I feel like treating UBI as a panacea has actually hindered its adoption, giving critics plenty of ammunition in the form of implementations that don’t quite live up to their proponents’ loftiest ambitions.
Can UBI transform society? Probably not! But why is that the bar? It can just be boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people’s lives easier. That’s still a good thing worth doing.
I'd say that a "boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people's lives easier" would be transformative. Not utopian or anything, but a judgment-free welfare that just automatically happens without all the bullshit (in the U.S., anyway) would be amazing.
The thing I’ve never understood about UBI is how it wouldn’t immediately be counteracted by inflation.
Money is like water or electricity; its only ability to do work is when it flows. Just like a water wheel can’t do any work without a river flow, or a motor can’t do any work with a potential difference, money is useless when everyone always just has the same amount. It is only the transfer of money from one entity to another that causes work to be done.
The difference between 9V and 12V is 3V. The difference between 12V and 15V is still 3V. The amount of work you can do is the same, but the bar to entry is higher. So somebody explain to me, when everyone gets the same baseline amount of money, how that does anything but raise the baseline?
> The thing I’ve never understood about UBI is how it wouldn’t immediately be counteracted by inflation.
I think you are not wrong, but not completely right either! It's true that the income difference among people would not change, but the distribution would: homeless people begging on the street could afford something in a stable way, at last; people on minimum wage would double their income; medium class would see their disposable income increase; and rich people would not notice any difference.
Sure, the purchasing power of the UBI sum would be reduced the moment the UBI is introduced, but still poor people would see their situation get better: the poorer, the "more better"!
Furthermore, most of the money flowing to the poor people would be spent right away, boosting the economy, which is a very nice side effect. In the end, UBI would be a way to force the rich to take some of their money out of the vaults and spend it (1st benefit) for the poor (2nd benefit).
The only problem lies in how much money you'd need to take from the rich to implement UBI in a meaningful way.
This is probably also a flawed analogy applying simple ideas to an extremely complex system / set of overlapping systems, but I see UBI as a sort of social and economic lubricant.
People at the bottom of the economy are not able to effectively participate in it. At the absolute bottom it's homeless people with no real path to employment or any real ability to improve their situation. You get above that layer and you've got people making constant compromises between competing necessities like housing, nutrition, and clothing.
Inconsistent and/or substandard nutrition can be massively impacting to adults and even more so to children. Their immediate and long term mental and physical capability is lessened compared to others. People who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy today have kids who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy tomorrow. This creates a persistent drag on the economy as a whole.
It's absolutely possible UBI causes some degree of price increases, but in exchange we get an economy with a larger number of effective participants and less drag at the bottom.
I’ve had the same question. We saw this, to some degree with the stimulus checks during the pandemic. Initially people got all this money and reports were that savings rates had never been higher… but most of the world was also shut down. As things opened up, or people simply got bored at home, what did we see? People spent everything they were given, and more. Personal debt is now at an all time high, and we’ve seen a bunch of inflation (for various reasons). Most people are in a worse place now.
Financial literacy is extremely important. Giving more money to people who don’t know how to handle money, allows them to dig bigger holes.
That said, everyone’s investments and 401ks are reliant on this reckless spending to keep returns high.
A fiscally balanced UBI is one which increases taxes on the average taxpayer exactly the same amount as it pays to the average taxpayer. It would not increase the money supply and would have minimal impact on inflation.
This argument seems to imply that if you had a big red button that would uniformly distribute all the world's resources, that we would be stuck in a steady state and unable to produce anything. This conclusion is obviously false, and I think if you work backwards you can probably find where the analogy breaks down.
One interesting thing about giving money to the poor is that when they have money, they spend it immediately because they have to. I don't think this addresses the inflation question, as there are guaranteed to be check cashing rackets and price gouging where thing costs 1 UBI unit all of a sudden.
If it is funded by taxation, it need not be inflationary.
If you think about it, the Fed only really has one "knob" they can turn to control inflation: they can either raise or lower the interest rates.
However, raising taxes is also anti-inflationary, and in stagflationary environments (like we had at the end of Trump's presidency), it lets the government control inflation without making borrowing more expensive.
> Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) learns from the collective intellectual and creative output of humans and uses this to dispossess workers of their livelihoods,
Has anyone actually lost their job to AI yet? At best it helps some workers do their jobs faster as many innovations in the past have. Historically, this increases the amount of work expected to coincide with the capacity for doing work.
For example, CAD software replaced hand drafting. This didn't remove jobs, clients just expected things to be designed faster and in greater detail than they were before.
Maybe before we start patting ourselves on the back and handing out free money we should have a concrete example of an AI doing actual useful work without any human intervention.
Are you arguing that technology never forces people out of their jobs?
Note that even if the total number of jobs stays fixed, it doesn't follow that the same people are doing them. They might end up doing something better, or something much worse, or just die and get replaced by a new generation with different skills. There are many examples from history going in either direction.
The fundamental problem that I see with UBI is that it basically means that we are just paying people to be passive consumers of resources.
It'll always be a hard sell as a result. People want their neighbours to pull their weight. Even if it's just sweeping the street, painting their fence, whatever. Paying people to sit about watching TV is never going to work.
Not only do you steal from working people to give to tv watchers, you also structurally shift the market by forcing all jobs to pay more than the baseline minimum wage, which means that all would-be workers that cannot provide more than $x in value to an employer would never be hired. This tends to impact unskilled workers, who tend to need experience to increase the value they can offer employers.
If it's just the bare minimum to survive (e.g. food + roof), there's still quite a lot of self-interested incentive to pull your weight. Of course, some people would be satisfied with the bare minimum but my guess is it wouldn't be a large percentage of the population.
> People want their neighbours to pull their weight.
This is not a universally held belief, although I'll admit that (at least currently) a great majority still do think this way. I am hoping we one day evolve past this idea that one's existence must be justified through arbitrary toil. We shouldn't have to invent hole-digging jobs and hole-filling jobs purely so people can "do something" to pull their weight.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Annoyingly, the basic income pilot described in this article is not universal, and only helps people who could already afford to be artists. I'm sure the people working behind the counter in your local chipper would've liked to avail of it but they don't qualify as working "artists".
But being Ireland, I can't imagine they'd ever implement it without an enormous means test.
UBI makes most sense as a targeted way to increase wages by removing some people from the workforce.
It would be very good for society, for example, if we paid parents to stay home with the kids instead of sending the kids to day care and to homeschool their kids instead of sending the kids to school. We'd also benefit by paying creatives and scientists so they can pursue their calling without having to work a day job in the patent office like Einstein was infamously forced to and without having to work for a university where there are perverse incentives that discourage the most important work in favor of what is most likely to lead to publications and to governmental/corporate grants.
Of course UBI is only part of a plan to control the labor supply and thus drive up wages. We also need to preserve child labor laws, lower the retirement age (60 or maybe even 50 would be reasonable), tax outsourcing instead of subsidizing it and restrict the sort of immigration that takes our jobs instead of creating new jobs. In the case of immigration, that's why green cards for college graduates are preferable to guest worker visas because highly skilled immigrants seem to be disproportionately entrepreneurial but only if their immigration status isn't tied to a job. Prosperity for all rather than maximizing GDP needs to be the goal of economic policy.
The issue with most UBI proposals is that their supporters seem to have no understanding of economics and no bigger plan to achieve any real policy objective. So their proposals would just cause inflation unless corporations were able to automate away almost all jobs. In which case we'd basically have an imperial Roman style economy where most of the population is dependent upon the government for bread and circuses while a few accumulate great wealth from the machines (in the case of Rome, humans who had the misfortune to be born as "machines") that run everything. I don't think that's really the kind of future we should want.
The major issue I have with all the UBI studies is that it ends. If you know that UBI ends in say 2 years or 3 years, your actions will be different if it is a true UBI. That skews any of the results of people's behavior.
The universal in UBI is key, it means everyone gets the same basic amount, no matter how rich (reframing on purpose to make a point). No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.
When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income. And that's effectively welfare, which we already have. So it becomes mainly a discussion about reducing barriers to access welfare.
> When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income.
No. A guaranteed minimum income means that you can make 500 Euros scrubbing toilets, and welfare bureaucracy will top that up to 1000 Euros after "means testing".
A UBI means that you get 1000 Euros from the government without bureaucracy. If you so wish, you can earn additional income by scrubbing toilets.
> No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.
There's nothing wrong with giving the rich 1000 Euros like everyone else, as long as tax rates are adjusted so that they effectively give the 1000 Euros back. This zero-sum effect may seem silly, but it's a simple implementation without any additional bureaucracy.
The problem is getting political support for it. I'd be in favor of if it could be done without increasing government spending (aka by massively reducing/eliminating other government programs). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to resonate well with progressive voters.
UBI in effect would clean the most degenerate and ignored few in society while at the same time liberating the masses from aimless drudgery. It will inject cash into the consumer market and lower risk to seeking credit. I see it as the ultimate form of capitalism when everyone has a means to acquire goods and services at a mutually agreed upon standard. I also see it as the only option to avert a cataclysmic economic event when we all get layed off and replaced by robots. Read this article from McMaster about UBI in action in the Province of Ontario, it is short and clears up many pre conceived notions against such a program.
Not sure which way this post is arguing, but in my anti-UBI opinion, providing UBI does control the lives of others primarily by stealing from productive members to give to unproductive ones.
I have no problem if people want to personally finance folks to not work via private charity, but when it becomes a government program, you are definitionally controlling everyone.
Because control over lives of others is what makes a well functioning society. This is something that every single anarchist/libertarian is incapable of understanding, despite living in the developed part of the world.
It's just not personal control but institutional control.
Most of the arguments seem to be that UBI will reduce labor participation. That seems logically correct, but why is it morally correct?
In US (and in western countries), we have the capitalists benefit from the increase in productivity and the working people penalized. Maybe, it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way? Why should the the wealth generated by the society not go to the society (instead of a few wealthy people, as it happens today)?
For all the arguments about how it can increase the cost of labor, I would say so what? The profits of the corporation can go down a lot and go to people who make it work.
[+] [-] jakelazaroff|1 year ago|reply
Can UBI transform society? Probably not! But why is that the bar? It can just be boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people’s lives easier. That’s still a good thing worth doing.
[+] [-] jzb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|1 year ago|reply
The "income" terminology gets confused as "salary" by those who aren't well versed with these kinds of programs.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dgfitz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zoky|1 year ago|reply
Money is like water or electricity; its only ability to do work is when it flows. Just like a water wheel can’t do any work without a river flow, or a motor can’t do any work with a potential difference, money is useless when everyone always just has the same amount. It is only the transfer of money from one entity to another that causes work to be done.
The difference between 9V and 12V is 3V. The difference between 12V and 15V is still 3V. The amount of work you can do is the same, but the bar to entry is higher. So somebody explain to me, when everyone gets the same baseline amount of money, how that does anything but raise the baseline?
[+] [-] pif|1 year ago|reply
I think you are not wrong, but not completely right either! It's true that the income difference among people would not change, but the distribution would: homeless people begging on the street could afford something in a stable way, at last; people on minimum wage would double their income; medium class would see their disposable income increase; and rich people would not notice any difference.
Sure, the purchasing power of the UBI sum would be reduced the moment the UBI is introduced, but still poor people would see their situation get better: the poorer, the "more better"!
Furthermore, most of the money flowing to the poor people would be spent right away, boosting the economy, which is a very nice side effect. In the end, UBI would be a way to force the rich to take some of their money out of the vaults and spend it (1st benefit) for the poor (2nd benefit).
The only problem lies in how much money you'd need to take from the rich to implement UBI in a meaningful way.
[+] [-] sjsdaiuasgdia|1 year ago|reply
People at the bottom of the economy are not able to effectively participate in it. At the absolute bottom it's homeless people with no real path to employment or any real ability to improve their situation. You get above that layer and you've got people making constant compromises between competing necessities like housing, nutrition, and clothing.
Inconsistent and/or substandard nutrition can be massively impacting to adults and even more so to children. Their immediate and long term mental and physical capability is lessened compared to others. People who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy today have kids who aren't able to effectively participate in the economy tomorrow. This creates a persistent drag on the economy as a whole.
It's absolutely possible UBI causes some degree of price increases, but in exchange we get an economy with a larger number of effective participants and less drag at the bottom.
[+] [-] al_borland|1 year ago|reply
Financial literacy is extremely important. Giving more money to people who don’t know how to handle money, allows them to dig bigger holes.
That said, everyone’s investments and 401ks are reliant on this reckless spending to keep returns high.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofjoe|1 year ago|reply
Precisely.
"Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money" by James Buchan (1997) is a superb book that expands on your statement.
[+] [-] tempfile|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fgdorais|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rhelz|1 year ago|reply
If you think about it, the Fed only really has one "knob" they can turn to control inflation: they can either raise or lower the interest rates.
However, raising taxes is also anti-inflationary, and in stagflationary environments (like we had at the end of Trump's presidency), it lets the government control inflation without making borrowing more expensive.
[+] [-] coreypreston|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|1 year ago|reply
Has anyone actually lost their job to AI yet? At best it helps some workers do their jobs faster as many innovations in the past have. Historically, this increases the amount of work expected to coincide with the capacity for doing work.
For example, CAD software replaced hand drafting. This didn't remove jobs, clients just expected things to be designed faster and in greater detail than they were before.
Maybe before we start patting ourselves on the back and handing out free money we should have a concrete example of an AI doing actual useful work without any human intervention.
[+] [-] tempfile|1 year ago|reply
Note that even if the total number of jobs stays fixed, it doesn't follow that the same people are doing them. They might end up doing something better, or something much worse, or just die and get replaced by a new generation with different skills. There are many examples from history going in either direction.
[+] [-] throwaway22032|1 year ago|reply
It'll always be a hard sell as a result. People want their neighbours to pull their weight. Even if it's just sweeping the street, painting their fence, whatever. Paying people to sit about watching TV is never going to work.
[+] [-] hellojesus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
This is not a universally held belief, although I'll admit that (at least currently) a great majority still do think this way. I am hoping we one day evolve past this idea that one's existence must be justified through arbitrary toil. We shouldn't have to invent hole-digging jobs and hole-filling jobs purely so people can "do something" to pull their weight.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
[+] [-] CalRobert|1 year ago|reply
But being Ireland, I can't imagine they'd ever implement it without an enormous means test.
[+] [-] bdw5204|1 year ago|reply
It would be very good for society, for example, if we paid parents to stay home with the kids instead of sending the kids to day care and to homeschool their kids instead of sending the kids to school. We'd also benefit by paying creatives and scientists so they can pursue their calling without having to work a day job in the patent office like Einstein was infamously forced to and without having to work for a university where there are perverse incentives that discourage the most important work in favor of what is most likely to lead to publications and to governmental/corporate grants.
Of course UBI is only part of a plan to control the labor supply and thus drive up wages. We also need to preserve child labor laws, lower the retirement age (60 or maybe even 50 would be reasonable), tax outsourcing instead of subsidizing it and restrict the sort of immigration that takes our jobs instead of creating new jobs. In the case of immigration, that's why green cards for college graduates are preferable to guest worker visas because highly skilled immigrants seem to be disproportionately entrepreneurial but only if their immigration status isn't tied to a job. Prosperity for all rather than maximizing GDP needs to be the goal of economic policy.
The issue with most UBI proposals is that their supporters seem to have no understanding of economics and no bigger plan to achieve any real policy objective. So their proposals would just cause inflation unless corporations were able to automate away almost all jobs. In which case we'd basically have an imperial Roman style economy where most of the population is dependent upon the government for bread and circuses while a few accumulate great wealth from the machines (in the case of Rome, humans who had the misfortune to be born as "machines") that run everything. I don't think that's really the kind of future we should want.
[+] [-] RegnisGnaw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AwaAwa|1 year ago|reply
When you get something for nothing, you better believe that productivity will plunge.
Even a cursory glance at history will show this to be true. Argentina is a great example, of 'something for nothing'.
[+] [-] glitchc|1 year ago|reply
The universal in UBI is key, it means everyone gets the same basic amount, no matter how rich (reframing on purpose to make a point). No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.
When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income. And that's effectively welfare, which we already have. So it becomes mainly a discussion about reducing barriers to access welfare.
[+] [-] stvltvs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] petesergeant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] derdi|1 year ago|reply
No. A guaranteed minimum income means that you can make 500 Euros scrubbing toilets, and welfare bureaucracy will top that up to 1000 Euros after "means testing".
A UBI means that you get 1000 Euros from the government without bureaucracy. If you so wish, you can earn additional income by scrubbing toilets.
> No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.
There's nothing wrong with giving the rich 1000 Euros like everyone else, as long as tax rates are adjusted so that they effectively give the 1000 Euros back. This zero-sum effect may seem silly, but it's a simple implementation without any additional bureaucracy.
[+] [-] olalonde|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RegnisGnaw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DaleNeumann|1 year ago|reply
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/28173/1/southe...
[+] [-] swayvil|1 year ago|reply
UBI could make that happen again.
[+] [-] benmw333|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hellojesus|1 year ago|reply
I have no problem if people want to personally finance folks to not work via private charity, but when it becomes a government program, you are definitionally controlling everyone.
[+] [-] antisthenes|1 year ago|reply
It's just not personal control but institutional control.
[+] [-] wakawaka28|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] newsclues|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] slackfan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vaidhy|1 year ago|reply
In US (and in western countries), we have the capitalists benefit from the increase in productivity and the working people penalized. Maybe, it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way? Why should the the wealth generated by the society not go to the society (instead of a few wealthy people, as it happens today)?
For all the arguments about how it can increase the cost of labor, I would say so what? The profits of the corporation can go down a lot and go to people who make it work.
[+] [-] exabrial|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] incomingpain|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] freddealmeida|1 year ago|reply
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