The principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income (2015)

https://medium.com/@thersa/creative-citizen-creative-state-a3cef3f25775#.3n4hli2vj

by drawnalong • 10 years ago

39 101 10 years ago

The byline appears to have a redundancy, or a contradiction:

There is an increasing global conversation about the idea of a ‘Universal Basic Income’ – a universal weekly payment to all eligible citizens.

Wouldn't everyone be eligible for a universal basic income? Are all persons eligible citizens? Is the article actually talking about an ‘Eligible Citizens' Basic Income’?

hermannj3143• 10 years ago

I'm guessing criminals (current and former), drug addicts, and the willfully unemployed wouldn't be eligible. These are the vulnerable, marginalized and (sometimes) disenfranchised groups that America loves to shit on when it comes to social programs and basic rights.

josscrowcroft• 10 years ago

"I'm guessing criminals (current and former), drug addicts, and the willfully unemployed wouldn't be eligible."

I believe "criminals (current and former), drug addicts, and the willfully unemployed" are all eligible under most proposed schemes, although the income level may differ for current prisoners.

Edit: according to the RSA blog introducing their proposal: "Prisoners would not receive it."

https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rs...

"These are the vulnerable, marginalized and (sometimes) disenfranchised groups that America loves to shit on when it comes to social programs and basic rights."

The RSA (publisher of this report) is British.

delecti• 10 years ago

If anything, currently imprisoned criminals should definitely keep receiving at least some of their UBI, so they can land on their feet when they're released rather than just resorting to crime again.

I see no reason why we should exclude drug addicts. What level of drug do you start to count against a person? More people die from alcohol than marijuana, and I barely know anybody who isn't on some level addicted to caffeine. Prescription opiates are entirely legal, but lots of people are addicted to those.

The willfully unemployed are more or less the entire point of UBI. The theory is that as society increasingly moves towards automation, there will be fewer and fewer jobs, making the willfully unemployed a rapidly growing segment of the population, and that's a good thing as it will allow people to do with their time what they will.

drcube• 10 years ago

My guess is they're just hedging their bets with regard to wording. Presumably, there will be some crimes that entail losing your basic income, and it's probably up in the air whether the basic income will apply in whole or in part to children.

So "eligible citizens" in this case probably means "almost everybody, minus a few exceptions the legislature will certainly come up with".

notahacker7• 10 years ago

If you make literally everyone eligible for a basic income, you run into the small problem of the world's GDP per capita being around $13k in US purchasing power: around the levels generally proposed for a BI in a developed country.

It's obviously not feasible to promise everyone that indefinitely with no strings attached so long as they turn up in your country and ask for it. Simplest solution is to make it passport based. This particular proposal appears to insist that young people prove they deserve it too...

sctb• 10 years ago

We updated the URL from https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/re..., which points to this.

jupiterrising2• 10 years ago

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mjevans2• 10 years ago

In a lot of cultures, realized or not, having tons of children is a form of retirement insurance. Having basic income eliminates this uncertainty.

I'll reply to the implied point in a second post.

beat7• 10 years ago

"Breeding for welfare" is a myth. Children are a major economic burden, even with welfare subsidies.

That said, there's no reason offhand to provide basic income to minors. Parents can choose to have as many children as they want, at their own expense. One of the key advantages of basic income is getting rid of the complexities and irregularities of the current welfare model. Subsidies for children are one of those complexities.

jupiterrising2• 10 years ago

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Lawtonfogle• 10 years ago

One solution would be to not give basic income for children, but to give it to children once they are working age (~16) or when they become an independent adult (18). Everyone gets a certain amount to provide a very basic life on, where they get to decide how their money is spent. If they rather spend their BI on children instead of some other area of life, then that is their choice. If they want both, then they should continue getting a job to acquire funds beyond the BI amount.

brbsix2• 10 years ago

I think the bigger issue is that women are having children that they would otherwise not be able to afford. We know that people respond to incentives. Between free healthcare, WIC credit, free or low cost child care, public education, and more, there's massive subsidization.

UBI still permits people to have children that they'd otherwise be unable to afford, but at least the absence of other sibsidies will force individuals to decide how they'd like to budget that income, on children or otherwise.

hermannj3143• 10 years ago

The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

Social programs generally are not considered as income and do not preclude you from being eligible for other social programs (i.e. the benefits stack). This creates the unfortunate situation that some people that don't work at all receive more annual income (in kind) from the government than their working neighbors. It works out to nearly $60k per year in benefits.

I support the idea of a basic income that strives to create an equitable situation for the working class.

aoeusnth12• 10 years ago

Absolutely - and UBI would free people who want to work from having to find dead-end jobs. They would have the financial freedom to pursue education, volunteering or educational unpaid internships.

infogulch• 10 years ago

The solution to beat this problem is to reduce the benefits in a gradient as people make more of their own income. Here's the key: Benefits must be reduced more slowly than the increase in income. I.e. at all possible incomes, it must always be the case that if an individual were to make $1 more income, benefit reduction is significantly less than $1.

crdoconnor• 10 years ago

The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

It also artificially eliminates jobs that need to exist via austerity (e.g. not building necessary infrastructure), offshoring (moving manufacturing jobs abroad) and massive transfers of wealth to the already wealthy (e.g. wall street bailouts).

The techno-utopian notion of us approaching a post-work society glosses over these three things in a major way.

golemotron9• 10 years ago

The idea of basic income is commendable, but do we really want a system that incentivizes large families?

In Europe and Japan, yes. Birthrates are down and that leads to a number of bad social and economic consequences.

ThomPete17• 10 years ago

There is absolutely nothing that indicates that people would want large families just because they have more money. Having a kid is expensive both money wise and timewise.

So I think it's kind of a pseudo problem.

You could solve most of that by making sure that people use condoms and that it isn't religiously wrong.

mjevans2• 10 years ago

Addressing the implication of breeding for money, I actually prefer the solutions explored in Larry Nivin's main fictional universe.

Importantly, in that universe, different regions of human colonization had different limits for births; including un-affiliated areas (space between planets) having unregulated birthrates.

For the context of Earth/Terra:

I forget if it was one or two children, but for sure, for two parents 'the first child is free'. Let's simplify that and say that for each contributing parent (to society) the first child is free.

After that additional children slots can either be obtained through exponentially larger tax payments, performing a significant contribution to society (E.G. Nobel Prize winners might be granted unlimited reproduction rights), or winning a lottery.

Obviously in the case of massive global war, famine, or disease (age death waves included), additional children might be built in to the quota to keep the population at desired levels.

humanrebar3• 10 years ago

...I actually prefer the solutions explored in Larry Nivin's main fictional universe.

Was he advocating that? I thought it was just a setup for plot points explored in Ringworld.

metaphorm• 10 years ago

I'm really surprised to see anyone making this kind of argument. Do you honestly believe it or is this just devil's advocate stuff?

ThomPete17• 10 years ago

What most of these cases get wrong is that they confuse UBI as yet another way to deal with unemployment as the market corrects itself and new jobs are created.

I.e. it's seen as this temporary state that we might or might not be in for a limited amount of time.

The truth is that UBI is meant to deal with the fact that we will more or less all be unemployed and have no jobs and thus no income.

It's not meant to solve an isolated problem with the labour market, it's meant to solve the realization that there wont be any.

beat7• 10 years ago

It's not so much that there won't be a labor market, but rather than radical changes to the labor market are accelerating.

Two centuries ago, well over 90% of income earners were farmers. Today, it's like 2% and dropping. But unemployment didn't become a more massive problem than it was then. Labor became available for other purposes, enabling the industrial revolution.

ThomPete17• 10 years ago

Yeah but it's accelerating at such a rate that it's important to look at the endgame which IMO is no labour market.

I agree that even before we reach that level the issue is thre and so it will serve as a help for those who are "left behind".

chrisco2555• 10 years ago

We had 25%+ unemployment during the Great Depression, at a time when hardly any women were in the workforce. I would say that was a much more difficult time than this great stagnation we find ourselves in currently. Our economy is now largely service-based, but we are still quite a ways off from automating most services. There's a lot of speculation that the economy will imminently suffer rapid upheaval with few jobs to replace the ones that are automated, but it remains speculative.

aoeusnth12• 10 years ago

It's not just a way to deal with massive job replacement (by machines)... it's also a sensible policy to remove the poverty traps of unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, etc. These policies all create an incentive to avoid making money. UBI creates no such incentive - furthermore, it gives people the breathing space to find more productive ways to spend their time than dead-end jobs (such as getting an education).

ThomPete17• 10 years ago

Oh I agree I am just trying to pre-empt the typical discussion about whether someone is intensified to work if they get the basic income covered.

It's the wrong question.

golemotron9• 10 years ago

UBI seems like a good idea but it is important to recognize that the problem it seeks to solve has a cultural component too. Some people will use free money to build enriching lives. Others will fall into various addictions because they haven't found meaning. I'd like to see a UBI conversation that discusses is this point because it is significant and the history of welfare shows that it is real.

cmrx64• 10 years ago

Others will fall into various addictions because they haven't found meaning.

Is that such a bad thing? I'm not even sure if the effect would be significantly different than today's situation, in which you can fall into any addiction you want if you have resources.

golemotron9• 10 years ago

I don't think it would be too much different either. The problem would be if there were negative externalities. That's likely if people try to shoot for meaning rather than addiction and find it in ways that hurt others. We've seen that throughout history with the young: gangs, terrorism, and revolution.

gshulegaard3• 10 years ago

For me, I don't see this as being a problem.

First, I am a believer in economic momentum and money multiplier dynamics (perhaps irrationally so). But with this belief more money being spent (consumption) makes for a stronger economy, for everyone, including those of us who are not in need of welfare. Our current welfare system places too much restriction and I feel leaves too many welfare recipients with non-optimal purchasing decision...not to mention there is an overhead to our (America's) current welfare system as far as administration and what-else.

Another thing is that there have been studies done which show that giving cash to the poor has better outcomes than expected: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...

There are also deeper things we can theorize about regarding poor behavior, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel like a UBI would be a more efficient welfare distribution (more money spent actually issued as monetary welfare benefits) which would have a stronger economic impact than our current welfare system.

Disclaimer: The above is just my opinion, not claiming it to be right or wrong.

humanrebar3• 10 years ago

But with this belief more money being spent (consumption) makes for a stronger economy, for everyone, including those of us who are not in need of welfare.

So what's your counter to the 'broken windows' objection? It's pertinent in this case because we're talking not about broken windows but broken (addicted, depressed, isolated) people.

throwaway20482• 10 years ago

The entire point of UBI is to get rid of 19th century style notions of worthy and unworthy poor people, thats a huge part of the inefficency and waste of the current system.

dragonwriter9• 10 years ago

The entire point of UBI is to get rid of 19th century style notions of worthy and unworthy poor people, thats a huge part of the inefficency and waste of the current system.

Well, not the entire point (there's lots of different reasons that people advocate UBI), but its certainly one of the points.

brbsix2• 10 years ago

By unworthy I assume you mean unworthy of our support and sympathy?

What differentiates the "19th century style" worthy and unworthy poor is that unworthy poor are thought to have made poor decisions and brought about their circumstances on themselves whereas the worthy poor were seen as suffering through little to no fault of their own.

Prior to the welfare state (which makes no such distinction) the "unworthy poor" served as an example of what not to do. Do we really want to discard that wisdom (even more than we already have)?

Put another way, is every poor person equally deserving of our support and sympathy? I would think not.

golemotron9• 10 years ago

The entire point of UBI is to get rid of 19th century style notions of worthy and unworthy poor people, thats a huge part of the inefficency and waste of the current system.

So noble. When people see others spending their money in ways that they wouldn't, do you really think notions of 'worthy' and 'unworthy' will go away? People are judgmental. History and current events show it to be a dependably consistent aspect of our nature.

As an aside, I think that the biggest challenge in this century will be to cast aside idealistic visions of 'tabula rasa' humanity (largely based in Marxism and subsequent modernism) that were part of the 20th century's program. You can't fix people, you can only create systems that accommodate, deflect, and channel toward positivity rather than work against their nature.

notahacker7• 10 years ago

Except that in any conceivable scheme in the future it doesn't, it just makes "worthy person" equal to "person with the decency to be born with the right passport" rather than "person who will be expected to contribute to our society in future if they can"

ebbv• 10 years ago

Yes and some people will spend their UBI on weapons and murder people.

Does that mean we try to figure out who's going to be murders so we don't give them any money?

Some people have problems. That doesn't mean you scrap a good thing just because you don't like dealing with problems.

golemotron9• 10 years ago

No one said that. Reread my comment. What I said is that the cultural component needs to be addressed too.

ones_and_zeros2• 10 years ago

For this to be a concern you'd have to believe that there are currently a significant amount of people that would "fall into various addictions" if only they could afford to...

golemotron9• 10 years ago

When there's a deficit of meaning in people's lives, that's true.

dragonwriter9• 10 years ago

UBI seems like a good idea but it is important to recognize that the problem it seeks to solve has a cultural component too.

I don't think you understand the problems it seeks to solve.

Among the major problems it seeks to address (different advocates may not consider all of these important, and some may consider additional problems):

(1) Means- and behavior-tested (and use-limited) welfare programs substitute external judgements of what will provide utility for the recipient for the recipients own judgement, and expend extensive resources applying the means- and behavior-tests, all of which causes significant inefficiencies.

(2) Using minimum wage to reduce economic duress in the labor market, while it has some demonstrated value such that many UBI see it as a net positive compared to no policy to address economic duress, also has drawbacks in that it eliminates the possibility of work that provides a mutual benefit being done, without economic duress, where the pay would be low. UBI provides an alternative approach to address mitigate economic duress and thus allow more work that provides net economic benefit to be done.

(3) Wealth and income inequality is accelerating, and in a way where the saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is not an accurate reflection of the results, with virtually all of the gains in recent economic expansion going to the very top of the distribution, and this produces a variety of social harms, and is expected to be reinforced as automation and other economic changes continue to reduce the relative value of labor other than the most skilled (resulting in returns increasingly going to capital and shrinking pool of elite labor). Some mechanism to constrain this growing inequality is seen as desirable to address the social impacts.

TrevorJ3• 10 years ago

TO me, they key problem you have to solve is: how do you avoid rent-seeking, and cost of living inflation? I'm not convinced UBI works in a free market.

dragonwriter9• 10 years ago

TO me, they key problem you have to solve is: how do you avoid rent-seeking, and cost of living inflation?

You avoid rent-seeking by avoiding monopolies; competitive markets prevent rent-seeking.

and cost of living inflation?

Monetary policy, the same way inflation is managed now.

That aside, before considering any corrective changes in monetary policy, any UBI is likely to produce some level of upward pressure on prices, but at a level where buying power is still increased for people on the lower end of the distribution receiving UBI.

The principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income (2015)

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