I’m sorry, but “getting free money makes people happy” isn’t exactly a shocking result is it? The result that the employment level was consistent is mildly interesting, though I’d expect the numbers could be different with a longer or larger test. But the real question imo is “does this scale without destroying the country’s finances?”
Well, this test is invalid for one more reason - recipients knew that the experiment has "end date." This means that the employment rates would not be affected since people could not treat the benefits as a permanent thing and plan accordingly. If you would take 1,000 people and give the lifetime benefits, I would assume this would change things a bit.
That's one of my points I always make when people mention UBI experiments. The other one is the amount is too low. I have never been to Finland, but can someone there comment on this: can you live on 560 euros a month without some other income or assistance?
"I’m sorry, but “getting free money makes people happy” isn’t exactly a shocking result is it?"
Well, in the context of the experiment the people would have been able to garner state support through a bit more complex social security / social services schemes so it's not entirely about that they have more resources available, but also how they were given those resources and how many needless strings were attached to those.
I agree on principle to your point, but it's not as blatant as if the people had been living in abject poverty and then given money beyond their current financial means.
You could line up knowledgeable opponents and proponents, and you would probably find their reasons vary wildly. They also come from all over the political map.
But I agree with you. It seems odd to me that people are worried about an income harming people on average, or even affecting employment. We already have plenty of people with passive incomes, and they don't generally become depressed bums. They're called rich people.
>I’m sorry, but “getting free money makes people happy” isn’t exactly a shocking result is it?
It's kind of significant, yeah. As a general rule, people on income support in Australia and the UK tend to be harassed, stressed and moderately unhappy people despite the free money.
There's a lot of evidence from looking at lottery winners and people with significant disabilities that suggests that people have some base level of happiness they trend towards.
Happy fun people who have catastrophic accidents and end up paraplegics are really unhappy for about 6 months and then start rolling with it and end up being happy fun people who make light of their situation and enjoy life despite the wheelchair.
Debbie downers who win the lottery are super-happy for about 6 months and then become rich unhappy people.
A persistent long term increase in net happiness is a notable result. Maybe not earth-shattering, but certainly not necessarily to be expected either.
> It's kind of significant, yeah. As a general rule, people on income support in Australia and the UK tend to be harassed, stressed and moderately unhappy people despite the free money.
The experiment had an appropriately-matched Finnish control group on standard unemployment benefits. The UBI group received four fifths of those benefits plus an extra unconditional EUR560 per month and were according to the preliminary results about 4% less likely to report themselves as stressed
Obviously the caveats about the experiment being short term apply, but that's not a significant result, that's a disappointing result.
> But the real question imo is “does this scale without destroying the country’s finances?”
It depends on how it is implemented and the numbers involved.
One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.
This allows one to get get enough for the bare necessities (shelter, food) "for free", but if you want to have a life that's more than just subsistence living, you would have to work--but you get to keep a lot of that upfront.
If you want a 'fancy' life, then you'll have to work more, and there would be personal income taxes. Presumably there would be corporate and sales taxes as well.
I don't know enough about the math to know if it is practical.
>One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.
That sounds a lot like the Fair Tax plan that was all the hubbub a decade ago but never got off the ground.
> Giving everyone $10K/year would just inflate prices until $10K was the zero baseline for income.
That doesn't make sense. A downward redistribution (which UBI is) is going to inflate prices of goods with disproportionate low-end demand and deflate those with disproportionate high-end demand somewhat, but in any plausible scenario it will still (before considering any effects of reactive production shifts) increase the buying power on the low end and decrease it on the high end, even after the effects of price level changes.
> Luckily, [[new research]] on a program in Mexico gives us a real-world test case for this idea. And it strongly suggests that giving out cash doesn’t cause inflation — or if it does, the effects are very, very mild.
> If, however, you funded a UBI with graduated taxation, you would effectively be redistributing wealth from the wealthiest to the population in general. Depending on the tax code, people somewhere in the middle of the scale would receive about the same amount in UBI as they pay in tax increases.
I'd expect the opposite. Giving a UBI would suddenly give the poorest people a voice in the market, and industries that are currently bottom-feeder would become inclusive and thriving. Eg payday loans becomes small business loans. Dollar stores get better fresh produce, etc.
Actually, it is. When you don’t approach social welfare as a corrective action of a defective person, this is evidence of a positive effect similar to social security. It’s very different than the norm.
When you think about the money spent on nursing homes, daycare, juvenile justice or even kids who extend college due to the need to work, society pays a big bill directly or indirectly.
My family does well, but we realized that expenses like daycare, summer camps, etc made it such that having one of us take a sabbatical would only cost a few hundred bucks a month, and be a better outcome for our family. Not many folks have that luxury, and imo we are all worse off for it.
This. From what I understand, raising taxes goes over better most places than in America. It's also worth pointing out that Norway, a country with an incredibly generous entitlement program, funds a huge amount of it via oil production.
Well, I don't remember ever reading the comments about any UI article here without people claiming that people receiving it will get depressed and desperate.
As a member of the Nordic societies I find it important to point out some important information. In these countries we already have rather sizable unemployment benefits.
If you read the (better) article by NYT[0] on the same subject, you will be given an example showing her income under basic income only increased with 50$ out of 635$.
It would also been useful to see results of the one in Ontario, Canada, but the Conservative government that was elected last year cancelled it before it had run its course (after promising to let it finish during the campaign).
Is it a legitimate argument that smart hardworking people who are considered economically valuable will be swayed to non-economically valuable interests within this system?
As a former fine arts student that became a UI developer mostly for the monetary stability, I do feel like if I had the ability to fully invest myself creating art without constantly struggling with relevancy and rent, I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large.
there's a difference between "non-economically viable" and "not useful". i have no problems with people losing interest in doing stuff that current market values because current market values turning people into zombies that occasionally are happy to go murder each other.
art, volunteering, social programs and plenty other activities are way more useful for civilization as a whole than almost any random job on the market. as soon as businesses start losing workers as they realize they don't need to do shitty unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table - market will finally put the right price on lots of these jobs and start paying for it adequately.
> they don't need to do unimportant stuff just to put bread on a table
I think at first they will, but I think over time they will realize they don't have to do anything at all. People work because they want something, or at least I always have.
Yes that is how human nature evolved. Competition for scarce resources so you and your offspring can survive. This extends to supporting society to the extent it helps your personal survival.
When people retire, they get doubly depressed from age and if they don't have structure and activities to keep them occupied. It's best to never "retire," not because of cognitive "use it or lose it" (which was disproven[1]) but because of the harms of slipping into depression.
For example, my step-father was a copy editor for a large government body who was initially happy/go-lucky on retirement initially but is now extremely self-isolated and depressed.
You may have thought you'd be more "qualitatively" useful, but the wasn't the prevailing wage for creating art, that you found insufficient, at all reflective of general society telling you that it wasn't more "qualitatively" useful?
Yes, but currently you must be unemployed to get most aids. These aids may be as much as your monthly pay at work. If you end up unemployed, it makes sense to stay so for a while. With basic income it would get continuous and unconditional, albeit less in amount. Finland has quite complex welfare system and basic income would make it simpler and avoid people gaming the system to optimize aids instead of focusing on getting employed.
As an employed person making 100k, if given UBI I would quit and not do anything productive-to-society for most of the rest of my life. So yes, that is a legitimate argument. The counter-argument is that the benefit coming from more people pursuing entrepreneurial/risk-taking/passion-driven endeavors will OUTWEIGH the lazy fucks like me.
Usually the goal of UBI is to lift everyone above the poverty line, not to make everyone's lives comfortable.
If you're happy living as a lazy fuck just shy of poverty, you're welcome to do so. If you want some comfort, security, and the ability to not anticipate each 1st of the month, you'd probably still want to work.
I personally think that UBI is a requirement for us to be able to say that we each have a fair shot at success. Nobody should worry about having a roof over their head or providing food on the table. We have plenty of both for each human in the world already.
The problem is whole I'd like to think they would, I think people will gradually get lazier as they get used to it. Most people do the minimum required now; what makes everyone think they will keep that same level of productivity arbitrarily when it's not the minimum liveable?
I'd suggest looking at retirement- one of the important facets of retirement is the encouragement to continue contributing to society once retired because it is always necessary to be productive in some way or form for the human condition as we understand it. It is psychologically damaging to not be constantly doing stuff that is at least mildly fulfilling in some way. If a sizeable portion or even a majority of people recieved UBI we would quickly learn as a population what's always been advised to our elderly.
Do we? I'm unaware of that, actually. I was under the impression it was widely known that retired people are the sizeable portion of those who volunteer for anything in particular, and there's the existing tropes of retired people getting into art and fitness, and community activities. Book clubs. Crochet/knitting clubs. Bingo. Dancing.
A sizeable portion, maybe, but certainly not all (and probably not even most). Do you think crocheting, knitting, bingo, and dancing are honestly good things to put people to do? Let alone pay them for?
Exactly. Those are time killing activities to keep from staring out the window and losing your mind. Which is also a big problem for the elderly and unemployed.
Or, we could view them as “happiness activities”. In labor economics it is called leisure and the goal of people is to optimize between income and leisure.
I know lots of employed people who spend their days “staring out the window losing their mind”. It seems we have over optimized in the wrong direction (towards work and away from leisure).
They already are subsidized in plenty of places (sports stadiums and public parks for example).
It raises a fundamental question about the government's role and it's goals. We tend focus on maximizing productivity and other countries focus more on maximizing health/happiness. Even the way Americans talk about education is through the lenses of creating more productive workers as opposed to something like creating more enriched citizens.
Volunteering is one possibility. People are just going to replace their jobs with doing free work entirely? If not, what else will they do? According to you, crocheting, knitting, bingo, and dancing.
Volunteering is one possibility. People are just going to replace their jobs with doing free work? If not, what else will they do? According to you, crocheting, knitting, bingo, and dancing.
The gift of ubi is society saying, “we are here to help you without compelling you to contribute in any specific way. But if you don’t contribute in some way, we may lose the ability to help people. here and now is your chance to choose for yourself how to keep the world afloat and vibrant. You have our support. We are looking forward to seeing how you choose to support the world in turn.”
I believe the "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" approach has already been tried many times over the world in the 20th century and failed every single time. As E. O. Wilson (a world leading expert in studying ants) said about communism/socialism: “Great Idea. Wrong Species.”
Let’s not rail on someone simply because they provided a counter-example to disprove the original assertion that everyone on UBI would do something productive with their time.
Given that he is strictly providing a personal anecdote on what he would do with the money and extra time, the responses suggest that some people are quite judgemental about how other people spend their own money.
I'm assuming you'd also downgrade your lifestyle from a 100k/yr to the median individual income or less? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious as to your thought process regarding quitting 100k/yr income because you can survive off 25-30k/yr or something)
depends what kind of UBI we are considering. if you get $10k each for you, your wife (assuming you are married), and each child, you might be somewhere close to breaking even after taxes and the expenses you mentioned. if only you and your wife get the $10k, you're looking at a pretty tight budget.
imo, only the latter setup is reasonable. I'm all for giving individuals the freedom to float around for a while figuring out what the want to do, or even subsist for their whole lives if they don't "click" with any work that's valuable to the market. but I don't think it's fair to make the taxpayers support however many children you decide to have.
I am employed and making more than 100K and still I am not doing anything productive for society. So even if I quit given UBI and become "unproductive" it will have no meaningful impact on anything.
It's complicated but in general if somebody is willing (or has to) to pay you it's not per se productive. In a society where everyone's basic needs are guaranteed to be covered we both would have made different choices.
You can't have a UBI without massive taxation. Massive taxation increases the risk of doing business. The higher the risks, the less entrepreneurship a country will see.
> Massive taxation increases the risk of doing business
I encourage you to make a list of countries ordered by taxation level, and another one ordered by the risk of doing business. And then compare the two.
I'd phrase it as "massive taxation reduces the reward of doing business" and therefore, assuming equivalent risk, some number of potential entrepreneurs (and their investors) will decide it's not worth it.
If you're thinking that it's instructive to compare nations by tax rates in isolation, as if it's an "all things being equal" comparison I would challenge that on many levels.
Some of my most productive moments have been when I'm following my own whimsy, instead of responding to economic pressure. I can only imagine this effect, scaled up, would be a net benefit for society.
- How much does this actually happen?
- Is the job market over or under satisfied?
- Does what people end up doing somehow turn out valuable to society, even if not in a way we know how to assign monetary value?
There are so many unknowns.
Great that somebody are actually trying it out and getting us some data.
UBI might solve rent, would it solve "relevancy"? There are genres of art where the means of production became so easy/cheap that the world is flooded with them, I recall reading a blog from some years ago discussing how EDM music had become so cheap and easy to produce that the market was flooded with content which fewer and fewer people would actually pay for.
UBI might give people the opportunity to explore their interests but ultimately wouldn't you end up in the same place? Torn between a desire to make "art" which suddenly everyone else is also trying to make and follow their passion, or get paid substantially more for UI Development?
I'd point to fan fiction as a possible outcome. Most writers are never recognized, and they don't seem to be phased by that outcome.
They write for themselves and develop a niche that they are happy to contribute to.
Just because the cost of writing and publishing has plummeted doesn't mean it's less valuable, it's development becomes either decentralized or internalized.
Seriously? You're comparing a job you don't like to slavery?! Unless you have people who whip you if you run away, it's not, and it's pretty insensitive to compare it to that.
Show me the gun being pointed to your head to keep you in that job. Otherwise, shut up about slavery.
Not necessarily. I view the advertising industry as a net loss to society, yet the amount of revenue is immense and the salaries of the people working there are equally large.
Yes, the idea of exposing potential consumers and informing them of what your product is in principle fine, but that idea was perverted long before any of us were born. Now it's about spending money on selling products that aren't selling themselves, because it's cheaper than making a better product. As always, exceptions exist.
OP wrote: "I would have been far more qualitatively useful to society at large."
There are far more people that need UI work (in the form of websites, apps, etc) these days than art. UI work scales very well, art not really - you can affect way more people and that is reflected in the salary.
"Qualitatively" UI work is far more useful to society.
Earning money is not easy. The fact that on average a larger group is willing to pay for UI work than for art indicates that UI affects their lives more than art and is more worth to them. Whatever one's reason is.
That doesn't really work. Is my life better or worse if I feel worse about myself because I become aware of the way that I'm part of a unethical social system? Given the choice, I wouldn't choose to be a happy person who lives in the Jim Crow south and supports segregation. Part of what many artists do is help people understand themselves differently. You can't assume people are going to be willing to pay for something that's good for them (by their own standards).
My skills are now very bounded to building interfaces for consumption, not critical thought. In fact, the choices I make for developing interfaces usually revolve around the user being some level of drunk.
My senior thesis was a receipt printer that wireshark'd instant messenger messages on our school's unsecured wifi and dumped those messages into a pile.
...so you are not critically thinking about your work in the context of how useful it is to the end user? That's a bad UI work, I'd say.
As for your senior thesis - Developer's job is to create software that makes lives easier. It was your decision to use your skills to harm people by exploiting their privacy.
Or it could be seen as something good - you discovered a way to exploit people and if you informed whoever was running this app you helped a good amount of people in your school.
I think you're misunderstanding both my role as a UI developer and as an artist...
It takes critical time and energy to reduce the complexity of a products' features to something a layperson can use, and a layperson is usually barely paying attention.
As to your second point, I wasn't a developer, I was an artist, attempting to ask real questions about privacy and spark real discussions and possibly getting myself in trouble to start a conversation.
How many people work full time ubpaid on the Linux kernel? For the 4.15 kernel, AMD, Intel, Google and Red Hat contributed between 35 and 50% of the changes, depending on whether you count number of commits or number of lines changed.
I think you may be picking up on a but of a cultural difference here. In America, people are identified, both by themselves and by others, in a large part by there job. It's a huge part of personal and cultural/societal identity.
A big problem about the basic income is that it is perceived as money that you get for nothing and so people don't have to work and therefore they are lazy.
Let me give you an analogy:
Imagine that breathing air would cost money and you would have to work in order to breathe. Unless you don't work you would die. Would then a basic income be something that makes you lazy or would it be something that gives you confidence in surviving the next day?
The same is true for the "basic income" that is used by its recipients for food, medical care, clothing and shelter. So how in the world can we deny the basic needs to most of the population in our civilization and call these people lazy?
You’re basically saying that because it has ethical value it can’t make people lazy. That’s irrelevant. UBI might make people lazy. In fact, it would be pretty shocking if it didn’t make some % of the population choose to do nothing for their entire lives but stay at home and play video games.
People like to point out that techies would feel more comfortable building start ups, and that’s probably true. But for people with low skills and low opportunity costs to doing nothing (of which there are many more people), I don’t see a reason why they would work relatively shitty jobs for low income. Who is going to work minimum wage to be a janitor to get basically no substantial benefit. Maybe you think people deserve better wages then- but then uh oh, it’s even harder to justify not doing things in China wherever possible.
UBI benefits society when it’s given to a person with a high ability to to positively impact society (let’s say skilled workers and parents). And that’s before considering any effect on prices or whatever.
So it looks like what you argue is that without UBI some people are forced to work the shitty low paying jobs that more secure people would pass on, and that's beneficial to society? So basically wage slavery of the lower income people is beneficial to society?
I dunno... I think, UBI may actuall ydrive change in those very awful professions where they become more attractive either through quality of life improvements or through the pay rise. Otherwise, yep, I think having people not to go to a soul crushing job because they are secure is a better thing than grinding lots of them down generation over generation.
While it is certainly possible to give people enough money to become uninterested of working, one of the conclusions of the experiment is that the UBI version tested did not make people less efficient at seeking employment. UBI just made them happier.
In other words, not implementing their UBI version is simply a way to punish unemployed people for not having a job. You can still argue that unemployed people should be unhappy, but you no longer have any basis for saying that unhappines will make them more likely to get a job.
They didn’t get UBI forever, they got it for a fixed amount of time. If they quit working, they would be shit out of luck when they money stopped flowing. It’s not a very useful experiment.
Really this is just basic economics though. Money has decreasing marginal utility. The first stack of cash you get pays rent, then food, then later on luxuries. For low income workers, the opportunity cost of not working is not being able to afford basic things. If that’s covered, there’s no reason to do a crappy job for low pay. You don’t even need to assume laziness. If cashiers now have their basic needs covered and want to go invest their time into improving their education, then the cost of cashiers goes up. If the cost of cashiers goes up, the cost of food goes up. If the cost of food goes up, the original UBI is now too low, so the cashiers need to stop pursuing education and get some money again. If an equilibrium exists, it’s going to be at the point where poor people need to work, because somebody needs to clean the toilets.
The security that you have medical care, food and housing tomorrow takes away a lot of psychological pressure and your mind can think about other things. But nevertheless I also think about the ethical implications of letting people die because they cannot afford the medical care they need. A society that just thinks only about profitability of a person is in itself unjust and inhumane.
And I agree that these are things that need to be solved. But UBI won’t do that long term.
Like, just to push a point, with medical care, the prices are so absurdly high that a poor person with UBI who had to pay a large medical bill would effectively just lose their UBI to medical debt payments and interest. And now they’re back where they began. It’s an entirely different problem.
If you look at communities where large portions of the population have their basic medical care, food, and housing all provided or paid for by the government, you don't see hotbeds of creative and entrepreneurial activity. You see cesspools of drugs and crime.
Exactly. And if all the people with low skills upgrade their skills, the cost of low skilled labor increases, driving up the price of goods, and making the current UBI insufficient.
We NEED low skilled labor. Bioshock proved this years ago.
==We NEED low skilled labor. Bioshock proved this years ago. ==
Would we stop importing this labor from other (poorer) countries? I imagine only people with a SSN would get the UBI benefits. Immigrants would still come here to do low-skilled jobs as they would be ineligible for UBI, no?
The problem with your analogy is that other people have to work to make the food, provide the medical care, produce the clothing, and give shelter. You don't do anything to produce air (more likely we do the opposite).
The question is, can we make the economy work while providing everyone with these basic needs. If too many people stop working, either the people that are working will be reduced to a similar sustenance level, or it won't even be enough to cover the basic needs of all anymore. If the people that are working don't get more they will think "why should I be the one working?", and then the problem exacerbates.
In this experiment, the unemployment numbers didn't rise, but the participants knew it was supposed to be a temporary measure. So this doesn't really look at long-term sustainability.
But that is what automation is all about. The productivity of a single worker went through the roof in the last century. There is not enough work for all the people who want to.
The fact that the proponents of UBI pretend to be content with "free money made people happier" is probably a sign that the experiment did not go as expected. Regardless, i think the bigger question here is how would UBI prevented the negative effects of the allegedly impeding large-scale unemployment. How did recipients use their time apart from seeking work. How were their relationships to the rest of society and vice versa? Does UBI result in 2 classes of people instead of a spectrum? What were their spending habits and are they conductive to a functioning economy?
To add some anecdata to the void: I have been receiving a form of basic income (veteran's disability compensation) for the past 8 years. It's an amazing "privilege" that has allowed me to live fearlessly, take risks, and has kept me afloat through rough times.
I have, in no particular order:
- Dropped everything and moved to a different state with no job lined up (multiple times)
- Taken a big pay cut to spend a few years working in the non-profit sector
- Co-founded my own non-profit (it failed)
- Joined a friend's company to help rebuild/scale it (it was acquired)
- Pursued different goals in different schools (currently working toward an MS in CS)
As someone who has lived in poverty most of their life, knowing that my basic necessities can be paid for no-matter my circumstances is a game changer. I would not have done most of the above without knowing that I could scrape by irregardless of it working out. My path would be far more linear and safer.
I feel free. To be clear, I threw out the American Citizen Instruction Booklet (do well in high school -> go to college -> get a job) at age 17 for the military anyway. But more broadly I feel that I don't have to participate in the rat race out of necessity. I have the freedom to experiment with my life and to try whatever I want to without (much) worry. I don't look forward to the contraction of my free monthly deposit. It will come at some point.
That said, my economic participation has been inconsistent. Those 22 year olds incentivized by the structure of our society to get into a safe and high-paying job ASAP and to stay there for the next 40 years will probably contribute quantitatively more $ into the system than I will.
That's not what the articled alleged but yes, certainly it could be a reason. I can't recall was the extra income on top of the already existing one but certainly getting free extra money must feel better than without. The conclusion that the article made, that the simplification of the process and reduction of the extra bureaucracy makes you more content, doesn't seem highly implausible either. I certainly would enjoy it and I think it's more humane. If it would cost the government the same amount I think basic income would be better than the current system. But it's never that easy to estimate.
the argument goes that if people get free money they lose motivation to work and spend all their time on a sofa killing time, which isn't healthy physiologically and mentally.
it's quite idiotic argument, but i've personally met people who discard the whole idea of UBI based on it alone.
You have villages all over the world where unemployment is high. They're poor and insecure, but aren't starving to death. What does the record show? Do they want jobs or handouts? Are they creating mini renaissances of the arts and sophisticated political communes, or getting high, staying shiftless, and forming gangs?
Since the economic crises of 2008, central banks have been desperate to induce some positive inflation. "Helicopter Ben" even said he would drive around in a helicopter and drop pallets of cash out of it, before he allowed deflation to take hold (the only way out of their debt crises, is to inflate it away).
Its no wonder that the PTB are now pushing for helicopter money across the debt-laden west, its the last tool they have. Sad its the poor who must suffer.
Overall, the experiment failed to prove its main hypothesis that UBI would incentivize the unemployed to find employment. Those who received additional benefits failed to achieve higher employment than the control group.
And it's interesting how many people paint it as showing that it simply didn't decrease the likelihood. One would think that before handing out actual free money, a benefit out to be shown (not just an absence of harm or loss).
Many say that it made people happier, but since when has it been the job of the government to guarantee happiness?
We would do well to remember that many politicians simply use this as a way to get elected. It strikes me as buying votes, writ large.
That's true. But on the other hand it seems that for the same cost people got happier, while not affecting employment levels. So it also shows that placing conditions on unemployment support creates wasted effort and extra suffering.
If you give people everything, they just won't work as hard. At least, I don't think they will over the long term. It's like retirement: some may learn a skill, volunteer, etc., but most just watch TV and wait to die. This is hard for many of us to realize, because we spend much of our free time tinkering with and leaning technologies.
I hear a lot of people saying that society is bound to provide all the needs of a person. I can definitively say for America, that was not the social contract on which she was founded.
Lastly, this is sort of conspiratorial, but isn't this commonly the way we see dystopias arise in stories? I think democracies function differently when the average person is a net contributor that expects a return in the form if infrastructure and services, rather than a check.
> most just watch TV and wait to die
This may be true of older people who feel they may have already lived a full life, and it might be too late to start anything new. What about people who reach financial safety very early, and can afford to experiment and experience a lot more?
There's still perks to a job. It's Universal Basic Income, aka (IMO), basic compassion. You shouldn't be able to starve to death, but if you want a Mercedes and a nice house in the city, you're going to have to work for it, one way or another.
The question you need to ask is what % of the workforce considers their potential extra wealth (for most people, small) worth working for. The more people who choose not to work, the more expensive labor is. The more expensive labor is, the higher prices are, the less effective your basic income is, the more your wealth inequality increases, the more jobs move to China, the more the economy shrinks.
A huge amount of effort in society is wasted in pointless competition simply because people need income. Imagine 2 farmers selling melons, each with 50% market share. One discovers if she hires a social media marketer she can get to 70% market share. The other farmer now must respond by hiring their own marketing people. These two marketers are both very happy to be employed, but overall we would have been better just giving them free melons and letting them work on something they are truly passionate about.
I very much like your analogy. Competition has its advantages, but it can oftentimes be a destructive force. The entire marketing/advertising industry is enormous and yet nothing of value is being produced. Instead, apps and platforms feel the need to become ever more addictive and receive ever more of our attention share, just because then they can place more ads in front of our eyeballs. Ads that contribute nothing to society except distract and annoy.
The farmers would still try to hire the markerters even with a UBI, unless you're proposing that the UBI will eliminate the profit motive. It probably won't unless it's so large that it destroys the economy and replaces it with communism.
> If you give people everything, they just won't work as hard.
But are we talking about giving people "everything" though? The word "Basic" is in the thing's name, so it may be just enough to not die (or turn to crime).
One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.
$10K is enough, in many places, to pay rent and food, but not much else. So you won't have the worry / stress of being homeless, but if you want more than subsistence living, you will probably have to work.
Is basic income having “everything”? If that’s the case, why isn’t there more downward pressure on wages? Because if $635 is all it takes, we are drastically overpaying everyone!
A (very) modest ammount of health, housing, and food security is more like a foundation for an individual, rather than the entirety of their existence.
There's a lot of difference between "give people everything" and "make sure everyone has enough money for food and shelter". We're already doing the latter part, at least in the more civilized parts of the world. The argument for the U in UBI is that there's currently a whole lot of administration fees spent on determining who should get which handouts. If it's universal, all that management overhead disappears.
It's like retirement
Your view of retirement doesn't match the retired people around me.
Having enough money for housing and food is not "everything". People will always want more and this will drive them to work. They will just be a little bit more secure and happy.
> It's like retirement: some may learn a skill, volunteer, etc., but most just watch TV and wait to die
How much of that is due to retirement coming for most people when they are old? I'm pretty sure that if I retire at, say, 67, I'll spend a lot more time watching TV than I would if I had retired at 27.
Talking about scify stories:
From the evolutionary point of view it is very bad for a super-organism like a whole country to let parts of its body starve or get sick. Do ants have to pay for food or housing?
The philosophical conception of the state as a living organism goes back to Plato's Republic. Not to say your point is invalid, but the implications in those models for individual human freedom are usually pretty bleak.
I have some concerns about this experiment, but I may be wrong.
The whole idea of basic income is that the basic income would be enough for a person to live. Having never been to Finland (but other northern European countries), I can't see how you can live on 560€ a month without some other source of income or social assistance.
The people in the study are told that the basic income will end in two years, wouldn't that change their behavior? I mean if they know the money is temporary they're not to change their behavior too much.
I know for myself if they gave me 700CAD an month for an basic income experiment for two years, I would be "cool extra cash". However I won't change my behavior job/career wise as 1) its not enough to live on; and 2) its going to end.
Why can't UBI be attempted on a local scale first?
We have state and local governments for a reason. Something as risky and expensive as UBI, if it is going to be implemented, should be implemented gradually with proper testing, feedback, and adaptation.
Probably not. One of the most fundamental and vexing problems of macro-economics is that individial effects often don't aggregate to the larger system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregation_problem
Just consider the simplest thought experiment: levy a one-off extra tax of $0.01 on every tax payer and credit some random poor person. This is almost certainly a strict Pareto improvement, but it clearly doesn't scale.
Most countries grant freedom of movement to its citizens (within its borders), and there's a significant risk of unemployed/underemployed people intentionally moving into the state seeking a better social safety net.
In the U.S., this already happened in Alaska with the Alaska Permanent Fund. All residents of Alaska receive annually a portion of the proceeds from Alaska's oil revenue. Alaska tried to prevent internal migrants from receiving this by having the dividend be dependent on a person's years of residency in Alaska , but this was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Zobel v. Williams[2]. Now, anyone who has lived a whole year in Alaska is eligible to receive the dividend.
As such, a social safety net as generous as UBI will likely not be workable in the United States. Other states' unemployed residents would likely swarm the state with UBI. (Unless of course, if the Supreme Courts decides to reverse its decision in Zobel v. Williams.)
"Under the plan, each adult resident receives one dividend unit for each year of residency subsequent to 1959, the first year of Alaska's statehood. Appellants, residents of Alaska since 1978, brought an action in an Alaska state court challenging the statutory dividend distribution plan as violative of, inter alia, their right to equal protection guarantees. ... the dividend statute creates fixed, permanent distinctions between an ever-increasing number of classes of concededly bona fide residents based on how long they have lived in the State."
This is seemingly exactly what Finland is doing according to the article. Finland is trialling this approach with on a small subset of eligible people (n = ~ 2000) to assess the effects and allow feedback, etc.
Unless local governments have the ability to levy significant taxes, the experiment would be unrealistic. The impact of UBI needs to be studied at the societal level, not just the individual level. Who pays the higher taxes, which jobs would find no takers, where would wages need to increase to compensate, etc.
Most countries which are not the Unites States don't have the power to make large scale systematic changes that this requires. It might not be possible even in the US, what with states shipping homeless people to other states and all.
What, exactly, are these risks you talk about? How do those risks compare to the risks of loose moderation on social networks (bullying, radicalisation, etc)?
States don't have anywhere near as high of a margin in terms of essential expenses (infrastructure, etc) vs entitlements (social security, health insurance, etc) as the federal government does in the USA. The fed has more money to spend than states.
Maybe because it's hard to control? I could imagine if enough people work within the jurisdiction of a local government but live outside it then the experiment could get skewed.
India is toying with this idea with the NYAY guaranteed income scheme which the Congress party proposed as part of its 2019 election manifesto. If implemented, it will be the largest scheme of it's kind in the world, ensuring that the poorest 20% of the population will be paid Rs.6000 (approx. 85 USD) per month. But 20% of the population = 50 million people. How the scheme will work on this grand scale is yet to be seen.
except they are not representative of an entire society - specifically they are only representative (usually) of a subgroup of society that _cannot_ work.
This. If you take existing pensioners then you are preselecting a population that is wildly different than the population that the UBI scheme would target.
no government will be able to give people basic needs except at the cost of other people. I believe this will eventually happen, but through technology, not through these 'Robin Hood' type politicians. if you look thoughout history it wasn't any societal rules or enforcements that advanced us, but application of scientifical discoveries to build products that help make human life easier
Basic income means that people who are willing to work will pay probably higher taxes. I believe that will be easier for some people who do not earn much to just stay home with basic income. Then less people will be economically active (who will do low wage jobs ?) and taxes will need to go higher etc... It's economical spiral of death for whole nation.
The goal is to provide a sustainable and desirable quality of life for all, and economic activity is one or part of a way to achieve it. I don’t think people will just stop wanting to go out to restaurants, or skiing, or whatever other activities they want to do. And if they want to do them, they will have to work. And especially to attract a quality mate.
Then what is there left to work for? Also, I thought the job of a society was to protect it's citizens' negative rights (various freedoms from, freedom from want not being one).
I think this might turn out something like retirement, as people will have to work less: some people make very good use of their extra resources, but many will just sit and watch TV. This is a bit in an inherent bias in the HN crowd, because most of us tend to be more intellectually curious and would likely spend the time learning a new language, etc.
Mamy people find work fulfilling, or enjoy being challenged. There is charity work too, where you can work towards the benefit of others less fortunate than yourself.
Also, keep in mind that UBI is meant to be just that - a basic income; nobody is going to be living the life of Riley on UBI. People are human, and inevitably want better, or more - and working, or starting a business (which I expect we'd see more of) is a means to that end.
I live in Seattle. There’s a sizable portion of society here who would love to stay home, smoke weed and play XBox. I’m not inclined to pay more taxes for them to do so.
Of course, if there is somehow 'enough money' in the system let's give it to the people to guarantee 'sustainable and desirable quality of life'. Question is where to take such large amounts of money for everyone. I know one country where citizens get free money - Quatar, that's because of oil and because they use cheap labor from immigrants from various African and Asian countries.
Whole idea of basic income is like from communist manifesto. You need to exploit someone or some other nation in order to get money for your citizen who wants to have 'sustainable quality of life for free'. A) exploit rich people B) exploit immigrants and use them for cheap labor
Some people think UBI should be enough for emergency rations only, similar to food stamps now. Some people think it should be enough for a very-low-income but working person's expenses now. Some people think it should be enough for a few basic treats as well.
For example, the Living Wage Foundation uses the Rowntree Foundation's Minimum Income Standard to set their 'living wage', which does include luxuries such as eating in restaurants and even an annual holiday (I struggle to afford that!), so what they think is 'minimum' clearly isn't literally just enough to just 'live' on.
People have the same attitude towards what UBI should be.
Would you set UBI to below what Rowntree thinks is the 'minimum to live on'?
When you realize that automation is eating the jobs that these people used to do, and realize that the service economy can't fit even a fraction of these displaced workers, you have a scenario where we can produce goods for sale in mass with minimal labor but now less people have money to buy things.
Creating a death spiral because consumers buying things is the fuel which makes the entire economy run and grow, so when you fire them all and replace them with robots, your individual profit might temporarily rise but as we all do it, more and more fall out of the workplace and can no longer consume, hurting the economy based on consuming.
Basic income may come across as a luxury today, in a world where there can still be enough jobs for the number of people in the economy, but it very well may become a requirement to ensure that consumers exist to buy automatically produced and automatically served goods.
P.S. the taxes don't necessarily rise on the workers, but rather on the automators and producers. The amount of income and wealth in this country is not decreasing, rather, the amount of it going to workers and consumers is. Is it ideal to have the government redistribute it such that the engine stops running poorly and works well again? No, but the alternative is worse.
Everyone has thought that automation would eliminate the jobs for a hundred years. In a way it has come true as some jobs that existed before no longer exist, but so far other jobs have been created to take their place. Nobody really knows when or if that will stop.
Yes I am aware of the "infinite work hypothesis" however blindly running into the future and basing 7-8 billion human lives and our entire civilization upon this hypothesis without any mitigation strategy seems naive and high-risk at best.
I will also point out that automation is currently starting to eat fields that were traditionally un-automatable due to either skill, labor price (or both), including everything from complex farm work done for cheap to surgical robots.
Humans have always had a cognitive advantage over machines in the past. This will not necessarily be true in the future.
What advantage do we will then have? The only possible advantage I can see is that raising a human for 20 years + housing + food + other expenses and then employing him would be cheaper than replicating another AGI, but I cannot imagine this to be true.
If an AGI was smarter than a human, why would it want to work for free? Personally I think it's unlikely to be possible to create something more capable of abstract reasoning than humans yet somehow constrained to be completely subservient to us. And if it is possible, all it takes is one mistake to produce a robot slave revolution.
I'd expect supercapable AGI to command higher wages than less-capable humans, so they wouldn't be pushing out service jobs.
Perhaps human cognition will be enhanced by machines? This would open up a lot of new opportunities. I know there are companies working on doing exactly this.
Only so long as humans are required for the machine to do their job. The second it is feasible and cheaper to have a machine do what the human/machine hybrid could do, they would switch.
This is more of a bridge solution to full automation. "We need doctors to control dumb surgical robots until we're advanced enough that surgical robots can operate without a human controlling them" etc
We're doing the "assist" thing already in all the places that we can't quite do the "machine only" thing.
Even self-driving cars mirror this: the goal is a vehicle that doesn't require an operator. The bridged reality, currently, is that the operator must remain alert and able to take over any time.
TL;DR: Anarchy is the system you're describing (total voluntary interaction with government, or no government) and there's plenty of anarchists around, and literally 0 successful anarchist states.
Let me approach your anarchy differently:
Why do we not have anarchy? Because not-anarchy is working and is the best system we've ever used.
Why don't we get rid of this to try anarchy? Well -- who's stopping you from creating your own Amish/Scientology/SoverignCitizen whatever lifestyle? Who's forcing you to live where you do? Is the tax man showing up at your door with guns drawn?
I think your contribution to our society is far more voluntary than you want to admit.
There are plenty of Americans who live 100-1000 miles away from a real government and largely never interact with it. Preppers in Alaska or in the wide expanses of the West.
Something tells me you choose not to live like they do, free from government regulation, not meaningfully paying taxes, etc, because you like the society and civilization that is built through Liberty (freedom with common sense restrictions) as opposed to Anarchy (freedom without restriction, period).
P.S. if you call taxation robbery but use public infrastructure, you're a completely entitled hypocrite who deserves no respect for your "I can take for free but how dare I have to pay" hottake. The only people who can criticize taxation are those who homestead far, far, far away from government and society, because they truly do not use any infrastructure or benefit, but, they largely do not pay taxation (and no government agency is going to Waco style attack to force them to, either).
Anarchists often like to cite the monopoly on violence (often purposely misrepresenting the "violence" for shock value) as evidence that all states are corrupt. Yet the only difference in application between a state and anarchy is violence being a monopoly in the former, versus a free (as in unregulated) market in the latter.
That violence doesn't apply to actors who implicitly accept the fiction of the social contract, and who follow the rules. Rather, it applies, as intended, to those who don't. And this remains true within the construct of a state as well as in anarchy.
The violence implicit in taxation is targeted against people who don't pay their taxes, taxation itself is not an act of violence. The social contract, implicit as it is, does require the needs of society to be met, and the cost of enjoying the rights and protections of law in a society is paid towards the collective welfare through taxation.
Many people will say that anarchy doesn't mean there aren't rules... and fair enough, but you can't have any degree of hierarchy or social interaction without coercion, or violence in the sense that the monopoly on violence describes. There will always be bad actors, charlatans, sociopaths and psychopaths, or simply those who can't afford the burden of debt entered into voluntarily and in good faith. As soon as a rule or a contract is enforced against someone's will, then you've just implemented an ad-hoc, poorly defined subset of a state.
No. Societies who have respect for individual rights are not necessarily anarchy. For example collecting taxes is obviously justified when it would prevent more significant violence - e.g. to fund an army, police and a court. Stealing from the hard-working to give to the lazy brings is a massively perverse incentive which only low birthrates, dysfunctional behaviours and national decline.
On the contrary - there is actually 0 successful socialist states. So your statement is massively misleading.
>"Stealing from the hard-working to give to the lazy brings is a massively perverse incentive which only low birthrates, dysfunctional behaviours and national decline."
This is outrageously charged and bigoted language is the sole result of radicalization.
That you use these ignorant and bigoted labels when discussing economics belies your total academic and functional ignorance on the subject, and betrays your true purpose: to mindlessly repeat the propaganda which convinced you into this tribalistic response.
"On the contrary - there is actually 0 successful socialist states. So your statement is massively misleading."
An extremely common "whataboutism" defense from a fully radicalized zealot. No one brought up socialism, but the Propaganda Script that you are rote-repeating and incapable of deviating from makes heavy use of this particularly ignorant "whatabout" trope, so of course, you have to just copy-paste this red herring in.
I truly hope you can wake up from the radicalization which has fully consumed you. Good luck, you really need it.
The entire thread is on socialism - what do you think UBI is? Also you're talking about academic ignorance but your posts are nothing other than extremely lowly ad hominem attacks - first I was an anarchist, now I am ignorant - where are your real arguments?
And I use public infrastructure - was raised 200 meters away from a transfer subway station - and I call taxation a robbery. But I am not a hypocrite, because on a free market I would have paid roughly 20 times less for it - what is also called a fair price.
Not surprised that a person who sees violence and robbery as a universal solution is acting like that. Shame I just got down to your disgustingly low level...
Socialism is communal ownership of the means of production and self-regulation of workers. This is ELEMENTARY, by the way, so your propaganda-based misinformation on the subject definitely demonstrates the low-quality of your opinion.
Using a government to regulate a market to provide a social safety net is not "socialism" outside of the radicalized anti-academic conservative sphere who use the red scare in every single post they make -- NO EXCEPTIONS (and you clearly fit the rule).
"Not surprised that a person who sees violence and robbery as a universal solution is acting like that. Shame I just got down to your disgustingly low level..."
At the end of the day, you are a fully radicalized zealot whose radical anti-civilization speech perfectly mirrors the alt-right terrorists who attack our civilization all across the globe. From the far-right radical sovereign citizens who resort to violence nearly every day, to the alt-right youth bigots who shoot up mosques/blackchurches/synagogues and drive into crowds, nearly all of them parrot exact same ideological script as you do.
If I had to pick the conservative terrorist that you remind me of, I'd say either the Bundy terrorists who violently attacked the government multiple times because it existed, or the Vegas Shooter who murdered all those people. Both are huge anti-government tax-is-theft "monopoly of violence" types, and they decided to end the "monopoly of violence" in their own ways.
I'm proud -- honored -- to hold myself to a dramatically higher, more academic and more rational standard than your policy of rote-repetition of terrorist propaganda. If you think my level is low, then I have succeeded, for it is the policy of your ideology to make rabid use of doublespeak. I am legitimately honored to be considered "low" by you as that is a rather significant testimony as to my high moral quality!
And here is the second part of the quote you posted (the first result if you google your quote).
"Under a socialist system, everyone works for wealth that is in turn distributed to everyone. ... The government decides how wealth is distributed among the people" which is UBI.
I am really sorry, but you're very cheap fraud.
P.S. Also in our discussion the only person advocating violence was you, so don't you dare comparing me to terrorists. Don't you have at least a tiny bit of self-respect? And you have also called me a conspiracy theorist - this is funny now.
"When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, everything seems to be a nail."
Like you, I'm not convinced this wouldn't turn into a spiral of lazyness. I would add though, that if this is implemented properly you should always be getting more money with work than without. So even if the taxes rise there should always be an incentive to work.
Currently in Germany for example there are a lot of people on long-term unemployment that have enough children and low demand for their skills that if they worked they would earn less. This in principle is one of the advantages of UBI. That if everybody gets it, you don't have to take it away as soon as somebody earns money. So everything you earn, will be beneficial to you.
Of course if UBI is set too high it might not be attractive to work for only a little more, but right now you have people that would earn less if they worked.
I believe there is a psychological aspect as well. Work is socially useful, gives a sense of purpose, of accomplishment. Sure, some won't mind being paid minimum salary staying at home doing nothing (and even feel entitled). But I expect many to become depressed and feel resentful.
It's nice when your model is simple enough to make conclusions obvious, but simplistic models of complex systems have a nasty habit of being incredibly inaccurate.
Which is why this was trialed on a small subset first to evaluate hypotheses such as what you suggest. According to the article, those receiving UBI were not economically less active than controls who were not receiving it (i.e. they had similar probability of being employed).
People already could just be unemployed and live on state aid in Finland. Not all of them do. In a way the nordic wellfare state itself can be held as a prototype for a nation wide UBI since people are not forced to work out of fear of starvation (in the general context - I know people can live still in poverty and misery in these systems).
UBI is the biggest pie-in-the-sky proposal I've ever seen. Number one, this study shows nothing. It's absolutely worthless to select a few hundred to a few thousand people and give them free money for two years and measure the result.
The far more serious question, is how sustainable UBI is at a macro level. The proposals I've heard mention as much as $1000 a month per person.
That would cost the U.S. somewhere between $1 and $3 trillion a year, just on paper.
U.S. is already 15 years from Social Security insolvency. We have a lot of debt ($20+ trillion) and we're talking about creating a program that costs more than anything like it, ever.
I see no evidence to support the claims and the program has a real possibility of completely wrecking an economy. Beyond reckless.
