Unconditional handouts benefit recipients and their neighbours: study | Hacker News Reader

Unconditional handouts benefit recipients and their neighbours: study

economist.com

95 pointsknown167 comments

*in certain parts of kenya, according to one study.

Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? I think HN knows by now that most publications miss the nuance of most publishings.

Yeah, that's the real problem here. We've long known that limited forms of communism, such as cooperatives and communes, can function extremely well in small self selected populations, but fall apart when they get big enough to be taken advantage of by bad actors. I think there's a future for basic income, but I'm not going put faith in it for broader adoption without vastly broader study.

And capitalism?

Capitalism is a system that builds some form of increasing prosperity using people's selfish behaviors.

Historically, outright capitalism at scale had outperformed outright communism at scal. Europe is actively experimenting with small admixtures of communism / socialism to overcome some of the shortcomings of capitalism, as they see it.

how long do you think history is?

Capitalism proper only exists for a few centuries.

http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/general-equilibriu...

Give Directly press release ...

https://www.givedirectly.org/how-do-cash-transfers-impact-ne...

Direct link to paper ...

https://www.givedirectly.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Gene...

A much larger program called Bolsa Família has been in place for almost two decades here in Brazil. The findings were smaller but still positive: for every R$1 that went into the program, GDP grew by a calculated R$1,78 [1]

[1]: https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2013/10/15/ipea-cada-... (original article, in Portuguese and paywalled, can be read here: https://outline.com/SAALuA)

And of course, distribution and quantity seems to have an effect. Lotteries have famously bad impacts...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-comparing-yourself-to-...

If you want a serious analysis of money handouts by a macro hedge fund manager, including how it worked in the past, look up Dalio's PDF on the topic:

https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/MMT_%20MP3_MK.pdf

Universal Basic Income is just one of the configurations in which the next big stimulus may be deployed. There's plenty of others, and it's informative to understand the continuum.

Why does this and general basic income generate so much anger?

Angry people want other people to suffer and feel threatened by research and policy proposals that would invalidate their cruelty-as-a-policy.

This is not a good-faith argument, and strawmanning at best. If you cannot comprehend a view, implied malice is not the obvious fallback.

With all due respect, for those people to construe taxation that suggests to actually improve neighbourhoods as "theft" is not good-faith either. It is clearly not theft but rather another means by which societies can invest in themselves.

And often, these people wouldn't say the same about taxation that goes into funding the justice system - which is another means for society to improve stability and foster prosperity. But the justice they reach for is punitive, rather than rehabilitative, because again, it's their crab mentality that guides their policies.

All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity.

> All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity.

Whether malice or insecurity or something else at the root, animus is the result at the surface.

I used to drive rideshare, and I heard perspectives on handouts to from my passengers that would peel paint.

This just is not a forum where such resentments can be acknowledged.

It is seen by many as 'theft'. I worked for this, it is mine, and now it is being 'taken' and given to those that provided less obvious value. Its easy to see the issue many have. The argument is really around what denotes 'value' to the arguer. The devide is that some see value as easily tallied by value of work (capitolism), some feel that each human is equally 'valuable' reguardless of economic input. The problem is that both sides are correct in some sense.

I'm not sure most people on any side of this debate would agree with that assessment. IMO the more important disagreement is whether or not laissez-faire economics (for lack of a better term) will yield the best results for the most people, or whether some systemic inequalities exist that could be remedied to yield an overall increase in welfare.

Does laissez-faire involve tax financed institutions such as a monopoly on violence to uphold a commonly decided rule of law, or would even such institutions be determined by the market? More to the point, who even decides the definition of “property” in a laissez-faire economy?

These same people conveniently forget that their wealth is provided in some part through social investment in them (public funding of education, security, transport, business-safe laws etc), and not acknowledging this is effectively 'pulling the ladder up behind them'

Things that everybody else also got.

I dunno, the quality of public education varies significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood. So does security. Equality of opportunity is just an ideal that we occasionally strive for. I'm glad that we strive for it, but we can't take it for granted in an argument about actual policies.

Globally?

That obviously isn’t what I meant. And it has no bearing on the discussion. If your proposal is to tax me and not only give the other citizens of my country a UBI, but also give everybody else in the world a UBI, I’ll just leave you to make it happen.

Distributive Justice is a central topic of how societies are structured. The idea of fairness is important in pretty much every single culture (but with different ideas of what is fair, obviously). Your ideas of fairness likely just line up with what the article supports, but the people who feel angry about it feel exactly how leftists complaining about the 1% feel. A violation of fairness inducing anger is exactly what you would expect, it just seems odd to you because it's not your idea of fairness being violated.

while it's true that opinions diverge, how disparaging people are towards cash redistribution compared to other forms of distributive justice is interesting.

While there are people who hold extreme positions on redistribution, most people in general actually seem supportive of ameliorating the plight of the poor, and I would say broadly do believe that doing good for many at some expense of the few is justified. Many people even will go to great lengths and do charitable work among other things.

However, cash redistribution which is arguably a very effective way to accomplish the same thing still faces huge opposition. Suddenly otherwise charitable people will start talking about 'welfare' in disparaging tone and so on.

Paradoxically you were more likely to find support among people like Milton Friedman ("the thing poor people need the most is money") who was not exactly known for his left-wing views.

there is something different going on with cash redistribution that is separate from general notions of fairness. My guess is that there is still way too much cultural emphasis placed on the notion of work. People would rather have poor people receive a salary for meaningless menial work rather than just flat out receiving cash assistance.

"Incentives are king." That seems to be the paradigm, doesn't it? Government is seen largely as the management of incentives to achieve the desired result. Now, start throwing around money with no strings attached - what incentives are there in that for the recipients.

Of course UBI and helicopter money ruffle feathers. They directly contradict the basic assumptions our political systems are thought to work on.

UBI is efficient because the bureaucratic structure and approach to managing peoples incentives for them is so poorly thought out and inefficient that more of money gets allocated properly if you give it to the recipient directly and basically just hope their incentives align with yours indirectly rather than micromanaging their lives indirectly with conditional benefits to force some appearance of gains in your measured metrics.

I'm not arguing for or against UBI. I'm trying to point out a reason it might be unpopular that has nothing to do with its actual effects.

Exactly. Different people have different ideas of fairness. Some people think life is inherently unfair and that luck determines who reaps the rewards and who does not. Other people believe that hard work is paramount and that those who are in poverty have some just reason for being there (just world).

There is no reconciling these positions. Society is a struggle between them, with one side or the other gaining the upper hand at different times.

“Reconciling these positions” is exactly what’s tackled by philosophers concerned with justice and fairness.

It seems you’re suggesting that certain current societal victories (like say Civil Rights) aren’t actually achievements of justice and fairness but merely “one side” and their arbitrary views having the “upper hand” today.

Many philosophers are going to say that’s completely wrong and that we can determine what justice actually is.

Whatever you're describing, it's not philosophy. Philosophy is about questions, not answers. Debates about justice are thousands of years old and there are no answers in sight. The account of Thrasymachus is every bit as relevant today as it ever was.

> Whatever you're describing, it's not philosophy. Philosophy is about questions, not answers.

What are you talking about? I'm sorry but you don't understand basic Philosophy. Plenty of philosophers give answers. You're saying John Rawls dedicated his life to thinking about justice and came up with no 'answers'? Ridiculous.

Although you're abosolutely correct, there were philosophers who thought that we must go beyond philosophy, seeing philosophy as limited - the big three here are Marx, Nietzche and Freud (considered as a philosopher, anyway) - best put by Marx: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." - unfortunately, from at least of what I've seen, this kind of thinking has run out of steam in contemporary (especially "analytic") philosophy, and it's a shame.

This has been the case for the entire history of philosophy. Any time a philosophical question received a definitive answer, it became a separate field unto itself. So it was with mathematics, science, and law. Philosophers continue to debate these fields (I’m studying philosophy of mathematics right now) but it has little bearing on actual practice. I happen to be partial to the Wittgensteinian view that philosophy is primarily therapeutic, but I won’t rule out the possibility of philosophers creating new disciplines in the future.

John Rawls had some very nice ideas about justice but by no means did he settle the debate. For one thing, he was a utopian, opposed to property rights. That is unrealistic, unless you’re talking about some hypothetical post-human society.

To create any workable theory of justice, I think you should start with the basic assumption that you’re dealing with human beings who naturally incline towards competition and status-seeking. Envisioning a society without some of the traits of human nature is the epitome of Utopianism. You might be able to engineer these traits out of human beings but then you’re dealing with a post-human world.

Because people are trained by the system to be pissed off at everything and see topics like UBI to be a fight between good and evil. I'm mostly against UBI if we can avoid it, but when I have this discussion with people who support it, both offline and online, they assume that I'm cruel and that I don't want to help people. (If only some of them understood the irony of their statements)

Politics has always generated anger, but I think there'd be less visceral hostility if people stopped reading Twitter and didn't watch MSNBC day in and day out.

The greater inequality becomes the greater the anger there will be, media acts to redirect that anger into a million little grievances. UBI addresses the fact that we can't avoid it, power has been concentrated to the point that it will not diffuse by natural market forces.

What you call "anger" is probably just common sense that people express when proponents of basic income try to present such studies as a proof that basic income is the way.

Of course a rich entity giving money to a limited number of poor people for a limited time will generate great results. Sure, a study is good but I would have guessed the correct outcome anyway. Now, compare this to a money transfer not from some rich external entity but from fellow citizens, countrywide, for generations. That's what basic income is. And it has very little to do with the study.

No need to assume an income tax based financing if that’s what you mean. My own take on UBI is to finance it from land rent. In the way Henry George thought about it (or Thomas Paine, John Locke, or even John Rawls for that matter)

See Geolibertarianism for good start to learn about the argument https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

Another word for "land rent" is "property tax". I know there are differences from the geolibertarianism view, but in the context of funding something like UBI they amount to the same thing.

They're quite different, because improvements to the land (buildings, etc) are not taxed under a land value tax but are taxed under a property tax.

The argument is that the value of the land itself is collectively created, so it is morally justifiable to capture this value for public benefit. On the other hand, improvements on a particular piece of land represent an individual's investment.

There's a better-known argument that land itself is in fixed supply. (Even where land reclamation is a thing, say in the Netherlands, it's not the private sector doing it.) If you pay a tax on land rent, this doesn't alter your behavior compared to paying no tax, because you would've had to forgo that same rent anyway as part of holding that land for yourself.

The fact that land rent correlates so well with locally-created value also makes it quite convenient as a source of funds for local government.

Sure. But if it's better, it's worth doing anyway. The question of how best to collect taxes is orthogonal to questions of what to spend them on.

Yes, it's also economically efficient. A moral objection to land taxation is common enough that I now lead with the moral argument.

I would extend that argument even further. Not only is it morally justified to capture the value, its also the only means by which the private ownership can be justified at all. It is, after all, our rule of law and common institutions that will enforce the title to begin with.

From a position of Rawls veil of ignorance, I don’t see how you could justify land title being granted on first come first served basis. Leased to the highest bidder (with a public dividend) seems much more agreeable.

Maybe "land tax" would be best here, with "tax" being a specific type of rent due to a government and "land" being a specific type of property (and not all property!).

Taking the money from land ownership instead of from income doesn't make the taking more palatable to those you're taking it from.

Chances are, if I've got a high enough income to be net taxed for UBI based on income tax, I've also got a high enough land interest to be net taxed based on UBI based on land rent/property tax.

Personally, a system based on income tax works better for me, as I'd like to have some high income time, then retire and lower my tax burden. If land/property is a significant source of government revenue, I need to have a much larger reserve before I retire; it may be easier to accumulate, but it's a psychological barrier. If you're changing the rules after I've already retired though, I'm going to get out the torches and pitchforks.

> If land/property is a significant source of government revenue, I need to have a much larger reserve before I retire

On the contrary, many people retire to low-cost areas where land rents are incredibly low. You can also move to a smaller house or apartment and lower your land "footprint" that you would be paying rent on. (This is of course the gains you would realize by selling the larger property, in the absence of taxation on land rent. Since land rent tax does not substantially alter incentives.) And you need to pay tax on your retirement savings anyway, either at saving or withdrawal. It amounts to the same thing.

My point was that it wouldn’t be collected from “fellow citizens” but, as you say, a few rich entities such as yourself.

Calling fellow citizens “rich entities” doesn’t make it more palatable.

The original point was that there’s a difference between a rich entity and fellow citizens. I took it to imply the people around most people who would benefit, and support such a scheme.

A large majority of citizens don’t own property, most have debt. And I would argue, mostly due to legislative capture from the few people who do own property. So when I think of the word “fellow citizens” attribute the word to how people in the first group relate to each other. The latter group would be fellow plutocrats.

You're mixing tax policy (land rent) with tax income distribution policy (UBI). I think property taxation should be improved and Geolib is one way to do it. However, if we assume that Geolib is the optimal taxation policy, by no means does it follow that UBI is the optimal distribution policy.

I’m mixing it on ideological grounds. Tax comes from the state, a violent actor with arbitrary rights to tax an distribute (although in democratic societies, ostensibly controlled by majority rule)

For me land rent isn’t a tax, and it does not belong to the state in any shape or form. It’s about the commons and fundamental inalienable rights. Things I expect to see in the UNs declarations of human rights rather than in the tax-policy of the local government

My point is that there are couple of problems/unknowns with UBI:

1. Where do we get the money from?

2. What will be the long term effects of UBI and does it constitute progress compared to the current system.

I have no idea whether the math with Geolib checks out but even if it does, it only answers the first question. I just find it very amusing that UBI is aimed at fixing the inequality, yet its proponents are somehow oblivious to the obvious - UBI by design is increasing the inequality. UBI means the top 10% by income/wealth will receive exactly the same distributions as the bottom 10%. Jeff Bezos will be getting the same UBI as the bum on the street. How is that progress?

Whatever your ideology is, I don't think Jeff Bezos should have any fundamental inalienable right to land rent/tax.

I happen to think he should. Not sure about the other income or wealth though, and I think it’s well within scope of the discussion to consider how he could be deprived of most of those while at the same time getting a fair deal.

I do think capitalists can perform a useful service by calculating risks an moving resources around to productive use. I do not think, however, that such work automatically should reward people with the right to extract rent from those resources for private gain. So I’ll happily grant Bezos an UBI as long as any rent extract from resources under his control is payed back to the commons.

Edit: Btw it’s not just about fixing inequality. For me it’s also the realization that markets are exceptionally bad at allocating resources to intrinsically motivated labor, biasing the whole economy toward optimizing for greed. An UBI could alleviate this problem somewhat by allowing more amateur work to flourish.

People don't get pissed when income from a shared resource (petroleum for instance) is divided among people living on the land or in the country. People get pissed when the taxes they pay (for improving infrastructure and governance) is directed towards subsidizing the living of others (even though in the long run, it might be in many ways beneficial as a society). In many ways it is natural for them to be unhappy about this. I think, there needs to be more education on the benefits (as a social net, they themselves may be the beneficiaries) that alleviates people's fears on such UBI plans and shows the overall societal benefits. Also more longer-term experiments to confirm if it really helps.

If society makes progress and does move to a model where machines are doing most of the work, and there is more free time for people and most people don't need to do any work for their living or will not be able to find work for their living, we will definitely need to look at this model or any other alternate model that may come about as a result of natural experiences with such progress.

This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts managed by GiveDirectly (a charity, and widely considered a highly efficient one), targeting households in extreme poverty. Much of this could be expected, BTW; since the grants were fairly large, the GDP-boosting effect was probably due to recipients acquiring some sorts of physical assets and kickstarting broader economic growth. These dynamics would only apply to a very limited extent in high-income countries where automation is a concern - even though UBI is quite likely to be a good idea for a variety of other reasons.

> This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts

Sure, but it's being read as a pilot study for such things "at home", where it would most certainly have to be funded by taxes. Or at least this reading is GP's explanation for why people get angry.

When people are only discussing how best to spend 3rd world development aid, then nobody gets all that angry.

Yeah, I was responding to why this generates anger. It's not directly about taxes, but about how the people who generate the taxes spend large portions of their day "working" to produce the income that gets taxed while the social net helps people who aren't"working" -- yeah the issue is more complex than that, but I think the anger is due to thinking of this simplistically in a cause-and-effect manner. UBI appears to be a form of social net which might encourage people to not work.

> UBI appears to be a form of social net which might encourage people to not work.

UBI is actually the only form of social net that tries its best to limit this.

(And it's not an easy problem to solve - a redistribution arrangement like UBI inherently involves some sort of "means testing" and must be phased out as one reaches the breakeven point where one starts "paying into" the system.

People who tell you that this isn't a thing and that UBI "gives money to everyone, or to the rich" are totally clueless. They fail to understand the basics about balancing a budget, never mind actual, non-trivial economics.)

Depends on where you put the emphasis. Most UBI discussion (amongst proponents) start from the assumption that it has to be a certain size with various disagreements of the proper sized vs budget concerns.

I think that is the wrong focus. If we instead start with deciding “just” financing options, an make a public dividend it would be a good start.

One study concluded that an unconditional payout as low as $50/month can help some people tremendously (IIRC this was in Sweden)

“Just” financing to me is to recognize that some resources are truly part of the commons, and any expropriation should generate rent for everyone. Land being the typical example, but also things like fishing rights, carbon emission rights, or why not ipv4 networks and dns-domians.

I'm not comfortable implementing any form of UBI. In my estimation, UBI will create an easy, explicit mechanism for vote-buying, which will be too much for politicians and voters to resist and would drive the benefit ever upwards.

If everyone gets $50 UBI bucks in the mail every month, and candidate A runs on the platform of raising it to $100 per month, they will guarantee themselves the support of some significant self-interested portion of society for whom this would be a net benefit. Other candidates would be pressured to make similar offers to compete. We already see this kind of thing (farm subsidies, student loan forgiveness, etc), UBI would be more explicit/immediate, and expand the affected block to include every eligible voter. Just how hesitant politicians are to make the needed reforms to social security, even though we all know that it needs to happen in some form. UBI would be worse.

We're already at a point where machines do most of the work.

There are so many homeless Americans because our government has failed to manage the resources of our country to provide even a basic poverty level standard of living for everyone. There are countless reasons and studies about how or why this occurred but I think the reality is rather simple. People in power exploit those they control to get more wealth and power. Whether it's the manager at mcdonalds or bezos himself, if they can abuse their power they will. The reason there is so much anger against handouts to the destitute is because this reduces the power these oligarchs hold. Unless you're topping Forbes richest list then you're a peon in their game and they're not going to capitulate to the life of a pleb without a fight that'd make Hitler look like Rosa parks.

> We're already at a point where machines do most of the work.

We're at a point where machines are very clearly doing far less than a quarter of the work. I think it's more likely under 10%.

If you were right, right now we'd have true mass unemployment as we're nowhere near prepared for that level of automation in the global economy. The next tier of jobs are not here yet to absorb the labor. Scan from country to country, you'll find global unemployment has never been lower.

Further, if we were at that level of machine labor share, we would have likely seen a large increase in productivity or profitability in manufacturing. Manufacturers are not replacing humans en masse unless it makes a lot of business sense (in output, cost, or a combination; and we're not seeing anything even remotely close to those types of seismic-shift figures showing up in manufacturing numbers anywhere).

The vast majority of all manufacturing in China is still done by hand, with minimal machine contribution. They've barely begun to scratch the surface of machines taking over their manufacturing (and naturally they're freaking out about the future unemployment prospects of that, just as people in the US and elsewhere are). And Chinese manufacturing is further down the machine-adoption curve than other countries like Mexico or Vietnam.

We have hardly even automated a consequential share of the labor in your typical fast food chain. Globally we're just getting around to electronic ordering kiosks as the norm.

If work means mechanical work (which was once important!) then machines must be well over 99% now.

More generally, the only sensible answer is probably to divide labor productivity today with that of pre-industrial labor. Which amounts to approximately the ratio of GDPs. Which means about 500/50_000 (USD, very roughly). Which again leads to the conclusion that machines & automation are doing about 99% of the work, right now.

We don't have mass unemployment because all the people no longer working with their muscles have found other jobs, providing things other than food, which their ancestors simply didn't have. Like hospitals, HVAC, websites, and food stamp programs.

BTW both China and fast food are massively automated/mechanized. The price difference between McDonalds and having a personal chef cook you a similar burger is the degree to which machines have been used instead of human hands. The fact that none of them look like C-3PO is irrelevant.

Comparing GDP only means we’ve gotten more efficient, and only when it’s compared on a per capita basis. It doesn’t mean machines are the sole method of that increase in production.

If work also counts as things like performing mathematical calculations, communicating between people, data entry, and most other unskilled tasks, then your point still applies.

> People in power exploit those they control to get more wealth and power.

True, if we include bureaucrats. Otherwise that's a just-so story leftists tell to cement their grip on power.

Despite the US Federal government controlling over 36% of all money spent in the economy, it's not enough cause oligarchs. Meanwhile our nomenklatura are pure of heart, selfless with only the interests of the people at heart.

We have to be really careful! If not the distant future will be dystopian nightmare where government controls everything you do and tells you how to do it.

To stop it, we need to make sure the government is telling everyone what to do and how to do it! It’s the only way!

Sorry, I assumed that was clear. I'm specifically referring to any relationship where one party has distinctly more power than the other. This includes bureaucrats, police, politicians, managers, c level, teachers, HR, advertising companies, the list goes on and on. Everyone's angling for more at the expense of everyone around them and that's the accepted status quo. Taking a step back to think about this and it's like everyone's on crazy pills.

>"There are so many homeless Americans because our government has failed to manage the resources of our country to provide even a basic poverty level standard of living for everyone."

Americans enjoy a higher general standard of living than most others in the developed world precisely because our government has a relatively hands off approach to "managing resources".

Homelessness is the result of addiction and mental illness. The government could pour huge sums of money (even more than it already does) into initiatives focused on addressing these issues and the broken people that comprise the homeless population will still not get better.

> Americans enjoy a higher general standard of living than most others in the developed world precisely because our government has a relatively hands off approach to "managing resources".

How can one come to this conclusion?

Does it account for the boost the US got for not being destroyed in WW2? For having tons of natural resources per capita? For having land borders with only 2 countries, neither of which can threaten it, and oceans on other sides?

I can easily see how there are more factors to the quality of life in America than the government being relatively “hands off” managing resources. Although, even that is tough to define as the US government is very hands on in many businesses.

> Americans enjoy a higher general standard of living than most others in the developed world

I'd question that. Rich americans maybe. But the average american has to deal with long working hours, poor access to high quality food, extortionate costs for healthcare, cities where you can't walk anywhere, etc.

Homelessness is indeed a difficult issue. But what about the people working 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs. They'd benefit big time from mote government support.

> But the average american has to deal with long working hours, poor access to high quality food, extortionate costs for healthcare, cities where you can't walk anywhere, etc.

I'd question that. Poor Americans maybe. But the average american has relatively average work hours[1], shops at large grocery stores or supercenters[2], and has among the highest median income in the world(adjusted for PPP)[3]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#OECD_ranking

2. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015/august/most-us-hou...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gross_median_hou...

Including part time workers distorts the average.

On average, a full-time employee in United Stats works 1,768 hours per year, or 38.6 hours per week. By comparison, Europeans work up to 19 percent fewer hours annually compared to those working in the US.. Even more extreme On average, a full-time employee in Germany works 1,363 hours per year, or 34.3 hours per week That’s the equivalent of 26 days more per year full time Americans are working.

Median income PPP is not that great of a means for comparing standards of living. The US bottom 25th percentile earn less than 1/2 the 50th percentile. I would argue for disposable income PPP after taxes, food, shelter, and medical care at the bottom is more representative as a minimum standard of living.

It would be useful to look at the median in addition to the average here. I suspect that because there are specific highly compensated professionals in the US that regularly work 60 or 70 hour weeks (Lawyers, doctors), the average may be distorted upwards.

The original comment I responded to compared the average American to the average citizen in the "developed world". I'm using OECD countries as a proxy since the term "developed" is ambiguous. But comparatively, US workers are only slightly above the OECD average in number of hours worked per year (1,781 vs 1,763).

>The US bottom 25th percentile earn less than 1/2 the 50th percentile.

Again, only considering the average American here. I would agree that it's worse to be poor in the US compared to a lot of other countries due to fewer social safety nets.

OECD is a common list for developed countries. But did you ever really look at it? It includes included Mexico and Turkey with a ~10k per capita GDP. Even Latvia, Chile and Hungary @ 15k USD seem a bit underdeveloped. Czech Republic and Slovenia at 20k per capital are borderline but probably fine. Granted things change somewhat when you look at PPP, but large PPP differences generally mean an underdeveloped economy.

https://www.oecd.org/about/document/list-oecd-member-countri...

Income is a worthless metric if getting in a moderate severity car accident means I'm going bankrupt and will be mostly unemployable the rest of my life.

>Homelessness is the result of addiction and mental illness.

Citation needed.

You're wrong, but spout long since debunked victim blaming rhetoric as fact. Apt username.

> We're already at a point where machines do most of the work.

This premise is false on its face, given how aggressively western countries are trying to encourage working age immigration. The entire developed world is facing shortages of construction workers, nurses, daycare workers, doctors, engineers, etc.

Jobs aren’t being automated away for you look at the labor force participation rate: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...

From 1998 to 2028, there will have been a sharp drop in the 16-24 age group. But there will have been only a few points drop among 24-55, and sharp increases among 55+ (which mostly happened from 1998 to 2008).

You're completely missing the point. Either willfully, or you're just so blissfully unaware of the marvels of modern technology. You're missing things like automated knitting and sewing. A garmet that would take 25-100 hours by hand can by made by a machine in minutes and sewn into shape in just moments more. Have you ever done a needlecraft? I have. Besides the yarn for a sweater costing over $100 itself, I'd have to ask $3,000 for the labor alone. Brick roads used to take weeks just for a few blocks with an equivalently sized crew, and several orders of magnitude greater effort. Now far more length can be torn up recycled and paved over again in days with relatively minimal effort. We used to have manned switchboard operators. Do the math on how many we would need to accommodate the internet at current scale without routers and switches then get back to me.

You just don't see now many thousands of billions of hours of hard, boring labor is done by machines every day, and mostly perfectly. It's truly marvelous. The fact that people are still homeless is a crime against humanity that rests squarely on the world leaders who allowed so a tragedy to occur. In a truly civilized society these leaders would imprisoned.

Want to really know how dann good you have it? Spend 10 years in the northern reaches of canada. I doubt You could survive the summer months. You can only bring the clothes on your back. No tools, supplies, books, or resources. If you want to take my bet drop me an email. I'm sure we can come to a fair wager.

> "In many ways it is natural for them to be unhappy about this..."

Is it? Anyone with a reasonable understanding of the process of life knows how fragile a given (personal) status quo really is. Factor in the indirect costs to everyone for any single "failure" and only naivete can explain your assumption.

Note: I'm not saying your naive. I speaking of those who would fall under your the umbrella of your observation.

Isn't it? Atleast thinking of it from the perspective of someone who spends a large part of their day "working" in jobs that might not be something they really like to do.

As a society, I think people are already conditioned to help out their "family" by their labors, but the education I was talking about should be geared towards thinking of every one has part of an extended "family" where some parts of the family need to be subsidized and that it is natural to do so :-).

The use of the world "natural" was/is the key issue here. That's misleading, at best. Naturally, in the Darwinian sense of natural, we as a species survived because there was a we/us. In that context (of history) "narural" is completely unnatural. From Darwin to Orwell, see? :)

The myth of the individual is a "modern" invention that has little if any historic support. To normalize that myth (read: false assumption) with the word natural is silly at best. Of course, those most susceptible to that ruse are typically the least likely to realize and/or admit they've been duped. Of course they want to believe everyone else was duped as well.

I hope this helps.

"People don't get pissed when income from a shared resource (petroleum for instance) is divided among people living on the land or in the country"

I think that statement is worth considering a bit more. For instance, Alaska and Saudi Arabia fit that description, setting aside whatever "on the land" means.

I don't know if people "get pissed" about it, but it has been noticed that such a situation oftentimes doesn't seem to result in a healthy economy/society.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

The resource curse mostly affects poor African countries with terrible governance. The revenue from the valuable resource usually goes straight into the pockets of whoever holds the most power, triggering a fierce competition for who can get away with the most corruption. I don't think any of these countries have tried the Alaskan model of just paying everyone an equal dividend, so that's a huge confounding variable.

Well, you're just asserting the causal relationship goes the other way.

And..just because Alaska isn't that bad doesn't mean it couldn't support the hypothesis. It's not California. Of course, California has a lot of resources too, so one could also say it's not New Jersey, or New York.

I suppose that Alaska does make a case that giving away a "citizens dividend" can be done without attracting the world to move there and making it unmanageable.

People generally aren’t niave, especially the HN crowd. If there’s a sink (basic income) then there’s certainly a source (YOURE THE SOURCE).

That’s not how economies work. Money _circulates_. If you’re a sink, you’re also a source (as long as you don’t sink money into inflating some financial bubble instead of buying actual services)

So in general it’s the opposite, taking money out of bubble sinks and giving to people who will spend it on services will cause more circulation, not less.

Ask a well-off friend of yours for a dollar every single day and follow it up by explaining that they don't really need it and they've got plenty of dollars, and you need it more than they do. If you can begin to understand why they might start getting angry with you on that micro level, then you will start to understand why it makes people angry on a larger scale.

Consider that exactly the same argument applies to tax breaks for families and homeowners, who are effectively being subsidized by everyone else's money... and yet there's little to no political resistance to either.

it's not anger so much as dismay (for me, at least). the hearts of UBI proponents are often in the right place, but the solution is grossly ignorant and shortsighted. it won't lead to any meaningful long-term change, but rather a new equilibrium where the struggling have even less leverage and opportunity.

and many proponents are really only trying to solve for "i don't want to experience poor people" rather than "i don't want people to be poor (especially if caused by automation i created)". you see this position a lot in comments here about homelessness in SF, for example.

UBI tries to solve a complicated problem (inequity) with a simple solution (the simplicitiy of which is irresistably attractive to makers of all sorts). inequity needs to be solved by healing the thousand cuts we've endured over the last 50 years, not with the tiny little band-aid that is UBI.

we need to fix the ways that plutocrats have tilted the economy in their favor. just around taxation: income tax rates, employment taxes, capital gains tax, depreciation, corporate loss-shifting, interest deduction, nearly every deductions actually, etc. moreso, lending (student loans, mortgages), insurance (healthcare), and real estate (literal rents) have become de facto ways of extracting rents out of the many for the few.

I completely agree that one of the core problems we need to fix is the unbalanced influence of wealthy individuals and corporations on policy and lawmaking.

However, potentially UBI does more than you imagine. There are measurable differences in both behavior and development when meeting basic needs is a struggle. Rutger Bregman did a great job touching on some of the basics in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...

By giving low income people extra cushion (even a small one) you can improve their cognition and decision making, giving them a platform from which to improve their lives, pursue education, even innovate. All without complicated, difficult to implement and expensive social programs designed to achieve the same goals. Poverty squanders potential.

And then, of course, there is the oft talked about, and in my opinion self evidently valid, concern about an increasing number of white collar jobs being replaced by automation. At some point we'll have no choice but to come up with a solution for a shrinking pool of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.

Conveniently the same process that will remove those jobs, will also make the production of the goods and services they relate to dramatically cheaper. UBI gives some of that surplus to the lower and middle classes, which is important given the danger that it would otherwise be absorbed by the rich.

> "Poverty squanders potential."

having seen this in practice, i generally buy-in to this idea but disagree that UBI is the solution (i might buy that it could be a small, targeted part of a larger solution). fix systemic inequity. give disadvantaged folks dignity and fairness. they'll do the rest.

poverty may not even be the principal problem. don't try to step in to solve their "problem" for them, especially if you have no experience. let them do it. allow opportunities, listen, but don't just give solutions.

> "...in my opinion self evidently valid, concern about an increasing number of white collar jobs being replaced by automation."

entirely not self-evident and an overblown concern, given history. humans are infinitely creative. we'll do other stuff, or even change the system, in the pursuit of esteem.

You seem to labor under the delusion that inequity and the lack of dignity and fairness are easier systemic issues to solve than handing out a check. They are virtually impossible by comparison.

Another benefit that needs to be mentioned is it provides an unconditional safety blanket for anyone who has a job. People who now feel they are stuck in a job for fear of being broke wouldn't feel as stuck under a UBI. This is a huge benefit for the majority of people. Many workplaces would improve, especially the worst ones, as people wouldn't feel as stuck in them, this severely limits the degree that employers can treat their employees badly. For the self employed it gives them freedom to leave their occupation and do something else when things get bad for whatever reason. Even people who are financially secure and have their own wealth as a safety net are likely to benefit from workplace improvements, even if the money from a UBI itself is a lot less important to them.

In short, the benefits to the already employed should not be left out.

This is an underappreciated benefit. That whole, enduring feeling of being "stuck where you wouldn't want to be" is also a huge drain on productivity and a leading cause of a host of workplace issues, as well as stress or burnout in the longer run. The improvement in 'low-wage' employees' way of working might easily be as large as the one in actual workplace conditions.

Absolutely! Building on one of your points, if everyone had more freedom to pursue their passion, as a result of the cushion to take risks, the potential benefits to society and culture at large are huge. Science, art, technology, etc..

It's no doubt overly idealistic but I envision it as a new renaissance.

One thing is certain: as technology continues to make providing basic needs cheaper and cheaper, we need to come up with some way to give a significant part of that surplus to the masses.

The current system will allocate it to the 1% and we can look to science fiction for what happens after that.

What I find frustrating personally, living in the US, is the irrationally vehement opposition to the idea. Like universal healthcare, accessible higher education, affordable child care, sane vacation time, reasonable parental leave and etc.. the US will no doubt be decades behind the rest of the world here too.

My thinking is that all those things would be easier to address politically if doing so meant giving back that rent to the people

but the lock, stock and barrel shouldn't have been given away to rentiers in the first place. giving a token of it back to the poor just saps political will out of making the structural changes needed.

inventing and making and doing is what should unlock profits, not simply just owning property (rents).

I fully agree actually. It just happens that my suggested remedy is to extract that rent back by reshaping private property rights into leasing from the commons. Right now there is no political movement near any legislative assembly I’m aware with a geoliberal base though, so my hope is that if at least a practical policy from its book was part of the policy debate among the incumbents there would also be room for an actual geoliberal group to take place and shape it.

gotcha. in the US at least, there's little chance of that because property ownership is so tied to identity. i'd support some form of land value tax because it would nudge development toward the "highest and best use" of real property, but even that's an uphill battle here.

I think it's fair to say that our society is divided to a large degree and the individual feels increasingly isolated from those around him. It is not incromprehensible that in this context extensive trust, cooperation and sharing are difficult to attain. You don't have to be leaning either way on the universal income subject to acknowledge that.

'Got mine' mentality.

If you raise the floor you are by definition making everyone else less wealthy by comparison, and therefore threatening the status of middle class persons as being significantly better than those on the bottom of society.

At least with means-tested welfare you can trap those people in a cycle of dependence and tell them what they can and cannot do in order to receive that help.

Because conservatives think such an idea is morally wrong, while liberals don't actually trust or respect the people they want to help.

Because it doesn’t make economic sense. If you give all people money, ostensibly to make them not poor, you’ll just cause inflation and they’ll be poor again.

I’m not opposed to basic housing and/or food instead - those are much simpler, as there is finite demand (in contrast to money), which can be planned for and satisfied.

I think a lot of people may not like the work that they do and the number of hours they have to do it to earn the money that they do, and then get angry at people who can earn money either without doing that much work (eg people on welfare or people who own things that generate revenue) or people who like the work that they do. In a way, a form of "it's not fair, I have to work hard at a job I hate for my money, they should as well."

I mean, I think there are plenty of other reasons as well, such as the effectiveness of such a program or trust that the people receiving the money won't use it on things the people giving the money deem immoral. But I think the big one is just that I believe most of us humans receive money by renting ourselves out for money and doing things we don't like, and instead of finding ways to receive money by renting out other things we own or by finding a thing we enjoy doing, we harp on those who do. (I think why Andre Yang is trying to frame a UBI as a dividend is that it reframes it into we as citizens own stock in the economy and should receive profit sharing...but that's a convo for another day)

Because humans as a species have a strong bias to unmask 'cheaters.'

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

“Unconditional” is a nice euphemism for “free”. There is no such thing as a free handout (and, thusly, an unconditional handout), unless it’s coming in the form of manna from heaven.

In these limited studies that don’t affect the inflation rate or the greater macroeconomic picture, there appears to be no conditions, especially none imposed on the recipients.

If you expand a study like this, in your mind, to include e.g., the entire population of America, you don’t need to be a PhD economist to see that there are certainly conditions involved.

There are always at least some constraints on the givers, e.g. there is X amount of money available to be distributed in a given time period. This should not be conflated with conditions that the recipients must first meet. The article is referring to this second type.

The reason there are no conditions for these recipients is because this is a small, controlled experiment, with outside resources.

If you expand this experiment to include the entire population, then each recipient has to meet the condition of welcoming expansion (inflation) of the money supply, each time they receive a payment (unless each recipient is also taxed 100% of what they receive each month). Inflation comes at the expense of savings, and also discourages lending (since the money repaid will be worth less - e.g., Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, et al).

Given the aforementioned circumstances, if you are a saver (with money to lend) OR a borrower (e.g., attempting to grow a business), then you have to accept that these activities will be economically discouraged by the inflationary effects of this income payment system. Only economic inactivity is rewarded (e.g., folks who retire without savings, folks without a job, etc.) without conditions.

This is all axiomatic and completely provable with syllogism alone, except for in one scenario: new wealth is discovered (free energy, manna from heaven, altruistic robots, etc.).

Nothing is axiomatic in economics. It's not a hard science -- there is too much complexity for us to create highly accurate models yet. It's not proven that UBI will cause inflation uniformly across the board.

You can make argument that this will happen. But it is simply wrong to state that it is an obvious mathematical derivation.

And once again, the potential systemic impacts of the policy that you are describing are not the same type of thing as a condition that an individual must meet to receive the payment.

Why is it that massive handouts in the form of quantitative easing over the past decade are fine but giving money to poor people will lead us to an instant Zimbabwe/Weimar situation?

Being against personal welfare and being against corporate/bank welfare are not mutually exclusive.

Nobody that I know, is OK with giving out corporate welfare or quantitative easing of any kind. Certainly, I’m not.

Well, the point is not whether you’re ok with it or not. The point is why did the massive amount of quantitative easing not lead to Zimbabwe, since there is very little difference between that and giving handouts to poorer people.

Basically, QE completely undermines your claims about “handouts = Zimbabwe”.

If you really want to know what caused Zimbabwean hyperinflation, it was the fact that Mugabe took land from people who knew how to use it productively to grow produce and rear livestock, and gave it to people who didn’t know how to do that.

IOW hyperinflation happens when the money supply exceeds the productive capacity of the economy in question.

If the productivity of the economy grows then the money supply can be increased without causing hyper inflation. If there is slack in the labour market, potentially caused by the money supply being too low, the money supply can be increased without hyper inflation simply because because the increased output matches the increased money supply.

Very little of what you’ve typed out is actually correct.

1 - Creating money out of thin air does not necessarily lead to inflation. How do we know this? Because Europe and the US created a ton of money out of thin air after the financial crisis but were unable to meet their already historically low inflation targets. 2 - Inflation isn’t always hyper inflation. You’ve mentioned the 2-3 countries that have experienced hyper inflation in the past few decades. You’ve ignored the fact that nearly every other country in the world, including the richest countries in the world, have been experiencing inflation every year for several decades. A certain amount of inflation is a good thing. In fact, the only major economy that has experienced deflation for any sustained period of time over the last few decades was Japan, and that was a massive concern.

3 - Inflation helps lending. In fact, deflation on the other hand discouraged lending. Inflation means that in order to retain the value of the money you’ve earned, you have to invest (I.e. lend). In deflationary scenarios, the value of your money goes up simply by virtue of sticking it under the mattress. Hyper inflation is a completely different situation, and the lack of lending there probably has a lot more to do with the fact that there are no economic opportunities in a country whose economy is so bad that it’s suffering from hyper inflation.

4 - How in the world is inflation benefiting people who don’t have money (retired folks without savings, or folks without jobs). Inflation means that whatever money they do get (by begging?) only buys them less than it would have without inflation.

You clearly know very little about economics, and your insistence that this all axiomatic indicates you’ve likely not even done a cursory study of macro economics, but are convinced whatever you’ve concluded from certain basic principles is obviously correct, even if it diverges from what the entire academic (and investment and government, for that matter) fields say about those situations.

1. e.g., quantitative easing is literally described as “an unconventional form of monetary policy, it is usually used when inflation is very low or negative” - just because we are not able to meet a specific inflation target does not mean that creating money does not the create inflation… this is some of the most basic monetary economics stuff

2. At what point did I state that inflation is always hyper-inflation? It is perfectly appropriate to bring up hyper-inflation in a conversation about money creation where the money would be created at a rate of no less than $335 billion per month (e.g., UBI of $1,000/mo), which would be the greatest expansion of money supply, in PPP terms(and 25% expansion of M2 per year), in planetary history.

3. Pray tell... if the inflation is due to an increase of the money supply at the inter-banking level, then of course loans are easier to be had. If you already have loans, then of course you are in a great spot when inflation ramps up. If you’re trying to get a loan and the money supply is increasing at 25% per annum, you will likely need to be lent money at a rate higher than what usury laws allow...

4. Never said that either. What I said is that those people are the only ones that will benefit without condition, because inflation does not affect them (other than price stickiness in their assets, if they choose to sell them - they can also thank money expansion for this, one of the known failings of New Keynsianism)

Pertaining your last point about the divergence of my thinking from the boundless wisdom of academics... Don’t fall for the college tribe common look no further than Paul Krugman for an example of how Neo Keynesian economics will lead you down a path of endless failure (search for his predictions - as we know, predictions are the best way to test a theory). New Keynesianism economics will go down in history as the single failure that collapsed the Occident into an inescapable swamp of debt. You sound like you’re in junior high or early high school, so you still have time; trust me, do not waste your time studying economics in college. And if you do, at least seek out some place that teaches Austrian School economics at least from a historical perspective (like Booth).

Hey there :) no need to reply if you don’t want to; I already know you read it all

About 40% have conditional payments, in which recipients must fulfil certain obligations, such as getting their children vaccinated or enrolling them in school.

It's unequivocally clear how the word 'unconditional' is being used in this context. The article even gives some examples of unconditional welfare to the poor around the world. And if you do some research, it seems like these programs are reducing poverty.

On a macro scale, where does the money go when you give it to the poor? They buy things, so, it goes into the economy, doesn't it? When you give money to the ultrarich, it goes into offshore accounts, more than it goes back into the economy. Not that we shouldn't be giving money to the rich in the form of tax cuts and monetary policy - having dudes shoot their dick shaped rockets into space is beneficial for everyone. But save us all your 'fuck-the-poor' attitude.

edit: a word

> “Unconditional” is a nice euphemism for “free”.

No it means that there are no hoops that the people receiving it must jump through in order to receive it (e.g. look for a job, report in periodically, pass a drug test, volunteer time)

Just as importantly from the point of view of those who support UBI, it means a whole lot less bureaucracy for deciding who gets how much.

It is not free if it's unconditional. It comes from a wealth transfer. It's just that the transfer always happens

After living in a very poor region of the US for a few years, coming from quite affluent areas like Silicon Valley/SF, I've grown to substantially disapprove of handouts.

At the local grocery store, 90+% of the people I follow through the cashier lanes are paying for their groceries with EBT. What I see these folks buying is carts full of overpriced packaged foods with out of control kids often carrying tubs of Ben and Jerries ice cream one per child. They are absolutely not spending responsibly and living frugally, their lives of excess are being subsidized and as they say easy come, easy go.

When I socialize with the locals, they're all on food stamps and promote it as a way of life if they learn I'm not currently taking handouts. I'm literally peer pressured to get on the EBT program, many have argued they want as many people on it as possible because the more people supported by it the less likely it is to be taken away. These are perfectly capable people who choose to spend their lives horsing around and smoking pot all day. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but I do take issue with deliberately abusing social programs to fund it.

One annoying effect is because of these programs, I'm surrounded by people whose lives are precariously built upon a system that can vanish rather suddenly from political events like the current president getting elected. There's been murmurings of EBT qualifications changing to cut down spending on these programs, and many expect it to happen should this president be re-elected. If that occurs, the crime in my community (and many like it) is going to absolutely explode because the programs have been supporting lives for too long and these people have grown far too comfortable on unstable ground.

When I see a headline "Unconditional handouts benefit recipients and their neighbors" I immediately think to myself "It's not unconditional when the program is conditional on the current government's decision to continue it". When you have large-scale populations becoming entirely dependent on such programs for their livelihoods, and yes, in poor, low-cost areas you can and people will 100% survive off as little as $1000/mo, you have a weaponized community where the trigger for releasing rampant crime and instability concentrated in low-income neighborhoods is the single decision to cut handouts.

Now I don't think having these programs is a good idea at all, it seems to create more problems than it solves. I would rather us find ways to wean people off EBT to the point of all but eliminating it, and forget this UBI-like crap unless it's more permanent, like in the form of an amendment to the constitution.

> They are absolutely not spending responsibly and living frugally

I think something you're overlooking here is that, in absence of money to use on other forms of stress relief, food is a cheap, easy, legal, and (as long as you get enough exercise) generally side-effect-free way to unwind. Some greasy, salty, fatty burgers can't compare to a vacation, but they can make it a lot easier to live without one, and they're certainly more 'spending responsibly' than getting into drugs or buying lotto tickets.

The EBT-based SNAP program is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The whole point of it is giving handouts to food producers; the low-income folks who happen to buy all that food and even get fat as a result are only the mechanism by which the handout is delivered. Totally corrupt, and so sad!

I've always wondered that if these programs were cut people would begin to really demand fairer wages and everything else. As it stands now unfair wage + assistance gets them to the point where they are comfortable enough to not riot.

Almost like you can blame the assistance for the unfair wage in a sense.

On that note, you may find it interesting to hear that Wal-Mart employees are the single largest national group of food stamp recipients.

Yes. It's a con and it upsets me. Entities like Wal-Mart basically conned the US Government into paying their employees.

There's nothing really special about what Wal-Mart is doing, though: they're just following the minimum wage. Of course, as soon as anyone talks about raising the minimum wage, people start screaming about how that will kill all jobs forever...

You're worried about the wrong things. No one is going to be hurting for food or rebelling if EBT is taken away. As you've seen, it pays for indulgences. The same WalMart that sells Ben & Jerry's sells flour at 0.025 dollars/ounce. People can eat flapjacks pretty cheap. And with their own money!

The real victims if EBT goes away? Ben & Jerry's.

Other anecdotes for those who've never been poor: A favorite sight is big-fat-mama paying for a cart full of shit with EBT, and then big-fat-papa rolling up behind paying for a cart full of Bud Lite out of a roll of cash. Love that. Another is hearing about people who got off EBT reminiscing about buying steak and lobster (yes) when it was someone else's money.

It's total waste. Just go back to government cheese and all the "problems" with nutrition will still be "solved" and Ben & Jerry's (and Gino's pizza, and the beef council, and indirectly Budweiser, can go screw.)

You and parent comment are not convincing me of anything other than your own biases.

Some of the people at every level of financial stability cheat some system somewhere.

> No one is going to be hurting for food or rebelling if EBT is taken away.

History would suggest otherwise. Look into the "rediscovery" of hunger in the 1960s. Both Republicans and Democrats eventually supported expansions of food programs because investigations found widespread hunger and malnutrition, and those expansions did appear successful in reducing it.

"Their lives of excess"? No one on EBT is living a life of excess, and they are just as deserving to enjoy ice cream or other pleasures of life as you are. There's nothing irresponsible about buying ice cream or anything else in a grocery store. You're being ridiculous and cruel.

>There's nothing irresponsible about buying ice cream or anything else in a grocery store

That's a debatable point when you consider the context that these people, many of whom are perfectly capable of working, are living exclusively off of the labor of others, perhaps not entirely with the laborer's consent. Is it just to force someone to work without benefit for someone else else's survival? What about for someone else else's comfort?

Some reservations over such handouts are entirely justified. You have no right to force others to toil for your pleasure, that's a form of oppression.

> You have no right to force others to toil for your pleasure

No one is being forced to work! They can simply live a life of “excess” off government assistance right?

All they have to do is trade in their current friends, their standard for home ownership, their dreams of financial stability, any ability to pay for their kids’ emergencies / college / wedding ...

This society has determined that the people who cannot fully take care of themselves should still be taken care of and given a microscopic slice of a tiny sliver of dignity, and that it’s worth the cost of some percentage of bad actors milking the system.

It’s not perfect but I am okay with that trade off.

This is not black and white. The point is that there is some cutoff between full welfare for all of life's luxuries and literal table scraps. Some of us think spending a month worth of food stamps at Walmart on junk (where there are cheap healthy alternatives) is past the line of the minimum that people deserve for free. And it may be anecdata but anyone who's been to Walmart on EBT day has seen plenty of people making this choice.

I am so sorry but it is exactly black and white:

Society sets up rules, most people follow most of them. One of the policies society has agreed on is that if your life is totally fucked financially you can get some table scraps from the government so that you don’t die as a direct result.

Some people are bad actors, which society will tolerate up to a certain level, so long as it means that the worst off people in the country can eat if they jump through some hoops.

That said if you see someone you suspect is scamming EBT etc please report them. Same goes for when your friend gives you a stock tip that’s a little too hot or your folks tell you they didn’t report some income.

>can get some table scraps from the government so that you don’t die as a direct result.

I think you've missed my point. By black and white I mean we are debating over where the appropriate line is between table scraps and government subsidized golden toilets.

The fact that the stuff is in Walmart is proof that people who aren't on EBTs are eating the same junk. You aren't interested in them eating healthy food. You're interested in making them suffer for their poverty.

When I vended ice cream we were directed to poor neighborhoods where people wouldn't have ice cream from the grocery store

by that logic you should also give that pass to beer and cigarettes, as they are comparably addictive and unhealthy. I think it's more cruel to have no standards for expecting responsible eating and spending as it only leads to more suffering down the line for ones family.

Ice cream isn't comparably addictive and unhealthy to beer and cigarettes. C'mon.

But yes, I also believe the poor are equally deserving to enjoy a beer or a cigarette as the rich. I also think both the poor and the rich should be helped out of alcoholism or cigarette addiction, of course, when such issues arise. But I really don't see why the poor should be given so much moral scrutiny over every little pleasurable indulgence that no one questions the right of the rich to access as they choose.

The problem with successful programs is that the problem goes away, but the costs are still noticeable.

Ask yourself if you'd feel the same if you'd spent years around malnourished kids. And no, that's not some sort of exaggeration, as that's been an issue in a number of rural areas in quite recent history.

On that note, free school lunch programs in the US started in large part from the Army publicizing on how too many potential soldiers were malnourished. It was considered a genuine national security concern at the time.

https://outline.com/NeLHSV

Benefit recipients and their landlords. Fixed that for you.

Unconditional handouts are only good for the person handing things out.

Can you explain your comment? I'm having a hard time understanding how giving someone something without conditinos benefits the giver more than the receiver (or, as you say, _only_ the giver)

I am guessing here, but usually the implication is that you are 'bought' and now even more beholden to a (possibly corrupt) government. I.e. the oft repeated 'if you arent paying, you are the product' mantra. The outlay is somewhat small for the amount of influnce it can have on the lives of people who come to depend on it. It may be irrelevant, or a genuine concern, depending on the context.

I think he fears that the main effect of a UBI-type program will be raised rents, it will be a transfer of wealth from members of the wealthy class to other members of the wealthy class, something of a Wework-style boondoggle.

I feel like the lowest-overhead way to manage such a theoretical would be to have a progressive tax rate that, in the higher brackets, negates the UBI.

That is, you give out $X to everybody, but everyone making over $Y+$X total has $X added to their taxes.

This feels a little silly on a but-you're-doing-things-twice level, but it lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in.

it lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in.

In software engineering terms, it reduces coupling. We do the same thing with Social Security: benefits are taxable so recipients with high incomes end up getting checks and paying some portion of them back, but that's simpler than trying to have the SSA figure out everyone's taxes.

This sort of logic just fails to understand human behavior. First off, you make the terrible assumption that there will be more people earning at least double $X so that you can take half of it to give to another that isn't making X. That's nowhere even close to a 50-50 split, and this policy would make it even less even not more. You cannot tax yourself to prosperity. All you are doing is taking money from the people that are producing and giving to the people who are not in the hopes that they might suddenly decide to be entrepreneurial with their newfound financial freedom. Guess what, that desire to become financially free is a far stronger motivator.

In the US, CPI doesn't include health care and housing. If health care and housing were to be added to CPI, interest rates would go up, resulting in lower asset valuations(both housing, and stock market). The elite will never add housing and healthcare to CPI to keep their asset valuations pretty high.

UBI without cheap housing and almost universal healthcare will just siphon off the majority of monthly UBI payouts to land lords and healthcare cartel.

Only after fixing housing and healthcare first, can one see the benefits of UBI.

People aren't going to vote against the hand that feeds them. Money is a proxy for the top of the hierarchy of needs, and if people are going to be voting merely to satisfy their hierarchy of needs then other policy comes second.

Say you've got one party running for office that promises to continue handouts, or perhaps expand them, but also is highly authoritarian, but there's another party that wants to protect fundamental freedoms but wants to reduce handouts. Who do you think has the upper hand in that scenario? It'd be one thing if the populace was well educated and had an interest in their own freedoms, but we're not exactly known for that these days.

This is one of the reasons that California is in the state that it's in. It dwarfs all other states in welfare spending, has the most homelessness, has an exponential feces and public urination problem in its big cities, and the return of medieval illnesses. The problem is unlikely to resolve any time soon because enough voters are dependent and detached from society that those in power can sit back.

That's why there are people who are wary of handouts. It's not that they don't want to help other people; it's that handouts are an easy way to influence the populace, and once you give out handouts, it's extremely difficult to take them away, lest you are willing to lose elections.

>>People aren't going to vote against the hand that feeds them.

This is demonstrably false. Here in the US, conservative states are net recipients for federal aid, yet they continue voting for the party that is determined to shrink the federal government and abolish many of the aid programs they are benefiting from.

How often do conservatives successfully run on the platform that they're going to end handouts? (Besides Trump)

Have you ever spent any time south of the Mason-Dixon line?Conservative "austerity" is the bastard stepchild of Jim Crow and it's pretty much been the central party plank for decades.

If California actually paid to take care of the massive amount of homeless people I think this number would shift blue quite a bit. You cannot tax yourself to prosperity as a society.

Many answers! What I think the GP is saying is this: A system of handing out benefits needs a class of administrators to actually hand it out, keep track of who should get it, who's already got it, and so on. For sure it's good for these people.

Aid to the developing world is often criticised on these grounds. It can be pretty hard to figure out which programs have how much benefit for the intended recipients (some do, but some send the wrong things, or out-compete local businesses, etc). But what's easy to see is that any place with lots of aid has quite the fleet of white toyota 4x4s, with foreign experts driving around, and all of their jobs depend on these programs.

It isn't beneficial to the poor suckers whose livelihoods are taken so that the giver has "unconditional" "gifts" to give I'm sure with "no strings attached"

The "poor suckers" in this case are people donating to charity, and the unconditional gifts are, in fact, actually unconditional gifts, specifically set up that way so the effects of them can be studied.

UBI is not a donation. It is forcibly taken at gunpoint (though they will ask nicely many times before pulling out the gun). Also, there can be no "unconditional" giving without "unconditional" taking in a world with finite resources.

The article this comment thread is about is about a study of efficiency of charity methods. It is useful for studying possible effects of UBI-like programs, but it isn't about UBI.

As for UBI specifically...

> It is forcibly taken at gunpoint (though they will ask nicely many times before pulling out the gun).

This is the case with all taxes.

> Also, there can be no "unconditional" giving without "unconditional" taking in a world with finite resources.

This already happens all the time. The money for the military and Medicare has to come from somewhere, after all.

Resources are finite, ergo it’s a zero sum game. To give unconditionally to one, you must take unconditionally from another.

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