The principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income (2015)
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Is that such a bad thing? I'm not even sure if the effect would be significantly different than today's situation, in which you can fall into any addiction you want if you have resources.
First, I am a believer in economic momentum and money multiplier dynamics (perhaps irrationally so). But with this belief more money being spent (consumption) makes for a stronger economy, for everyone, including those of us who are not in need of welfare. Our current welfare system places too much restriction and I feel leaves too many welfare recipients with non-optimal purchasing decision...not to mention there is an overhead to our (America's) current welfare system as far as administration and what-else.
Another thing is that there have been studies done which show that giving cash to the poor has better outcomes than expected: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...
There are also deeper things we can theorize about regarding poor behavior, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel like a UBI would be a more efficient welfare distribution (more money spent actually issued as monetary welfare benefits) which would have a stronger economic impact than our current welfare system.
Disclaimer: The above is just my opinion, not claiming it to be right or wrong.
So what's your counter to the 'broken windows' objection? It's pertinent in this case because we're talking not about broken windows but broken (addicted, depressed, isolated) people.
> Mr Anoche’s first move on getting his windfall was to buy a new roof. Not only is thatch leaky, but it also needs to be replaced twice a year, at $40 a time. He spent half the money on his home, and half on timber and chickens. Those two businesses now turn a monthly profit of nearly $90. “If you’ve got the money and the mindset,” he says, “you can change your life.”
> Of course, not all the money has gone on things that make development economists happy. Sitting on a rough bench in his moonshine bar in a banana grove, a tipsy Bernard Okumo says his wife used her windfall to bail him out of jail, where he was facing a murder charge. But the first independent study of Give Directly’s methods, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro (who is a former board member of Give Directly), suggests this sort of spending is unusual. In randomly selected poor households in 63 villages that have received the windfalls, they say, the number of children going without food for a day has fallen by over a third and livestock holdings have risen by half. A year after the scheme began, incomes have gone up by a quarter and recipients seem less stressed, according to tests of their cortisol levels.
My own opinion still tends to believe that the net benefit will be positive, despite misapplications. At the moment the things I have read seem to indicate that while misuse occurs, it generally is the exception to the rule, not the other way around.
Edit: I should also point out that UCT (Unconditional Cash Transfers) are concluded to only be part of the solution to poverty in the article. CCT (Conditional Cash Transfers) are also useful for correcting deeper systemic issues (such as undervaluing education in the poor).
Efficacy of UCT compared to CCT is a different (empirical) argument that I'd definitely like to see continued research on.
But I don't see spending for spendings sake as a bad thing. In some ways it was one of the pillars of the recovery from the Great Depression.
And I too am interested in continued research of UCT vs CCT and combinations thereof.
Well, not the entire point (there's lots of different reasons that people advocate UBI), but its certainly one of the points.
What differentiates the "19th century style" worthy and unworthy poor is that unworthy poor are thought to have made poor decisions and brought about their circumstances on themselves whereas the worthy poor were seen as suffering through little to no fault of their own.
Prior to the welfare state (which makes no such distinction) the "unworthy poor" served as an example of what not to do. Do we really want to discard that wisdom (even more than we already have)?
Put another way, is every poor person equally deserving of our support and sympathy? I would think not.
I disagree with this, I think the interplay between policy, public opinion, and the media is more nuanced than that. I believe they can all have effects on eachother.
So noble. When people see others spending their money in ways that they wouldn't, do you really think notions of 'worthy' and 'unworthy' will go away? People are judgmental. History and current events show it to be a dependably consistent aspect of our nature.
As an aside, I think that the biggest challenge in this century will be to cast aside idealistic visions of 'tabula rasa' humanity (largely based in Marxism and subsequent modernism) that were part of the 20th century's program. You can't fix people, you can only create systems that accommodate, deflect, and channel toward positivity rather than work against their nature.
Its not so much to make the notions "go away" from existence in society (which is a harder problem), but to make them "go away" from producing the inefficiencies the particular current reflections of them in public benefit programs and their administrative rules do in the application of government policy and expenditure of public resources.
Does that mean we try to figure out who's going to be murders so we don't give them any money?
Some people have problems. That doesn't mean you scrap a good thing just because you don't like dealing with problems.
But, even if that were true, you'd have to think you are a pretty special snowflake to think that there are currently people that:
a) have "a deficit of meaning" in their life (not sure where you come up with this stuff but keep it coming, I think it's great!)
b) Once the stress of wage slavery is removed, they wouldn't spend time searching for meaning... just like everyone else does. I mean, where do you think friendship, purpose, spirituality, etc come from?
I don't think you understand the problems it seeks to solve.
Among the major problems it seeks to address (different advocates may not consider all of these important, and some may consider additional problems):
(1) Means- and behavior-tested (and use-limited) welfare programs substitute external judgements of what will provide utility for the recipient for the recipients own judgement, and expend extensive resources applying the means- and behavior-tests, all of which causes significant inefficiencies.
(2) Using minimum wage to reduce economic duress in the labor market, while it has some demonstrated value such that many UBI see it as a net positive compared to no policy to address economic duress, also has drawbacks in that it eliminates the possibility of work that provides a mutual benefit being done, without economic duress, where the pay would be low. UBI provides an alternative approach to address mitigate economic duress and thus allow more work that provides net economic benefit to be done.
(3) Wealth and income inequality is accelerating, and in a way where the saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is not an accurate reflection of the results, with virtually all of the gains in recent economic expansion going to the very top of the distribution, and this produces a variety of social harms, and is expected to be reinforced as automation and other economic changes continue to reduce the relative value of labor other than the most skilled (resulting in returns increasingly going to capital and shrinking pool of elite labor). Some mechanism to constrain this growing inequality is seen as desirable to address the social impacts.
You avoid rent-seeking by avoiding monopolies; competitive markets prevent rent-seeking.
> and cost of living inflation?
Monetary policy, the same way inflation is managed now.
That aside, before considering any corrective changes in monetary policy, any UBI is likely to produce some level of upward pressure on prices, but at a level where buying power is still increased for people on the lower end of the distribution receiving UBI.
Monopolies are not the reason that prices rise according to what the market will bear.
And, in fact, part of this is that largely higher education is monopolistic. Except at the very bottom tier, degrees from established institutions are not, in the market, as having equivalent substitutes when a new entrant comes into the market. The established reputation of institutions is a big part of what people are paying for.
I.e. it's seen as this temporary state that we might or might not be in for a limited amount of time.
The truth is that UBI is meant to deal with the fact that we will more or less all be unemployed and have no jobs and thus no income.
It's not meant to solve an isolated problem with the labour market, it's meant to solve the realization that there wont be any.
Two centuries ago, well over 90% of income earners were farmers. Today, it's like 2% and dropping. But unemployment didn't become a more massive problem than it was then. Labor became available for other purposes, enabling the industrial revolution.
I agree that even before we reach that level the issue is thre and so it will serve as a help for those who are "left behind".
What most people get wrong about a job is that they confuse the human doing them with the job they human is doing.
Most if not all jobs only require you to be a subset of a human to actually be useful. And so there is a general misconception that computers would need a general intelligence to take over a job when in fact most of the jobs we do require only a fraction of our abilities as humans and normally can be broken down in smaller subsets.
Trouble with breaking down jobs into smaller subsets is that you need an awful lot of robots, and suddenly the rental on those doesn't look an awful lot better than the cost of hiring unskilled labour. I mean, the core role of the average fast food service employee in exchanging cash for heated product was rendered obsolete by the heated coin-operated dispensing machine more than a century ago, but it turns out that they're also quite good at upselling to larger items, dealing with unusual requests, getting rid of unruly customers and removing stains from locations you'd need a robot with really impressive articulated limbs and computer vision to adequately deal with. And they don't cost very much per month compared with specialist business process software licenses, never mind hardware. So fast food vendors, with some of the most obsessive attention to process optimization imaginable and some of the least highly-regarded employees, continue to be huge employers
This is what is happening now. Machines are gradually moving further and further up the abstraction ladder.
So unless you are aware of another human ability used to do a job it kind of stops there.
Machine learning is still unfortunately limited to very specific tasks. Even though the means through which those tasks are accomplished may be very general (neural networks, Bayesian statistics, etc...) the end result is still very limited.
Let's not fool ourselves with how far along the technology is and instead embrace it for what it is.
Prices that needs to keep going down in order for them to 1) survive the competition, 2) deliver affordable food from the majority of their customers who are making less and less money.
It basically affect how employers can make money and it will be the very reason why you would se an even bigger move towards automation of the actual service.
You keep using history as if it's any indication of the future even though the very underlying premise why have been how they have historically is changing.
It's ok you don't want accept this but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Anyone who sits u little further up than the people who work on the floor will tell you that there are in fact plenty of plans to reduce the work force to be able to keep competing by keep making it cheaper.
Ignoring that problem won't make it go away.
"This time it'll be different" is never a good argument, especially not when deployed with condescension in lieu of evidence.
The chains have no other way to go than to reduce the cost of their staff.
It's not a this time it will be different argument it's this is the only way they can survive in the market argument.
Vending machines have always been cheap, but they've never been popular. Which is why the fast food giants, each with large teams of analysts armed with all the relevant numbers, have experimented very little with them, and generally cancelled the experiments after very short periods.
You are trying to establish strawmen no one is talking about. That's my signal to get out of a conversation.
Believe what you want, reality speaks for itself.
Automating away the human in the order process removes a way to speed up the process. Modern registers are complex enough to require training. Untrained, possibly illiterate customers using them while decision-making? That's bad news.
A number of fast-food and similar outlets have order-ahead mobile apps, which include payment through the app. These take humans out of the order process, but do not require customers to use the kind of "modern register" that the existing counter staff use.
The real win on that front isn't fast food, it's the ability to order from local restaurants for pickup. We do that a lot.
Who cares what you think. The point is that the majority don't consider it a pain in the ass.
If you want to debate this issue based on your personal preference it becomes pointless.
No, actually, a century ago there was reason to think things would head that way at some time in the future; now, there is evidence that it is actually happening. Real average hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory private-sector employees peaked in January 1973, and for the manufacturing sector in January 1978. Sure, there's still jobs, but more of the value they produce is going into providers of the capital necessary to do them than the labor, as labor is marginalized.
In the same period the US lost 4mio jobs to China, the Chinese lost 15mio jobs to the robots.
Globalization is only easing the overarching trend ever so slightly until it's cheaper to do it automated.
Point machine learning towards a problem and things that normally was cumbersome and took several people to do is suddenly done in the fraction of a second.
It's like claiming that if an alien race landed on planet earth with superior skills and superior technology it wouldn't effect the human ability to survive because we endured battles with other species before. We can't use history to teach us much since the opponent is different.
This is not speculation anymore. This is unfolding right in front of us and we better take it serious.
So when machine learning will remove the need for radiologist and many surgeons as it's already well underway to. What areas is it that these doctors will then be able to work in thats going to be of value?
It's ironic how steadfast many of you are in this idea that more jobs will be created when there is no evidence it's the case and the new jobs that are created require much less than whatever it replaced.
You are also confusing globalization with actual job creation in the west.
Say, 150 years ago, you needed to move a ton of rock a hundred yards. How was it done? By hand. You needed to harvest an entire field of grain. How was it done? By hand. A couple of centuries ago, virtually everyone was employed in farming. Now, hardly anyone is. Powered vehicles and hydraulic lifting wiped out more jobs than computers ever have.
Certainly the Great Depression was more of an acute problem that the current ones; the current ones are more persistent. We're forty years past the peak in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages.
> Our economy is now largely service-based, but we are still quite a ways off from automating most services.
Arguably, that should be a "because" rather than a "but".
> There's a lot of speculation that the economy will imminently suffer rapid upheaval with few jobs to replace the ones that are automated, but it remains speculative.
The idea that there will be a rapid cliff in the number of jobs is mistaken, sure. What there is -- and not merely imminently in the future, we are well into it -- is an end to the returns to labor increasing alongside economic output. There's still output growth, but the returns are captured by capital. Automation is a key reason for that.
It's the wrong question.
>There is an increasing global conversation about the idea of a ‘Universal Basic Income’ – a universal weekly payment to all eligible citizens.
Wouldn't everyone be eligible for a universal basic income? Are all persons eligible citizens? Is the article actually talking about an ‘Eligible Citizens' Basic Income’?
I believe "criminals (current and former), drug addicts, and the willfully unemployed" are all eligible under most proposed schemes, although the income level may differ for current prisoners.
Edit: according to the RSA blog introducing their proposal: "Prisoners would not receive it."
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rs...
> "These are the vulnerable, marginalized and (sometimes) disenfranchised groups that America loves to shit on when it comes to social programs and basic rights."
The RSA (publisher of this report) is British.
I would think when the state acts as ward to an individual, the agency would receive the BI on their behalf.
I've always felt basic income would greatly simplify many funding / administrative questions. Perhaps my view is too simplistic.
Probably not a good idea if we want to see our prison population lessen in the future.
I see no reason why we should exclude drug addicts. What level of drug do you start to count against a person? More people die from alcohol than marijuana, and I barely know anybody who isn't on some level addicted to caffeine. Prescription opiates are entirely legal, but lots of people are addicted to those.
The willfully unemployed are more or less the entire point of UBI. The theory is that as society increasingly moves towards automation, there will be fewer and fewer jobs, making the willfully unemployed a rapidly growing segment of the population, and that's a good thing as it will allow people to do with their time what they will.
So "eligible citizens" in this case probably means "almost everybody, minus a few exceptions the legislature will certainly come up with".
It's obviously not feasible to promise everyone that indefinitely with no strings attached so long as they turn up in your country and ask for it. Simplest solution is to make it passport based. This particular proposal appears to insist that young people prove they deserve it too...
I'll reply to the implied point in a second post.
That said, there's no reason offhand to provide basic income to minors. Parents can choose to have as many children as they want, at their own expense. One of the key advantages of basic income is getting rid of the complexities and irregularities of the current welfare model. Subsidies for children are one of those complexities.
Indeed.
A foster care system is, in my opinion and at least in poor areas of large metros - is a good (and pretty depressing) example of what many people are willing to do for money. To some extend - childcare subsidies demonstrate the same.
> Simply stating something does not make it a fact.
Your first quote makes it sound as if it was the inevitable outcome.
SOME people. Not all. It's a slippery slope fallacy.
What if the same type of people that try to manipulate the system do it because it seems like the only reasonable way to stay afloat?
It could be possible then that some of them would not have more kids to get more money.
UBI still permits people to have children that they'd otherwise be unable to afford, but at least the absence of other sibsidies will force individuals to decide how they'd like to budget that income, on children or otherwise.
Social programs generally are not considered as income and do not preclude you from being eligible for other social programs (i.e. the benefits stack). This creates the unfortunate situation that some people that don't work at all receive more annual income (in kind) from the government than their working neighbors. It works out to nearly $60k per year in benefits.
I support the idea of a basic income that strives to create an equitable situation for the working class.
Meanwhile as a software engineer, the work you do can be put on your resume and used as leverage for better opportunities.
It also artificially eliminates jobs that need to exist via austerity (e.g. not building necessary infrastructure), offshoring (moving manufacturing jobs abroad) and massive transfers of wealth to the already wealthy (e.g. wall street bailouts).
The techno-utopian notion of us approaching a post-work society glosses over these three things in a major way.
In Europe and Japan, yes. Birthrates are down and that leads to a number of bad social and economic consequences.
So I think it's kind of a pseudo problem.
You could solve most of that by making sure that people use condoms and that it isn't religiously wrong.
Importantly, in that universe, different regions of human colonization had different limits for births; including un-affiliated areas (space between planets) having unregulated birthrates.
For the context of Earth/Terra:
I forget if it was one or two children, but for sure, for two parents 'the first child is free'. Let's simplify that and say that for each contributing parent (to society) the first child is free.
After that additional children slots can either be obtained through exponentially larger tax payments, performing a significant contribution to society (E.G. Nobel Prize winners might be granted unlimited reproduction rights), or winning a lottery.
Obviously in the case of massive global war, famine, or disease (age death waves included), additional children might be built in to the quota to keep the population at desired levels.
Was he advocating that? I thought it was just a setup for plot points explored in Ringworld.