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> Which means those jobs have to pay more

The assumption being made here is "all other things being equal". All other things are never equal.

I am no economist but couldn't it be that raising pay in few sectors does not cause inflation? I would think that depends on what the people receiving more money spend it on. If they only spend it on things where we have no bottleneck and there is still excess capacity, how would that create inflation? Inflation should only happen if the increased paycheck is used to compete for scarce resources/products. So I think predicting inflation requires a more detailed analysis, especially you need to have a cycle of increased prices and pay.

> I'm still yet to understand how a lot of relatively poorly paid work that probably still needs to be done, gets done under UBI.

To flip it around, right now we keep a huge number of people so immerserated they will do all sorts of bullshit for a little wage. Is that a solution?

My personal belief is that there is huge potential technical progress, but it is stuck in the research phase and cannot get to development because with so much weak cheap labor, there is no reason to automate. But with UBI, and people able to say "no, fire me I don't care", that will shift, and suddenly those investments will become valid. I am very excited for that as a programmer.

To restate, Andrew Yang and his ilk have it dead backwards: It's not UBI because unemployment apocalypse, it's unemployment utopia because UBI.

However, say I am dead wrong, and technology doesn't pick up the ball. We might have to cut back on certain luxuries that are no longer affordable. We might also need to "ration" certain un-fun jobs with like a chore rotation --- think civilian 3 years guaranteed service. But this seems good. This is the type of stuff that keeps society honest and fair, and I think will rebuild ties between humans.

Besides these 2 options, the 3rd view is society needs to exploit certain people, hereditary for maximal learned helplessness, to function, and there is no alternative. You can believe that, but you better be honest to yourself if you do.

It won't. It's only poorly paid because there's a power imbalance - the tradeoff is "do shit work for shit money, or starve to death".

UBI removes the "or else clause". Which will fundamentally shift how we pay for work - instead of overvaluing rare skills, we will value willingness to do the work that needs to get done.

It doesn't necessarily lead to inflation because UBI doesn't automatically mean all jobs will pay more. There's a likelihood that many BS jobs will go away - i.e. nobody will want to be a bagging clerk in supermarkets, because you couldn't pay enough to make it worth people's effort without exceeding (vastly) the return that having bagging clerks produces.

You'll still have people cleaning sewage lines, because civilization literally rests on that. It'll be a well-paid job suddenly.

That's as intended, as far as I'm concerned.

I haven't seen a baggage clerk in years here in Canada.

Probably just an extra person to pay, tbh - and there's also starting to be quite a few self-checkouts, with some places like Dollarama having entirely self-checkout operations.

We're going to see a lot of these jobs just replaced with machines, and reasonably so - which is also why UBI is going to be increasingly necessary as the years pass.

If I get $1000 a month from UBI, and I have a minimum wage job, I'm still working. Because now I will have even more money! But I might be more likely to quit my job for factors other than money - e.g. I'm going to be less likely to take shit from a bad manager. Maybe this means bad managers will start to get fired?

People will want to work, but when UBI exists then people can shop around for better jobs. If the jobs disappear, so what. A lot of people talk about fast food jobs, but honestly this disappearing would be a net benefit to society. If UBI means people have to cook for themselves, and can now, why is that bad?

Overall, maybe if we have UBI then a lot of "crappy jobs" can simply become part of the gig economy, which would be far less exploitative if it didn't trap people into being the sole source of income. Imagine if shifts at Walmart, restaurants, etc. had Uber-style apps. Need extra money? Go work a few, or work as many as you want. Don't want to? Fine, stay home or do whatever.

UBI doesn't work under any circumstances. And you don't need it besides. The better managed welfare states of Europe such as Austria, Germany, Finland or Sweden, have already figured out how to operate relatively good systems. No UBI needed.

The approach that will work in the US is a system of income crediting targeted at lower wage workers. And that will still push up their cost of living, for housing and lower priced used vehicles in particular (which will result in the left attempting aggressive rent controls in cities, which will largely backfire).

It's irrational to give everyone a universal basic income. Scale a wage credit for poorer workers and reduce it as you go up the income brackets. Instead of earning $10/hr, it's $15/hr with the credit; instead of $12/hr, it's $16/hr; instead of $15, it's $18/hr. Make the floor $15; shift the federal minimum wage up to $10. Spend the time and money necessary to research what setup - what bracketing - will work best for the present US economy, and then fix it to be adjusted every few years.

It will also put pressure on wages above those workers. It'll ripple through the pay scales. People just beyond the cutoff will be the most unhappy.

* why not shift the minimum wage up to $15? Because if a worker's labor isn't worth $15/hr, they have no place in the labor force. If you use a credit system, their labor may be worth $7-$10/hr, and they can be subsidized up to eg $15/hr or whatever makes sense. A high minimum wage is regressive by comparison, it chops people off at the knees if their labor value isn't high enough.

The best way to achieve that is a negative income tax. If you earn below a certain income you get a payment (not just no tax). That makes it reasonably easy to avoid the "welfare cliff" as you create smaller brackets and slowly move from negative to positive tax rates, likely with a reasonably large band where you neither owe taxes or get a payment. It would need to be combined with government calculating monthly or quarterly payments to avoid feast at tax time and famine the rest of the year.

It would need to come with a strong education on tax brackets and a good online calculator for people to figure out their true income. Way too many people don't understand progressive taxation and think moving up a bracket means they pay a higher rate on all their income, not just the portion that falls into the higher bracket.

> That makes it reasonably easy to avoid the "welfare cliff" as you create smaller brackets and slowly move from negative to positive tax rates

NIT, in the idealized form (which is exactly a UBI + income tax system) always has positive marginal rates (its semi-realization in the US EITC does have negative marginal rates over some ranges, which brings back—or exacerbates, since EITC coexists with other welfare programs which also have cliffs—the welfare cliff effect.)

Why is it irrational? in a way it is creating liquidity (the additional funds will be spent in different ways by those in different socio-economic groups). Why does there need to be a cut-off the whole point of it being Universal for it to work, there should not be anyone just above the cut off as its in addition to their existing salary, this is a problem that exists in the current welfare states, where those earning just above cutoff earn similar to those on welfare.

For the cycle you propose the increase in inflation would have to be equal or greater than the increase in pay.

If there's an increase in wages and the increase in inflation in response is lower then there's and effective wage increase despite the inflation. Which is simply the desired outcome.

An increase in inflation that matches or outpaces an increase in wages should only happen if wages are 100% of the cost of goods/services. So the cycle you propose should be a non-issue.

Right now i feel that we've been so scared to increase wages that we've simply made wages pointless altogether. Assets from second hand cars, to houses, to shares are all skyrocketing in value. I can't imagine people working for minimum wage and looking at the value of the house they rent go up by 10x more than their salary each month and thinking this is ok. We've been so scared of increasing wages because of inflation fears yet we've allowed all the QE to go into assets. It's led to an imbalance of wages compared to the cost of assets. There's a need for market correction from the government to get wages back in line with the value of assets and as long as any forced increase in wages isn't leading to inflation that outpaces the increase it's a perfectly reasonable solution to pursue.

The current "inflation" thing is not so much due to asset inflation, but due to poor people finally seeing some gains, and the global production capacity still recovering.

Before now, there still was a large amount of QE, and yet little inflation or wage gains. Now, the labor market finally gets tight, bottom half real income goes up, inequality shrinks. But our global supply chains were bred on austerity, tuned to low demand, bean-counter efficient over resilient, and can't keep up.

In particular, your minimum-wage protagonist has a better 2020 and 2021 than 2019.

The current inflation freakout is anti-fiscal- and anti-monitary; it just wants to go back to 2019 and is thus little but evil class warfare, intentionally or not. The right thing to do is to keep the labor tight while finding some completely separate way to discipline the speculation in land, stocks, and crypto (in order of increasing being a farce).

UBI isn't unemployment. Less desirable jobs won't need to pay more: income will be in addition to UBI.

The only jobs that will need to raise their wages are those that were exploitative to begin with: the ones that rely on people not even having the resources to seek better work.

> I’m still yet to understand how a lot of relatively poorly paid work that probably still needs to be done, gets done under UBI.

UBI does not exist in a vacuum, it replaces means-tested welfare programs which reduce benefits for additional work. It may also replace or reduce minimum wage, UBI proponents disagree rather strongly over whether it should do this; very broadly those most Left UBI supporters stend to oppose displacing minimum wage and Right Libertarian UBI supporters tend to support it doing so, but that’s not exactly accurate (for instance, I’m a left-leaning UBI supporter, and I support it displacing minimum wage on about a $2000/yr offsets $1/hr of ideal minimum wage basis, so that an early stage, immature UBI would not completely replace minimum wage, but a mature livable UBI would.)

By replacing means tested welfare it reduces worker disincentives to low-paying work, and by reducing/eliminating minimum wage, if it does that, it reduces barriers to work which might be mutually beneficial to employer and employee but not viable given minimum wage.

Enabling work that status quo welfare systems inhibit is a major argument for UBI.

If particular work genuinely needs to get done, inflation will necessarily drive the real value of UBI down while demand drives the real compensation for the work specific work up until the combination causes a sufficiently large number of people to be motivated to do the work in question. The work for which that is not true does not, almost by definition, need to be done.

What do you think of moving medicaid funds to UBI? I ask because I doubt young people will spend their UBI money on health insurance.