[flagged]
I'm getting major eugenics vibes from that comment. I'm not saying you're for forcible population control, but it's just a tiny hop and a skip from the "poor people are so burdened by having children that they just shouldn't" to "poor people are too dumb to realize that they should not have children so we should 'help' them not reproduce".
Education and reproductive changes don’t alter the reality that you can spend years working on developing skills in an industry that rapidly disappears due to technological upheaval. It also doesn’t change the fact that you can’t remedy a plummeting number of jobs for low-educated people by educating everyone.
Will pilots be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? What do we do about the fact that we need them now, but we won’t in an unpredictable amount of time?
Will truck drivers be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Do you think they will all be amenable to retraining as full-stack developers and financial analysts? Do you think we could even absorb that number of people in other industries, even if we could retrain everyone? And what happens when the jobs they retrained for disappear in five or ten years?
No, it isn't. All of the issues you describe are business realities; they are facts of life that everyone has to deal with. You can't make those issues go away by guaranteeing everyone an income, because those issues are issues of production, not consumption. Guaranteeing everyone an income doesn't magically enable us to predict the future or magically retrain people instantly for new jobs when old ones become obsolete. It doesn't magically get the right goods and services produced for everyone's income to be spent on.
In other words, whether we like it or not, we are all exposed to the risks you describe, and UBI does not magically un-expose us to them. The only really practical way of dealing with those risks is for everyone to take a share of them; that means everyone has to be responsible for their own future planning, for being aware of the extent to which their current skills and jobs are becoming obsolete, and to plan their future accordingly. In other words, every mature adult needs to be able to act like a mature adult and take responsibility for their own lives. There is no magical solution that frees anyone from the need to do that.
I believe you’ve thoroughly missed the point.
UBI does not, as you note, “magically enable us to predict the future or magically retrain people instantly for new jobs when old ones become obsolete”. What it does do—in principle—is allow the people who are impacted by structurally decreasing job opportunities and increasing turmoil in the job market to live in something other than destitution. And it does so without many of the downsides of means-tested programs, such as benefits cliffs, negative incentive structures, and operational overhead.
Even if I accept your description of the problem for the sake of argument (I actually don't think you're correctly describing the actual facts), why is universal basic income needed for this? And how does it avoid the obvious problem of increasing these same problems by reducing people's incentive to produce goods and services?
For the simple fact that working and gaining an income will always improve your standard of living, unlike means-tested programs today with benefits cliffs and perverse incentives.
We can even potentially reduce or eliminate minimum wage, since basic survival is no longer contingent upon working a job that pays enough.
Additionally, the problems foreseen aren’t a result of a lack of population willing to produce goods and/or services. They’re from an economic future where there are no reasonable opportunities for a growing number of people. What will, for example, ride sharing, food delivery drivers, and truck drivers do when self-driving vehicles eliminate the need for them? Do you believe we have (or will have) jobs to employ the ten-plus million who will be put out of work in the coming decade or two?
Do you mean now? Or under UBI? Or under UBI plus the necessary changes in the tax code to make sure adding more income never puts you in a higher tax bracket that reduces your actual take home income? Even the last wouldn't necessarily make your claim true, since working has costs as well as benefits--paying for your daily commute, for example.
> We can even potentially reduce or eliminate minimum wage
This would be an obvious thing to do if UBI existed, but nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing it, and it would be politically very difficult to achieve even with UBI. Nobody wants to be the one who takes away any perceived benefit.
> an economic future where there are no reasonable opportunities for a growing number of people
To the extent this is an actual problem, the way to fix it is not UBI, but removing the massive number of government regulations that make it extremely difficult to start a small business and be competitive. The idea that we are running out of actual opportunities for productive work--that is, opportunities for making positive sum trades that are not being made now because nobody has yet started the necessary business to enable them--is laughable. Human wants are limitless. But the most cost effective ways to satisfy particular wants do change, and people's expectations of job opportunities do have to change with them.
> What will, for example, ride sharing, food delivery drivers, and truck drivers do when self-driving vehicles eliminate the need for them?
What happened to all the horse carriage drivers, grooms, stable hands, etc., etc. when the automobile made horse transport obsolete?
The answer, of course, is that they went and found different jobs. Some of them found jobs in automobile factories, or became gas station attendants, or worked on road paving crews. But others went to work for new businesses, or started new businesses, doing things that hadn't existed at all before, because there were no people available to do them.
In other words, your implicit mental model, which is that there are a fixed number of jobs and once automation takes some away, no others arise to replace them, is simply wrong.
> Do you believe we have (or will have) jobs to employ the ten-plus million who will be put out of work in the coming decade or two?
Historically, that has always been what happens when a technology change makes a large pool of people available for new work, so yes. The only thing that might put a spoke in the wheel is government regulations preventing people from starting new businesses doing new things to employ those people. See above.
Under UBI, but we can end this discussion here since you seem painfully unaware of the basic facts around this topic and so I cannot assume we’re operating under the same general basis of understanding. The U.S. uses marginal rates, so increasing your income cannot reduce your take home pay, full stop. This is a sadly common misconception, but it is quite simply completely untrue.
> Nobody wants to be the one who takes away any perceived benefit.
Sorry, but I can’t help myself here. Nobody? Not even the major political party for whom—if they still had an actual platform—this is a major component of their party platform?
And I genuinely have no idea what you're even getting at with your second question. Nobody? The market? What does UBI have to do with individuals becoming rich?
No, it meant contributing to production of goods and services. Some amount of "resource extraction" is necessary for that, but historically, the amount of production for a given amount of resources has increased dramatically, so we get far more value out of the same resources.
More likely then UBI or universal living wages, we’ll just see a return to communal living with shared responsibilities and far more modest personal luxuries: more multi-generational homes, a return of boarding houses and flops, etc
It doesn’t look anything like what we grew up imagining the future to look like, but it’s actually pretty livable overall. Many people already live that way throughout the world, without particular suffering, and even in the US/West most people did until quite recently.
However disappointing to the idea of progress, it’d just be a reversion to the proven norm.
First, profit margins on things like groceries are pretty small. That's why grocery store chains are heavily consolidated: the only way to make a decent overall income in this business is with volume.
Second, both basic economics and all human history teach us that the best way to maximize the quantity and quality of "life's necessities" that are available is through a free market, where people provide these "necessities" because they want to earn a profit.
Third, to the people who provide "life's necessities", what you call "profit" is their income. If you're saying people should provide "life's necessities" with no profit, you're saying those people should have no income. Is that your position?
Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unnecessary luxuries like packaged foods and off-season produce to undercut local grocers who had otherwise been profitable selling seasonal produce and regional meat.
“But clearly, consumers end up ahead if the necessities are cheaper at the supermarket!” you say.
But of course, with a supermarket organized to maximize profit rather than contribute to a community, they do everything they can to empty the consumers wallet. The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise.
Then, instead of the money folding back back into the local community and local farmers/ranchers, it goes to investors at Nestle and Mars and to industrial farming operations in some distant hemisphere. Given the importance of food and it’s affordability, everything about highly consolidated supermarkets is bad.
Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric.
A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries".
A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices.
> Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way.
In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.
I assume HN users are American unless informed otherwise. I'm glad that your health insurance bureaucrats can make a salary, but it's nonsense to believe that's a good way to run a society, even if it is profitable for some or can be deemed to be "free-market provision". There are better models that still generate income for pharma and doctors and nurses.
America made the car part of its identity. Your society was moulded by automotive lobbying in the twentieth century, on the hill and in town planning. It's great that car makers can generate income, but they've mugged you. All the mandatory spending on that sector could be optional, and the rational actors in your economy could use that money to maximise their personal profit functions in a way that encourages entrepreneurs to create new value.
It simply should not cost six figures to turn a school graduate into a doctor or lawyer. It's great that universities generate income and employ people, but you made bad choices there. A professor spends 10-20 hours a week teaching a class of fifty - research grants come from industry - where's the fucking money gone?
House builders deserve to get paid, but when you condemn a generation to rent slavery, you curtail their economic activity, making yourselves much poorer collectively and individually than you would be if your young could afford to take part in other parts of the economy. It's not like your rent-seekers can't cream income from other capital investments, there are ways to turn money into more money that increase liquidity for businesses. Housing isn't mandated by the laws of the universe to be an income stream.
If we translate Maslow's pyramid into goods and services, at the bottom we have groceries - which moooost people can afford, yay, you win a point; then housing, which is touch-and-go for a large minority; then leisure time and retirement planning and non-vocational education, which are enjoyed by only the wealthy.
And this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist... where the individuals in question are specifically rich and powerful ones. So you have apparently phenomenal GDP per capita but only 90% functional literacy, and lots of you die indigent because you got cancer. That GDP, I assert, is fucking fictitious. I'm sure America is rich one way or the other but it looks like the books are being cooked. If you claim that a university degree is $50k then your claim of $50k GDP is bollocks. Where is the actual production that you write down as $10k for having a broken arm set?
John Galt shat in your mouths and you're calling it stew.
Sorry if this rambled. GP, please let me know if I've fleshed out your point or missed it entirely.
The post I responded to mentioned "food" as well as the other things you list. Last I checked, "groceries" is food.
I focused on groceries because they are closer to being in a free market than any of the other things you mention, all of which are more heavily regulated by the government and therefore are more inefficiently and wastefully provided than groceries are. If we want to talk about giving everyone easy access to "life's necessities", it seems obvious that making the provision of those necessities more efficient, hence making them cheaper and easier to afford, would be a good thing to do. That means making all those other things more like groceries in the way we provide them. That might well decrease the per-unit profit on such things--which is why I pointed out that profit margins on groceries are pretty small. That's what free markets do: they drive profit margins down, not up, through competition.
Most of the rest of your post is simply uninformed about how things in the US actually work. I'll focus on one particular statement of yours to make that clear:
> this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist
Quite the contrary: things that are a mess in the US are a mess because of too much collectivism, not too little. To take your two major examples:
The US health care system is a mess because the people who actually have to make decisions about care--patients and doctors--have no idea what the care they are deciding about actually costs. All those costs are hidden--negotiated collectively behind the scenes by large corporations who have no skin in the game in individual cases, which is where the availability and quality of care actually matters. How can people possibly make decent tradeoffs of benefit vs. cost when providing or receiving care if they can't see and control the costs?
Housing is a mess in the US because much, if not most, urban and suburban planning was done from the top down, by collectivist central decree, instead of from the bottom up, evolving as individual choices and interactions shaped communities. (In Europe, by contrast, most cities and towns developed from the bottom up, and hence were much more suitable for introduction of a few top-down things like mass transit when those became available, because the top-down planners had the benefit of centuries of bottom-up evolution of communities.)
I apologise for saying you were straw-manning, your comment was apposite.
I think where you and I differ is that you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist, whereas I will characterise actions by organisations and individuals as individualistic or collectivist on a case-by-case basis.
I agree with the principle of individual agency in the default case, but town planning is a prime example where this doesn't work - absent a population with a strong collectivist culture. I've spent time in a rural part of Spain and, please know, the towns are a mess - traffic arteries go down to one lane and detour around houses that someone decided to build where they pleased. It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.
In terms of healthcare, your thesis would stand a hundred years ago, when medical skill was the prime differentiator and drugs were simple and cheap. That is not the case today. For any given condition, the treatment is often a monopoly or has little competition. Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it - is one of the elements that makes American healthcare such an international joke. These companies have a captive market, and the cost of entry is enormous. Respectfully, the idea that what you need is _more_ individualism does not stand up to inspection.
You may have individualism as your highest value, in which case avoidable death in penury is a price you are willing to pay. Most of the world finds that incomprehensible. The common solution in other countries is single-payer. This has the disadvantage that it levies the healthy to pay for the sick, but the advantage that the levy is affordable. It's not as if there is no benefit to the healthy - it is valuable in itself to live free from medical worry.
Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Your principle is a very expensive one. And it's not as if pharma is struggling in Europe. Strange hill to literally die on.
No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense.
> It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.
A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped?
Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals.
> Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it
I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism.
Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with.
> You may have individualism as your highest value
I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others.
> Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance?
Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.
How would one predict who is going to have children that contribute to society and who is not? If the idea is to stop them reproducing then you have predict ahead of time, after all.
I don’t have a strong opinion on UBI, but I want to challenge you on this.
If everyone gets $20k per year, let’s say the median earner goes from $40k to $60k. An increase of 50%. And let’s assume that we don’t increase taxes, even though it would definitely play a role.
Pretty soon, inflation kicks in and everything goes up 50% in price.
But a low income earner of $16k per year is now making $36k per year. More than double! So the 50% increase of prices means that the UBI helps the lower income person’s purchasing power to be on a more level field with the middle earners, even though the middle earners obviously still are better off with their larger income. Just less so.
And the person making $200k is now making $220k. But the 50% inflation means that they have to lower their consumption a bit, to be more in-line with the median earner.
So introducing UBI like this causes an automatic rebalancing between different levels of income, somewhat, even if the median earner is unaffected. Obviously this is greatly simplified though.
Poor people buy goods, driving a productive economy. Rich people buy financial vehicles. Yeah yeah yeah liquidity makes it easier for businesses to raise capital... tired old bollocks. However seductive the reasoning may sound, it's turned out to be bullshit every time it's tried. If the financial sector is the most profitable part of your economy, you've got it precisely the wrong way round.
Predicating your economy on appeasing the rich is like putting accountants in charge of a company - the headline numbers look good for two years, then it dawns on you that you don't have any products to sell.
You get a more vigorous economy when the poor people can take part, because while they may not spend much, there's a lot of them.
In a convoluted, bureaucratic way, we have many of the pieces of UBI (welfare, unemployment, social security, minimum wage). We just lack the "universal" part. I agree that UBI is contentious, but I wouldn't be surprised if UBI dressed up in some definitely-not-socialism clothing eventually reaches critical mass of support.
> fixing the hard things like education
Sure. Hard, but not controversial.
> ...or reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society.
Excuse me, what? Who gets to decide who has kids and who doesn't? Unless you have some clever voluntary economic way to affect this, then it sounds a lot like eugenics.
By reactive, do you mean addressing symptoms rather than causes?
What does education have to do with this? Are we really still pretending in this day and age that education is some magical panacea to fix even a fraction of the ills? A populace with a lot of education and a poor means to earn a living wage just means you'll end up with a lot of educated poor people.
The current way of things is an anomaly in human history. You can't have a continuous consolidation of wealth by the very few AND allow them to capture the means of production and pretend that things are going to be hunky dory in the long run. Either you ensure that the average person can have a comfortable life in your system, or heads are eventually going to start rolling. The only question is how long before that happens.
We do have a UBI of sorts started during the Covid pandemic for folks who don't have employment and not on any other benefit (current 18 million people) - it is called the SASSA and is about $18 per month (R350).
On the Big Mac Index we are about $2.81
The govt was supposed to cancel it but they keep extending it and are now coming up with inventive accounting tricks to keep it not that our economy can afford a rollout to more people.
It works but our taxbase is so small.