The world is increasingly complex making it seem to many people that their work is unproductive (bullshit/make-work jobs). This and lack of agency in many jobs is what leads to massive frustration with work* but it's not actually an incisive observation about the economy as a whole.
it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole
I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea.
* Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.
> I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale.
In turn, I'm sceptical of people who say we can't entertain any non-trivial, non-cautionary, non-evolutionary changes to the status quo ... while downplaying the fact that the situation we're in now - 9-5, mon-fri, 20-65yo - was not piloted or effectively tested on a smaller scale before all of us inherited it.
My point was, and remains, that the current de facto, whatever is considered 'normal' in whichever country you currently reside and work, was not piloted or effectively tested.
You inherited your place in it, and it is therefore normal.
I'll extend my argument to suggest that most HNers are familiar with changes that can not be tested in isolation, simply because they require significant changes to the whole platform. [0]
UBI studies - including the one in TFA - help us work out some of the likely effects, but they are - also as per TFA - always going to be fundamentally flawed studies in the absence of a) guaranteed forever, b) universal, and c) basic coverage.
the current de facto, whatever is considered 'normal' in whichever country you currently reside and work, was not piloted or effectively tested
I understand your point and directly disagree with its main part: the move from a family-run farm to a shift-based employment happened before I was born so I did inherit it but it was in fact piloted, tried on small scale, and organic at first.
Nah, they just threw bodies at the problem - shifts be damned. In the US people were working most if not all days of the week. We’re lucky we got where we are now with a 5 day work week brought about by union pressure.
> We’re lucky we got where we are now with a 5 day work week brought about by union pressure.
This is not backed up by any source I can find. Nearly every source says that the 5 day week was invented by unions in the 1800s, popularized by Henry Ford at the Ford motor company due to measurable improvements to productivity, and made law in the 1930s (in the US) to attempt to counter wide-spread unemployment during the Great Depression. Union pressure is not mentioned anywhere, and honestly doesn't make any sense given that unions were not particularly powerful in those time periods.
> Union pressure is not mentioned anywhere, and honestly doesn't make any sense given that unions were not particularly powerful in those time periods.
Unions were so powerful in the early 1900s that multiple revolutions occurred in part due to their pressure and actions all around the industrialised world. And the fear of strikes led to many reforms and regulations to take talking points off unions (like Bismarck enacting the first welfare state to be a step ahead of social democrats).
Specifically in the US, look at the Coal Wars and the Battle of Blair Mountain in which the US army fought with aircraft and artillery against striking miners.
> I'll extend my argument to suggest that most HNers are familiar with changes that can not be tested in isolation, simply because they require significant changes to the whole platform. [0]
Flag days are still tested in a staging environment that represents production as closely as possible, and the overwhelming view of the kind of change you're talking about on a technical level is generally don't do that if you can ever help it.
heh. go away and take your UBI and 38 hour work week. they are implementing a law to enforce this. so you will work for twice a 38 hour work week and still be paid less because why not.
The network effect of mass messaging was tested at smaller scales many times. Victorian era pneumatic tubes come to mind or unlimited local calls later, but there must be countless other examples that did not require changing the economy as a whole.
I think the overwhelming majority of transactions can be characterized as a trade (of goods for money, services for
money, work for money, money for other money (in form or time), etc.)
UBI seems quite different in that regard and, while it doesn’t invalidate everything, it introduces a lot more of money for nothing and a corresponding nothing for money trade that is required to fund it.
Courier services have existed for a very, very long time. Heck, Ben Franklin was running one to help connect the 13 colonies.
Presumably the government could have actuslly piloted the USPS if they wanted to, only supporting the northeast for example. They just didn't need to, the leap from private courier systems to a government run courier service didn't have many unknowns to test out first.
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices.
The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.
It's a creeping expansion of social benefits...society will adapt around it
I think this will never happen (in the US). The modern political environment in the US won't allow it.
If it appears that there will be an expansion of social benefits, the wealthy class will work to sabotage it (a la ACA; not that there weren't benefits, but net-net the shareholders and executives of insurance companies won). There's nothing stopping them.
What's more likely to happen, IMO, is that as the cost of existing increases, the birth rates will continue to decline. Rather than address this population crisis, the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc. With their left hand, they'll import cheap labor. With their right, they'll pit the rest of us against this cheap labor to distract from reality. The corporations want this cheap, imported labor -- they just don't want to pay the taxes to support social services for anyone.
The wealth gap will continue to widen without a voting base willing to increase taxation. And to suppress this, the wealthy will use a narrative that is driven by the media consolidated and owned by these mega-rich. There are increasingly few politicians on either side that feel like they are genuine about solving this issue. The flood of money in politics feels like it's broken the system.
Everything you say may be true, but is orthogonal.
I do think social benefits are expanding in the USA also, more and more people find it viable to be a NEET. The wealth gap will surely widen; this implicit UBI is certainly not communism in any way. Truth is, today western societies can afford to provide the basics for everyone, so ultimately withholding in order to keep the masses in the jobs is not tenable.
> There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions
I agree, in the sense that I think UBI proponents would do better to lobby for that than a big, deus-ex-machina version of UBI. But I don't see it happening "naturally", without a lot of political effort.
I do see it happening naturally; the very idea that an UBI idea is floating around is a product of the wealth and automation we enjoy. It's a realization that sets in on a broad front, from bullshit jobs, to new generations of products that are not improving much or even regressing, environmental concerns that discourage producing more, massive government budgets squandered ("why not give it to the people who need it?"), and COVID giving people a pause in their respective hamster wheels.
Imagine a technological reset and/or war: Under those circumstances one could still argue for a socialist system of work, but not for people doing nothing getting UBI.
Maybe things are different where you live, but it seems like the opposite is happening here (the UK). The State Pension (UBI for old people) is getting further restricted. At least anecdotally, it seems like it's getting harder to claim benefits like Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payments. We introduced additional caps on benefit payments in 2013 and again in 2017. Our new government doesn't show any obvious sign of reversing the trend, and I don't see any popular movement to encourage them to.
All right, there are certainly other major forces affecting western societies and various scenarios could play out in the future. Let's put our weight behind the movements that would lead to some positive outcomes...
> Unsurprisingly, the study participants became less inclined to work jobs.
while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.
I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day.
People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end.
And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job.
But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset.
This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief.
But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work.
So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless.
Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.
> It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
This is an oversimplification naturally but the gist of it is spot on. Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere. One thing leads to another, and that's how most wealth is created by robbing the future. But the future actually arrives some day, and we're seeing some of that now.
There's no exit strategy for this behaviour though. Since so many people did exactly what they were incentivized to do, they of course don't want the rules to change now. The current generation will always need to pay 10x whatever a house is worth, because otherwise all of the people in the last generation can't afford to settle debts / retire / pay unreasonable amounts for healthcare. This puts the current generation in debt, so that they have to rob the next, and so on until there's some collapse. Most millennials have had a rough time waiting for that collapse though, so lots have bought something on credit to build equity rather than continuing to throw away money on rent. Soon instead of cheering on any kind of collapse in the housing market, they also will want it postponed because they will need to rob the next generation. But each iteration of this same game isn't exactly the same, because every generation does a little worse while more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.
> Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere.
2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.
Much more generally: Think in terms of supply and demand. If nobody is going to work any more, then the price of work goes way up. So does the price of things that work produces.
> 2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.
Totally. Just because it's the game that capital wants us to play doesn't mean that there's any guarantee that you win. It's just also that it's the only way to maybe win. This supports parent's argument that wealth distribution is arbitrary. One person wins and another loses, playing the same game the same way, just because they entered the market at different times. The uncomfortable contradiction that we're supposed to generally agree with is that the first person is "smart and hardworking", and the second person "is financially irresponsible, obviously living outside their means".
> So does the price of things that work produces.
Not sure if this a comment re: UBI, antiwork, or housing costs, but housing in particular is always a special kind of crazy because we've insisted on looking at it as a financial vehicle instead of you know, a place to live and work from. Prefab things that could cut costs are illegal most places. In Florida they build labor-intensive houses out of match-sticks even though the next hurricane is always coming, because that's what's easy to permit, that's what people historically wanted to insure, and it keeps construction rackets and developers in business. Further from the coasts, even in the more sparsely populated mountain/desert states, you can go to the edge of any larger town and look out at the "supply" of hundreds of miles of empty, and still get forced into paying half a million for a crappy place on half an acre. Supply and demand is certainly some kind of a factor, but like parents point about wealth-from-work vs wealth-from-asset-appreciation, it's a small factor and getting smaller. The market's already intensely manipulated.. it's just done in a way that makes problems worse instead of better.
Sir, you write so well! I read it twice and then I had to literally put the phone away and walk around, letting your thoughts bounce around in my little brain. Just felt I needed to thank you for taking the time. Thanks.
The only tweak I would make is to disregard financial assets as assets in this context. Holding money isn't really that different than holding IOUs for a share of stock that you'll never actually own.
If a person is really does view money as smoke and mirrors, and is concerned that it can be printed whenever it's needed, tangible assets like land or tools at least useful if you no longer see value on money.
That said, I'm not advocating for that view necessarily and very much agree with your take here. People do seem to be losing faith in money, at least a bit, and that can be very dangerous if the faith continues to erode.
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
Handing out money will never make resources appear where they don't exist though. And if we want to say everyone should have access to certain resources, having money as an intermediary actually does us a diservice.
If everyone should have access to water, federalize water utilities and don't charge anyone. You will them have to deal with access rights though. How much water is enough for everyone to have access to? How do we avoid water rights issues even worse than what California has?
Defining certain resources as a fundamental right while still forcing them to operate as a free market is a risky game of chicken. If prices are still able to fluctuate in response to market supply & demand then we really aren't saying we truly believe everyone should have water, shelter, etc. A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
Also conveniently, when prices are partly decided by market factors the fundamental right to a resource may be impacted. If we really think everyone should be guaranteed access to water, electricity, housing, food, etc those resources would just be available and wouldn't require the market abstraction of money.
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. ... What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
> ...I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However:
What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve?
What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure?
[0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
Yes, that’s the seemingly obviously correct way to think about it. Which is also why many people who think the sliver of population who is unable to work should be able to get welfare to avoid starving, but that the vast majority of the population who is capable of productive work should be expected to provide for their own consumption rather than have it be provided to them.
Part of the problem is that if people don't have access to those things then they don't have much incentive to support the government or things like property rights.
I wouldn’t argue that you’re responsible for anyone. I would argue more that if you value the suffering of conscious things, it is a very short logical leap to care about such in all humans, even those who you don’t directly interact with. You don’t need to feel anything about them or be responsible for them to take the alleviation of broader human suffering into account when discussing policy. Do we disagree on this?
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
A government that governs a nation is arguably responsible for every human in it.
This is the core of so many problems in western governments today. Governments should be there to coordinate complex problems that society doesn't have a better way to handle. Governments should not be there to be a responsible parent to everyone, whether they want it or not.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure how that ties in. What's your point here with regards to a UBI and whether a government should work for or be parent to its constituents?
Citizens have to obey their country's laws (restriction of freedom) in exchange for government taking care of essential human needs like housing, clean water, electricity, food, and so on (obligation of the government).
If a citizen cannot get access to those needs (and remember - 5% unemployment is optimal), then why would anyone expect them to keep following their country' laws, and not steal and murder?
You seem to be assuming that we first have to have countries, laws, and governments. That seems like an obvious assumptuon today, but that isn't an absolute fundamental of life.
People don't need the heavy hand of governments and laws to stop them from stealing and murdering, as if that is the base state for all humans. If there were no laws, would you move right on to both of those acts?
> People don't need the heavy hand of governments and laws to stop them from stealing and murdering, as if that is the base state for all humans. If there were no laws, would you move right on to both of those acts?
In absence of police-like force enforcing rules, crime happens often, so people naturally create police-like forces like neighbourhood watches to prevent crime.
Countries, laws and governments aren't un-natural - they're just more complex and powerful versions of institutions that naturally appear in any organized group of people.
If you were in a tribe whose hunters were hoarding meat for their fat sons, would you starve to death to avoid stealing because stealing is wrong?
Not even remotely so in practice. Adults are largely responsible for themselves and their kids/elders. Sure, with some government assistance but true state wards are fairly rare and the system would have no chance of working if they weren't.
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Do you expect them to respect your right to have those things? IMO, your line of thought leads to violent revolution.
I don't think you can usefully equate 'UBI' to a single outcome of UBI.
One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero.
And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong.
Why should it cost to live?
(You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us.
A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom...
There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
You're right, it does tend toward medieval when the serfs have less agency than the landed gentry.
>Why should it cost to live?
We would have to get out our slide rules, or maybe go back to them ;)
Well if previous generations productively built the richest country because of the most widespread opportunity (without taxing income) in historical times, and prevailed handily like no other when challenged by financially devastating world-wide conflict, with plenty of time to invest the surplus wisely and let it appreciate, you would expect by now everybody would be able to coast, but Nooo . . .
The government dropped the ball and it was already big enough to take away everything you had.
In complete defiance of what all those generations had in mind for us now, and everything every American had ever worked for.
That's why the cost of living is not lower, if not zero, or even negative, if only slightly better choices would have been made. Compounded over all this time !! And that's with only better stewardship of the percentage taken out of laborers' pay once that got going, without even considering the wealth of the citizens that had been built up before the quest for revenue did a 180 and turned on internal targets.
My dude, that is a despairing world view you have there.
First, no UBI proponents are suggesting that it be
a) combined with a bureaucratic dictatorship, and
b) implemented absent significant concurrent social and financial changes.
Your phrasing makes me think you're based in the USA, and so I can understand some of the societal norms that might have led you to believe we can't have a better quality of life, a better society, simply because amoeba have to hunt their prey to survive.
We -- intelligent life forms with breathtakingly advanced technologies (compared to what we would need to just live) -- can do much better.
Surely cost of living, expressed as hours of labour, remains the same regardless. Anyone can reduce their cost of living by reducing the standard of living.
No it doesn't, you can't multiply a zero income by any number and put people out of poverty. You can't redistribute wealth by multiplying everybody's income either.
But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market.
Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.
The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc.
UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.
Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy.
Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.
According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources.
As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.
That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
> Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.
Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
Social safety nets today are needed weslth distribution. A UBI needs to cover everyone. With the same funding a UBI would have to provide less benefit than the programs we have today.
That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.
UBI requires changes to the tax code, but look at the comparison between SNAP and the 10% tax bracket for people making 0-11,600$ in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086690
At least for single people how SNAP sunsets with income is almost 1:1 with the discount for the lowest tax bracket.
Thus changing SNAP to a low UBI could have almost zero impact.
Only if you ignore the tax code. US example for single people:
SNAP for a single person is $291/month - total income * 0.3 so they get nothing at 11,640 per year of annual income and 291$/month at 0$ annual income.
2024 income brackets for single people are: 10% $0 to $11,600, 12% $11,600 to $47,150, 22% $47,151 to $100,525, ... Maximum tax bracket is 37%.
Hand everyone 260$ per month, but change things so the highest tax bracket 37% applies $0 to $11,600 and everyone making 12,000+$/ year sees zero change in their take home pay. And people making 0$/year get 260$/month.
Those numbers aren’t quite identical, but it’s surprising how close it ends up. At 30%, $0 to $11,640 it’s off by less than 1$/year.
Not quite sure that I follow here. In your model, what are the proposed benefits given out as a UBI? Is it $260/mo reducing down to $0 when you make at least $12,000 per year?
If so, how is that universal? Or a basic income covering some of the basic resources UBI is argued to cover, like shelter or food?
My example was for a US UBI that only covered food and the math was limited to single people, but the points could be applied more broadly.
UBI means everyone has an income of at least x$/year. If you’re making more than x$/year in take home pay that’s an income > x$/year.
Behind the scenes the advantage of the government handing out money every month is redundancy. Even if that same amount is normally removed from a paycheck, people aren’t suddenly left with 0$ if their paycheck bounces etc. Thus a single deposit of $10,000 per month is slightly worse than a deposit of $10,000 - $x and an independent deposit of $x.
If you want to take the SNAP program as a baseline and only slightly tweak the limits on when funds taper off, why bother with a new UBI program at all? It sounds like SNAP gets you 90% of the way there, it mainly just needs the restrictions on what the money can be spent on removed.
With limits so low I'm not totally sure how it would make a meaningful difference compared to the various welfare and entitlement programs we have today in the US. We already have multiple programs attempting to give needs-based funding to the public. How is such a limited UBI as you describe it any different, or different enough to justify the massive political battle it would entail?
I was bringing it up as a starting point for discussion and to show how UBI doesn’t imply extra spending.
Proponents suggest bring more programs into a single UBI could significantly lower operating costs. A single check each month could replace some or all of: Housing assistance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), including Pass through Child Support, General Assistance (GA), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), etc.
Healthcare in the US is similarly split across Medicaid, Medicare, VA benefits, ACA health insurance subsidies, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), plus a host of things you haven’t heard of like Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. There’s a massive opportunity for cost savings by simply reducing administrative redundancy.
Interesting, I could see that going either way. Surely there is waste when funds are split across multiple programs, but the potential benefit to that approach is that people may get benefits from one or two programs rather than all of them.
WIC and the CA are great examples. The population helped by both programs is purposefully smaller than the total population. If the funds currently spent only on mothers or veterans is spread across everyone it seems reasonable that efficiencies of moving to a single program wouldn't make up for the increased number of beneficiaries.
No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government.
For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing.
I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.
The US doesn't have a centrally planned economy, so the government can't lower the prices of everything. UBI is much more feasible to implement than communism.
Not centrally planned, except the humongous federal government, the central bank, the interstate highway system, even things like corn subsidies. There are a lot of centrally-planned areas.
One problem not called out in any UBI arguments I've read, including this one, is how we even consider this while also arguing about how poorly our borders are managed.
Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.
> When we create jobs for a purpose other than the product of the labor, we’re paying people to waste their time unproductively. This is what happens under full-employment policy. This is what happens when we use expansionary monetary policy to boost consumer demand.
Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"?
Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."
I believe it's the bullshit jobs argument. You could point to Twitter though, or really any sizeable corporate layoff that isn't driven by entirely getting rid of departments or products.
Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
> Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
I don't see how this idea holds up to scrutiny. People who do actual work need time off regularly to keep concentration and motivation up, especially over long periods of time. These factors don't matter for bullshit jobs - who's gonna notice if their output is reduced?
The impact of time off is instead directly related to quality of management. People will need time off for various reasons. You can either work together and plan around this, or you can act like it's not the case and have a) less chance of properly planning, b) greater risk of the full team being affected (e.g. when sick colleagues come into work), and c) less happy workers with higher turnover.
Sure, I wasn't meaning to argue that any person who can be out sick or on leave without hurting the team is in a bullshit job.
I was just pointing to it as a potential indicator, an example of where we may be paying people to waste their time (that was the GP question).
If a team handles leave well due to management that's going to be very clear to the team, it's intentional and takes active work. If a person can be out unexpectedly for a meaningful amount of time and there's no noticeable impact with that role going undone, it may be that it's a bullshit job. It also may not be, people often exagerate how many bullshit jobs there really are.
The article revolves around the responses of Noah Smith but it is my opinion that Noah is not really a genuine actor. Noah to me just represents the system (as opposed to non-system [0]). His role is not to make radical conclusions but simply to provide a counter reactionary voice for the neo liberal order.
The author seems to effectively argue for UBI as a solution to bullshit jobs. People waste a lot of time today in jobs that produce no real value, instead the government should pay people a similar wage to not do those jobs.
> There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI.
More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis.
What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.
UBI is not at all based in Marxism. The idea is older than Marxism and almost entirely unrelated to it. That's probably why you never see it mentioned.
My point isn't that Marx invented the idea of a UBI, I don't actually recall him specifically writing about the concept. My point is that the idea of a UBI is rooted in very much the same arguments as what Marx wrote so much about.
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, well, I have others." -- Marx
BI is not for work, it's for when there is not enough opportunity for work that is productive enough to both better the worker measurably plus provide a return for the master.
Regardless of whether it's a shrinking economy everywhere or just one of the selected demographics or career fields which opportunity can be found receding from, or even "just" creeping credentialization with its growing exclusionary effect.
Plus what if there was never enough opportunity to begin with in one way or another?
What BI is really for is so that nobody ends up with absolutely nothing. On a regular basis while the rest of the world has descended into a situation where it's not enough to be fully out of debt and ahead of the game quite well at any one point. Not that many decades ago this had been enough to gain a secure enough foothold along the path to upward economic mobility. The need for cash outlays on a monthly basis has skyrocketed, just to be able to participate in the same society as those millions having only barely-productive jobs. And the threshold between productive vs barely-productive can be a faster-moving goalpost that can provide a distorting illusion to "smart" people no different than anybody else.
A country can't even afford the most minimal "welfare" payouts to a small minority of the most disenfranchised citizens if the country itself is a "poor" country in a serious way that would need to be remedied beforehand. But beyond a certain point any country that was successful as a whole to a certain extent would be able to afford to fix it at least for a minimally significant portion of citizens whom it would help the most. And the most detrimental effect it could have on the overall economy would naturally be minimally significant. And that's the cost for a place that is not a rich country at all and can barely afford anything like this. Some people are just better at math than others.
In a truly rich country you have overwhelming resources compared to that, so you can draw the line where a lot more significant percentage of citizens can be kept away from the zero mark. How rich are you capable of being anyway?
There's not much difference between now and over 50 years ago when the continuous devaluation of currency was commenced. Other than scale. Back then only a small minority of citizens was left with absolutely nothing on a regular basis whether they had a job or not and whether that job was nearly as financially beneficial to others more so than the worker. A handful of people would be using food stamps at the supermarket, now it's every single cashier multiple times per hour.
People paying the workers are so heavily in debt now it can't work the same any more, and the workers themselves are even worse off at the same jobs.
But it's the same system, only the balance of wealth has changed and the buffer that has been increasingly absorbed is the citizen's resource level needed to avoid being pushed to zero by ever-more-prevailing forces.
Now no matter how you do the math, it's not a small minority of the most opportunity-denied citizens who need something on a regular basis to keep from going to zero. It's getting to be a serious majority who are increasingly at risk and the sooner something is done about it the better since it could take quite a while to take effect and the first salvo might not have enough smart people making the decisions.
UBI is not some new concept, it's just regular BI all grown up since it seems like everybody is at risk now, no differently than only the worst-off were facing before so much of a country's wealth had been extracted from the citizens to who knows where. It took a while but it's just about squeezed dry.
A valid argument against UBI is that everybody doesn't actually need it yet, but you've got to remember that for things to continue trending in the direction having the greatest financial momentum, more people will be needing it if the true beneficiaries (rent-seekers) are to continue experiencing the growth prospects they have in mind.
Sure, I don't disagree with you about what the concept of a (U)BI is. I am arguing, though, that fundamentally a UBI maps very well to Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" writings.
Basic income on the scale of welfare programs for a small minority of the most poor aren't quite the same. A UBI is a much more broad program, even if it doesn't help every single person it does attempt to prop up a large chunk of the population. At that point we're solving the wrong problem.
That were we definitely agree. A growing number of people in the US are falling behind. We need to fix the root cause of that though, the lack of money is only an obvious symptom. If our social, political, or economic systems are the underlying problem then let's fix those. Throwing a UBI at the problem creates even more chaos in the system and we simply don't know what the side effects will be.
Worse, if a UBI isn't the right answer we will have wasted all of our attention and political capital forcing it through. We almost certainly would walk away feeling like we solved it and end up in a worse spot when we're blind to the still growing problem. Roe v Wade comes to mind, we hung our hat on the victory of one supreme court decision when what was really needed was legislation codifying the decision.
Do you think we have tried all the recomended remedies? And who do we look to to define what is and isn't recommended?
We're in uncharted territory here, at least in modern history. At best experts can hypothesize about different interventions but they are ultimately making assumptions that frequently go unspoken.
The biggest category of remedies that I rare, if ever, see recommended is removing interventions from a complex system that has gone awry. In this case, instead of adding more layers to the economy by having the government give most people free money, potentially by racking uppre debt, maybe we should be reducing costs and liabilities. I wouldn't pretend to know what can or should be removed, but I would love to see honest research and consideration going towards what a remedy may look like if we come at it from the angle of subtraction.
This is the only real answer and the ongoing failure there is bad enough, but it's getting worse not better at a growing rate, and the few that do benefit when the majority suffer have had the upper hand financially for so long now, there may never be any possible reduction. I think this underlies a lot of the confusion about a solution since there's been increasing doubt for generations that there even is a solution to costs that didn't used to exist. It's been over 50 full years since I saw this accelerate through the roof and I already thought how was all of this bearable before that? It was plain to see it was unsustainable or we would end up like we are now. The only fair and predictable way to reverse never-ending wasteful costs that end up being imposed universally (to all citizens whether they own any currency or not), would be to roll them back in the reverse order in which they were imposed. And go back as far as it takes for the US to be as "rich" as it once was.
That was then and it already seemed impossible :(
>Do you think we have tried all the recomended remedies?
Even back then I never thought all sensible remedies would be tried in my lifetime and it was more of a shock then compared to a gradual boiling since.
>And who do we look to to define what is and isn't recommended?
There is no answer when everybody who says they have one can only be lying.
>We're in uncharted territory here
That's so true, in spite of so many similarities and logically expected negative outcomes for an increasing majority, it's still not supposed to be this way by this time at all, and surely never been quite like this before. It's been awry for so long it can only get weirder.
Plus those actually acting in decision-making positions have never been as intellectually incapable of making sweeping changes, and everybody knows it, especially changes for the better. There is no end to the decline in brainpower. Politics only gets in the way further since smart people are limited to the same choices as dumb people.
Now a lot of the financial decision-makers are billionaires, but if they are so wise with money why is the whole country not as "rich" as it used to be?
UBI does seem a little communist being a "mandated wealth redistribution" but I think there are complete free-market capitalists who are OK with it when they do the math for themselves. At their scale it's not wealth being redistributed, it's a pittance.
It's like UBI could be huge and apply to everybody which really adds up, but too late, that's not sweeping changes any more. It's actually more likely and less disruptive to the powers-that-be compared to fixing the real problem which I'm sure some very sophisticated financial institutions have calculated would be even more costly, for them. By untold amounts, so don't go there. Everything unspoken may not be an assumption.
>I would love to see honest research
Your eyes would have to be very privileged for that :)
Citizens be damned, let them eat cake, or soylent green, whatever they can get their hands on. Maybe not, if you do give enough for the population to have cake every month, they might be revolting anyway, so why bother ;)
Programs that truly are needs based don't really fit into the Marxist approach. UBI is much closer to, or just is, Marxism because its universal. You get the money simply because the government decided that is the amount of money everyone needs and deserves.
> the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed.
To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc.
Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society.
It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way.
We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies.
The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
That may be the crux of it though, people largely don't know what "enough" means.
People aren't okay with having shelter, food, water, and community. We want the smartphones, huge TVs, ridiculously expensive cars, access to fly anywhere in the world, etc. We absolutely could have all the basics cover, and then some, with 20% of the work we all put in today but few people want that world.
You forgot about all the people making minimum wage working 40+ hours who can't afford the basics like food and shelter
Because you can cover your necessities with 20% of your income doesn't mean everyone else can.
I know several people on SSI who had to take under the table jobs because their checks wont cover their food and shelter. And that's with food stamps. If they get a regular job they lose their SSI.
Ive got a friend who had to take a part time job dashing after work as a supervisor at my factory.
I think about this stuff when I'm working overtime- how lucky I am to be able to rather than have to find a second job.
I make over 6 figures as an electrician/instrumentation technician. I have a surgery coming up in September that's going to cost me 40k+. Instead of feeling it's so much and all the other things I could use that money for, I try to remind myself I'm blessed to be able to afford it without saving for years. I, again, know people who work full time and don't make that in a year.
I was actually thinking about the societal level here rather than any one person's financial situation.
I expect that we could make sure everyone had the basics much more easily if the average person could define what "enough" means for themselves. For one thing, we would be using many fewer resources as a country and would therefore be much better able to make sure the resources we do have would be available. For another, when a person knows what "enough" is for them they may decide to work less when they achieve that goal, leaving those potential paying work hours for the next person that needs the work.
It feels like people go to far the other way as well. People don't just need shelter, food, water, and community. Things like entertainment, art, and learning are also essential to having a good life.
Totally agree here. In my opinion, though, a UBI won't help with those and could actually hurt. We continue to quantify our lives to the point where the government can put a price on the products they deem me to be entitled to.
I'm not totally sold on Iain McGilchrist's specific analogy of the brain hemispheres, but his underlying point is spot on. In his model, we continue to make our world more and more left-brained (analytical) and we're losing the way of seeing the world required for art, community, etc. I expect a UBI would just make that worse, further quantifying our lives and reinforcing the idea that we're all cogs in a machine that can purr like a kitten if we just do as we're told and avoid thinking critically or differently.
Unless you can provide some hard figures, that number is probably not really accurate.
I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food.
I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions.
We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.
I'd argue that the labor required for growing food and building houses is highly dependent on the scale you are trying to achieve.
Raising enough food for a small family is very doable when you don't spend 40+ hours per week working for the paycheck. Building a small house is definitely a big project, but very doable as long as you aren't attempting to wind the clock all the way back and milling your own lumber. It can be done with a surprisingly small set of tools if the house is reasonably sized and designed with your tools and skills in mind from the beginning.
Is the average person going to build their own 2,500 square foot two-story house and grow enough food to feed everyone? Obviously not. But could a person build a 900 sq ft ranch, have a garden feeding their family, and raise animals for their own meat, dairy, and eggs? They absolutely can, I'm doing it today, and if climate change concerns you the reduced impact on the environment is huge.
Well, what I think we learned from COVID is that a bunch of the jobs that we think of as "bullshit" are really important. Yeah, critical-care nurses are important, we saw that, but we found out that grocery store workers are pretty critical, too. And truck drivers.
For that matter, I was at work a bit ago, using the restroom, and this janitor guy came in and started refilling the toilet paper rolls in the stalls. And it struck me that his job was really important. I don't want to do his job, but I absolutely don't want to work somewhere where nobody does it...
It seems people forget the most obvious thing: A government powerful enough to give everybody a salary is powerful enough to REMOVE everybody's salary. It is also a monopoly of power.
That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well.
UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor.
And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.
When you take away the government's monopoly on power you get what subsequently happened in Russia, a handful of oligarchs who have all the power instead.
It links to a blog post about China's third plenum and gives examples of western media's bias in relation to it. At least that's a dialog instead of the single sided take you offered originally.
So this explanation is neat and tidy. The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. So they start demanding exorbitant wages, show up late, if at all. This is productive work, and productive work that frees higher skilled resources to be more productive.
Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
> The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate.
We've uh, we've known this for millennia. "When no longer required to do something that they hate, people will often choose to stop doing that hated thing." is not even a little bit surprising.
> ...and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
Nah. Most folks don't give a shit about whether or not their work has "meaning". They work to fund their hobbies and fun, they don't work to find "meaning". Terminally-management-brained middle managers sure THINK that it's important for rank-and-file people to understand that their work has "meaning", though. They can't fuckin seem to shut up about it.
That's not my experience at all. Most people I know and have worked with care a lot about if their work has meaning. The people who do not are the outliers.
So, most people you know live to work, rather than work to live? Just out of curiosity, are most people you know what would generally be called in the US "white-collar" workers?
The world is increasingly complex making it seem to many people that their work is unproductive (bullshit/make-work jobs). This and lack of agency in many jobs is what leads to massive frustration with work* but it's not actually an incisive observation about the economy as a whole.
it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole
I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea.
* Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.
> I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale.
In turn, I'm sceptical of people who say we can't entertain any non-trivial, non-cautionary, non-evolutionary changes to the status quo ... while downplaying the fact that the situation we're in now - 9-5, mon-fri, 20-65yo - was not piloted or effectively tested on a smaller scale before all of us inherited it.
Shift work with fixed time frames was absolutely piloted on tiny scales way back during industrial revolution and evolved from there.
We supposedly even had podcasts to make menial work bearable back in... 1865: https://mashable.com/feature/cigar-factory-lectors
My point was, and remains, that the current de facto, whatever is considered 'normal' in whichever country you currently reside and work, was not piloted or effectively tested.
You inherited your place in it, and it is therefore normal.
I'll extend my argument to suggest that most HNers are familiar with changes that can not be tested in isolation, simply because they require significant changes to the whole platform. [0]
UBI studies - including the one in TFA - help us work out some of the likely effects, but they are - also as per TFA - always going to be fundamentally flawed studies in the absence of a) guaranteed forever, b) universal, and c) basic coverage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)
the current de facto, whatever is considered 'normal' in whichever country you currently reside and work, was not piloted or effectively tested
I understand your point and directly disagree with its main part: the move from a family-run farm to a shift-based employment happened before I was born so I did inherit it but it was in fact piloted, tried on small scale, and organic at first.
Nah, they just threw bodies at the problem - shifts be damned. In the US people were working most if not all days of the week. We’re lucky we got where we are now with a 5 day work week brought about by union pressure.
> We’re lucky we got where we are now with a 5 day work week brought about by union pressure.
This is not backed up by any source I can find. Nearly every source says that the 5 day week was invented by unions in the 1800s, popularized by Henry Ford at the Ford motor company due to measurable improvements to productivity, and made law in the 1930s (in the US) to attempt to counter wide-spread unemployment during the Great Depression. Union pressure is not mentioned anywhere, and honestly doesn't make any sense given that unions were not particularly powerful in those time periods.
> Union pressure is not mentioned anywhere, and honestly doesn't make any sense given that unions were not particularly powerful in those time periods.
Unions were so powerful in the early 1900s that multiple revolutions occurred in part due to their pressure and actions all around the industrialised world. And the fear of strikes led to many reforms and regulations to take talking points off unions (like Bismarck enacting the first welfare state to be a step ahead of social democrats).
Specifically in the US, look at the Coal Wars and the Battle of Blair Mountain in which the US army fought with aircraft and artillery against striking miners.
> I'll extend my argument to suggest that most HNers are familiar with changes that can not be tested in isolation, simply because they require significant changes to the whole platform. [0]
Flag days are still tested in a staging environment that represents production as closely as possible, and the overwhelming view of the kind of change you're talking about on a technical level is generally don't do that if you can ever help it.
This was piloted, only those who first rose to clamor for it were the guinea pigs for years, in place of the previous 6-6, mon-sat, 15-expiration.
Otherwise it couldn't have gotten so popular and we couldn't have inherited it.
https://www.firstpost.com/india/karnataka-congress-governmen...
heh. go away and take your UBI and 38 hour work week. they are implementing a law to enforce this. so you will work for twice a 38 hour work week and still be paid less because why not.
Oh don't be cynical, free money won't come with strings attached.
There are things that work and couldn’t be piloted - Postal System for example.
Couriers have existed since the beginning of civilization. With many famous examples, like Pheidippides in keeping with the Olympic spirit.
It was obviously valuable and workable from the smallest scale possible: a verbal message carried by a runner.
But the network effect of mass messaging —- is what the article means by unpilotable.
The network effect of mass messaging was tested at smaller scales many times. Victorian era pneumatic tubes come to mind or unlimited local calls later, but there must be countless other examples that did not require changing the economy as a whole.
but is changing the economy as a whole a fair characterization of UBI?
That’s a disservice to the existing complexity of modern economies.
Valid arguments not downvoted pls
I think the overwhelming majority of transactions can be characterized as a trade (of goods for money, services for money, work for money, money for other money (in form or time), etc.)
UBI seems quite different in that regard and, while it doesn’t invalidate everything, it introduces a lot more of money for nothing and a corresponding nothing for money trade that is required to fund it.
Courier services have existed for a very, very long time. Heck, Ben Franklin was running one to help connect the 13 colonies.
Presumably the government could have actuslly piloted the USPS if they wanted to, only supporting the northeast for example. They just didn't need to, the leap from private courier systems to a government run courier service didn't have many unknowns to test out first.
How so? The first postal systems certainly didn't cover entire kingdoms and didn't serve the entire population.
They did work at smaller scale though. It's not dependent on psychological dynamics like UBI.
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices.
The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.
If it appears that there will be an expansion of social benefits, the wealthy class will work to sabotage it (a la ACA; not that there weren't benefits, but net-net the shareholders and executives of insurance companies won). There's nothing stopping them.
What's more likely to happen, IMO, is that as the cost of existing increases, the birth rates will continue to decline. Rather than address this population crisis, the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc. With their left hand, they'll import cheap labor. With their right, they'll pit the rest of us against this cheap labor to distract from reality. The corporations want this cheap, imported labor -- they just don't want to pay the taxes to support social services for anyone.
The wealth gap will continue to widen without a voting base willing to increase taxation. And to suppress this, the wealthy will use a narrative that is driven by the media consolidated and owned by these mega-rich. There are increasingly few politicians on either side that feel like they are genuine about solving this issue. The flood of money in politics feels like it's broken the system.
> the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc.
The end game is something like the planet Solaria from Asimov.
Everything you say may be true, but is orthogonal.
I do think social benefits are expanding in the USA also, more and more people find it viable to be a NEET. The wealth gap will surely widen; this implicit UBI is certainly not communism in any way. Truth is, today western societies can afford to provide the basics for everyone, so ultimately withholding in order to keep the masses in the jobs is not tenable.
> There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions
I agree, in the sense that I think UBI proponents would do better to lobby for that than a big, deus-ex-machina version of UBI. But I don't see it happening "naturally", without a lot of political effort.
I do see it happening naturally; the very idea that an UBI idea is floating around is a product of the wealth and automation we enjoy. It's a realization that sets in on a broad front, from bullshit jobs, to new generations of products that are not improving much or even regressing, environmental concerns that discourage producing more, massive government budgets squandered ("why not give it to the people who need it?"), and COVID giving people a pause in their respective hamster wheels.
Imagine a technological reset and/or war: Under those circumstances one could still argue for a socialist system of work, but not for people doing nothing getting UBI.
Maybe things are different where you live, but it seems like the opposite is happening here (the UK). The State Pension (UBI for old people) is getting further restricted. At least anecdotally, it seems like it's getting harder to claim benefits like Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payments. We introduced additional caps on benefit payments in 2013 and again in 2017. Our new government doesn't show any obvious sign of reversing the trend, and I don't see any popular movement to encourage them to.
All right, there are certainly other major forces affecting western societies and various scenarios could play out in the future. Let's put our weight behind the movements that would lead to some positive outcomes...
> Unsurprisingly, the study participants became less inclined to work jobs.
while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.
Agreed too much emphasis placed on a small data point from one study. Oddly enough my response was the opposite — only 2%??
I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day.
People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end.
And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job.
But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset.
This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief.
But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work.
So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless.
Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.
> It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
This is an oversimplification naturally but the gist of it is spot on. Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere. One thing leads to another, and that's how most wealth is created by robbing the future. But the future actually arrives some day, and we're seeing some of that now.
There's no exit strategy for this behaviour though. Since so many people did exactly what they were incentivized to do, they of course don't want the rules to change now. The current generation will always need to pay 10x whatever a house is worth, because otherwise all of the people in the last generation can't afford to settle debts / retire / pay unreasonable amounts for healthcare. This puts the current generation in debt, so that they have to rob the next, and so on until there's some collapse. Most millennials have had a rough time waiting for that collapse though, so lots have bought something on credit to build equity rather than continuing to throw away money on rent. Soon instead of cheering on any kind of collapse in the housing market, they also will want it postponed because they will need to rob the next generation. But each iteration of this same game isn't exactly the same, because every generation does a little worse while more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.
> Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere.
2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.
Much more generally: Think in terms of supply and demand. If nobody is going to work any more, then the price of work goes way up. So does the price of things that work produces.
> 2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.
Totally. Just because it's the game that capital wants us to play doesn't mean that there's any guarantee that you win. It's just also that it's the only way to maybe win. This supports parent's argument that wealth distribution is arbitrary. One person wins and another loses, playing the same game the same way, just because they entered the market at different times. The uncomfortable contradiction that we're supposed to generally agree with is that the first person is "smart and hardworking", and the second person "is financially irresponsible, obviously living outside their means".
> So does the price of things that work produces.
Not sure if this a comment re: UBI, antiwork, or housing costs, but housing in particular is always a special kind of crazy because we've insisted on looking at it as a financial vehicle instead of you know, a place to live and work from. Prefab things that could cut costs are illegal most places. In Florida they build labor-intensive houses out of match-sticks even though the next hurricane is always coming, because that's what's easy to permit, that's what people historically wanted to insure, and it keeps construction rackets and developers in business. Further from the coasts, even in the more sparsely populated mountain/desert states, you can go to the edge of any larger town and look out at the "supply" of hundreds of miles of empty, and still get forced into paying half a million for a crappy place on half an acre. Supply and demand is certainly some kind of a factor, but like parents point about wealth-from-work vs wealth-from-asset-appreciation, it's a small factor and getting smaller. The market's already intensely manipulated.. it's just done in a way that makes problems worse instead of better.
Sir, you write so well! I read it twice and then I had to literally put the phone away and walk around, letting your thoughts bounce around in my little brain. Just felt I needed to thank you for taking the time. Thanks.
The only tweak I would make is to disregard financial assets as assets in this context. Holding money isn't really that different than holding IOUs for a share of stock that you'll never actually own.
If a person is really does view money as smoke and mirrors, and is concerned that it can be printed whenever it's needed, tangible assets like land or tools at least useful if you no longer see value on money.
That said, I'm not advocating for that view necessarily and very much agree with your take here. People do seem to be losing faith in money, at least a bit, and that can be very dangerous if the faith continues to erode.
Does anybody have advice for finding appropriate assets to purchase for individuals of very low net worth? Suitable here means:
- affordable to begin with (max 3-4 figures)
- not mass produced (so they’re not already hyper-efficiently distributed to market)
- demand for them will continue to exist (so you can be assured to liquidate them when necessary)
- their value is likely to appreciate (at the very least in line with inflation).
The only example I could come up with is hand-crafted (unique) collectibles, like figurines and such.
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Doesn't UBI equate to lowering the prices for everything? Isn't it more feasible to pursue the latter?
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
Handing out money will never make resources appear where they don't exist though. And if we want to say everyone should have access to certain resources, having money as an intermediary actually does us a diservice.
If everyone should have access to water, federalize water utilities and don't charge anyone. You will them have to deal with access rights though. How much water is enough for everyone to have access to? How do we avoid water rights issues even worse than what California has?
Defining certain resources as a fundamental right while still forcing them to operate as a free market is a risky game of chicken. If prices are still able to fluctuate in response to market supply & demand then we really aren't saying we truly believe everyone should have water, shelter, etc. A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
> A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
Conveniently, money can be used to acquire resources.
Also conveniently, when prices are partly decided by market factors the fundamental right to a resource may be impacted. If we really think everyone should be guaranteed access to water, electricity, housing, food, etc those resources would just be available and wouldn't require the market abstraction of money.
We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. ... What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.
Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
> ...I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
That's fair and totally 1000% reasonable. However:
What if (whether through sudden injury or the accumulated injuries of aging) you become utterly unable to work, you've burned through your savings, all your family is dead, and you're an unlikable cunt [0] so those around you are supremely disinclined to provide assistance? Should you be cast out into the wilderness to starve?
What if you were born permanently unable to work and utterly unsympathetic? Should your fate be to die of exposure?
[0] I cannot stress hard enough that if you think I'm making comment about your character, please do remember that I absolutely am not. I don't know shit about you, so I cannot comment on your character. However, injury, illness, and prolonged bad periods can absolutely turn someone into an unlikable cunt... driving away a predicated-on-tolerability material-and-emotional support network just when one needs it most.
That's a welfare argument, not really relevant to UBI.
> That's a welfare argument, not really relevant to UBI.
UBI is welfare.
Is it not reasonable to consider a UBI as a universal welfare program?
Yes, that’s the seemingly obviously correct way to think about it. Which is also why many people who think the sliver of population who is unable to work should be able to get welfare to avoid starving, but that the vast majority of the population who is capable of productive work should be expected to provide for their own consumption rather than have it be provided to them.
> I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage
You aren't, individually, but shouldn't we, collectively?
Part of the problem is that if people don't have access to those things then they don't have much incentive to support the government or things like property rights.
I wouldn’t argue that you’re responsible for anyone. I would argue more that if you value the suffering of conscious things, it is a very short logical leap to care about such in all humans, even those who you don’t directly interact with. You don’t need to feel anything about them or be responsible for them to take the alleviation of broader human suffering into account when discussing policy. Do we disagree on this?
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
A government that governs a nation is arguably responsible for every human in it.
This is the core of so many problems in western governments today. Governments should be there to coordinate complex problems that society doesn't have a better way to handle. Governments should not be there to be a responsible parent to everyone, whether they want it or not.
What do you think happens to the wealthy when the government does not ensure the majority of people are well fed and secure?
Does the mob respect property rights?
Sorry, I'm not quite sure how that ties in. What's your point here with regards to a UBI and whether a government should work for or be parent to its constituents?
Citizens have to obey their country's laws (restriction of freedom) in exchange for government taking care of essential human needs like housing, clean water, electricity, food, and so on (obligation of the government).
If a citizen cannot get access to those needs (and remember - 5% unemployment is optimal), then why would anyone expect them to keep following their country' laws, and not steal and murder?
You seem to be assuming that we first have to have countries, laws, and governments. That seems like an obvious assumptuon today, but that isn't an absolute fundamental of life.
People don't need the heavy hand of governments and laws to stop them from stealing and murdering, as if that is the base state for all humans. If there were no laws, would you move right on to both of those acts?
> People don't need the heavy hand of governments and laws to stop them from stealing and murdering, as if that is the base state for all humans. If there were no laws, would you move right on to both of those acts?
In absence of police-like force enforcing rules, crime happens often, so people naturally create police-like forces like neighbourhood watches to prevent crime.
Countries, laws and governments aren't un-natural - they're just more complex and powerful versions of institutions that naturally appear in any organized group of people.
If you were in a tribe whose hunters were hoarding meat for their fat sons, would you starve to death to avoid stealing because stealing is wrong?
Not even remotely so in practice. Adults are largely responsible for themselves and their kids/elders. Sure, with some government assistance but true state wards are fairly rare and the system would have no chance of working if they weren't.
> true state wards are fairly rare and the system would have no chance of working if they weren't
How so? Wouldn't that, at the very least, solve homelessness?
> Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Do you expect them to respect your right to have those things? IMO, your line of thought leads to violent revolution.
I don't think you can usefully equate 'UBI' to a single outcome of UBI.
One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero.
And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong.
Why should it cost to live?
(You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
> Why should it cost to live?
Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us.
A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom...
There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
Very good points.
You're right, it does tend toward medieval when the serfs have less agency than the landed gentry.
>Why should it cost to live?
We would have to get out our slide rules, or maybe go back to them ;)
Well if previous generations productively built the richest country because of the most widespread opportunity (without taxing income) in historical times, and prevailed handily like no other when challenged by financially devastating world-wide conflict, with plenty of time to invest the surplus wisely and let it appreciate, you would expect by now everybody would be able to coast, but Nooo . . .
The government dropped the ball and it was already big enough to take away everything you had.
In complete defiance of what all those generations had in mind for us now, and everything every American had ever worked for.
That's why the cost of living is not lower, if not zero, or even negative, if only slightly better choices would have been made. Compounded over all this time !! And that's with only better stewardship of the percentage taken out of laborers' pay once that got going, without even considering the wealth of the citizens that had been built up before the quest for revenue did a 180 and turned on internal targets.
My dude, that is a despairing world view you have there.
First, no UBI proponents are suggesting that it be
a) combined with a bureaucratic dictatorship, and
b) implemented absent significant concurrent social and financial changes.
Your phrasing makes me think you're based in the USA, and so I can understand some of the societal norms that might have led you to believe we can't have a better quality of life, a better society, simply because amoeba have to hunt their prey to survive.
We -- intelligent life forms with breathtakingly advanced technologies (compared to what we would need to just live) -- can do much better.
Surely cost of living, expressed as hours of labour, remains the same regardless. Anyone can reduce their cost of living by reducing the standard of living.
Your premise is patently not true.
No it doesn't, you can't multiply a zero income by any number and put people out of poverty. You can't redistribute wealth by multiplying everybody's income either.
But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
UBI equates to an assumption that the government can predict and control markets completely, effectively destroying markets that resemble anything like a free market.
Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.
The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc.
UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.
Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy.
Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.
According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?
Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources.
As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.
That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.
Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.
> Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?
I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.
Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.
Social safety nets today are needed weslth distribution. A UBI needs to cover everyone. With the same funding a UBI would have to provide less benefit than the programs we have today.
That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.
UBI requires changes to the tax code, but look at the comparison between SNAP and the 10% tax bracket for people making 0-11,600$ in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086690
At least for single people how SNAP sunsets with income is almost 1:1 with the discount for the lowest tax bracket.
Thus changing SNAP to a low UBI could have almost zero impact.
If the current spending on safety nets is spread evenly over the whole society, won't the current recipients not have enough to live?
Only if you ignore the tax code. US example for single people:
SNAP for a single person is $291/month - total income * 0.3 so they get nothing at 11,640 per year of annual income and 291$/month at 0$ annual income.
2024 income brackets for single people are: 10% $0 to $11,600, 12% $11,600 to $47,150, 22% $47,151 to $100,525, ... Maximum tax bracket is 37%.
Hand everyone 260$ per month, but change things so the highest tax bracket 37% applies $0 to $11,600 and everyone making 12,000+$/ year sees zero change in their take home pay. And people making 0$/year get 260$/month.
Those numbers aren’t quite identical, but it’s surprising how close it ends up. At 30%, $0 to $11,640 it’s off by less than 1$/year.
Not quite sure that I follow here. In your model, what are the proposed benefits given out as a UBI? Is it $260/mo reducing down to $0 when you make at least $12,000 per year?
If so, how is that universal? Or a basic income covering some of the basic resources UBI is argued to cover, like shelter or food?
My example was for a US UBI that only covered food and the math was limited to single people, but the points could be applied more broadly.
UBI means everyone has an income of at least x$/year. If you’re making more than x$/year in take home pay that’s an income > x$/year.
Behind the scenes the advantage of the government handing out money every month is redundancy. Even if that same amount is normally removed from a paycheck, people aren’t suddenly left with 0$ if their paycheck bounces etc. Thus a single deposit of $10,000 per month is slightly worse than a deposit of $10,000 - $x and an independent deposit of $x.
If you want to take the SNAP program as a baseline and only slightly tweak the limits on when funds taper off, why bother with a new UBI program at all? It sounds like SNAP gets you 90% of the way there, it mainly just needs the restrictions on what the money can be spent on removed.
With limits so low I'm not totally sure how it would make a meaningful difference compared to the various welfare and entitlement programs we have today in the US. We already have multiple programs attempting to give needs-based funding to the public. How is such a limited UBI as you describe it any different, or different enough to justify the massive political battle it would entail?
I was bringing it up as a starting point for discussion and to show how UBI doesn’t imply extra spending.
Proponents suggest bring more programs into a single UBI could significantly lower operating costs. A single check each month could replace some or all of: Housing assistance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), including Pass through Child Support, General Assistance (GA), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), etc.
Healthcare in the US is similarly split across Medicaid, Medicare, VA benefits, ACA health insurance subsidies, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), plus a host of things you haven’t heard of like Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. There’s a massive opportunity for cost savings by simply reducing administrative redundancy.
Interesting, I could see that going either way. Surely there is waste when funds are split across multiple programs, but the potential benefit to that approach is that people may get benefits from one or two programs rather than all of them.
WIC and the CA are great examples. The population helped by both programs is purposefully smaller than the total population. If the funds currently spent only on mothers or veterans is spread across everyone it seems reasonable that efficiencies of moving to a single program wouldn't make up for the increased number of beneficiaries.
It sounds like you are talking about some very different thing also abbreviated "UBI"? Here it stands for universal basic income.
No that's also what I'm talking about. If implemented, a UBI will subsidize every single market in the economy with federal dollars. For every dollar a consumer spends on any product, a portion of that money is directly from the government.
For a government to build and maintain a UBI program they will have to be able to predict where prices will be and how much money everyone needs or deserves to cover the basics. Assuming the country runs on a fiat currency and partskes in monetary policies meant to control the cost of money, a UBI adds another complex layer onto that puzzle making it even more challenging to predict and control markets.
No
Helpful, thanks. I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have anything worth sharing.
I'd be particularly interested how you would see a program on the scale of a UBI working sustainably if the government can't predict the outcomes. Or, alternstively, if you think the government can predivt the outcomes I'd be curious if you disagree with the OP author that a UBI can't be tested before a full rollout.
The US doesn't have a centrally planned economy, so the government can't lower the prices of everything. UBI is much more feasible to implement than communism.
Not centrally planned, except the humongous federal government, the central bank, the interstate highway system, even things like corn subsidies. There are a lot of centrally-planned areas.
It's centrally planned by all the monopolies we have
One problem not called out in any UBI arguments I've read, including this one, is how we even consider this while also arguing about how poorly our borders are managed.
Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.
> When we create jobs for a purpose other than the product of the labor, we’re paying people to waste their time unproductively. This is what happens under full-employment policy. This is what happens when we use expansionary monetary policy to boost consumer demand.
Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"?
Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."
I believe it's the bullshit jobs argument. You could point to Twitter though, or really any sizeable corporate layoff that isn't driven by entirely getting rid of departments or products.
Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
> Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
I don't see how this idea holds up to scrutiny. People who do actual work need time off regularly to keep concentration and motivation up, especially over long periods of time. These factors don't matter for bullshit jobs - who's gonna notice if their output is reduced?
The impact of time off is instead directly related to quality of management. People will need time off for various reasons. You can either work together and plan around this, or you can act like it's not the case and have a) less chance of properly planning, b) greater risk of the full team being affected (e.g. when sick colleagues come into work), and c) less happy workers with higher turnover.
Sure, I wasn't meaning to argue that any person who can be out sick or on leave without hurting the team is in a bullshit job.
I was just pointing to it as a potential indicator, an example of where we may be paying people to waste their time (that was the GP question).
If a team handles leave well due to management that's going to be very clear to the team, it's intentional and takes active work. If a person can be out unexpectedly for a meaningful amount of time and there's no noticeable impact with that role going undone, it may be that it's a bullshit job. It also may not be, people often exagerate how many bullshit jobs there really are.
The article revolves around the responses of Noah Smith but it is my opinion that Noah is not really a genuine actor. Noah to me just represents the system (as opposed to non-system [0]). His role is not to make radical conclusions but simply to provide a counter reactionary voice for the neo liberal order.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition
What would a non-system actor look like? Can you give some examples?
I have read through your comments until 2018. I think you just need to follow through on your instincts.
As to why the situation is not clear or why the answers are not easy to present:
"I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670
The author seems to effectively argue for UBI as a solution to bullshit jobs. People waste a lot of time today in jobs that produce no real value, instead the government should pay people a similar wage to not do those jobs.
> There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI.
More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis.
What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.
UBI is not at all based in Marxism. The idea is older than Marxism and almost entirely unrelated to it. That's probably why you never see it mentioned.
My point isn't that Marx invented the idea of a UBI, I don't actually recall him specifically writing about the concept. My point is that the idea of a UBI is rooted in very much the same arguments as what Marx wrote so much about.
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, well, I have others." -- Marx
BI is not for work, it's for when there is not enough opportunity for work that is productive enough to both better the worker measurably plus provide a return for the master.
Regardless of whether it's a shrinking economy everywhere or just one of the selected demographics or career fields which opportunity can be found receding from, or even "just" creeping credentialization with its growing exclusionary effect.
Plus what if there was never enough opportunity to begin with in one way or another?
What BI is really for is so that nobody ends up with absolutely nothing. On a regular basis while the rest of the world has descended into a situation where it's not enough to be fully out of debt and ahead of the game quite well at any one point. Not that many decades ago this had been enough to gain a secure enough foothold along the path to upward economic mobility. The need for cash outlays on a monthly basis has skyrocketed, just to be able to participate in the same society as those millions having only barely-productive jobs. And the threshold between productive vs barely-productive can be a faster-moving goalpost that can provide a distorting illusion to "smart" people no different than anybody else.
A country can't even afford the most minimal "welfare" payouts to a small minority of the most disenfranchised citizens if the country itself is a "poor" country in a serious way that would need to be remedied beforehand. But beyond a certain point any country that was successful as a whole to a certain extent would be able to afford to fix it at least for a minimally significant portion of citizens whom it would help the most. And the most detrimental effect it could have on the overall economy would naturally be minimally significant. And that's the cost for a place that is not a rich country at all and can barely afford anything like this. Some people are just better at math than others.
In a truly rich country you have overwhelming resources compared to that, so you can draw the line where a lot more significant percentage of citizens can be kept away from the zero mark. How rich are you capable of being anyway?
There's not much difference between now and over 50 years ago when the continuous devaluation of currency was commenced. Other than scale. Back then only a small minority of citizens was left with absolutely nothing on a regular basis whether they had a job or not and whether that job was nearly as financially beneficial to others more so than the worker. A handful of people would be using food stamps at the supermarket, now it's every single cashier multiple times per hour.
People paying the workers are so heavily in debt now it can't work the same any more, and the workers themselves are even worse off at the same jobs.
But it's the same system, only the balance of wealth has changed and the buffer that has been increasingly absorbed is the citizen's resource level needed to avoid being pushed to zero by ever-more-prevailing forces.
Now no matter how you do the math, it's not a small minority of the most opportunity-denied citizens who need something on a regular basis to keep from going to zero. It's getting to be a serious majority who are increasingly at risk and the sooner something is done about it the better since it could take quite a while to take effect and the first salvo might not have enough smart people making the decisions.
UBI is not some new concept, it's just regular BI all grown up since it seems like everybody is at risk now, no differently than only the worst-off were facing before so much of a country's wealth had been extracted from the citizens to who knows where. It took a while but it's just about squeezed dry.
A valid argument against UBI is that everybody doesn't actually need it yet, but you've got to remember that for things to continue trending in the direction having the greatest financial momentum, more people will be needing it if the true beneficiaries (rent-seekers) are to continue experiencing the growth prospects they have in mind.
Sure, I don't disagree with you about what the concept of a (U)BI is. I am arguing, though, that fundamentally a UBI maps very well to Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" writings.
Basic income on the scale of welfare programs for a small minority of the most poor aren't quite the same. A UBI is a much more broad program, even if it doesn't help every single person it does attempt to prop up a large chunk of the population. At that point we're solving the wrong problem.
That were we definitely agree. A growing number of people in the US are falling behind. We need to fix the root cause of that though, the lack of money is only an obvious symptom. If our social, political, or economic systems are the underlying problem then let's fix those. Throwing a UBI at the problem creates even more chaos in the system and we simply don't know what the side effects will be.
Worse, if a UBI isn't the right answer we will have wasted all of our attention and political capital forcing it through. We almost certainly would walk away feeling like we solved it and end up in a worse spot when we're blind to the still growing problem. Roe v Wade comes to mind, we hung our hat on the victory of one supreme court decision when what was really needed was legislation codifying the decision.
Snake oil is snake oil, but what if the economy is already upended?
Plus after all recommended remedies have been tried, the only possible solution is to implement something that is not recommended.
You're going to need a different kind of oil . . .
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually, you're making a lot of sense all over the place, along with many others.
Do you think we have tried all the recomended remedies? And who do we look to to define what is and isn't recommended?
We're in uncharted territory here, at least in modern history. At best experts can hypothesize about different interventions but they are ultimately making assumptions that frequently go unspoken.
The biggest category of remedies that I rare, if ever, see recommended is removing interventions from a complex system that has gone awry. In this case, instead of adding more layers to the economy by having the government give most people free money, potentially by racking uppre debt, maybe we should be reducing costs and liabilities. I wouldn't pretend to know what can or should be removed, but I would love to see honest research and consideration going towards what a remedy may look like if we come at it from the angle of subtraction.
>we should be reducing costs and liabilities.
This is the only real answer and the ongoing failure there is bad enough, but it's getting worse not better at a growing rate, and the few that do benefit when the majority suffer have had the upper hand financially for so long now, there may never be any possible reduction. I think this underlies a lot of the confusion about a solution since there's been increasing doubt for generations that there even is a solution to costs that didn't used to exist. It's been over 50 full years since I saw this accelerate through the roof and I already thought how was all of this bearable before that? It was plain to see it was unsustainable or we would end up like we are now. The only fair and predictable way to reverse never-ending wasteful costs that end up being imposed universally (to all citizens whether they own any currency or not), would be to roll them back in the reverse order in which they were imposed. And go back as far as it takes for the US to be as "rich" as it once was.
That was then and it already seemed impossible :(
>Do you think we have tried all the recomended remedies?
Even back then I never thought all sensible remedies would be tried in my lifetime and it was more of a shock then compared to a gradual boiling since.
>And who do we look to to define what is and isn't recommended?
There is no answer when everybody who says they have one can only be lying.
>We're in uncharted territory here
That's so true, in spite of so many similarities and logically expected negative outcomes for an increasing majority, it's still not supposed to be this way by this time at all, and surely never been quite like this before. It's been awry for so long it can only get weirder.
Plus those actually acting in decision-making positions have never been as intellectually incapable of making sweeping changes, and everybody knows it, especially changes for the better. There is no end to the decline in brainpower. Politics only gets in the way further since smart people are limited to the same choices as dumb people.
Now a lot of the financial decision-makers are billionaires, but if they are so wise with money why is the whole country not as "rich" as it used to be?
UBI does seem a little communist being a "mandated wealth redistribution" but I think there are complete free-market capitalists who are OK with it when they do the math for themselves. At their scale it's not wealth being redistributed, it's a pittance.
It's like UBI could be huge and apply to everybody which really adds up, but too late, that's not sweeping changes any more. It's actually more likely and less disruptive to the powers-that-be compared to fixing the real problem which I'm sure some very sophisticated financial institutions have calculated would be even more costly, for them. By untold amounts, so don't go there. Everything unspoken may not be an assumption.
>I would love to see honest research
Your eyes would have to be very privileged for that :)
Citizens be damned, let them eat cake, or soylent green, whatever they can get their hands on. Maybe not, if you do give enough for the population to have cake every month, they might be revolting anyway, so why bother ;)
Don't we already have Marxism-Socialism though?
It been called many things from social safety net to welfare.
You can look at Social Security and its money woes as an example.
That system is going insolvent with people contributing.
It is mandatory to contribute if you are gainfully employed..
Programs that truly are needs based don't really fit into the Marxist approach. UBI is much closer to, or just is, Marxism because its universal. You get the money simply because the government decided that is the amount of money everyone needs and deserves.
From the post...
> the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed.
To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc.
Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society.
It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way.
We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies.
The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
That may be the crux of it though, people largely don't know what "enough" means.
People aren't okay with having shelter, food, water, and community. We want the smartphones, huge TVs, ridiculously expensive cars, access to fly anywhere in the world, etc. We absolutely could have all the basics cover, and then some, with 20% of the work we all put in today but few people want that world.
You forgot about all the people making minimum wage working 40+ hours who can't afford the basics like food and shelter
Because you can cover your necessities with 20% of your income doesn't mean everyone else can.
I know several people on SSI who had to take under the table jobs because their checks wont cover their food and shelter. And that's with food stamps. If they get a regular job they lose their SSI.
Ive got a friend who had to take a part time job dashing after work as a supervisor at my factory.
I think about this stuff when I'm working overtime- how lucky I am to be able to rather than have to find a second job.
I make over 6 figures as an electrician/instrumentation technician. I have a surgery coming up in September that's going to cost me 40k+. Instead of feeling it's so much and all the other things I could use that money for, I try to remind myself I'm blessed to be able to afford it without saving for years. I, again, know people who work full time and don't make that in a year.
I was actually thinking about the societal level here rather than any one person's financial situation.
I expect that we could make sure everyone had the basics much more easily if the average person could define what "enough" means for themselves. For one thing, we would be using many fewer resources as a country and would therefore be much better able to make sure the resources we do have would be available. For another, when a person knows what "enough" is for them they may decide to work less when they achieve that goal, leaving those potential paying work hours for the next person that needs the work.
It feels like people go to far the other way as well. People don't just need shelter, food, water, and community. Things like entertainment, art, and learning are also essential to having a good life.
Totally agree here. In my opinion, though, a UBI won't help with those and could actually hurt. We continue to quantify our lives to the point where the government can put a price on the products they deem me to be entitled to.
I'm not totally sold on Iain McGilchrist's specific analogy of the brain hemispheres, but his underlying point is spot on. In his model, we continue to make our world more and more left-brained (analytical) and we're losing the way of seeing the world required for art, community, etc. I expect a UBI would just make that worse, further quantifying our lives and reinforcing the idea that we're all cogs in a machine that can purr like a kitten if we just do as we're told and avoid thinking critically or differently.
Unless you can provide some hard figures, that number is probably not really accurate.
I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food.
I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions.
We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.
I'd argue that the labor required for growing food and building houses is highly dependent on the scale you are trying to achieve.
Raising enough food for a small family is very doable when you don't spend 40+ hours per week working for the paycheck. Building a small house is definitely a big project, but very doable as long as you aren't attempting to wind the clock all the way back and milling your own lumber. It can be done with a surprisingly small set of tools if the house is reasonably sized and designed with your tools and skills in mind from the beginning.
Is the average person going to build their own 2,500 square foot two-story house and grow enough food to feed everyone? Obviously not. But could a person build a 900 sq ft ranch, have a garden feeding their family, and raise animals for their own meat, dairy, and eggs? They absolutely can, I'm doing it today, and if climate change concerns you the reduced impact on the environment is huge.
Sure maybe 20% can run the basics but what about building or growing society?
That's not required. So long as it's not falling apart (which it currently is, by the way).
Well, what I think we learned from COVID is that a bunch of the jobs that we think of as "bullshit" are really important. Yeah, critical-care nurses are important, we saw that, but we found out that grocery store workers are pretty critical, too. And truck drivers.
For that matter, I was at work a bit ago, using the restroom, and this janitor guy came in and started refilling the toilet paper rolls in the stalls. And it struck me that his job was really important. I don't want to do his job, but I absolutely don't want to work somewhere where nobody does it...
It seems people forget the most obvious thing: A government powerful enough to give everybody a salary is powerful enough to REMOVE everybody's salary. It is also a monopoly of power.
That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well.
UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor.
And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.
When you take away the government's monopoly on power you get what subsequently happened in Russia, a handful of oligarchs who have all the power instead.
Power != force, and Western governments certainly don't have a monopoly on power.
> UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work
Can you explain what you mean by "confiscatory" and how it differs from normal income tax?
This comment suggests your views are heavily biased by capital owned/controlled western media.
Here's a different take, with modern China as an example:
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/chinas-thi...
Your answer to "capitalist owned/controlled western media" is China's third plenum? You think that's going to be less biased?
It links to a blog post about China's third plenum and gives examples of western media's bias in relation to it. At least that's a dialog instead of the single sided take you offered originally.
Exactly, the list of conditions to keep what is now your only available source of income happy will keep growing.
Hesitant about the latest gene therapy, no money for you.
The government can already tell you to do things.
Of course, but they don't have the same means to force me.
Look, I think taking care of everyone is a great idea, about time too.
But giving centralized government even more power is likely a very, very bad idea.
So this explanation is neat and tidy. The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate. So they start demanding exorbitant wages, show up late, if at all. This is productive work, and productive work that frees higher skilled resources to be more productive.
Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
> The problem we learned in COVID payouts is that people would rather watch Netflix and smoke weed all day than do any amount of low skilled work at a job they hate.
We've uh, we've known this for millennia. "When no longer required to do something that they hate, people will often choose to stop doing that hated thing." is not even a little bit surprising.
> ...and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
Nah. Most folks don't give a shit about whether or not their work has "meaning". They work to fund their hobbies and fun, they don't work to find "meaning". Terminally-management-brained middle managers sure THINK that it's important for rank-and-file people to understand that their work has "meaning", though. They can't fuckin seem to shut up about it.
That's not my experience at all. Most people I know and have worked with care a lot about if their work has meaning. The people who do not are the outliers.
So, most people you know live to work, rather than work to live? Just out of curiosity, are most people you know what would generally be called in the US "white-collar" workers?