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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.
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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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.
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."
The theory is that in the long term, the money should come from savings. UBI would remove the need for a bunch of expensive-to-administer welfare services, for example.
The United States has one of the least efficient social welfare systems in the world. The US famously spends something like 17% of GDP on health care in return for consistently worse outcomes than almost every other developed country that spends 9-12%.
That's the theory. As with all such reforms, even if UBI worked elsewhere it's unclear that it would work in the United States because it would require a critical mass of people in charge to believe that the US system is not the greatest in the world. It's a very hard sell.
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"Any my taxes won't pay your leisure while I have any say on it."
And yet they pay for any number of wasteful government programs. You're paying for the leisure of well-connected thieves.
Mostly random stuff.
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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Money created without limit benefits 2 groups: the source of the money (who gets to buy with it without significant cost)
This. This is why the Big Finance fights so hard to have fractional reserve lending not only legal but even preferred. Money that's produced from thin air still works same as any other money.
and net debtors (who see their debt inflated into less real value.)
This has a significant effect only on long-term debt.
Whether money that comes from the government is printed or acquired by theft, makes very little difference in the amount of damage it causes.
Printing money works exactly same as a tax on holding any assets denominated as money -- only paperwork differs. If inflation is 5%, you just got taxed 5% on the whole value of all your savings.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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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That is the issue though. It comes from savings. This is a basic investing issue.
Currently your wealth is either in real assets or in cash. As long as the latter is not used for consumption, both are used for capital investment into productivity either directly by carrying the risk yourself (stock market purchases) or indirectly by letting someone else care the risk for you (cash in a bank). Assets that are purchased on the secondary market (stock market) do not directly shift the funds into productivity improvements, but they fuel the larger financial economy that enables the primary market (issue of new stock) to function in the first place.
Now in comes the basic income and you take away the money from the richer people to give it to the poor. The only money you can take away is that which is already not being consumed, thus money currently going into productivity improvements. It doesn’t even matter if the money comes from a middle class server farm guy or Trump’s third nephew, because the effect on the macroeconomic allocation of capital is the same. You are not feeding the poor at the cost of some rich asshole buying a new yacht, that’s an absolutely minuscule part of an UHNWI’s cash flows, you are feeding the poor at the cost of a new factory or laboratory not being built. There’s no amount of goody two shoes hand waving that can eradicate this simple fact.
Agreed, friend. There are many, many wasteful government programs. I would love to see those removed and the money spent on them released back to the public in the form of lower taxes. However, wasteful government programs today don't justify, pay for, or make possible a basic work-free income for everyone. Someone has to pay for that. Someone has to do the work to get us there.
We are, I suspect, at least two generations away from having the level of automation that will make what you want actually possible. We can not only foresee the possibility (like we could in the 1950's) of automation at that level, we are now at the point where we can say, yes, you know what, it just might actually be possible. And now that we've come to that stage, there are people who want it now. Like a teenager, our reach is exceeding our grasp. We have the understanding to see it's possible, but some of us don't have the understanding to realize it can't be possible today. Unfortunately, we will, without major medical breakthroughs, likely never ourselves be the beneficiaries of the type of technology that will make possible the kind of leisure that you want. However, stopping now won't get us there. Leisure now will not get us there. And I'm not willing to just pay off those that don't want to work while those of us who realize we still need to shoulder the burden for them too.
To be honest, even when that technology has arrived, it will bring a new set of issues. I don't think we ever will get "there", where no one has to work. In fact, I hope we never do. That will be a troubling society. I hope we have to work less, I hope we get to work more intelligently, and I hope we all get the time we want with our families and loved ones. I hope we develop into a society where families work together, where schooling and working is integrated into a holistic entity where there is no fine line between the two. And I hope we, as a society, have a firm grasp on the need for working and striving and have good leisure addiction awareness and counseling.
That all being said, this is where we live, and today, we all need to work.
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.
Thats alot of planets.
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... stop the adoption of trickle-down economic policies?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It was tried in Dauphin, Manitoba with pretty good results. Most everyone kept working, the exceptions were young mothers spending more time raising their children and young people staying in school to get a better education rather then quitting to help support their family.
Funny enough, this seems like results that right wingers would like, more family friendly and people trying to lift themselves up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
Having the biggest / most expensive military of the world, e.g.?
What else than a mini UBI is that land army of the US?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So you mean to say that, knowing the plan was temporary, participants didn't decide to ditch their money-rewarding incomes which would lead to unemployment the day after the program was closed? Count me surprised.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
- Benjamin Franklin
There's no NEW money.
Almost all the existing benefits are cancelled.
The ordinary worker and the rich will have the UBI taxed away again.
Some savings will be made in not having to employ lots of people to decide who deserves what benefits.
The people that it's intended to help are already receiving a bunch of benefits in one form or another with various strings attached. This just removes the strings and paperwork and just gives them a weekly amount to spend however they like.
People seem to be imagining that UBI will be enough to support a middle class lifestyle without working. It's not. It's enough to have a bed for the night, food and clothing. Enough that people aren't sleeping on the streets, starving or freezing to death, which is what any decent society would be trying to prevent in any case.
An entirely made-up quote. You cannot cite a source for this because it does not exist.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age