Belgian think tank study: universal basic income is a dangerous utopia

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by enimodas • 9 years ago

31 30 9 years ago

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valuearb• 9 years ago

You don't need a think tank to figure this out.

We only have stuff because people work.

Paying people not to work means they won't make stuff.

People who remain working will have to be taxed heavily to pay others not to work, increasing the remaining workers incentive to not work.

Eventually you arrive at a utopia where we have nothing and no one works.

jmiserez• 9 years ago

We only have stuff because people work.

In a society where everything is built or farmed by robots, only a small subset of the population needs to work. The rest can just do whatever they like. Even in today’s world, large amounts of people don’t really make “stuff” anymore.

throwaway-1209• 9 years ago

Fortunately that society is at least 100 years in the future and none of us here will see it. When I was a kid, we were promised flying cars and life of leisure. 30 years later: no flying cars and busting my ass at work like a hamster in the wheel.

blacksqr• 9 years ago

Universal basic income != enough money not to work.

The report itself says that Alaska has had a UBI for 40 years with none of the predicted dire consequences.

You do need a think tank if your objective is to launder unfounded prejudices and discredited lies into something that sounds serious and academic.

exclusiv2• 9 years ago

"Alaska among top states in illicit drug use" [1]

"A new report from the state health department shows a dramatic rise in heroin use in Alaska. The number of hospitalizations for heroin related causes nearly doubled in the state from 2008 to 2012" [2]

"Alaska had one of the lowest four-year graduation rates in the United States in the 2013-14 school year...That year, 71.1 percent of Alaska's high school seniors graduated in four years -- the rest dropped out or needed more time to get their diplomas." It was 68% in 2011. [3]

[1] http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/alaska-among-top-st...

[2] http://www.alaskapublic.org/2015/07/14/report-heroin-use-is-...

[3] https://www.adn.com/education/article/despite-steady-gains-g...

EliRivers• 9 years ago

"Paying people not to work means they won't make stuff."

Right. Luckily, basic income is not paying people to not work, so we had a lucky escape there. On basic income, people are still free to work.

closeparen• 9 years ago

Labor force participation is falling while production is rising. That is what everyone on HN and in any engineering or computing related field does all day: figure out how to get more value from less labor.

You're right. People won't make stuff. People already don't make stuff. Machines do. A tiny elite class of engineers and managers figures out what the machines should do, designs them, and tends to them. The masses need not be involved.

odbol• 9 years ago

The problem is, our society right now only pays for "physical stuff". Hardware and services that are made and performed by people (who are usually in poverty).

However, think of all the artists/musicians/journalists that spend just as much "work" producing this content that you consume for free on the internet. We haven't figured out how to pay those people yet, except through internet advertising.

Now look at the most profitable company: Google. We make pretty much all of our record profits through advertising. Yet everyone hates advertising, and it's only getting worse, as evidenced by the ad-blocker wars happening right now. Lets get rid of the middle-man advertisers, and pay those content creators fairly for their work. UBI is one way to do this.

loa_in_• 9 years ago

In my opinion the basic income idea is the good way to go.

In my mind UBI means stability, stability means better, thought out choice choice of employment, better work choice means less abuse by employers (who happily exploit people on the edge) AND more happiness, therefore less stress and higher productivity.

It's not a perfect solution, as there will be people who will refuse to work, but those would in my honest opinion use their time to socialize with others, and less stressed people who actually work would, at least in part, happily resocialize people left out through socialization and natural integration. Social circles mean opportunity, opportunities mean chances of success in finding work.

Mz• 9 years ago

Tech giants are predicting widespread, permanent unemployment. Jobs that currently pay something like $20k to maybe $50k are supposed to be replaced with basic income paying more like $10k. If large swaths of the population are going to take a de facto pay cut over jobs that in some places are already considered poverty wages AND then they have little or no hope of securing paid income to supplement their UBI, this sounds like a terrible nightmare to me.

I would much rather people be working on new ways to spread the work around while improving quality of life for the masses. You know, the policy they pursued during the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs.

neilwilson2• 9 years ago

It is one of those ideas that is neat, plausible and wrong. It suffers from several fallacies of composition.

The money becomes worthless in the eyes of those that receive it, and that's because if I have spent my time growing carrots - even if I have used machines to grow lots and lots of carrots, I still need to see you give up your time in the service of others before I am happy to let you have carrots.

If you don't, then you are not seen as contributing to society and humans get upset when that happens.

That's because you get paid twice in real terms. Once by the self-consumption of your own time and once with the consumption of the output of others you have purchased with your basic income.

That is seen as unfair.

The correct solution is to organise your time to the service of others as a job. A job that is focussed on social value, not profit. You then get the living wage for that job - a wage that is much higher than any suggested basic income, without any need to increase taxation.

The problem is a lack of jobs. The problem is the fallacy that the private sector creates jobs, when in reality its task is to destroy them and replace them with automation. A task we need it to do if we're to drive productivity forward.

fvdessen• 9 years ago

A UBI that allows citizen to surive on it is simply unfundable; Let's take Belgium, 1000eur/month per citizen; That's 120 billion eur/year. The Belgian state revenue is 227 billion eur/year, and Belgium has the highest taxes in the world. How does the discussion on UBI goes past this simple mathematical fact ?

esarbe5• 9 years ago

Yes, how does a discussion on UBI go past this simple mathematical fact?

By looking at the income distribution and realizing that a vast majority of the worlds income is concentrated in the hands of a breathtakingly small group of people and is continuing to be concentrated even more by the advent of even more integrated automated production and services.

All the while this small group continues to lobby for lower taxes worldwide and engages in tax-avoidance schemes that drive local manufacturers and service providers out of business. Heck, this group has so much money, they don't even know what to do with it anymore! Profits have skyrocketed in the last 30 years, but these increases have gone exclusively to the richest people of the world.

Productivity per person has more than quadrupled since the 1950. Yet the wages have stagnant since the 1970. Where did all the money go? I bet you can answer that question yourself.

Now, where do you specifically go wrong with the math? By not having a high enough tax on those that mooch away all the money. They could afford it. They just don't want to. And the system they built for themselves allows them to get away with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_bracket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance#Methods

terminalcommand4• 9 years ago

IMHO instead of raising taxes, states could focus on giving employees the salary and the security they deserve. If the productivity indeed increased 3x, then employees should be able to benefit from it not the state.

I want to believe in a world, where you receive wealth by creating it.

runT1ME• 9 years ago

Nominal wages have increased since 1970. Where did the money go? It's not hard, it's basic math: deficit spending necessitates printing money (done in various ways, notably QE) , which eats away spending power.

jimmywanger2• 9 years ago

By not having a high enough tax on those that mooch away all the money

How are they mooching it away? You have not yet proven away that they haven't accumulated the money fair and square. At the extremes, tiny differences in competence lead to exponentially differing compensation scales. Look at any professional sports league for examples.

They could afford it. They just don't want to.

Why should they "afford it"? Just being richer does not give anybody lower on the socio-economic spectrum free reign to determine spending/taxation habits. You look at somebody with a mclaren and whine that it's not fair - there are ten people out there looking at your stable supply of food, clothing, and utilities and saying the exact same thing.

And the system that they built with laws that allow them to get away with it - the proposal is to fix that with more laws, conveniently forgetting that the legal system is a NP complex system, which just creates more unintended consequences that only the extremely rich are allowed to exploit.

armenarmen• 9 years ago

How much of their current revenue goes to social programs? If current spending was removed, or rather reapplied to UBI would the be coming out ahead?

Could the UBI as an entitlement program feasibly replace current programs?

tluyben2• 9 years ago

Well, rich people move to Belgium to pay (a lot) less tax (popular among Dutch and Americans for instance: you can go to mansion towns like Schilde and Braschaat and find only American and Dutch legal tax evading millionairs); so as with everywhere, you will need to force the rich to pay like everyone all over the world at which point the problem will already look different. Sure they might have worked for that money but paying less or no tax: how is that fair? Won't happen soon though.

neilwilson2• 9 years ago

Very true.

The basic income is an idea that is supported by people who don't seem to understand humans, or who want to take power away from most humans.

Basic income is essentially another form of theft from the workers. People resent the rich because they do nothing for their income, but apparently if everybody does nothing for their income then that resentment is magically disappears.

That doesn't work in human society. Humans require that others contribute. As the Great Ali said: "Service to others is the price you pay for your room here on earth".

The problem the UBI has is that, like the rich, it is unfindable in real terms. Those that produce see the fraud, gather together and politically agitate to have it removed.

And you end up with what we have now - a depleted unemployment benefit system, and various small handouts to people others consider 'scroungers'.

The actual solution is to expand the definition of 'job', get beyond the neoliberal idea that everybody and everything is a business trying to create profit and implement a Job Guarantee full of activities that deliver social value - allowing people to serve others.

Once you do that, then you just pay them the living wage and the system works. From an individual's point of view their experience is that they have a job, one that is matched to their skills and that others consider a useful use of time. If they move jobs to the private sector, they still get a wage of about the same value. But the public spending stops instantly - which gets rid of the need for additional taxation.

https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/job-guarantee-jobs-f...

Belgian think tank study: universal basic income is a dangerous utopia

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