How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. This may solve some issues with basic income: it's not "free" money, which doesn't present as much of a problem to people's values. It won't feel like a handout, and people will more easily transition back to a real job if they want.
The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
> check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument against UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, might — enable them to be their flavor of productive.
Another demographic to consider is retired people with pensions.
Some of them waste it down the pub, others lead meaningful lives and describe these years as their happiest.
> The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I think most of the problem with "one-euro jobs" is more that they're (a) "one-euro" than anything else and (b) treated as a temporary thing for people who are unable to find anything else.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
(1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
It sounds like you're suggesting that the government provide a class of jobs to citizens and pay them a small wage for it. Not only does that sound very different from the idea and principles of basic income, but it also sounds suspiciously close to certain socio-economic models that have been tried, unsuccessfully, by other countries throughout history.
Examples? You probably only think you have some because you're over-extrapolating what the proposal really is about. Job Guarantee advocates usually advocate for it within a larger framework that is pretty much the same as we have today.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
I think it is great they are studying UBI, but I agree with you in that giving people work is the way to go. I believe it goes by the term "workfare" (as opposed to welfare). There is always more work to do, the problem is people may not be willing to pay enough money to have it done. If the government is paying out the money anyway, there should be something productive coming from it. I think this is good for the country and for the people doing the work.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
Because they will be conditioned to a routine of getting up at 7am and getting to work by 9am putting in there hours and doing that five days a week.
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
Cleaning parks and repairing roads will be done via park cleaning and road repairing robots unfortunately.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
"Make work" programs like this built the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn bridge.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
There's no dignity in work, there's dignity in creating value, which not all work does. Private companies are quite capable of generating useless makework (If you haven't experienced this personally, I envy you).
"Basic employment" sounds a lot like "the military" (or, in the USA, national guard etc). While they don't accept literally anyone, they will take mostly anyone and give them a job that they can perform reasonably well. Sometimes this is flying planes, but more often it's mopping floors and keeping track of inventory. To paraphrase a friend, the military can take somebody that's dumb as fuck and fit them into a little box where they perform one simple task well.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
German has the so called "1 Euro jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_add... It's a job where you have to show up, cleaning up parks is one example, but essentially you're 99% on welfare. People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
> People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
In addition there could be subsidy for for corporations and business that provide training certificate program material for entry level positions in there industries.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
How about an employer based basic income, where the government subsidizes X dollars per year, per employee. Seems like it would fit right in with an employer based healthcare.
My fear is that people would get stuck in such a program for life - they wouldn't have much opportunity to learn skills that could help them find a different job
Basic income will have to come with extremely limited immigration EDIT: or immigrants will be ineligible for the income.
That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.
This is an important point, especially because the first country that implements UBI will be the most attractive country to immigrate to for people who have no value to employers. Many potential immigrants who want to work hard will choose to go to other countries, so the country with UBI will miss out on their productivity and their tax dollars. That would certainly put a burden on the UBI system.
The developed world already has this problem: Australian unemployment benefits are on the same order as most UBI proposals. The current Australian response is the systematic rape and murder of unauthorised immigrants, which most of the country thinks isn't tough enough. (That is literally true, not a joke.) So this can go very wrong.
This isn't immediately obvious to me, especially if basic income is implemented as a negative income tax.
Of course if there are more people beneath the tax threshold you have to pay out more, but that might well be offset by their added contributions to the economy. I'm not saying it definitely will be, but it's not obvious that it won't.
I think Tyler Cowen's post, "What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?" is one of the better analyses of why basic income is likely to fail even if it is implemented: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
The bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The larger point of that article is an important frame for this discussion: Everyone's income is based on the total economic surplus. No one's value to society is equivalent to their income.
Universal income is so complex and transformational that we have to assume that before it can be implemented in scale in the US, the prerequisites such as a welfare state with single payer healthcare will seem as a minor obstacle along the road. I guess what I'm saying is that "those forces" will have to change first, and that's the small problem. UBI is already a realistic possibility in some places but I think it's a few decades out (at least) in the US.
The places that can make realistic attempts to implement it now are those with large cradle-to-grave welfare systems and and an economic outlook that requires stimulus, which is why Finland is such an interesting example.
Paying people to not contribute to GDP will result in decreased GDP. Lower GDP means less income to be distributed.
UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.
Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
One thing I haven't really seen adequately addressed is this: what happens when some people inevitably waste their $2000 a month stipend on non-essentials and then don't have enough money for rent or food?
Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
> what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
The same thing that stops us from recreating the current welfare state on top of the current welfare state to protect people who barter away all their food stamps for drugs.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.
This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever.
I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and no income whatsoever are not the same thing.
Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.
For one thing, any "recreated system" would be dealing with fewer people. For another, it would be clear that the help those people need is of a different kind.
> Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.
Basic income will require a major shift in attitudes. We already have a situation where even highly profitable companies refuse to pass on to their employees more share of profit than absolutely necessary. Why would the people who make these decisions support basic income? And they are the ones ultimately in power.
I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.
I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?
> The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing
The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.
The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.
> Altman envisions a scenario in which the majority of Americans, fresh off their initial basic income payments, become perfectly content to sit at home in their virtual reality headsets. He questions whether that future is necessarily better than the stimulation and (modest) physical activity found in commuting to work and chatting with coworkers.
> "People do form bonds with their community and their society through work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."
I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.
I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.
Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self-funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.
It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.
[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.
Its the company you choose to associate with. You probably don't hang out with the drug addicts,[0] unemployed[1] or the surprisingly large number of DUI arrestees.[2] Everyone has their own filter bubble of community, but I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
I've given a place to stay, a place to stow belongings, and paid work to homeless drug addicts. I am more familiar with their problems than most on HN (incl. the ones that are vocal about the contrast between the tech environment and the homeless in San Francisco).
Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.
In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.
> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.
b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.
d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."
e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.
f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.
g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.
h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?
Nevada County, California. Not really that far from the Bay Area.
Bandwidth is currently spotty -- your best bet is Comcast in their small and crowded service areas -- but a local ISP has secured funding for a large last-mile fiber deployment and I think they've either just broken ground or are about to.
It's beautiful here, you can get to the store and back in 5 minutes, you can go to Tahoe or to Sacramento for the day, and, seriously, it seems like everyone is always doing at least three cool things.
I'm curious whether the basic income studies being done by Sam Altman and others will also cover what happens when subsidies are withdrawn?
Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.
(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."
I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.
Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.
The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.
There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?
> Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
> The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non-priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.
It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.
Happiness is correlated not so much with one's absolute wealth but rather with one's relative wealth compared to others in the local community. Even within those slums there is a wide range of incomes, and I think you'll find that the very poorest of the poor in a particular area are usually rather unhappy.
If the goal is to have more people working and we assume that the government would be paying the money for this "basic income", why don't we just subsidize companies that hire lots of people based upon how many people they have. And if you focus it toward jobs that require low skill only and manufacturing, then it directly benefits many companies in the US that would probably choose the same price for having something built in the US vs China. I am honestly pretty tired of flying to china to get products built.. Been doing it for years and I'd prefer to fly to Texas instead..
I once went to a committee meeting held by an interfaith organization who wants universal Pre-K education. In CA, this will cost about $4500/student by the teacher's own estimates. I asked "Why don't we just pay parents with pre-K aged kids, say $3500/year. We will say the money is to enhance the educational environment of the child, but it will be up to the parent to spend it and the money will have few strings attached.
The schoolteachers in the room told me I was an idiot and to shut up.
How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. This may solve some issues with basic income: it's not "free" money, which doesn't present as much of a problem to people's values. It won't feel like a handout, and people will more easily transition back to a real job if they want.
The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
> check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument against UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, might — enable them to be their flavor of productive.
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Another demographic to consider is retired people with pensions. Some of them waste it down the pub, others lead meaningful lives and describe these years as their happiest.
Why is it necessary for everyone to make productive use of their time?
> The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I think most of the problem with "one-euro jobs" is more that they're (a) "one-euro" than anything else and (b) treated as a temporary thing for people who are unable to find anything else.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
The article is here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (click 'here' to remove the purple overlay).
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
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If WWII (or other total war) hadn't happened, I wonder if the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration would still exist today and in what form.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
(1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
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No, science has pulled people out poverty. Capitalism, like other forms of terrible economy systems happened to exist at the same time.
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Socialism is when workers own their means of production. What you described isn't socialism nor communism.
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It sounds like you're suggesting that the government provide a class of jobs to citizens and pay them a small wage for it. Not only does that sound very different from the idea and principles of basic income, but it also sounds suspiciously close to certain socio-economic models that have been tried, unsuccessfully, by other countries throughout history.
Examples? You probably only think you have some because you're over-extrapolating what the proposal really is about. Job Guarantee advocates usually advocate for it within a larger framework that is pretty much the same as we have today.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
I think it is great they are studying UBI, but I agree with you in that giving people work is the way to go. I believe it goes by the term "workfare" (as opposed to welfare). There is always more work to do, the problem is people may not be willing to pay enough money to have it done. If the government is paying out the money anyway, there should be something productive coming from it. I think this is good for the country and for the people doing the work.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
> more easily transition
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
Because they will be conditioned to a routine of getting up at 7am and getting to work by 9am putting in there hours and doing that five days a week.
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
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Cleaning parks and repairing roads will be done via park cleaning and road repairing robots unfortunately.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
I think makework is tremendously destructive to the dignity work affords.
"Make work" programs like this built the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn bridge.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
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There's no dignity in work, there's dignity in creating value, which not all work does. Private companies are quite capable of generating useless makework (If you haven't experienced this personally, I envy you).
"Basic employment" sounds a lot like "the military" (or, in the USA, national guard etc). While they don't accept literally anyone, they will take mostly anyone and give them a job that they can perform reasonably well. Sometimes this is flying planes, but more often it's mopping floors and keeping track of inventory. To paraphrase a friend, the military can take somebody that's dumb as fuck and fit them into a little box where they perform one simple task well.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
German has the so called "1 Euro jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_add... It's a job where you have to show up, cleaning up parks is one example, but essentially you're 99% on welfare. People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
> People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
In addition there could be subsidy for for corporations and business that provide training certificate program material for entry level positions in there industries.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
How about an employer based basic income, where the government subsidizes X dollars per year, per employee. Seems like it would fit right in with an employer based healthcare.
Do you feel that employer based health care has been a success?
So a profit subsidy then.
My fear is that people would get stuck in such a program for life - they wouldn't have much opportunity to learn skills that could help them find a different job
How very Keynesian.
Basic income will have to come with extremely limited immigration EDIT: or immigrants will be ineligible for the income.
That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.
This is an important point, especially because the first country that implements UBI will be the most attractive country to immigrate to for people who have no value to employers. Many potential immigrants who want to work hard will choose to go to other countries, so the country with UBI will miss out on their productivity and their tax dollars. That would certainly put a burden on the UBI system.
What immigration system allows people who have no desirable skills to immigrate currently?
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The developed world already has this problem: Australian unemployment benefits are on the same order as most UBI proposals. The current Australian response is the systematic rape and murder of unauthorised immigrants, which most of the country thinks isn't tough enough. (That is literally true, not a joke.) So this can go very wrong.
Systematic? Citation please.
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This isn't immediately obvious to me, especially if basic income is implemented as a negative income tax.
Of course if there are more people beneath the tax threshold you have to pay out more, but that might well be offset by their added contributions to the economy. I'm not saying it definitely will be, but it's not obvious that it won't.
I think Tyler Cowen's post, "What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?" is one of the better analyses of why basic income is likely to fail even if it is implemented: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
The bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.
Along the line of relevant analyses, there was an insightful post by Brad DeLong recently: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one-of...
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The larger point of that article is an important frame for this discussion: Everyone's income is based on the total economic surplus. No one's value to society is equivalent to their income.
Universal income is so complex and transformational that we have to assume that before it can be implemented in scale in the US, the prerequisites such as a welfare state with single payer healthcare will seem as a minor obstacle along the road. I guess what I'm saying is that "those forces" will have to change first, and that's the small problem. UBI is already a realistic possibility in some places but I think it's a few decades out (at least) in the US.
The places that can make realistic attempts to implement it now are those with large cradle-to-grave welfare systems and and an economic outlook that requires stimulus, which is why Finland is such an interesting example.
So essentially universal basic income will fail because it won't be implemented universally or basically.
Paying people to not contribute to GDP will result in decreased GDP. Lower GDP means less income to be distributed.
UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.
Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
original source of this example: https://ploum.net/largent-doit-il-etre-notre-seul-objectif/ (in french, but interesting essay)
Yeah, try that in scale for a few years and watch the economy collapse under runaway inflation.
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One thing I haven't really seen adequately addressed is this: what happens when some people inevitably waste their $2000 a month stipend on non-essentials and then don't have enough money for rent or food?
Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
> what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
The same thing that stops us from recreating the current welfare state on top of the current welfare state to protect people who barter away all their food stamps for drugs.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.
This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.
What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?
They have no income whatsoever.
I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and no income whatsoever are not the same thing.
Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.
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>Presumably they become better at managing money.
That's, uhh, a bold assumption.
For one thing, any "recreated system" would be dealing with fewer people. For another, it would be clear that the help those people need is of a different kind.
> Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.
You may be interested in Tyler Cowen's post on this subject, which I posted about elsewhere in this thread: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
There's no reason to assume that it's paid monthly. There is no reason a basic income couldn't be paid daily.
Basic income will require a major shift in attitudes. We already have a situation where even highly profitable companies refuse to pass on to their employees more share of profit than absolutely necessary. Why would the people who make these decisions support basic income? And they are the ones ultimately in power.
I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.
I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?
The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing
> The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing
The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.
The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.
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> Altman envisions a scenario in which the majority of Americans, fresh off their initial basic income payments, become perfectly content to sit at home in their virtual reality headsets. He questions whether that future is necessarily better than the stimulation and (modest) physical activity found in commuting to work and chatting with coworkers.
> "People do form bonds with their community and their society through work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."
I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.
I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.
Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self-funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.
It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.
[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.
Its the company you choose to associate with. You probably don't hang out with the drug addicts,[0] unemployed[1] or the surprisingly large number of DUI arrestees.[2] Everyone has their own filter bubble of community, but I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANEVA0URN [1] https://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/hhsa/bh/docs/Alcohol%20and... [2] Nevada County has a much higher rate of alcohol involved motor vehicle accidents than Placer County or the State as a whole
I've given a place to stay, a place to stow belongings, and paid work to homeless drug addicts. I am more familiar with their problems than most on HN (incl. the ones that are vocal about the contrast between the tech environment and the homeless in San Francisco).
Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.
In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.
> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.
b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.
c. There exist right now entire classes of businesses which survive on exploiting poverty, and UBI might make them go extinct, and that would certainly be a net good for society. For one example: http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the...; for another: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee... (and before all the supply-side armchair economists appear to tell me that UBI just means that impound costs and court costs will rise to exactly match: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/econo...)
d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."
e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.
f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.
g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.
h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?
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This county sounds nice. Where is it? Do you have good bandwidth?
Nevada County, California. Not really that far from the Bay Area.
Bandwidth is currently spotty -- your best bet is Comcast in their small and crowded service areas -- but a local ISP has secured funding for a large last-mile fiber deployment and I think they've either just broken ground or are about to.
It's beautiful here, you can get to the store and back in 5 minutes, you can go to Tahoe or to Sacramento for the day, and, seriously, it seems like everyone is always doing at least three cool things.
http://gonevadacounty.com/
We're pretty high-tech for a rural county too, and we're actively recruiting tech companies to come up here.
If someone's seriously interested in relocating, contact me. I'm pretty plugged-in to the folks pulling strings to make it happen.
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Another prerequisite for basic income would have to be the separation of health care from job based health insurance.
I'm curious whether the basic income studies being done by Sam Altman and others will also cover what happens when subsidies are withdrawn?
Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.
(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."
I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.
Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.
The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.
There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?
> Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.
This is what the leftist want you to believe.
Nothing will ever work to bridge the wealth gap. The best we can possibly achieve is equal pay for equal work.
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> The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non-priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.
It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-baltimores-young-blac...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-m...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
Marx was proven wrong even in his own lifetime.
For example, he wrote:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.
Happiness is correlated not so much with one's absolute wealth but rather with one's relative wealth compared to others in the local community. Even within those slums there is a wide range of incomes, and I think you'll find that the very poorest of the poor in a particular area are usually rather unhappy.
If the goal is to have more people working and we assume that the government would be paying the money for this "basic income", why don't we just subsidize companies that hire lots of people based upon how many people they have. And if you focus it toward jobs that require low skill only and manufacturing, then it directly benefits many companies in the US that would probably choose the same price for having something built in the US vs China. I am honestly pretty tired of flying to china to get products built.. Been doing it for years and I'd prefer to fly to Texas instead..
Americans tend to feel that it's ok to personally accept assistance, but everyone else that does is a lazy cheat.
I once went to a committee meeting held by an interfaith organization who wants universal Pre-K education. In CA, this will cost about $4500/student by the teacher's own estimates. I asked "Why don't we just pay parents with pre-K aged kids, say $3500/year. We will say the money is to enhance the educational environment of the child, but it will be up to the parent to spend it and the money will have few strings attached.
The schoolteachers in the room told me I was an idiot and to shut up.