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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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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.