The Real Cost of Universal Basic Income

https://medium.com/@keredson/the-real-cost-of-universal-basic-income-757b6573e277

by keredson • 10 years ago

4 3 10 years ago

moxious• 10 years ago

I'd like to make a basic prediction about UBI. Maybe the Internet wayback machine can check me in 10 years.

Debate about the UBI will be driven not by facts, but by culture and how we perceive ourselves. I predict that in the US, where culture of entrepreneurship, (relatively) less government intervention, and individualism rules, that UBI is completely dead on arrival no matter its merits/demerits, whatever the facts.

I'd further predict that in Europe, a number of governments will flirt with it in the coming decade, but that the overall results will be completely inconclusive, owing to a mix of irregular implementation, and confounding factors that nobody can tease out. At first, bastardized half-measures will be implemented as small increments to existing welfare programs. Some may go all the way. Those that do will see an influx of immigration. There will be huge fights about whether the influx is from freeloaders looking to cash in, or valued citizens looking to add value free from typical economic constraints.

I feel like these predictions are pretty safe, because it's how most large-scale economic experimentation usually goes. I look forward to arguing about this from relatively speaking the same rhetorical positions 10 years from now.

Articles which try to lay out a speculative economic cost for how much all of this is going to run us aren't terribly interesting, because they must inevitably take a huge raft of assumptions which won't prove to be true in the end, and secondly because the facts won't matter in the end for this particular debate.

keredson• 10 years ago

I predict that in the US, where culture of entrepreneurship, (relatively) less government intervention, and individualism rules, that UBI is completely dead on arrival no matter its merits/demerits, whatever the facts.

i agree with your premise, but not your conclusion. UBI is (much) less gov intervention that our current welfare state. and UBI allows more entrepreneurs to take risks on their great ideas. and moving social welfare from a three party system (individual, employer, gov) to a two party system (individual, gov) is in support of individualism. so the US should love UBI!

wahern• 10 years ago

Immigration is self-limiting in that way. The more people immigrate for the fixed-sum entitlement, the greater the cost inflation, and the less that entitlement is worth.

Anyhow, when Massachusetts enacted universal health coverage, they didn't see any measurable increase in immigration, foreign or domestic. I'm not aware of any situation anywhere in the world where such entitlements caused significant immigration.

People emigrating from Mexico, Turkey, Syria, etc, are fleeing violence and systemic corruption. Conservatives like to point out that the most basic role of government is to provide security--that is, a physically safe environment with a strong rule of law that minimizes the costs of economic transactions. And, indeed, those things are what people value most and are the principal drivers of immigration.

But I, too, am skeptical of UBI. There are too many cultural factors that will gum up the works. For example, the perception that entitlements attract immigration and promote freeloading is one of the reasons a UBI will likely result in increased resentment, even in the face of substantially improved overall objective benchmarks of well-being. And that will likely be the case in both the U.S. and Europe.

Another Medium.com article mentioned that a UBI would make it easier for laborers to strike. But they fail to realize that a UBI will also reduce demand for labor organizing. Below a certain threshold institutional labor advocacy will disintegrate. That means less political support for maintaining a UBI. (Which is part of the reason why it wasn't at all hypocritical for the unions promoting a $15/hr minimum wage in Los Angeles to seek to exclude unionized workers. It's a fair presumption that a union--as compared to an individual--that bargained for less than the minimum wage exacted other compensation. And as long as the minimum wage isn't bound to inflation, you'll need to maintain unions to ensure future political support. Voters have short memories and are poor advocates for themselves; unions are far more strategic, and closer to the kind of rational economic player economics models.)

Increased resentment + weaker political support means even greater difficulty sustaining UBI, let alone enacting it.

The Real Cost of Universal Basic Income

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