious: Most people do not and cannot do jobs that require original thinking, creativity, insight, mathematics, engineering, etc. Hence their jobs can be automated, as all these things are exactly the limits machines have. And once you have a machine design that does the job, you can just copy it and eliminate all the jobs of this type. For humans, you have to train them, you have to keep them motivated, etc.
As a result, having machines do these jobs (which are maybe 80% or so of all jobs) is vastly cheaper once a good automated solution exists. As this is capitalism, the cheaper solution wins.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If we have UBI, will those choosing to work need to pay taxes or will all funding be generated by those using robots?
The prices will raise, true (unless it turns out so many people were doing non-productive jobs before that prices will not actually rise), but you overlook the glaringly obvious: Prices raise per good unit, while the UBI gives you the $1000 upfront. Sure, if you buy exactly the same things, this may result in the same thing as before, but if you buy less or cheaper things, it most definitely does not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I don't have a solution to recommend as a third option, but I know there are many more possibilities. I'm also aware of how giving more power to the government has often caused more problems than it solves.
doen't make it true, right? There's a massive automation push going on right now. Most economists openly admit 60% of all jobs are "at risk" to be automated in the next 20 years. "at risk" in economics generally means "sooner or later".
We're going to start running out of work to do. And make-work projects are only a short term stop-gap. Worse, if we ignore the problem we'll leave millions to starve. They won't go quietly into the good night, btw. They'll find themselves a dictator and join an army/militia and turn into a junta. Then you'll have a dictatorship and brutal oppression until a war kills off enough of them and blows up enough stuff that the economy gets started again.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
neither is going to happen
here in the UEA
so don't worry about it
People have been so strongly indoctrinated that they honestly believe work is good for them. What pathetic lives people have that can't seem to fill them with anything but labor.
...jobs are a real thing, while ubi is a complete fantasy.
People suggesting ubi are in most cases out right liars or they haven't thought through the consequences of their ideas.
For example, when trying to rationalize how ubi would be more efficient (to say nothing of trying to find the staggering amounts of money needed for such a program) they talk about it replacing other social programs.
Every.
Single.
One.
So you're saying that we hand every single person $x and then simply wish them well? If they then don't plan for medical care and then can't afford it...we let them die? If they've spent their check on new sneakers and cigarettes, and don't have any food, we let them starve?
Poor people in the West are generally poor for two reasons: they were poor when they got here and they're in that first generation, or because they've made stupid choices. They're not going to make less-stupid choices if you give them more money.
Handing people free money may buy you votes but it doesn't make people better off. Note that this is a proven fact: most lottery winners that win enough to never have to work end up POORER than before.
-Styopa
Iâ(TM)m not sure I understand why they would be. Having a basic income is mostly to guarantee that everyone is clothed, fed, and medically cared for at a good minimum level. Being also guaranteed a job that would allow you to exceed that shouldnâ(TM)t necessarily remove that.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
If you survey a large sample of people living on government largesse, I am pretty sure you will find that they don't feel "in control" of their lives. Instead, they are at the mercy of the government and are often completely demoralized by this. The money from any guaranteed income scheme is never enough to provide more than a hardscrabble existence, certainly not enough for most people to feel comfortable. Of course, the government loves this. It provides a permanent underclass of people who depend entirely on the government for their existence, and who are always available to riot in the street when the government needs this. If you want to feel in control of your life, get a job. You can always quit it and get another if you don't like it. Once you are trapped on the dole, you have no control at all.
Massive complaints outside the US vs. massive lawsuits inside the US? What's the difference?
The US is a laughing stock for the idea that as soon as you've been treated by a doctor or hospital, lawyers are asking you to turn right around and sue said doctor or hospital for any tiny mistake they might have made. "Thanks for saving my health," indeed.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I agree, you could even go so far as let the government provide the money to everyone, and then rent out non-profit minimalist housing operated just to cover projected lifetime capital and maintenance expenses. Same result, less bureaucratic overhead. Be really easy to auto-debit rent from your incoming dividend payment - especially if you had a government-operated non-profit bank account designed specifically to handle everyone's dividend payments with minimal overhead. If the free market can do better, GREAT! Less demand for government housing and its bureaucratic inefficiencies, but there's always a backup option to keep the free market honest.
If it costs $X for the government to build and maintain a Hovel Tower apartment at break-even expense, then a private operator can probably do at least as well, and will have no reason to charge several hundred more unless they're offering genuine added value in terms of the quality of the environment, except for pure rent-seeking profiteering - and there's no reason we as a society should encourage such usury behavior. In the worst case, if If that means the residential property market is largely abandoned as an investment vehicle - so much the better, let people go back to being able to buy their own homes - a guaranteed income should help with that, and helps spread real long-term wealth into the hands of the masses.
We could do something similar for food - let the government produce K-rations or Soylent or whatever - something inexpensive with a long shelf life that's sufficient to keep people healthy, if bored, sold at cost. If you want to save some of your social dividend for other pursuits, you've got a nice baseline to fall back on - you probably can't get complete nutrition for cheaper than this.
Heck, we could even do it with medical insurance - let everyone buy into Medicare at projected average cost - if the free market can genuinely offer a better deal, or worth-while supplementary options, wonderful - but there's a solid baseline to keep them honest. Getting the profiteering out of the medical industry is likely to be a long, involved process, but giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices and demand minimum quality of service would probably be a step in the right direction - they would have outsized bargaining power, but also no profit motive, positioning them perfectly to strongly advocate for the interests of patients themselves - nobody wants to pay too much, but paying too little is even more expensive in the long run. "Breaking a leg in Europe costs the system $X to fix to everyone's satisfaction - over the next 10 years we'll be reducing the payout here to 2*$X, so you'd better start reorganizing to deliver at that price if you want our business - otherwise you're welcome
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No rational person would choose to be a government slave.
There are not enough rational persons to make this a worthwhile argument.
No rational person would choose a subsistence living, it's extremely harsh to provide everything on your own and pretty much any modern day man massively cheats by buying tools, medicine and other things made by advanced civilization. So you have to deal with either private companies or the public government, neither is really all that voluntary if there's no real competition. Good competition is not the default, there's a massive number of natural reasons for that like economics of scale and a host of nasty business tactics to thwart real competition. In fact without any laws to the contrary they'd all organize like cartels and fuck you over ten times worse than today. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary some people still act like unfettered capitalism would be rainbows and unicorns.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The whole post is a troll. The guaranteed job system has been tried on a large scale in Soviet Union. There every adult able to work had to work, and not being employed (after a certain short time period) was a crime. I'd say the universal basic income sounds better than that.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
A universal income has a few advantages:
- Reduces personal catastrophic financial risk in starting a new small business or non-profit.
- Supports people obtaining an education.
- Supports people who are not able to work (invalid, disabled, etc.)
- Provides a "floor" of survivability for people who *are* employed but at sub-living-wage.
- Encourages finding a job, because it doesn't go away when you do obtain a job. Said another way, it benefits everyone, not just those who have a job.
- Puts more power in employees' hands when it comes to bargaining for wages, health and safety, etc. The old-school way of handling this is unionizing, which can still work as well, but a UBI improves the employees' negotiating position without the need for collective contracts or mass strikes.
- Done properly, could replace *dozens* of complex, expensive government assistance programs (unemployment, welfare, social security, etc.), improving government efficiency and effectiveness.
- Would encourage legal migration, as only citizens would enjoy the benefits.
- Would support families where one partner wants to leave the workforce (fully or partially) to care for children or elderly relatives.
- A UBI *could* be scaled based on age (making it a better possible replacement for Social Security) or past income history (making it more viable as a replacement for unemployment insurance).
Yes, there *are* people who would never lift a finger again to be useful to society in any way if they could instead survive on a UBI. But I believe the vast majority would use that spare time to improve themselves (education, job skills, etc.), to improve their communities (volunteering, activism), and to hold their ground for the *right* job.
Also, while I don't think it should be means-tested (for the above reasons), a UBI could provide extra financial incentive for people who *are* showing that they are claiming other income during the same month. Or those who are in school and making good grades. Or those who can show time volunteered at a non profit. Or simply based on age.
Three other points:
- Even if someone sat on their butt and collected their UBI for the rest of their life, they would be spending their UBI, which does much more to increase economic activity then a rich guy sticking those same dollars into stock market speculation.
- A "guaranteed job" would be far too expensive to manage for whatever useful output the recipients give in labor. This isn't the 1930s, we don't need a bunch of unskilled government workers building railroads and dams by hand. So we would have them doing something fairly useless, while we would have to also provide all of the oversight to manage the workforce, enforce participation/eligibility, handle health and safety risks, provide training, etc.
- Neither form of assistance makes sense unless it is paired with universal healthcare.
There is a word in economics for the robot takeover. It's called "productivity growth". I.e. each worker produces more because they get robot help (or for any other reason) so fewer workers are needed to achieve the same output. Productivity growth is one of the very basic statistics that we know a lot about.
If the robot takeover was imminent, we would expect to see productivity growth of at least 10% a year, the same kind of growth that we saw in the previous great changes like the beginning of industrialization. In reality, productivity is struggling to grow at all! We are seeing a trend towards lower and lower growth.
Robot-takeover advocates keep saying that "it's just around the corner". However, it seems entirely unlikely that the downward-pointing productivity growth trend of the last decades would suddenly and drastically change.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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$.
You'll probably have the same general problem with guaranteed income. At least in America and how we run things, you'd still have the problem of people being forced to use specific vendors/products instead of having a real choice.
The Democrats ("It's our job to guarantee everyone a perfect life free of even the slightest tinge of discomfort.") and Republicans ("Fuck poor people. If they wanted a good life, then they should have decided to be rich instead.") would need to compromise somehow on the level of income that should be guaranteed. As a result, they'd decide the guaranteed income with a calculation like this:
Figure out the lowest amount of money that someone could possibly live off of. Like if you were to live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere and gruel, and see a veterinarian for your medical needs instead of a doctor, then you can live off of $[X] per day. So that's the starting number. But because Republicans would want to make sure people were motivated to work, and actually being able to pay your bills would make you too comfortable, they'd slice off 10%, and give everyone $[X*(9/10)*365] per year (let's call that $[Y]). Better save up for leap years, because you don't get extra money when there's an extra day.
And then they'd spend the next 40 years with Democrats arguing that we should raise it to $[Y*2], with some of outspoken figures saying it should be $[Y*20] if you're any kind of a minority in terms of ethnicity or sexual identity, or if your feelings were hurt at some point in your life. Meanwhile, Republicans would spend the next 40 years arguing that the whole thing should be abolished because it's turning everyone into a gay terrorist.
And during those 40 years, there'd be inflation. So that $[Y] per year that used to just barely almost let you pay your bills, it now doesn't come close to paying your bills. Republicans will outright refuse to increase the income level a single cent, but an alternate compromise will emerge. Instead of increasing the income, they'll lower the price of gruel, veterinarians, and trailer parks so that someone with an income of $[Y] per year can afford them. They'll do this by paying $[Z] in subsidies to gruel manufacturers, veterinary clinics, and trailer park developers, and making those companies promise to lower prices. It turns out $[Z] is trillions of dollars, and $[Z] is greater than the total cost it would take to increase the minimum guaranteed income so that people could afford the gruel, vets, and trailer parks at market prices, but forget about that. When the government gives handouts to companies in order to control prices, that's "free market capitalism". When they give money to poor people to buy their gruel, that's "Communism", and Jesus said Communism was evil.
Ok, so the end result is that you end up with one brand of gruel, one veterinary clinic chain, and one trailer park development company that are making affordable options, and those are the only things that poor people can really buy. And there, you have the same basic problem that you mentioned before, where people have to use specific vendors and products.
But actually, it's even worse!
Because these gruel/vet/trailer subsidies go on for several years, and then those vendors get lazy and greedy. The head of the gruel manufacturer needs to $700 million bonus and their shareholders need their dividends paid. They cut back on the quality of the ingredients of the gruel. Now it's canned in outer Mongolia and it's mostly made of sawdust and asbestos. The guy running the veterinary clinics embezzled $500 million and therefore they can't afford to pay their workers anymore, so they start promoting their receptionists and janitors to act
You're presenting a false choice.
1) We're not going to have a choice. Corporations will decide that for us.
2) Why not both? You're earning your universal income and selecting your guaranteed job. Republicans will ensure that those who don't work won't receive money, and will suffer in poverty.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I don't see a problem in need of a solution - only a potential future problem predicted in much the same way that futurists, fortune tellers, divinators, politicians and con men have been predicting the future for quite some. This is not foresight attempting to come up with a pragmatic solution before a problem becomes major - it is a solution in search of a problem. In every instance I've replace a portion of a job, the capable person who's job I replaced has thanked me for creating a program to do the most mindless, boring, portions of their job. When someone was fired, it was actually for not working towards automating their own job quickly enough, freeing them to work on more interesting things. They were fired for being complacent and happy with a mindless job that a machine could do.
I don't actually believe universal basic income would come anywhere close to preventing the *possible* collapse of western society. If that is your goal, I think ecological issues should all be in the top ten. The U.S. unemployment is at 3.6% according to Google. This is SUPER low. Like, historically low. Like, so low that I think it's actually not correct, either due to some kind of crazy hot employment bubble (systemic problem), or tons of discouraged workers stopping looking for a job and/or being stuck in part time solutions (problem with measurements.)
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.
Something I wrote about a decade ago: https://pdfernhout.net/basic-i...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I don't see how 'guaranteed work' can work, if one assumes that indeed people will be let go because they've been replaced by AI/robots. The more advanced AI will become, the more people will be supplanted by it. We won't be able to meaningfully assign all these people to jobs.
Reducing the retirement age could help. Older people already have it harder, both in finding a job and in doing it (in general; this doesn't apply to all jobs equally). Younger people are also easier to retrain. If we thin out the job market by removing older people (say 50+) who'd rather retire, and giving them a way to continue to live which is not dependent on previous savings, we provide more space in the work market for younger people. It could be a win-win situation for all age brackets.
Granted the issue of a job being an important part of one's life is also something to be considered at 50+, but if we can't afford to employ everyone, I think we'd rather tilt the job market in a way that would give younger people the jobs, and let the older ones rest and find more meaning in life.
yes .. give everybody free money, then free drug of their choice ... .. out source drug making to [third world country]
then find it's not profitable
millions are overdosed/poisoned in weeks
problem solved
In the UK you don't pay income tax on the first £11,000. Therefore setting that to zero allows the payment of £2,200 to everyone instead - or somewhat more given how much bureaucracy you can delete because everyone's income has 20% deducted at source. Squeeze out some other savings - e.g. on capital gains tax - and you can get to a level sufficient to end the need for many people to sign on for unemployment benefit, and certainly no gap whilst your application for it is being processed.
One could offer a small guaranteed income and if you want more then a guaranteed job as well. It doesn't have to be either-or.
As for meaning full work the Depression era found many meaningful jobs. Every time I visit an older park I'm so grateful for the lasting staircases and bridges that were hewn into the walls of canyons for me to walk through. We don't have that scale of free labor these days. I'm sure it was hard work but it was meaningful and lasting. Many people were employed as artists and not only made epic frescos and such that we still have today but also produced temporary art like theater for the desperately poor folks of the depression. It was morale boosting and reminded people we are a society that can come together. It had great value to defining US culture. It was also a time when a lot of new ideas got explored too.
Even mathematical functions were enumerated and tabulated (before computers) so that people could knwo the zeros of the hypergeometric series functions for my gaussian quadrature integrals needed to compute the amount of concrete needed for hoover damn or the stress on an airplane wing.
Lots of meaningful work from blue-collar to academian occured in the depression era jobs programs.
Paying one person to dig a hole and another for fill it back in is unlikely to be what people mean by gaurenteed jobs.
In fact I would argue that compulsory public service is really a good thing for citizens. I certainly volunteer lots of time to causes because I can see the impact it has on my community. That impact makes me feel good inside. But it also binds me to my community too which is a good thing.
Finally, if you study the Gini index and consider which countries have the largest economic mobility (Do you earn a different wage than your father did?) then you see that countries with good safety nets actually have more economic mobility than those without. I would guess this is because people willing to take risks can achieve more, but they won't take them if there's a chance of losing everything. Thus just knowing there's a net helps even if you never need it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Given that in the UK you don't pay income tax on the first £11,000, setting that to zero allows the payment of £2,200 to everyone instead - or somewhat more given how much bureaucracy you can delete because everyone's income has 20% deducted at source. Squeeze out some other savings - e.g. on capital gains tax - and you can get to a level sufficient to end the need for many people to sign on for unemployment benefit, and certainly no gap whilst your application for it is being processed.
Sadly there is a substantial group who are incapable of entertaining themselves and so who spend their time destroying things. It requires a certain amount of self awareness / social skill to keep yourself entertained. Almost by definition anyone on Slashdot has these skills - but there are a lot of people who don't.
This fly on the wall documentary from Her Majesty's Prison Durham will remind you of their existence
https://www.channel4.com/progr...
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.
For food and housing government provided really is the cheapest acceptable option since the people who use it are the poorest who lack political capital to demand more.
But for most nations with public health care all but the rich use that public option, so there's quite a substantial political constituency demanding that it be of high quality.
I stole this Sig
Our job is to spend money, not to make it!
Given that the cost of UBI will come out of tax changes or somewhere, actual demand won't increase, so these suppliers won't be faced with a shift in their demand curve.
Basic income allows you to trash your place, party with loud music at night, throw trash on the streets and generally be a pest to society. Job guarantee allows you to additionally do shobby work and be an asshole to your boss, coworkers and customers. People need to get their goods and services in exchange for something, even though it may not be a traditional factory job. Let people work as actors in VR games. Bad behaviour should have consequences that people are not able to ignore.
Thete was a short story about that online. People got housed by gov. One person got send to Stralia where they did it differently.
Anybody a link?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A guaranteed but not compulsory part time job with a livable wage hands down beats a free hand out. But first a guaranteed free education including secondary and trade schools, healthcare and child care.
IMHO, we should rename the "Unemployment Office" to the "Employment Office". It should be run locally like school districts and there should be standardized criteria for measuring productivity. Will is be perfect? No. Will their be corruption? Probably some.
Any system we devise will have bugs because we cannot perfect human nature.
While it may not be what lazy people want, its what they need.
Greed is the root of all evil.
What would be the macroeconomic effects of UBI and JG?
UBI is inflationary: you are handing out money, and it would have to be a lot, without getting anything back.
A Job Guarantee on the other hand acts as an inflation anchor. Because it is a buffer stock of employed people it damps oscillations in the business cycle.
Note that the JG is an idea that has been developed over 20 years by economists. The UBI has a 100 year history but economists tend not to like it too much.
You can find a recent paper on the JG here which answers a lot of FAQs.
The entire AskSlashdot topic is wrongheaded because it started from money, not time. So I have to begin by reviewing Ekronomics 101.
In highly advanced societies the essential working time is quite small. Averaged over the entire population, perhaps 2 hours/week is actually required to produce all the food, clothing, and housing required. The real question is what happens to the rest of the time. The topic is assuming that the possible answers are "no work" or "fake work". (By the way, in an extremely poor society people work ALL the time and still starve to death. Take Yemen, for example.)
Ekronomics divides the rest of the time into investment and recreational. Investment is things like education and research and new infrastructure that increase productivity and actually reduce the essential time even more. There are also meta levels of investment time that improve investment time or contribute to new forms of recreational time.
Recreational time is the bottomless pit, but it has many interesting characteristics. For example, many recreational products are not consumed in use. The same book or movie can be read or watched by many people, or even be reread or rewatched by the same people. There is also a special category for people who create new recreational goods and services. They, too, are contributing to the economy and their work is highly valued, even though it is not essential. However, to improve the future status of the society in competition with other societies, it is important to convert more of the recreational time into investment time...
From this ekronomic perspective, the question looks very different. Fake work has to be regarded as a kind of recreational time, but the least pleasant, and the only possible rationale is if you think it will force more people to increase their investment time. (This is for advanced societies where the essential time cannot be increased.)
Anyway, that's already more time than I want to give Slashdot right now, especially since this article failed to pay me back with any recreational time in the form of funny comments.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You managed to remind me of this one titled "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!": http://eco-epistemology.blogsp...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That's not an argument for keeping up our current system. We should cut our healthcare costs in half, and the other countries should pay the 7% more or whatever to offset it.
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Jesus, you spent a long time figuring out how to calculate the poverty line, which is something we already do, along with a much more complicated process of trying to sort out the deserving. The thing to bash conservative skulls in with is that it actually COSTS MORE to try and stop free riders than the cost of the free riders themselves.
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And where, prey tell, is this 'free money' going to come from?
Oh - from those actually gainfully employed. Via tax.
Or by increasing government debt. Upon which the gainfully employed will be paying their taxes to pay the interest for. And their children to pay the principle off.
There is no 'free money.'
http://harridanic.com
The residents were allowed to buy those homes - they were not told that they can get these homes for free, or get other homes for full price.
On a related note:
On one hand the welfare system, financially, is terribly inefficient, serving mainly as welfare for bureaucrats. Some years ago it was estimated that, for each dollar of benefits given to a recipient, over six were spent on administration. The dollar-for-dollar loss of welfare payments if the recipient has some income made working at all a net loss (of both time and the expenses of things like work-suitable clothing and transport to/from the job site), encouraging total dependence, while the presumption that a man in the home should be financing the family (and elimination of welfare payments if one was present) led to multiple generations of unwed mothers among the poor and enormous social fallout.
On the other hand, the income tax is similarly costly (beyond the tax money paid), both in the actual costs of dealing with the reporting,, computation, and money-handling requirements and the economic cost of the market distortions resulting from the complex rules and policy rewards and punishments built into the tax rates and rules. Even without the policy builtins, the graduated tax system would still require the heavy-duty accounting.
One proposal (which has been around for decades) is the "negative income flat tax". This works as follows: :
1. Every citizen (or other qualifying person), regardless of income, receives a stipend corresponding roughly to full welfare benefits.
2. Every dollar of income, starting with the first, is taxed at a fixed rate.
3. The stipend and rates are set so that, for the bulk of the population, the net income transfer is about the same as the current system.
4. The entire welfare and internal revenue departments and all their programs and regulations are replaced by a
4a. Checking that nobody signs up for more than one stipend.
4b. Checking that the flat tax is withheld and transferred to the treasury.
Some characteristics of this:
- If a wage-earner's flat tax is withheld by his employer and paid to the government, there's no need for the government to even know who he is. No filing papers with the government for each job and/or at the end of the year. Very simple reporting for the employer, too.
- Those living on stipends can spend it as they please, without constant oversight from the government. If they need a little more, and can find employment, they can just go ahead, without loss of benefits. This breaks the "welfare trap" and makes working for pay, whether intermittent, piecework, part time, or full time, a net gain.
- The simplification of the tax structure would also drastically reduce the administrative costs and barriers to going into business or hiring others. This should produce a substantial increase in productive employment and GDP.
- The bulk of the bureaucrats can be laid off, at enormous reduction of cost to the government. (They can live on their stipends or go find more productive work.) This savings should more than offset any shortfalls from the mismatch of the simple rates to the current tax and welfare cash flows.
- Similarly the bulk of the tax-related accountants and financial workers would no longer be needed by the bulk of the population, as well. (Again they COULD live on the stipend. But their skills should be largely transferable to other employment - including bookkeeping for the expected explosion of new small businesses.)
You could even keep the effect of the few, critical, major deductions under this system without breaking it back into a forest of regulations and bureaucrats:
- Mortgage interest deduction on primary residence:
- The bkorrower declares to the lender that this mortgage is on his primary residence and supplies his (social security / stipend) number.
- The lender supplies this, along with the interest charged, to the "only one stipend per person" department, which checks "only one primary residence at a time per stipend".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But UBI is the most decentralized as power can get. Instead of letting either the government or businesses have control over the masses, individuals end up having the most freedom.
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The poverty threshold, poverty limit or poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed adequate to cover total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. In the US, this is presented as an income level based on household size (number of dependents). For a single person household, the poverty line is $12,060 (2017).
Perhaps worth noting is that a single person household working a full-time minimum-wage job exceeds the poverty line (50 weeks time 40 hours times $7.25 is $14,500), so by definition a full-time minimum wage worker is not living in poverty. But if that same person has a child, then both are living in poverty, as the poverty line for a two-person household is $16,240. In a very real albeit statistical sense, children cause poverty.
An assumption of a UBI is that it provides sufficient income to survive on, so let's use the poverty line as the basis for the UBI. That is, a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the amount of money we currently spend on all social welfare benefits programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, foodstamps, etc. A reasonable idea--indeed, this was put forward in a WSJ essay by Charles Murray--would be to eliminate all those programs in favor of the UBI. Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Exploring the notion of replacing the most basic welfare programs, e.g. foodstamps, section 8 housing, while not disrupting the SS and Medicare that the elderly view as an earned right. After all, the UBI based on poverty level should by definition cover those sorts of expenses. There will still be screams from people concerned about drug addicts not buying food for their kids and that sort of thing. So it seems unlikely that the overhead of those programs, let alone the programs, would be completely done away with.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this a bit.
A worst-case cost would be adding UBI on top of all the existing programs, for a total cost of about $5T. Or perhaps the UBI in lieu of all other programs can actually be rammed through so that the cost remains a minimum of $2.303T.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues. And the math here assumes that no one receive UBI drops out of the workforce or reduces their taxable income at all--i.e., that revenues stay constant.
A "guaranteed" job, typically means you don't have to prove your worth to your employer (example: politicians & some government/union employees). Same for the so called basic income. Give a man a fish, you feed him for the day, but if that man fishes for himself, he feeds himself for a lifetime, without dependency.
I am sort of torn between the ideas of a Guaranteed Job and Universal Income. The idea that you must work, are forced to work, when someone else eventually decides what that job must be, is demeaning. On the other hand, a society where nobody "needs" to work can lead to a society that isn't socially connected. Or possibly some needed things don't get done (garbage processing?).
I retired at 55 (lucky me!) with a relatively good pension. My basic needs were all covered, with a bit extra for mad money. But I found it became boring. So I started up a small business, serving a need for many. Minimal investment. Soon it grew to 8 or more hours a day, as much as I did when "working full time". But I enjoy those working hours, more than I ever enjoyed the hours I spent working for someone else. I call the shots, I decide how "hard" to work, I select the priorities, and I can decide when to stop. I always have the basics covered through my pension.
This pattern is not unusual. May people that no longer "need" to work, will find something productive to do with their time. If not a sideline business, then volunteering or other things they see as needing to be done. I have met many people like that over the years, more so since I became a part of that circle. Often enough, we end up kicking around other ideas on what else can be done, or needs to be done.
So I suspect that even with just a UBI, enough people will "want" to do things. Society will not fall apart. Things will get done. Large scale stuff will end up being automated, while individuals will discover and implement small scale stuff (some of which may migrate to large scale). Ingenuity and creativity will become the "credentials" people strive for, much like the attitude entrepreneurs have today.
We have tried work for the dole in Australia and it doesn't work. It cost more to run than just letting people get the dole. Forcing people to do a shit job they don't want to do is pointless.
Free money or a guaranteed job where you couldn;t get fired.... what then would be the motivation for anyone to ever make any effort?
All you'd get is a slowly declining society full of lazy slobs who sit infront of TVs all day, never dream, or ever do anything to improve themselves or humanity.
15 years ago I emigrated to the US from the UK to escape from exactly that sick dependent give-up mindset. I don;t want to have to move again.
This might sound evasive, but I think the problem with that line of thinking is that it's still looking at the problem from the perspective of what we know now and how things are now. But maybe it's fair since we're also discussing a problem that doesn't actually exist yet. :)
It seems like you could put your finger anywhere on the timeline of human history and have more or less the same situation - technological advancements will soon eliminate or reduce some burden off the shoulders of humans, freeing them up to do other stuff. Given our general inability to correctly predict what that new stuff would be (I mean, this cartoon was a great joke in its time, but now that's really a thing), I'm just really skeptical that this time it will be any different, especially since the technology that will supposedly make it different doesn't really exist yet.
A false choice....I choose "neither of the above".
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Intriguing assertion...credible cite?
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
There is no fundamental difference between "free" money and a "guaranteed" job. Make no mistake. There is ALWAYS a price to pay and when something is free, YOU are the product being bought and sold by someone else. "Free" money or a tenured job just means that those giving it to you expect your total loyalty.
Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job?
"Decently" is the key word. If UBI is not enough to live and force people to accept any crappy job to meet ends, then this is just enterprise's labor costs subsided by taxpayers, and a decently paid job is definitively preferable.
This time is different is a bit of a cliche. But it could be. None of those other times did the disruption disrupt everything at the same time. And the new jobs tend to require more skill/training each time. Eventually there will come a point where enough people just can't do the training, can't learn the new skills required. Not everyone is cut out to be highly skilled. Then there is just the time required to learn a new skill. You study to become a doctor, how far have robot doctors advanced in those 4 years? Now what do you learn? Rinse repeat. Think of credential inflation now, imagine you need a phd in customer service before you can even ask people if they want fries with that.
It's still far off, maybe extremely far off and it's no problem. But eventually, what happens if someone makes a humanoid robot as dexterous and an AI as capable as an average person. What is left for people to do? Why would it even stop there, robots could be faster stronger bigger smaller, anything at all really. If we keep the current system, whoever makes the robots will own everything and everyone else will have nothing.
That's also a pretty big incentive for people to make the robots/AI.
Jesus, you spent a long time figuring out how to calculate the poverty line, which is something we already do
We already calculate the poverty line, but part of what I'm pointing out is that it's not clear or uncontroversial. It's one of those things where, because there's an official term for it, people assume it's all figured out and set in stone, but there are arguments about how to calculate the poverty line. Republicans often complain it's too high, evidenced by the fact that people in poverty can sometimes afford such "luxuries" as TVs and refrigerators.
Basically it ties in with their argument that people are never poor because of systemic problems, but it's always a problem with their personal choices. You know, when they get on a rant about how food stamps are a scam because someone committed fraud and used them to buy lobster, or whatever? They'll sometimes throw out arguments like, "These poor people don't need any kind of government assistance. If they really don't have money, then how could they afford a refrigerator?!"
So my point is, the way these things are calculated are dumb, and there are always people trying to push the numbers around for their own agendas.
http://www.shopliftingpreventi...
"There are approximately 27 million shoplifters (or 1 in 11 people) in our nation today. More than 10 million people have been caught shoplifting in the last five years."
https://www.iii.org/fact-stati...
"in 2017, there were 16.7 million victims of identity fraud, a record high that followed a previous record the year before. Criminals are engaging in complex identity fraud schemes that are leaving record numbers of victims in their wake. The amount stolen hit $16.8 billion last year as 30 percent of U.S. consumers were notified of a data breach last year, an increase of 12 percent from 2016."
https://www.statista.com/stati...
https://www.census.gov/popcloc...
USA population is 328 million
Say that crimes caused by poverty cost $50B/year in the US. That's $152/year per person. Not enough for UBI, but it could eventually offset part of the cost of UBI.
"We play both kinds of music here; country, and western!"
As the saying goes, idle hands are the devil's workshop.
We've actually conducted fairly large scale experiments in just giving people money for many decades now. The results are not, to say the least, encouraging.
The guys selling drugs on the corner, or roaming the streets causing trouble, would in fact be better off breaking rocks somewhere for eight hours a day, whether or not those rocks need to be broken. And society would be better off with them doing that too.
Maybe an "early retirement": when they get old enough to calm down, then they get the UBI ...
Yeah, those are some good points. Hmm... I guess I get hung up on the idea that it's all from the perspective of what we know now - e.g. as AI improves, there will be few, if any, doctors as we know them, but people will just do other stuff besides being doctors - it's really hard for us at present to imagine what that will be.
My grandfather was a farmer, and if you were to tell him years ago that technology would replace nearly all the farmers, it'd be hard for him to foresee anything but a ton of people sitting around with nothing to do - there's no way he could anticipate my job as a software developer, for example.
But yeah, you might be right - maybe this time it's different because the disruption is so widespread and fast. Of course, if we do get to the point where robots are better in every meaningful way, then the problem for humans could be far beyond anything UBI or guaranteed jobs could solve.
Thanks for sharing your insights - much appreciated!
I don't think it's perfectly clear, but it's clear enough that the only people that complain about it are people who are distracting from their own widespread theft from the people by claiming that helping out the poor is a similar kind of abuse. As far as government metrics go, poverty line is on the less controversial side. There's way more gaming of unemployment metrics.
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If you guarantee people something that takes a great deal of time, they cannot use that time to improve themselves, or start innovative companies, or write the next Harry Potter.
Keeping people busy, is like daycare. The point of the robot society is that our basic needs can be met, so we don't need to base survival on labour. Everyone can live a life that in former times was of the upper class, in that they are free to pursue their interests. Having a larger group of people able to pursue their dreams has got to have a far higher upside than just keeping people busy.
Have you ever considered that corporations have "enslaved" people with the full cooperation of the government?
I mean, how many mandates passed by the government only work if you're a full-time employee of some corporation? What about the mandate for employers to provide health care to full-time employees? The mandates for employers to provide worker's compensation? In-kind contributions to their retirement (in the form of Social Security)? Pre-pay their taxes? Provide family and medical leave?
All things that our government has sought for corporations to provide--things that are only provided to individuals if they are employees.
Think about it--and I'm being quite serious here--how much of this sounds like the old Feudal system of Noblesse oblige, but instead of peasants being cared for by their manor lords, it's employees being cared for by their corporations at the directive of the government?
And worse, how much does all of this absolutely fucking fails if you're self-employed, a member of the "gig" economy, under-employed or unemployed? Have you priced health care insurance on the exchanges? Medicare works, medicaid works (sorta), employer-provided health care works--but God help you if you're self-employed, because private insurance does not work. (For example, my wife and I pay nearly $1,300/month for insurance off the exchange. A two-person corporation would only pay $650/month total ($325 employer contribution, $325 employee contribution, broken down into 2 payments per employee of $82 per bi-monthly paycheck) for group insurance for similar coverage.)
Does this sound like an accident to you?
Or does it sound like those in Washington D.C. govern the United States as if we are all wards of our employers--and if we are unemployed or poor, we then become wards of the State?
No, it's the other way around. Corporations have infiltrated and corrupted the government to do their bidding.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
There are other options.
As far as government metrics go, poverty line is on the less controversial side.
I'm under the impression that it's not very controversial in the sense that people don't care very much, but not in the sense that people generally agree. If all social welfare programs, including food stamps, medicare, and social security were suddenly swapped for UBI, and the basic income level was set at the poverty line, I'm sure the poverty line would become extremely controversial.
I agree that it would get more attention. However, as far as I know, there isn't a major credible dispute on that metric.
Since we are talking about political viability, it's worth mentioning that UBI has a HUGE advantage over welfare due to being nondiscriminatory. It's relatively easy to chip at welfare and other such programs when they are only used by a small portion of the population. But the very nature of UBI is that it's money everyone receives, which puts it more in line with programs like Social Security and Medicare., which are very popular, and much harder to attack without facing consequences.
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UBI won't eliminate begging. Many homeless people have mental illnesses that prevent them from being successful at "normal" jobs and lives. UBI won't fix that.
Having any serious guaranteed income has meaning if inflation or tax increases or sellers being able to raise prices on a whim is allowed. Further, if businesses are to survive the people will need income that exceeds their basic needs. In other words if people only have enough to buy flour and potatoes then only businesses that fill those crude and basic needs can survive. Obviously human employment is about to vanish.
I like universal basic income to start with, especially since it's clear that worker's wages are not rising with worker productivity. However, part of the problem is that major industries - payday loans, health care, landlords/rentals, banks - have made price-gouging their standard practice. They've already mastered the art of scamming desperate people via means that would be illegal in many other developed countries, and they've been buying off the lawmakers too. Fix that too - fix that first, even. I don't think an uptick in income is going to last very long without some way to enforce decency in the trade of living essentials.
Who gets to define "basic"? Enough calories to not starve to death and enough money to cover the rent of the cheapest studio apartment in town with 8 or 9 roommates?
UBI is about eliminating the need to work to meet your basic needs. If you want more than the basics, you're going to have to work.
You are thinking too short-term. Sure, for a person who got replaced by a machine - they could probably provide a useful job-function. At least until they are too old to work, or lose their skills, or find that their skills are now obsolete (taxi driver in the world of AVs, for example).
But fast-forward 20 years to the next generation. What would they have learned that made them employable? Would they even have the notion of work, reward. Jump to the next generation after (say) 50 years of UBI. They would accept the "basic" living they and their parents had ever known to be all there was, all there could ever be. Not only would those people be completely unemployable, but there is no guarantee that the state - or anyone else - would even have bothered to educate them. What would be the point?
That is the danger behind UBI. Not how people are a year or two into the prograame. But how completely dependent they would become after a generation or two.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"cost as part of GDP" is a silly way to compare, because the U.S. is wealthier than almost all other countries and as a result spends more on everything where you can spend more to get more, including books, restaurants, fast food, education, lawn care, cars, roads, bridges, electronics, and yes, health care. The U.S. also subsidizes a lot of medical device and drug research for other countries. All you're showing is that wealthier people tend to spend more on discretionary items (like extra doctors and a private room when you don't really "need" that) than less wealthy people.
Once Medicare/medicaid and VA health spending are comparable to OECD levels of health spending (hint, they're much higher), then you can start arguing public health care would cost similar to what the government already spends.
"Cost as part of GDP" is a pretty good way to compare. It shows how much of a country's production goes towards healthcare, helps correct for different salary and cost levels etc. FWIW, Norway is a bit better off than the US in general. We spend more than the US in absolute terms, but less when seen as a part of the GDP
Administrative costs seem to be a huge part of why - 8% of GDP in the US, 3% in most other countries.
Just slowly reduce the 40 hour work-week to 20.
Besides, this is all in response to what is only a potential problem whose likelihood is greatly exaggerated.
I can tell you right now, If I had a proper Basic Income guarantee along with healthcare, I would work part-time to afford luxuries & travel, and split the remaining free time making music & art, doing things with my friends & family, and volunteering.
This is the kind of life people could have if the productivity gains of recent decades had been shared, rather than hoarded.
We gave the banks free money in order to bail them out. We give corporations free money. Cities are paying for Amazon's head quarters and warehouses even though Amazon can afford to pay for them.
So when you say free money, make sure you look at all the free money you had out. Seems to me if you give Amazon free money you can certainly give someone who's job's been displaced free money.
Remember, people will spend the money and that will go back into the economy. As opposed to Amazon where the money goes to investors.
Bigger back for your buck when you give it to people.
We are a consumption economy after all.
Any implementation of UBI will be approximately revenue neutral, or it will be unaffordable - i.e. there will be increased taxes somewhere to pay for it. Therefore total demand will be the same. Now yes, some commodities will experience a rise in demand for them, but equally others - in this case the apartments that people who want to move into these ones - will see a fall in demand.
I get your point - but the 'revenue neutral' will, overall, result in no major shifts in prices.
But we should make them something they can take pride in; for example a small but significant contribution to the community such as removing graffiti or repairing roads, or even listening to children read in primary school, they could be really helpful.
Both options are horrible, this is like asking if it's better to beat your wife or beat your children when you come home from work. Both options will lead to depravity.
You ...
... have the right to choose your own dead-end job!
Secure Employee Rights & Freedoms (SERF)
-- Futurama Poster
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
We will always have a need for people to do work, but we will not always have need of everybody to do work that directly contributes to endless (arguably pointless) economic growth. Left as it is, this semi-conscious living organism we call 'The Economy' will grow so fat that it will collapse under its own weight. Endless growth-for-growth's-sake can only go on so long, especially with tech innovations that lessen the need for certain jobs. Basic Income isn't a long-term sustainable model either, but I think it's an intermediate step between the current Scarcity-everybody-must-work socio-economic model and whatever comes after when there are more people than jobs and the accumulation of fiat currency becomes less important to human society. What do we do with the lazy ones who just take and don't work? I predict that laziness will one day be seen as a disability for which treatment will be made available... and in extreme cases, mandatory. There will always be some kind of poor and disadvantaged people, it's just the language that changes around them. For humanity to ever get past its barbaric past, we have to learn that it's our responsibility to see to people who just don't get it. If you're a parent of a child with genetic disorders, like Down syndrome, you just have to accept that this person will be your responsibility for the rest of your life. This is a microcosm of a stark reality - that all people are our responsibility for all of our lives. Saying you shouldn't have to pay for another person's welfare is itself a lazy/irresponsible statement. This is the attitude that has to change if we are ever to climb out of the dark pit of humanity's violent past.
The problem is real, unfortunately the politicians are way behind. The good news there will be jobs. The bad news very few policy makers have a clue. The start is a change in education toward a European model of free education with 2 tracks one toward university and primarily sciences and the other technical/vocational with an optional extension beyond HS. This also enables easier changes to core curriculums.
We have God-given rights, Life (air, water, food and place to be) Liberty, (choose whether to work, leave or mooch) and Pursue Happiness. If we are asked how we want to pursue happiness then it would be nice to get help at least in the form of advice, education, tools, whatever is needed to have a shot at actually finding happiness. This is the job of the parents but if it's left to the Feds then Food Stamps, Education vouchers, housing coupons, bus pass and a smartphone should do the trick with maybe a bit of cash for alcohol and CBD to deaden the pain. Money helps but good relationships are better.
Consider a few vital jobs: doctor, nurse, teacher - indeed all child and elder care, public transit driver, police officer, prison officer, judge, construction. All of those jobs are very real and need more than 2 hours a week. Given they constitute a substantial part of the economy, on their own they torpedo your argument about it being 2 hours a week.
Unfortunately this requires a bureaucratic machine to respond to such subtleties. Clearly for someone with a concern for the appearance of their public space, graffiti removal IS meaningful. To brats for whom it is 'art', it would be punitive; finding something they would find meaningful will be challenging!
Sharing our wealth is mandatory. Forced employment is slavery.
suffering from pronoia
That's why I put "free" in quotes.
Sure, it's not free, as in beer.
But it's painless as it's already part of your taxes, in my country and in many others.
The US system, from what I've read over some decades, is .... quite the opposite.
And for those who don't pay taxes? Which is about 40% of households in Australia, so what?
We work together as a nation to bring us ALL up to an equal (ish) level so we don't have to worry about things like health, visiting a doctor and paying for medical bills.
It works, pretty much.
There are better systems, there are worse, but ... the USA seems to be a stand out in the the worse section :(
Do you think it's painless? What country do you live in? I bet your country feels the pain of the oppressive tax burdens in things like unemployment, economic growth, scientific and technical development, and taxes... The only exception to these trade-offs is Norway, when oil prices are high.
These things aren't painless for those that try and build businesses. Even more of a pain than the actual, direct, monetary, costs are complying with all of the crap legislation and bureaucracy. That is the worst for me.
Furthermore, why restrict "us" to those within a country? I think it makes zero sense, from the law of diminishing returns, to "bring ALL up" to bring "us" within industrialized countries "up." It makes more sense to work to bring basically all of Africa up, than any of Europe up, since they are lower and will come up faster/cheaper/better.
I believe the reason we do not take this approach is because Africans do not vote in "our" elections. Many of the people "we" are bringing up (40% by your quote) already don't pay taxes - but they vote.
Painless? No, but there is (or should be) no oppressive tax burden in a decent progressive tax system. It should be relatively pain free. You earn more money, you get to keep more money, but you pay a bit more tax.
I mentioned Australia, as that's where I live.
Everyone in every era complains about bureaucracy, but no-one seems to offer a better suggestion than anarchy, it seems?
I'd love for the world to be a utopia, it's arguably possible, but it, again, never seems to happen. I wonder why? (that's a rhetorical question!)
How have you directly complied with these laws? How? You speak about "should" be but my experiences with what "is" are somewhat different. I spent 10-16 hours getting my Colorado state employer documents in order - unemployment insurance, worker's compensation insurance, and state withholding taxes. My business is based in the state of New Mexico, and hiring an employee in a neighboring state took way more work than I would have liked. This is because the states, and the Federal government, all believe they have a role in protecting workers in the U.S.
My suggestion would be to not mandate workers compensation insurance and unemployment insurance, and instead leave those up to individuals to purchase if they want (exactly as individual retirement accounts are optional here, and have much more faith in them than our Federally managed social security "retirement" plan.) I also prefer the 1099 contractor, as opposed to w2 employee, responsibility with taxes to be on the person getting paid, and not on the person doing the paying. Every country I have researched labor law in typically has this distinction between employee and contractor.
Those are my concrete suggestions, based on running a rental property business for ten years, and a software company for six years.
No, I have not directly complied with USA laws, never having been in the hemisphere in which the USA exists.
I live in the Southern Hemisphere, the land of the free!
I'm an Aussie, from Down Under.
I've never been an employer, but I have been a worker in the Australian government area that deals with employers and employees. Some years ago...
From memory, an employer says "Yes" to "I'll employ you", to a new employee.
The new employee hands the employer a "Tax File Number Declaration".
The employer records the details in their payroll system, and then forwards the TFN dec to the government.
Bingo, job done.
Umemployment insurance (which in Australia is a federal govt thing) sorted.
Workers compensation insurance, sorted
(I think, may actually require some notification to the employers workers comp insurer, I'm not sure, but easy enough, it's via email I'm sure) and state withholding taxes? They don't exist here.
Hiring someone from a diffferent state? No difference between hiring them or someone who lives next door.
Why does your country make things so difficult?
That's for you to answer, not me.
It's pretty simple here, apart from, maybe, workers comp, and even that is national here, and if I join a uniion (which I will next pay, within a week) it's sorted, nationall.
oh, and it seems while I've been typing a reply to you, I've been killed in my tank game... thanks, Brian, thanks... tanks a lot! :)
Basically, things don't HAVE to be as difficult as they are in the USA. The USA has CHOSEN to make things difficult, because of... reasons (your constitution?
Don't Tread On me, Big Govt is bad, FREE DUMBS@!@S!!) I don't know, but most of the arguments I read about from the USA seem to be retarded, redundant or simple idiocy from my perspective (that said, as mentioned, I do not employ people, I'm an employee and it's been REAL SIMPLE for me for over 30 years).
Rant over (I admit to being... unable to legally drive at the moment, but it's almost 2pm where I am and I've nothing planned that requires leaving my house for today).