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Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs? (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes MIT's Technology Review:
Silicon Valley loves the idea of universal basic income. Many in the tech elites tout it as the answer to job losses caused by automation, if only people would give it a chance.... Getting people on board with basic income requires data, which is what numerous tests have been trying to obtain. But this year, a number of experiments were cut short, delayed, or ended after a short time. That also means the possible data supply got cut off.
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period, while Y Combinator's experiment "has also faced more delays, pushing the experiment into 2019," saying these programs illustrate the three basic issues faced by basic income tests. First, there's political disagreements. ("The Ontario program was shut down by the province's newly installed Conservative government.") Then there's also concerns about funding -- "As you might imagine, giving away free money is expensive" -- and also fears about disrupting existing benefits "To avoid that, they've had to work with municipal and state agencies to get waivers for pilot recipients. But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy....
"The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around."
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period, while Y Combinator's experiment "has also faced more delays, pushing the experiment into 2019," saying these programs illustrate the three basic issues faced by basic income tests. First, there's political disagreements. ("The Ontario program was shut down by the province's newly installed Conservative government.") Then there's also concerns about funding -- "As you might imagine, giving away free money is expensive" -- and also fears about disrupting existing benefits "To avoid that, they've had to work with municipal and state agencies to get waivers for pilot recipients. But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy....
"The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around."
They've been trying UBI since the 1960s in Canada. We have the technology and resources to enable a leisure society with guaranteed minimum living conditions for everyone.
We *choose* to not do it.
Mostly random stuff.
should come from Google, Apple, MS, and the 1%. Taxing anyone else is highway fuckery.
an endless supply of someone else's money.
;)
Just my 2 cents
No amount of "studies" or "data" can solve the tiny little detail that the money has to come from somewhere.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Don't worry though, there will be enough idiots in power before too long to push it through!
This is called "Bad Luck".
the ruling class not wanting to pay for it is holding it back.
I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior. The latest studies (real ones done by Universities) show $5 trillion savings every 10 years. We could pay off the national debt in my kid's lifetime with that and all our foreign held debt in _my_ lifetime. 70% of Americans support it.. Still no go.
Meanwhile several Democratic congressmen just exited Congress while imploring their party to abandon Medicare for All (funny that they all took big money from insurance & Phrama, I'm sure that was just them buying into their agenda).
America has a ruling class, but we like to pretend we don't. Like most things in life pretending the real world doesn't exist is bad juju.
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Who is going to pay for it?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Industrial revolution and socialist mindset have allowed those that cannot pull their own weight to live.
Ironically, in order to fund the UBI, you'll have to exploit labour, putting a gun to people's heads and telling them "Pay your fair share, comrade!"
If you want socialism, it must be built a top capitalism, so that the socialism is constrained by voluntary interaction; otherwise, socialism inevitably leads to the same conclusion every time that it is tried: Dysfunctional breadlines, and then re-education camps, and then gulags, and then unimaginable death and violence and suffering.
Why can't you people just leave us alone???
The countries which seriously consider UBI are the "rich" countries, whose governments are deep in red and whose populations have fallen in the low-tax-high-spending-huge-income-disparity spiral from which there is no clawing back without a revolution.
Don't tax the population to pay for a massively dysgenic welfare campaign, just implement the rat utopia via inflation. Zimbabwe for all and for all a goodnight.
Math is preventing Universal Basic Income. The problem with spending other people’s money is that at some point it runs out.
The reason why Silicon Valley billionaires like UBI is that they know technology is creating a growing underclass who cannot afford to buy food, let alone Netflix subscriptions. What do to? I know: get the taxpayers to pay for Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Red, ... subscriptions, iPhones, FitBits, etc.
Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of UBI. The empirical, non-ideologically driven research and evidence is clear that it's superior in every way to most, if not all, alternative forms of social welfare. All I'm saying is don't take the techno-elite's support for it as altruism: it's just financial common sense for them and their shareholders. After all, they don't pay tax, so they won't have to pay their share of the UBI tax burden Talk about a win-win!
Professional Idiot
Some decisions are just not data driven, or should I say. The only way to really get all the data would be to actually implement the program.
All these small tests really are pretty pointless and a waste of money.
If I were to ask you how would a society work if all drugs were decriminalized? Would drug use go up and people become druggies. You wouldn't know. There's a million what ifs. Only by actually trying it for a substantial amount of time could you get a clue. When Portugal decriminalized all drugs (not legalized), they just did it and took a gamble.
Similarly with this. How will the unemployed behave? Will those with jobs keep working? How will this change 1,2,3... generations down. No one has any damn clue. Any small experiment is not going to answer the big questions at all.
If only we could all just know the results of decisions before trying, our decisions would just be easy. But life is not that simple.
Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs?
No, common sense is.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
That's rich! OP means they love the idea of UBI as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Google, Apple, Intel, Oracle, and hundreds of other tech companies set up headquarters in low-tax countries and divert billions of dollars there every year instead of paying the higher US tax rates which would benefit the US. I doubt they'll be so accommodating and willing to fit the bill to pay billions annually towards the 1M or more Californians that would gladly trade work for $15K for do nothing for $15K.
Lack of automation is holding UBI back. If too many people drop out of the workforce, society will collapse. That won't be a problem when we can automate the job of anyone who drops out, but right now we can't even come close.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We would rather bailout banks than give money to people, as if the banks deserve it more after mismanaging the loans. That has happened many times.
No, it's good sense and fiscal restraint.
Not sure what part of Canada you're from, but thankfully this hasn't surfaced anywhere near me. I understand there were some trials in Ontario, but then I think they've tried most things once or twice somewhere in Ontario.
We don't have that level of technology. Not today we don't. The day we have automation to do everything menial for us, then I will agree we can revisit the issue. Until then, leisure won't get iron, copper, oil, bauxite, or the host of rare earth minerals we need out of the ground. Leisure won't smelt any of that. Leisure won't plant or mill wheat, oats, barley, canola, corn, or sunflowers. Leisure certainly won't plant the rice you had on your yuppy idealist leisurely sushi roll. Leisure won't pick wild blueberries or honeycrisp apples. Leisure won't assemble the laptop you are reading this on, not fully. In many cases not even by half. Leisure won't fix the power lines blown down in the last storm, it won't run new transatlantic cables, it won't design or build satellites.
Any my taxes won't pay your leisure while I have any say on it.
When we can fully automate all of the above, that is when we can revisit the issue. And even then, even then, who is going to design it all? Who is going to research new technologies and drive innovation? You think leisure will do that?
Rather than push towards a leisure society, how about we push towards normalizing our population to what is required? We are more than a generation from automating everything on my list.
So-called 'UBI' WILL NOT SCALE UP. I don't care what anyone says, all you need is basic arithmetic to see: you would bankrupt the ENTIRE COUNTRY IN THE FIRST YEAR. The country is already being wrecked by Orange Julius Caesar, we sure as fuck don't need to intentionally crash the entire World Economy just because some lazy fucks don't want to have to go to work anymore.
UBI in practice is just a non-punitive version of welfare/unemployment benefit. It doesn't address the underlying causes of wealth & income inequality. It'd make more sense to bring democracy into the workplace, i.e. make the workers the owners & ultimately the ones in control, & they hire the management/executive board. Could you imagine American workers deciding to close their own factories & using cheap overseas contractors? Could you imagine what job security, working conditions, healthcare, benefits, & pensions would be like? Workers could afford much better lives because the revenue generated would be going back into the companies instead of being siphoned off, hoarded, gambled, & squandered by a tiny elite of hyper-rich assholes. And just imagine how much more stable the economy would be.
Or rather, a lack of "other people's" money
How about giving people a fairly small but reliable basis for their income and then letting them build on it, without any fear of losing any part of it. this might be a game-changer in the results that are seen
That would be a yes. Trying to give basic income to dead people doesn't help anyone.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
their power comes from money. Specifically they say who lives and who dies because we're a society where if you don't work, you don't eat. And they decide who gets to work. Maybe during the cold war when they were afraid of outsourcing their factories least they be seized by the communists, but that boogieman is long gone.
And no, UBI wouldn't be the masses living in poverty. We already have enough housing to end homelessness and enough food to feed everyone and enough medicine to care for everyone. Look it up. We owe most of that money to ourselves. Only about $6 trillion is owed overseas and most of that is basically tribute. It's people buying our bounds and in doing so making the US Dollar the defacto world currency. They're not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts or because we're just so competitive, they're doing that because we have 19 air carriers and China, our closest rival, has 2, both old Soviet retrofits.
And besides, did you even bother reading my post? We could pay off our national debt in 40 years with the money saved from Medicare for All. We could do the foreign debt in 6-8 years. But again, we don't want to. We _want_ to owe those folks money because it locks them into our currency.
The puritanical myth that people won't work unless they constantly fear death by starvation, the elements or lack of medicine is just that, a myth. One created by the ruling class' propaganda and indoctrination.
You're being manipulated by the ruling class. I really wish I could get people to see these patterns. It's not like the American ruling class is doing anything special. It's the same techniques since the bronze age: divide and conquer the working class along economic, religious and racial subdivisions. We see the pattern over and over again (the US Southern Strategy, India's caste system, Britain's classes, Hell, when the Japanese didn't have any racial or religious divides they just declared everyone in "unclean" professions low-caste and kept books of their names so they could oppress them.
It's called Kicking Down, and as a method of controlling a large population it's been almost completely effective. Every now and then cracks appear and are promptly spackle over. I just don't get why folks don't see it and get angry.
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discussing how American can afford UBI.
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Sigh. The world's problems are not solved by data and studies, children. This concept just doesn't work, and it will never materialize in modern countries that aren't the size of a postage stamp, and even they bail when they discover how untenable it is. What passes for critical thought and ingenuity these days is just sad, man. Sorry millennials, you are just going to have to grow the eff up and work, because welfare *doesn't*.
80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 60% if you don't consider "$1000 in the bank" paycheck to paycheck.
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Raw data isn't the answer to everything. UBI isn't trying to sell adverts.
An act of real "bravery" (not killing a headphone port) is necessary to show the viability of UBI.
86% of the manufacturing jobs lost in America since the 70s were due to automation and process improvement, not outsourcing. Self driving cars and frictionless checkout are coming in the next 20 years tops, probably less. Farming robots are rapidly developing. Drones are already being used to replace professional crop dusters.
Face it, we're running out of the kind of work that 90% of the population can do. We can't all be surgeons. It doesn't matter how hard you want to work if you're hands aren't steady enough. Same with being a math wizard. Study all you want, you'll hit a wall somewhere. Most hit it long before Einstein (he famously joked about it and numbnuts misread it to think he was bad at math).
The world is full of billions of people not smart enough to live in the information economy. But they _are_ smart enough to hold a gun. If you abandon them, especially in a country like America where there are more guns than people, expect nasty things...
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It's not a lack of data, it's an abundance of IT DOESN'T WORK.
The 1% have been getting their free money in droves for centuries for sitting on their arses and waving their genoms, so why such a resistance to giving free money to everybody? Money has to come from somewhere? Well, to 1% money comes from the rest, in droves. Do they deserve it? Why? I tend to think we all deserve a little bit of that for just sitting on our arse, too.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
The world suffers from lack of goods and services, not lack of money. If production is boosted, the goods will eventually find their way to the poor. Certainly, wordwide people are still starving to death, so it's premature to declare victory of the robots. Even say in US, lack of affordable healthcare has a lot to do with shortage of doctors, as well as overregulation of medicine. Without boosting supply, giving people money will just raise prices.
Pretty clearly the idea of the UBI is hated on the right. I don't think conservatives hate the idea because it's not conservative, or because someone else will get something for nothing. I think they hate it because they seriously believe that they will be the ones to pay for it, one way or another. Looking at the question financially, it is hard to say they are wrong. They may be, but that has never been demonstrated.
Conservatives always bitch about us liberals "running out of other people's money." Often it makes me shake my head in dismay. In this case, though, I think they're right to be cautious. When you think about the scale of a functional UBI program in the US, holy crap, that's a lot of money. This is why some of us would be very interested in seeing the data from a long term experiment.
A further problem is based in the ownership of the production increases supposedly requiring a UBI. All this extra production (you know, the production that kills all of the jobs) is due to the implementation of automation - think 'lots of robots'. Problematically, we have this extra production because of the money invested by business owners, and they deserve (I think) to reap the rewards of that investment. They took a risk to make it happen.
Additionally, what happens to small businesses during the transition to automation? It is not clear to me that the majority of them will survive once the unpleasant jobs have a better, free alternative. The scale of the potential economic dislocation is astonishing.
Maybe it could work, or maybe it would just cause inflation until people's buying power reached an equilibrium at or below their previous one. No way to know without data.
Disclaimer - Socially, I am radically liberal (I should be able to buy heroin and a hooker at the corner drug store. Legally, I mean. I already could get that, realistically.) Fiscally, I am more of a moderate conservative. I think UBI is a fascinating idea, but I'm not convinced the math works out right.
The debate isn't about whether UBI would be a good idea or not. I think it would be, in that it would give people the freedom to do what they want to do, rather than they have to do. I also think that it would give families more time to spend together, leading to stronger relationships, better mental outcomes, and so on.
The debate really is about how to fund such a scheme... I doubt that the funds are available for this, and even they were, I believe that the political resistance to re-appropriating money from other sources would be so intense in many countries that the scheme would be a non-starter.
I think that the problem will really only be solved when technology enables things that people need (food, water, electricity, clothing, shelter) to be made so cheaply that the cost of funding such a program will be relatively trivial.
Till then, it's just a good subject for frequent Slashdot debates...
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
That was extremely well articulated.
Of course, I'm getting old, so...
Thats alot of planets.
[($)]
I'll believe in UBI when PCs have 4192 cores, 64 Tb networks, and unlimited memory. Until then, I'll stick with the almighty USD-thank you very much!
... stop the adoption of trickle-down economic policies?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
>But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy....
The source of the money was supposed to come from the money saved by eliminating all the bureaucracy. Can't do that by adding more bureaucracy.
The guillotine enabled corrective surgery by common folk.
It was a very effective cure.
Well put. Insulting, but a well-phrased insult.
It's the billionaires who are advocating for stealing from the working class so they can get money out of the poor. The working class, however, realizes it's they, not the 1%, who will be paying for freeloaders on UBI.
I think that's the problem, right there.
Let's just call it what it is, communism. Who told you this was a good idea?
Targeted benefits are almost always better.
Or a properly-funded universal healthcare system.
Or making sure the ice shelves stopping Antarctica sliding into the sea remain intact.
Yes? So what? Again, you are fucking moronic and posting ridiculous trash. Of course you need to work to eat!!! How else should it be?
If we take your idiocy to the logical conclusion, no one works yet somehow we magically all eat and have a home and transport and electricity and doctor care and so on. Just from thin air. And how EXACTLY does paying people to do nothing save us $40 trillion dollars or even one dollar?
Dumbass.
That's not "we". "WE" did not decide that. Politicians did. Both sides. The problem is politicians.
What more do you need to say, where does all this magical money come from and what happens when it runs out?
Its serfdom V3.0, people dependent on the new feudal overlords, rent your computer power, you dont own the stuff you bought its licensed, you can't fix your stuff its restricted, rent your place to live, bend the knee to get your 'income', dont complain we are tracking everything you say online.
I still prefer the ladder we build ourselves over the rope they dangle down for you at their whim.
Back in June we declared, "Basic income could work -- if you do it Canada style." We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario's 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
Oh. so I guess it can't work if you do it Canada style after all?
The article complains that in addition, Finland's test program ended this year after its initial trial period,
No! Not the nordic paradises too?!?! How could you?
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, there are some actual challenges here, beyond just those obstinate mean old right wingers? Or did obstinate mean old right wingers torpedo it in Canada and Finland, those noted hotbeds of obstinate mean old right wingers?
we're about to put 3.5 million people out of work with another 3.4 million behind them.
We already have social security. Put a stop to our massive, pointless wars (7 or 8 of them give or take since I _think_ we're pulling out of Yemen, not sure about Syria yet, believe it when I see it) and we'll be well on our way. Meanwhile we can start taxing taxing these guys. That'll account for 30% of the population right there.
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Why is UBI more interesting than any other wealth redistribution scheme.
Whether it's welfare or plain old socialism or commission.
Take from the rich. ...
Give to the poor.
Profit.
If it's voluntary, why would the rich want to agree.
Nations can only pay for some many people doing nothing. And health care. And a mil. And pensions. And roads. And...
Giving everyone free money including the tax payers will take too much money from all other services and gov sectors.
What money for citizens not working, not in education? Use means testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Is the person a citizen? Not an illegal migrant?
Got a bank account? Photo ID?
Not working? Then they can a nice support payment.
Start education? Thats a better payment.
Found work and become a productive tax payer again? The payment stops.
No UBI needed as people move from work to not working, to education.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I think we could calculate "how much" support it would cost to have UBI in the USA. I just don't think Sillicon Valley is willing to pay that much.
The truth is that bailing out banks meant that working middle class people who saved money and put it away in banks were not screwed over as they would have been if banks went under. If the alternative is giving money away to people who did nothing to earn it, then yeah, I would rather bail out banks, even if only enough to pay off investors up to the fdic limit of 100k. Maybe not as much as they were bailed out, but enough to protect real people who did nothing wrong but choose a bank to deposit their day to day income in, or their retirement fund, or a college fund for their children.
Multiply a UBI which is just barely over the poverty level ($12,000) by the adult population of the US (300 million), and you get a price tag of $3.6 trillion per year. How much "data" do you need to collect before you figure out that this is a non-starter?
Go read Manna by Marshall Brian. I think they have the right idea. We should automate and create robots to do everything possible leaving people to be creative and collaborative or just chill on a beach somewhere. Our monetary system is holding us back in so many ways itâ(TM)s getting dangerous. Would we be having arguments about global warming if nobody had to spend more to solve it? The only reason we managed to tackle the ozone hole was the industry impacted was not big enough to fight it off like the oil industry was able to.
Oh, forgot a couple points:
A: We are currently spending somewhere over $50k per family under the poverty line in welfare. We could literally eliminate poverty by just giving them the money we're already spending. The overhead is insane.
B: Current welfare schemes end up creating "welfare cliffs", where the family unit in question can be penalized, have lower total income, by earning more money. IE earn $1 more and lose $10k in benefits. A large part of my support for UBI is eliminating that.
C: I would prefer to pay for this via a sovereign wealth fund. Basically, a smallish amount of taxes goes into the fund. The UBI is paid for out of the fund, like what Alaska is doing. It'd take years, but would create a self-balancing situation.
D: Payouts should be "managed" similar to how interest rates are managed by the Fed. If you're seeing excessive wage inflation due to not enough workers(at the lower end), keep the UBI payment low. If you're seeing plenty of employment but wages are stagnant or dropping at the low end, increase the UBI some.
I don't read AC A human right
I think most good parents would agree that self sufficient children make for healthy and happy members of society. Whether we admit it or not, I don't think we truly feel content unless we are reasonably self sufficient and contributing in some way that benefits society.
A better idea than UBI or welfare would be providing a basic level of shelter, food, medical care, safety, and guidance with strict rules and structure. So if you are willing to follow the rules and contribute to the community then government and society will in return provide the basics that will help you grow into a healthy contributing member of society.
At the very least I would like to see something like this tried before UBI.
we know where communism goes.. no thanks.
Maybe.
The "laws" of biological ecosystems and real, not imaginary "calories economy" could not be defeated. The competition for a scarce resources for survival and reproduction is a fundamental and implicit constraint in any ecosystem. The only way the basic income could work is that "the privileged" (the rich) have enough money to give to the rest of us (the poor) for free. It is exactly like having a pet. Lots of them. (Or use a sugar-daddy analogy, if you prefer). This is only way it could be viewed and implemented. Everything else is an utter bullshit.
1. It will never be enough, the people getting it will sue for more
2. The ditch digger of the world could give up, for example if you work 12 days owning a company doing physical labor be worth more to do nothing
3. I donâ(TM)t fucking want to pay for it because the people receiving have no skin in the game. They get something for nothing
4. At some point the country is going to learn NO because there literally will not be able to give anything else canâ(TM)t just print money or ride in credit
5. How can we afford this when we canâ(TM)t even afford social security
Can your country handle millions of people flooding across the border to take advantage of free cash?
Money is just a representation of added value and its most basic purpose is to facilitate trade in a circumstance where there is a limited supply of stuff people want.
When you give somebody money while they have not added value to anything, you violate a basic principle - this is not the problem which destroys the "universal basic income" sham, but it feeds into the mess.
The real problem is that prices in a marketplace float to the point where the number of consumers who can afford a thing lines up with the number of available instances of that thing. If there is only 1 widgomatic on Earth and it's extremely desired, the price will rise until very few can afford it and then some very rich person will buy it for some obscenely high price. If there are a billion cheeseburgers available and fewer than a billion are needed, the price will be low enough that enough people can afford to buy them all. What basic income actually does is set a new baseline for what "poverty" is - meaning even the poorest person who sits around using drugs all day can suddenly afford stuff, which means all prices will rise to account for the new poverty baseline. It's nothing more than an onramp to inflation, and like most hair-brained ivory tower bull session daydreams, it would be most harmful to the middle class who would feel the brunt of the inflation but not feel any lift from the income.
It's lack of money.
Sure - tech corpos are well known for paying huge taxes..
Raise taxes paid by someone else so poor have more money for my products they use instead going to work
If you can't solve health care for everyone, this seems like a moonshot.
Interesting position, but it isn't psychological, either. The problem is that conventional economics thinks money is more important than time, but technology has increased productivity to the point where that approach makes no sense. Time for Ekronomics 101 (again).
Consider the essential working time for such goods as the famous food, clothing, and shelter. In advanced societies, the overall average is quite small, but people still have more time. The rest of the time has to go somewhere. I suggest it is divided between investment and recreational time, and the balance is the key thing.
Anyway, I've just been called to dinner, but ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No. A lack of common sense is. Eventually you run out of other peoples' money
Experiments on limited pop carry no sense. They are bound to have zero effect on overall inflation, for example.
You can't experiment with UBI. I do not even understand why people came up even with an idea of such experiments. Did people "experiment" in this way with minimum salary? Or with various programs?
What is wrong with good old unemployment benefits? Why do we need to pay extra money to people who already are capable to earn the money?
Is it one of the imbecile modern ideas that you can "simplify" regulation of such a complex organism as modern human society? By paying flat rate anyway.
If you are worried that people are not getting elementary necessities, give them these necessities eliminating a middle man - money.
If people are in need of housing - give them free housing, not the option to make terrible decision with the universal equivalent.
If something is minimal and obligatory, why do you give people an option of waste the money earmarked for buying it?
That's what minimum is. Enough food, housing, clothes for everyone, not the monetary equivalent of that.
If people are trading their free food, free housing or free clothes for something else, then, you guess correctly, it's not a necessity then. It's their choice.
The only reason why people need to be given money is plain vanilla simple - so they do not jilet jaune the whole society to the ground.
That's how civilization dealt with lazzaroni since Romans.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Seems like California would be a great place to try it:
- open borders? Check
- tech income disparity? Check
There IS the issue that one state trying this would be a magnet for low/no income earners in other states... But California is already a sanctuary state. No borders, right? Bring em all in!
I'm buying the popcorn.
You could take all the billionaires and millionaires and hand all their money to the rest of the population and still not even come close to funding universal basic income. You're going to also have to take about 75% of the wealth from the middle class.
UBI is just a buzzword for what used to be called communism or socialism, where everyone hands all their wealth to the government who them splits it up equally among the population.
Please define "universal basic income". To what level of annual net income are we talking about? Is it full salary, or just a top-up of whatever people are making now? Unless you give hard numbers, and we all do the math, it's useless speculation.
And if inequality grows, the Fat Cats of the world can decide between between having a portion of their wealth taken away, or finding their head at the top of a pike or at the business end of a guillotine.
Having large disparities of income is in no one's best interest. Personally, I think countries / regions should aim to have a Gini coefficients in the range of [0.25, 0.35]. As an example: the US in 1979 was at 34.6, while in 2016 was at 41.5; see also (lack of) real wage growth in the US for the last forty years.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
If only the "government" would pay me to do whatever I want, instead of what is economically useful to others!!!
The system will work IF we only address the wost off lowest 10%, not on entitlemets, but actual real world living standards.
If we can raist the poorest so they can aspire to become trailer trash
Is that person living very very frugally such as shared house/bunks
Is the person sleeping rough and not on drugs
Is the alternative a police cell or hospital bed.
Malnourished
No assets such as no TV and no clean bedding
Has neglected timely medical intervention
Long time cases that are self evident.
Living in car / shopping trolley.
So we miss kids living with parents, Single mothers who want their own house/apartment and wont share.
It was a welfare program rebranded as UBI. It wasn't universal at all. It was limited to people of little to no income already. It had the same money-sucking bureaucracy of welfare that UBI programs are supposed to eliminate, so of course it failed miserably.
The same goes for Finland. It's lies. This isn't UBI. These are rebranded welfare programs, UBI *in name only* but not in practice, designed to create bad PR for the whole concept of UBI through a series of cleverly orchestrated and highly marketed failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... all over the posts and replies here!
Sure, it'll be given to the rich as well.
And promptly taxed away again.
The ordinary working guy to the rich won't see much difference in net income.
There would be savings in not having to employ lots of people to decide who is deserving of what benefits.
Problem 1 is that there is no way to pay for universal basic income, it is impossible. Possible for small countries if they get outside money to help.
Problem 2. it would mean less people will choose to work.
We already have too many welfare programs to add another one on top of them.
What economic system works that's based upon robbing Peter to pay Paul? The only "Peter" that would work would be an underclass doing all the work, be it some kind of robots/AI or genetically engineered lifeforms. And we're obviously not there, and slavery regardless of it's form is an ugly institution. Basically what we'll get is currently what we have, welfare, and we can see how well that's worked.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You sound more like a Libertarian than a current-day liberal. Join us!
Then again, current-day liberals really aren't liberal any longer - they have evolved into dictatorial leftists.
Which never made sense to me. I thought the point of the FDIC was the banks could be allowed to fail and we wouldn't lose our savings?
Two family illnesses followed by the 2008 crash devastated me. And I'm not alone. 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That house you have a mortgage on? You don't own it, the bank does.
If I may digress for a moment, this is one of the reasons women's rights was such a problem for the ruling class. The rulers didn't want to give the masses real property and financial security. But any fool can see that's not fair. You spend your whole life working for the lord (or the robber baron as the case my be) and have nothing to show for it. Solution? Make women property. Then at least there's _something_ you own (your wife and the children she bore). I wish all those numbskull blue haired feminists could figure this out so they could actual do something useful for a change.
Everything is about money. Things get really fucked up really fast when you give 50%+ of civilization's output to 1% of the population. The shit you have to do to maintain that craziness is, well, batshit insane.
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See here for a list of common sense things that are just plain wrong.
The real world is a stupidly complex mess that very, very often operates counter-intuitively. There's a saying in science and math: "For every sufficiently complex problem there is a simple, elegant solution that is also wrong".
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No, it's common sense.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
A million times, this. By employing an exceedingly simple and sensible tax code, we can aid those facing hardship without surrendering our (economic) freedom.
Markets are supposed to be free markets, value exchanged in agreement. Yet if your choices are "Death by starvation" and "Take the job as offered", in what way is it a free exchange of value? Make a UBI and you suddenly DO have a job market, not a slave-selling-themselves market.
So since their tax burden is still lower than their wealth "burden",they're getting a sweet deal.
Meanwhile the wealthy get more for their money. They have more to steal. Someone with fuck all has fuck all protected by the police force patrolling, not that the patrol to protect in the poor areas. However in the gated areas for the wealthy, they will ensure that things are safe and protect those ten million dollar homes.
The army protects the USA, most of which is owned by the wealthy, not the poor, and the people dying are mostly the poor not the wealthy.
Courts protect contracts, IP rights, laws and all sorts of things that the wealthy keep their wealth from and even generate more. The poor don't get much from it.
Targeted benefits are almost always better.
There are several serious problems with targeted benefits. First, there is who will and will not benefit which is bound to become a thorny political issue. Here in the United States, where benefits are stingy to begin with and cutoff quickly and abruptly, leaving out most of the middle class, the effective of the benefits are minimized while the political rancor is maximized. The worst of both worlds. Second, if benefits are to be targeted then you have to have some method, system or means of discovering who satisfies the requirements and that's both difficult and expensive. Third, if benefits are limited to specific groups in society then they're likely to become stigmatized and create a permanent underclass, with hatred fueled by those not receiving the benefits and having to pay taxes to support those whom they presume to be losers, undeserving or lazy. There's very good evidence here in the United States that all three of these negative effects have occurred and continue to occur with our transfer programs. Targeted benefits might sound better to those with soft hearts looking to best help those who need help, but experience tells a different story. This is why the universal part of universal basic income is so important. If society is not all in it together equally on benefits, it's doomed to failure.
...the belief that God and Jesus commanded everyone must work or they are no allowed to eat, and that people believe that its always the person's fault if he or she can't work. Must be a drug addict or a lazy bum or both or something....
Yes, the powers-to-be got people brainwashed good.
No, it's the same as "the real communism has never been tried"
We already knew Universal Basic Incomes wouldn't work before the evidence was in that it didn't work (see prior slashdot stories). The reason is basic economics. True free markets promote competition (we don't actually have this anywhere- but we have markets which are close enough in at least some cases) and that leads to economic prosperity by rewarding those who are innovative and more efficient. There will be losers and winners in such systems and while trickle down economic is bull shit that doesn't mean truly free markets are bull shit. They remain the ideal system for both those at the top and those at the bottom. Those at the bottom tend to be hurt more by government interference in free markets (ie rewarding select individuals, companies, or markets via various means, both including direct cash handouts and indirect such as forcing people to purchase health insurance) than by leaving said markets alone. If the prices of goods go up (because taxes) and the poor then get discounted food, housing, and so on, it still has a negative long term impact on the ability of the poor to move up the economic ladder. Whereas in a free market the poor have lower barriers to move up while not being hurt by extreme prices on artificially heightened (ie because of taxes) costs of goods. People seem to think that we need to cap prices of housing to ensure the poor can get housing when we really need to eliminate the artificial barriers created to building new housing which artificially increase the costs of housing. Socialism isn't just a direct redistribution of wealth, but also the artificial redistribution of wealth through other means. Both by forcing people to buy health insurance (redistributes wealth to an elite who own stocks in health insurance companies) to inhibiting the construction of new housing through restrictions on builders which redirects dollars to current property owners.
Quite surprised to stumble across a constructive-solution approach on today's Slashdot. Not surprised to see it is unmoderated and the discussion is about to time out, too. I found you on the search for "unemploy".
What sort of encouragement can I offer? Perhaps to delve a bit deeper into the justification for UBI? From an ekronomic perspective these things look too simple?
For my simple new example, I'm picking agriculture. From a "big history" perspective, most people have been farmers for most of human history. (In prehistory the hunter-gatherers dominated.)
Now imagine you run a gigantic corporate cancer that focuses on producing food. Any factory farm would be an adequate example. You have to hire a new employee. Here are your candidates:
(1) An uneducated and not very bright fellow (think of a medieval French peasant or Russian serf) who can do the work adequately and produce enough food to feed himself and lots of other people.
(2) A PhD in applied agriculture who can do the production work while also developing the techniques to improve productivity, hire even fewer farmers, and increase profits.
(3) Same as (2) but he's willing to work cheaper, right down to the minimum wage (or less) because he's desperate for money because there's no UBI.
Enough time invested now, but as usual I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I could really hang with the Libertarians except that they have completely unrealistic ideas about the interplay of government and corporations.
The ONLY long-term countervailing force to corporations is government.
The natural state of an unregulated free market is domination by a series of monopolies, one per industry. This is accompanied by all of the evils associated with abusive monopolies. These industries are free from competition, allowing maximum profit extraction from the consumers. This is in no way a good outcome for the people (you know, the human ones.)
Other than that, sure, I'm with you.
I looked over your troll-modded comment and it seems obvious that you were modded "troll" because there is no moderation for "dumber than a troll". However I think you're probably too dumb to understand what that means.
If you actually clarified your "principle" somewhere else, then you should be more clear, or perhaps include a link to the original comment explaining your "principle". On the face of your complaint, I'm certainly disinclined to spend the time to search for it.
My theory is that your only principle is "I can and should squash the inferior peasants." Most so-called Libertarians have such a primitive and false understanding of what "freedom" means.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Universal basic income would allow a whole lot of insufferable people to pursue their "art' when they should really be working as a stock clerk at Target.
one of the Scandinavian countries did it, I forget which one. Drug hard use went down. The catch was they treated hard drugs as an illness. If you wanted to shoot up Heroine the government paid for it. You went to a clinic, got high, and as soon as you came down you went straight to drug rehab.
Folks don't shoot up and/or take meth for kicks. They're usually doing it to cope with mental illness. Treat the underlining cause and the problem goes away. Now, for most of those folks we can't really do that, because we just don't know enough about mental illness yet. But again, we can still treat it to some degree.
That said, I don't think we can do this in America. Too many Americans would be furious over tax dollars paying for "junkies" to shoot up (the fact we call them Junkies tells you how loaded our language is.... but such is life in America). You can point out that it's cheaper than the crimes they'd commit, but I've pressed these kinda folks on that before and if you keep at them they'll either stop talking to you or support forced work camps for the drug users. I mean, prison slavery _is_ one way to keep them away from drugs and not have to pay for it...
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How can you test UBI without a universal test? Any test that gives money to a subset of people isn't universal, and introduces some kind of criteria that determines who gets it and who doesn't, thus invalidating the concept, and the test.
So shall we test it by giving everyone money? For how long? What if it flops? Once you start giving away things, it's really, really hard to stop. But you're still out a tremendous amount of money. Yes, YOU are the source of the government's money, which UBI people want to give away. It's not magic.
Not at all, although that is an interesting observation.
Conservatives always bitch about us liberals "running out of other people's money."
Conservatives (as a large, generic group) do bitch about that. Constantly. And I am a liberal, if you look at me as a whole. If you split the US-ian population into two groups (Conservative/Liberal), I'll be over there on the left.
Fiscally, I am more of a moderate conservative. I think UBI is a fascinating idea, but I'm not convinced the math works out right.
My fiscal opinions are ONE ASPECT of my outlook/preferences:
In my starry-eyed innocence, I really do believe that we can do much better as a group if we take better care of our humans, even the ones we don't really like. I want progressive social policies. I really, really want poor Americans to stop voting against their own best interests.
However, studying business at university level for six years (particularly economics, accounting, and management theory) introduces some cold, hard facts of life to the conversation. While most of the time I find objections to social programs to be spurious, some of the shit I hear from my own side of the aisle is just... not grounded in reality. Like, just a complete failure to understand very simple concepts, and a pathologically optimistic view of human nature.
the quoted statements are contradictory.
So, while I guess I can see where you're coming from, I don't think they are contradictory at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
"Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs?"
No, but a deep ignorance of history and dismissal of empirical evidence is certainly lunging it forward.
If "single payer" makes everything better and cheaper for life-critical products, why don't we have it for food?
If you [4874633] can't understand and want to, then feel free to ask questions. Here is a relevant example of a possibly meaningful question: "Do you have any idea what "communism" means?" Let me give you a hint: It is not equal to "socialism".
Of course the underlying problems there are (1) I do understand you [4874633] (and your "cunt" is rather too kind a description), and (2) I don't want to. In logical terms, F AND F = F. You have heard of logic, right? Certainly can't tell from your writing.
If I could get enough energy to care about you [4874633], I would probably say something like "bloody twit", but such people (or sock puppets) are a dime a dozen on today's Slashdot. Perhaps two dozen. Who's counting? I don't go out of my way to look under rocks, though the bugs and maggots sometimes crawl out on their own initiative. And no, I don't care enough to wonder why or worry how many get squished.
However I do believe there is one slightly remarkable aspect of your [4874633's] "thinking". That empty and worthless "reply" was how you "freely" chose to start your new year. I started mine quite differently, but I hope the rest of your new year follows exactly along the path you've chosen. If I cared enough to peek, I'm quite sure you wasted your last year, too. Happy new year and congratulations on getting one year closer to wasting your entire life. (Perhaps you're some kind of reincarnationist and think you'll get more of them?)
In conclusion, judging from your [4874633's] precious words, I think it is best that you learn to follow the easy advice: "If you have nothing to say, then you should say nothing." There's also a version using a funny story about a jackass in disguise, but the funniest idea is that people like you could learn anything.
I wasn't talking to you [4874633]. Obviously. Too bad this "discussion" was concluded before it began, eh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That empty and worthless "reply" was how you "freely" chose to start your new year.
Uh.. no... nope. It's still 2018 here... The new year is still in the future.
question: "Do you have any idea what "communism" means?" Let me give you a hint: It is not equal to "socialism".
Do you communists not know you have become parodies of yourself? That is exactly what communists say.. ALWAYS. The communist believes himself to be superior than all others. Nobody else got communism right.. They all implemented it incorrectly. Only our hero knows how to implement communism correctly. The level of ego is mind boggling.
Z^-1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Z^-2
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Heh, now you know what it's like to talk to a democrat. The best you can do is use him as an example of how they operate. Maybe he's really a republican, trying to discredit democrats by making them look weird. He's very "Trump" like, so infantile. Either way, run with it.