UBI isn't meant to be a full replacement for an individual's economic activity. It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.
The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
I think the opposite will happen: once people have the basics taken care of they will become more economically active. They will take risks they couldn't before because of the overhanging risk of complete destitution. They will negotiate for better wages because everyone will know they have a perfectly viable alternative. They will invest time in themselves because they won't have to worry about how they will live if they don't have a job while they study or launch a business.
Further, there will be more money sloshing around and creating broad-based demand for goods and services that these self-same people can try to capture through their own industriousness.
I strongly believe that we have as many on welfare right now because we have a huge sector of our population that have the following choice: live in poverty on welfare with lots of free time or live in poverty while working your ass off treading water. And the reason they remain in poverty is that their employers know that there isn't a great alternative for those marginal employees so they pay just enough to keep their employees afloat but not enough that they can get ahead. UBI or negative income tax (my personal preference) would deeply change this calculus. People could spend their time and energy to truly better their situation rather than merely not lose everything.
We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution. There isn't a lot of democratizing of economic power in those regimes.
> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity. I think the opposite will happen...
I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.
I agree with your opinions on the current state of the Welfare system, and agree we need something better.
However I do think their is a non-trivial risk that a Basic Income depending on how it is implemented can result in a sever limiting or loss of liberty. We have already seen that with the welfare system today, and in other segments of the legal system where basic human rights are under continual assault to the point that most people do not even recognize properly the level of oppression that exisits in the world as it is today. They have assimilated the general rules and laws into their lives to the point they no longer "miss" the freedom they lost, or the freedom was lost so long ago no one alive even remembers a time where the law or regulation was not in place. The most common manifestation of these can be found in things like Airport Security, Drug Raids, Police Checkpoints, and about 1000 other things I can list.
If landlords know exactly how much a large subset of their renters make, that is how much they will charge. Examples of this in action is looking at rent in military areas and rises in BAH. They follow almost exactly, with rent being in response to BAH change.
Any form of UBI will just be used as a wealth transfer to landlords that rent.
"The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity."
Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.
This counter point really didn't address the article; that we risk creating tyrannies when we use the government to support everyone. That is so much money and power it will corrupt any person or organization who wields it.
For example, it's a 'universal' income right? Do people still get it when they're in prison for rape/murder? How about in jail for a few weeks on shoplifting? What if a citizen is living in another country? What if they're here illegally? Do you get one for each kid the moment they're born? What if the kid is born in the US and parents are illegal immigrants? And just how much UBI should everyone get? Your answers to these questions will not agree with your neighbor's answers.
A UBI would become more corrupt than anything else we've seen because there will be even more power in it. The power hungry will seek it and corrupt it because we will never agree on who has a right to that giant pile of money.
Wait. Isn't the point that we're trying to gather empirical data on what happens. Without this data "strong belief" one way or another seems a bit irresponsible to me.
Completely agree. Basic Income would not only be tremendously stimulative and probably lead to more growth and demand for labor, it would also give many the flexibility to avoid traps of poverty and engage with the economy in a more sustainable and ultimately productive way.
I have not spent much time studying basic income, but I'm sure the topic of inflation must be addressed. What's the current thinking on basic income having an effect on inflation?
> UBI isn't meant to be a full replacement for an individual's economic activity.
Indeed not.
> It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.
Honestly, I think this is one of the fundamental mistakes UBI proponents make: proposing the idea that there is some particular level that UBI should reach.
UBI is much more coherent of an idea if the "basic" is recast as representing simply a baseline, rather than targeting basic necessities, which are, critically, not a fixed target anyhow, but a moving baseline determined by social expectations, which UBI itself will affect.
> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons. Mostly, ignores a lot of basic observations of human behavior and the difference between UBI and the systems it displaces:
(1) People strive for more material wealth, so long as that provides perceived marginal utility (there's some evidence that beyond certain very high incomes -- IIRC, studies ~10-20 years ago had this in the neigborhood of $200K/yr in then-current dollars in the US -- but even so people strive for more when they have that much because of perceived utility.)
(2) People's expectations and self-perceived "basic needs" are strongly influenced by comparison to others visible in their society, not merely absolute conditions; UBI improves the absolute condition of those without capital or labor income, but it doesn't remove the incentive to strive for more (in fact, compared to a system with a means-tested safety net, it increases it.)
(3) Capital income is still a thing with UBI: this is perhaps them most significant oversight in UBI criticism. Its true that UBI is often posed as a protection against a world in which an ever increasing share of the population is unable to find work with significant value, reducing (at least, in a relative sense) the income of workers, it is not intended for a situation where there is no opportunity to strive for more. Between UBI and what people can make from work, there are opportunities to acquire capital, which is the route to development which remains open even if labor opportunities become scarce.
(4) But labor opportunities won't disappear in the near term, though many may pay less per hour (especially at the entry level.) But UBI makes lower-pay labor both viable (by providing support which isn't removed with additional labor income) and legal (as it is usually posed as replacing minimum wage -- I personally prefer a phase-out where minimum wage is reduced as UBI ramps up), which increases rather than decreasing work opportunities.
> We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution.
Well, UBI won't drive that, at any rate, and largely opposes it. There's a very good argument that the first part is largely true, and you could argue that the one thing that's been happening in recent years is the fine tuning of just how little is necessary to hit just the point where the second half is true, too.
According to the logic used in this, Alaska is an autocratic regime. But when I look at Alaska, I see a state with the lowest poverty, lowest inequality, and highest well-being of almost all 50 states. I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on.
It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example:
> "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?"
Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction.
I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express.
Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects.
With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented.
Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others.
Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.
The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000.
The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3.
I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be.
Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News.
And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.
> Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times?
The numbers are overblown, but I see this as a real issue with utopian interpretations of UBI. I.e. those where, to quote the article, proponents expect "a majority of non-workers to live off the fruits of the labour of a small minority", as opposed to a more realistic UBI where the working poor use that free money to maybe cut one or two of their multiple jobs from their tight schedule.
But in the "utopian" version, a huge group would be left without anything to strive for. If the payout would be too generous, adding an entry level work income would not make a noticeable difference. When people are depraved of all other kinds of achievement, they are likely to use breeding as a substitute. If you can't climb or defend any ranks, you can still move up one level by spawning "subordinates". Instant status.
I feel bad just for thinking thoughts that cynical, but I can't help expecting that kind of outcome if it isn't openly addressed. A "nonutopian UBI" that just creates a smooth, regulation-free ramp (I almost want to say "interpolation") between welfare and full self-support would leave the cynic in me much more at ease.
> Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times?
I think 10-20 is hyperbole but the inverse relationship between GDP and birth rates is well documented -- a chief argument being unemployed people have time to make babies.
> With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
This is where UBI loses me. So many of it's advocates are convinced people freed from labor will become scholar poets. Proles will be proles whether you call it Marxism or UBI.
> It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name.
TFA's author bio: "Shai Shapira is a computer programmer and writer."
Poli-sci academics usually don't construct their premises so obviously poorly and proceed to build a castle on sand like this article does. Typically they're at least good enough that any, "wait, what?"s aren't apparent at first glance.
> Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible?
Religious extremists.
In the early days of the State of Israel, the largest secular party needed the support of the parties of religious extremists, in order to form a majority in parliament and create a government. Those parties set a price: they would support the government, but only if the government exempted their young men from military service, and pay them a living stipend, so that they could spend their days engrossed in religious studies. All told, about 400 men would be granted such an exemption and stipend.
At the time, the secular party's leader thought that religiosity in Israel was going the way of the dodo anyway. He didn't have a problem with setting up a kind of living museum for religious study, so he accepted.
The official birthrate for those religious-extremist families is around eight, but it is not uncommon to find families with a dozen or even more children. Because of how Israeli parliamentary politics works, the religious extremist parties often served as kingmakers for parties which sought to form governments, and they kept that price as the price for support. Today there are more than 10,000 such people receiving such exemptions and stipends, and more than 25% of all children in Israeli elementary schools come from ultra-religious families, in spite of such measures being almost universally unpopular outside that sector and continually struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court every few years.
To finally answer your question: it's not just theoretically possible, it's a guarantee. And demography is one hell of a time bomb.
I like to think you're right, but given the cheaty nature of men, most would trick the system by having a large number of children, even with different women, it doesn't matter.
That's what they already do where children are subsidized by the state welfare, imagine what they would do if it would mean another salary in the house.
I don't buy it. In a democracy, the government cares about votes, not people refusing to pay their taxes. The government has a lot of ways to compel you to pay taxes, but not your vote.
The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.
That's true in a democracy, but the question is why would the democracy remain a democracy if the productive, governing elite doesn't need the citizens for their economic activity?
From time to time, governing elites have asked themselves a question: is now the time to overthrow democracy?
When the wealth of a nation comes from the productivity of its citizens, you can't overthrow a stable democracy without destroying the wealth you intended to capture. But when the wealth of a nation comes from its natural resources, say gold or oil, the calculus changes. You can run a gold mine with dying slaves and still extract great wealth.
"The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."
Some economists refer to human labor as "the ultimate resource," a resource of value beyond gold, beyond oil. As automation becomes more and more useful, as the value of capital relative to human labor increases, the more we're cursing ourselves with the ultimate resource curse.
His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption.
In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.
That said, I think they miss a core point: there is very little precedent of functional democracies, which have been functional democracies for more than a few decades, turning into autocracies [0]. In the grand scheme of things decent democracies are a pretty new idea and we simply lack the data.
The author's list of awful fuel-exporting countries has a nice exception in it: Norway. Apart from a WWII hiccup, Norway was pretty much a functional democracy for a long time when they started exporting oil in the sixties. And they did not turn into an autocracy, even though Norway's government does not need its people to stay financed.
I feel like this single case undermines the author's entire argument. I'm willing to buy that an autocracy turning to universal basic income won't make it any less autocratic. But a functioning democracy (for a sufficiently great value of "functioning") has no incentive to turn into an autocracy merely because its median citizen increasingly depends on the government. That needs a much stronger argument and I haven't read it in the article.
[0] Some people might point to Turkey, Hungary and the US right now, but a) those stories haven't played out yet and b) none of those countries fit the author's bill.
Instead of basic income, which has the danger of creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people, economist richard d wolff suggested (since he is an avowed socalist, amusingly, appearing in a Fox Business interview) that instead of basic income, we put everyone to work, while at the same time reducing everyone's hours. Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).
> creating a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people
I can't imagine how you would arrive at this idea.
Unemployment benefits create a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people.
Basic Income creates a continuum. You can have BI + leisure, BI + freelance, BI + 10 hr workweek, BI + regular load, BI + burning out. Whatever works for you.
> Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).
"Hey Kek you are a programmer right?"
"I am indeed"
"We need you to work 80 hour weeks because we don't have many programmers, don't worry though we will give you another half ration to make up for it"
"No, i'm only going to work 20 hours like the street cleaners"
What does this fictional UBI government do then? Put a gun to my head and force me to work seems to be the most common solution to this problem historically. The problem is all human work can't be divided evenly among all humans, we need doctors more than we need fast food workers thus doctors typically work longer hours. For the system to be "fair" we can't pay doctors all that much more than fast food workers, maybe 10% - 15% or even 100% more but not the 1000% more they see currently. What if doctors decide that isn't enough and all become fast food workers instead? What do we do then? That is the problem UBI and Communism has yet to solve.
So which way is it? Non-workers will be disenfranchised politically, or tyrannously use democracy to assert their power over people who do work?
The fact that even in this article both sides are argued points to the fact that there will be some counteracting forces that will stabilize things for at least a while if basic income is implemented. I think that getting concerned about what will happen 10 steps down the line when things could really go either way is a type of premature optimization.
I believe it's pretty clear that people _with_ money will have that power, but at some point that money will have to make its way into the hands of more citizens in order to avoid societal collapse. Then when political power needs rebalancing, there will still be a massive amount of people fighting for political power if things go too far one way, and people with a massive amount of wealth to counterbalance them.
In my opinion, UBI should be earned not freely given away. Perhaps it is earned through education coupled with community service. This ensures that those who are rewarded UBI know that they are expected to produce something of value (to give back) to society and their communities. In return, we are given valuable education (it could include entrepreneurship, computer science/programming, cooking, personal finance, communication -- stuff that should be taught in schools!). In the end, UBI serves as a reward for completing this rites of passage to become part of society through education to better ourselves for our communities.
If given freely -- based on our current society where the poor gets the lowest amount of education -- it will help in some cases, in most it will not. It is very hard to wean yourself of a mindset without education.
Interesting observation. Societies where large numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have lots of freedoms. Societies in which small numbers of people participate economically in the structure of government have fewer freedoms. UBI, by definition, takes more and more people out of active participation and makes them just consumers of the economic "product" of government.
...And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government....
The conclusion, if I understand the author, is that UBI postulates that a few really rich and successful people need to worry about the money and how to get it to the masses. The masses are there for consumption, to find their true meaning in life, and so on. Not to create economic value for others, which is a critical part of a healthy state.
Beats me. I'm looking forward to more data from the experiments YC and others have going. I'm also looking to narrow down exactly what UBI is. So far it looks far more like a slogan to me than an actual policy. The experiments should help with that.
UBI is a technique the state can use to entrench its influence by encouraging the people to become increasingly dependent on the government for basic needs.
I've seen this happen in Bahrain in the past, wherein the government relies heavily on selling oil and uses the profits to subsidize living costs in Bahrain, making Bahrain bearable so that people don't complain/protest all the time. I can see the UBI argument of tyranny.
However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario yet in a much similar strain of a with-UBI world, isn't tyranny still inevitable because those that need UBI are powerless and hold no sway on opinions or even angry and gain enmity against those who hold power such as in the Tea Party and Alt-right movement?
(Recently, however with oil prices falling, subsidization isn't happening as much and Arab Spring has brought on protests and govt. repression)
The only way universal basic income even approaches making sense is if it replaces _everything_ else. No housing benefits, education benefits, welfare, unemployment or social security. Dump it all.
Yes, instead of living in large urban centers, unemployed poor people would have to move to smaller places with low costs of living. This is a good thing, really.
And without price supports through unlimited government loans, schools will have to become cheaper. Those associate professors of English lit who are so abused by the current system can live on BI plus cheap tuition in addition to online classes.
But of course it's all politics and I'm sure it will be impossible to pass a reasonable, cost neutral plan. Instead people will find ways to pile on the bureaucracy until it is less annoying to just go to work and get paid than it is to fill out all of the BI paperwork and file it with six different agencies.
The easy idea of just creating a virtual bank account at birth linked to a SS number or equivalent is so simple it's just a non-starter. And I've tried to convince people that means-testing and such is a waste of money and time but no, plenty of people see BI as welfare and want drug testing and means testing for it. Bah! Give Bill Gates his $20K per year. Who cares if he doesn't need it!?
It replaces all the other financial safety nets, but not all social services, such as universal health care.
The savings involved in dismantling the corpulent bureaucracy currently managing and adjudicating benefits will actually go a significant way towards paying for UBI.
IMHO, ideally, UBI would be sacrosanct, and could not be legally garnished to service any debt. This would prevent if from being used as collateral, and ensure that it would remain available to support the individual - people would not be able to ever get themselves into such debt that they became a burden on society, since they could never borrow against it.
Moreover, it may be better method for managing inflation than our current setup of anointed central banks making themselves money out of thin air: Instead of passing out money to the banks, in order to generate velocity, deliver it to the citizens in the form of a deposit into some form of money market account, thereby immediately putting it into circulation in the economy.
The simple solution (and the one that allows smooth transition with a ramp up of universal income) is that the universal income counts as income for existing income-qualified programs. As it ramps up, it displaces them and, eventually, they can be folded entirely, some much sooner than others.
This author makes some good points. But I think he's making a crucial mistake.
He posits that political power comes from the ability to withhold something; in this case work. That seems correct to me. But, I think the mistake is in assuming that the majority of people today even in countries like the US do have that power. If you are working a job that doesn't require credentials or a long period of training or education, then you don't really don't have anything to threaten the powers that be with, aside from a massive general strike, which has not happened in a long time. So the danger scenario he posits is really already here, for most people.
UBI wouldn't really change that, except inasmuch as it would make it plausible for working people to go on strike much more painlessly, which would really increase their bargaining power, not decrease it.
Slightly off-topic: only read part of the article, but just want to say thank to the OP for turning me onto the website. I've already read several of their other articles and am pleasantly surprised at the balance and clarity with which the authors approach the issues. These kinds of publications are an extreme rarity, especially nowadays.
This has nothing to do with UBI.
Fewer and fewer people will be necessary to cover everybody's needs regardless of the existence of a UBI. The Future here presented could happen anyway without a basic income.
But what will we do with billions of people without any income?
Similar to the ethical and philosophical basis of things like universal health care, a universal basic income could not work if done partially. If you adopt universal health care without enshrining in your society the utter importance of taking care of everyone because of their fundamental value as human beings absent all other factors - the outcome will be tyranny. If there is an ability for someone to say 'oh, but perhaps we shouldn't take care of person X because they made bad choices and it would save us money to do so' then you will rapidly see the definition of various health-related regulations created with the goal of reducing the cost burden of health care.
While one might be tempted to say 'that would just result in people living healthier lives', that would be a very superficial and unstudied evaluation. Behavior modification on a society-wide scale like that is radically dangerous. It might actually be the most dangerous thing in history, I'm not sure. I'd need to run some numbers, but I think there is a good chance that the unintended consequences of well-intentioned behavior modification like that has killed more than all wars combined.
Basic income is an interesting idea, but requires social support. It cannot succeed in a society which has been accustomed to seeing other people suffering less than themselves as the worst thing possible. This is a necessary legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic which dictates that a persons virtue is measured by the degree of suffering they endure for the benefit "of society" (in truth only for employers, not society at large). In that mindset, asking for reward is itself immoral and can only reduce a persons virtue. Either to receive or provide such rewards is an act of immorality, and though many can not actually recognize or admit it, this underlies how they see the world. The poor deserve their lot because they contribute little. The rich must be moral because they are rich (this is predicated on a fantastical delusion that riches are awarded only when a person has benefitted many). This is why so many people hate punitive damage judgements. They're not concerned with the well-being of the corporation being fined tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for acting harmfully. They are obsessed, to the point of willful self-destruction, with ensuring that some individual does not get a "payday" legal settlement.
Without a philosophical backing that justifies a universal basic income, it would continuously be under threat, with people from all sides attempting to reduce the income to the point that few could survive on it alone, attempting to push people to 'be productive' in a world that doesn't need productive people. It's not a situation you can simply ignore and hope people wake up to. It has to be discussed and justified and explained. Why should society at large provide for those who do not produce material products? At what level should they be supported? Should drug addicts and criminals be supported? When someone feels slighted that someone who has not suffered as much as they gets the same amount, how will you answer them?
This would be a much better argument if it had data and citations instead of just references to things that of course everybody knows (and, in practice, not everybody knows).
Here are a couple of my objections, that could be answered by data or references to serious studies:
> In the suggested world of universal basic income, what puts pressure on the government to maintain democracy and political rights? Will they be afraid of a popular uprising? The people have nothing to threaten them with. A person who does not pay taxes cannot threaten to stop paying them. Violent revolution? History shows that governments tend to be significantly better than common people in using violence.
Who puts pressure on the government now to maintain democracy and political rights? For example, are the governments of the US or Australia really feeling today that if they fail to allow gay couples to marry, the people might stop paying taxes or engage in violence?
There is, certainly, a mechanism whereby the sentiment of the people puts pressure on democratic and even sorta-democratic governments. But the assumption that that mechanism is tax is a huge and undefended one, and seems pretty central to the argument.
> It has often been taken for granted that as societies advance, fertility drops, but this has only been happening for a short time and in societies where having children requires hard work to provide for them.
Isn't the main factor here the availability of birth control (which depends on scientific advancement/knowledge and industrial practice in mass manufacture of birth control, not on hard work)? I'm surprised not to see birth control mentioned at all in this argument. The strawman pleasure-seekers would be motivated to spend their free time figuring out better forms of birth control, because (again as a strawman) sex is fun and childbirth isn't.
> The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens?
A huge number of those countries have been ravaged by external political interference, in part because of the fuels in those countries. I don't think it's honest to can leave that out of the analysis and make a direct correlation between natural resources and despotism. We know that warlords and strongmen rise in politically unstable places, and we know in several cases that warlords and strongmen are propped up by other countries who are trying to gain favorable exports, to the extent of populist revolutions being suppressed.
(To be clear, I am not an unreserved proponent of UBI. I just think that this argument is a bad argument against it, and in particular I worry that this argument leads in short order to positions I actually disagree with "Economic inequality is inherently good" or "Lazy people shouldn't eat.")
[+] [-] clavalle|8 years ago|reply
The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
I think the opposite will happen: once people have the basics taken care of they will become more economically active. They will take risks they couldn't before because of the overhanging risk of complete destitution. They will negotiate for better wages because everyone will know they have a perfectly viable alternative. They will invest time in themselves because they won't have to worry about how they will live if they don't have a job while they study or launch a business.
Further, there will be more money sloshing around and creating broad-based demand for goods and services that these self-same people can try to capture through their own industriousness.
I strongly believe that we have as many on welfare right now because we have a huge sector of our population that have the following choice: live in poverty on welfare with lots of free time or live in poverty while working your ass off treading water. And the reason they remain in poverty is that their employers know that there isn't a great alternative for those marginal employees so they pay just enough to keep their employees afloat but not enough that they can get ahead. UBI or negative income tax (my personal preference) would deeply change this calculus. People could spend their time and energy to truly better their situation rather than merely not lose everything.
We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution. There isn't a lot of democratizing of economic power in those regimes.
[+] [-] RestlessMind|8 years ago|reply
I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.
[+] [-] syshum|8 years ago|reply
However I do think their is a non-trivial risk that a Basic Income depending on how it is implemented can result in a sever limiting or loss of liberty. We have already seen that with the welfare system today, and in other segments of the legal system where basic human rights are under continual assault to the point that most people do not even recognize properly the level of oppression that exisits in the world as it is today. They have assimilated the general rules and laws into their lives to the point they no longer "miss" the freedom they lost, or the freedom was lost so long ago no one alive even remembers a time where the law or regulation was not in place. The most common manifestation of these can be found in things like Airport Security, Drug Raids, Police Checkpoints, and about 1000 other things I can list.
[+] [-] lithos|8 years ago|reply
Any form of UBI will just be used as a wealth transfer to landlords that rent.
[+] [-] joeblow9999|8 years ago|reply
Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.
[+] [-] DickingAround|8 years ago|reply
For example, it's a 'universal' income right? Do people still get it when they're in prison for rape/murder? How about in jail for a few weeks on shoplifting? What if a citizen is living in another country? What if they're here illegally? Do you get one for each kid the moment they're born? What if the kid is born in the US and parents are illegal immigrants? And just how much UBI should everyone get? Your answers to these questions will not agree with your neighbor's answers.
A UBI would become more corrupt than anything else we've seen because there will be even more power in it. The power hungry will seek it and corrupt it because we will never agree on who has a right to that giant pile of money.
[+] [-] xelxebar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiantino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalJack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Indeed not.
> It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.
Honestly, I think this is one of the fundamental mistakes UBI proponents make: proposing the idea that there is some particular level that UBI should reach.
UBI is much more coherent of an idea if the "basic" is recast as representing simply a baseline, rather than targeting basic necessities, which are, critically, not a fixed target anyhow, but a moving baseline determined by social expectations, which UBI itself will affect.
> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons. Mostly, ignores a lot of basic observations of human behavior and the difference between UBI and the systems it displaces:
(1) People strive for more material wealth, so long as that provides perceived marginal utility (there's some evidence that beyond certain very high incomes -- IIRC, studies ~10-20 years ago had this in the neigborhood of $200K/yr in then-current dollars in the US -- but even so people strive for more when they have that much because of perceived utility.)
(2) People's expectations and self-perceived "basic needs" are strongly influenced by comparison to others visible in their society, not merely absolute conditions; UBI improves the absolute condition of those without capital or labor income, but it doesn't remove the incentive to strive for more (in fact, compared to a system with a means-tested safety net, it increases it.)
(3) Capital income is still a thing with UBI: this is perhaps them most significant oversight in UBI criticism. Its true that UBI is often posed as a protection against a world in which an ever increasing share of the population is unable to find work with significant value, reducing (at least, in a relative sense) the income of workers, it is not intended for a situation where there is no opportunity to strive for more. Between UBI and what people can make from work, there are opportunities to acquire capital, which is the route to development which remains open even if labor opportunities become scarce.
(4) But labor opportunities won't disappear in the near term, though many may pay less per hour (especially at the entry level.) But UBI makes lower-pay labor both viable (by providing support which isn't removed with additional labor income) and legal (as it is usually posed as replacing minimum wage -- I personally prefer a phase-out where minimum wage is reduced as UBI ramps up), which increases rather than decreasing work opportunities.
> We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution.
Well, UBI won't drive that, at any rate, and largely opposes it. There's a very good argument that the first part is largely true, and you could argue that the one thing that's been happening in recent years is the fine tuning of just how little is necessary to hit just the point where the second half is true, too.
[+] [-] walterstucco|8 years ago|reply
Looking at what's already happened, one can only say it's the most probable outcome.
Look at what happened in USSR.
Or what happens right now in Switzerland where pay checks are so high that almost nobody works at 100%, they all have some kind part time job.
Any other assumption is, well, an assumption, and a risky one.
[+] [-] 2noame|8 years ago|reply
It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example:
> "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?"
Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction.
I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express.
Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects.
With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented.
Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others.
Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.
[+] [-] stretchwithme|8 years ago|reply
The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000.
The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3.
I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be.
Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News.
And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.
[+] [-] usrusr|8 years ago|reply
The numbers are overblown, but I see this as a real issue with utopian interpretations of UBI. I.e. those where, to quote the article, proponents expect "a majority of non-workers to live off the fruits of the labour of a small minority", as opposed to a more realistic UBI where the working poor use that free money to maybe cut one or two of their multiple jobs from their tight schedule.
But in the "utopian" version, a huge group would be left without anything to strive for. If the payout would be too generous, adding an entry level work income would not make a noticeable difference. When people are depraved of all other kinds of achievement, they are likely to use breeding as a substitute. If you can't climb or defend any ranks, you can still move up one level by spawning "subordinates". Instant status.
I feel bad just for thinking thoughts that cynical, but I can't help expecting that kind of outcome if it isn't openly addressed. A "nonutopian UBI" that just creates a smooth, regulation-free ramp (I almost want to say "interpolation") between welfare and full self-support would leave the cynic in me much more at ease.
(Edited: my writing is terrible)
[+] [-] ng12|8 years ago|reply
I think 10-20 is hyperbole but the inverse relationship between GDP and birth rates is well documented -- a chief argument being unemployed people have time to make babies.
> With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
This is where UBI loses me. So many of it's advocates are convinced people freed from labor will become scholar poets. Proles will be proles whether you call it Marxism or UBI.
[+] [-] ashark|8 years ago|reply
TFA's author bio: "Shai Shapira is a computer programmer and writer."
Poli-sci academics usually don't construct their premises so obviously poorly and proceed to build a castle on sand like this article does. Typically they're at least good enough that any, "wait, what?"s aren't apparent at first glance.
[+] [-] solatic|8 years ago|reply
Religious extremists.
In the early days of the State of Israel, the largest secular party needed the support of the parties of religious extremists, in order to form a majority in parliament and create a government. Those parties set a price: they would support the government, but only if the government exempted their young men from military service, and pay them a living stipend, so that they could spend their days engrossed in religious studies. All told, about 400 men would be granted such an exemption and stipend.
At the time, the secular party's leader thought that religiosity in Israel was going the way of the dodo anyway. He didn't have a problem with setting up a kind of living museum for religious study, so he accepted.
The official birthrate for those religious-extremist families is around eight, but it is not uncommon to find families with a dozen or even more children. Because of how Israeli parliamentary politics works, the religious extremist parties often served as kingmakers for parties which sought to form governments, and they kept that price as the price for support. Today there are more than 10,000 such people receiving such exemptions and stipends, and more than 25% of all children in Israeli elementary schools come from ultra-religious families, in spite of such measures being almost universally unpopular outside that sector and continually struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court every few years.
To finally answer your question: it's not just theoretically possible, it's a guarantee. And demography is one hell of a time bomb.
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
http://fortune.com/2014/06/10/most-corrupt-states-in-america...
> I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on.
that's exactly part of the point of the aricle.
[+] [-] tu7001|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md2be|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterstucco|8 years ago|reply
That's what they already do where children are subsidized by the state welfare, imagine what they would do if it would mean another salary in the house.
It's only basic logic.
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.
[+] [-] dfabulich|8 years ago|reply
From time to time, governing elites have asked themselves a question: is now the time to overthrow democracy?
When the wealth of a nation comes from the productivity of its citizens, you can't overthrow a stable democracy without destroying the wealth you intended to capture. But when the wealth of a nation comes from its natural resources, say gold or oil, the calculus changes. You can run a gold mine with dying slaves and still extract great wealth.
We see this worldwide as the resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
"The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."
Some economists refer to human labor as "the ultimate resource," a resource of value beyond gold, beyond oil. As automation becomes more and more useful, as the value of capital relative to human labor increases, the more we're cursing ourselves with the ultimate resource curse.
I recommend this video to every one (watch it at double speed; he talks slowly). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|8 years ago|reply
His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption.
In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|8 years ago|reply
The political system isn't structured around them, they just manage to get their way a lot of the time.
Political systems tend to center around who has economic power (where to quote Dune "power over a thing is the power to destroy it").
I think this explains the principle he was trying to get across better than he did: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-...
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
That said, I think they miss a core point: there is very little precedent of functional democracies, which have been functional democracies for more than a few decades, turning into autocracies [0]. In the grand scheme of things decent democracies are a pretty new idea and we simply lack the data.
The author's list of awful fuel-exporting countries has a nice exception in it: Norway. Apart from a WWII hiccup, Norway was pretty much a functional democracy for a long time when they started exporting oil in the sixties. And they did not turn into an autocracy, even though Norway's government does not need its people to stay financed.
I feel like this single case undermines the author's entire argument. I'm willing to buy that an autocracy turning to universal basic income won't make it any less autocratic. But a functioning democracy (for a sufficiently great value of "functioning") has no incentive to turn into an autocracy merely because its median citizen increasingly depends on the government. That needs a much stronger argument and I haven't read it in the article.
[0] Some people might point to Turkey, Hungary and the US right now, but a) those stories haven't played out yet and b) none of those countries fit the author's bill.
[+] [-] platz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|8 years ago|reply
I can't imagine how you would arrive at this idea.
Unemployment benefits create a tribal, polarizing division between working and non-working people.
Basic Income creates a continuum. You can have BI + leisure, BI + freelance, BI + 10 hr workweek, BI + regular load, BI + burning out. Whatever works for you.
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|8 years ago|reply
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" - Karl Marx
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KekDemaga|8 years ago|reply
> Work, but work less (adjust according to demand as needed, adjust compensation as necessary).
"Hey Kek you are a programmer right?"
"I am indeed"
"We need you to work 80 hour weeks because we don't have many programmers, don't worry though we will give you another half ration to make up for it"
"No, i'm only going to work 20 hours like the street cleaners"
What does this fictional UBI government do then? Put a gun to my head and force me to work seems to be the most common solution to this problem historically. The problem is all human work can't be divided evenly among all humans, we need doctors more than we need fast food workers thus doctors typically work longer hours. For the system to be "fair" we can't pay doctors all that much more than fast food workers, maybe 10% - 15% or even 100% more but not the 1000% more they see currently. What if doctors decide that isn't enough and all become fast food workers instead? What do we do then? That is the problem UBI and Communism has yet to solve.
[+] [-] dontreact|8 years ago|reply
The fact that even in this article both sides are argued points to the fact that there will be some counteracting forces that will stabilize things for at least a while if basic income is implemented. I think that getting concerned about what will happen 10 steps down the line when things could really go either way is a type of premature optimization.
I believe it's pretty clear that people _with_ money will have that power, but at some point that money will have to make its way into the hands of more citizens in order to avoid societal collapse. Then when political power needs rebalancing, there will still be a massive amount of people fighting for political power if things go too far one way, and people with a massive amount of wealth to counterbalance them.
[+] [-] jotjotzzz|8 years ago|reply
If given freely -- based on our current society where the poor gets the lowest amount of education -- it will help in some cases, in most it will not. It is very hard to wean yourself of a mindset without education.
[+] [-] daemonk|8 years ago|reply
I think UBI is meant to be "universal", with no prerequisites.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|8 years ago|reply
...And this is the real danger of a universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary to the government....
The conclusion, if I understand the author, is that UBI postulates that a few really rich and successful people need to worry about the money and how to get it to the masses. The masses are there for consumption, to find their true meaning in life, and so on. Not to create economic value for others, which is a critical part of a healthy state.
Beats me. I'm looking forward to more data from the experiments YC and others have going. I'm also looking to narrow down exactly what UBI is. So far it looks far more like a slogan to me than an actual policy. The experiments should help with that.
[+] [-] jjawssd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forkLding|8 years ago|reply
However, I raise another point, wouldn't then these people who are made jobless due to technology, etc. be again powerless and unable to stop tyranny or autocracy in a without-UBI scenario yet in a much similar strain of a with-UBI world, isn't tyranny still inevitable because those that need UBI are powerless and hold no sway on opinions or even angry and gain enmity against those who hold power such as in the Tea Party and Alt-right movement?
(Recently, however with oil prices falling, subsidization isn't happening as much and Arab Spring has brought on protests and govt. repression)
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|8 years ago|reply
Will a basic income supplant those programs or be another addition to those programs?
[+] [-] zlynx|8 years ago|reply
Yes, instead of living in large urban centers, unemployed poor people would have to move to smaller places with low costs of living. This is a good thing, really.
And without price supports through unlimited government loans, schools will have to become cheaper. Those associate professors of English lit who are so abused by the current system can live on BI plus cheap tuition in addition to online classes.
But of course it's all politics and I'm sure it will be impossible to pass a reasonable, cost neutral plan. Instead people will find ways to pile on the bureaucracy until it is less annoying to just go to work and get paid than it is to fill out all of the BI paperwork and file it with six different agencies.
The easy idea of just creating a virtual bank account at birth linked to a SS number or equivalent is so simple it's just a non-starter. And I've tried to convince people that means-testing and such is a waste of money and time but no, plenty of people see BI as welfare and want drug testing and means testing for it. Bah! Give Bill Gates his $20K per year. Who cares if he doesn't need it!?
[+] [-] WalterSear|8 years ago|reply
The savings involved in dismantling the corpulent bureaucracy currently managing and adjudicating benefits will actually go a significant way towards paying for UBI.
IMHO, ideally, UBI would be sacrosanct, and could not be legally garnished to service any debt. This would prevent if from being used as collateral, and ensure that it would remain available to support the individual - people would not be able to ever get themselves into such debt that they became a burden on society, since they could never borrow against it.
Moreover, it may be better method for managing inflation than our current setup of anointed central banks making themselves money out of thin air: Instead of passing out money to the banks, in order to generate velocity, deliver it to the citizens in the form of a deposit into some form of money market account, thereby immediately putting it into circulation in the economy.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingfrog|8 years ago|reply
He posits that political power comes from the ability to withhold something; in this case work. That seems correct to me. But, I think the mistake is in assuming that the majority of people today even in countries like the US do have that power. If you are working a job that doesn't require credentials or a long period of training or education, then you don't really don't have anything to threaten the powers that be with, aside from a massive general strike, which has not happened in a long time. So the danger scenario he posits is really already here, for most people.
UBI wouldn't really change that, except inasmuch as it would make it plausible for working people to go on strike much more painlessly, which would really increase their bargaining power, not decrease it.
And that's why we'll never get it.
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagutierrezn|8 years ago|reply
But what will we do with billions of people without any income?
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
I'd be more worried that a UBI makes citizens unnecessary to each other.
[+] [-] otakucode|8 years ago|reply
While one might be tempted to say 'that would just result in people living healthier lives', that would be a very superficial and unstudied evaluation. Behavior modification on a society-wide scale like that is radically dangerous. It might actually be the most dangerous thing in history, I'm not sure. I'd need to run some numbers, but I think there is a good chance that the unintended consequences of well-intentioned behavior modification like that has killed more than all wars combined.
Basic income is an interesting idea, but requires social support. It cannot succeed in a society which has been accustomed to seeing other people suffering less than themselves as the worst thing possible. This is a necessary legacy of the Protestant Work Ethic which dictates that a persons virtue is measured by the degree of suffering they endure for the benefit "of society" (in truth only for employers, not society at large). In that mindset, asking for reward is itself immoral and can only reduce a persons virtue. Either to receive or provide such rewards is an act of immorality, and though many can not actually recognize or admit it, this underlies how they see the world. The poor deserve their lot because they contribute little. The rich must be moral because they are rich (this is predicated on a fantastical delusion that riches are awarded only when a person has benefitted many). This is why so many people hate punitive damage judgements. They're not concerned with the well-being of the corporation being fined tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for acting harmfully. They are obsessed, to the point of willful self-destruction, with ensuring that some individual does not get a "payday" legal settlement.
Without a philosophical backing that justifies a universal basic income, it would continuously be under threat, with people from all sides attempting to reduce the income to the point that few could survive on it alone, attempting to push people to 'be productive' in a world that doesn't need productive people. It's not a situation you can simply ignore and hope people wake up to. It has to be discussed and justified and explained. Why should society at large provide for those who do not produce material products? At what level should they be supported? Should drug addicts and criminals be supported? When someone feels slighted that someone who has not suffered as much as they gets the same amount, how will you answer them?
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
Here are a couple of my objections, that could be answered by data or references to serious studies:
> In the suggested world of universal basic income, what puts pressure on the government to maintain democracy and political rights? Will they be afraid of a popular uprising? The people have nothing to threaten them with. A person who does not pay taxes cannot threaten to stop paying them. Violent revolution? History shows that governments tend to be significantly better than common people in using violence.
Who puts pressure on the government now to maintain democracy and political rights? For example, are the governments of the US or Australia really feeling today that if they fail to allow gay couples to marry, the people might stop paying taxes or engage in violence?
There is, certainly, a mechanism whereby the sentiment of the people puts pressure on democratic and even sorta-democratic governments. But the assumption that that mechanism is tax is a huge and undefended one, and seems pretty central to the argument.
> It has often been taken for granted that as societies advance, fertility drops, but this has only been happening for a short time and in societies where having children requires hard work to provide for them.
Isn't the main factor here the availability of birth control (which depends on scientific advancement/knowledge and industrial practice in mass manufacture of birth control, not on hard work)? I'm surprised not to see birth control mentioned at all in this argument. The strawman pleasure-seekers would be motivated to spend their free time figuring out better forms of birth control, because (again as a strawman) sex is fun and childbirth isn't.
> The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens?
A huge number of those countries have been ravaged by external political interference, in part because of the fuels in those countries. I don't think it's honest to can leave that out of the analysis and make a direct correlation between natural resources and despotism. We know that warlords and strongmen rise in politically unstable places, and we know in several cases that warlords and strongmen are propped up by other countries who are trying to gain favorable exports, to the extent of populist revolutions being suppressed.
(To be clear, I am not an unreserved proponent of UBI. I just think that this argument is a bad argument against it, and in particular I worry that this argument leads in short order to positions I actually disagree with "Economic inequality is inherently good" or "Lazy people shouldn't eat.")
[+] [-] jlebrech|8 years ago|reply
make it a universal parachute.
free money will just raise the prices of essentials.