The Failure of a Past Basic Income Guarantee, the Speenhamland System
nakedcapitalism.com
nakedcapitalism.com
One of the major criticisms made of Speenhamland (a means-tested top-up) is that pay was reduced because employers knew employees could claim it back via the state top-up. That could happen under guaranteed income, as it apparently does here, but is not relevant to basic income.
Wikipedia clearly points out this difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_from_g...
A very poor article.
There are lots of things worth considering along this line of thought. You are essentially being paid to be a responsible citizen.
EDIT: When I said there are a lot of things worth considering, I was not advocating stupidity, but consideration. I.e., thought. For one, it wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing. Surely if you have to pay a traffic ticket, it will already be coming out of your income. But if you chose to gamble your income away and you have children to feed, why should you keep getting it?
Good luck with that. Do you pay citizens, or residents, or perhaps the intersection of them? Do you pay only adults? Or every one who has been born? How dead do you have to be to no longer get the money? (Ie keep your relatives on the machines for longer for money?)
Anyway, I agree with your sentiment. But it's not as clear cut in practice. You still have conditions.
One would draw whatever line results in the least ambiguity and the lowest enforcement cost. Regarding end-of-life decisions, that's what medical ethics, living wills, and single-payer healthcare are for.
A lot of people like to think that BI is paying people for nothing. It isn't. You still have civil responsibilities, and upholding those responsibilities has real economic value.
"Worth" just gets to be too sticky of a subject. If I went to either side of my extended family and asked for a list of things that made someone "worthy" of receiving money, I would expect drastically different results. I think if we can't get people to agree on a choice, we have to restructure the problem to remove the need for a choice.
Plus, I think we'd be better off if all the "worth" that anyone needed to deserve some dignity was simply being human.
A lot of people like to think that BI is paying people for nothing. It isn't. You still have civil responsibilities, and upholding those responsibilities has real economic value.
Civic responsibility is important, but as with defining "worth", it seems one would be unlikely to get much agreement on a definition.
Anything on top of that is just to encourage a responsibility to share their successes.
Ah, but someone's common sense, i.e. thought, is someone else's absolute unutterable idiocy.
For example: Some consider it absolute basic rock-simple common sense that a marriage is between one man and one woman, both of whom were born with those genitals, period. Completely inarguable, as in if you try to argue the point, they will scream at you until you give up.
Therefore, they conclude in their inarguable fashion, no same-sex couples should get benefits, because it is contrary to basic intelligence that the government should fund such things.
There. Now you have a political dispute which is completely immune to negotiation, because if you give one red cent to same-sex couples, one side has utterly lost the argument. There is no Overton-Window-Approved middle ground.
That's why Basic Income needs to be no-strings-attached and unconditional for it to work.
My whole point is that this might as well be the empty set, for all the good it's going to do you, and if you make Basic Income contingent on this, people opposed to Basic Income for whatever reason will work hard to make it the empty set.
If I said you don't have a right to a fair trial, that is not a reason to abolish fair trial laws.
I'd love to see it tested for 'real' though.
From Wikipedia: "The authorities at Speenhamland approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty. Families were paid extra to top up wages to a set level according to a table."
So... "basic income isn't going to happen, a priori, so I'm going to call the failure of this other system (that looks much more like what we're currently doing than like a basic income) a failure of basic income".
If the new idea takes into account the experience of the old, and has revisions to specifically deal with the problems that the old system encountered, then the question is whether the changes are actually going to fix the problem. (You want to avoid "We painted it orange this time, so your previous experience doesn't prove that our approach won't work!)
Looks like it was tried as a 5-year experiment. I haven't looked into the details too closely though, although the statistics on Wikipedia seem relatively promising.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution And that's just two examples from Europe alone.
The author makes some frank points that BIG advocates should take to heart. This paragraph really hits home: Too many of the fantasies about a basic income guarantee seem to revolve around a tiny minority, like the individual who will write a great novel on his stipend. Let’s be real: the overwhelming majority of people who think they might like to write a book don’t have the self-displine to do so in the absence of external pressure. And that’s before you get to the question of whether it will turn out to be good enough for anyone but the author to want to read it.
The fact that your strawman appears so frequently shows that knowledge about the details of a Job Guarantee are not spread widely enough yet.
How do you tell apart a job guarantee from any old program doing things that need doing?
The difference is that, with the job guarantee you may eventually have to start creating make-work; otherwise, it is not a guarantee. I oppose make-work, so I oppose the guarantee. I do not, on these grounds, oppose creation of jobs to do things that are not make-work.
Basic income doesn't make working illegal, does it?
If someone thought they could write a book, well, now they can try. So what if they fail? Then they will get another job. Or they will get better at writing. Or they will live in poverty.
Do you really think external motivation will disappear because people have subsistence income? Do you think you'd like to sit around for years on end doing nothing and living in poverty while everybody else goes out there and makes their lives better? What's not 'external motivation' about that?
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Guaranteeing someone a McJob really only wastes people's time. Their employers know it; they could get better work cheaper from a machine. They know it; the job sucks and isn't useful. We all know it. It would be shit policy.
I guess you can always do more, but it hasn't exactly been austerity over here.
One kind of exciting thing that might happen in a GBI system is that maybe someone who right now can't get a job because, for example, he lacks skills or has a dubious past, could get a job paying something really, really low ($1 per hour, maybe), but it's all on top of his GBI, so he's marginally better off, and he could either prove that he was all along actually valuable, or learn things that make him a valuable worker, and then start up the income ladder.
That seems much harder in a guaranteed job system. I mean, you could imagine how it might work in a guaranteed job system, where the guaranteed job does teach/prove generally useful skills, and where the guaranteed job is managed competently enough that private employers trust that people who have good performance ratings at the guaranteed job (or whatever) genuinely are good workers, but it's much less direct.
The article is correct that it's a little insane to focus much on people living on GBI and writing a novel, and only marginally less insane to focus on people living on GBI and trying to, say, start a business that will genuinely prove to be economically expansionary, but I think it's less crazy to focus on people whose employability is currently below the floor of the minimum wage, but who might be worth taking a chance on at a very low wage.
A guaranteed income should absolutely reduce the minimum wage. That's one of its major benefits: redistributing wealth without distorting the market. And I wouldn't worry about the idea that any rich people (the people who presumably you're ultimately worried about subsidizing when you use the shorthand "subsidizing companies") are going to be unfairly benefited by this scheme: it's pretty massive wealth redistribution from the wealthy to everyone else.
A basic income system helps people who are mentally ill, sick, caring for family, or otherwise have difficulty holding down a job. Without demeaning them by forcing them to demonstrate that they can't hold down a job right now. Thereby leading to endless arguments about whether they are truly incapacitated or simply lazy.
To me that's a pretty good social reason for preferring unconditional handouts.
Why the obsession with a labor based economy when the whole point of a basic income is that we're moving away from labor being needed? You can't base the distribution of resources for a society on labor when the population exceeds the necessary labor force. This puritan work ethic where you judge people by how hard they work is becoming antiquated, time to try something else.
In an automated world where labor isn't of great value, people still need to be able to live meaningful lives. A job guarantee is not superior, it in fact misses the entire point of basic income.
Many jobless people are still doing things everyday, they just don't get paid for it.
(yes, I understand there are a lot of things in place that fall under that umbrella)
Principles held by a group of people including Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, who later wrote another pamphlet entitled Agrarian Justice wherein he proposed a stipend funded by a land value tax.
Some of Jefferson's writings also had a mildly Georgist flavor.
I don't think the principles are as far opposed as you seem to.
that was pretty much the argument against Medicare 60 years ago, welfare 80 years ago, etc... and i think it would be a great argument against municipal sewer as well...
With UBI it will always be financailly beneficial to work more even if you don't do it year round. Its in many ways exactly the kind of systems a society who bases more and more of output technology should be in a possition to implement.
Because if you were just going to have each generation decide what principles that they want to be governed by, why have a constitution in the first place (especially one that's hard to change)? Why not just, you know, let each generation do what it wants?
Look, I was initially agreeing with you. If pbreit is going to claim that it makes no sense given the constitution, I want to see section and clause quoted before I believe that it's any such thing. But I also don't think that each generation gets to re-do the constitution in the image of their own principles.
>But I also don't think that each generation gets to re-do the constitution in the image of their own principles.
I never said that. But every generation does have that power, because all other generations are dead and don't get to make amendments anymore. I don't know what it is about what I've said that makes you think I would support some _other_ means of modifying the constitution.
Those who are alive have all the power. I don't see what is so objectionable about that; it's one of the great benefits of not being a corpse.
(In case you can't tell, I'm not a fan of the "it's a living document, it means whatever we want it to mean" school of constitutional interpretation.)
I don't think we should be reinterpreting the law to suit whatever goal we currently want. That kind of behavior is essentially corruption. We should be rewriting the laws to say explicitly what we want, why we want it, and how important it is to us.
This just reminds me of other gov't efforts to "tweak" the system. A great example in the US is drug prices. Some federal gov't programs (Medicare) get to buy drugs at either discount X% or the lowest price offered (to non-gov't customers) whichever is lower.
Sounds like a great idea, but what drug companies started to do is pull back their discounts on private customers in order to minimize the discount to the gov't. As the gov't started paying more, a mish-mash of "tweaks" were made to avoid this. This just created new ways for drug companies to respond.
Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain.
It might, but I don't see why. As some people are more able to opt out of the workforce, you're reducing the supply of labor. Meanwhile, you're making some individuals more capable of realizing their needs as demand. It would hugely surprise me if lower supply and increased demand meant a lower price. Which is not to say I couldn't be surprised.
"Basic income is a decent idea at first glance, but holy crap it could become a complex mess pretty quick if it's not done right. It could create some pretty perverse incentives for either individual or companies to maximize their gain."
Note that we already have a welfare system with a bunch of layers of complexity to try and coddle various behaviour out of people. A system with one simple formula and no discontinuities is likely to be substantially less weird.
When you earn a dollar, you lose 30c of your basic income. Once your basic income is eaten up in this way, you lose 30c out of your income as tax.
This means that the incentive to earn each subsequent dollar is essentially the same as the last. Of course, I'm sure someone smarter than me has a better idea of what:
1) The basic income amount will be 2) What the flat tax amount would be
The idea is that this would be both a tax reform action and also a replacement of a lot of welfare programs.
The robots are taking the jobs and we are going to have to figure out what people are for (because I'm assuming we cant just throw the "excess" population into a volcano or something, and just working them for no reason is obscene.)
Wendell Berry wrote a whole essay about this called, "What are people for?"
Something similar was tried not so long ago and I doubt it will be the last attempt. I can think of quite a lot of people that will cheerfully sacrifice a mass of people on the altar of their basic ideology, and won't regard themselves as morally deficient for doing so.
(Is that an okay ideology? Or should you throw yourself into a volcano if you believe? I for one would gladly throw all the jerks in the world into a volcano and jump in myself afterward as I feel it would be worth it to be immortalized forever as the Last Asshole on Earth. Then you all could get on with your lives in peace and harmony. I expect life would be rather pleasant. I mean, can you even imagine it? A world with no assholes? Sure the four or five people left would be pretty lonely but at least there wouldn't be a littering anymore, eh?)
Unfortunalley i think that massive reduction of population is imminent, either in form of war or some ebola type disease. Sure hope that singularity will happen soon enough.
- national - otherwise you would get strange arbitraging behavior
- unconditional
- available to all adults
The idea is that you get the minimum (let's say 22k a year if we started one now), then you work to get even more money. It's enough to live on. To not starve. To pay rent. If you want to live well, you try to get a job if you can. It would have to replace nearly all of the current welfare state (except maybe disability - 22k may not be enough for the seriously disabled), and not just be another program.
I'm also confused about her confidence that there's "so much work to do." Automation is on the march, and will continue (I'm sure Smith is very familiar with Autor / McCaffee / Ford and friends.) Many of the jobs that one might envision (and that still exist) are jobs that no one wants to do in today's world in any case. They aren't pinnacles of dignity and pride; they're soul-crushing, meaningless, repetitive, and body-destroying. The sooner we automate them, the better. No one will miss doing them. A jobs guarantee also puts us right back in the workhouse / make work mindset.
"People need a sense of purpose and social engagement. Employment provides that. History is rife with examples of the rich who fail to find a productive outlet and and whose lives were consumed by addictions or other self-destructive behavior."
Yes, many people would do drugs and play lots of video games. I think it's short-sighted to believe we can stop that (and as things like VR improve, we'll probably get to the point of wireheading.) Many others would spend time with their friends, make art and music, etc. I think pre-emptively assuming that most would just be loafers is falling to the same thinking trap that has sustains ideological wonders like the Protestant work ethic and modern Social Darwninism. There are other ways to encourage "purpose."
A jobs guarantee is, and will hopefully remain, a non-starter. Machines will free us from work; then we'll have to find our own purpose.
We don't need to leap right to "a living wage" for basic income to make a huge positive difference. $2k is a huge bump to someone who was getting 0.
Basic income is a hedge against a future where labor is no longer required for productivity so one rich family owns all of the factors of production in the world and wonders why everyone is too poor to buy the outputs of their robot factories.
So, look, suppose that we have four people in our population. Before taxes and redistribution, their incomes are $0, $50,000, $100,000, and $150,000.
We want to create a more egalitarian society and basically redistribute $25,000 from the richest person to the poorest, and $10,000 from the next richest to the next poorest, so our target final incomes are:
$25k, $60k, $90k, $125k
We could do that just in a straightforward way, as described, in which technically the government takes in $35k and the cost of the program is $35k.
Or we could do it with a GBI, giving everyone a $25k basic income, and taxing everyone including the next poorest person, so everyone's total incomes look like this:
$0 + $25k - $0k = $25k
$50k + $25k - $15k = $60k
$100k + $25k - $35k = $90k
$150k + $25k - $50k = $125k
And then technically the government has taken in $100k and spent $100k instead of $35k... but everyone is exactly as rich as they were in the version where the tax was $35k. Government expenditures look bigger, but are actually the same, because a lot of the expenditures are essentially taxed down to zero.
You can do this with any desired level of redistribution. You shuffle money around a lot more in a GBI system, but what matters is the amount of redistribution, not the total "expenditure."
It would be admittedly hard to make the general public understand that.
If you want to look at an actual basic income system look at the test results from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
The human condition is such that most people devolve into pretty useless individuals once all is provided for them with no effort. Even if what is provided is not "all" this usually has negative effects. We do best when we EARN what we have. We become better people when we have to devote time, effort and treasure to achive what we want. Various forms of subsidizing life only succeed at destroying people, communities and futures.
You want a country with a culture hell-bent to innovate, struggle, work hard and compete. That country will prosper and eat everyone else alive. In the US we have generations of people on the dole that have, as a result, utterly destroyed everything from individuals to cities.
While I don't have any data I'd be willing to bet that recipients of huge ridiculous unearned government and union pensions are some of the most selfish people out there, just living their "no worries" life without a care in the world and without doing a thing to help others.
Then you have people like me. I've had two huge business failures. One resulted in a total business and personal not-a-dime-to-my-name bankrupcy. I come from an immigrant entrepreneurial family. I licked my wounds and got back to work each and every time. And did well every time because I worked my ass off while everyone else was watching TV.
Because I understood failure and struggle so well I have always gone out of my way to help those struggling. As an example, I have been working with this guy I met at three meetups here in Los Angeles for a year. He is basically homeless and sleeps at friend's homes while doing gigs here and there for money. I am not giving him a dime. I am teaching him how to start a business. We've been at it for a year. He could barely send an email when we started. Today, I fully expect him to start making $5K a month by June and up from there.
Maybe what we need is safety nets for the sick and old without any family/social (church, friends) backup. The rest get nothing could qualify for something like welfare for a very limited time and only to pay for food, a place to live and education. No iphones, no satellite TV, no playstations. You have to make it such that you turn on the innate drive to problem-solve and improve your situation that exists in every single able-bodied and able-minded individual. Nobody is suggesting throwing grandma off a cliff or not helping those who simply cannot do for themselves due to illness or dire situations. Charity is important. At the same time, organizations like churches get tax free status for a reason. They ought to help people rather than build massive empires (anyone who's been to Texas knows what I mean).
And, yes, businesses, entrepreneurs, might get some kind of a tax incentive to help and mentor others. I don't have any specific ideas to put forth. I know this can be abused to a ridiculous extent. I also happen to know that most tax money that goes to government is often wasted in absolutely grotesque ways. Imagine if we paid someone a couple of million dollars to build the Obamacare website properly the first time around and used the billion (or whatever, the exact number is irrelevant) to launch a massive startup funding program or some other worthy cause. Imagine if the 60 to 100 billion dollars California is going to absolutely burn building a high speed train nobody is going to use and, again, launched an entrepreneurial orgy. No, there's a lot that can be done to produce positive results before we make slaves out of people, even a little bit.
Source? Evidence?
It doesn't meet the basic smell test. The vast majority of the population works far harder and for far longer than they need to to attain a basic standard of living.
I earned enough to get by in college working ~10 hours a week. When I graduated I still got a full time job. I also could have retired 10 years ago but I'm still working hard. You could have simply got a job and worked 10-15 hours a week to have your basic needs met and yet you worked your ass off.
A few hundred thousand years of human history. What kind of a stupid question is that? Examples of the human struggle to clear difficult hurdles and advance abound.
No. Not everyone succeeds.
> You could have simply got a job and worked 10-15 hours a week to have your basic needs met and yet you worked your ass off.
That's the beauty of freedom. I chose to work hard, invent technologies, build companies and, as a result, create jobs for people like you who chose a different path in life. One isn't any less than the other, just choices. Yet not everyone is willing to take the risks lots of entrepreneurs will gladly brave in the pursuit of their dreams and ideas.
What is wrong is taking from those who work 80 hours a week to subsidize thise who only want to work 10. If you work 10 then you get to live the life 10 hours a week affords you.
I'll give you another example of this. Up until Obamacare our family was paying $600 a month with a $3,000 annual deductible for health insurance. After Obamacare we pay $1,400 per month and our deductible is fucking $9,000 per year. So we went from $10,200 per year to $25,800. And we are likely subsidizing people who want to work 10 hours per week. That is theft.
It is simple. If you want to choose the 10 hour per week lifestyle, fantastic. Do not steal from others to get he things your work ethic cannot get you.
You can't have it both ways unless you are willing to take risks and work hard to rise to a different level. Today I probably work less than 10 hours a week and make more per month than most Silicon Valley developers make in a year. That took effort, sacrifice, loosing it all twice, learning from mistakes and not giving up.
So you don't have any? I didn't think so.
The western world has had life so easy relative to the thousand years before and yet we have made far more progress.
We have a lot more provided to us "for free" than third world countries and yet our productivity per person is miles ahead of theirs.
"That's the beauty of freedom."
Yes it is. And it is clear that the vast majority of us are happy to work hard even once we have met our basic needs.
The rest of your post is just political talking points. I'm not interested in talking politics or right vs wrong.
Just say "thank you" and move on. You have no point.
You are missing the point. I'm saying the majority of the working population can meet their basic needs with 10 hours a week of work and yet they work much harder and for much longer.
So why then do you keep insisting if they could meet their basic needs in 0 hours they would just be lazy? If modern society is any indication then the vast majority would work just as hard.
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>While I don't have any data
Ugh