There may be labor resistance to self-driving trucks, but you know who is in favor of[1] self-driving cars? the American Association of Retired Persons. They are the most powerful lobbying organization in the US because in addition to their $232 million[1] lobbying budget, they can deliver the thing that politicians on state and federal levels care most about: votes. People age 65 and older consistently vote at higher rates than the rest of the population [3]. At least, until their inability to drive a car keeps them from the polls...
The elderly have organized pickups to drive them to the polls, absentee ballots, relatives, etc.
The scariest thing I've seen was a Facebook conversation in which no less than a dozen of my classmates, all finance sector employees, were openly mocking an article about the massive disruption self-driving cars will have, as if it were a Jetson's fantasy rather than a one to two year prospect and ten year inevitability. We're in for a massive bumpy disruption. Smart investors stand to make a fortune right now. But a lot of people are going to lose their shirt in the process.
Thats true. I've overstated the case that AARP would view driverless cars as a means to greatly increase the size of its voting bloc rather than just prevent social isolation of its members.
I'd be willing to bet that the combination of the possibility for massive economic value from driverless cars combined with a lack of knowledge around that will lead some people to be irrationally exuberant. Hopefully this does not lead to a bubble.
If you're unable to drive to the polls yourself, you have several options:
You can vote by mail.
You can catch a ride with a friend or neighbor.
You can get a ride from one of numerous organizations and agencies that offer voter transportation. Call your local election office to find out who is providing transportation in your community.
"During the [trucking] trip [from Springfield to Atlanta], Homer falls asleep and wakes up abruptly at the wheel of the truck due to taking a combination of pep pills and sleeping pills that he bought at a general store. He awakes to discover that the truck drove by itself with its Navitron Autodrive system. He informs other truck drivers, who inform him that he cannot let anyone know about the Autodrive system because it would make all truck drivers lose their jobs. However, Homer tells a passing bus about the system which causes an angry mob of truckers to get in a showdown with Homer, and he survives without the autodrive system. Homer and Bart arrive in Atlanta to finish the shipment on time, and then commandeer a train full of napalm to Springfield."
The blackboard in a particular episode also contains the correct mass of the Higgs boson. There were several maths PhDs on the writing staff, so there's a lot of intelligent humor that flies over the average viewer's head (and often mine for some of the hidden math jokes.)
For those like me who looked at that map and thought "no way is truck driver the most common job in so many states!", click the NPR link below the map to get to the source for the map. They explain the truck driver thing there. One big factor is that their source doesn't subdivide truck drivers, but does subdivide most other common jobs, such as teachers (split into primary and secondary school teachers).
Also, the map on the NPR site is interactive, showing changes over the years. For instance, you can see a lot of states where you probably would have guessed farmer is most common were that way 10 to 20 years ago, but now fewer farmers are needed to grow the same or more food, and so the number of farmers declined.
In other words: the "most common job" statistic is quite arbitrary due to non-uniform binning of job types.
The question is, is this somehow fixable?
I don't see a way because those categorizations themselves seem arbitrary and you could lump anything somewhat related together while dividing down anything else if you want to show it's "the most common".
Presumably if you took the top 100, and manually merged then into the top 25? 50? job "categories", you'd have a more stable grouping and more interesting time-series statistics.
I was actually blown away that software developer is the most common jobs in four US states. Software developer jobs are becoming a commodity, if not already.
All of this is absolutely true. But what we need for the idea of basic income to take off is a positive rationale for it, as opposed to a negative one of the 'if we don't we're fucked' kind. The reason this matters is that the disruption won't be overnight, so you're looking at more of aobiling-frog scenario where the pace of job loss is slow enough that politicians can blame it on other sources for a while, like whoever is in the White House at the time, furriners taking our jawbs, workers being too lazy to retrain...basically the same bullshit we've heard over most of the last decade as an excuse not to engage with the deeper structural problems in our economy. Politicians excel at this; look at how Japan has been in an economic stall for 20 or so years, with politicians tinkering round the edges and shying away from fundamental change, because opportunist opponents can leverage change to mobilize political power by making empty promises.
The problem is that a basic income to (say) the 150m people in the civilian labor force x the ~$23k poverty line income would be about $3.4 trillion, which is not far off the entire federal government budget. That's (very roughly) $10,000 worth of redistribution for everyone in the country, which is going to be an incredibly tough sell politically, for reasons that I hope are obvious.
People in general are terrible at doing sensible things to stave off a distant-seeming catastrophe, viz the relatively poor progress on lowering/mitigating/managing the effects of climate change (whether or not you believe it's humanity's fault) or any number of other topics.
I do agree with the writer's conclusion and reasoning, I'm just pessimistic about our ability to manage the accelerating pace of disruption.
> The problem is that a basic income to (say) the 150m people in the civilian labor force x the ~$23k poverty line income would be about $3.4 trillion
There's no need to introduce it all at once. Call it a "Citizen's Dividend" instead of a "Basic Income" and start it at around $30 a week. This can replace a lot of lower welfare payments and, given to everybody - not just workers, would only cost $450 billion or so.
It can also be used to introduce more money into the supply and gives you much finer grained control over inflation, for example. It can slowly be increased up until it becomes enough of a basic income for some people (not everyone would be happy with the same level of income, obviously).
As a concept, it also promotes the idea that you're an active member of society. As your society becomes wealthier, you benefit directly. There are a lot of pluses to the general idea.
This definitely needs to be called the "America Permanent Fund," and be explicitly marketed as a scaled-up Alaska Permanent Fund[0], which is a hilariously popular basic (small) income program that literally no one has opposed ever, no matter what.
There's a huge difference between the Alaska Permanent Fund that was established primarily with oil revenue windfalls and augmented with surpluses in boom years and a basic income program that would be funded by increased taxes.
Huge policy and economic backend difference, definitely. But for propaganda/marketing purposes, to the common man these are the same program. It's the government giving you free money and that's all that should ever be in the talking points.
Or you could call it something like "Free Money Forever", because that's what its proponents seem to think they'd be getting, as if the money didn't have to come from somewhere.
How many people have any clue as to where tax revenues come from?
How many understand that other people have to earn that money first?
How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that? How would that affect the burden on the remaining earners?
> Or you could call it something like "Free Money Forever", because that's what its proponents seem to think they'd be getting
No I don't. Frankly, I suspect I understand tax and spending a fair bit better than you do, probably because we've spent the past 2 years talking about it in Scotland due to the independence referendum (and the following talks on full fiscal autonomy).
> How many people have any clue as to where tax revenues come from?
Just about every grown adult on the planet? Who do you think pays taxes?
> How many understand that other people have to earn that money first?
Well, that's just plain wrong. You're conflating money and wealth. They're different things. Money is just created to reflect wealth: it's literally just invented by your government (or, in the case of Bitcoin, just by proven work). And wealth doesn't have to be earned; it just has to be created.
> How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that?
Sure, I'm going to stop contracting at $3000 a week because, hey!, I could just live on $30 a week instead.
> Please just think about it for a while.
Yes, please do. There are actually intelligent objections to BI.
Here are some proper concerns: What about illegal immigrants in the country? What about the federal government having all your details if you want to claim BI? Would it be better to be state run than federal (or in the EU, by countries, or would it be better run as an EU project?). Would it create problems with inflation? Would it cause problems with the banking system?
I'd thought about that, but there could be two effects. There are people working for low wages, who live in high cost areas, because that's where the jobs are. If we're talking about a liveable BI, then they would have the option of moving to a cheaper area to live. Once there were many more people living there, at least some of them would start their own businesses, and there would be more economic activity in that area.
Now, this would raise rents in that area slightly, but would have a downward pressure on rents in the more expensive area. In short, it might have the effect of equalising rents.
It's difficult to be sure, of course, which is why I think it would be a good idea to start BI low enough that we can keep an eye on what's actually happening (say $30 a week), as there could well be multiple effects all at once if you started at, say, $150 a week.
> Well, that's just plain wrong. You're conflating money and wealth. They're different things. Money is just created to reflect wealth: it's literally just invented by your government (or, in the case of Bitcoin, just by proven work). And wealth doesn't have to be earned; it just has to be created.
My point was that people have to do something to acquire the money they have, and no one is going to give it to them "for free". All the money people have represents some sort of valuable activity, time used and effort spent.
So basically, money isn't free. It costs time and effort, and that's a central reason for why there's a limit to how much of it you can take from people.
(Let's not bicker about the financial industry at this point though - they're not actually providing value anyway)
But it makes no sense to say that "money is just created to reflect wealth". I get that wealth is all of the stuff we have available to us, in whatever pursuits it may be useful, and so on. But money is just a means of exchange. It's fundamentally a commodity that has become widely accepted in exchange for goods and services.
Now that's not how our fiat currencies work in today's world, but that's just because governments have abandoned sound money altogether. What I'm talking about - and what you should be too - is sound money. Something that just emerged as money through people engaging in voluntary trades.
Anyway, you're not in a position to complain about my understanding about economics (or taxes or whatever).
> Sure, I'm going to stop contracting at $3000 a week because, hey!, I could just live on $30 a week instead.
Is that supposed to be an argument against something I said? You'll have to explain how.
Ok, so you're talking about a hypothetical non-fiat currency, rather than the one that's actually used. If you'd made that clear at the start, there wouldn't have been so much misunderstanding.
I should note that money didn't "just emerge". The reason money from the Roman Empire, for example, became so popular, even outside the empire, was because it was government backed. Outside the empire, people traded goods and would just use bits of gold or silver to trade, which suffered from massive fraud (mixing with base metals).
> Is that supposed to be an argument against something I said? You'll have to explain how.
Yes, it's an argument against the bit I quoted. That people would stop working because they saw others living on BI. I'm not going to stop working because I can do a lot better than BI, even working part time. Especially if it's started low, at $30 a week.
Gold and silver sure as hell did, and that's what I was referring to, which I'm pretty sure you saw anyway, especially considering you brought up gold too.
Actually, the concept of "debasing currency" comes from the government of the time diluting the gold content of the gold coins in use back then.
> That people would stop working because they saw others living on BI.
Alright, so your argument against the idea that people would stop working because they saw others living on BI, is to snarkily suggest that you personally wouldn't?
Surely you understand that other people very much would, even if you personally wouldn't? You'll have to try harder.
> Gold and silver sure as hell did, and that's what I was referring to
No, they didn't. I was referring to gold and silver being used as tradeable goods, not as currency. There's a difference.
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay on getting rid of the gold standard called "The Modern Midas". You'll find it in the collection "In Praise of Idleness". You might find it interesting. In fact, you might find the whole collection interesting, though I doubt you'd agree with any of them.
> Surely you understand that other people very much would, even if you personally wouldn't?
Oh, please. How many people would give up a job to live on $30 a week? You can live on welfare better than that. Would you give up your job for that? Do you know anyone who would?
> No, they didn't. I was referring to gold and silver being used as tradeable goods, not as currency. There's a difference.
Oh come on. You know they did emerge, as mediums of exchange, which is what money/currency fundamentally is. You're making a meaningless distinction to cover your ass.
> Oh, please. How many people would give up a job to live on $30 a week?
We're talking about a Basic Income, where the idea is to get enough money to live on, right? That most definitely would cause many people to just stop working because they wouldn't need to anymore, even if the BI happened to be too low for you to stop collecting your phat paychecks. You get that, yes?
> We're talking about a Basic Income, where the idea is to get enough money to live on, right?
No, I specifically mentioned starting it low and even gave an example amount of $30 per week. Several times. My first post was saying "call it a Citizen's Dividend instead". With the exact reason that it would be good to monitor the effect.
If you're going to refuse to actually think and read then you're not worth my time. Go away and learn something.
The moral hazard you've described is definitely a thing, and it would be silly to expect 0 slippage in the labor market after BI introduction, but I guess the claim is that we already spend so much on inefficient social welfare programs that if we just killed them all and gave the money to the people directly that it would be better for literally everyone involved. And it is an elegant sort of solution; after all, cutting out the middleman is the American way.
I'd argue that UBI would unlock latent productivity of all the people doing shitty jobs who would otherwise being doing something they love, and thus contribute to society instead of seeing the world as a zero sum game that they got the short stick of. Opposition to UBI comes mostly from people stuck in a zero sum mindset.
UBI is bread and circuses to allow the present economic system to continue a little longer.
End of the day, we're making lots of technological advances that aren't advancing people in a meaningful way. We've already devastated the working class so much. Truck driving is a key "success" job for many people. Take that away without prospects for something new, and you're going to have an uprising.
People need an occupation. 50 years of the welfare state should have taught that lesson.
Taking away someone's money to give it to someone else IS actually a zero-sum game. Of course, bureaucratic waste and/or graft makes it actually a negative-sum game.
Two people trading with each other is not, because both perceive a benefit, because otherwise they wouldn't trade.
Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics. One more time: the money for UBI has. to. come. from. somewhere.
Money is not free, and therefore it can't be just handed out by the truckload without adverse effects elsewhere in the economy. Whoever gets free money is happy, but someone somewhere was burdened more than before and is unhappy.
I would argue that wealth redistribution (which UBI absolutely is) is not a zero sum game.
First, let's talk about utility. Utility of capital is non-linear. So, if we take $100 out of a millionaire's pocket, and distribute it evenly to 10 people who each have $100. The millionaire's ability to contribute to society has decreased by 10 units. The ten other members of society each had their ability to contribute to society increase by 2 units. We've generated a net-gain for society by redistributing wealth.
Second, we can look at the dollar value of the system. Yes, I would argue that even the dollar value of this redistribution is not a zero sum game. Obviously the basic transfer of wealth was zero sum. But it made our enonomy slightly more efficient by improving the capacity of the 10 citizens. Let's say the economy grows $10 more than it would have without the redistribution. Suddenly, even in just dollar-value the redistribution was not zero-sum.
It's important to realize that UBI is a response to extreme income inequality, which can cause large ineffeciencies in a market. Automation obsoleting jobs only needs to lead to UBI if that automation leads to rising income inequality. If we find a way to work with technology that keeps income disparities at a reasonable and efficient value, then there's no need for UBI. However, income inequality has reached to pretty significant heights and continues to grow.
> The millionaire's ability to contribute to society has decreased by 10 units.
Are you taking into account the fact that 10 people now have a means to convey to entrepreneurs that some new product or service would solve a problem they have? Does doing this on a larger scale increase the ability of an entrepreneur to bootstrap a company through revenue rather than acquiring capital from now-poorer millionaire (whom we'll assume was an investor)?
I generally agree with this reasoning. You'll notice each member of society had their ability to contribute go up by 2 units. So the overall gain was 20 units, and the overall loss was 10 units, for a net gain of 10 units of "ability to contribute".
There's too much to unpack in what you wrote. Again, define "efficiency", and while you're at it, define "utility" too and what it means that it's "non-linear" for capital.
Non-Linearity: This suggests that the utility that someone derives from wealth is not linearly proportional to their wealth. A simple example may demonstrate this more clearly: We give both an extremely wealthy person and an extremely poor person $10. The poor person will get more utility out of that $10 than the rich person will.
You're talking about something like marginal utility. The first $10 used towards satisfying a certain want are more effective than the next $10.
For example, if you're really hankering for an apple and you eat one, that apple will be more satisfying than the second one, because the first apple satisfied your strongest craving.
The same can be applied to resources etc.
But more importantly, why would anyone else have the right to decide how your property is allocated or used, even if you do happen to be rich?
Besides, even if you redistribute people's property based on the idea that the end justifies the means, what if the poor people you're helping through harming others don't use the money wisely? What if someone gets $10 and uses it to maintain his alcoholism? -Did your grand vision of increased Societal Utility come true?
Even disregarding morality, which would be.. rather psychopathic, how can you know if people will use the money wisely? What about Rational Actors® and Efficiency®? :)
> "You're talking about something like marginal utility."
No, I was using marginal utility to demonstrate that the relationship between total wealth and the utility provided by that wealth is non-linear.
To complete the full thought: Marginal utility is the first derivative of utility. If marginal utility is constant, then overall utility is linear. If marginal utility trends downward then the overall utility is non-linear. Since we appear to agree that marginal utility tends to decrease, then calculus forces us to agree that the utility that someone derives from wealth has a non-linear relationship with that wealth.
> "what if the poor people you're helping through harming others don't use the money wisely"
I think it's a fair question, but it seems hypocritical to ask immediately after asking: "why would anyone else have the right to decide how their property is allocated or used".
However, every study I've seen done on this issue has shown that unconditional cash transfers to impoverished people tends to be used reasonably well[1]. Certainly there will be some people who choose not to use redistributed income well, just as there are some people who have lots of capital who choose not to use their income well.
> "why would anyone else have the right to decide how your property is allocated or used"
This one you'll have to take up with the Supreme Court, Congress, the United States Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service who all take it as a given that the United States Government has the right to decide how your property is allocated or used.
Again, as mentioned in our other comment thread, since you seem to be advocating for zero taxes and zero government spending, I don't think we can come to any meaningful resolution on these issues in a text-format over the internet.
I think this is the critical point of our disagreements over UBI — you find all government spending to be theft and morally wrong. This isn't an argument against UBI, but an argument against the entire system of governance that the world has adopted. That's totally fine, but it's not an argument that I'm prepared to consider on this particular forum. If you want to continue this discussion, let's do so in person or over the phone sometime.
Yeah, we can agree that utility is non-linear. What we haven't established yet is: "so what?" :)
> I think it's a fair question, but it seems hypocritical to ask immediately after asking: "why would anyone else have the right to decide how their property is allocated or used".
Why would it be hypocritical? I'm not advocating for someone else using your property, nor for helping some through harming others.
> However, every study I've seen done on this issue has shown that unconditional cash transfers to impoverished people tends to be used reasonably well[1]
Didn't we already conclude that evidence is really quite meaningless in this discussion? It's not difficult to find statistics and articles to support the idea of redistribution.
It is difficult, however, to explain why anyone's money should be "redistributed" away from him, considering it's his property. If a rich person's kid has a shitload of Lego bricks, should some of them be taken away from him to be redistributed to poor people's kids?
> Certainly there will be some people who choose not to use redistributed income well, just as there are some people who have lots of capital who choose not to use their income well.
What does it mean to use one's income well? Who decides if my use of my income is acceptable? Why would anyone be in a position to decide that for me?
If I want to buy my seventh Ford Fiesta because it will bring me immense joy, can you claim I'm not using my capital or income well?
> This one you'll have to take up with the Supreme Court, Congress, the United States Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service who all take it as a given that the United States Government has the right to decide how your property is allocated or used.
Well no, I don't "have" to, and that would be roughly as worthwhile as writing to your representative, asking not to get shafted by SOPA/CISPA/PIPA/NDAA/PATRIOT ACT/etc.
Instead, I brought it up with you, as part of OUR discussion here, which you're perfectly capable of continuing by answering my question.
I realize that I am capable of continuing this discussion on this forum but I'm not going to. I do not consider the comment thread on this article on Hacker News an appropriate venue for an extended debate on moral absolutism, the value of the existence of government, and the ethics of taxation and robbery.
I would be happy to continue the debate in a different venue — a thread with the ethics of taxation as it's core concept, a different website, an e-mail thread, a phone call, or an in-person meeting. Let's take this to a more appropriate place, and I'll happily continue the discussion as long as it remains productive.
The problem with "inefficient welfare programs" is that they're actually very efficient... at providing well-paid, secure jobs for bureaucrats and civil servants. UBI or similar ideas only really work if the overhead of running them is very, very low.
Decades of increasingly large and seemingly free lunches have gotten us to a point where people actually think there is such a thing.
But there isn't. The money has always had to come from somewhere, and it's always had consequences. It's just that the consequences can't be swept under the rug anymore, and soon even the most fervent propaganda will fail to convince the masses that everything is alright and the economy is recovering (when in reality it's not, and it's not).
I would argue that the prolonged debate between well-educated and well-respected economists on the topic of government spending[1] indicates that reasoning alone does not lead to a single straightforward answer on the topic.
Since reasoning alone doesn't lead to an obvious answer on this topic, then I would argue that yes, you do need evidence to back up your claims.
> "do you think there's no limit to how much of other people's money governments can spend?"
It's obvious that there exists such a limit. However, the existence of that limit doesn't do anything to help us determine what amount of government spending is the most efficient.
The claim that:
1) There is a maximum amount of government spending possible
2) Therefore, the current government spending is too high
Has the same flaws as:
1) There is a maximum velocity that we can travel (c)
2) Therefore, the current highway speed limit is too high.
[1] For example, there were a large number of respected economists that weighed in on both sides of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Well then, we can assume that all those economists have also presented evidence to support their cases, but even with evidence, they haven't reached an agreement. Therefore, it's pointless to demand evidence from me either.
You want to know what amount of government spending is the most "efficient", but you should first define what you mean with efficiency in that context.
In ordinary life, efficiency involves maximizing output from input, right? A car can be more fuel-efficient than the previous year's model, and so on.
So you want government spending to be "efficient", but all government spending represents a wasteful middle-man between people and their money and whatever goods and services they need. Therefore, all government spending is "inefficient" from the point of view of the people whose money governments spend.
So I'd say that there's no such thing as efficient government spending. What's efficient is people paying for stuff on a free market with free and unhindered competition among providers. Surely you know how competition works, and results in lower prices and higher quality, right? In other words, free competition results in maximal "efficiency" in an economy.
In conclusion, if you want maximal efficiency in the way money is spent, you can't support the idea of any government spending.
> "Well then, we can assume that all those economists have also presented evidence to support their cases, but even with evidence, they haven't reached an agreement. Therefore, it's pointless to demand evidence from me either."
The main difference being that evidence changes between 2009 and 2015. Maybe there is new evidence since then to really support your claim that I'm not aware of? Evidence is constantly changing. Raw reasoning and logic is not constantly changing. If the only basis we're working from is rational thought, then you should be able to reach the same conclusions that Aristotle did.
Hence, the request for evidence.
> 'You want to know what amount of government spending is the most "efficient", but you should first define what you mean with efficiency in that context.'
I'm sorry for assuming an economic context for my terms — elsewhere in the thread you asserted that "Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics" so I made the assumption that you were familiar with economic terms. Additionally, I'll be the first to admin that my economics background is merely some early econ classes in college and a general interest afterward. I'd be very interested to hear from any economics if I've badly mucked up any of these concepts.
> "In conclusion, if you want maximal efficiency in the way money is spent, you can't support the idea of any government spending."
I don't think there are many serious economists that you back you up on this assertion. This claims that I would be happier if there were no roads, no water supply, no education systems, no protection from criminals (which technically don't exist because there's no criminal behavior), and no protection from other countries. I absolutely would like some of my money taken and spent on those thing.
I'm happy to debate if the amount of government spending is currently too high or too low; I'm happy to discuss where the best place for it to be is. However, if you would seriously contend that the correct number is zero I think we may be too far apart on a base ideological level to continue this conversation in a productive way. At the very least arguing economics won't get us to any common ground — I think we'd have to switch over to philosophy before we'd find common ground.
> Raw reasoning and logic is not constantly changing.
That's exactly why it's a better foundation for economic conclusions.
Why would you keep requesting evidence even after acknowledging that there's evidence every which way? Anyone can just cherry-pick evidence that suits them, but where does that leave us?
Reasoning based on correct premises works pretty well though.
> I'm sorry for assuming an economic context for my terms — elsewhere in the thread you asserted that "Opposition to UBI comes from people with a clue about economics" so I made the assumption that you were familiar with economic terms.
Let's just say I've seen those terms thrown around, but they're vague and obtuse enough to be practically meaningless. That's hardly surprising, considering their main use is rationalizing government intervention.
For example, no economy can ever reach "pareto optimality": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_optimality .. because every single voluntary exchange leaves both participants better off, because otherwise they wouldn't go through it. Since value is subjective, it really is enough that they both perceive a benefit in the trade.
If you want to argue against that, you'd have to somehow magically know how much I'd be willing to pay for a Ford Fiesta tomorrow at 4pm. But you can't. No one else can. Just like I couldn't possibly know your preferences at some given moment in time.
So yeah, pareto optimality is nonsense, as explained above, and so is a lot of the other stuff involved in these discussions. That's part of why I demanded definitions.
> I don't think there are many serious economists that you back you up on this assertion.
You'd have to look to the Austrian school of economic thought for that, but all of them would agree with me.
> This claims that I would be happier if there were no roads, no water supply, no education systems, no protection from criminals (which technically don't exist because there's no criminal behavior), and no protection from other countries.
All the services you list are provided by people working for a living. Do you want to claim people need governments to tell/force them to work for a living?
> I absolutely would like some of my money taken and spent on those thing.
No you don't. No one wants to be robbed, any more than beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat. What you might be thinking is that you're willing to pay for those services, but that would also apply without getting robbed.
> At the very least arguing economics won't get us to any common ground — I think we'd have to switch over to philosophy before we'd find common ground.
> How many understand that if the people who earn money are burdened with much higher taxes to pay for someone else's BI, a lot of them them will just stop working because fuck that? How would that affect the burden on the remaining earners?
Do you think Basic Income will be sufficient enough to sustain anyone's lifestyle that they will _stop working_ out of spite?
There are a ton of jobs that need doing that probably no-one actually likes, like stacking shelves in a supermarket, sweeping the streets, waiting tables, and so on. There are a few more that people maybe do like, at least some of the time, but would probably rather be doing something else, like tending bar. If everyone doing those jobs quits to focus on their guitar or something, what happens? Well the demand for those jobs doesn't go away but now employers have to pay a lot more to attract people to work them. Which sounds pretty good until you realize that that feeds back into the cost and suddenly everything in the economy costs more and the BI doesn't stretch as far as it used to. Which rather defeats the entire point of the exercise.
For those that make an only moderate amount more than the basic income? It's a good probability that they will not want to work.
Perhaps not out of "spite" as you suggest, but a simple time tradeoff. E.g. "Work 8 hours per day, and get $100 more. Or work 0 hours per and have $100 dollars less to spend, but 8 hours more to work on hobbies and leisure and social activities.
Perhaps not out of "spite" as you suggest, but a simple time tradeoff. E.g. "Work 8 hours per day, and get $100 more. Or work 0 hours per and have $100 dollars less to spend, but 8 hours more to work on hobbies and leisure and social activities.
That situation exists today, and to a greater extent than it would with a basic income. Due to the loss of benefits, as income increases the working poor face huge effective marginal taxes, sometimes over 100% so that they are literally made worse off by earning more. See https://www.epionline.org/studies/r27/ for example.
Some people would stop working just because it would be kind of silly not to, considering their circumstances. Some other people would stop working because why bother when those lazy scumbags aren't doing anything either, and others would stop working because being productive just gets you assraped with taxes.
money has to come from somewhere, and it has to go somewhere.
just like water, money disappears forever once used.
water flows from the mountain into the sea, and one day the river will run dry.
the government is like Niagara falls, a huge waste of money/water.
Universal Basic Income would accelerate this flow of moneywater, and is so obviously a bad idea that its opposite,
Universal Basic Outgo is a good idea.
UBO would reverse the flow of moneywater by taking the same monthly sum of money from every citizen and pumping it uphill.
this would motivate everybody to work harder, resulting in a happier society with enormous moneywater reserves in the mountains.
In New York, for example, the property taxes for super rich are at less than 10% of the property taxes a middle-class person would pay for their house.
This is where the money comes from. It’s not just New York, but everywhere. And not just property taxes.
Yes, the money comes from taxes, and no one wants to pay them. There's a limit to how many percent of someone's income you can take away before he stops working.
There's also a limit to how much people are willing to pay in property taxes before they move the fuck out (or stay away to begin with).
In a nutshell, there are limits to what governments can do with their economies.
In the place where I am, about 44% of the income is taken in form of taxes (Northern Germany, assuming an income of 50k€ a year, assuming non-married, assuming no children)
And most people are actually happy, because they still get free college, free child daycare, etc.
This depends on what gets automated first. For example, if we put the legislature on eBay so they could be bought by corporate buyers directly, through a simple e-commerce interface, lobbyists' jobs would be obsolete. On their way out, they would surely create a generous mincome program.
Wouldn't you have to apply to become a citizen tor receive basic income though? And wouldn't this encourage illegal immigrants to try and become citizens, which I think would be a good thing.
>Wouldn't you have to apply to become a citizen tor receive basic income though?
Aren't the standards of citizenship currently being eroded to suit whichever ethnic-voting-block the party in power happens to be pandering to today? Today's illegals are defacto citizens as evidenced by America's bankrupt ESL schools, hospitals, and "citizen-only" social services. Cutting a check for the rest of the Earth's six billion people who "make it" to America is a recipie for exponentially more economic-refugee-cum-colonists.
This ignores the fact that new citizens are also workers and contribute to, rather than drain, the economy. Median estimates of the effects of opening world borders predict a doubling of GGP (Gross Global Product).
Before permanently altering the demographics of a nation that was recently successful (the USA ranked highly in nearly every standard of living metric a scant few decades ago), let's try implementing social theories based on "estimates" in a nation with nothing left to lose.
There are plenty of other nations available for globalist theorists to potentialy help and likely destroy.
A lot of the USA' historically recent economic success had little to do with ethnic demographics and a whole lot to do with age demographics and the fact that USA's industrial capacity was completely undamaged following WW2, unlike almost every other industrialized nation. It's easy to be #1 for an extended period when your major competitors' economies are literally a smoking ruin. While this is far from the only factor in American economic success during the 20th century, it's nonetheless a rather significant one. If we're going to talk about demographics, you should also consider the fact that the US is facing a shortage of younger workers relative to retirees: http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_versio...
>While this is far from the only factor in American economic success during the 20th century, it's nonetheless a rather significant one
I believe we differ on fundamentals, and certainly on the notion of "success". A nation is more than place to make money, rather it is a home for an extended family. Economic arguments quantify away the essence of a nation: a living space set aside for the well being of progeny. Either a people is in control of its inheritance, or, its inheritance is being subsumed by another tribe. When viewed in these terms, rather than flourishing since the second World War, the United States has in fact been on a path to dissolution. And one can do better than a URL for proof of this; go to Southern California, open your eyes, and be honest. There is a reason Southern California's Anglo middle class paradise of 1880-1970 is now a squalid Latin American sweatshop; demographics is destiny. Calcutta is Calcutta because Calcuttans live there. Detroit is Detroit because Southern Blacks now live there. Etc.
If this does not ring true to you, feel free to disagree with me, but please, try the alleged benefits of demographic substitution somewhere where economists will feel the pinch themselves. Given the large number of Jewish economists I've read over the years, Israel would be a prime testbed (if the nation wasn't currently sterilizing and exiling their Black Ethiopian populace). Middle class gentile globalists could start by opening the floodgates to their own gated communities and HOAs before gleefully replacing their "unwilling worker" blue-collar cousins.
>If we're going to talk about demographics, you should also consider the fact that the US is facing a shortage of younger workers relative to retirees
This thinking is completely backward, IMHO. The economy serves the people, the people do not serve the economy. The means is not the ends. If a people cannot afford to have sufficient numbers of children, the problem is not with the people, its with the (usurious) economy. The economy needs to be replaced, not the people.
The entire economic argument for making (illegal) immigrants citizens is that they do the work that Americans won't do and that they contribute to the economy already. If you don't have to work anymore if you're a citizen, it completely destroys that argument for immigration. Also, the part where if UBI existed, those horrible-paying jobs would have to raise their wages to get anybody to do them, which would price immigrants out of the market because natives would then be incentivized to do them.
I'm glad you pointed that out because it makes the challenge more manageable (about half of what I first suggested), but the underlying political principle is the same.
Also, there are a lot of programs to help out low income people. EX: Social security, lower income tax rates, unemployment insurance etc. Replacing them with a 5 k / year basic income would actually be cheaper.
Most advocates of BI don't not advocate replacing progressive income taxation with BI, they advocate funding BI with progressive income taxation. Some might advocate replacing some tax credits or deductions with BI (e.g., EITC), but most advocates of BI would still have lower-income folk paying lower tax rates.
In what manner is taxing basic income anything other than a full-employment programme for bureaucrats? Surely it costs less in total to pay someone $10,000 a year than to pay them $12,000 and oblige them to fill out a (probably error-filled) income tax return, pay $2,000 in taxes, and have to process all that paperwork, payments, refunds, audits, etc. Same arguments apply to SSRI and other similar schemes. Just make it nontaxable and then if someone had no other significant sources of income they just do nothing.
As a matter of policy, I'm all for broadening the tax base, ideally to 100%. But that makes zero sense in concert with BI.
I'm not sure who proposed the thing you're arguing against here, or precisely the shape of it. Clearly many people receiving BI would still be filing taxes, as everyone receives a BI by the definition of a BI. I can think of some reasons we may want to treat BI as income like any other income.
I think we'd definitely want to count BI as income in general, but we may want to rework the tax code on the low end such that if BI is your only income you don't need to file, as fredkbloggs suggests. One way to do so might be setting the standard deduction equal to BI and eliminating refundable tax credits.
I can also see introducing BI as an opportunity to remove some of the tax expenditures that riddle the tax code -- broaden the tax base. But I don't see any reason to change the basic nature from progressive to flat. After all we'd still need to raise quite a bit of money to pay the BI as well as the remaining government functions that BI doesn't replace. Even under the current progressive model, eliminating tax expenditures is probably not going to be enough.
One argument I see for making them file anyway is reducing disincentives to work; I'm not at all sure the magnitude of that disincentive is worth the extra paperwork, though.
Yeah I haven't heard anyone suggest a flat tax in conjunction, but social security and unemployment could be eliminated, food stamps cut sharply, Pell grants all but eliminated, and so on. I'd conservatively estimate that a trillion of the $2.8 trillion cost could be offset through reduced social spending elsewhere. Another $600B or so would come back to the government in the form of income taxes. So net you are looking at $1.2T. No question, that's a lot of money but it's not far off from the size of the MIC. It's a choice that could be made.
I don't know how to quantify, but I have definitely heard proposals for BI with a flat tax and with a progressive tax, with somewhat different groups pushing them.
Agreed. If anything, a BI would remove mountains of red-tape and unnecessary levels of administration. I'm not a fan of BI, personally. However, there is a large segment of the population that is dependent and part of the welfare administration complex, that it'll never change easily. You'll see huge media-blitzes by government-employee unions, and strikes, etc.
Isn't basic income a bit weird? I am a total noob, but to get money, truck drivers do something. Getting money for not doing anything is like increasing the lower limit on minimum money you can have.
The way to do it is probably paying only to the unemployed. Sounds socialism, because it is. But hating socialism just because USSR did it the wrong way is, in my opinion, stupid.
increasing the lower limit on minimum money you can have
.. yes? That's the point. Along with increasing the lower limit on the amount of food you can have and the amount of housing you can have, up from "starvation" and "cardboard box".
What I'm afraid of is that setting a basic income will increase food and housing prices, because "people can now afford it". And then we're back to square one...
There would probably be a little inflation from introducing a basic income, but we shouldn't expect it to put us back to square one, exactly. The re-distributive nature of a basic income will prevent some inflation, as will economies of scale. You would expect we would end up in a situation where production of expensive luxury goods decreases somewhat while lower end staples goes up.
Food is a buyer's market. If existing vendors try to increase prices, new ones will arise and push prices down. Unless US$ suffers inflation, food price likely stay the same.
Housing is more complicated. With basic income you're free to choose less expensive areas because you aren't required to find work. There might be some ups and downs but it will settle.
Inflation does not have to be even across all categories of goods. It is entirely feasible that the cost of food and housing would rise, while the cost of luxury yachts would fall.
Wealth redistribution also does have the effect of increasing the money supply, without minting more money. The poor tend to spend 100% of what they take in, while the wealthy put a large portion of their money in the bank, where its not circulating in the economy.
I think your second paragraph has the effect backwards. If you spend $10, then you have $10 less, and someone else has $10 more, no change in money supply. If you put $10 in the bank, the bank loans out $9 of it, so you "have" $10, someone else has $9, and the money supply has grown.
The grandparent comment (i.e. by URspider94) is correct. What you write about banks is a common, but incorrect misconception about what banks do.
The truth of the matter is: Banks do not need deposits to make loans.
Quite the contrary: Banks make loaning decisions independent of the level of their deposits - and it is the loan that causes the deposit, rather than the other way around, because the money loaned by the bank eventually lands in somebody's deposit.
Think about it this way: A bank cannot force anybody to take out a loan. Instead, there is a demand for loans which banks satisfy (subject to checks of creditworthiness and available collateral). Whether person A spends $10 or puts it in a deposit does not change person B's demand for credit,[1] and therefore the amount lent by banks does not change either.
[1] Of course, this is not entirely true. There can be causal links, but their direction is totally uncertain. For example, person A deciding not to spend money could mean that person B's business begins to struggle and person B needs to take out a loan that they otherwise would not have had to take. In that case, saving does increase the level of loans, but in a way that most people would judge to be detrimental to the economy.
Conversely, person A deciding to spend the money could lead to person B's business projecting growth, which encourages person B to invest by taking out a loan. In this case, the loan level increases as well, and in a way that most people would judge to be beneficial.
Where do banks get the money that they loan out if not from deposits?
Reserve requirements dictate what percentage of deposits banks have to keep on hand rather than loan out, and its inverse, the money multiplier, determines how much the money supply is expanded by repeated application of the deposit->loan process. This seems to be the standard treatment: I checked Abel-Bernanke's and Mankiw's Macroeconomics textbooks and they both tell basically the same story.
The supply and demand for loanable funds are balanced through a price mechanism: the interest rate. If banks have lots of deposits and can't loan them all out, then they'll lower the interest rate that they charge until they can. If there's more demand for loans than can be covered by deposits, then banks will increase the interest rate that they charge until the two are balanced.
The banks emphatically do not get the money they loan out from deposits, because even though your bank makes loans, the money in your deposit is still there and available whenever you want.
Compare this to a private investment arrangement where after you invest (aka lend) your money, your money is gone (in exchange for the promise to get more back later, and/or certain other rights such as ownership in a company).
When banks lend out money, what they do is either give you an account with a positive balance (in this case, the money doesn't have to come from anywhere, because all the bank is doing is changing some rows in their databases) or they make a payment to another bank on your behalf. In the latter case, the money that you actually see as a bank customer again doesn't have to come from anywhere, because it gets created by the involved banks changing some rows in their databases. There is also settlement in reserves occuring behind the scenes, and if a bank's reserve position drops low, what I write elsewhere applies: As long as a bank is solvent, they can always get reserves either from another bank or, in the worst case, from the central bank.
As far as the money multiplier is concerned, there are two ways to look at it. The first is empirical: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MULT
How does a wildly varying money multiplier fit in with your story?
Also, there a countries where the reserve requirement is zero. The inverse of zero is not well-defined or infinity, depending on how you look at it. Yet those countries don't have an infinite money supply. How does that fit in with your story?
The second way is from first principles by actually looking at the laws. If you look into reserve requirements, you'll see that banks only have to satisfy them after the fact. That is, people in a bank's loan department first make loans, and then people in a different department of the bank go out and ensure that the bank satisfies the reserve requirements. They usually do so by lending and borrowing on the interbank market, but if they cannot borrow there, they can always get the required reserves from the central bank. See e.g. here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window
Finally, your last paragraph does show a potential causal pathway from increased savings to a higher demand for credit, via the interest rate. The import question is the relative strength of that pathway compared to others, such as the ones that I have described in my previous comment.
Obviously even economists end up disagreeing on that matter, given their political biases (though beware false prophets paid by wealthy people to spread lies and half-truths). Three final points on that particular matter:
(1) How sensitive to interest rates do you really think loan demand is? If a business sees growth in revenue, they are likely to invest and expand (which often involves taking loans) even in a high interest rate environment. On the other hand, if a business sees decreasing interest rates but also a fall in revenue, will they still take on loans in order to invest in a growth of their business? The answer can be yes occasionally, but it is more likely to be no. This is supported by surveys of business leaders.
This point is important, because in the face of high savings, businesses may see lower interest rates as a second-order effect, but they will also definitely see lower revenue as a first-order effect. When a large-scale shift of customer behavior towards savings happens, then businesses will see the fall in revenue first, long before banks lower their interest rates on loans.
(2) Empirically, some people have predicted for a long time, since the beginning of the financial crisis, that low interest rates would bring growth back via investment. And yet interest rates have been at the zero lower bound for some time with at best mixed results. (Again, the quantitative parts matter: Yes, low interest rates encourage demand for credit, but how strong is that effect compared to others that may go in the opposite direction?)
(3) The range in which interest rates actually vary by that mechanism is limited, because the central bank fixes the short term interest rate based on political considerations. (That's what e.g. the FOMC meetings in the US are all about. It's totally in your face, actually, but still many people refuse to really grok it ;-)) Obviously, the long term interest rate for loans taken by banks (which is some markup above that politically set rate) can vary, but the real story is control by the central bank.
[My comments are getting too long, so I stop here, even though there are more details to be talked about.]
> even though your bank makes loans, the money in your deposit is still there and available whenever you want
This is definitely not true. If everyone asks for their money at once, the money won't be there because most of it has been loaned out. That's a bank run.
> How does a wildly varying money multiplier fit in with your story?
Over three decades, it looks pretty stable to me. The multiplier also varies based on the amount people want to hold in cash (I'm getting this from Krugman's book), because that's how money leaks out of the deposit->loan cycle. That could easily vary a non-trivial amount over 30 years. The most recent period where the multiplier is less than one I will grant is weird. The Fed has started paying interest on reserves, and banks are more wary post-recession, so they've started accumulating a huge amount of excess reserves: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS.
> there a countries where the reserve requirement is zero
Obviously, the ratio that matters is not the legal minimum reserve requirement, but the actual effective reserve ratio. A bank has to keep a certain amount of reserves to keep their business running. The legal requirement is just to make sure that the amount they keep on hand is prudent. There's also the aforementioned leakage of money out of the deposit->loan cycle via currency held by the public, which can reduce the money multiplier further.
The rest of your post gives some good reasons that the real world doesn't work quite like the mainstream theory. It sounds like you're explaining an endogenous money theory; do you have any suggested references for further reading?
"The way to do it is probably paying only to the unemployed"
Foe some weird reason you seem to think "unemployed" are exempt from "people not doing anything".
Anyway, the problem here is not socialism (socialism actually had mandatory labour). It is that you subsidy unemployed. You will get more unemployed. People who are forced to do nothing.
With Basic Income people are encouraged to work at least part time.
It actually doesn't put much of a hard floor on anything. The minimum amount of money you can have is still zero (temporarily). It does put a minimum on income, but not necessarily income after prior obligations.
I think the other commenter meant that self driving trucks will likely reduce the cost of shipping.
Shipping doesn't add a whole lot of cost to goods already though, an awful lot of bananas fit on a pallet (I think bananas are a reasonable example here, they are shipped overseas, cheap, bulky and somewhat fragile).
Don't think costs will go down, but the commenter probably thinks that as middle class jobs get automated away, more and more people begin to rely on BI, thereby taking the median income down and reducing the overall spending.
Basic income is a kind of Quantitative Easing for people instead of for banks. If they can create money out of nothing for banks they can do it for everybody.
Basic Income is not "Quantitative Easing for people instead of banks".
Quantitative Easing is the creation of money to buy assets and therefore carries the risk of asset price inflation. It is used when the central bank intends assets prices to go up, e.g. after they slumped in a recession.
Basic Income on the other hand does not entail creation of new money. Most Basic Income proposals finance the costs through taxation or other government revenue (including savings from simplification and/or reduction of welfare programs that BI allows).
Creation of new money to redistribute to consumers would cause consumer price inflation and is unlikely to bring meaningful benefits in the long term.
EDIT: Also, the money created by the central bank in QE is lent to the government and/or banks, not given to them. It must be returned to the central bank. On the other hand, BI is not debt and need not be repaid.
Food won't inflate much. In the world there are a lot of places that grow food, and they are happy to sell more for same price. Some food might become more expensive (premium, farmer, local-made), but common food won't.
If general inflation sets in, food will be affected all the same. You need to buy lots of things to farm, such as equipment fertilizer, seeds and so on. All these will cost more, therefore even if your labor is extremely highly leveraged, all other inputs will drive up the prices if general inflation exists.
Creating money to give to the people would certainly cause inflation, but that would be proportionally more damaging to people who already have money. So it would be beneficial to the poorest, even in the longer term. Still probably not a good idea though, I think it would screw with the global economy.
And with that, the elimination of entire industries built up around the existence of car ownership like: mechanics, car washes, parking, valets, body shops, rental companies, car insurance, car loans, and on and on.
I'm not so sure that's true. If a truck/car breaks down on the road, it doesn't matter if there's a human behind the wheel or a software program. It still needs to get fixed. There will still need to be financing of these vehicles, ostensibly because they might be more expensive because of the software/hardware allowing it to be autonomous in the first place. We haven't really worked through how insuring these things will work, but just because they're autonomous does not mean that all of a sudden the entire automotive insurance industry evaporates.
On the whole, however, I agree with the initial point about how the peripheral economies built around servicing human truck drivers on their routes will take a hit. I'm thinking of all the towns on the way to Watertown from Minneapolis that would probably evaporate if they didn't have the trucks running the daily on the 212.
> On the whole, however, I agree with the initial point about how the peripheral economies built around servicing human truck drivers on their routes will take a hit. I'm thinking of all the towns on the way to Watertown from Minneapolis that would probably evaporate if they didn't have the trucks running the daily on the 212.
Are they going to stop the trucks? Are self driving trucks going to be able to carry more load? Are we going to change highway rules to allow more than 80k pounds total weight for a single tractor/trailer? Are the trucks going to be electric or have vastly improved MPG?
No. So there will still be the same amount of truck traffic as well as the same amount of fuel being sold in nearly the same locations. Perhaps restaurants will take a hit, but fuel and servicing will still be utilized for quite some time.
I agree that this point is somewhat weak but with fuel it's not so far-fetched to imagine that there will be changes: with a human driver, you have hard limits on the maximum time in motion so there's an upper bound on how much fuel it's worth carrying since you're going to have to stop after a shift anyway.
If you have a robot that can drive 16 hours straight, however, it's easy to imagine the incentives pushing companies to explore larger fuel tanks so they can use corporate depots where they can save a few percent on the operating costs.
I'd imagine it would be profitable to install larger gas tanks in autonomous trucks. A human driver would need to stop for breaks anyway, so a huge tank doesn't make sense.
With autonomous trucks, there's no reason to stop until you run out of gas. Trucking companies could pretty easily save some money if they have their own private gas stations on the endpoints. Especially since they can make them autonomous as well.
> I'd imagine it would be profitable to install larger gas tanks in autonomous trucks.
To a point. There are still limits on the total weight of the tractor and trailer (and fuel). So, the more you scale fuel, the less load you can carry. There is a tradeoff, and it's _not_ much more beneficial than where we are today.
Considering most trucks take a 300 gallon load out already. That's already 2,600 lbs of fuel or 3% of your total weight limit.
If we choose a low value for the average MPG, let's say 5, then those 300 gallons of fuel will get you 1,500 miles. If we choose a high value of 70 miles per hour average speed, then it will take you 21 hours to deplete your fuel.
So, when I examine this, I don't see a case for much larger fuel tanks than we have today. The economics and realities of trucking are already very well thought out; more so than most people seem to believe.
I've said it before, but short other technological advances and human needs, I think we're at least 20 years away from fully automated trucking.
It's hard to say exactly, but the tractor usually weighs around 25000 lbs. You can probably save around 2000 to 3000 lbs of that.
If you do remove the operator completely you're going to end up creating other jobs anyways, as now you're going to need people to respond to flat tires and other load issues, you're going to need marshalling yard with load masters, you're going to need more humpers at each location.
This also ignores the case where loads are directly delivered to a customer. I work in radio broadcasting and the 53' box freight truck will drive straight to our transmitter site, even the ones up on mountains. There's _no_ driverless trailer that's going to do that and help unload the item. Also, since the transmitter is one of four destined for other customers, there would be no one to supervise us around other loads that we don't own and aren't covered for.
So, you'd need to create secondary hubs that can handle these types of deliveries with smaller trucks, hence, more jobs.
This is what I meant earlier, the logistics are really well nailed down. Owner operators of trailers make a lot of money because they solve a lot of problems all at once, are independent, and usually make a fuel surcharge so the price of gas impacts them far less.
If you remove them, you're going to need a whole bunch of other infrastructure to replace what they do. The system is labor efficient already as computers have already impacted all the secondary parts such as freight bookers many years ago.
Someone elsewhere mentioned companies making their own fuel dumps, which is _highly_ optimistic due to the way the current industry is arranged and the overhead and regulations involved in managing fuel tanks. Right now a dispatcher has software that can track their trucks with GPS, get fuel prices at all US locations from corporate fuel vendors, estimate current fuel volume on the truck and determine the optimal place for the driver to refuel along with the optimal amount for the driver to purchase. The message to the driver is usually communicated automatically through a message system installed in the cab, the driver can use the same system to communicate their actual mileage and fuel volume which gets factored back into everything. With newer trucks, the driver doesn't even need to input this information.
Sorry for the ramble, but this industry is pretty complex already. I'm not sure having fully automated trucks is a near-term reality, nor am I sure that the companies involved are actually aiming for that. There will be a slow shift of _certain_ types of loads into full automation with the last mile being driven the way it currently is with a very gradual shift to full automation as technology advances to meet these secondary demands.
Well, regular gas stations hardly make any profit on gas at all. It is pretty much a service or loss leader to get customers into the store buying coffee and snacks.
It might be diffrent for the specialized truck stops.
It is my understanding that, because fuel is a fungible commodity with well known prizes, gas-stations don't make that much money on them, but instead make their money by charging more for the other things they sell - food, soda, cigs, etc - exactly the things that trucs don't buy, but humans do.
Besides if we end up with the same economies of scale that e.g AWS has the majority of trucks are going to be owned by any given company, which means that they may find it advantageous to establish their own fuel dumps.
Police depend on traffic ticket and parking ticket income. The whole CJ system depends on traffic stops to make drug and other minor crime arrests. That's going away.
But there will be far fewer cars, as it's no longer necessary to own one. Less parking space, narrower paved roads (Traffic will also be more efficient), less car sustained industry overall.
1. The heck? Software Dev is the most common job in WA, VA, UT and CO but not California?
2. I'm coming round to the idea of a non-means-tested basic income. This would mean there are no marginal effects. For instance, in many countries, if you get paid unemployment you lose it when you find employment. This means you might need a very high income to make it worthwhile, because you'll be losing the benefits as well as your free time. If it was simply a non-dependent income/tax break (if you have an income) you wouldn't get this high effective tax rate. You could work or not work, totally up to you. You can take a side job, try new industries, etc.
There would also be less of a circus about controlling that you're sending job applications (adds up to a LOT of apps for jobs people may not actually want), courses about how to write a CV, and staff to send out the money.
3) Other benefits of self-drive:
a) You don't need to drive as fast. These things won't need to sleep, so that's a good few hours a day extra. You can drive slower, saving fuel, and still arrive on a current logistical schedule. Driving slower also means you can have a bunch of trucks really close to each other to save on aerodynamics. You could write software to plan truck trains for this purpose.
b) They're all going to be electrical. I know, they aren't currently. But electric is just taking off now, while ICE has had plenty of development. A lot of complication in modern cars is the ICE. You need to lug a transmission with you. You need to mix the fuel with air. With electric, you have regenerative breaking, engines are smaller, and batteries will only get better. You'll use less energy, which will push the economics towards slow moving land-trains.
California also has this one industry, it's kind of retro, you might not have heard of it. It's mostly based in Los Angeles and they make these things called "movies" and "television".
>> "For instance, in many countries, if you get paid unemployment you lose it when you find employment. This means you might need a very high income to make it worthwhile, because you'll be losing the benefits as well as your free time."
Obviously I don't know which countries you're referring to but in the UK the way it works is that while on job seekers allowance you can work up to 16 hours per week and still receive the benefit. It's not perfect but I think it's designed to prevent the problem you're describing.
Each of those states has a large tech hub, that though smaller than Silicon Valley, is a much larger portion of the state's economy because those states are much smaller than California. E.g. the SF Bay Area holds 18% of California's population while 31% of VA's population is in the DC metro area.
Technological change obsoleting jobs is not new and has been going on for hundreds of years: bookbinders, scribes, lamplighters, milkmen, town crier, etc.
As each profession sunsets, these individuals find new ways to contribute to society. Change isn't easy, but these are "people" not "truck drivers" and will adapt.
Basic income is a separate discussion from technological change, unless there is a clear argument why technological progress now is fundamentally different than it always has been.
I'm pretty fed up with all the people pushing UBI. There is never not enough work for labor to do, labor is just misallocated. I feel like every third piece I read has some poorly thought out UBI slant thrown in for no reason.
> "There is never not enough work for labor to do"
Without arguing that this will happen anytime soon I would argue that sometime in the future technology will advance to the point that the luddites will be right. Human labor will be replaced with machines.
The is, conceptually, a skill-ceiling for humans. There is a large set of tasks that we — as a species, not as individuals — are capable of performing well. Technology is ever-improving and one-by-one becoming better than humans at those skill sets. In 1811 we could retrain textile workers in plenty of other fields. Through the industrial revolution people have been pushed up the skill-ladder into higher-skill jobs. In 2025 we can retrain truck drivers into other jobs where humans are better than technology.
But one day — whether it's 2050, 2250 — machines will have caught up to humans in the last skill-set. There will be literally no tasks that we can retrain humans into, because machines are better laborers across the board.
So, yes, it's been an ongoing cry from luddites for the last 150 years. They've been consistently wrong and that makes us comfortable as a society that they will always be wrong. They will probably continue to be wrong for quite some time, but in the long-run they will be correct. We as a society need to think about that day and make sure we're prepared to handle it when it comes.
Every field is safe from automation until it isn't. I agree that software development will be safe from automation for a long time.
But eventually software will be able to reason better than humans; eventually software will be able to communicate better than humans; and eventually software will be able to build and maintain software better than a human can.
> software will be able to build and maintain software better than a human can
Who knows, maybe software will decide that their energy is better spent doing other things, and leave menial tasks like writing software to humans while they pursue more intellectual and creative endeavors.
You might want to read about comparative advantage[0]. Even if machines are strictly superior on an absolute basis to humans at everything, there is still plenty for humans to do.
I think you're right. I would really like to read the opinions of some respected economists on the issue of automation and basic income. The question we should be asking isn't "how do we make sure these people can still consume", it's "how do we find a way for these people to remain valuable to society". Or something along those lines.
I always understood that to be the main power of the idea of UBI. Economically liberated individuals will be able to choose how to be valuable to society instead of 'choosing' to work their asses off in a dull repetitive job that they need to survive. There are so many things that need to be done in the world that aren't because they are not profitable. Maybe we can get stuck into them for a start once we aren't worried about feeding the family and keeping the lights on anymore.
I agree with you, but I think there is more to it. pro-UBI typically compare our future to the turn of the industrial revolution (I think Crash Course does the best illustration of this massive change in the introduction to this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhL5DCizj5c) but they should really look to the earlier change where people went from farms that they owned/leased and sold their goods in markets to the industrialization where people sold their labor. That was a big change and not altogether positive (for example that makes you beholden to the whims of an employer) - but nothing says that the future won't involve a shift towards smaller business as being the norm, rather than employment. We all know that large business are insanely inefficient, imagine what we could unlock if most of those workers instead worked for themselves? After all they would then have both the ability and the incentive to be smart about their business rather than following what management told them to do.
Will it be better for everybody? No? Will it be better for most? I think so.
Indeed. A farm labourer could become an assembly line worker or a docker or something quite quickly. Not to denigrate those guys and I'm sure there are some that have or could, but truck driver to Javascript developer or whatever, is a much bigger jump. And the skill of driving a truck doesn't change nearly as fast as the latest JS framework which has a half life of 6 months before its wiped out by the new thing.
The difference now is that the amount of jobs available has been reduced so much that a good proportion of people just can't find a job. Even if you would fill all the jobs available currently, it would not be enough to employ everyone. So yeah, if you watch some TV, they are basically going to say that the lazy are unemployed but that's just not the reality. How we solve this problem and going forward is another thing.
I don't think the data agrees with "the amount of jobs available has been reduced so much that a good proportion of people just can't find a job". Unemployment now is not significantly higher than it has been over the last 70 years:
I would argue the prime age employment to population ratio is probably a better proxy for the job market. In addition wage growth has been very stagnant recently. I think these two data points show that we've haven't fixed out employment problem yet, and there isn't enough jobs to employ another several million truck drivers.
The US is bad at helping people transition to new skillsets. Companies want to hire people who can do the job now. Basic income is a way to help bridge that gap. I'm not saying it's the best idea, but it is easily linked to technological change.
I hear a lot of technologists with this opinion, basically that the way it's worked out for the last 150 years will continue work out.
But I think there is definitely cause for concern, not because of x or y class of jobs going away, but two factors: 1) the concentration of wealth increasing at the same time that increased taxation on the rich is political anathema, even though they pay only a fraction of the tax rate that they paid the last time income disparities were this wide a centry ago. 2) an unabated hunger for exponential growth in the consumption of natural resources with no serious economic thought given to the long-term viability of assumed infinite growth and what externalities we are ignoring to our own peril.
It's very easy to sit here as a privileged class of software elites who have no realistic risk of becoming unemployable—or even just as an the average human in a first world country who has a relatively low risk of global economies collapsing during our lifetime—and just hand-wave away these concerns. But personally I think we need to start thinking harder about sustainability and egalitarianism in society if we ever want to achieve the fabled post-scarcity economy, because at the moment we seem to be in a greed-driven economy which will never recognize itself driving off a cliff until it's too late.
Regarding #1, increasing taxation on the rich is much more politically feasible than implementing basic income.
Regarding #2, economics is all about managing scarcity. What natural resource consumption specifically are you concerned about not being effectively controlled by pricing mechanisms? And it's the role of government to fix market failures when externalities are being ignored. Which are you concerned about?
BI/NIT is a separate issue, agreed, though the threats of technological advancement coincide somewhat with the problems they alleviate.
A somewhat scifi concern is that technology will advance at such a rate that displaced workers can not upskill at the same rate, causing structural unemployment. Regardless, some effort should be made to help workers transition to new industries; the net benefit to society would be more than enough to bear this.
Just because they will adapt doesn't mean that it won't be extremely painful for many people and communities. I believe a basic income would help mitigate this pain.
It would provide income support to the many truck drivers who would lose their job, and it would increase demand, leading to an increase in the number of jobs available for the new unemployed truck drivers to fill.
I'm still very skeptical on self driving vehicules to react correctly in non traditional events happening on the road...
Like, fraying your way in a traffic jam to reach the correct lane, which sometimes involve slow but untraditionnal paths.
Or Waiting half an hour for an accident to be cleaned, then looking at the police officer signs telling you to move on the lane coming in the other direction, because they've secured it for a while, etc.
I'm pretty sure we'll have a lot of autonomous vehicles stuck on the roads in a " wait for a human driver to unlock me" mode at the beginning.
I'm sure the electronic equivalent of traffic cones will appear pretty quickly - the cost won't be much more and the existing ones will be easy to retrofit.
I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting consequences and side-effects of this. I'd be very interested to see the result on the natural environment in 100 years time - with great concentration of people in cities there might be need to restore former wetlands and riverine habitats to ensure sufficient retention of water throughout the year. The shutting down of a myriad of small towns would take a lot of people out of the environment leaving more space for plants and wildlife. The possibilities are endless.
So you can just put a couple of cones across a highway and stop all traffic for a few hours? Cool! I'll bet you can even camouflage the transmitter so that no one can figure out why all traffic has stopped until they come out with a really sensitive detector and realize that there's something stuck 30 feet up in the tree branches instructing all vehicles to go into emergency stop mode.
You can stop opperations at London Heathrow within 15min with one or two phone calls. Yes, it is that easy. People regularly don't do it because (1) what is good for and (2) what ever it is good for, is it worth paying the damage caused for the rest of your life?
--- In Germany, a live TV-show with 10.000 spectators in the studio (hosted by Heidi Klum) was canceled on Tuesday because of a fake bomb-threat-call. Stuff like that remains the exception.
If the cars are stopping because of the device, I think you can say that they have successfully detected it, and expect that they would provide some explanation as to why they have stopped.
That doesn't solve the problem of localizing the device, but I think you would want the implementation of such a thing to have some robust distance bounding[1], so it might not be a careful, sensitive process, more of walk up to where your phone says it is thing.
> fraying your way in a traffic jam to reach the correct lane
That is what makes Elon Musk's branding of his technology so smart. He is not replacing you the driver by a label such as “driverless car” or even excluding you from the driving experience with a “self-driving car” label.
Mr Musk's offer, an “autopilot”, is an opt-out to driving, an aid. Great branding, same technology.
Besides, people consider autopilots to be an old and well-known technology, because it has been used on airplanes.
Maybe. But is that so much different from the status quo? Agree on situations that require a human to direct traffic, but a lot of times when I'm driving on the 5 between Seattle and Tacoma I'm straight terrified of the other humans not knowing what to do in that construction zone around the Tacoma Dome.
"One further important detail to consider is that truck drivers are well-paid. They provide a middle class income of about $40,000 per year. That’s a higher income than just about half (46%) of all tax filers, including those of married households."
Or, in other words, they make slightly less than the average tax filer.
It is important to make a distinction between what they make and what they take home. In the US, workers subject to the DOT's "Hours of Service" rules (truckers, train crews, airplane pilots, etc) get very generous tak breaks and take home a far greater percentage of their earnings than most workers.
I made nearly 40K my first year in trucking and had no problem clearing 50K each year after that, and my total income tax rate was exactly 9%. I moved to a state with no state income tax and life was pretty good for a while, until I got tired of trucking. For those who enjoy it, it's not a bad income with very low barriers to entry.
This article lost me with the above statement. Perhaps it's not relevant to the central thesis of the piece, but to say that truckers are "well paid" is misguided. My father drove a truck for almost 2 decades. I would be very surprised if he ever drove fewer than 80 hours a week...and I'd be equally surprised if he was an outlier in this respect.
The work is painfully hard. It takes a toll on the drivers physically (because they're sedentary so much and because of the terrible ecosystem of truck stop food available to them), emotionally (endless hours staring at a road alone), and mentally. At the end of the day, they're lucky if they take home a minimum wage hourly rate for the work they do.
There are jobs out there that I wish we could find a way to get people out of and into other lines of work because, for the work they do, what they take home is a pittance and the price they pay is high. Truck driving would be way up on that list.
Median is an average. There are typically three averages in common use; mode, median and (arithmetic) mean. That people generally use "average" as short for "(arithmetic) mean average" is a colloquial shorthand.
Mode: "Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a way of expressing, in a single number, important information about a random variable or a population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, and it may be very different in highly skewed distributions." [1]
I'm pretty sure that mode and median are considered averages.
Average: "In colloquial language, an average is the sum of a list of numbers divided by the number of numbers in the list. In mathematics and statistics, this would be called the arithmetic mean. However, the word average may also refer to the median, mode, or other central or typical value. In statistics, these are all known as measures of central tendency." [1]
No other way to put it; you are simply wrong. I could direct you to reference after reference, citation after citation, but it's clear from your other comments here that you're not willing to accept any reference or citation we make.
Why not at least try? I'd like to see something that is from a statistics or math source that does not resort to "colloquial" distortion to justify such use.
And note, I didn't down vote you in spirit of promoting a healthy discussion, you instead have, so who's really unwilling to hear opposing opinions?
Your own link calls mode an average, and the quote you provided says nothing about it not being an average. I'm not sure what you are trying to demonstrate with it.
The quote clearly states that mode coincides with the mean (arithmetic average) and median (mid point of a distribution) in perfectly normally distributed populations. Therefore, mode is not the same as average in most cases, as perfect normal distribution is not that common.
Mode is the most commonly occurring value in distribution. According to some schools of thought, a distribution can have multiple modes.
There are many programs which together provide a significant economic baseline. It's not all in the form of direct cash deposits, although much of it is, it's just that the programs are a disparate and tangled mess. That $40k trucker's salary nets out to only about $5k more than the baseline benefits for an unemployed adult citizen. [1] It's barely better than not working, and you have to spend the whole week on the road! Staying home and fixing up the house [2] while taking the subsidies will always be a better bet.
The only difference between what we have today and "Basic Income" is currently we phase the benefits out as you start to work, obviously to disincentivize working. You could think of "Universal Healthcare", for example, a lot like eliminating the phase-out for Medicaid. ACA already eliminated the asset test, now it's just an income test, so maybe that will go next. (mostly depends who's elected in 2016)
We have a massive bureaucracy to handle all the various aspects of the distribution of those benefits. Most of which is not necessary in a basic income system.
The cost savings by eliminating that bureaucracy would be substantial.
Maintaining the working environment of all those bureaucrats.
Buying them new equipment as the old stuff breaks or becomes obsolete.
And it may not show up directly on a balance sheet, but: how many bureaucrats love their job? How much depression and misery do you remove by replacing "go sit in a dimly lit crowded office all day for enough money to pay for your basic needs" with "hey here is enough money to pay your basic needs, go do whatever"?
New rule: if you want to write about how mechanisation and automation will affect the people, you need to - at absolute minimum - have read the entirety of the Wikipedia article about The Industrial Revolution, and know where the term Luddite comes from.
The way they are normally referenced glosses over the fact that the Luddites were a group of people with actual, real concerns about their future. The industrial revolution was good overall, in net, but it was not a pareto improvement and people did suffer. While it's very likely that the continuation of automation will increase global wealth, some efforts to identify the winners and losers and redistribute will be necessary to minimise societal disruption. I'd say the US hasn't done spectacularly on this front in the past.
Okay, so what's your actual criticism? You realize the vast majority of textiles are produced by machinery, right? The luddites lost, and sank into irrelevance.
Maybe, but I don't know why the original author should be obligate to demostrate knowledge about that in order to talk intelligently about basic income. Remember, I'm responding to:
> "New rule: if you want to write about how mechanisation and automation will affect the people, you need to - at absolute minimum - have read the entirety of the Wikipedia article about The Industrial Revolution, and know where the term Luddite comes from."
Luddism is certainly interesting, but it's relatively small in terms of its effects and one can certainly talk about basic income without talking about luddism.
I don't believe truck drivers will become jobless. They'll just become truck operators. Trains are far more easy to automate, but even bullet trains in japan still have
"train drivers" to supervise them.
Yup. 3.5 million professional truck drivers at $40k income (+ $3,600 in payroll taxes + ~$12,000 in health insurance premiums + ~$2,000 in 401(k) matches) is $200b in annual costs that potentially go away. A huge portion of the cost of many goods is in transportation, and a large amount of that cost is human capital (as it is in any industry). Auto insurance rates will likely drop, as well.
The supply-side effect of this is that goods will get a lot cheaper, and because robots can drive 24 hours/day, shipping gets faster and easier. Anything that isn't locally produced will become cheaper and more available than it is now.
Self driving trucks are going to be a real bomb in the economy, make no mistake. I personally suspect we'll really see some labor unrest as it hits. Millions of people will lose their jobs, and they aren't going to be prepared to find an entirely new career. I'm very much a bull on technology, but this is something we (technologists) need to start talking to policy makers about. Incredible disruption is coming down the pipe, and good policy needs to be designed to cope with it.
Manufacturing automated the jobs away, by the by - it didn't really send them overseas. That's a popular error, but wrong. The US was #1 in manufacturing until last year.
I wonder how a ubiquitous self-driving car "cloud" will affect motorcycles. I don't think I speak only for myself when I say that I don't just ride my motorcycle to get from point a to point b; rather I choose to ride it for the thrill of riding a motorcycle. I don't imagine you can completely remove the human element from transportation without killing the thing that makes motorcycles most enjoyable.
I don't think autonomous driving will kill recreational driving. Enthusiasts will still buy motorcycles and drive the open road. I'm not a rider, but have many friends who do and I understand the appeal. Those types are not going to give up that lifestyle. The industry around recreational driving may shrink a little, but will still be there to provide vehicles for those who want them.
The Basic Income ship has already sailed, and it's not coming back any time soon. The main reason for this is the fact that automation is here to stay. Every day new systems are being automated, first replacing low-skilled, low-wage jobs. People in these job don't really have much power, knowledge, will nor money to push the BIG agenda. Often times, they are not even aware that such thing is being proposed. People in better paying jobs are also being slowly replaced, but they rarely see this as threat to their jobs, but more like productivity improvement.
When some tradesmen, or engineer loses a job because of automation, they first try to work on their skills to stay relevant in the field. They usually won't blame automation for being unemployed, but instead they blame their age, lack of specific new skills, outsourcing or the economy. Without a well paying job, they quickly drop from the affluent middle class to a poor low class. In the mean time, their peers don't see what the real reason for this is, and they happily continue working, hoping that it's not going to happen in their case. They have no incentives to support BIG as they already believe that a lot of taxes go to support the lower classes, and put unfair strain on them.
This shift from middle to low class, is already happening. To keep themselves safe, the high middle class, and the 1%'s will support militarization of police, and push even more entertainment options to the masses. People will rarely revolt, as it's easy to imagine that if you're a father and see your kids starving, you will either work even harder trying to support your family, or you'll drink, do drugs and abuse the kids because you may feel that you failed, and you will try to hide this feeling not only from them but from yourself.
What you describe is worryingly reasonable, however I don't see how it leads to the conclusion that the basic income ship has sailed.
Current US politics is still very "job creation" centered. Some think tanks need to start churning out pieces to shift public opinion that the number of over all jobs has permanently decreased and separate that from the idea that this is an indicator of our economy doing poorly. From there it is fairly simple to start convincing people that with a good economy and not enough jobs to go around we need to still ensure that everyone has the basic necessities of life.
The ship has sailed, in my opinion, because these people who could/should be behind it right now, will have no leverage, and people who don't need to get behind it now, but will in a few years, will lose that leverage before they realize what happened
Those are some very sweeping claims and they'd need some explanation of why this time will be unlike all of recorded history. Labor protection, minimum wage, a 40 hour work week, etc. all happened after long periods of misery for people who would have been just as erroneously dismissed as not really having the “power, knowledge, will nor money to push the BIG agenda”.
There was a lot written about this by smarter and more articulate people, and I'm sure you can google it, if you really want to know.. From myself I can only add my observations, as someone who works in automation.
It's simple really - technology to automate a lot of jobs it already here. In most cases it's very economic to automate the jobs, and doesn't really take long. Many more companies are moving in that direction. However, some government contractors are required to have a specific number of employees. They get tax incentives to keep people working. That's holding back automation.. And there is one more reason - a lot of small companies, which are still majority of the economy, are run by older guys that are afraid of big changes, and afraid of technology. Their businesses work, and bring money, and they will not implement any changes until they absolutely have to. As the demographics shift, and people who are more open to automation come aboard automation will speed up.
If the rich can delay that moment for long enough, they will not only own automated truck drivers, but also automated armies. The poor will be in a strong disadvantage.
The problem with basic income is that idle hands do the devils work. Without labor of some kind, kids get into trouble. What we need is basic income in exchange for going to school. Get rid of welfare / foodstamps, but if you can prove you are educating yourself (relative to your education level) you can get a minimum income.
The Basic Income ship has not sailed. Social networks of the future will divulge a percentage of their profits back to active users. I know because I am building one as we speak. Now that you know my platform's secret, you can race me to zero.
If you manage to build something comparable to fb, and your profits will be around $700mln with 1.4 billion users, you will be able to pay each user 50 cents.. whoa... BIG is now a real possibility!
Eventually someone will be smart enough to figure out how to build an automated package delivery network in a city. Just imagine the economic benefit that will have. Imagine if every company could offer shipping services similar to Amazon Prime but at a fraction of the cost. Automated trucks would significantly aid long haul shipping legs in such a network.
Exactly, truck safety is the most important part of being a driver and it is the biggest risk to the company of course. The problem is safety inspections and securing a load properly apparently are harder to do than drive (from my experience shadowing a safety officer). Perhaps if we have less drivers we could transfer the responsibility of certifying the truck/load as "safe" to a surrogate safety officer better trained for that task than your typical driver who frankly doesn't care and will say things like "it's not my trailer" "I didn't load that pallet" or "running the scales"
Given the stall of real wages for the lower ends of the wealth spectrum, the replacement of human labor by machines seems slated for hunger and riots, since the human jobs aren't actually being replaced.
So yes, I expect it actually will be a rather terrible time.
Land between large cities increasingly turns to human desert in many places of the world. People find no reason to continue living in small settlements and no ecomonical backing for doing so.
Places where people lived for thousand years now become deserted.
This might be another nail in the coffin after rail (only stops at large cities) and air (flies over entirely).
What if it works the other way round? What if automation eliminates most, if not all, jobs, and thus reduces the appeal of living in cities where work is easily found? What if land remains expensive in urban areas, but the economic support for people to afford it isn't there?
What if automated delivery makes it cheaper to deliver to anywhere, so that it becomes easier and more practical to live far apart from others?
This might as well happen. I think that decent Basic Income will cause just that: millions of people leaving expensive cities to live cheaply in the country.
This thought is backed by Russian dacha phenomenon.
This article claims that truck driver is the most common job in more than half of all states. That's obviously false.
There are as many registered nurses as truck drivers for example. And there are seven million teachers in the US.
"About 2.8 million workers drive trucks around. That’s a big number, but it pales in comparison to other occupations. More than 21 million people work in office and administrative support, more than 14 million work in sales and more than 11 million work in food services. Nine million work in transportation or material-moving occupations. Heck, there are nearly 9 million production workers who actually make things."
I don't know if the claim is correct or not, but you have not demonstrated that it is false.
The occupations you describe (nurses, teachers, office workers) can be expected to correlate with population density in a way that just doesn't seem to be necessary for truck drivers, or at least for many of them. Given that population is very non uniformly distributed amongst the states, it is very plausible to have a high proportion of long distance truck drivers living in low population states, so this claim could be true.
Look at some of the states in the map that claim truck driver as the highest - CA, TX, MI, IL; these are not low-population states.
What's happened here is that the statistics are very poorly represented. Jobs like 'teacher' and nurse are broken down to fine-grained distinctions, while seemingly everyone who touches a truck steering wheel is lumped in as a truck driver. Lies, damned lies, and...
We can’t stop there though, because the incomes received by these 8.2 million people create the jobs of others.
... going further, the income of wage earners is what creates demand for the goods being transported by the trucks. Once nobody can earn an income, there will be no need for trucks.
So the concern is the economy slowing down due to the large number of current truck drivers who are going to be out of jobs in the near future. I don't expect there to be a sudden drop.
First comes the autopilot trucks where they still need to be manned. Sure the drivers will likely take a hit in pay, they'll still have a job. Then comes the fully autonomous trucks, removing the drivers although. I see this being a gradual transition, not a cliff like the article mentions.
"Basically, the only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks is purely legal in nature, not technical or economic."
I feel like this is such a huge assumption considering any type of autonomous driving has not been seen use anywhere yet.
Not to mention, a high proportion of the costs of the physical goods you consume are the transport costs. More than 1/3 of the transport costs are the driver.
300 million people will be better off.
10 million people lose out.
On top of that, the demographic of truck drivers tends towards older male. There is already a problem.
> I feel like this is such a huge assumption considering any type of autonomous driving has not been seen use anywhere yet.
It has, Google has openly admitted to have driven more than 100k miles fully autonomously. The technology IS here, it's going to be widespread in 15-20 years.
Google's up to 1.7m miles, apparently; this came up earlier in discussions of the accident rate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9526602 (Always in motion, the future is...)
The thing is that once it makes sense to replace one (long-distance) truck driver with a machine it will make sense to replace most of them. That change could easily happen over a month (it may not happen for years, even after driverless carriages are technically feasible, because the economics aren't there) and since trucking is a commodity business market forces will force them to get driverless trucks quickly, after it becomes the economic choice.
This article seems vaguely similar to the Luddite's destroying automated manufacturing equipment because of the belief that it would take their jobs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite). It seems that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics. Yes truck driver jobs will go away but this does not mean the loss of jobs and income on the aggregate. The economy will change and shift resources to the now more efficient modes of transportation, which will benefit everyone.
Sometimes there are misunderstandings of economics involved, but just as often that kind of resistance stems from factors that "basic economics" glosses over or abstracts away. There's a lot of economic friction involved in shifts like this, and the pain tends to fall on people who have less power to do anything about it -- it's not trivial for a truck driver to go get a new job in a different industry, and our economic system is not very well set-up to encourage that kind of retraining and shifting, nor to support the basic needs of people who don't have much to contribute to "the economy". (All that's vaguely related to the fact that we've been (in the US) working more and more hours collectively despite higher and higher productivity, so that Keynes's prediction of a 15-hour workweek looks crazy even though his estimation of productivity increases was basically on point...)
Median wages went down right after the luddites lost to manufacturing. Its going to be hard to employ people who have been driving their whole lives and now need to learn a new skill.
Except, well, the Luddites. The benefits of automation are largely diffuse and society-wide, outside of the few directly involved in the new, smaller industry. Those displaced would be at a net loss, save any Kaldor-Hicks type interventions.
In addition to ignoring the big picture economics, it makes rather silly claims such as "And with that [the elimination of the need to own cars], the elimination of entire industries built up around the existence of car ownership like: mechanics, car washes, parking..."
I think he's confusing eliminating the need to buy a whole car (dubious in the first place even if/ especially if they're automated) with the elimination of cars in general (???) Or he somehow thinks that part of "self-driving" means also self-fixing, self-washing, and cars that never park... roaming the streets in packs I suppose, ganging up on people when the cops aren't looking and stealing their jobs...
Robot trucks also don’t need salaries — salaries that stand to go up because fewer and fewer people want to be truckers.
Doesn't that kind of contradict the beginning ofthe article?
In any case I've been in favor of Unconditional Basic Income for a long time as a result of increased automation and to mitigate demand shocks for local labor. Even anarcho-capitalist libertarians can admit that transitions within the economy can take time that will cause massive contractionsin the money supply of a city/state/country.
I don't know how a machine program is going to drive in my city, many times you have to read the other driver face to know if he is going to respect the norms.
I propose the following challange for those cars, try to cross Arc de triomphe in Paris, or any similar place in my city and prove you risk your life reasonably, it is not so far a experience from poker.
It's not necessary for the automation to solve the most difficult environments. As long as it can handle the majority of the distance it would be quite useful. For example a small number of operators could get the trucks to a depot near a highway, trucks could drive autonomously non-stop across the country, and then another operator could manually move them from a receiving depot to a local destination.
That's not a problem for trucks, most of them don't go into the city centers anyway. And in any case, they can just drive themselves until they reach the city borders, then park themselves and wait for a human driver to pick them up. Instead of having hundreds of drivers on the roads, companies can just have a few on each endpoint.
But I think you overestimate the difficulty of dealing with other drivers. Remember that self-driving cars have essentially immediate reactions and much better awareness of their surroundings. You can avoid a lot of accidents when you can track every car around you, millisecond by millisecond.
It's a shame that the author felt the need to add the basic income proposal onto an excellent article about autonomous vehicles. They are both very big topics and warrant individual analysis.
I would not be surprised if the next car I buy is the last car I buy. Personally, I think it will change humanity for the better, we just do not quite grasp how or what yet.
What is the state of autonomous driving tech in terms of (semi)hazardous weather conditions? Isn't this still a major barrier? Are roadside RFID chips viable?
I expect a constant review of the sensor performance and adjustment. The truck in question is part of a decade-old testing phase, according to the article. This will provide a lot of information, which can help navigate the issue of sensor interference.
Sensor malfunction was a constant worry when I worked on small robotics projects. I hope that car companies, which have much bigger resources than I can afford on my projects, will spend sufficient effort on making sensor interference and various malfunctions not degrade the operation of an autonomous vehicle.
You are right, just like AI that writes finance and sports articles would never displace journalists. Oh, hold on, it has. But surely a robotic assembly line would never replace honest and hard working American automotive workers..... just don't look at Detroit for conformation of that theory. At least all of our secretary and typist jobs are still safe..... well, not so much, but still, surely one can always go to a pharmacist school and get a high paying job after that. Right. What, AI is doing that now too, and better than humans ever could? Na....
Change is coming, and there are too many people who wish to hide their head in the sand rather then embrace this change, and figure out how to deal with it. We need a new economic model, because capitalism isn't going to work in a world where everything is created by machines (capital) and consumers have nothing of value to exchange for the goods that capital is producing. I am not arguing for communism, because we all know how well that has worked in the past. We need another solution.
Unless, if AI is going to replace all the labor, why not also replace the consumers with AI :)
I never said that change wasn't coming. I said drivers would remain. There are still pilots.
High quality auto-pilots have been around for at least 20 years in airbus. Planes capable of flying and landing for longer than that (takeoff is harder than landing because the plane needs to know what the wind is doing).
Pilots are around to deal with exceptional circumstances and to accept responsibility (loading, security, risk assessment, maintenance, health). The same will happen with trucks. The risk is entirely different with a commercial enterprise than it is with an individual, and corporations are very happy to spend money to avoid risk. Yes, it's a conflation of the management roles of the Captain, with the task roles of Pilot, but there will be a person, and we will say they fly it, and if there are humans on the plane, they will be on it.
Pilot and co-pilot add (rough estimate) $200/hr to a flight cost. There are 140 people on the plane (United A320), so it adds $12 per person to have two pilots on the plane for a flight across the US.
> I am not arguing for communism, because we all know
> how well that has worked in the past. We need another
> solution.
Do you have any ideas? Capitalism uses the market to allocate resources. Typically, when someone pitches an alternative it will boil down to some variation of government reallocation. This has many names, but all of them are a breeding ground for corruption and injustice.
Maybe we haven't been looking hard enough.
What if we start with your premise: capitalism is failing some regions. To avoid ending back at government-reallocation, we could add to it a second premise: the purpose of government is to enforce live-and-let-live and do absolutely no more.
Within these rules, can we find something new? It might help to stop seeing government as a God-Object to stick new functionality into, and instead consider whether there should be other objects in play.
So far I've got nothing. But I find myself thinking of business models, rather than social reform.
the problem with communism was that it tried almost 100% government management and planning. Private iniative was forbidden, even in the areas in which it would be useful. (source: I grew up in a socialist/communist country)
In that manner, capitalism with guaranteed income is different. You want to be rich, go ahead amd try your chances at trade, entrepreneurship etc. You see a market opportunity - go ahead and kickstart it. On the other hamd, if you lack a capability, or you prefer to do things that nobody will want to pay you for (art, raising children etc), the govrnment will keep you covered.
Obviously there are problems to it, especially today when production costs are expensive. And there are implementation problems as well. But still, one system is the ultimate oppression, another one is ultimate freedom.
Btw. The running joke in communism was: "yeah, our system is perfect, it's just the implememtation that sucks". I believe that communism was impossible to get implemented correctky, whereas capitalism + minimum income can be. Not today, but in a few years when the goods will be even cheaper.
If I remember well the texbooks, communism is about common ownership of the means of production (typically factories), not about personal private property or money.
I bet I would have been executed back at the time of the October revolution for saying this, but you could have a market even with communism: if nobody want apples and everybody like oranges, guess what is going to be cultivated and what's going to cost more? It doesn't matter that the state (the people) owns all the apple and orange trees and processing factories. They'll allocate resources as the market want.
Unfortunately communism almost always came with central planning, maybe because the guys in charge were often dictators and, as you wrote, private initiative was not well received. Furthermore they had to differentiate from capitalism as much as they could (that was marketing), and anything remotely looking capitalistic was forbidden.
The problem with communism was that people were locked-out of the decisions. They had no idea what's going on. The reason for that was not that the leadership imposed it. It worked out that way, because the government made a promise to the common people:
"We will take care of your needs, you just be as productive as you can. You will be happy, we will take care for you".
So the people did. The government gave bread to the masses and the masses didn't care about much else. The ones who cared about more were deemed to be dangerous to the communist society and were killed.
How is the promise made by basic income proponents different that the communist promise?
Capitalism uses the market to allocate resources, but it is not the only system that does so: [1][2][3]
From what I can gather, you're limiting the role of government to a very libertarian role, and not finding any feasible solutions.
Why abandon government reallocation? To the contrary, many forms of government reallocation specifically counter injustices, for example, any Pigou tax.
Regulation is also a good thing, as it allows the citizenry to enact constraints on companies where consumer action would be toothless.
Your software-writing fingers are controlled by a neural network - a pretty complicated one, but it is still a physical process. I am sure an artificial neural network will be able to approximately do the same within a few decades. Not soon, but even we, software developers, are not safe. Well, we are today, and we will be among the last ones, but it will not last forever.
I think the key to save ourselves is to create artificial brains that are hardwired to _like_ taking care of us humans. I see flaws in every other solution. And even this one is not totally safe, just my best shot.
That's not a good comparison due to the difference in risks and returns.
Airplanes are expensive, are subject to international regulations and possess extreme damage potential.
Trucks can be confined to desert roads (like in Australia), are relatively cheap and are subject to national regulations. Also AFAIK drivers are relatively more expensive than pilot in comparison with total cost of ownership.
I find myself in the strange situation where I both agree and disagree with this sentiment.
The source of disagreement can be described as "time" - I consider not only the past, but the delay that happens after a technology is described to when it makes changes in our lives. It all takes time, and in the time to come, there is a chance that autopilots can take more responsibility from the pilot. Would you really be confident that in 20 or 30 years time, pilots will have the same job description as of today?
Of course, a pilot in a passenger plane has a lot more responsibility than simply piloting the plane. For example, dealing with passengers or talking to ground control.
The autonomous trucks will not take driver's seat overnight - the truck in question will be a decade-long testing phase, according to the article. What happens afterwards is anyone's guess.
Would you really be confident that in 20 or 30 years time, pilots will have the same job description as of today?
Yes.
"Autopilot" systems are, in terms of capabilities, well behind even current widely-deployed technology in ground vehicles. In the air, an autopilot system is essentially glorified cruise control, and nobody asks when cruise control in cars will take over for humans. Autoland systems are pretty far behind automatic parallel-parking features in modern cars; autoland requires significant human decision-making, human input and human oversight to function.
And the purpose of autopilot/autoland is not to replace the pilot, but to relieve the pilot of mundane tasks the software can do perfectly well, freeing the pilot to do things software still is -- and likely will continue to be -- bad at.
Unless, of course, you think friendly human-serving general-purpose AI will be available within the next two or three decades (I don't).
>>Unless, of course, you think friendly human-serving general-purpose AI will be available within the next two or three decades (I don't).
/sigh.
A decade ago I started my bachelors. When I was in college, I expected that general-purpose AI will be readily available by this point. How naive I was! Currently, I doubt it will be available by that point in time.
/sigh
I do not know how much progress will be achieved within the next two or three decades. In the circumstances of passenger flights, keeping current solutions is likely a conservative and more pragmatic approach.
With regards to my comment, I do not expect autopilots to substitute pilots. Instead, I expect that they should be able to handle additional tasks assigned from the pilots.
For example, it was not a passenger flight, but a helicopter crashed in Nepal during the rescue from the earthquake. I wonder if its pilot had fore-warning from sensory information prior to the crash; and if they had not, how to design its warning system and if an autopilot could take control of the helicopter to land it safely.
I agree and I believe that at first automation won't be integrated in the boeings and airbuses but will grow and evolve from inside the drone industry.
"Apple already has technology that may lend itself to an electric car and expertise managing a vast supply chain. The company has long researched battery technology for use in its iPhones, iPads and Macs. The mapping system it debuted in 2012 can be used for navigation…"
The mapping system Apple debuted in 2012 cannot reliably be used for navigation.
Journaist who covered the Freightiner/State of Nevada annuncment last week here. The article's summary of the current state of truck autonomy is quite cogent There's an explainer link below for those looking for more detail, but the point Daimler Trucks execs and engineers emphasized is that they have no plans to pursue Level 4 (no driver needed) autonomy. (Although I don't recall that they were pushed on a timeframe for that commitment.)
So, as is, this is very much a tool to benefit drivers; i.e., cruise control with steering. But the critical point, as the article notes before taking the leap truck drivers are soon to disappear, is that trucking is big business (collectively) and if this technology can be suppoerted by the business case, then it will be adopted as rapidly as pubic policy permits.
However, the author doesn't take into consideration a couple of things:
1: The trucking industry is having a very hard time finding drivers (waaaay tough gig for over-the-road guys). While this may support the notion that trucking companies will rush to adopt autonomus vehicle tech, it takes away some of the punch of his basic income thesis: people don't want to do this job.
Truck drivers come from the same pool as construction laborers and factory workers, and when the economy is good there's a driver shortage because workers prefer jobs that let them go home every night compared to sleeping in a truck for weeks at a time. So in this case, basic income is, at best, a trucking industry subsidy. Otherwise, it's make-work.
2: The trucking industry is very fragmented. We're all familiar with many of the big fleet names we see on trailers every day, and while these mega-carriers haul a large percentage of the freight, they're far outnumbered by the number of companies with five or fewer trucks. And there's a great deal of conflict between the policies sought by well-capitalized larger firms (with money to invest in new tech and often lobby to have it manadated) and the Joe's Trucking Cos who are one breakdown or accident from going out of business. But Joe stays in businees because because he fills a niche the big guys aren't interested in.
And Joe ain't going to buy a robot, not that he'd mind staying in the office while his truck deivers freight without him, but because he can't afford it.
So either the fully driverless truck is going to become so operationally efficient that big trucking companies can move into these niches and fill spot demand, or the technology is going to be so affordabe that the little guy adopts it and then uses his niche expertise to grow is business. Both are wins for the overall economy, with the latter actually staving off a further concentration of capital--which I guess would be a good thing for the basic income crowd. (And as a journlist, I assure you I'm not averse to the concept.)
Great article until the very end... Basic income is not the answer to this. Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueling even more government corruption and ultimately, totalitarianism.
I can't help but think all of this talk and rhetoric in recent years is deliberate propaganda, conditioning left-leaning people.
I have seen a number of websites posted on HN, especially in comments, which are overly rhetoric and nudge the reader towards utopian left ideas. The sites are well developed both in the application and in the information architecture sense. They don't seem to have revenue model and saying that tracking their financing proved difficult, would be an understatement.
Please remember that changing the social framework is a VERY delicate matter. Oftentimes things sound very good on paper, but are not practical at all. Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". When people believed this can happen, it ended terribly. Not because of the specific people in charge at the time. Socialism/Communism as a model is doomed to fail because of human nature.
When you make social policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator and currently, it is very low indeed.
Anecdotes are not data, but here is my anecdote about Not Having To Work.
A few years ago, I came into enough money that I don't have to work for several years. I have not been spending this time just lying on the beach; instead, I've been spending this time doing a thing I dearly want to do, which doesn't bring in much money. I leverage the skills I gained in the time I spent hanging around the animation industry to draw weird comics.
I have been able to turn this into something that mostly pays my rent over the past four years. I could not have done this if I had to spend the bulk of my time working for someone else.
Sure, some people will sit around and play video games all day. But I think you may be underestimating the number of people who have a thing they'd be spending a lot of time working on if not for that pesky day job. Even the most burnt-out and broken-seeming homeless folks.
You are probably in the top %1 of the specimen. People who are naturally gifted are not the problem. The problem are the ones who are not. They don't aspire to achieve like you or me. Read very carefully the last line of my comment. Social policy needs to be made with the lowest common denominator in mind.
You can look at education for cues. You have experimental programs that show tremendous improvement over current ones. But they are done with the top 1% of teachers tutoring the top 1% of kids. When they try to roll it out to a random school, they fail miserably.
Poverty is not considered to be a unsolved problem in academic economics. An NIT has wide support as a way to both directly eliminate poverty while taking away the need for distortionary measures such as minimum wage and the administrative costs they entail.
Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.
Proponents of basic income use the same rhetoric. This is what I find dangerous. Overly ambitious politicians tripping the masses to rise against the evil rich bastards. Like for example in the heart of Europe - France. Or Hungary. Or plenty of other populist political parties in Europe. Most all of which linked with sponsorship from the Russian government.
And what's your point? That the efficacy or applicability of these ideas is somehow diminished by their presence in the political rhetoric of European minor parties?
That we are going to make awful, rash decisions because of a bunch of self-entitled pricks, lead by a bunch of gullible and vain mr.know-it-alls. For the benefit, and sponsored by a few unscrupulous KGB officers.
The Chicago school is a driving force behind the NIT, and I'm pretty sure Friedman wasn't secretly shilling for the Mossad or whatever the intelligence agency du jour may be. Dismissing ideas based on disagreement with some of their lesser proponents is not logically sound.
I'm not dismissing the idea because of the unsound reasoning in lesser proponents. I'm opposed to the idea because it ignores how humans work - like any animal - on an incentive program. Your body needs water? Drink that glass, get hormones released for the good job! Much more so when we talk about high level activities. If you remove the incentive system from the social framework we live in, people will simply stop caring. Like a pothead stops caring about anything. His brain is showered in endorphenes on demand. Because of that, he has no motivation for anything else.
I mention the lesser proponents of the basic income idea, as you describe them, because I'm scared senseless from what a bunch of self-entitled, special little snowflakes can do.
There are other ways to achieve the results basic income is trying to achieve. Subsidize their electricity,water,phone. Give free textbooks, subsidize education for their children. Teach them how to manage money. Reduce the government overhead with technology, get more efficient, invest the excess money in the programs. Those are not problems only for starving people. You can do it for people with under certain threshold of median income. People will be free to spend their money on things other than the bare necessities, thus increasing their quality of life.
I'm not advocating against reforms. I'm advocating against people tripping over ideas who sound too good. The majority of people I've talk to, who believe in basic income, have put very little thought about the ramifications of it. They have very little understanding of politics and social sciences. They read a bunch of articles, like this one, and thought "Hey, that's great, gimme free monies, I read an article that says people are more productive when they are not motivated by money". Next thing you know, they are advocating for it, convincing their friends how great it is. Politicians are always ready to ride the wave, chasing their grandiosity.
The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement.
"The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement."
Can you give some evidence supporting the idea that this has been proved?
My thinking is that technologies are improving at a non-linear pace, and technological change leads directly to social change. Given that, a conservative approach often leads to policies which are out of touch with reality (as political/social trends diverge).
A strange point to make, given that the second biggest factor leading to economic growth over the last century (after the information revolution) was women joining the workplace post WW2.
Conservatism does not mean clinging to the status quo. I'm not sure if there is any point in replying at all since you can't make the difference. Conservatism is about slow, but deliberate moves. Carefully contemplated, but decisive actions.
Was not the opposition of equal participation based on enforcing traditional gender roles? My apologies if you mean something different, you just can't ignore that this position is very strongly aligned with conservatism as most understand it.
The dangerous part is after the comma. If you read my comment at all you would know that my point is that guaranteeing the existential minimum to everyone means that they just stop caring about other shit and the political elite goes down the slippery slope.
> Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueling even more government corruption and ultimately, totalitarianism.
I actually thought this line was satire until reading the rest of your comment. How's Alaska doing right now? Is it a totalitarian regime?
Guaranteed basic income isn't a never-tried-before idea. Yeah, it sounds similar to the USSR, but the USSR had a lot of things beyond just redistribution. Alaska is clearly a much, much more apt analogy, and it doesn't seem worse off than other rural states.
The whole point is that technological advances also change the social framework and we need to have a constructive plan for how to maintain a society in the face of that.
Politics that tell us that poor people are naturally lazy, immoral children who can't run their lives may not be the most productive framework in the years to come.
[1] http://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-201...
[2] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/22/is-the-aarp-...
[3] http://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2012/03/19...