Enough with Basic Income
salon.thefamily.co
salon.thefamily.co
He didn't spent a lot of time offering up specific arguments against basic income, but rather on background, and the primary arguments he has are to me some of the strongest arguments for BI:
1) He worries about division and polarization. Well, BI is the only solution that I'm aware of that draws on support from both the libertarian right (strong support, mostly) and liberal left (many support, but some are suspicious like this guy). No other solution to the jobless future can boast of support from both sides of the political spectrum.
2) Oddly, the quote from Olaf Palme he offers up as a critique of basic income reads to me as strong support:
"An efficient and stable welfare state must be based on universal social programs,
such as health insurance, pensions, and child-support allowances-programs that are directed to all citizens.
Official “poverty lines” or “means-tests” would not have to define “the poor” (which would minimize the need for bureaucratic controls).
At the same time, people in difficult financial circumstances would not have to put up with the degrading classification of “poor.”"
In fact, it's completely unclear to me after reading this whole damn essay why he is so strongly in opposition to the point where he wants people to stop discussing it altogether, other than it's not the favored solution of his team.
On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals.
On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options.
Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
You've missed the point.
The point is that the foundation of the basic income concept is that the income redistribution scheme works flawlessly and according to the people's expectations. This assumption is patently false, as the system is established and managed by people, particularly elected officials and the regime's apparatchiks, who have a long and plentiful resume of manipulating, distorting and corrupting the state to fit their own personal agendas.
I can tell you exactly what happened in my country's income redistribution scheme. It is supposed to be entirely independent of the state and self-managed. Yet' somehow the ruling regime managed to manipulate the system to finance golden parachutes to the nation's career politicians (golden pensions paid off to people who never contributed to the scheme) as well as forcing it as a cash cow to the state as a exceedingly cheap source of state loans.
And it is supposed to be a simple system where worker contributes 1/3 of their salary to finance pensions and unemployment benefits.
That's what these organizations made by people are used for, in reality, and reality always trumps fiction.
Now again, the fact that there is corruption in many countries and money is used wrongly simply means there might be initial or additional work be done, but it definitely does not mean it's inherently not possible, there are plenty of government with low corruption, too.
Finally, what's the alternative? Let the market work and private companies, which I highlighted have the exact same flaws as the government, possibly just on a smaller scale!?
Just putting our heads in the sand and saying this will never work is not a way forward, unless you think of course there's no problem in the first place.
Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects. Poverty inevitably leads to violence, drug abuse, disease, overpopulation, war, and other erratic behaviors.
How much more do we spend on bureaucracy in vain attempts to mitigate these resulting effects? Prevention is far more cost effective than maintenance in this case.
The NHS is also great value, costing us far less for universal healthcare than the US government spends on healthcare.
The NHS is also amazingly popular, and until the ideological austerity movement was pretty much getting better.
I'm not sure why so many people in the US think that government cannot run things effectively. The NHS is a great example. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Clearly.
I suppose that my previous comment's wording could be construed as assuming we couldexist in a post-scarcity economy. That was not intentional. However, universal basic income does not require a post-scarcity framework to be workable, and the claim that universal basic income will cause inflation to 'spiral out of control' is left unsupported.
Money is currently created out of nothing through the banking system, and the FED controls inflation just fine through various mechanisms e.g. setting interest rates. Basic income proposals can have similar inflation controlling mechanisms e.g. tie payouts to inflation rate or changes in tax rate. In any case inflatuon caused by basic income could be offset by increasing the fed interest rate which is currently near zero.
Dubious claim. Most serious proposals are largely revenue neutral and simply redistribute.
> and will require massive taxation to be sustainable.
Not anymore than already exists.
> Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
It requires no new infrastructure if given as a tax rebate. It also introduces no additional corruption than already exists via tax loopholes. Centralizing all debate and scrutiny over corruption in one location is a benefit of the proposal, not a problem.
Many (all?) libertarians lean left on a great many social issue and consider the social part of libertarianism as important if not more important than the right leaning economic part. I think the term "libertarian right" while not an incorrect term at face value -- there are in fact right leaning Libertarians just as some Democrats are further left than others -- is miss-leading and can potential lead to misconceptions about Libertarians as similar to Republicans. I for one share much more in common with the Democrats but I am very definitely a Libertarian.
I think many of us would prefer you just use the term Libertarian and leave off left or right.
Edit: or perhaps if you were in-deed referring to the conservative party, add some clarity and say "Republicans that lean Libertarian"
On the other hand, in my experience, libertarians are pretty far from being liberals, and even farther from being typical Democrats. Personally, I share even less with typical Democrats than with typical (non-Trump and non-Evangelical) Republicans. I do share a lot of social beliefs with people who consider themselves to be liberals first and foremost, and agree with them about some of this nation's greatest challenges. I've found typical Democrats to be against drug legalization and only with great hesitation have started supporting LGBT rights, when most libertarians were supporting gay rights 40 years ago (in the sense that gays rights mean that gays have the same rights as everyone else, because what people do in the privacy of their homes is not the government's business).
Anyway, I think it's fair to say that there's support for BI from two different parts, if not sides, of the political spectrum.
But fair point about there being left libertarians and right libertarians, I don't really disagree. I mean, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian, but is definitely "of the left" (and I happen to disagree with him on a lot of issues, yet share some of his core beliefs about the dangers of government and authoritarianism). I'll take more care in the future.
To be fair I think "The Libertarian Left" would also be miss-leading. We defy the left and right labels :)
By world standards, not to mention many past US standards, the two presidential candidates (and the current president) are clearly right-wingers.
Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.
However, in general the cause is the same but the approach is different. For example, just of those two causes should be handled by the courts (as a libertarian sees it at least) rather than through regulatory agencies.
To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work. They just disagree with the top down approach to solving that issue.
In certain narrow situations where there is an identifiable property right at issue (e.g. dumping waste on private land). But there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.
> To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work.
Libertarians generally believe that the level of safety in the workplace should be set by the market, rather than by a regulatory agency. I.e. if a workplace is known for being unsafe, it won't be able to hire employees (or will have to pay a premium for employees to take on the extra risk). Liberals in contrast believe that the government should impose a safety floor on all workplaces, irrespective of the market.
To me, this is where the libertarian philosophy loses its internal consistency. For two reasons:
1) There is no such thing as a closed system, so land use is fundamentally social
2) For the most part, all existing property deeds were obtained by force, not through the voluntary agreeing to contracts, so no one who holds a deed really has any kind of moral claim on it.
Libertarians have to fall back on some other political system (manifest destiny, kraterocracy, democrasy, etc) to resolve the land use question. But to me land use is the foundation of all property law and the fact that Libertarianism has nothing to say about it makes it largely useless as a foundational political system. It's a nice thing to think about, but it can't be relied on to answer basic questions.
Essentially this highlights the difference between your particular policy opinions and your enthusiasm for having a government enforce those policies on everyone.
I know that UBI, on paper, looks like it’s a good answer to many of the challenges listed at the end. But I don’t think that UBI, once put in place, would be as strong, politically, as other universal programs such as universal social insurance: => Round #1: new left-wing government enacts UBI with appropriate funding. => Round #2: left-wing government loses elections, new right-wing government decides to target UBI on the poor in order to master the costs. UBI becomes BI without the "U". => Round #3: the rich find that their taxes are too high and denounce the BI-claiming poor as welfare queens, contributing to the right-wing government winning reelection and weakening BI even more.
There are two kinds of universal benefits: the rich (and the middle class) all need universal health insurance (in case they have cancer), but they don’t really need UBI because they earn enough money from other sources.
So I’m not sure why, even if they’re supportive at the beginning, they would keep on supporting UBI under the inevitable ideological and financial pressure that comes with a polarized democratic society.
Considering this perspective, my understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance (which the US still lacks even with Obamacare, and which could benefit for the attention and design skills from the tech community).
As both US parties currently have significant trust issues with one another, I would say UBI is a complete non-starter.
I couldn't seem to find a clear definition of UBI in the article, which helps people discuss the concept as many people view possible UBI programs completely differently.
While I am in agreement that UBI is massively overhyped and not a true, large-scale solution to income inequality, I'm happy that it has gotten so much interest and might lead to productive conversations around tax reform.
2: Universal and free market oriented. You are not told how to spend that income and you can then use it to support small business/entrepreneurial endeavors.
In practice, my guess is that it wouldn't be long before UBI is converted a means-tested benefit, for both financial and political reasons.
As for advantage number 2, yes you're not told how to spend that income but chances are that income is far from enough to pay for proper healthcare / childcare / elderly care or well-located housing.
The history of the social state shows us that transferring money to people is not enough: you also have to supplement the market and correct its imperfections.
There has not been UBI so history tells you little. By supplement the market you mean
We saw that happen in many cases in the recent period of austerity, because scarcity of resources is a powerful argument to convince the rich, then the middle class, to renounce their benefits in favor of the poor.
As for "there has not been UBI" I disagree. Many supporters provide examples such as the Alaska dividend. There are many lessons to be drawn from many social policies in developed countries.
In France alone we had two BI-like programs which, for various reasons, underwent slow financial and political destruction: - the RMI/RSA, about which I wrote in the article - less known is the "régime des intermittents du spectacle", which works like a universal unemployment insurance for freelancers in the entertainment industry (and it costs so much money to the taxpayer that governments regularly try to kill it). It only survives because the entertainment industry is a powerful lobby in France.
The flaw here is that this would seem to apply to any form of social assistance. Why hasn't the same thing happened to social security?
The answer is that Round #2 doesn't make sense. You can't take someone who is making $60K/year + $10K UBI and take away the UBI without lowering their taxes unless you want them to burn you in effigy. But if all you propose to do is replace $10K in UBI with $10K in tax cuts for the same people, who is going to be the lobby in favor of that?
The dynamic you're describing is what happens to things like education assistance. Because people would rather have in $1 in cash money tax cuts than $1 in education vouchers. But the UBI is cash that spends just the same as the tax cut would.
It hasn't happened to Social Security because, if I'm not mistaken, the pension amount is proportional to what you earned during your career => hence the rich pay more but also receive more. Same with unemployment benefits.
This is actually the only way to make a universal monetary benefit politically sustainable. And UBI, with its fixed amount, doesn't match that criteria.
I think the reason that social security survives while welfare benefits continue to be slashed regularly is perfectly clear.
While I myself am a programmer and support basic income, I have talked with many people outside the technology world who are also in favor of such a system. YC is getting their hands dirty with their research project and Finland's government is most definitely aware of politics. The only way for us (US citizens) to get our hands dirty in politics when not voting is talking about these things.
> ... energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance ...
BI and health insurance, universal or not, solve very different issues. Both deserve attention and one doesn't preclude the other. I do think that a very important part of BI discussions is what programs it can replace, what it can supplement, and what it doesn't solve.
The fact that so many people talk about BI without leaving their job, raising funds, going on strike, founding unions, etc., is proof in my eyes that we're having an intellectual discussion, not waging a political battle.
The one precedent of authentic political action in the current context, the foundation of the Freelancers Union, was meant to fight for health coverage for freelancers, not a monetary benefit.
I don't exactly think that going on strike or leaving your job, serves as a good argument for UBI - quite the contrary. And no, the same cannot be said for worker rights or work similar issues.
I do think that unions have a great role to play in this, and that they could easily focus and do research on the effects on UBI, much like the YC project.
Like knots in tangled string. We need to fix the system one knot at a time. We might even need to cut out whole sections but there's not one simple solution for the whole problem.
It's interesting how many of the techies out there would laugh at the idea of replacing the internet with just computers and wires - what could be simpler. Yet according to many, we can replace a complicated system like welfare with a simple system like basic income. To me this points out lack of understanding and as you said, reluctance to get ones hands dirty.
Well, dumb pipes are in fact simpler and superior to the centralized systems of control and preferential treatment that telcos are constantly trying to impose.
Maybe BI won't work, and any money invested in it will be wasted. Maybe BI will work, and it will eventually solve many problems with today's Western societies.
Who are you to tell the rest of us we're not even allowed to try?
Is it your money being invested in the attempt?
Will it negatively impact you?
If we take your attitude, possible improvements will never be attempted, and therefore, nothing will ever improve.
>My understanding is that all the energy thrown in BI-related discussions is wasted while it could be invested in favor of universal health insurance for instance.
It's fantastic that you have another idea! Don't waste your energy nay-saying people who are trying something other than your idea, get to work making your idea happen!
Also I point out that real-life enactments such as the French RMI, even though they succeeded at providing critical resources to those in need, are under extraordinary financial and political pressure. That pressure explains why it's become so complex, ridden with adverse effects and hated by much of the political spectrum.
I'm fairly certain that basic income would suffer the same fate. Therefore I see it as a political dead end and a distraction from much-needed debates on critical social risks in the digital age.
Your opinion does not give you the right to stop others from voicing theirs, and working hard to achieve what they think is a worthwhile goal.
The fact you ignored that's what my comment is saying, and merely paraphrased your article makes me think you don't care about other people's opinions and ideas, which is a really, really great way to make people not care about yours.
I'm not really sure why an "old age and unemployment" security net is intrinsically more politically stable than a "basic income" social security net. You need some deal of political cleverness to implement both.
"Momentum; i.e. the green party's candidacy is far less realistic" says Alice. "Therefore, the democratic party deserves your green vote." I don't like winner-takes-all elections since it incentives a two-party system. But despite this current state, I'd still vote for the green candidate if I preferred it over the dem candidate. Because in the long term, it gives the dems an incentive to more closely align with the greens if they want improve their chance of success.
In this sense, the green vote wasn't a distraction, it was a message. The sentiment that incumbents feel entitled to third party votes and feel that third party votes are "wasted", I find baffling. I could argue that all votes are wasted, because nobody but me voted for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The only interpretation under which others' votes could be said to be "a distraction" rather than "political input" is if one believed in the objective superiority of their own beliefs.
I wonder if you would change your tune if (hypothetically) UBI one day gained more momentum than Universal Health Care. But in your ideal world, this could never happen. Because all reasonable people would expend effort only into the coalition with the most momentum, which A) happens to be Universal Health Care ATM and B) will only ever be Universal Health Care in the future since the positive feedback loop never breaks.
I happen to think it's the greatest challenge to be tackled by civic tech startups...
See this older story https://salon.thefamily.co/software-eating-politics-the-case...
So you believe UHC is better than UBI. All good. But to end the debate on UBI because it subtracts from a related discussion is ridiculous. I read the link, and I recognize that political campaigns require large expenditures. I also believe the market place of ideas can accomidate both discussions.
By calling UBI a "distraction", you are implying it'd be more convenient if the UBI discussion didn't exist because it's more convenient than letting the UBI and UHC compete on a their merits. It signals that it is inconceivable to you that UBI might in fact be the better idea, and that you'd bet the farm on UHC's superiority.
Sam Altman: "Let's perform a UBI experiment and see how it goes."
Nicolas Colins: "I'm a historian. I already know the outcome. The experiment is a waste of time and money."
Okay bud.
- there have been a lot of large-scale BI policy experiments in the past in many countries, and none turned out so well on the long term. Yes it's true that technology changes many things, but I think it should be exploited primarily to improve existing benefits (considering the criticality of healthcare and housing, two major factors of both economic insecurity and inequalities);
- I think a healthcare single-payer or public option experiment would be more impactful, because this is what is currently at stake in Congress, the Supreme Court and the coming presidential election + it's important to win many small victories in the present rather than a hypothetical large one in a distant future (any union leader would agree). Finish the job on healthcare, and you'll discover that it becomes easier to advance the cause of UBI.
I guess you're more of a communist and I'm more of a social-traitor ;-)
This suggests you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone to UBI. Is this actually your opinion? Because it doesn't reflect the vibe I got in your article. If I understand your article correctly, you believe
A) UBI is inherently fragile.
B) Conservative lobbyists will cause UBI to decay into something ugly.
C) UHC is more resilient.
D) Therefore UHC is better.
E) And France proves it.
But your comments upthread suggest you believe UHC is superior because it's easier to implement given its comfortable position within the Overton-Window. The Overton-Window Argument says it may become feasible in the future, while the Fragility Argument says it will never become feasible.
Frankly, I suspect the article is a Motte & Bailey. Maybe your real issue with UBI is that it will take too long to campaign for. I.e. you want your marshmallow sooner rather than later. Which is reasonable. But understand that it's another discussion entirely and was not clear to me from the article.
The more charitable interpretation is that you believe UBI's fragility is due to its immaturity. And that UHC will grant us experience. Okay. But if so, this was not clear to me from your article. And it would contradict your position that UBI experiments are a waste.
What I meant is that if you care for economic security and lesser inequalities, then you have to fight for the whole liberal agenda (improving the coverage of all risks), not just one issue, otherwise the bad guys win this time, and the next, and the next.
I you think UBI's worth fighting (I don't), your only chance to succeed is in the context of advancing that liberal agenda in its entirety over the long term.
And right now, with Obama's legacy and Trump on the verge of winning, the main social front is social health insurance. Sadly I don't hear many tech people on that issue (for hypothetical reasons laid out in the article) and I reckon the whole UBI discussion has a responsibility in that deafening silence.
How convenient for you. The reason why you believe UHC is a useful stepping stone is probably because making UHC a reality will pull UBI within the Overton Window. But perhaps there are other ways to improve UBI's legitimacy. Like... discussing ramifications. Or performing an experiment.
Allow me to reiterate: "Voters' power over a coalition varies directly with the voters' volatility." Once a vote is pledged, the voter's negotiating leverage is lost. It's like haggling. If a potential buyer says "Oh what a nice sweater", the sweater's price is mysteriously doubles. People learn not to say things like that, because they don't want to waste their money.
Agglomeration is one tactic at one's disposal. Walking away is another. Maybe that sounds weird. Because as far as you know, the only force at work in politics is economies of scale. "Join us! Resistance is futile!" True, the power of a coalition (over other coalitions) is proportional to its size. But it comes at the cost of the voters' power over its residing coalition. By analogy. A heavier motorcycle is more powerful. But a lighter motorcycle has better handling. Meditation: why do states/provinces/municipalities exist if the federal government has stronger economies of scale?
UBI proponents should pledge their allegiance to liberals? Wouldn't that be convenient for you. Oops, the price just doubled. Question: how does a store convince a potential customer to part with their money? The store courts them with something of value. And how does a liberal convince a UBI proponent to part with their vote? "Your idea is dumb but mine is better. So buy into mine instead. Whoah, no need to compare -- trust me I'm a professional. Now shut up and give me your vote. By the way, your vote is worthless so you should totally give it to me." The pitch didn't start out bad, but things get sketchy fast. You're essentially trying to conscript (rather than entice) mercenaries into your coalition when you're not in a position to do so.
That being said, what I suggest is not throwing away the UBI concept for the greater good. Mostly I regret the lack of participation in the discussion over social risks and economic security in general, which I don't think can be reduced to UBI and the problems it (supposedly) solves.
For lack of that participation, UBI ends up resembling a solution looking for a problem (a very bad starting point as you know if you're in the startup world). And those who support it so enthusiastically look like they're single-issue voters.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-unethical-to-be-a-single-issue-v...
Workers engaged in the labor movement didn't fight for social insurance because it was a good idea. Rather they fought for it because some of them felt ill and couldn't afford proper care and then they died in misery.
Another way to put it: if I was aiming at building a giant tech company with a mission to provide economic security, I wouldn't start by promoting UBI but rather by solving my future customers' most pressing social problems—and those are (surprise) unaffordable housing and lack of health insurance, two issues that UBI doesn't address (or am I missing something?).
Maybe 10 years later, when you serve 1.7 billion users with a very large pool of risks, sophisticated financial tools and advanced machine learning, you'll end up with something vaguely resembling UBI. But UBI as a starting point seems like a failed startup to me.
Do something people want :-)
I am from Canada, so that is the data I am most familiar with. The employment rate has almost never been higher (2008 was the highest), the unemployment rate has almost never been lower (2008 was the lowest). The US housing crash did take some toll on the Canadian economy as did the more recent fall in oil prices, but we're still looking far better than the historic norms when it comes to job numbers.
At the same time, I remember in the mid-1980s there was widespread media panic about how the robots starting to become common in manufacturing were going to eliminate all the jobs. A rise in employment, and decline in unemployment is exactly the opposite of what I would have expected in the following 30 years based on the panic at the time. The claims being made today are exactly the same as they were 30 years ago.
When was the last time we saw the most common job on the brink of being wiped out? Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
Edit: [1] questions the claim that trucking in the most common job by state. There's still a lot of drivers out there though!
[1]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...
A couple of hundred years ago. And not just the most common job, but the job that was employing 90% of the labour force at the time. For comparison, transport truck driver accounts for just 1.5% of the labour force in Canada.
> Even if tech continues to grow and add jobs, will it surpass the loss from the trucking and transportation industry?
Yes. I struggle to believe we've reached the pinnacle of human achievement. Do you think the last time we went through this that people were sitting around thinking that the internet will provide jobs in the future? I'll be amazed if they even grasped that an internet could be possible. The jobs that will need to be done are things we cannot even dream of right now. If we could dream of them, we'd already be doing it.
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of valuable work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all.
Unemployment is a phenomenon fabricated by the ruling class for social control. As long as people are afraid of becoming unemployed, they'll stay in an exploitive job.
It's not as if there is some kind of fundamental limit on productivity. We've been trying to finish the work for a thousand years, and yet each year we keep finding more!
Not if I have anything to do it! Luckily not everyone is a defeatist.
First principles analysis shows there is plenty of work to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it all. We could probably erase global unemployment by adding mental health care jobs alone.
Funny how the article zeroes in on this as a criticism of basic income, even though it describes the biggest way France's system is totally different from what basic income advocates are talking about.
This is exactly the reason I want basic income. I want nobody to feel like someone else is cheating the system. I hear a bunch of people (even old people who are on medicare and social security!) who will talk trash about "welfare queens".
It is not like we can't afford it. There will be short term pain, of course but I think we will have greater solidarity. This is good for the 0.01% as well because if you are doing really well, you want to keep the ship steady. (Well to be cynical, you could try to keep everyone else fighting amongst themselves but any arsonist will tell you that a fire once started won't spare the people who started it.)
There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. You remove the incentive to grow and guess what happens next.
Or if you want to really start thinking hard, maybe you should ask yourself what happens when everybody has X in money and businesses raise their prices accordingly?
I wanted to congratulate you on your enduring politeness and civility while enduring exactly the opposite. I thank you for your tone and your contribution. While I may not agree with you, I applaud the manner in which you communicate.
It's people like you that really make HN a different place.
When kids are raised without the persistent threat of not surviving? They'll stand a better chance of flourishing and reaching their full potential, like many of us here on HN who have an affluent background.
Having to contribute to society by keeping a job, and using the income of said job to finance your cost of living is far from being a life-risking enterprise.
You're trying to avoid the point by inventing absurd emotional examples.
That's your assumption, and a baseless one at that.
Back in reality, we're experiencing unprecedented economic development which includes the inception of a whole new economic sector.
You're essentially complaining that buggy whip artisans have less job opportunities in a world that's creating whole new jobs such as forum moderators, social media experts, and data scientists.
Today's economy even creates jobs playing video games, surfing, and talking about gourmet food.
The world's most developed economies are enjoying structural unemployment rates.
And you're here talking about "less job opportunities over time".
You need to separate facts from fiction, including your own baseless beliefs.
There is also homeostasis. Perpetual growth is cancer.
What happens when kids know they don't have to steal or rob to survive?
What happens when kids know living for the good cause will never starve them to death?
What happens when kids know they can pursue their best interest without worrying about being starved?
Can you point out exactly how many people starved to death in any western country? Because I vividly remember that there isn't any universal basic income program in effect, and somehow people manage to feed themselves just fine.
You can't expect to be taken seriously if all you can come up with are absurd emotional works of fiction.
http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/12/teens-americ...
Have you looked at the US Economy lately?
(Jan 2016) Why 2016 keeps getting uglier for US economy - http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/29/why-2016-keeps-getting-uglier...
(April 2016) Americans' confidence in economy at 2016 low - http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/economy/us-economic-con...
(June 2016) The next recession is already here—and there isn't much the Fed can do - http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/21/the-next-recession-is-already...
I'm all for a basic income for lower income families, but I'm not sure how routinely volatile our economy is, we really afford this long term. What happens when you put something like this in place, and then can't afford it? There's a long list of government programs already awash in waste and mismanagement. I'm not sure another program (which would have to take the place of other programs - WIC, TEFAP, HUD, etc) is really going to solve the problem.
Universal basic income is a reform that satisfies both the left and right. My conservative brethren are totally on board. Not perfect, but good enough, and better than what we have now.
Economists will undoubtedly turn up their noses when not so well learned people like me start explaining our position because it is clearly too stupid for them. If we have $100 available and three people: one who doesn't need any money, one who needs $20, and one who needs $50 to survive, clearly it is best to give nothing to the first person, #20 to the second person, and $50 to the third person. Look, we were economically efficient and now $30 can go towards maintaining the system! What I propose is that the $100 should be divided more like $33 each with just $1 going towards maintaining the project itself.
This came up before when talking about college education and whether the government should subsidize college education for the wealthy. My answer is yes! Of course, the government should pay for college for everyone, even if that person is Bill Gates' son. Similarly, should the government pay for Bill Gates' health care expenses under a single payer universal health care system? I say again Yes! We should not discriminate against the wealthy. Sure, it might result is less care for the poor but at the end of the day, I think it is better for everyone.
If it's just moving some bits into everyone's account monthly, entire layers of bureacracy, with their buildings, staff, forms, and fraud checking departments, can be removed. It should make it remarkably cheap to run, comparatively.
Make it lower income only and you have to bring all that back.
You're assuming that it would be possible to simply eliminate government and state services and institutions, both politically and practically.
Instead, everyone working within an organization works to serve their own personal interests. This means that it's practically impossible for an elected official to eliminate all this state cruft, as every single person within the organization would fight tooth and nail to sabotage the project.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/28/government-p...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/even-in-an-era-of-bu...
I only read through about half of the article, but I didn't really see any real reasons why basic income would be bad. Most of the arguments boiled down to "That's not how we do things now". I ended up coming away from this article with more faith in the potential for basic income than I did going into it as none of these arguments were very compelling.
As a regular reader of mondaynote.com (and so therefore an expert), I have the impression that France has many other obstacles to entrepreneurship. Like their labor laws.
It seems to me that universal basic income, alongside universal health care and other reforms, would greatly reduce the need for stultifying labor laws. More simply, employers could hire and fire as needed.
This is a major disincentive of work.
However, the work that will not be done by those people who can do it but don't want to will still need to be done. The solution will then be to hire people at higher wages.
But since these higher wages are not a result of increased productivity, the employers won't be able to sell more. The result is that prices will go up, generating price inflation. And we know inflation is the worst of all taxes, as it affects the poorest the most.
In the long run, the money received via BI won't be able to sustain the "comfortable living" that it was supposed to.
Child care? Elder care? Volunteering?
Consider this scenario: you're taking care of you elders and you need to go out and buy some medicine. But the drugstores have all closed, since nobody wants to work there anymore (why would they? They're at home taking care of their elders too). Do you think this is not a realistic scenario in the long run? Why not?
Sure, above a certain level people's taxes would go up, so they pay back some of their basic income as tax. But that wouldn't kick in until people are earning rather more than $1200 a month.
This also has the inflationary consequences that I mentioned in another comment: you're effectively increasing wages without increasing productivity. This will cause prices to rise because employers will face higher taxes so that the state can support basic income, and demand will rise because people will have more money.
This will cause inflation, and in the long run purchase power will not increase, while society will be worse off with less people doing productive work.
Sure, some people won't work. But most of those would be people who either would have a hard time finding work, or who have some specific other thing they'd rather be doing.
You are also confusing money with wealth. Basic income may give people more of the first, but its inflationary nature does nothing for the second.
> So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. If you know politics, you can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, politics is not Silicon Valley’s strong suit.
Then, in the following decades, many people, notably on the right, started to hate it and, as a result, new, conservative rules made it more difficult to claim the benefit.
(Just like, for instance, Republican legislatures all around the US make it more complicated to vote, not because it's a necessary procedural evil, but because it's in the political interest of the Republican party.)
I think that the same fate awaits UBI if it were to be enacted (which I doubt, but that's another story).
As an example: see how quickly the Democrats lost control of both the houses once Obamacare was passed. And see how the Republicans are continuously trying to kill Obamacare.
I didn't vote for Blair, or support many of his policies, but his governance utterly transformed the NHS for the better. It was adequately funded for the first time in a couple of decades, at the time of this speech, and they were now searching for ways to measurably improve care, especially in comparatively neglected areas such as mental health.
Quality goes down when governments start bringing political ideology to the fore - eg "we must bring the efficiency of the market to the NHS" neatly ignores the fact the NHS is actually pretty damn efficient, and is one of the strongest buyers on the planet getting significantly better pricing from all the drug companies. Adding managers and market aspects actually worsened this.
The French example of basic income isn't. It's a means tested benefit which is utterly incomparable to UBI.
I'm starting to doubt everything he's written by this point.
Read the article again. His point is that the RMI (RSA) is what they ended up with, even though they wanted (started with) something similar to UBI.
The RSA was a reform intended to "smooth the edges". While you would lose you're RMI as soon as you start working, now you can keep part of the RSA during a transition period.
But the problem with RSA is that it's really complex and most people still don't get it. And it's a lot of paperware for a relatively small amount of money.
I think France is actually one of the best place to start a real UBI scheme. Our system is close to UBI but probably the worst implementation possible, with a lot of edge cases.
This proposal details a complete reform of our tax system around a UBI: http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09...
What's interesting is the underlying philosophy: instead of providing citizens with money, the New Labour tried to rebuild the best system possible for rich and poor alike. A UBI is unable to achieve that goal in healthcare.
As for the French example: I agree it isn't the theoretical concept of basic income (and thought I wrote so). Rather my point is that this is how basic income would end up after 1 or 2 electoral rounds.
I don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely.
I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.
People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere.
The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done"
It's never going to work that way.
Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again.
Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others?
The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has?
Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.
Sure, there will continue to be trade, but the need/desire to trade will be reduced.
To look at how/why, you need to look at decentralised production. Technologies like 3D printers promise to be able to produce many of the products we currently trade for, and this goes beyond the plastic trinkets people currently associate with 3D printers (there are already 3D printer devices in the fields of clothing, food, medicine, heavy machinery, etc...). So whilst there will be trade for the raw materials, why would you pay someone else to make something for you when you have access to a machine to do it for you (note that I said access, not ownership, I don't expect everyone will own a device that can create a car, for example)? It makes sense for people to cut out the middle man when the end result is just as good as they could've gotten by paying a premium.
There will still be people wishing to trade for things they can't get for low cost locally, but there will be a lot of industries disrupted by the ability of people to produce their own consumer goods.
I've heard it said that, "even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."
Unfortunately virtual scarcity will persist for some time. This is because the economic system isn't organized enough to distribute all resources fairly and efficiently. As jobs decline (due to increased automation and export), the old way of distributing resources fairly fails, and virtual scarcity will increase.
UBI seems like it can fill that gap but I worry that it's an overly simplistic solution. It seems like it can cause runaway inflation without a counter-balance. What prevents rent/food/gas prices from simply going up?
That's an incomplete statement, because it doesn't quantify the effect. Will the effect be zero, or will BI be priced-in (higher prices, lower present-value of BI)?
US college tuition and housing prices increased dramatically, because of decreased consumer price discrimination driven by low-barrier loans.
If [over]population is a factor, then "post-scarcity" is fiction.
This makes me think BI advocates are quietly assuming constraints such as "we'll discourage reproduction somehow"--while constantly mentioning how BI will be free of constraints.
By the way, the issue is not as much population growth as high consumption. What is worse, more people living on basic income or the billions in China and India aspiring to an American middle class lifestyle?
So absence of scarcity will totally be a thing if everything just goes according to plan. Got it.
Your sarcasm does not contribute to this discussion.
The real false assumption here is that increased standard of living leads to overpopulation. The data indicates the opposite is true.
Reproduction is a survival mechanism. Threaten an organisms survival, and that mechanism is triggered.
Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system.
If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes.
> Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.
Here's a very simple example. We can make a very strong argument that we've reached a very high mark on safety. We live in a society that's safer now than ever before. Yet we are constantly scared that the world will come to an end. Politicians and the media have made sure we have something to be scared of. Do all people feel safe? No, yet by all statistics we live in a very safe society.
Another one, internet access. Forty years ago, if anyone even mentioned that it needs to be a basic need they would have been laugh at with no mercy. Today, it's not such a ridiculous thought.
You say these are really wants. Yes to some but wants are so strong to some(many) that they become basic needs. How many times have you heard some one say,"I need my coffee." Really, coffee is a need?
Given this what does post-scarcity really mean?
We can define a set of basic needs now but over time they will change and they will grow.
We had to hit each other with sharp bits of metal for a long time. We don't have to do that anymore. Do we notice or not?
Bucky Fuller pointed out that, in terms of our technical ability, post-scarcity arrived in the seventies. We can call it with the invention of the microprocessor. (We don't need to postulate fusion, as there is already a serviceable fusion reactor available nearby: it's that thing in the sky that burns your eyes when you look at it.)
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasis: We are already in a post-scarcity condition.
Put another way, all our problems now are psychological. Which is kind of what you were saying, or not?
"So enough already. Grow up now, study history..."
Regardless of the actual content of the article, I found the style of so many unnecessary ad hominim attacks offputing.
The actual content of the article isn't really backed up. It mostly seems to say that engineers are seduced by the elegance of Basic Income and that they should really just focus on making the existing social system have less friction. Not a bad opinion, just not really in line with the many statements that "Basic Income won't work".
I didn't write that basic income won't work as a solution designed to fix a problem. My point is that I don't see a political path to enacting it, and even though it was enacted, I don't see how it could survive the next round of election.
So yes maybe it's time to focus on more winnable fights such as implementing universal health insurance.
https://medium.com/@Nicolas_Colin/thanks-for-all-the-respons...
Yes, for two reasons. First, the meaning of the label 'Silicon Valley' is unclear, but whatever it means, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized. Doing that is usually just a rhetorical device, and that dilutes arguments.
Second, the people I know in Silicon Valley are acutely interested in those things, so I'd say your claim is way off base.
As for the second argument, I trust there is much progress in terms of tackling politics and history in SV, but many sources contributed to forming my opinion:
- In "Googled" (published in 2004), Ken Auletta of the "New Yorker" explains in great detail how clueless Google initially was in dealing with Washington, DC., a trait he claims can be linked to the naïveté of engineers who see the world as a collection of "problems" all waiting for a "solution". As an engineer myself, I really recognize that engineering bias. Yet I agree the engineering culture may be stronger at Google than at other tech companies. But it's still dominant in the tech industry.
- In his "Secret History of Silicon Valley" conference, Steve Blank constantly jokes about the fact that people in Silicon Valley are ignorant of history, to the point where even students at Stanford University don't have a clue about who was Frederick Terman.
- More recently, another "New Yorker" article told the story of Mark Zuckerberg "getting an education" in his failed attempt to transform the education system in the state of New Jersey—see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
-In Europe most of us are appalled at how clumsy SV-based tech companies are when dealing with local governments and adapting to the various cultures, institutions, and special interests => hence the many problems that Uber, Airbnb, Google, and others have here in Europe on the regulatory front (Apple being the latest to suffer that fate with the infamous €14B European tax bill).
Maybe it's a false impression. Or maybe in Silicon Valley those who are genuinely interested in geography, history, and politics are not in the executive seats and so far fail to make a difference.
But I can assure you that the tech industry's passion with basic income has a direct consequence on the ground: when you try to open up the discussion about the future of social policy, the tech people's response is always: "nevermind those complex policies from the past, basic income will solve everything". Ugh.
In most cases the reason is that they read the books by Peter Thiel and others, they read the blogposts by American Entrepreneurs and VCs, they believe the hype around basic income, and, I'm sorry to say, I think they don't have a clue about what it takes to build inclusive and sustainable social institutions.
I can't wait for regulatory hacking to join the field of social policy. Many people will convert to social realpolitik at that point :-)
Entrepreneurship is at about 14% working age adults in the US (1). I would say that the number of people who would be entrepreneurs is higher, but limited by risk. Entrepreneurship is very high risk. Reducing that risk would enable more people to become entrepreneurs (a good thing). Removing the risk that being an entrepreneur will make you loose the shirt off your back, will allow more people to start companies.
It is not limited to entrepreneurship. How many more amazing painters would there be? Writers? How much more creative common good would there be in the world if basic needs (via UBI) was taken care of?
None of the current social risk insurance, are directly reducing this loss to us all.
(1) http://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/us-entrepreneurship-reache...
I get your point about painters and writers. But my guess is that working on affordable housing would do more good on that front—and would be more sustainable politically.
You can read this convincing article by Sarah Kendzior: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-c...
Should I even bother to continue reading after that? After all, what we actually know is that technology creates jobs, like the ones that I and a large number of people I know have had.
For an alternative view, I like the horses example in this video...
Technology destroys some jobs and it creates others, but those new jobs are numerous enough only if we put in place the right institutions (sustainable and inclusive). We're not there yet (and I don't see UBI as one of those).
This is an older article about job destruction and job creation: https://salon.thefamily.co/another-100-days-a-digital-new-de...
I struggled with this example on the RMI/RSA in France.
>So you could argue that the “RMI/RSA” is basic income, except maybe for the paperware frictions that it inflicts on those who are eligible and that could be removed thanks to technology. Accordingly, those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers.
The author holds this example up as why UBI might fail. But the reasons listed why the RMI/RSA failed are all either driving forces for UBI or solved by UBI.
1) RMI/RSA is complicated to administer due to high burden of proof for the individual to demonstrate no income. UBI solves this by allowing everyone to have an income, not just those without a salary.
2) RMI/RSA has adverse economic effects because it disincentivizes people to seek jobs. Part of why people are thinking UBI could be a good idea is there will be fewer jobs in the future and so disincentivization to look for a job for a subset of the population is partially a good thing.
3) RMI/RSA is politically difficult. That's why people involved in the UBI movement are running private, small scale experiments. They want to prove/disprove their hypotheses to provide evidence in favor of or against UBI.
The fact is that the only reason we endure a job day after day is that we need to get paid to pay for our needs and wants. We get up everyday and race to work not because we owe someone a favor or because we love our work but because if we don't we'll get fired and have to deal with the consequences.
I would hate to live in a society where people show up to work at will. Think about it. The fireman, or name your specialist, decided not to show up today. Yikes!
I can see why the idea is attractive but money is what makes the world go around. Cliche but very true! If we decide that everyone can get it and not have to work for it, we are asking for a society that loses a prime motivator to get people moving towards a career and even to get out of the house.
The Utopian idea that if we don't have to work we'll be free to create a wonderful world. Is wishful thinking. All we have to do is look at what a group of rich young adults do when all their needs are filled. They become self absorbed and look to fill their own selfish wants. How many of them become nurses or doctors? Yes, rich is an extreme way to look at it, it's not "basic income" but it gives a clue to what happens when people lose a basic motivator.
We are scared that technology will suck up all the jobs but if we don't have people thinking about how to get people jobs and keep them busy we are in real trouble. Basic Income does not help in the long run.
Also it will never be enough. Basic needs will be fulfilled but people will always want more. One example that comes to mind is the introduction of the white phone by Apple. Apple introduced it and some people were falling over each other to get it. Not because it was white but because they could own something that others wanted. Human wants are infinite. Basic income will only create a never ending spiral that will keep people unhappy because they can't get what they want.
Money is a societal tool that's used to keep society fed and safe but it has to be used correctly. Giving it away, while attractive, is not the answer.
I agree with this, and it negates your first point. Basic income is not intended to be something that you'd want to live on by default; it's just protection against hunger and homelessness. Almost everyone will want more, and they'll be unambiguously better off by increasing their earnings (unlike today: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-m...).
The author also mention the fight for Obamacare as more pragmatic. I think his argument are mainly targeted at the US were universal services are lacking (or perceived as lacking).
A Basic Income program is unrepealable after enough time(say 20 years) has passed. People are terrible at making decisions: They don't save money, they run up their credit cards, they don't invest. A BI program limits the damage that their bad decisions can cause.
Even $800/month would wildly distort decision making. I don't think that a lot of people who've been receiving it their whole life are going to be in a position to function independently if you try to repeal it. There are going to be too many single mothers crying "How will I make my rent?" if you take it away. Even if they otherwise would've managed without it.
A law that's a one-way ratchet requires extraordinary evidence before you even consider it. It doesn't matter if it has a positive expected value, or the models say it will probably work; the risk that it won't deliver on its promises is too high, and we'll be stuck with it forever.
Argument 1 looks at BI on a practical level and asks questions such as: Is BI feasible? Will it ever be feasible? Who should administer it? What would it mean for the economy?
Argument 2 deals with BI more on a social level and can even be modeled as a thought experiment: What would people do if they had basic income? Would it remove the incentive to work? Would it reduce inequality? Would it offer more freedom to recipients or less?
Many people (including the author of this article) make grand claims like "It's obvious that it'll fail"; "It's obvious that people will stop being productive members of society if they have BI"; "It's obvious that it's not feasible".
I think that the most persuasive argument, and one advocated by the YCombinator experiment, is "We need more data". This holds true especially for argument 2 (how will people react if they received BI). Argument 1 for me is less interesting, but my rudimentary understanding of economics and politics is enough for me to be sure that anyone who declares a black-and-white position on the idea probably needs to spend some more time thinking and reading about it.
No matter whether you are for or against BI, you should be happy that these experiments are being done. If you're against it, they will provide evidence that you are right and then people can "Just stop talking about it already". That's not going to happen because you wrote an overly long rant against it. If you are for BI, such experiments might confirm your hypotheses that BI will be beneficial to recipients and will allow us to move more towards argument 1 (is BI feasible? where will the money come from?).
Oh there will be many jobs left but they will all require a certain level of education, let's call that university degree for the sake of simplicity. Also people will need to have some degree of mental capacity to attain this level. It is pretty much natural to presume not everyone will have this mental capacity. Already this is showing everywhere. What will society do with those who have the physical capability but not the mental to work? BI is one of the answers. It may not be the best answer but do have a better one? We need an answer right effin' now because long range trucking will be automated away Real Soon Now(TM) and that's (at least in Canada) is one of the most populated occupation and society level answers are never reached quick.
The idea is basically just creating even more "stimulus" money, but distributing it just a little further from the centralized bankster cronies. Don't doubt for a second that they will still end up collecting it as rents on financialized assets (chiefly housing).
Our fundamental economic problem is being in a Keynesian death spiral - now that production has gotten insanely efficient, the incentives that were forcing people to overwork are now battering those who can't find work. Turning up the treadmill even faster yet will not get us out of it!
Right now SF is not even capable to host 450 homeless arriving every year. What would you do if that number of people arrived every day or every hour?
I don't think immigration laws would permit that. For one, you couldn't "just move" to the US like that.
Within the EU it could become an interesting problem if some countries did this and others didn't. I suspect that if anyone were to try this there'll be some limitations at first, like you have to have citizenship, or prove legal residency for longer than "since the past few minutes".
Anyway, by definition Basic Income is unconditional. Anyone who applies should get it.
Doesn't have to be. Some versions are, some aren't. Given we are talking about a system that does not exist, not sure why you say it is one thing or the other. Some versions give to minors, some do not. Some only give to citizens in good standing (no felons). Conditions can exist and should exist in my opinion.
This means, there's at least one condition: only humans can apply.
For example, I knew a vet in college who came very close to dropping out, where a few hundred bucks the safety net never knew he needed made all the difference. I can only imagine what percent of their lifetime writeoffs come from having these condescending "shutup, we know what you need" safety net systems.
>> "The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals."
The only reason this is a problem is political. We have the NHS but we also have private options - get rid of those. Then there would be more staff available for the NHS, a huge some of money would not be wasted on locum staff, and therefore more money would be available to the NHS. Some of that could be used for funding and some could be used to pay staff a fairer wage. The fiscal austerity argument is nonsense. We have plenty of money - it's just spent poorly. We don't need to spend £30bn on nuclear missiles we'll never use (and if we ever do need to use them it'll be too late anyway). We don't need to spend £30-40bn on the military. Of course defunding these things is political suicide but you can't tell me we can't afford decent healthcare when we're wasting money on missiles we don't need, a huge military we don't need, and locum staff which shouldn't be a thing in the first place when you have a public health care system.
Edit: To clarify this as it seems like a very unpopular opinion around these parts: a public system isn't going to work in a free/competitive market. I think we need to either go all in on a public system or all in on a private system. When you land somewhere in the middle it just doesn't work.
"It is broadly true that the more people who benefit from a government program, the more popular the program usually is. Social insurance programs that benefit the middle-class and the poor are usually politically durable.
American social security, for example, is less politically vulnerable than food stamps, in part because food stamps will never benefit most middle-class people. UBI, however, is more like social security than it is like food stamps. The middle-class may not need UBI, but UBI would still benefit them.
A comparable case is the status of single-payer health insurance programs in countries that have them. Most middle-class and rich people in these countries don’t need single payer healthcare — nearly all of them would have employer coverage if single payer didn’t exist. And yet there is broad support across classes for single-payer in these countries, in part because it (like UBI) benefits the middle-class. Universal healthcare is in these countries what conservatives would malign as “a sacred cow”.
None of this is to say that UBI would be politically invulnerable. Even the most durable social insurance programs are often put at risk.
[...]
But Colin appears to think UBI would inevitably become means-tested to only benefit the poor. Financial pressures, he says, would cause voters to limit the program. But Colin doesn’t make it clear why middle-class voters would react in this way, stripping themselves of a direct cash benefit. This is certainly not typical voter behaviour, and I am skeptical that a popular turn against UBI is inevitable or likely."
so your supposed to replace: housing assistance, social security, medcaid, medicare, tuition assistance,food assistance, among others with $497/mo. Also, a strong incentive to have children without a job.
Now you could not give it to children but they seem like the neediest group of people to give it to.
Now you could leave out medicare and social security but now your left with 615B / 272M = $188/mo but, why bother?
Read as "continue to serve the oligarchs who pretend to care, pandering their endless bullshit solutions that serve only their own interests".
Nicolas Colin eat your own.
If UBI were to make more sense than whatever welfare maze we currently have then why not switch? Having a job or means to support yourself is not a guarantee these days, not everyone is as lucky.
(I wrote the Medium article)
he's right when pointing at lack of a political argument. But form me it's quite clear. The argument is : redistribution. I know it's a simplistic left-wing argument but wealth redistribution is what basic income is. And unfortunately it's way too simple. I'd prefer a complex system because it offers many places for negotiating redistribution.
TL/DR:
> Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity. But in fact it is impossible to implement; it’s also politically suicidal; nobody’s ready to die for it; and even if it existed, it would probably trigger extraordinary political tension and the highest level of inequality in modern Western history.
Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.
Likewise, the author's arguments for social welfare are bullshit:
>There are two reasons why those four risks call for social state intervention. The first is their high criticality. A risk is critical if it is highly probable: for instance, most of us are bound to get old (dying young, fortunately, remains a small probability). A risk is also critical if, however improbable, it can have a devastating impact on your life: having cancer can ruin you if you don’t have health insurance; losing your job can plunge you into a devastating spiral towards poverty, etc. By definition, criticality is probability times impact.
That does not explain why we have to resort to state intervention.
>The other reason why these risks are not well-covered on the insurance market is that they are all affected by what economists call market imperfections. Moral hazard, a well-known imperfection, “occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks”: it plays a key role when it comes to covering the unemployment risk.
This does not explain why we need state intervention. It sounds like market insurance doesn't want to cover these things for sound economic reasons, so he wants the government to cover it instead (even though it faces all of the same micro-economic problems, like moral hazard).
>Another frequent imperfection on insurance markets is adverse selection: if given the choice, an insurer will refuse to cover those who present signs of a high level of risk, thus providing insurance only to those who eventually don’t need it.
False. An insurer will cover a person who pays a premium that accounts for the risk.
This has the economically necessary effect of encouraging people to get insurance before they get sick and need it.
If that's what you believe then any tax would meet the criteria and you would have to consider almost every government in the world authoritarian. Is that the case?
>> "replace all taxes with user fees for use of government services and assets (like roads)"
I'm guessing with this we would also have to drastically reduce the number of services the government is providing? For example there will be certain services that they few people use but cost a lot to provide so if we aren't all contributing they can't continue to offer them.
As for a split rate tax I hadn't heard of it before but after a quick glance it looks interesting.
However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
>However I don't understand how you can think tax on trade is authoritarian yet other tax forms aren't.
Land, and to a lesser extent the property that's built on it, can more justifiably be taxed, because an individual has less of a natural right of ownership over it.
This is due to land being a natural resource, that derives almost all of its value from its natural form, rather than the value the party that appropriated it added to it.
Having a country where people fall, through no fault of their own (unless you count their genetics), to such an extent that they live in tents and sewers is enough indication that there's inadequate state protection.
Like something the Sparrows in GoT would justify.
>but if most people want BI then it would be authoritarian to not give it to them in a democracy.
That's not how authoritarian is defined. The majority have no right to violate the right of the minority. More to the point, I'm arguing that we should try to change the minds of the majority, because the majority held viewpoint is authoritarian.
>I also don't understand the distinction for private trade, in that without a functioning government to support a marketplace, such trade would not exist.
Private trade refers to trade amongst exclusively private entities, as opposed to trade amongst several entities, one or more of which are public (government).
Your speculation that private trade wouldn't exist without services rendered by government, even if it were accurate, would not disqualify trade amongst private parties as private.
How do you pay for military, police, courts and all other aspects of a developed state?
If taxes are ok to pay for those, why not a UBI that tries to improve on what's currently done? It won't be perfect, nothing human is.
Money introduces the question of "how do you ensure that people want your currency?" A problem Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies or blockchain currencies) face.
In the case of dollars specifically, demand is derived from:
1. The obligation to pay US taxes in dollars.
2. The status of the dollar as the international reserve currency.
3. The status of the dollar as the currency for all petroleum commerce.
(Consider what would have happened to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia/USSR, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, had their national currencies been the basis of their own oil trade.)
There's also the economic output of the US itself, of course. But there's a tremendous intrinsic demand for US dollars as a consequence of this mandated trade. And yes, taxes are an element of this.
Other national currencies have other bases, though not as broad a demand foundation as the US dollar.