A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/free-money-for-surfers-a-genealogy-of-the-idea-of-universal-basic-income/

by lxm • 6 years ago

134 151 6 years ago

burlesona• 6 years ago

I don’t know what’s wrong with that website, but visiting it heats up my phone to the point of being uncomfortable to hold.

luckylion2• 6 years ago

1.2 Megabytes of JavaScript and 900 kilobytes of css will probably do that.

They have more JS and stylesheet to present their website about books ... than actual books have letters.

daenz2• 6 years ago

Based on the load time, they must be proxying all requests through your phone.

franciscop2• 6 years ago

Spaniard here since this article[1] about Spain was prominently noted in the linked article, there isn't a basic income plan here and nothing like that has happened, please stop with making up this kind of stuff about other countries.

There is regular unemployment insurance and an unemployment plan targeted to temporary job freezes (ERTE) that has always existed, nothing to do with basic income. I would also like to see BI even if it's just a test, but what we have here has nothing to do with it.

The government has just made the rules for these pre-existing unemployment plans a bit more flexible (or arguably not). Also the rent situation has become a lot better.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.nl/spain-universal-basic-income-...

Edit: removed references to the future since I cannot predict it and moved those to the present.

Edit 2: it's also interesting to see the original headline was "Spain is moving to" (already false, there's no specific plan now) but in this article the mention was "Spain decided to institute the program" (ridiculous).

SlowRobotAhead2• 6 years ago

Seen similar misinformation about Nordic countries and their UBI testing/experiments.

There is definitely a component to how much someone wants to believe something to clickbait/fakenews.

craigsmansion2• 6 years ago

I'm about as "red as they get" and there's something really grating about US citizens talking about "UBI", and pointing to a variety of social policies in various European countries.

These policies are hard-fought and need to be well balanced to be effective in the long term. You can't just implement them without thinking about repercussions and side-effects.

I'd say, if you're a US citizen, forget about "UBI" as a simple answer to the various social wrongs within your country, and focus on your healthcare; that's where various European models could be used as a partial model, and it's a very good and achievable first step towards a fairer and healthier society.

tgv2• 6 years ago

< the Netherlands ... experienced a wave of “basic grant” militancy in the 1980s and ’90s

Did it really? I remember strikes against "austerity" measures and such, but a wave of basic grant militancy?

Pilot programs have been set up in several cities and countries — Utrecht

There is no such thing. They relaxed the rules for the bottom rung of welfare, which basically scraps the obligation to apply for jobs.

Doesn't bode well for the article.

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

Did it really? I remember strikes against "austerity" measures and such, but a wave of basic grant militancy

I know nothing about these events, but it's not hard to believe a large number of people came to support UBI during a period of frequent strikes. With huge groups working together for a common goal, you'd expect some of them would start supporting more radical ideas

There is no such thing. They relaxed the rules for the bottom rung of welfare, which basically scraps the obligation to apply for jobs.

The word "Utrecht" that you quoted links to the ongoing pilot program, also here

https://capx.co/keeping-an-eye-on-utrechts-basic-income-expe...

tgv2• 6 years ago

The word "Utrecht" that you quoted links to the ongoing pilot program

That's what I commented on. The link is nearly 5 years old, and the policy is nowhere near UBI.

0x8BADF00D• 6 years ago

I’m in favor of UBI, but let’s draw it from each congressman’s personal bank accounts. It’s easy to be generous with someone else’s money.

kazagistar2• 6 years ago

Base assumption, we just print the money. It's how we pay for everything else like wars and subsidies and whatnot.

Then, as a courtesy to those people who benefit from a society without excessive inflation (mostly, people with lots of money who are clearly benefiting the most) we take and burn that money, to remove it from circulation.

mistermann4• 6 years ago

I was thinking about this idea, if we print money and distribute it "wisely" among the lower income classes, this would debase the currency proportional to the amount printed, harming primarily those who are wealthy, proportional to their wealth, and the money will eventually flow upwards through the financial system, primarily through consumer spending, but ultimately back into the pockets of the wealthy.

Of course, inflation in certain categories would need to be taken into consideration, and other factors, but is this idea a non-starter for some reasons I'm overlooking? Excluding politics of course, for the purposes of this mental experiment.

There was also an article posted here in the last two weeks or so about a massive global short situation with the USD, I have it in my mind that the particulars of that situation were conveniently complementary to this idea, although I may have that aspect completely backwards.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

Most reasonable UBI proposals draw the funding primarily from a VAT and a reduction of benefits that it replaces (like food stamps and welfare).

The beauty of a VAT is that while normally regressive, by redistributing the funds as a UBI, you essentially make it a tax on only upper-middle-class/rich people.

For example if the VAT is 10% and you give people $1,000 a month, they would have to spend over $10,000 a month on VAT taxed items (ie. not rent and probably not a lot of food) before they were paying more than they were getting back.

Generally people who can afford to spend $10,000 a month on non rent items are usually making over $180,000 a year.

karpierz• 6 years ago

VAT+UBI is still regressive, you're just subtracting a constant factor. So instead of hitting the poor the hardest, you're hitting the middle class the hardest and creating a valley around where the break-even point is.

In addition, since VAT taxes don't apply to capital transactions (as there's nothing added when you buy or sell a stock), the vast majority of transactions conducted by the upper class won't be hit by this.

Causality1• 6 years ago

What always seems to happen with UBI studies is the proponents point to results that say "the people we gave free money to are happier" but never try to quantify whether that money would have done more good used in a different way.

wjmao88• 6 years ago

I don't think that's the right question to ask. It should be "Would they be happier if the tax to fund UBI was not levied"

gonational2• 6 years ago

This question is insufficient, because, in most large economies, taxation is insufficient to fund a UBI have any reasonable size. Therefore, new money creation (a.k.a. inflation) is the means, and the timeframe for its ruinous effects are too long to study within a single generation.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

That all depends on who gets a UBI payment. If it served to "top up" people to a minimum income level, then those receiving the payments would by definition have been paying little enough tax that it wouldn't have covered the UBI they receive. So in those case, yes, they're probably more happy to receive the UBI than to have the tax waived. UBI doesn't require it to avoid means-testing the benefits, it simply sets a minimum acceptable income and lifts anyone below it up to that level. People with high incomes pay for it.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

Below is an article arguing that New Zealand has been testing a UBI for decades with its pension scheme which is available to everyone aged over 65. Be warned - Gareth Morgan has some interesting politics. http://morganfoundation.org.nz/already-ubi-nz-super/

mikedilger8• 6 years ago

UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. My argument against UBI is that it erodes the desire to work, and we still need nearly everybody of working age to work... until the robots catch up (they still have a lot of catching up to do).

zozbot2348• 6 years ago

The whole point of UBI is that it has lower disincentives against work than other kinds of social insurance. When you say that UBI discourages working, that's perhaps true compared w/ no social insurance at all but it's not a very meaningful comparison.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work: Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it. The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more.

zhoujianfu4• 6 years ago

I feel like that’s the same argument the hunters gatherers had against farming: it erodes the desire to hunt and gather!

zanny4• 6 years ago

still need nearly everybody of working age to work

Within my entire known family tree maybe 1 in 8 people work jobs essential to the creation of goods (including food, power, water), the construction or maintenance of shelter, or the providing of health or transportation.

A huge swath of society is employed in doing things often equating to simply moving numbers around in databases or inside heads. Or more generally, they serve economics by operating to move money from one pocketbook to another.

Its also worth mentioning that labor force participation rates trend downwards over the last 50 years in industrialized nations. Since the participation boom of womens emancipation there has been a general decline in participation not reflected in unemployment figures largely because the number of people required to produce the needs and wants of 99% of everyone else is so few, and because there are so few of means to create demand all on their own (ie, millionaire+ elites) for more extravagant goods markets that don't manifest in a widespread form.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different.

If you can make it work for a group that are working for money less that the population average, surely you can make it work for a larger population? Keep in mind that there are other parts to this like sick pay, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment leave etc. There are a collection of separate systems that could be combined, have vastly less administrative overhead and improve incentives (ie more work = more pay).

erpellan2• 6 years ago

It can be structured as an income tax that starts out negative. Everyone of working age is paid the UBI, which is designed to act as the safety net. This frees up a ton of overhead as means-testing, benefit fraud, etc. all goes away.

Then when you get a job, the UBI starts to reduce, at a rate LESS than the money you are earning. So if you're paid $1000 monthly UBI, and get a $1000 job, it might reduce UBI by $500. So you're always better off working. You'd probably want a sliding scale so maybe the first couple of hundred only reduces your UBI by 0.20 per dollar, or whatever. It can be structured so the net tax take for the government is the same. Yes this probably means people earning more than say $100,000 pay a bit more in tax. I'm okay with that.

danesparza2• 6 years ago

I'm glad to see Thomas Paine referenced in this article. So many Americans don't realize that one of America's founding fathers championed the idea of universal basic income back when the USA was just being created.

This was something that Andrew Yang pointed out, but was largely ignored.

innocentoldguy• 6 years ago

I hear this a lot but in reading Paine’s writings, I can only find ideas somewhat similar to Social Security payments for elderly people. I have not been able to find anything in Paine’s writings that is synonymous with the concept of UBI. I’m not saying it isn’t in there somewhere, just that I haven’t found it.

Would you mind citing specifically where you found this information?

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

I'm not familiar with his writings to cite more detail, but it seems to me if he supported a sort of Social Security, then he was advocating for a targeted UBI. Maybe that's just semantics though.

CuriousSkeptic6• 6 years ago

In Agrarian Justice he proposes to “ create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property”

He also makes it very clear that this isn’t some form of charity to help people. But rather about justice

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Paine was the Bernie Sanders of his era. He was a hardcore humanist and abolitionist. Very few Americans realize how marganalized he became after the revolution. His story is a sad one and he should be celebrated far more than basically any other founding father by persons of conscious

dependenttypes• 6 years ago

This is a very one-sided and unsupported (I don't see links to articles) argument. You can do better.

rriepe• 6 years ago

Once we implement UBI, what's the argument against doubling it?

jedberg2• 6 years ago

Diminishing returns. The same argument against making the minimum wage $100/hr. At some point the graph crosses.

jandrewrogers• 6 years ago

The dynamics aren't the same, the UBI case has a much weaker negative feedback loop than minimum wage. The percentage of the population that benefits from ratcheting minimum wage is much smaller -- they are intrinsically a permanent minority.

Ratcheting UBI, on the other hand benefits a much larger population whose growth as a percentage of the population is effectively unbounded by negative feedback. It would be very easy to arrive at a pathological equilibrium where the majority of the population has a strong incentive to vote for short-sighted expansion of UBI at the expense of the minority. Once in that mode, addressing the pathological consequences of that politically would be very difficult unless mitigations were designed in from the beginning.

It is possible to design negative feedback loops for the UBI case to greatly mitigate this issue, but it tends to be avoided by UBI proponents because most solutions have varying degrees of unpalatability.

devit2• 6 years ago

The fact that UBI should not be about giving an amount of money, but rather about giving essentials like housing and food or the equivalent in money, and "doubling" essentials doesn't make as much sense, since you don't have much use for two beds or twice the food.

jariel• 6 years ago

What constitutes 'basic necessity' changes every year.

Is a car a basic necessity? What about a mobile? Broadband? Netflix/Cable wouldn't be an obvious choice but many will argue it is. Washing machine? What about food delivery for those over 55?

You know those 3-wheel motorized chairs, between scooters and wheelchairs for the elderly ... they are definitely a 'necessity' for some but really quite 'in between' for others.

Once UBI is initiated, the arguments to increase UBI will be unyielding.

The next generations' youth will make arguments about the 'inhumanity' of such and such. They may have a point, but we will be the 'old timers' thinking they are mostly ridiculous and actually voting.

CuriousSkeptic6• 6 years ago

An UBI based on dividends such as from a land value tax, or a carbon trading, would follow GDP more or less. No reason not to double it if possible in a sustainable way.

akvadrako4• 6 years ago

LVT is great. You could go even further and nationalize all natural resources (oil) and sell/rent them at market rates.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"Once we implement UBI, what's the argument against doubling it?"

Nothing. There's a reason the US Social Security program is one of the so-called the "third rail(s) of politics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_of_politics). Once a UBI program is started, the UBI receiving population will just keep voting for politicians that keep raising it and raising it ... until the system collapses. Already, most young people entering the workforce today expect to get nothing from the Social Security program when they reach retirement age despite paying quite a bit into it. And yet we want to repeat this with UBI?

gonational2• 6 years ago

“Universal basic income” of any reasonable size in, e.g., the US, requires the creation of new money, because taxation is insufficient for its funding.

New money derives its value, subtractively, from the value of existing money (“WEALTH”), which is held by individuals who earned that money (“WORKERS“).

Some individuals decide not to work because of reasons OTHER THAN retirement, inheritance, disability, and child bearing; these individuals do not contribute directly to production (for convenience, we’ll call this group “LAZYS”).

Therefore, giving UBI to LAZYS intrinsically takes WEALTH from WORKERS, regardless of whether not WORKERS also get UBI.

In other words, universal basic income can be correctly defined as “transfer payments from WORKERS to LAZYS“.

mistermann4• 6 years ago

...from the value of existing money (“WEALTH”), which is held by individuals who earned that money (“WORKERS“).

"Earned" and "workers" seem like rather tricky words in this context.

This theory sounds like somewhat of the typical strawman (innacurate) understanding of Randian laissez faire economics.

geddy• 6 years ago

Sounds about right. Like everything in the US, some group is trying to figure out a way to siphon money from those to earn to those who “need it more”. I don’t care to support this, I want all the money I make, thank you very much. I’ll decide who to help with it. Or, I’ll help no one at all with the money I worked for, which according to college students and other people who have no skills and have paid no taxes, makes me “greedy”.

Now if you want to fix the screwed up healthcare system, I’m all ears.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

So you'd pay for your own private guards, private fire department, pave the roads you use to drive to work out of your own pocket, and countless other things that are currently tax-payer funded resources? You'd need to be exceptionally wealthy indeed. Or maybe you still think there's some basic things the government should do, and therefore needs to collect taxes for them. In which case we're not arguing over whether or not money gets siphoned, we're just arguing over where you draw the line.

sxyuan• 6 years ago

Your first paragraph makes a good point, but given that in the US capital (i.e, being paid for owning wealth) is taxed at a much lower rate than income (i.e., being paid to work), I'd offer the following correction:

UBI intrinsically takes wealth from the wealthy, who are generally NOT "workers" but those who have earned or inherited a large amount of capital at some point (and thus are more appropriately labeled as "the lazys [sic]"), and distributes it to everyone, the vast majority of whom are indeed "workers".

In short, UBI can be correctly defined as "transfer payments from lazys to workers".

(This is an oversimplification, but I believe a tad bit more accurate than the original.)

pryce• 6 years ago

This article might have been more informative if it had placed these ideas in context - the rise Marxism and Communism, which tie the state's mandate to preserving the interests of labour rather than those of capital, provoking in the west the rise of social democracy, which proposes that a balance can be achieved between workers and capital while still preserving capitalism.

mistermann4• 6 years ago

Mark Blyth is an economist who focuses quite a bit on this topic (labor vs capital).

Also Thomas Frank (journalist and).

Both have good videos on YouTube.

raincom• 6 years ago

UBI works well in developed countries, whose currency others desire. Developing countries who spend more on imports, can't afford that.

CuriousSkeptic6• 6 years ago

Given the results in developing countries I’m not sure you can say that. It could very well be that the increase in GDP more then makes up for any costs of such policies.

https://www.poverty-action.org/impact/cash-transfers-changin...

rodolphoarruda• 6 years ago

Quick conceptual question from a noob in the subject: does the UBI entirely replace social security for elderly individuals or is it added on top of it?

evolve2k• 6 years ago

UBI sets an income ‘watermark’ of basic income for all. I would say they interact. It would eliminate the pension where desired/planned pension funds were at a similar watermark.. if the pension needed to be more then it would supplement towards this.

akvadrako4• 6 years ago

What you are describing sounds like guaranteed income. UBI doesn’t phase out quickly so it would stack with similarly sized pensions. Larger pensions would see little extra money.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

That seems more like an implementation detail. It certainly could replace social security, but then again in the US social security payouts are tied to how much you've paid into it over the years. Then again, UBI would be paid for, albeit less directly, but tax payments as well so it might not be an important distinction.

And of course it would be important to peg the UBI to different costs of living for different regions.

zozbot2348• 6 years ago

I'd do the opposite. Peg UBI to the lowest cost of living, and have separate short-term insurance-only programs (on top of UBI) for folks living in higher-cost areas. That way, those who are unwilling or unable to work in the longer term will be incented to move to low-cost areas and relieve pressure elsewhere.

mikedilger8• 6 years ago

I don't think there is any sort of unanimity regarding UBI. Being compensated for staying home is not UBI, because it is not ongoing.

I'm against UBI for reasons that became apparent while playing MMORPGs. Stay with me here and I'll explain.

Players of an RPG want a fun game. But they also want to succeed/win. These goals partially conflict. If they prioritize winning too highly, and pester customer support to make the game easier (nerf), the game loses it's fun. Even (in my estimation) to the people who pestered customer support. Because some people aren't self aware enough (kids) to realize that the challenge is what makes it fun.

In life, we want to be lazy. I certainly do. And that desire makes me think a UBI would be quite nice. But I also realize that I most certainly would be lazy. I'm already working less than 20 hours per week (pre-COVID) because my mortgage is paid and I don't really need the money anymore. With a UBI I might stop work completely. But as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer. Less hours will be worked, prices will go up, and the economy will be more depressed and sluggish.

Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Maybe we are there in very specific manufacturing industries, but no robot is going to install a new roof on my house (for example).

So I think we should wait until after all the jobs are taken by robots (rather than thinking it's imminent when it's most certainly not) to institute UBI. Eventually. But not any time soon.

OTOH I'm perfectly okay with a means-tested payout to people who really need it.

mikedilger8• 6 years ago

If you downvote me because you disagree, PLEASE share your thoughts on this. I cannot understand why you disagree if you simply downvote.

Supermancho5• 6 years ago

There are too many ideas in your post. Some of which make sense, some do not.

Players of an RPG want a fun game.

I don't think you understand game theory and design well enough to be commenting. Generally, games are about learning about the world and performing pattern recognition to optimize in a constrained environment. MMORPGs have LOTS of games within them, some of which are completely player driven.

as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer

Slack off? Real economy? Suffer? Soft terms that are composed into an unqualified statement. There is sentiment, but no meaning.

Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot.

Now meandering on to robots for some reason, which is not related to previous points.

Some forums (like this one) prefer smaller assertions with arguments and typically reward those who track down supporting documentation or revealing technical support (equations, papers, historical references, active research, etc). Ironically, HN posts are preferred when people put work into them :)

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

In life, we want to be lazy.

Therea plenty of evidence that this isn't really all that true, and that if there is even a modicum of apparent reward for extra labor, people will continue to put extra labor in for that reward, often even past the point where that extra nominal reward seems to provide any additional real utility for them.

. I'm already working less than 20 hours per week (pre-COVID) because my mortgage is paid and I don't really need the money anymore

Very few people, even well into the income range where research shows no additional subjective utility to additional earnings, ever reach the point where they recognize that they don't need any more money. So, you aren't typical and your entire argument seems to rest on assuming your atypical attitude holds generally.

But as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer.

Anthropomorphizing the economy here obscures rather than aids understanding; what would happen if abstention from additional effort were excessively common is inflation, bringing down the real value of the UBI and reducing the number of people who found it sufficient to not exert additional effort, pushing people back into the workforce. It's a self-controlling negative feedback system.

Supermancho5• 6 years ago

> In life, we want to be lazy.
Therea plenty of evidence that this isn't really all that true

"All that true" doesn't mean anything and is ostensibly misleading, ie false. There are segments of the population (pareto) that try to excel, but they generally do not do it sustainably (burnout). Common terminology...scams, shortcuts, work smarter not harder, are all colloquialisms centered around basic human behavior. Even working in ANY industry, people do everything in their power to either accrue wealth simply and/or make their work easier, without taking on additional work and asking for more compensation for doing more with their time.

mikedilger8• 6 years ago

I may have overstated, believing people on average are more like myself than they are. But I think you're likely doing the same thing in the opposite direction, believing people will keep working hard for little benefit when many of them wont. Let's just agree there are different kinds of people and they will behave differently, and my argument has some merit, as does yours.

There was no anthropomorphizing in my statements.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

I think UBI as a single monolithic program for providing minimum resources to provide the basics of food/shelter etc can be much improved on by other means:

[0]Instead, I think a constellation of smaller, targeted programs (think best-of-breed) might be more effective and provide a more robust effect: If a society provides universal healthcare, comprehensive unemployment benefits that don't have absurdly low caps, housing & food subsidies for those close to the poverty level, comprehensive disability benefits, and probably a few other things I'm missing, then the need for a "universal" UBI is diminished: That too can be targeted towards people not otherwise covered by the above. The advantage is that each program can be highly tailored to the specific needs & nuances of those seeking that specific benefit, rather than just throwing a larger block of money at people.

[0]Note: I'm not particularly attached to this idea. I think is has merit, but my goal is to start a conversation about the idea, sort of pressure-test it, not proclaim it as the way to do things.

zozbot2348• 6 years ago

A patchwork of "targeted" programs is unsatisfactory for many reasons. It lets people fall through the cracks, and it results in unintended effects as the programs are not designed or managed in a consistent way. The need for some sort of minimal income floor is universal, and it should be addressed in a universally-applicable way.

zhoujianfu4• 6 years ago

Exactly.. my personal genealogy for discovering UBI was:

The government should provide for a base level of food, medicine, housing, and education.

But let private industry compete for it, so just provide vouchers for each of those things.

But, how to efficiently allocate the amounts for each individual? How much health care voucher vs. food voucher vs. housing voucher vs. education voucher?

Ah, just have a universal “health or food or housing or education” voucher!

Oh, but what about transportation!

Okay, a universal “housing, food, medicine, transportation, and education” voucher.

Oh wait, we have one of those already! The dollar.

ineedasername8• 6 years ago

But then people need to go out and shop for those things using UBI, for example compete for housing in markets that may offer no affordable housing, but housing subsidies would help resolve that.

If targeted programs can be poorly designed or mismanaged inconsistently, then so could UBI. The whole idea is to thoughtfully design a program. If that is possible, there's no reason we can't thoughtfully design targeted programs, and UBI would still be there in a lesser capacity precisely for those people that would fall through the cracks of those targeted programs.

UBI just feels like a kind of sledgehammer, when a dozen scalpels might perform better. I'll grant that UBI would be superior to the very loose "safety net" of social programs in the US though.

Even with a "strong" UBI program, I still think we'd need other programs as well-- UBI will be far too low for people that suddenly lose a job that pays 5x UBI and need to get by until they find new comparable employment, as an example.

65102• 6 years ago

Think of the oddly familiar security vs usability problem.

The tailored programs always fail to reach some people who badly need them.[1] At the same time they always have some fraud to deal with. You will reach more of the target audience by accepting more fraud. You can also fight fraud more effectively at the expense of those in need. OR you can throw more money at it and try but fail to eliminate both.

Then you'd want to avoid turning it into a blunt instrument. To do this an incredibly large army of skilled and trained people has to be hired (and removed from the private sector) who are tasked with many impossible tasks. (They tried to measure how fucked my back was one time. We concluded that no one had any idea what would happen if I got a job)

Then there is the ego problem of living on hand outs- because A, B and C. Others might not say it but you feel pathetic not being able to take care of yourself.

Also interesting is to wonder who all those industries and markets should be working for. They currently work for whoever has money. This includes you and me but only to a very very limited extend.

[1] - Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Examples are not doing this chaos any justice. Try picture a combination of someone close to you dying horribly, physical injury, mental problems and losing your administration. We give you some forms to fill out and you simply can't do it. You just want 3 months of alone time. We give you 20 experts who want you to talk about how fucked up your situation is the year round. No way to move on.

zhoujianfu4• 6 years ago

There are two questions to answer first.

1. Do you think people can best decide what’s best for themselves?

2. Do you care about other people?

The Democratic Party answers no and yes.

The Republican Party answers no and no.

The Libertarian Party answers yes and no.

A UBI is the solution to yes and yes.

lazyant• 6 years ago

No mention of the UBI initiatives in Canada https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-basic-income-pilot (scrapped by the new Conservative government) and the older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome (also "free money for surfers"? wtf)

rasalas• 6 years ago

(also "free money for surfers"? wtf)

I was curious about the surfers as well. It's a reference to something John Rawls wrote in 1988:

"[...] those who surf all day off Malibu must find a way to support themselves and would not be entitled to public funds." [1] provides context.

In 1991, Philippe van Parijs wrote "Why surfers should be fed: The liberal case for an Unconditional Basic Income", which instead supports Rawls's surfers. [2]

[1] https://rawlsbasicincome.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/chapter-tw... [2] https://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/1991l.Su...

twblalock4• 6 years ago

The problem with UBI is that we would turn it back into the welfare system we have now.

Let's say we pass a truly universal basic income bill -- every person gets the same amount of money from the government, every month. It wouldn't take long before politicians propose giving more money to teachers and single mothers, or taking benefits away from convicted felons and sex offenders.

Over time, bit by bit, we will entitle certain groups of people to more or less money than others. That will happen for the same reason our existing welfare system is the way it is - the voters believe that some people are more deserving of help than others. UBI would not remain universal, or basic, for very long.

Given that we can't actually end up with a universal or basic income system, and that we will end up largely re-creating the same kinds of entitlements that characterize our current welfare systems, we might as well just improve and extend our current systems.

Jedd3• 6 years ago

The problem with UBI is that we would turn it back into the welfare system we have now.

That's not a problem with UBI.

IMO that scenario is not likely, let alone guaranteed.

I appreciate a pessimistic outlook as much as the next guy, but I don't think we should abandon UBI because you think it may change in the future.

xsdklfsdfklj• 6 years ago

the argument against it [1] is practically that if it is being pushed by the current system it is to benefit the current system. As in, "uber needs a safety net for their drivers" kinda of vision, which given the track record in the US is very likely.

[1] https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequa...

twblalock4• 6 years ago

It is actually a problem with UBI: UBI does not line up with most people's beliefs about who deserves help, those beliefs are so powerful that they resulted in the creation of our existing welfare systems, and they aren't going to go away overnight.

ralusek• 6 years ago

I am a free market advocate, libertarian-lite, that believes that UBI is the correct social safety net. I am clearly not unique in this regard, as this actually seems to be the most common type of UBI advocate I've encountered.

That being said, the one lingering question I have comes down to a variant of inflation. I think most people think of inflation as something that only happens as a result of monetary policy, but that's not entirely true. Let's say that UBI could be entirely funded through taxation, no new money is introduced into the system. There is still a form of inflation on certain goods. For example, let's take an extreme example of redistribution: we take all of the money from a billionaire and redistribute it. One billionaire doesn't buy 100,000,000 TVs for their house, but 1,000,000 people with $1,000 might each buy a TV. 1,000,000 people with an extra $1,000 has a much larger impact on demand for typical consumer goods than having that wealth be more concentrated. Of course stricter taxation of the uber-wealthy would have impacts lessening demand for large investments, so it's not a blanket inflation in the same way that just printing money would be, but it still has all of the same characteristics of inflation within certain consumer markets.

It's all very complicated, and I would like to see it modeled. If I'm a landlord, and I know that my tenants now have an extra $12,000 a year, do I raise rents? I think the natural argument is that because the scarcity or value of my real estate didn't actually change, I open myself to being undercut by competition if I try to arbitrarily raise the value of my property to reflect increased demand. But the problem is that it might not be entirely true that the value of my real estate didn't change. When I have to call a plumber, or gardener, or construction worker for a remodel, are their rates going to be the same? Are rates going to go up or down? It's very hard for me to know for sure.

It reminds me a bit of debt. Debt shouldn't necessarily produce inflation, but it definitely does. Do you think houses would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if the average person didn't have access to debt? Would it cost 50k+ in order to attend college? No. Access to debt dramatically increases the prices on the things purchased by the available debt, regardless of whether or not this theoretically is meant to produce inflation. My concern is that, as with access to debt, the increase in wealth will be met with an increase in cost across the board, and not due to exploitation, but because the effects are that most consumer products and services actually just end up costing as a natural reflection of increased demand.

rafd3• 6 years ago

Some scarce things that everyday people want are likely to go up in price (ex. rent in cities that are already struggling with housing prices).

Some things may drop in price (higher demand allowing to spread fixed costs over more units; or, lower volatility allowing for smaller margins).

Some prices that would increase, may only do some temporarily, as the market catches up with production or competition (ex. greater stable demand for basic housing makes it less risky to build said housing, so more of it gets built).

CuriousSkeptic6• 6 years ago

Why would debt not cause inflation? “Money” today is almost entirely made up of credit, increase credit and you increase the money supply, which is more less the definition of inflation.

The thing about shifting demand causing inflation seems to me more like an adjustment. Not really the kind of inflation that cause trouble.

Also, since you mentioned landlords. Check out geo-libertarian take on this. Financing an UBI from a land value tax is in my opinion the most interesting approach. Since it would be based on a principle of justice, not just another welfare scheme.

zanny4• 6 years ago

In modern globalized economics the only things that really inflate uncontrollably are things those supply is constrained by forces beyond production scalability. IE patents, copyrights, or things of extremely finite supply like land.

TVs keep getting cheaper because economies of scale keep growing and the industrialization of billions of people in the last 40 years has produced enough supply to more than meet rising demand combined with technological innovation and automation efficiencies dropping the resource and labor requirements substantively. There are probably orders of magnitude more TVs made and sold today than in 2000, but the cost per unit has fallen in that time (or you get a radically more complex / better product for comparative prices).

Insulin, college, rent, etc prices rise uncontrollably because they are supply constrained by monopolists. But dealing with those anti-competitive markets and industries needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of society regardless of the institution of a UBI or not.

Gibbon14• 6 years ago

In modern globalized economics the only things that really inflate uncontrollably are things those supply is constrained by forces beyond production scalability. IE patents, copyrights, or things of extremely finite supply like land.

It's felt to me like we've gone from

Pre 1800: A world where material inputs were very expensive. Complex manufactured goods ditto. And labor cheap.

1800-1980: Where where materials were cheap but complex manufactured goods were still expensive and labor not cheap.

Post 2000: Where materials are moderately expensive but complex manufacturing is dirt dirt cheap. AKA this is a micro controller with a million transistors. And this is a power transistor. The latter costs more because it requires more metal, silicon and packaging.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

Most countries already have programs to prevent people from starving or freezing to death and those countries also tend to have elaborate health care programs, and provisions for those not able to work. Even the US has programs like this in most states though you could argue that compared to other countries they are a combination of expensive, inefficient, and ineffective.

Basic income is formalizing the status quo that there's a minimum standard for all that basically translates into everybody receiving those same guarantees but simply with less bureaucracy & moralistic BS around it. Basically it gets rid off or vastly simplifies the business of collecting and handing out social security insurances and different types of benefits. The cost for this in some countries actually rivals the benefits handed out. E.g. unemployment benefit programs have amazing amounts of bureaucracy associated in many countries.

For those who work, what changes is that part of their income now comes from basic income and they pay taxes over the rest. For their employers, they pay less salary and have less bureaucracy around things like insurance programs and social security (all taken care off). Also things like minimum incomes go away: they pay market prices for what somebody does for them. State pensions, unemployment benefits, sick leave compensation, etc. all basically fold into this basic income. If you want more, you work and pay for extra insurances yourself. If you don't, basic income is there for you.

For those that are not part of the labor market, i.e. approaching (or already over) 50% of the population in many countries, what changes is that their life becomes a lot simpler. Either they are happy enough to get by on basic income or they secure some additional source of income. Either way, we're already paying for their health care, housing, and food as as society. It's a much less radical change than people think.

IMHO this could actually unlock the labor market in lots of countries. There are a lot of weird rules around unemployment that actually make it unattractive or hard for people to work. E.g. people close to their retirement age are expensive to fire and therefore unattractive to hire in lots of countries. People on benefits are actually would risk losing their benefits if they take some job on the side. So, they don't work until they find something "proper", which for some never happens.

Of course this kind of debate always raises the question "who pays for this?". The people that ask this never look at the other side of the debate: how much do we save by eliminating and dismantling the byzantine bureaucracy responsible for the current system. Nobody has actually run that experiment.

Also, we have plenty of taxes left and plenty of wiggle room with things like VAT, fuel tax, profit tax and income tax. It boils down to a quite simple formula: total cost = X*#people. If you have say 17M+ people (NL, my home country) and assume 500 EURO per person, the total cost would be about 100 billion/year for absolutely everyone. Sounds like a lot but as part of the GDP (around 900 billion) it's not that bad and the that's completely ignoring the fact that this would make hiring people lower risk and lower cost for all companies; which tends to do wonders for their profitability (and thus profit taxes). The cumulative budget for existing programs in NL is actually similar to this.

Sadly, doing this is not feasible not for economical reasons but for political/moralistic reasons and ingrained (wrong/naieve) assumptions that many people have about how economies work (e.g. that they are balanced and circular). It's simply too radical for a majority. Even socialist/communist countries never went there and in fact had a lot of moralism and ideals around the notion of labor with the state actively trying to control who was allowed to do what and for how much.

A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income

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