>Did it really? I remember strikes against "austerity" measures and such, but a wave of basic grant militancy
I know nothing about these events, but it's not hard to believe a large number of people came to support UBI during a period of frequent strikes. With huge groups working together for a common goal, you'd expect some of them would start supporting more radical ideas
>There is no such thing. They relaxed the rules for the bottom rung of welfare, which basically scraps the obligation to apply for jobs.
The word "Utrecht" that you quoted links to the ongoing pilot program, also here
I'm glad to see Thomas Paine referenced in this article. So many Americans don't realize that one of America's founding fathers championed the idea of universal basic income back when the USA was just being created.
This was something that Andrew Yang pointed out, but was largely ignored.
I hear this a lot but in reading Paine’s writings, I can only find ideas somewhat similar to Social Security payments for elderly people. I have not been able to find anything in Paine’s writings that is synonymous with the concept of UBI. I’m not saying it isn’t in there somewhere, just that I haven’t found it.
Would you mind citing specifically where you found this information?
In Agrarian Justice he proposes to “ create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property”
He also makes it very clear that this isn’t some form of charity to help people. But rather about justice
I'm not familiar with his writings to cite more detail, but it seems to me if he supported a sort of Social Security, then he was advocating for a targeted UBI. Maybe that's just semantics though.
Paine was the Bernie Sanders of his era. He was a hardcore humanist and abolitionist. Very few Americans realize how marganalized he became after the revolution. His story is a sad one and he should be celebrated far more than basically any other founding father by persons of conscious
What always seems to happen with UBI studies is the proponents point to results that say "the people we gave free money to are happier" but never try to quantify whether that money would have done more good used in a different way.
This question is insufficient, because, in most large economies, taxation is insufficient to fund a UBI have any reasonable size. Therefore, new money creation (a.k.a. inflation) is the means, and the timeframe for its ruinous effects are too long to study within a single generation.
That's a false premise. One of the intended effects of UBI is to universalize the kind of stability of cash flow that the wealthy tend to benefit from under Capitalism. This effectively shifts the balance of both economic and political leverage. In the same way that universal healthcare is less expensive than a balkanized insurance system because the people who want lower prices suddenly have a larger say in the marketplace, UBI would lower the amount of capital wealthy individuals and entities have to put towards assets, and raise the amount that, collectively, a much larger number of UBI recipients have.
Under these conditions, it makes a lot less sense to, say, build luxury housing units that are bid up and up by the demand of wealthy investors, compared to seeing that that demand has now been broken up and distributed among lower income would-be buyers and renters and realizing that a lot of money could be made expanding the housing base.
It's all about who has the money. Asset prices will fall as wealth is diffused among people who don't stockpile capital, making the amount of income necessary to survive lower.
Taxation is a cornerstone of making UBI work. Of course it has a higher chance of failure if it's predicated on grabbing money out of thin air.
That all depends on who gets a UBI payment. If it served to "top up" people to a minimum income level, then those receiving the payments would by definition have been paying little enough tax that it wouldn't have covered the UBI they receive. So in those case, yes, they're probably more happy to receive the UBI than to have the tax waived. UBI doesn't require it to avoid means-testing the benefits, it simply sets a minimum acceptable income and lifts anyone below it up to that level. People with high incomes pay for it.
Typical UBI proposals are "means tested" in the form of a "negative" income tax (NIT), or as we call it nowadays, a refundable tax credit. If you make 0 taxable income, you get a "full" UBI payment. Then some percentage of your earned income (typically 60% or so) is clawed back from the UBI, until the break even point is reached where you get nothing as UBI, but also no further earned income is clawed back. This gives acceptable work incentives at the low end, very good ones above the break-even point, and a low monetary cost for the program as a whole. It is important that the break even point not be too high, or the cost of the program would be way too high for little benefit.
It will disincentivize work to some extent, among a comparative minority of UBI recipients. But the flip side is that by keeping the break-even point at a reasonable level and not pushing it too high, you actively slash costs for the program as a whole. The effect of having moderately-high clawbacks at the low end ripples upward, saving a comparable disincentive for every income above the breakeven point. This is a key insight about non-linear income taxation which is borne out by computer modeling of the "optimal" (utility-maximizing) tax rate structure, and economists who are knowledgeable about the subject do agree on this. It's not really controversial.
I was curious about the surfers as well. It's a reference to something John Rawls wrote in 1988:
"[...] those who surf all day off Malibu must find a way to support themselves and would not be entitled to public funds." [1] provides context.
In 1991, Philippe van Parijs wrote "Why surfers should be fed: The liberal case for an Unconditional Basic Income", which instead supports Rawls's surfers. [2]
Spaniard here since this article[1] about Spain was prominently noted in the linked article, there isn't a basic income plan here and nothing like that has happened, please stop with making up this kind of stuff about other countries.
There is regular unemployment insurance and an unemployment plan targeted to temporary job freezes (ERTE) that has always existed, nothing to do with basic income. I would also like to see BI even if it's just a test, but what we have here has nothing to do with it.
The government has just made the rules for these pre-existing unemployment plans a bit more flexible (or arguably not). Also the rent situation has become a lot better.
Edit: removed references to the future since I cannot predict it and moved those to the present.
Edit 2: it's also interesting to see the original headline was "Spain is moving to" (already false, there's no specific plan now) but in this article the mention was "Spain decided to institute the program" (ridiculous).
I'm about as "red as they get" and there's something really grating about US citizens talking about "UBI", and pointing to a variety of social policies in various European countries.
These policies are hard-fought and need to be well balanced to be effective in the long term. You can't just implement them without thinking about repercussions and side-effects.
I'd say, if you're a US citizen, forget about "UBI" as a simple answer to the various social wrongs within your country, and focus on your healthcare; that's where various European models could be used as a partial model, and it's a very good and achievable first step towards a fairer and healthier society.
We never hear about the downsides of other countries models either. It's always a cherry-picking of the best policies and pretending there's never any trade offs. That kind of disingenuous promotion doesn't do any favors when it comes to convincing people.
Interestingly enough, 5-10 years ago in Spain you could hear some proponents of private healthcare to compare it with the US. Now I think there's enough understanding that the US model doesn't work that the proponents instead talk about Singapore or other private models, no one compares them to the US anymore.
Some arguments against universal health care I have heard in Spain:
• Not enough choice, since you cannot e.g. pay more to get better treatment.
• It's more expensive, since there's no free market to move prices down.
• It's more efficient, since people are not paid to do nothing and impossible to fire (common complain about gvmt jobs here).
No beef here, just relaying what I've commonly heard
My impression is, if you compare health care costs across various wealthy countries, it's pretty clear that socialised health care is cheaper than privatised health care. Netherland has universal but privatised healthcare, and has one of the most expensive health care systems in Europe, costing more than half that of the American health care system. And it's not particularly better than the more socialised healthcare systems of the surrounding countries, as far as I can tell.
And the only place in health care where you can have a free market at all, is in elective treatments. Treatments that you can choose not to use when they are too expensive. For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes, and that's a situation that's easily abused by profit-seeking companies.
> it's pretty clear that socialised health care is cheaper than privatised health care
Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system. Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services.
> For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes
This is not really true. There is such a thing as pointless overtreatment, and the right balance of benefits vs. costs can only be reached with increased price transparency on the part of providers.
The mistake we all make is thinking the market includes us, the patients. If there is anything resembling a 'normal' (price discovery) market, it's between hospitals and other care providers and the government. The entity with the funds can foster healthy competition between the entities with the product/service. If you need medical attention, you need medical attention. A treated patient is not the customer, they are the output.
> "Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system."
I see no reason why it would work that way.
I mean, switching the US to a completely socialised system is certainly going to be a hell of a task, and even Medicare is way more expensive than it should be, but that's also because it's required by law to be expensive; Medicare is not allowed to negotiate lower prices, which throws away the primary advantage of a socialised system. But from what I understand, Medicare is still generally cheaper than privatised healthcare for the same treatment (though more expensive per patient because it insures only older people).
"Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services."
The only graph I could find showed Swiss healthcare being even more expensive per capita than Dutch healthcare. This seems to confirm my suspicion that a privatised is generally more expensive.
While I agree with your point generally, it can still be useful to have competition between hospitals.
The NHS in the UK had great results with publishing clinical outcome statistics making people shun places with bad practices. This lead to a decline in deaths and complications.
Wouldn’t a (high enough) UBI mean the free market would create “affordable” education and “affordable” health care and obviate the need for unemployment benefits?
Regulation isn’t the reason those sectors aren’t free markets. On the contrary, regulation exists because they can’t be free markets. Both lead to market failures due to information disparities, principal-agent problems, massive externalities, and a lack of free choice (in the case of health care).
The issue is the amount of regulation, of course. Regulatory capture can have worse effects than most market failures, and healthcare is one of the most obviously "captured" sectors.
I would prefer more regulation to make sure prices are transparent. The current system is set up to make prices as opaque as possible. The employer has a lot of information, the provider has information, the insurance has information, but the patient is being kept in the dark. That is, until the big bill comes in the mail.
No country that has achieved high-quality affordable education and health care for its citizens has done it via market-based means. It probably can't be done.
Money is a representation of wealth, if you print more of it, the money loses it's value to match the wealth. We call this inflation. You cannot give away wealth that you do not have.
If we truly had a free market, we'd have none of these issues, since wealth aggregation wouldn't be prevented through regulations.
For example, you can already get free education of mostly everything from the Internet, but without getting a piece of paper at the end with the stamp of some university. It's a form of regulation, since without that piece of paper you'll have a hard time selling your services. Similarly, you can get all the information you need to lead a healthy life style, making it less likely for you to even need health care. But still lots of people just eat till obesity ruining their own bodies. In Japan there's a system where your company does yearly health checks and if you gain weight, you have to pay more in taxes or some such scheme. Curiously nearly nobody in Japan is obese.
... so you know... obesity isn’t usually from eating to excess because you can. It’s from eating high calorie low nutrition foods. Poor people in the US aren’t obese because they have excess it’s because it is cheapest to buy high calorie foods. Obviously I’m not talking 400lbs, that still takes effort and money, but 250lbs is easy to hit when poor.
Given the results in developing countries I’m not sure you can say that. It could very well be that the increase in GDP more then makes up for any costs of such policies.
I don't think there is any sort of unanimity regarding UBI. Being compensated for staying home is not UBI, because it is not ongoing.
I'm against UBI for reasons that became apparent while playing MMORPGs. Stay with me here and I'll explain.
Players of an RPG want a fun game. But they also want to succeed/win. These goals partially conflict. If they prioritize winning too highly, and pester customer support to make the game easier (nerf), the game loses it's fun. Even (in my estimation) to the people who pestered customer support. Because some people aren't self aware enough (kids) to realize that the challenge is what makes it fun.
In life, we want to be lazy. I certainly do. And that desire makes me think a UBI would be quite nice. But I also realize that I most certainly would be lazy. I'm already working less than 20 hours per week (pre-COVID) because my mortgage is paid and I don't really need the money anymore. With a UBI I might stop work completely. But as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer. Less hours will be worked, prices will go up, and the economy will be more depressed and sluggish.
Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Maybe we are there in very specific manufacturing industries, but no robot is going to install a new roof on my house (for example).
So I think we should wait until after all the jobs are taken by robots (rather than thinking it's imminent when it's most certainly not) to institute UBI. Eventually. But not any time soon.
OTOH I'm perfectly okay with a means-tested payout to people who really need it.
Therea plenty of evidence that this isn't really all that true, and that if there is even a modicum of apparent reward for extra labor, people will continue to put extra labor in for that reward, often even past the point where that extra nominal reward seems to provide any additional real utility for them.
> . I'm already working less than 20 hours per week (pre-COVID) because my mortgage is paid and I don't really need the money anymore
Very few people, even well into the income range where research shows no additional subjective utility to additional earnings, ever reach the point where they recognize that they don't need any more money. So, you aren't typical and your entire argument seems to rest on assuming your atypical attitude holds generally.
> But as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer.
Anthropomorphizing the economy here obscures rather than aids understanding; what would happen if abstention from additional effort were excessively common is inflation, bringing down the real value of the UBI and reducing the number of people who found it sufficient to not exert additional effort, pushing people back into the workforce. It's a self-controlling negative feedback system.
> Therea plenty of evidence that this isn't really all that true
"All that true" doesn't mean anything and is ostensibly misleading, ie false. There are segments of the population (pareto) that try to excel, but they generally do not do it sustainably (burnout). Common terminology...scams, shortcuts, work smarter not harder, are all colloquialisms centered around basic human behavior. Even working in ANY industry, people do everything in their power to either accrue wealth simply and/or make their work easier, without taking on additional work and asking for more compensation for doing more with their time.
I may have overstated, believing people on average are more like myself than they are. But I think you're likely doing the same thing in the opposite direction, believing people will keep working hard for little benefit when many of them wont. Let's just agree there are different kinds of people and they will behave differently, and my argument has some merit, as does yours.
There are too many ideas in your post. Some of which make sense, some do not.
> Players of an RPG want a fun game.
I don't think you understand game theory and design well enough to be commenting. Generally, games are about learning about the world and performing pattern recognition to optimize in a constrained environment. MMORPGs have LOTS of games within them, some of which are completely player driven.
> as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer
Slack off? Real economy? Suffer? Soft terms that are composed into an unqualified statement. There is sentiment, but no meaning.
> Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot.
Now meandering on to robots for some reason, which is not related to previous points.
Some forums (like this one) prefer smaller assertions with arguments and typically reward those who track down supporting documentation or revealing technical support (equations, papers, historical references, active research, etc). Ironically, HN posts are preferred when people put work into them :)
The reason I asked was to learn more about UBI and other people's perspectives on it. Not to be chastized and offended. None of this comment was helpful. I'd explain why sentence by sentence but I doubt that would be a fruitful exercise.
I didn't mean to offend you, but to help you understand why you were downvoted. This is from my own experiences as you can see from my post history. I'm not popular. This forum has a very specific...expectation (as well as some strong biases) for even the most casual comments.
Below is an article arguing that New Zealand has been testing a UBI for decades with its pension scheme which is available to everyone aged over 65.
Be warned - Gareth Morgan has some interesting politics.
http://morganfoundation.org.nz/already-ubi-nz-super/
UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. My argument against UBI is that it erodes the desire to work, and we still need nearly everybody of working age to work... until the robots catch up (they still have a lot of catching up to do).
The whole point of UBI is that it has lower disincentives against work than other kinds of social insurance. When you say that UBI discourages working, that's perhaps true compared w/ no social insurance at all but it's not a very meaningful comparison.
I've not heard this. Can you explain how? And are you also suggesting that UBI proponents support abolition of other kinds of social insurance, replacing them with (not augmenting them with) UBI?
Existing social insurance schemes typically are of the form: you get $1000/mth, but, if you do any work, it subtracts from your payment. So, if you work less than $1000/mth, you're working, say, 100 hours "for nothing".
To make it worse, there is often an income point where the payment goes to zero (ex. if you make more than $800, you are no longer eligible, leaving a $200 gap). Or there are certain benefits that are lost (child credits, transit credits).
With UBI, you get $1000, but then every hour worked puts more money in your pocket.
Yeah, the whole idea of ubi is you replace the patchwork of various social programs (and the overhead of each program) with a basic ubi for everyone. It's supposed to be much more efficient and there's no disincentives to self improvement (because you never lose your benefits).
I personally don't actually think it disincentives working very much because people who want to work for more than just the minimum always will and people who really, really don't wanna work find a way to get out of working within the current system. Since my family is full of degenerates, I've seen every trick in the book used. Out of my dad's family (8 kids) only one (1) has meaningfully participated in paid employment.
I know a few people on disability. Since it's their lifeline they are generally stressed to terrified of losing it. So you have both an disincentive to look for work and risk losing benefits. And the stress also negatively effects their mental health as well. Which also makes it difficult to find productive work.
It's the situation caused by the laws and policies in place and their physical and mental heath issues.
I have some sympathy because I got sick in the early 2000's and couldn't work and was just about overwhelmed with just trying to figure out what was wrong medically. Fortunately I had enough savings to see me through without having to worry about being homeless. And enough professional contacts that I was able to land a light duty job once I started recovering. I only needed to work 3-4 hours a day at first.
The public taxpayer ends up paying for their housing, their food stamps, their bus fare, healthcare, etc. As I indicated, it's multi-generational. However, this is because their behavior is degenerate. They spend all day being paranoid of people coming to take what little they have and lack any sort of trust in each other or themselves. Drugs are involved (including pot) across the board, excepting the little kids who are raised around it.
As an aside, my best friend (prescribed adderall) has always been affected by "the curse of the gifted". When lower grade school is easy. After high school, real intellectual competition breaks that paradigm of "if it isn't easy for me, it's too hard" resulting in similar lazy adult behavior...although he does work. He's never been stable and still hovers just over minimum wage and cannot care for his kids. These problems that have similar outcome (like homelessness) which are often conflated.
Depends on the person, and how they avoid working.
I can only speak to my personal observations.
There's the people who never get a job as an adult and so they never move out of mom and dad's house. Mom and/or dad end up supporting them until their deaths. I asked a guy I know whose son is 37, living with him, and doesn't have a job and hasn't had one in decades (and never worked full time) why he allows that sort of arrangement. He said "because I know he's got a safe place to sleep and something to eat."
There's people who have a kid or two and live off child support. In some states having a one night stand that produces a child with someone who has a salary of ~$120,000 is more lucrative than going to college and working the median salary for a college graduate. Even rape victims owe child support. There's two victims here, the person paying and the child(ren) who exist solely as a paycheck.
There's the related "bait and switch spouse," that's when someone, upon marriage (or cohabitation), just quits their job (or gets fired) and unilaterally decides they don't want to get another. This, of course, was their plan from the start. They may make the motions of trying to get a job to make it look like they are trying to work to their spouse, but the goal is to not work. They will ride this out as long as the spouse will put up with it, which can be decades. This is what my dad did, he basically worked for a couple weeks of my parents marriage and my mom has been footing the bill for him in the 4 decades since (and, no, he never took care of the housework or childrearing or anything like that).
Then, finally, we have the fake disability people. Claim you can't work due to pain, depression, anxiety, migraines, etc. Anything that's a subjective diagnosis. Establish a paper trail, then apply for disability. It really helps if you are in one of the above categories while doing this, because you have a history of "not being able to work" for the disability claim.
> still need nearly everybody of working age to work
Within my entire known family tree maybe 1 in 8 people work jobs essential to the creation of goods (including food, power, water), the construction or maintenance of shelter, or the providing of health or transportation.
A huge swath of society is employed in doing things often equating to simply moving numbers around in databases or inside heads. Or more generally, they serve economics by operating to move money from one pocketbook to another.
Its also worth mentioning that labor force participation rates trend downwards over the last 50 years in industrialized nations. Since the participation boom of womens emancipation there has been a general decline in participation not reflected in unemployment figures largely because the number of people required to produce the needs and wants of 99% of everyone else is so few, and because there are so few of means to create demand all on their own (ie, millionaire+ elites) for more extravagant goods markets that don't manifest in a widespread form.
I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work: Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it. The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more.
"I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work"
Probably about to the amount of working time and thus income it replaces? That could be an hour a day, a day a week, or a week per month depending again on how much UBI we're talking?
"Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it."
That's because the job isn't keeping someone at the poverty level, they are keeping themselves at the poverty level by choice. Sometimes, some people choose to change that because they realize they are the only thing holding themselves back, not the other way around.
"The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more."
Agreed...although many in America are already choosing to reject the notion of a "career path" and have relinquished their desires for "upward trajectory" - and that's before UBI.
It is a monumental assumption that people are career driven enough to keep working once there is a UBI in effect. Especially considering that people are career driven to provide for their families, and the UBI essentially makes that a non-issue. But let's hang on to that general assumption, and think about some specific examples where UBI will undeniably have an impact.
Many people will work fewer hours or quit their second jobs. Currently 7 million workers have a second job.[1]
Young people graduating from high school and college would have a greatly diminished incentive to enter the workforce. Why get a job at all when you can shack up with your buds, pool your UBI, and have all the money you need for booze and video games? Many will fall into this trap temporarily, some permanently.
Millions of creatives who want to work on their music or write the next great american novel are out on day one.
How about the folks currently working to supplement Social Security? Currently, 10 million people over 65 are still working[0]. How many of them quit their jobs on day one of UBI?
Millions of working moms are out on day one.
The biggest issue will be the fact that UBI will make retirement instantly possible for many, and much easier for many more. Currently, to retire with an income of 40K, you would need a nest-egg of $1.3M (assuming a conservative withdrawal rate of 3% annually and no social security). But if you're guaranteed a UBI of 12K per year, a married couple receiving 24K per year in guaranteed income is able to retire with a nest-egg of only 533K. Tens of millions of the most productive workers in the economy will be ready for retirement decades ahead of schedule.
None of these things are necessarily bad--I'd love to be able to retire a decade ahead of schedule! But when the workforce is significantly reduced in size while spending is dramatically increased, taxes will necessarily skyrocket, the incentive to work will plummet even further, and the resulting feedback loop will hollow-out the workforce and bring the economy to a screeching halt.
Then I suppose I projecting (psychologically). I would stop working. I'm barely working now. But I shouldn't assume I'm typical. Thanks for the feedback.
It can be structured as an income tax that starts out negative. Everyone of working age is paid the UBI, which is designed to act as the safety net. This frees up a ton of overhead as means-testing, benefit fraud, etc. all goes away.
Then when you get a job, the UBI starts to reduce, at a rate LESS than the money you are earning. So if you're paid $1000 monthly UBI, and get a $1000 job, it might reduce UBI by $500. So you're always better off working. You'd probably want a sliding scale so maybe the first couple of hundred only reduces your UBI by 0.20 per dollar, or whatever. It can be structured so the net tax take for the government is the same. Yes this probably means people earning more than say $100,000 pay a bit more in tax. I'm okay with that.
Working 40h weeks for an extra $500 isn't a good deal. As long as I can sustain life without working, not working at all will always beat getting some scraps. If there aren't repercussions for not working, than why bother?
The idea is that you'd be able to sustain if you lived _very_ frugally. Generally, people don't enjoy that. They like to eat the nice food, go to places, buy things, all of which wouldn't be covered by the UBI.
I lived my entire live frugally. I enjoy that. Working 40h weeks on the other hand isn't all that fun, even though now I have thousands of dollars to blow every month. If I had the choice I'd live frugally and not work.
I'm eating the same thing everyday, like to stay at home and hate to buy things. I'm working because I know it's necessary.
> UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different.
If you can make it work for a group that are working for money less that the population average, surely you can make it work for a larger population? Keep in mind that there are other parts to this like sick pay, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment leave etc. There are a collection of separate systems that could be combined, have vastly less administrative overhead and improve incentives (ie more work = more pay).
Quick conceptual question from a noob in the subject: does the UBI entirely replace social security for elderly individuals or is it added on top of it?
That seems more like an implementation detail. It certainly could replace social security, but then again in the US social security payouts are tied to how much you've paid into it over the years. Then again, UBI would be paid for, albeit less directly, but tax payments as well so it might not be an important distinction.
And of course it would be important to peg the UBI to different costs of living for different regions.
I'd do the opposite. Peg UBI to the lowest cost of living, and have separate short-term insurance-only programs (on top of UBI) for folks living in higher-cost areas. That way, those who are unwilling or unable to work in the longer term will be incented to move to low-cost areas and relieve pressure elsewhere.
UBI sets an income ‘watermark’ of basic income for all.
I would say they interact. It would eliminate the pension where desired/planned pension funds were at a similar watermark.. if the pension needed to be more then it would supplement towards this.
What you are describing sounds like guaranteed income. UBI doesn’t phase out quickly so it would stack with similarly sized pensions. Larger pensions would see little extra money.
I am a free market advocate, libertarian-lite, that believes that UBI is the correct social safety net. I am clearly not unique in this regard, as this actually seems to be the most common type of UBI advocate I've encountered.
That being said, the one lingering question I have comes down to a variant of inflation. I think most people think of inflation as something that only happens as a result of monetary policy, but that's not entirely true. Let's say that UBI could be entirely funded through taxation, no new money is introduced into the system. There is still a form of inflation on certain goods. For example, let's take an extreme example of redistribution: we take all of the money from a billionaire and redistribute it. One billionaire doesn't buy 100,000,000 TVs for their house, but 1,000,000 people with $1,000 might each buy a TV. 1,000,000 people with an extra $1,000 has a much larger impact on demand for typical consumer goods than having that wealth be more concentrated. Of course stricter taxation of the uber-wealthy would have impacts lessening demand for large investments, so it's not a blanket inflation in the same way that just printing money would be, but it still has all of the same characteristics of inflation within certain consumer markets.
It's all very complicated, and I would like to see it modeled. If I'm a landlord, and I know that my tenants now have an extra $12,000 a year, do I raise rents? I think the natural argument is that because the scarcity or value of my real estate didn't actually change, I open myself to being undercut by competition if I try to arbitrarily raise the value of my property to reflect increased demand. But the problem is that it might not be entirely true that the value of my real estate didn't change. When I have to call a plumber, or gardener, or construction worker for a remodel, are their rates going to be the same? Are rates going to go up or down? It's very hard for me to know for sure.
It reminds me a bit of debt. Debt shouldn't necessarily produce inflation, but it definitely does. Do you think houses would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if the average person didn't have access to debt? Would it cost 50k+ in order to attend college? No. Access to debt dramatically increases the prices on the things purchased by the available debt, regardless of whether or not this theoretically is meant to produce inflation. My concern is that, as with access to debt, the increase in wealth will be met with an increase in cost across the board, and not due to exploitation, but because the effects are that most consumer products and services actually just end up costing as a natural reflection of increased demand.
Some scarce things that everyday people want are likely to go up in price (ex. rent in cities that are already struggling with housing prices).
Some things may drop in price (higher demand allowing to spread fixed costs over more units; or, lower volatility allowing for smaller margins).
Some prices that would increase, may only do some temporarily, as the market catches up with production or competition (ex. greater stable demand for basic housing makes it less risky to build said housing, so more of it gets built).
In modern globalized economics the only things that really inflate uncontrollably are things those supply is constrained by forces beyond production scalability. IE patents, copyrights, or things of extremely finite supply like land.
TVs keep getting cheaper because economies of scale keep growing and the industrialization of billions of people in the last 40 years has produced enough supply to more than meet rising demand combined with technological innovation and automation efficiencies dropping the resource and labor requirements substantively. There are probably orders of magnitude more TVs made and sold today than in 2000, but the cost per unit has fallen in that time (or you get a radically more complex / better product for comparative prices).
Insulin, college, rent, etc prices rise uncontrollably because they are supply constrained by monopolists. But dealing with those anti-competitive markets and industries needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of society regardless of the institution of a UBI or not.
> In modern globalized economics the only things that really inflate uncontrollably are things those supply is constrained by forces beyond production scalability. IE patents, copyrights, or things of extremely finite supply like land.
It's felt to me like we've gone from
Pre 1800: A world where material inputs were very expensive. Complex manufactured goods ditto. And labor cheap.
1800-1980: Where where materials were cheap but complex manufactured goods were still expensive and labor not cheap.
Post 2000: Where materials are moderately expensive but complex manufacturing is dirt dirt cheap. AKA this is a micro controller with a million transistors. And this is a power transistor. The latter costs more because it requires more metal, silicon and packaging.
While we keep pipe dreaming about full AI or home automation the number of people required to extract a ton of lumber, iron, oil, etc has dropped an order of magnitude in the span of decades. Likewise the number of people required to participate in the refinement of materials into, say, TVs has fallen by a similar order. And it keeps falling. More industrialized automation begets more as the pipelines scale up and justify the investments in maximal "dumb" automation.
One thing people miss out on is transport - the cost to transport goods has also dropped astronomically thanks to computerized and networked navigation systems for rail and naval lines. You would never reliably insure the traffic volume of many docks, shipping lanes, and rail lines globally without computers controlling and often operating them. Thats how you get ludicrous quantities of goods crossing oceans for a few percent of its overall cost to consumers.
Over my career I've noted that the 'knee' on the mass production curve gets lower and lower. The NRE for design, molds and tooling keeps dropping. Out of my keester 30 years ago you needed 100,000 units to justify a set of injection molds. Every ten years after cut that number by 10.
Now if you want a 1000 plastic parts, not too complex, NRE is a couple bucks each.
Why would debt not cause inflation? “Money” today is almost entirely made up of credit, increase credit and you increase the money supply, which is more less the definition of inflation.
The thing about shifting demand causing inflation seems to me more like an adjustment. Not really the kind of inflation that cause trouble.
Also, since you mentioned landlords. Check out geo-libertarian take on this. Financing an UBI from a land value tax is in my opinion the most interesting approach. Since it would be based on a principle of justice, not just another welfare scheme.
The problem with UBI is that we would turn it back into the welfare system we have now.
Let's say we pass a truly universal basic income bill -- every person gets the same amount of money from the government, every month. It wouldn't take long before politicians propose giving more money to teachers and single mothers, or taking benefits away from convicted felons and sex offenders.
Over time, bit by bit, we will entitle certain groups of people to more or less money than others. That will happen for the same reason our existing welfare system is the way it is - the voters believe that some people are more deserving of help than others. UBI would not remain universal, or basic, for very long.
Given that we can't actually end up with a universal or basic income system, and that we will end up largely re-creating the same kinds of entitlements that characterize our current welfare systems, we might as well just improve and extend our current systems.
It is actually a problem with UBI: UBI does not line up with most people's beliefs about who deserves help, those beliefs are so powerful that they resulted in the creation of our existing welfare systems, and they aren't going to go away overnight.
Even if your claim is true, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a problem with UBI -- it could be a problem with 'most people's beliefs'.
Consider that 'most people', in the west at least, consider it normal to work ~8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with 1-4 weeks holiday per year, and do this for ~45 years.
Where did all those numbers come from, and how long have we (as either a culture, or better yet as a species) thought this is normal?
I don't think anyone's suggesting that most people are inclined or capable of changing their beliefs, or rather habits, overnight -- but that's also not a reason to abandon the consideration of UBI.
the argument against it [1] is practically that if it is being pushed by the current system it is to benefit the current system. As in, "uber needs a safety net for their drivers" kinda of vision, which given the track record in the US is very likely.
> "Once we implement UBI, what's the argument against doubling it?"
Nothing. There's a reason the US Social Security program is one of the so-called the "third rail(s) of politics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_of_politics). Once a UBI program is started, the UBI receiving population will just keep voting for politicians that keep raising it and raising it ... until the system collapses. Already, most young people entering the workforce today expect to get nothing from the Social Security program when they reach retirement age despite paying quite a bit into it. And yet we want to repeat this with UBI?
The fact that UBI should not be about giving an amount of money, but rather about giving essentials like housing and food or the equivalent in money, and "doubling" essentials doesn't make as much sense, since you don't have much use for two beds or twice the food.
What constitutes 'basic necessity' changes every year.
Is a car a basic necessity? What about a mobile? Broadband? Netflix/Cable wouldn't be an obvious choice but many will argue it is. Washing machine? What about food delivery for those over 55?
You know those 3-wheel motorized chairs, between scooters and wheelchairs for the elderly ... they are definitely a 'necessity' for some but really quite 'in between' for others.
Once UBI is initiated, the arguments to increase UBI will be unyielding.
The next generations' youth will make arguments about the 'inhumanity' of such and such. They may have a point, but we will be the 'old timers' thinking they are mostly ridiculous and actually voting.
If we could afford to live in a world where everyone was given $5000/mth, would we want such a world? (where work was optional) I think yes.
...can we afford that? At this point, probably not. But is it something to strive for?
I think it is eventually possible to get the costs of providing basic needs to everyone (say, through automation) to the point where they can be easily covered by taxes on those who choose to work.
I fear though, that housing is an obstacle to this vision, because in many countries, people rely on housing to be an investment (ex. my parents house is the majority of their retirement), and so the politicians protect it as such, and developers have weird incentives... and so the prices don't go down.
I do not think such a world is desirable. It would just distort markets. Everyone will charge more for everything, starting with rent.
If you cover the basic needs of "everyone", the number of everyone will just go up and up and up until you can't cover the basic needs anymore. Do you think earth can sustain infinite people? There has to be a mechanism preventing people to increase their number to unsustainable levels. The current world already does a really bad job at that, I don't think we have to make this worse.
I think the most desirable world is one with a build-in pruning process, where only the most adapted people survive, thus preventing the number of humans to reach unsustainable levels, while still progressing to greater heights. After all, if you just put a cap on the number of children people are allowed to have you're just going to stagnate. It's better to have a large pool to select the fittest and prune the rest, resulting in the same number at the end, only with much better quality. Historically, war was such a pruning process. But I don't think it was an especially good one.
> The next generations' youth will make arguments about the 'inhumanity' of such and such. They may have a point, but we will be the 'old timers' thinking they are mostly ridiculous and actually voting.
For one, we are likely to hit post-scarcity singularity on our current technological trajectory before generations of UBI queens can cripple capitalism with washing machine demands.
For two, there is no real "wrong" amount of UBI. Not in an objective sense. 100% GDP UBI would simply imply all wealth transfers are 100% taxed by the government and then universally redistributed evenly by said government. It totally breaks capitalism and removes the profit incentive from everything, but that is basically libertarian communism. Someone would probably argue for it. Likewise, where we are now with 0 redistribution we see the fruits of innovation disproportionately benefiting the rich economically for decades. The consequences of that transfer from the poor to the rich encompass a loss of political and economic influence by the poor and an upward trend in poor health and mental illness.
In the same way people will argue how much free speech, or guns rights, or monopolism, etc is "enough" or "right" is subjective and ideologically polarizing, the "right" amount of UBI will have to be decided by the socities that adopt it. If you have a functioning democracy you should be fine. Though for many nations of the Earth that might be an important first step to consider today.
Post-scarcity doesn't solve the fundamental problem of earth being unable to sustain infinite humans. Even with infinite resources, there will still be finite space.
Historically, human populations that did grow beyond sustainable had to starve to death back to sustainable. If you prevent this by giving everyone free food, that's not really a good thing.
An UBI based on dividends such as from a land value tax, or a carbon trading, would follow GDP more or less. No reason not to double it if possible in a sustainable way.
The dynamics aren't the same, the UBI case has a much weaker negative feedback loop than minimum wage. The percentage of the population that benefits from ratcheting minimum wage is much smaller -- they are intrinsically a permanent minority.
Ratcheting UBI, on the other hand benefits a much larger population whose growth as a percentage of the population is effectively unbounded by negative feedback. It would be very easy to arrive at a pathological equilibrium where the majority of the population has a strong incentive to vote for short-sighted expansion of UBI at the expense of the minority. Once in that mode, addressing the pathological consequences of that politically would be very difficult unless mitigations were designed in from the beginning.
It is possible to design negative feedback loops for the UBI case to greatly mitigate this issue, but it tends to be avoided by UBI proponents because most solutions have varying degrees of unpalatability.
This article might have been more informative if it had placed these ideas in context - the rise Marxism and Communism, which tie the state's mandate to preserving the interests of labour rather than those of capital, provoking in the west the rise of social democracy, which proposes that a balance can be achieved between workers and capital while still preserving capitalism.
Most countries already have programs to prevent people from starving or freezing to death and those countries also tend to have elaborate health care programs, and provisions for those not able to work. Even the US has programs like this in most states though you could argue that compared to other countries they are a combination of expensive, inefficient, and ineffective.
Basic income is formalizing the status quo that there's a minimum standard for all that basically translates into everybody receiving those same guarantees but simply with less bureaucracy & moralistic BS around it. Basically it gets rid off or vastly simplifies the business of collecting and handing out social security insurances and different types of benefits. The cost for this in some countries actually rivals the benefits handed out. E.g. unemployment benefit programs have amazing amounts of bureaucracy associated in many countries.
For those who work, what changes is that part of their income now comes from basic income and they pay taxes over the rest. For their employers, they pay less salary and have less bureaucracy around things like insurance programs and social security (all taken care off). Also things like minimum incomes go away: they pay market prices for what somebody does for them. State pensions, unemployment benefits, sick leave compensation, etc. all basically fold into this basic income. If you want more, you work and pay for extra insurances yourself. If you don't, basic income is there for you.
For those that are not part of the labor market, i.e. approaching (or already over) 50% of the population in many countries, what changes is that their life becomes a lot simpler. Either they are happy enough to get by on basic income or they secure some additional source of income. Either way, we're already paying for their health care, housing, and food as as society. It's a much less radical change than people think.
IMHO this could actually unlock the labor market in lots of countries. There are a lot of weird rules around unemployment that actually make it unattractive or hard for people to work. E.g. people close to their retirement age are expensive to fire and therefore unattractive to hire in lots of countries. People on benefits are actually would risk losing their benefits if they take some job on the side. So, they don't work until they find something "proper", which for some never happens.
Of course this kind of debate always raises the question "who pays for this?". The people that ask this never look at the other side of the debate: how much do we save by eliminating and dismantling the byzantine bureaucracy responsible for the current system. Nobody has actually run that experiment.
Also, we have plenty of taxes left and plenty of wiggle room with things like VAT, fuel tax, profit tax and income tax. It boils down to a quite simple formula: total cost = X*#people. If you have say 17M+ people (NL, my home country) and assume 500 EURO per person, the total cost would be about 100 billion/year for absolutely everyone. Sounds like a lot but as part of the GDP (around 900 billion) it's not that bad and the that's completely ignoring the fact that this would make hiring people lower risk and lower cost for all companies; which tends to do wonders for their profitability (and thus profit taxes). The cumulative budget for existing programs in NL is actually similar to this.
Sadly, doing this is not feasible not for economical reasons but for political/moralistic reasons and ingrained (wrong/naieve) assumptions that many people have about how economies work (e.g. that they are balanced and circular). It's simply too radical for a majority. Even socialist/communist countries never went there and in fact had a lot of moralism and ideals around the notion of labor with the state actively trying to control who was allowed to do what and for how much.
Most reasonable UBI proposals draw the funding primarily from a VAT and a reduction of benefits that it replaces (like food stamps and welfare).
The beauty of a VAT is that while normally regressive, by redistributing the funds as a UBI, you essentially make it a tax on only upper-middle-class/rich people.
For example if the VAT is 10% and you give people $1,000 a month, they would have to spend over $10,000 a month on VAT taxed items (ie. not rent and probably not a lot of food) before they were paying more than they were getting back.
Generally people who can afford to spend $10,000 a month on non rent items are usually making over $180,000 a year.
VAT+UBI is still regressive, you're just subtracting a constant factor. So instead of hitting the poor the hardest, you're hitting the middle class the hardest and creating a valley around where the break-even point is.
In addition, since VAT taxes don't apply to capital transactions (as there's nothing added when you buy or sell a stock), the vast majority of transactions conducted by the upper class won't be hit by this.
Base assumption, we just print the money. It's how we pay for everything else like wars and subsidies and whatnot.
Then, as a courtesy to those people who benefit from a society without excessive inflation (mostly, people with lots of money who are clearly benefiting the most) we take and burn that money, to remove it from circulation.
I was thinking about this idea, if we print money and distribute it "wisely" among the lower income classes, this would debase the currency proportional to the amount printed, harming primarily those who are wealthy, proportional to their wealth, and the money will eventually flow upwards through the financial system, primarily through consumer spending, but ultimately back into the pockets of the wealthy.
Of course, inflation in certain categories would need to be taken into consideration, and other factors, but is this idea a non-starter for some reasons I'm overlooking? Excluding politics of course, for the purposes of this mental experiment.
There was also an article posted here in the last two weeks or so about a massive global short situation with the USD, I have it in my mind that the particulars of that situation were conveniently complementary to this idea, although I may have that aspect completely backwards.
Of course. You don't even have to be all that wise about it: just a flat handout disproportionately affects the wealthy.
To get around capital flight (people reinvesting in non inflatory currency, sinking the international buying power of said currency), though, it probably needs to be able to economically isolate, or be universal enough that there is nowhere to flee. And when you do that, you might realize just how much everything is built on the ongoing suffering of the global poor.
“Universal basic income” of any reasonable size in, e.g., the US, requires the creation of new money, because taxation is insufficient for its funding.
New money derives its value, subtractively, from the value of existing money (“WEALTH”), which is held by individuals who earned that money (“WORKERS“).
Some individuals decide not to work because of reasons OTHER THAN retirement, inheritance, disability, and child bearing; these individuals do not contribute directly to production (for convenience, we’ll call this group “LAZYS”).
Therefore, giving UBI to LAZYS intrinsically takes WEALTH from WORKERS, regardless of whether not WORKERS also get UBI.
In other words, universal basic income can be correctly defined as “transfer payments from WORKERS to LAZYS“.
Your first paragraph makes a good point, but given that in the US capital (i.e, being paid for owning wealth) is taxed at a much lower rate than income (i.e., being paid to work), I'd offer the following correction:
UBI intrinsically takes wealth from the wealthy, who are generally NOT "workers" but those who have earned or inherited a large amount of capital at some point (and thus are more appropriately labeled as "the lazys [sic]"), and distributes it to everyone, the vast majority of whom are indeed "workers".
In short, UBI can be correctly defined as "transfer payments from lazys to workers".
(This is an oversimplification, but I believe a tad bit more accurate than the original.)
Sounds about right. Like everything in the US, some group is trying to figure out a way to siphon money from those to earn to those who “need it more”. I don’t care to support this, I want all the money I make, thank you very much. I’ll decide who to help with it. Or, I’ll help no one at all with the money I worked for, which according to college students and other people who have no skills and have paid no taxes, makes me “greedy”.
Now if you want to fix the screwed up healthcare system, I’m all ears.
So you'd pay for your own private guards, private fire department, pave the roads you use to drive to work out of your own pocket, and countless other things that are currently tax-payer funded resources? You'd need to be exceptionally wealthy indeed. Or maybe you still think there's some basic things the government should do, and therefore needs to collect taxes for them. In which case we're not arguing over whether or not money gets siphoned, we're just arguing over where you draw the line.
I think UBI as a single monolithic program for providing minimum resources to provide the basics of food/shelter etc can be much improved on by other means:
[0]Instead, I think a constellation of smaller, targeted programs (think best-of-breed) might be more effective and provide a more robust effect: If a society provides universal healthcare, comprehensive unemployment benefits that don't have absurdly low caps, housing & food subsidies for those close to the poverty level, comprehensive disability benefits, and probably a few other things I'm missing, then the need for a "universal" UBI is diminished: That too can be targeted towards people not otherwise covered by the above. The advantage is that each program can be highly tailored to the specific needs & nuances of those seeking that specific benefit, rather than just throwing a larger block of money at people.
[0]Note: I'm not particularly attached to this idea. I think is has merit, but my goal is to start a conversation about the idea, sort of pressure-test it, not proclaim it as the way to do things.
A patchwork of "targeted" programs is unsatisfactory for many reasons. It lets people fall through the cracks, and it results in unintended effects as the programs are not designed or managed in a consistent way. The need for some sort of minimal income floor is universal, and it should be addressed in a universally-applicable way.
Exactly.. my personal genealogy for discovering UBI was:
The government should provide for a base level of food, medicine, housing, and education.
But let private industry compete for it, so just provide vouchers for each of those things.
But, how to efficiently allocate the amounts for each individual? How much health care voucher vs. food voucher vs. housing voucher vs. education voucher?
Ah, just have a universal “health or food or housing or education” voucher!
Oh, but what about transportation!
Okay, a universal “housing, food, medicine, transportation, and education” voucher.
Oh wait, we have one of those already! The dollar.
Yes. And the "universal" part makes it UNCONDITIONAL on receive, which is the important part. It removes the necessity for a government institution to decide per individual how much they are eligible for. Much money is saved. Since the government already has an institution for checking taxes, the conditionality is merely moved to the end - they check not whether you get UBI, but just how much taxes you owe.
But then people need to go out and shop for those things using UBI, for example compete for housing in markets that may offer no affordable housing, but housing subsidies would help resolve that.
If targeted programs can be poorly designed or mismanaged inconsistently, then so could UBI. The whole idea is to thoughtfully design a program. If that is possible, there's no reason we can't thoughtfully design targeted programs, and UBI would still be there in a lesser capacity precisely for those people that would fall through the cracks of those targeted programs.
UBI just feels like a kind of sledgehammer, when a dozen scalpels might perform better. I'll grant that UBI would be superior to the very loose "safety net" of social programs in the US though.
Even with a "strong" UBI program, I still think we'd need other programs as well-- UBI will be far too low for people that suddenly lose a job that pays 5x UBI and need to get by until they find new comparable employment, as an example.
Think of the oddly familiar security vs usability problem.
The tailored programs always fail to reach some people who badly need them.[1] At the same time they always have some fraud to deal with. You will reach more of the target audience by accepting more fraud. You can also fight fraud more effectively at the expense of those in need. OR you can throw more money at it and try but fail to eliminate both.
Then you'd want to avoid turning it into a blunt instrument. To do this an incredibly large army of skilled and trained people has to be hired (and removed from the private sector) who are tasked with many impossible tasks. (They tried to measure how fucked my back was one time. We concluded that no one had any idea what would happen if I got a job)
Then there is the ego problem of living on hand outs- because A, B and C. Others might not say it but you feel pathetic not being able to take care of yourself.
Also interesting is to wonder who all those industries and markets should be working for. They currently work for whoever has money. This includes you and me but only to a very very limited extend.
[1] - Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Examples are not doing this chaos any justice. Try picture a combination of someone close to you dying horribly, physical injury, mental problems and losing your administration. We give you some forms to fill out and you simply can't do it. You just want 3 months of alone time. We give you 20 experts who want you to talk about how fucked up your situation is the year round. No way to move on.
Did it really? I remember strikes against "austerity" measures and such, but a wave of basic grant militancy?
> Pilot programs have been set up in several cities and countries — Utrecht
There is no such thing. They relaxed the rules for the bottom rung of welfare, which basically scraps the obligation to apply for jobs.
Doesn't bode well for the article.