I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (unconditional and for all residents) so its all theoretical.
Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have?
~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to, without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the existing welfare system. And so on.
And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away. Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest income tax bracket would start at 0.
Everything you say is still the idea and I agree but where does the idea that progressive taxation would go away coming from? What does it have to do with UBI?
A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying different marginal rates.
Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each other out -- lower income people are supposed to pay lower marginal tax rates but if you're paying a 10% marginal tax rate and then have a 25% benefits phase out rate, that's the same as paying a 35% marginal tax rate. Worse, the benefits phase outs for different benefits often overlap, with the result that lower income people are often paying higher marginal tax rates than wealthy people, and there are some cases when their marginal rates even exceed 100% of marginal income.
So you have two unnecessarily complicated systems that mostly exist to cancel each other out, and to the extent that they don't they're doing something you don't actually want (excessively high marginal rates on poor people). It's better to just get rid of both -- no phase outs is the "universal" part of the UBI, and then you combine that with a uniform marginal tax rate for everyone.
You're basically getting rid of the progressive rate structure so you can lower the marginal tax rates on poor people to the ones being paid by rich people, and if that seems counterintuitive it's because the status quo is very stupid.
It turns out that a theoretically optimal non-linear taxation schedule features a UBI plus varying marginal tax rates (i.e. continuous tax brackets) that start out quite high (but sub-100%) in the UBI-clawback range (to manage the UBI break-even point while still offering a high subsidy to the very lowest earners) become very low for low-to-middle income earners and rise gradually for middle- and high-income earners. That's quite redistributive in intent, but the tax brackets themselves are neither "progressive" nor "regressive". Nevertheless, middle- and high-income earners do face moderately progressive rates.
You should repeat that claim with concrete numbers.
What is the effective marginal tax rate in the UBI-clawback range, including any housing / healthcare / childcare / whatever benefits lost due to income? And what is the minimum hourly net income that would encourage someone with guaranteed basic income to take a job instead of staying at home? With those two numbers, you can calculate an effective minimum wage, below which it would be practically impossible to hire anyone.
> And what is the minimum hourly net income that would encourage someone with guaranteed basic income to take a job instead of staying at home? With those two numbers, you can calculate an effective minimum wage, below which it would be practically impossible to hire anyone.
The answer to the first question varies from person to person, and from job to job since some of them are less desirable to do independent of what they pay, which means the threshold in the second question doesn't actually exist. There may be 100 people willing to work a specific job for $X/year but not 1000 people, etc.
They benefit from greatly lowered tax rates on their earned income (this is also a 'carrot' for the UBI net-receivers themselves, at least at the higher end), and high growth because you don't need to 'soak' higher-earning folks, who only pay moderately progressive rates. The alternative either has the lowest earning folks getting screwed out of receiving a meaningful subsidy (which is really bad) or pushes the break-even point way too high, which is not really what you want either and is the main criticism of UBI from a practical POV.
> They benefit from greatly lowered tax rates on their earned income
Lowered marginal tax rates. Raising the marginal rates on the lowest earners is raising the effective rates on the lower middle class. That they don't get anything is essentially the purpose of your proposal.
> and high growth because you don't need to 'soak' higher-earning folks, who only pay moderately progressive rates.
But did you actually have to do that? Having the lowest marginal rates be in the middle is pretty expensive because it's also lowering the effective rate on everyone above them, or at best is just balancing out having the highest rates at the bottom. It seems like you're trying to increase the amount of the UBI while making sure the extra money comes from the middle rather than the top. Having approximately the top half (50% of the population) pay so that the second quartile (25% of the population) can get ~half the UBI instead of none both doesn't seem like a bad thing and doesn't seem like it would cost them that much rate-wise because it's a 2:1 population ratio and they they have a higher per capita base to apply the rate to.
And having the highest rates at the bottom is pretty bad incentive-wise.
> or pushes the break-even point way too high
What's the problem with the break-even point being somewhere around the middle? The people only slightly below that aren't getting a large subsidy, they're just not getting literally zero.
Meanwhile the amount of "well I didn't make that much money because I had half of it paid to my kid" marginal rate arbitrage you're reintroducing is large.
> Raising the marginal rates on the lowest earners is raising the effective rates on the lower middle class.
Those are just clawback rates. The lower middle class don't need UBI in order to pay for the necessities of life, and most UBI proposals don't expect them to be net recipients, any more than they'd be net recipients of current welfare.
> it's also lowering the effective rate on everyone above them
That's balanced by the gradual progressivity of tax rates on upper-middle incomes.
> while making sure the extra money comes from the middle rather than the top
The low rates for the lower-middle class are actually ensuring the exact opposite of that claim. The upper incomes are the source for the bulk of income redistribution in the usual optimal system as it comes out of these analyses; they just don't face prohibitive rates.
> And having the highest rates at the bottom is pretty bad incentive-wise.
It's the opposite. The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point. Meanwhile the high rates there help make the whole tax schedule sustainable. It may be a counterintuitive point but it's confirmed by rigorous, automated analysis.
> marginal rate arbitrage you're reintroducing is large
The most likely response is not necessarily arbitrage, it might just be earning enough that you start paying low marginal rates after the UBI is clawed back.
> The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point.
That's not true. One of the issues any serious UBI proposal needs to face are the increasing demands of the labor market. A couple of generations ago, there were still plenty of opportunities for people who had little to offer beyond a pair of hands and some work ethic. Today not so much.
The bottom end of the labor market consists of a nontrivial number of people who are not productive enough to earn a living wage. But there are still societal benefits from having them work for living, instead of being passive welfare recipients or turning to crime. To make that happen, even a low wage should increase the net income significantly above UBI.
> The lower middle class don't need UBI in order to pay for the necessities of life, and most UBI proposals don't expect them to be net recipients, any more than they'd be net recipients of current welfare.
The premise of them receiving it isn't so they can buy corn, it's so they can save up a down payment on a house or have enough savings that if their car breaks down they're not completely screwed. They're supposed to get the money.
> That's balanced by the gradual progressivity of tax rates on upper-middle incomes.
That's not balancing it, it's further exacerbating it. You then have the upper middle class paying less than the full marginal rate, along with everyone above them for that part of their income range.
> The low rates for the lower-middle class are actually ensuring the exact opposite of that claim.
I feel like this is still confusing effective rates with marginal rates.
Suppose you have a 50% marginal rate up to $30,000 in income and then a 5% marginal rate up to $60,000. Alice makes $32,000/year. In this system her effective tax rate is ~47%. By contrast, Bob makes $60,000 and has an effective tax rate of 27.5%. Moreover, between the two of them they have $92k in total income of which the government gets $31600, ~34%. Why would we want Alice to have to pay ~47% instead of ~34% so that Bob, who makes almost twice as much, can pay 27.5% instead of ~34%?
Adding the UBI would lower both effective rates and result in a progressive rate curve, but why would we want to add "progressive" rates that make the system less progressive?
> The upper incomes are the source for the bulk of income redistribution in the usual optimal system as it comes out of these analyses; they just don't face prohibitive rates.
But why would you need prohibitive rates at all?
US GDP is ~$31T with a population of ~340M. To give a $12,000 UBI to every single person would be ~$4T, i.e. 12.9% of GDP, implying that's the uniform marginal tax rate you would need to collect the money. That's assuming the tax is applied uniformly (and applies to corporations as well as individuals etc.), and maybe you want to exempt non-profits from the tax or something, but as a ballpark estimate that's the number and it's not crazy high. Especially when it's a universal transfer payment and the majority of people are just getting most or all of it back immediately.
> The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point.
That's not how that works. If you had a 50% marginal rate up to $30,000 and you're deciding whether to take a $32,000 job or not work, you're only getting $16,900 to put in your pocket from taking that job. Being "out of the clawback range" doesn't stop the majority of the pay from still being in it. And, of course, there are jobs that don't even pay that much, or some people might want to work part time and you're essentially screwing them for not making enough money.
> Meanwhile the high rates there help make the whole tax schedule sustainable. It may be a counterintuitive point but it's confirmed by rigorous, automated analysis.
Why do we need automated analysis to do arithmetic? You can avoid a huge increase in the rate on lower income people with a much smaller increase in a universal rate because the former only applies to a small proportion of total income and the latter applies to all of it.
> The most likely response is not necessarily arbitrage, it might just be earning enough that you start paying low marginal rates after the UBI is clawed back.
As soon as you have non-uniform marginal rates, arbitrage is going to happen. We don't have to speculate here because we currently have non-uniform marginal rates and it's extremely common. Family members in a lower tax bracket get added to the payroll to soak up taxable income at the lower rate.
We're talking about the lower middle class, they can sustain themselves by working, essentially by definition. They can get the money (compared to the status quo) - by working, because they'll be paying negligible overall rates on their own earnings as soon as the UBI is fully clawed back. Redistribution (UBI) is costly (being funded by high rates on the higher incomes, that deter them from earning more), so in most practical proposals it is largely limited to those who really are unable (or perhaps unwilling, but in a near-optimal system such 'unwillingness' is most often explained by practical inability) to earn enough for a tolerable life. Giving any part of the middle class a net-UBI only to claw it back with high rates (as it must be at some point in the tax schedule) wouldn't leave them any better off in practice and it would set up pathological anti-work incentives. It's a pretty clear non-starter.
> You then have the upper middle class paying less than the full marginal rate
If you're talking about effective rates being less than marginal rates, that's just inherent to any progressive taxation. There is in fact a strange theoretical result that the very top earner should ultimately be facing a zero marginal rate on their very last dollar of income since any non-zero rate on that "top" level is pure overhead, but of course that's a bit of a curiosity and hard to apply in practice, except maybe as a broad caution against the common idea of levying punitive rates on the very highest incomes. Progressive taxation at the high end is still the practical optimum.
> I feel like this is still confusing effective rates with marginal rates.
I feel like you're disregarding the fact that the high-rates at the bottom are purely UBI-clawback rates; in fact, $30,000 per year seems quite infeasible as a UBI range, so ISTM that you're inadvertently getting the wrong idea entirely about what the system might imply!
Mathematically equivalent does not mean human psychologically equivalent. e.g., people prefer a discount, even if the actual final numbers are the same. The framing matters
UBI basically is an equalizer, instead of a standard deduction and graduated taxation, you get $N off the top and pay X% of whatever you earn. The progression comes in the money you get since it comes out of taxes from everyone, theoretically it is wealth redistribution especially if it becomes a significant part of most people’s income.
That's exactly what it's supposed to be, but then opponents (or just people who are confused) will often characterize it as something else which is easier to find fault with.
The current UBI frame is nothing like what you said. And I think this is the issue with UBI - the incentives are not aligned for it to be stable and reasonable over time, but rather to get much worse and misused over time.
It could start out like that while we gradually dial down the other systems it is suppose to replace.
> Progressive taxation would go away.
There should be very aggressive progressive taxation. When you've absorbed a lot we should encourage you to stop hoarding and get a life.
Maybe do a license for a fund for a specific purpose. Then you can continue playing the game but the fund may only be spend on [say] high speed rail.
It seems fun to leave all the money in the companies and require them to explain to a committee what they are going to do with it. If apple says they are going to make phones the size of the fund begs to question why they are not already spending it on making phones?
I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI: have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic Work.'
Beyond spending government money to take care of the country and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they want to hire employees.
I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for the individual and the community they are a part of.
1. The idea behind UBI is that it is near-zero effort, the cost to operate UBI should be minimal. UBW cannot be low overhead I suppose.
2. What motivation do I have to do the work if I can’t get fired?
You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a guaranteed income.
It’s up to you if you take up the state’s offer or not.
The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything into volunteering. The result is a rise in the “reservation wage gap” - the amount the private sector has to pay to get people to work for them.
The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero - which is more economically efficient.
Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business loans.
One issue is that there's X% (debatable) of people who can't work for reasons that are complex or hard to explain. For many, even if they are physically able, you kinda don't want them to.
I mean, people who will create negative utility in a workplace or cost more in supervision expense than you get from them as output.
They create hazards for others by being drunk or on drugs on the job, or by harassing or bullying others, injuring themselves or others, causing personality conflicts or dramas due to trauma or unresolved mental health issues etc. I don't mean this as a value judgment, it's just like some people really aren't in a place in life where they can function well in work settings.
I'm not sure how you "guarantee" something that is dependent on complex situational decisions.
That confuses two points. Employees sell labour hours. At the basic living wage those hours are interchangeable between all people offering them. Even to the extent of age or infirmity. That’s what “unskilled labour” means.
The conversion of those hours into labour services is why the private sector is allowed to profit. If they want “better quality hours” then they have to bid up the price of those hours.
That should be market determined, rather than being administratively set as the gap between unemployment benefit and the minimum wage. You’ll be surprised how well the private sector can use hours once they see people doing the basics of turning up on time and doing something.
When we sentence offenders to “community service” we give them a job as rehabilitation, along with all the support mechanisms to straighten out lives. If we can do that for offenders, we can do that for everybody.
The government already does this by subsidizing low income earners via the EITC. It just outsources the actual job provision to the private sector, which is an effective alternative to wasteful make-work.
Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer.
The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.
If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.
An income subsidy does the same thing at lesser cost. Whether that subsidy is a UBI or a wage supplement is to some extent a political choice: we got the EITC instead of a proper UBI (managed as a "negative" income tax bill for low-earning folks) largely due to political objections to the notion of getting money "for doing nothing".
Yet the state pension tells us that isn’t the case. The state pension is a UBI allocated by age rather than physical area. We have millions of data points showing that when people receive sufficient to live on they stop working.
The result is political pressure to remove the state pension or increase the age at which it is received.
If UBI worked as you suggest then the resulting increase in productivity would drive the state pension age down not up.
The evidence is against you. Giving people money reduces productivity and makes it more difficult for firms to get the labour they require, and at huge cost to the state that uses up the finite taxation space there is available.
Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in bad faith throw at policies they don't like, because most people don't know enough to reject it.
The monetary side of the economy deals with money volumes orders of magnitude larger than the real side, and reacts to change also orders of magnitude faster. Because of that, inflation is almost always completely determined by monetary policy. A real shock that can out-impact monetary policy looks like the end of the world.
Oil is up due to shortages due to the war in Iran. RAM is up in price due to supply shortages due to AI. During COVID much of the early inflation was caused by supply shortages due to factories shutting down. Then house prices shot up in suburbs as people moved out of cities so the demand went up there. None of that is due to monetary policy.
Saying that the total money supply is the cause of inflation is a very simplified view. There are currently trillions of dollars in M2 doing nothing except sitting in wealthy people's bank accounts and investments as generational wealth. That does not raise the prices of anything until it is being spent.
Yes, we are in a situation today where the real economy may send inflation out of control in some countries. As we were at the early days of covid (but not an year or two later).
I don't know what relation you see between that and UBI.
I think UBI would have a similar effect just via increased demand instead of a decreased supply. When the poor and middle class are all getting supplemental income, and they're competing for the same rentals, the landlords will raise prices, and so on. Same for anything else in limited supply.
> Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in bad faith throw at policies they don't like, because most people don't know enough to reject it.
That's very dismissive. Since you know so much, why don't you try to reject it?
Inflation isn't inevitable, especially in the long term. But of course it depends on implementation.
The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an accounting trick: there's no actual goods not being produced that need to be produced, and it is just shifting costs from welfare, charity, family and friends, etc to the UBI program. This is not inflationary and frees up human effort to focus on higher needs than scraping together a basket of things merely to live.
A lot of the time, though, people also want some non-essential but still pretty important things covered, which is a bit trickier. In this case, there is the potential for more money to be chasing a fixed supply of goods. This will drive inflation in the short term. However, in the longer term, capital will be redeployed to capture that increased demand (while being deployed away from the desires of those taxed to fund the UBI).
This all assumes that the UBI is revenue neutral; if not, yeah, we will get a lot of inflation.
I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to cash won’t result in inflation. It’s about accessibility and how liquid the assistance is. It’s also about how evenly that’s distributed.
To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of UBI.
Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income buyers, cheap products wouldn’t even exist in a freely capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.
It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world that wasn’t subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in a freely capitalistic system.
The point is that, if limited to a level that just covers essential goods, it won't change their distribution, just their payer. If it did change the distribution of the good, then it wasn't essential (because it's the floor; without it, the consumer of the good would be dead; above it, and the vast majority of people immediately spend their income on luxury substitutes).
That is, to be clear, a much lower floor than what many people mean by "essential," which has undergone a kind of concept creep in modern discussion that, depending on the person, might be a cell phone, to an education at a private university, to owning a condo in San Francisco. My essential here means enough to afford enough caloric and nutrient intake to maintain a livable body mass; a couple sets of plain tee shirts and jeans; and a minimal shared living space in a low cost of living area. That's quite below what the US considers the current poverty line and a quite bleak existence (and most people would wonder what's even the point of it).
Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the short term.
In places that consist of many people with subsidized incomes, like elderly housing complexes, why aren't local grocery stores and gas stations higher than elsewhere?
Also, aside from that question, prices will only rise if there's no competition. In a working market, if more people can afford a higher rent more apartments will be built.
Because the subsidies aren't on top of base income?
The subsidy isn't the problem per se, it's the net increase in income.
It is obviously self-evident everywhere that high incomes create high cost of living, which can be traced through higher costs all the way down to the land rents (the rent someone is willing to pay to have market access to the high local incomes).
I don't see why UBI would necessarily be an increase of income for everyone. It could be that, but it could also be a decrease in hours worked, or a more equal distribution of wealth, or any combination of these.
I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by having more time to do things I like.
> Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount of hours you're currently working?
Show me the job like mine where this is an option, and I'll take it in a second. Hire another me and we'll split duties.
These sorts of "professional job that pays a professional hourly rate but is for 20 hours a week" are exceedingly rare. You'll usually be taking far less than 50% pay - far worse if you include benefits in the calculation.
I've been halfway keeping my eye open for such an opportunity so I could fund the basics of my life, plus have time to do personal projects with utterly no chance of monetary payback. Just stuff like paint the house, teach myself how to weld, work on backyard art, volunteer, etc.
I could certainly find a job that pays 50% of what I get now for working the same number of hours though. Perhaps moderately less stress and no "off hours" chance of being called in for an emergency. But that's not a great tradeoff since I'm looking to trade money for time.
This may not be the point you're making, but it really is sort of frustrating this isn't an option. I get why - I employ folks too and understand the overheads involved - but man it's the dream!
If we worked fewer hours for the same pay, our purchasing power would remain the same. I'm not saying there won't be any disruption at all, but we did it before with the five-day work week.
If "we" means everyone, yes. But the reality is there is a sufficient number of people willing to work more to earn more, and therefore they will raise prices of everything which destroys your purchasing power.
Your purchasing power is defined in a competitive equilibrium with your peers.
If you're assuming you can band everyone together to all decide to work fewer hours for the same pay, fine, but you just invented a union, not an improvement to UBI.
There are people working 80-hour weeks now. I don't think "some people want as much money as possible" is the basis of how we should think of labour. Plenty of middle-class workers will be happy to work fewer hours if they can maintain their current lifestyles.
> If you're assuming you can band everyone together to all decide to work fewer hours for the same pay, fine, but you just invented a union, not an improvement to UBI.
Why should this come solely via unions? I elect people to represent me, and I want those people to tax AI/tech companies and their beneficiaries, and return some of the wealth they've generated to the people it's been extracted from. The entire point of UBI is that it's universal, including in industries poorer and more vulnerable workers who can't self-organise work in.
The trick though is that you aren't really increasing net income. You are just adjusting the way you provide your safety net while increasing the volume of money and the "velocity" of that money.
A Universal Basic Income gives everyone a flat monthly or bi-weekly income. Whatever jobs you work on top of that also provide you income.
As a standard W-2 employee (in US terms) this UBI payment would be factored into your W-4 paperwork (income tax withholding). As your wage increases your withholding increases as well and at the end of the year ideally your return has a clean net 0 under/overpaid.
Below some income threshold your total income tax contribution would be less than the UBI payments and so you'd be receiving a prorated negative income tax throughout the year. You could also call it a prorated tax credit or fixed disbursement social welfare grant or whatever.
At that income threshold you are receiving an interest free loan from the government for the year with loan disbursment on a fixed schedule throughout the year. And of course you promise to pay back in full by the tax deadline (either via withholding and/or with a lump sum at the end of the tax year).
Above that income threshold you are still receiving that fixed disbursement schedule interest free loan from the government but you also start paying additional income taxes on top of that loan. This is of course all still handled via W-4 deductions during payroll and nobody touches your regular UBI disbursement that shows up in the bank as a direct deposit or as a check in the mail. It still shows up every 2 weeks or every month.
But importantly this system is resilient to sudden changes in income. If your income suddenly increases, you factor that in via your W-4 and nothing changes. But if you suddenly lose your job or you move to a much lower paying job, you keep receiving your UBI disbursements on that fixed interval and you aren't left with a tax burden for it at the end of the year.
And so UBI as a system is purely an implementation detail. If we took existing welfare systems. Housing subsidies, food security subsidies (SNAP, etc), insurance subsidies, etc. We factor their per person cost/payout and roll it all together into one fixed interval UBI check. We keep income tax rates the exact same as they are now but shifted to factor in this UBI income (i.e. start everyone at a negative income floor that slowly gets filled to 0 dollars once every UBI check for the tax year pays out). The taxes paid and the net incomes for everyone stays identical (more or less due to variations in thresholds for existing benefits programs).
So at the end of the day your income stays the exact same but there's more money moving around and more consistency for the tax payer/citizen/resident even when suddenly life events change their financial situation.
It depends. On its own, UBI puts a downward pressure on the value of money. Some other things (e.g. setting low interest rates) also put a downward pressure on the value of money. However, some things (e.g. taxes) put an upward pressure on the value of money. So it comes down to how all of those factors balance out.
If UBI is so high that people can afford paying extra without working for it then maybe, but I don't think that is the idea behind UBI. There still needs to be an incentive for people to work, they should just be in a place where they actually have a choice instead of living in survival mode every day.
I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year.
I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we introduced last year.
I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on precisely how progressive we're feeling this year).
I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.
I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don’t really understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or without it, it’s just that the floor of what “affordable housing” is gets risen. Unless you think that an unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn’t produce expensive housing? Which, I think we have many real world case studies in almost every major city in rich countries to disprove that assertion.
I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
> A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI.
Yes largely correct, but more specifically than "wealthy and powerful," I am referring directly to the landed class, wealthy or not. This type of infusion will ultimately be baked into the cost of land, which will propagate up to rent, then up to wages, then up to goods. The gains will accrue almost entirely to the landed class in the form of higher land rents with no symmetrical increase in costs because land itself does not incur costs.
> Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
It wouldn't have the same effect but it'd have an analogous effect in the localized markets in which those subsidies are applied. For example, you'd expect the price of land (and so rent → wages → goods) to increase where retiring people congregate. But it'd be less harmful to the exact degree that the subsidy itself is less broadly "helpful."
> And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Rent control is already a thing, and typically good short term but bad long term: renters don't move out because they can't get such low rent elsewhere, and landlords can't afford repairs so things are left broken. It's a great way to create slums over a few generations.
You might be interested to check out the Viennese model - Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000 subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's housing system, housing about 50% of the population.
Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obey to state. You'll always vote for your breadwinners.
Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed ans killed millions people many times in history, not just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI sounds really like an ugly idea.
UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.
As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.
Are you implying that landlords are naturally incentivized to build homes? Because in most circumstances, the exact opposite is true. In the U.S., the government has a number of programs that offer landlords vouchers in order to encourage them to build out more homes.
The broader claim that you're making is that any increase in after-tax income benefits only the rent-seeking classes (since the same argument you've made for landlords would apply to all other rent seekers, including netflix, airlines and more).
I don't know enough about economics these days to know if anyone who knows a lot about thus stuff thinks this is true, but it seems on the face of it to be absurd, since it would mean that pay raises are substantially diminished by rents paid for anything where demand is not elastic. I mean, I'm not insisting that cannot possibly be true, but it seems unlikely ...
No, this argument does not apply to rent-seeking classes. I am describing land ownership specifically. Land is a totally n-of-one asset in that it is completely inelastic. It is not created nor destroyed by any human intervention whatsoever, and so its supply is not affected by prices whatsoever.
The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land is a required input for all forms of production. People and machines must exist in space, and therefore demand land.
This does not apply to any other asset that we care about.
OK, so there are classes of activity that are fairly inelastic, but not as inelastic as those requiring use of land. Fair enough. But why would the cost of air travel not increase in response to UBI? It's not inelastic, but modest increases don't appear to reduce demand much at all. Or eggs (again, not inelastic, but not very elastic either)?
The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to multi-level dwellings (hence, for example, Singapore or Hong Kong), or increased density (e.g. ADUs or smaller lots).
I just don't see why you see UBI only affecting owners of a nearly-inelastic resource (land) rather than everything else too (even if to a lesser degree) ?
It would increase those prices! But that would then incentivize additional production, which would drive prices back down close to each good’s cost of production (modulo the suppliers’ dominance and ability to demand margin).
So same mechanism applies to land, except then there’s no way to spur additional production of land, so the price just goes up.
Re density etc: correct, which is why I’m not arguing this benefits homeowners or building owners, except to the degree they are also landowners. A building owner who does not own the land underneath his building would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent to will capture nearly all of the upside.
In response to what is deemed to be unreasonable and/or undesirable landlord behavior ... such controls would not stop landlords from continuing to earn from their properties.
"Unreasonable behavior" is just "setting market prices."
Correct it wouldn't stop landlords from continuing to earn from their properties but it would destroy the incentive to produce additional housing, so nobody wins.
Regulation is not what suppresses production, but the actual profit margins. It's extremely hard to make money building housing because the cost of land and labor are so high. These costs are high because we now live in an advanced economy where land can do much more valuable things than "be housing", and laborers can do much more productive things than "build housing."
Yup. Development companies contract when the housing market contracts. They aren't building houses for the fun of it, they are building them because they believe the 100 houses they build in a hot market will ultimately pay back the land purchase rights. They will never build so many houses as to decrease the cost of a home.
I actually got my home from a developer right after the housing bubble. They confided in me that they were giving away these homes pretty much at cost and that they had to fire a huge portion of their staff because the market was just crap at the time.
Really, the only way to actually achieve lower housing prices is through the state ownership and build out. The state could also spend a premium on building homes that it sells at a loss or rents at lower rates. But that will be pretty unpopular with the general public.
Yep — or aggressive subsidization of the inputs of housing production, or some other cost management of an input (such as a high LVT that discourages speculation and withholding of valuable land from use)
I disagree. Zoning, building permits, inflated utility hook-up charges, etc is what restricts me from buying a one-acre parcel and putting in 30 snug cabins.
You are confusing marginal price (or profit-equalization) theory with numerical limits on the level of housing unit production.
If people were allowed to build as they wished, they'd build a lot of housing, much of the housing crisis would subside and then the profitability of building house would equalize with the profitability of other uses. But stable point would give a lot more people housing.
It's like... Taxation or similar things can reduce X use of resource Y. Remove taxation and eventually X use isn't any more profitable than other uses but a tautology of markets/economics, not an argument the taxation isn't limit the production involved in X use.
Land might be scarce in the technical sense, but not in the practical sense. Housing is only expensive because people want to live in superstar cities, which in turn is because that's where all the jobs are. If UBI eliminates the imperative to live in superstar cities, that makes scarcity a non-issue.
I can work from anywhere, but I like to live in a superstar city because I find it boring living in the suburbs. I want to be near my friends, near the live events, near the buzzing restaurants and art galleries and clothing stores where I can walk around and touch things. There will always be a concentration of people in cities for these reasons.
>There will always be a concentration of people in cities for these reasons.
That's fine. Not everyone has to move. As long as the marginal city dweller would rather have cheaper housing than "buzzing restaurants and art galleries", there will be downward pressure on housing prices.
All this would do is raise prices in the marginally cheaper places to live, in order of desirability. Sure it might reduce some prices in the core "superstar" cities, but not by a whole lot - since by definition those receiving a net-benefit from UBI are going to make less than average. Especially for a HCoL city.
Sure a few folks will drop out of the highly competitive professional job market to go homestead somewhere. They will be a rounding error, since they have already expressed revealed preference that "bare minimum lifestyle" is not enough. Someone capable of holding down a $350k/yr white collar job is already qualified to go make $70k/yr remotely in some random city anywhere in the US they want to live but they choose not to.
As we've seen with COVID remote work, the desirable "cheap" places to live will very rapidly have price appreciation because they are starting from such a low floor to begin with.
A $300/mo increase in some 30,000 population city in the midwest is a lot more material to the market than a $300/mo decrease for a $3k/mo apartment in a top 10 city core.
It also ignores the folks who want to live in the superstar cities but cannot currently afford to. If UBI is high enough to really matter, there will simply be a reshuffling. I'd expect upper-end to perhaps go down (largely due to increased taxes and thus less disposable income for the high earning group), but the lower-end to be raised eating up basically all the UBI surplus.
Also this totally ignores the third and fourth (and more!) order effects. If people are less incentivized to work, and work carries a much higher tax load (as it must for UBI to be worth even considering) - pay for high-end jobs must increase since working is going to have less net-benefit for an individual who now has a choice to totally drop out of the workforce and have others pay for everything. Who knows? Maybe prices actually increase in those superstar cities as they become even more winner-take-all environments?
Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever.
Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them.
Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.
You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.
> Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price.
is very obviously not true, otherwise prices right now would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?
The answer is always supply and demand. As long as the supply is constrained or demand goes up faster the price will rise. But UBI doesn't change that math at all. (I say this as someone not actually a fan of UBI)
> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?
No, because local wages cannot sustain those prices
If local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all rents would rise to that new higher local income level
That is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally high in ultra high-income areas like SF
Every single landlord is setting prices by the same metric: what can the people who would live here be able to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil, which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to set prices: by local wages.
In fact, collusion with the likes of yeildstar is the name of the game. Everyone is setting prices based on what the algorithm tells them to set prices and they all benefit from that uprise in prices because there's basically no competition decreasing the price.
There's also been a steady consolidation of ownership of rental units which also artificially increases prices.
There's a reason nowhere in the country at this point has affordable housing.
> You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.
Most people like to live in the nicest place they can afford. This is a force pulling prices upward when many people with excess cash are competing for a limited supply of homes. Its why you'll pay more for the same size property in a wealthy neighborhood.
> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k?
Because some people in SF can only afford 3K/month. But if you added 3k/month to literally everyone's income, that number would increase.
(In case you're wondering why the many people with more than 3k/month don't crowd those people out: the wealthy depend on those 3k/month people for labor. At least for now.)
This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.
The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.
Defining "good" and "bad" in this context requires lots of other answers first.
When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many people considered it to be a bad place. But even as they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place at a good time?
When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" said the billboard in I5), many people considered it to be a bad place. But that was actually the beginning of a slow and steady population growth that now sees it as an incredibly desirable and expensive place to live.
Clearly, there are plenty of people for whom both cities were, at those times, "bad". But equally clearly, there are lots of other people for whom the very same places were, to some degree, just what they were looking for.
And these effects occur on even smaller scales. The neighborhood in London where I was born was basically a slumlords dream in the 1960s. Tons of empty housing, all very cheap (so cheap that my grandparents could afford a large home there). By the late 80s, it had become incredibly desirable and rather expensive. You can say "it was a bad place at a bad time in the 60s", but a bunch of people considered that an ideal place to be.
If we had completely equal distribution of financial resources, this sort of thing might be less of a factor. But as long as there are people looking for "value" and others looking for "luxury", the good/bad distinction doesn't really describe the world very usefully.
The empty places were by definition good for few people, typically people who couldn’t afford better places.
Artists don’t move into neighborhoods because they’re cool, they move in because they’re cheap. They’re cheap because, by definition, people don’t want to live there.
Landlords do not really set prices arbitrarily, especially not in HCOL areas where most of the cost is land rent. The rent is set by the market, and if there's a new UBI only a negligible fraction of it will go towards rent. Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics) and creates future opportunities for job creation in these economically depressed areas where such opportunities are most clearly needed.
Rents are set by local wages (via mechanism of land rents)
> Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics)
Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?
History shows — across the board — people move toward higher COL areas as their ability to pay for COL grows.
> Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?
It's difficult because the main driver is clearly towards increased urbanization, driven by the high productivity of urban jobs. But if you're planning to live mostly on your UBI and work less if at all, you won't care as much about that. There were several "back to the land" movements in the history of modern developed countries, and the early stages of succesful gentrification - often involving comparatively marginalized folks and highly mobile groups, such as artists and youths - demonstrate a similar dynamic that can ultimately lead to the flourishing of new urban areas as the stages of gentrification progress.
Your concern can easily be addressed by having a 100% tax on the value of land and then distributing this tax money through a citizen's dividend.
But this isn't all that related to the productivity dividend. That's more natural by setting banks to have a full reserve requirement. At that point new innovations would yield deflation, which would be harmful. The Fed would then have to step up and be the creator and distributor of new money. That money would then be the UBI, distributed equally to all.
You can't literally tax 100%, but this matters little: you just have to tax a sizeable fraction of land rent and this has as an outsized effect on land values due to capitalization, which vastly improves the effectiveness of the real estate market as a whole. You see this today partially, where states with high property tax rates tend to have broadly lower real estate costs.
This - since you can live in a rural area with UBI - and you get more time in the day to manage your accommodations, the move to urban housing is not so critical.
Yes if you simply assert an upside down reality, this is a good solution.
However, people actually move toward higher COL areas as their income permits them to.
If more income meant people moved away from high COL areas, cities wouldn't exist. We'd have a flat distribution of people across approximately all land with ultra-low COL and ultra-low productivity everywhere.
How does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the above scenaro).
This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.
The argument seems to be "that landlords are already charging the maximum that tenants are willing to pay for access to a given location and so cannot arbitrarily raise rents when a LVT is imposed."
But, if the tenants now have more money in the form of UBI, then that argument doesn't hold.
No the argument is that the landlord will raise rents, but they will not keep them. The gain generated by UBI, by virtue of raising the value of the land underneath the unit, would be recouped by the LVT at tax time.
UBI is passed from the tenants to the landlord in the form of higher prices, but is recouped by the LVT, which cannot be passed in reverse from the landlord back to the tenant.
It would not be inflationary if it's paid for with a tax on real value or income. Maybe somewhat inefficient, and prone to political meddling, but it's not introducing new money into the economy.
It would be in a sense, because that money is otherwise mostly hoarded by the wealthy, whose spending would look the same whether or not they are taxed. If money is saved and not spent, it is not really part of the economy in this sense.
But if the money is transferred to others and spent on additional goods & services that is when it increases demand and raises prices.
Ah yes, the old "we should actually be grateful to the ultra-rich, because by not spending all the financial resources they accumulate, they save us from inflation!"
> What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to?
I have no faith in Musk's vision of an abundance utopia for many reasons, but I suspect a lot of people would still want to do the job of being a human therapist or hair stylist even if they technically didn't need to for money.
They may want to work less than 40 hours a week, but most people do have an inate need to feel like their life has some sort of productive value beyond just base level existing.
> I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment. People who make a below average amount of money pay less in tax than they receive, people who make an above average amount still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount of taxes they pay.
The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people have a little more and higher income people have a little less.
Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make more money you make less money.
> Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would go across the street to the other grocery store.
It only works like that for products with fixed supply, i.e. things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases, because then if people have more money they have to outbid each other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your problem then is that, not people having more money. Notice that the same thing happens there if people get more money for any reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy improves. It's a major problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do them at all.
> Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor?
The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
UBI is not luxury communism, or at least not any of the proposals I've seen. A guaranteed $1000 a month would help a lot of people, but $12000 a year is not a high income and many people will want to keep working to earn more money than that. Maybe they'd be able to retire sooner, though?
As for inflation, a lot depends on how gradually it's adopted. As we saw in the pandemic, supply chains need time to adjust and bad things happen after sudden changes.
> if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year
You mean as opposed to very few people?
I'm told that if one is very curious about the topic one should not start by asking questions but read the 100+ years of the same questions being asked and answered again and again. I cant say I've followed the advice but it sounds very sensible.
This is kind of like social security, medicare or the 5 day work week, if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
The whole purpose of UBI is to increase the relative purchasing power on the left of the bell curve.
But inflation (sum total) is a moot point if total supply of dollars for total demand stays the same. Prices might temporarily increase for staples, such as shelter and food, but that should incentivize sellers in the economy to supply more staples, and fewer luxury goods.
The additional supply will eventually bring prices down, but end result is more people have more of the basics.
Just because supply of shelter in certain locales has not kept up with demand for that specific locale, and/or is affected by numerous legalities regarding things like eviction and zoning codes and fire codes and animals, does not mean invalid the theory of higher prices incentivizing sellers to increase supply.
1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and
2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation.
As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that.
A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is.
So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing. That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy.
If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China.
It's worth noting that Left-wing UBI can still be seen as a mechanism to replace social safety programs. It just requires that disability payments, etc be merged with the UBI system such that added disability needs can be treated like additional tax credits that get applied to the fixed-interval interest-free loan disbursement from the government based on your taxes that UBI effectively is.
In such a system you get your base UBI tax credit which pushes your tax burden into the negative. Additional UBI-elligible tax credits can push that tax burden even further negative. You can file the paperwork to adjust this at any point in the year and if it's for the current year the tax credit is prorated relative to the date of the next disbursement date (and the full amount for the next year).
Then your UBI disbursement updates and you get it. It works the same way as updating your W-4 tax withholding for a standard W-2 position.
At the end of the year of course your taxes all need to zero out still and if not you either get a bill or a refund.
And this also moves all of the social safety program fraud prevention together into the same system within your tax agency (IRS for the US, or state/local agency, or whatever else).
So instead of a bunch of different agencies and systems for avoiding and finding fraud it all rolls together into the responsibility of the IRS tax assessors, auditors, and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit. And while the rich hate the IRS and common media frames them as incompetent, the people at the IRS are in general extremely competent and more than willing to help and accommodate your average person (less so for the rich who get caught systematically trying to defraud the IRS).
The only way? What about built out infrastructure? What about universal health care? What about enforcing laws? What about enforcing truth in advertising? What about punishing various types of crooks in the various markets and transactions, financial and otherwise, that ordinary people take part in?
The only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the common idiom says doesn't exist?
I haven't thought this through, but I don't see how you could have UBI without universal healthcare. If the point of UBI is to ensure the most basic necessities are covered, and "basic necessities" includes healthcare, and healthcare is the Luigi-inducing travesty it is in the US right now, how is it UBI without universal healthcare?
The alternative is that UBI is high enough to cover healthcare, which is extremely (maybe unfeasibly so) expensive and creates all kinds of other incentives for abuse. Or we fix the systemic, profit motive-driven problems in the current system by nationalizing healthcare.
Yes, nationalized healthcare is also problematic, but I think UBI will indirectly alleviate a lot of the systemic problems there as well.
UBI is the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods.
Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems.
But wouldn’t it be great?
An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)
I'm sure there are other things that call themselves unions but don't serve the same function we expect of organizations using that word. I'm not really knowledgeable about either of the things you mention, so I don't know if I'd view them as fitting this description or not. Both seem unlikely to have the kind of broad negative impact police unions have, which is particularly egregious because they effectively make public oversight of a government function with a lot of potential to do harm impossible, which has the knock-on effect of making that harm more able to propagate, to the point where it's both quite severe and commonplace
I can see you're no fan of nuance. I pointed to what I believe is an important distinction between the general function of unions and that of police unions, this is hardly a claim of unimpeachability. Then when you for some non-sequitur reason started "what about"ing other unions, I said that I don't know enough about those to know whether they have a similar problem
I get the sense that you feel strongly about this subject, but it would do you some good to read the messages you're replying to, as not doing so makes you sound pretty foolish
No, the core premise of a union is to represent the interests of its members. You've confused a union with global communism, and delegimitized the ones that don't serve your interests instead.
For an extremely salient example, the purpose of coal miners' unions is to serve coal miners. The interests of coal miners don't necessarily align with everyone else's interests, and if the the interests of their union did, it would be a bad union.
If police are racist, police unions are either racist or not representative. The purpose of unions isn't to serve the purposes of upper middle-class liberal arts majors. You don't steer workers through their union, that's evil. If you want coal miners to prioritize the climate, or police to prioritize civil rights, you have to do it the traditional way - by convincing them. You might have to convince them to quit.
The idea that the police don't deserve a union because police unions would support your enemy is repulsive. Change the laws, maybe you wouldn't have to hire scum to enforce them.
This reminds me of a trading incident decades ago. We were unwinding a portfolio of correlation trades. The trades basically bet on continued correlation between assets. Unwinding those trades means assets which typically correlate now correlate less. When we fucked we they sometimes anticorrelated. Anyway, some of these price movements were noticed and incessantly commented on by CNBC pundits. Theories abounded. All wrong. Most amusing.
I’m working on that, but there’s an incentive alignment problem for early stage investment capital that requires investors with a little longer view to avoid kneecapping the value proposition, as well as the potential positive aspects to society.
(Am I allowed to be a little ideological when we are facing the potential extinction of humanity?)
Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.
Sorry, my AI autocorrected “ubi is” to “unions”. When I came back to all these “unions bad” comments I was like WTF are they on about??? lol.
But, I will say, often, unions are very positive things. Other times, basically evil. So, I think unions are a mixed bag. But the threat of potential unionization is almost a universal good, so it’s a right worth exercising once in a while.
OK, but the same response still applies. There still are plenty of arguments against UBI, and you still need to actually refute them rather than just dismiss them with "they're false or moot".
I’d agree with you in a debate, for sure, but I’m just stating my opinion. Of course, opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one lol, so I’m not saying im necessarily right.
But I do think in the special case of self maintaining, self manufacturing, intelligent servitors, I think the only way we can hope to sustain an economy of any kind would be to redistribute the output of those machines significantly, or we would end up with a concentration of power around capital that utterly eliminates the economy as we presently understand it.
As for moot, I mean that in this case, you aren’t taking anyone’s work to benefit others, so the usual arguments of socialism or wealth redistribution don’t have the same basis in injustice. Ultimately, the production of pure automation springs directly from the resources of the earth, and the earth is everyones, so it makes sense to redistribute the production to a significant extent.
As for false, I mean that the “no one will do anything” and other claims about UBI destroying productivity have all been refuted in study after study, and in the societies that already practice UBI. In this way, UBI is very distinct from needs based welfare, which is often imagined to incentivize low production, since low productivity is actually a requirement to qualify.
Ubi causing runaway inflation is another example of a thoroughly refuted claim that is easily given the lie by looking at extant UBI systems.
UBI seems to work best when it significantly removes or even eliminates stressors of survival (basic housing and food, medical care) while leaving lots of room to aspire to greater success. Throw away the stick, but leave the carrot.
It’s basically mirroring what behaviorists find time after time, that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement. Also, it makes people more willing to take risks like starting a business, getting an education, or having a family. All of which are positives for developed nations.
The goal we all seek - liberation - is a distant one. That said I’m skeptical that UBI is the right way. UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits. But as we’ve seen, such class members will organize to penetrate the state and contort it for their own ends. Thus any successful UBI will be a compromise or it will be dismantled by the powerful class that owns the economy.
In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership.
But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense?
I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.
> UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits.
It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all. It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is no need for community ownership of the means of production (though that might have some different benefits, along with some different disadvantages).
You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial.
Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A with workers in sector B. UBI does.
Community ownership does share across sectors if the community owns both sectors. Why would it not?
Also, you haven't really answered the point. You may be able to get this established. But how do you keep it established? How do you keep the elite ownership class from dismantling it? (Based on historically observed behavior, the default assumption is that they will try.) If you don't have a plan that accounts for that, you don't really have a workable plan.
I didn't say that tackling the elite class wasn't important.
But saying that the existence of an elite class implies regulatory capture is a step beyond that.
Regulatory capture is absolutely a problem. While one could advocate for eliminating the elite class (e.g. wealth taxes, confiscation, execution ... as you wish), I'd probably go for tightly controlled political donations & spending, combined with a strong anti-corruption culture (which has been severely damaged by, ahem, recent administrations).
I don't think anybody but those that are really close to the halls of power and have sufficient capital to engage in large scale lobbying is going to be able to achieve regulatory capture. So I suspect there is significant, maybe even perfect over lap between the groups that could achieve regulatory capture and the ones that actually do, and that outside of that group it is pointless to even try. You can get into the club by lucky accident, you stay in the club through regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture requires that laws (or regulations) are drafted that favor your interests. The only ways I am aware of for that to happen are:
(a) sufficient political donations/bribes to get lawmakers to draft suitable language themselves (or via their staff)
(b) a combination of political donations and a worldview on the part of lawmakers in which it is "just normal" for those affected by regulations to draft them, such that you yourself are able to draft the legislation.
There are levels of government where neither of these require incredible levels of wealth, I suspect.
Both could be stopped by limiting political donations and a political culture in which "the chemical industry writes its own rules" is self-evidently corrupt and/or non-sensical.
True, but the USA has institutionalized the power of money in politics to the point that this is now a reality: what would be called outright bribery elsewhere is called campaign donations, there are lobbyists who get to write the laws that favor their paymasters and in fact it has been argued that 'money is speech' (it doesn't get much more bizarre than that to me). What Musk did during the last elections would get you jail in some 3rd world countries, you know, where they take voting serious.
Whether any of these require incredible levels of wealth or not is moot, I think. The reason for that is that it only matters when 'lesser levels of wealth' come up against 'greater levels of wealth' and the latter will always win that confrontation.
If you can manage to believe in a system of 1 person 1 vote for just a bit longer, or maybe even 3 poor people 1 vote, then I think there is still plenty of space for "lesser levels of wealth" to overcome "greater levels of wealth". There are simpler more of us than there are of them.
I think you make perfect sense. And given that one has to take a cynical take to the writings on UBI knowing the voice of the elite establishment will overwhelm any grassroots thinking since it is actually supported by a financial sponsor to ensure the message is received the world over, unlike say you and I blogging to 7 people. So one can expect most points on it in the public discourse to be biased and in favor of elite-benefitting outcomes. Indeed, when you consider most topics in the media, no one has unique perspectives, they regurgitate the same couple perspectives everyone else does, which are probably crafted by PR firms.
The more I think about UBI though the more I come to the sad conclusion that you can't eliminate money. We can't just give everyone everything they could want for free; I don't think the planet can sustain everyone living like elon musk. So there has to be some forcing factor, some hand on top of the cookie jar that tells your monkey brain that just wants to be high, fat, and orgasming all day that it needs to endure a delayed reward or face some physical exertion to keep the party going. And for better or worse, that forcing factor is by making you have to do something to get credits, that you return for your portion of the produced abundance. This mechanism is able to tolerate the fact that someone might work on efforts not directly tied to any one thing and reap a generalized benefit from all the diversity of that which is produced. Whatever comes next, has to get through that hurdle and the more I think about money the more I find reasons why it is actually a great tool for this sort of distribution of resources and incentivizing labor.
I guess the challenge is that there is a lot of lopsided compensation, where people like say elon musk are paid handsomely even though there is realistically only so much a single human can do. When Elon musk does something that say moves billions in real world dollars on his decision, again this isn't because he is a unique superhuman, just that we have set up power on this planet such where one single person can make a decision to move billions in real world dollars, and if it wasn't musk it would have been someone else in that seat because the seat exists at all. So much power shouldn't be accumulated in one position, because again, we aren't superhumans.
A think a more workable and politically palatable version of UBI would be some form of universal utility allowance.
E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.
It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for essential utilities.
Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still need to work but there would be some element of safety net.
> Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups
I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries.
For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company and the government is guaranteeing it, you can bet water (which is relatively cheap where I live) will end up being the most expensive resource imaginable. And that may actually be true depending on the location, but it'd also be true in non-desert areas with plenty of water.
We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800. Private industries aren't stupid, they'll always charge the maximum price the market will bear. And when we start talking about captured industries like data provider, power provider, or your water provider... well that's where we can trust private industry the least as they literally have the public over a barrel. Utility boards are an OK solution, but the better solution is to turn these into public institutes instead of private ones.
> We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description of ACA [1], it didn’t lead to a dollar to dollar increase in premiums (share a citation if otherwise), and it’s a bit misleading to say it led to an increase in premiums because plans pre-ACA were effectively inaccessible to and lacking in benefits for impoverished people or people with pre-existing conditions.
[1] Here’s a brief description of ACA from Wikipedia:
> The act largely retained the existing structure of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer market, but individual markets were radically overhauled.[1][11] Insurers were made to accept all applicants without charging based on pre-existing conditions or demographic status (except age). To combat the resultant adverse selection, the act mandated that individuals buy insurance (or pay a monetary penalty) and that insurers cover a list of "essential health benefits". Young people were allowed to stay on their parents' insurance plans until they were 26 years old.
There will never be a cited reason for increases, but here's 2023 where basically all insurers filled for a 10% increase in premiums. [1]
Since the 2022 covid bill which significantly increased the subsidization of premiums, health insurers have found various reasons to increase their premiums by inflation beating numbers.
That's obviously a "the market will bear it" situation.
The ACA was a big bill that did a lot. I'm not talking about all of it, but rather the premium subsidization along with the covid premium increase which both expired in 2026.
Look, the premiums expiring was bad. IDK if that was clear from my earlier comment. But there's a fundamentally unaddressed issue with insurers in general where they charge not based on competition or the cost of service, but based on what consumers can bear. Profit incentives for healthcare in the US are completely misaligned with providing good general healthcare. The ACA premiums are a bandaid over an artery laceration. Better than nothing, but that thing is going to very quickly start bleeding through. You can keep slapping on band-aides, but ultimately you'll be looking at more damage if you don't just address the issue.
Utilities in America refers to the service relative to ideas of basic needs for survival in the US so they are often public infrastructure with private operators but in the case of some things like the internet, it’s purely privatized.
A non-tradable utility allowance would incent people to waste these basic goods, and a tradable utility allowance, while obviously fixing this, would be no different than a UBI that was indexed to the price of basic utilities.
That seems worse because it doesn't encourage conservation enough. You want people to be able to keep the gains if they conserve energy, to set the right incentives.
The “demographic groups” that find it unpopular dislike anything that can be remotely construed as giving to the poor. There is literally no purpose trying to cater to them while trying to set up a social program.
I recently came across the idea of Universal Basic Capital (UBC): "granting every person a meaningful ownership stake in productive assets from birth." UBC would be enormously difficult to implement, as well as have its own weaknesses. It doesn't seem realistic, but introduces a new idea into the conversation.
I still haven’t seen a convincing exoneration for how to avoid UBI warping politics. It seems politically impossible to lower (see Alaska’s challenges [1]) and too attractive for politicians to promise to increase in order to easily win votes.
UBI is good on paper but far from enough. Without Universal Ownership of the State, UBI is easily removed by inflation.
A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.
Source? A $20k UBI wouldn’t likely secularly increase food costs on a per-calorie basis. Those folks are already eating. There will just be supply-chain friction as the system adjusts to their newly-expressable preferences.
Just my hunch, as no major country has really rolled out UBI for everyone.
For example, how about supermarkets increasing prices? We already saw that happening for a few years since the COVID. And how about landlords increasing rents?
I'm (again) shocked that so poor article on UBI triggers any serious discussion: I mean, where's a math behind it? For US alone 1400usd for each adult and 500usd for kid would generate...4,95 trillion fucking dollars annually!
Won't any BUI proponent explain simply HOW (realistically) can it happen?
UBI will likely be necessary but that won’t appease society. Everyone wants to have a chance to climb the ladder. If it becomes self evident that humans can no longer have a meaningful impact on their outcome, there’ll be riots whether they have a roof and food or not.
My take is that UBI is the most obvious solution but not one we should count on happening. There is just too much political resistance and a population-level mental block against it, at least in the US. Not to mention, Capitalism doesn't like if it can't push labor around. (Which is largely why the mindset exists, but I digress.)
I say that we need to realize that by the same token(s) that AI reduces the need for labor, it also reduces the need for capital. A single motivated, disciplined individual can now do, using AI and public elastic clouds, what used to require an entire team. So companies can decimate teams, but companies are largely a source of capital. If you don't need so many people, you don't that much capital either! You could potentially parlay an insight or domain expertise into a viable business. Your moat could be the obscurity of your niche, or relationships, or IP (yes, patents. Suck it up and use every leverage you can.)
Easier said than done, of course. This essentially means everyone becomes an entrepreneur. Most people are not cut out for that because (besides hard-to-acquire domain expertise) that requires being immersed in an ocean of uncertainty at all times. None of our education systems prepare people for that, or for what is coming.
I expect a time of disruption, but we need to realize that AI not only a tool for the Capital class. It's a tool for us too, if only we can adapt.
UBI doesn't make any sense when you imagine how it will play out. Let's consider what it actually implies on the face: labor has been obviated through automation and therefore humans no longer have a purpose on earth. UBI then amounts to a bribe paid to the remaining surviving masses of humanity so they don't go on to destroy all the automated economy and those who remain in control of the automated economy, if those are actually people in this future and not some statistical models running on their own. This is unsustainable. The masses of humanity will inevitably want a larger and larger bribe to sustain a standard of living in probably an inflationary environment. Eventually a tipping point will be reached where the models in charge of the planet determine it is more efficient to eliminate humanity than to continue paying increasing bribes.
Have not seen a counter to the what-seems-to-me trivial point that the condition of possibility of UBI is the elimination of manual labour - or otherwise slavery and slave labour like exploitation
instead of UBI, we could just reduce working hours, while keeping the same pay. Easier to manage shifts than to upend the whole economy. Something like 3 days a week, with a german approach to sundays (everything closed).
I think the issue with ubi is it's not really basic. Cloths food and shelter are basic. I'm much more inclined to support ubi if it's food shelter cloths.
Not necessarily. It's straightforward to make it revenue neutral.
You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though they don't get more money, they have a safety net.
People making less than average get more UBI than the tax increase, and those making more pay more.
Most people get more money because the median income us a lot lower than the average.
Right, but people with lower incomes spend, and mostly on necessities, I think the idea is that most of those necessities would become more expensive (naturally or artificially due to price-fixing) if the poorest suddenly had more financial power. In the system as it stands, it seems to me like it'd just result in a bunch of money going to grocery giants and their suppliers, landlords, medical, etc.
Most of those are commodities, where the price is set by the cost of marginal supply.
Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI gives people the freedom to move from the former to the latter.
Yeah this is the downstream effect I had in mind. You could say we'd increase supply to meet the demand but that hasn't really worked out with housing for example
Is it straightforward to get Congress to make it revenue neutral? And to keep it revenue neutral? I don't think so. Politicians find "free money for everybody" to be too easy a way of getting votes.
If the only money is UBI money then things start to get weird. If UBI coexists with regular income in moderation then it doesn't change much. Consider that about 1/3 Americans receive some form of government assistance. There's already a kind of fallback UBI distributed across SNAP + Medicare + Medicaid + Unemployment + Social Security + etc, and no one on those programs is clamoring for them to be shut down so that lentils become cheaper. Giving money to everyone does increase inflation (though you can play with the tax rate to offset that), but the important effect is it transfers purchasing power to net recipients. Basically: the economy wide money supply would at worst go up by a modest factor, the income of the poorest goes up by an absolute amount (or a massive factor if you want to view it that way), which is a huge benefit to them.
"Solve the problem" probably not, but trigger inflation, probably not, since the amount is so low, it will have very little impact on the behavior of the richest, but it would have a massive impact on the behavior of the poorest, and their purchase habits generally don't impact inflation as much.
UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.
Humans have fixed calorie needs and even the very obese spend maybe 10x the norm, nothing more.
Compare that to the prospect of someone buying MULTIPLE properties, possibly multiple properties that are 10x more expensive the norm, the price disparity between a regular car and multiple supercars, the price disparity between owning a boat and/or yacht vs...not owning a boat.
Not everything, only stuff that are suddenly in higher demand that can't increase supply. If you take food as an example i don't imagine demand would increase? And if it did we could probably just produce more? And also it's not like everyone will have unlimited money, so you'll still have to prioritize and luckily we don't all have the same priorities. I'm pretty sure the idea is to fund this by taxing production and not by printing money, so inflation shouldn't be a problem.
Yes, it does cause huge inflation, but that's not even the biggest problem with it. That would be: people do not really like to share fruits of their labor with strangers, so UBI would significantly undermine the motivation to do anything other than bare minimum.
UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid of "those useless humans")
I don't think we should worry about the advent of AGI deciding to get rid of us; I'm more worried about the people who own the AI current AI infrastructure, as well as the current US regime, who don't see the value in the pesky humans beyond revenue and votes, respectively.
What if we build UBI but we turn out not to need it? Thats my worry. AI might possibly be “just another technology”. If we put in UBI we may disincentivize labor from adapting to an economic shift.
The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on Medicaid and food stamps. It’s raiding public funds for private profit.
UBI doesn't address structural inequality, and because of inflation it doesn't make necessities (health care, housing, child care, education, food) affordable. We've suffered conservatives opposing simple policies of:
* progressive taxation
* wealth tax
* government training workers, procuring supplies, and investing in advances
...but they're all gone now, so let's get going on this stuff.
Well, there's definitely other ways. I would prefer a system where company ownership public and private has a mandatory public stake in both ownership and voting on company policy and major business decisions.
I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset ownership limit.
You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and education are considered basic human rights that are included and free of cost at point of usage.
UBI, as the OP points out, as many of us have continued to point out/scream about, is a single component of a larger agenda of reforms.
It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.
It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.
It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.
It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.
It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
UBI doesn't replace market forces with central planning. You're still incentivized to produce goods and services that other people want, and to do so more efficiently than your competitors.
I don’t think Alaska has the kind of UBI people are discussing here? You probably cannot survive on $1000/year. In that situation it doesn’t seem much different to social programs standard in Europe + progressive tax.
I'm not sure UBI would work. But what's that got to do with communism? Communism failed (IMO), because it was incompatible with human nature. People form social hierarchies and like to own property. Would UBI prevent that?
You are answering my question - you posit that communism failed because people like to own property (and form social hierarchies) - and UBI doesn’t prevent those.
I’m not sure this is the case. Especially since people did form social hierarchies and did own propety in communist/socialist regimes of the Eastern block.
One might argue that UBI is incompatible with human nature, because most humans require a sense of worth, which paid work provides (to most). Take away the motivation, will the self-worthiness remain? (especially when thinking about _most_ people, not the struggling artists who wished they could pursue art without the burden of bills).
I’m not sure about this at all. I just think drawing the parallels and discussing communism failure modes is interesting for the discussion of UBI.
We never accomplished anything by everyone agreeing. If you want something and there are enough of you you take it. (It's easier if morality is on your side.) People who want to antagonize, moan or otherwise desire to get in the way need to be so afraid they wont do it or be discontinued prematurely.
At a time 99.9% worked in agriculture and agriculture was and still is complete bullshit. You can just mix plants and leave them alone. Just visit the garden if you want something to eat. Do a bit of modest pruning. Rabbits and other creatures will eat everything if you don't eat them. Just like with agriculture the rabbits will upscale their population to match whatever food is available.
I'm simplifying of course. The point being, 3% now works in agriculture. We know how to make durable houses, durable clothing, durable everything-you-need's stop listening to your wife (lol), all you need is a roof, bed, cloths, food, a good book and some time to think about what the hell we are doing.
Everything else is certainly nice to have but it should not be part of this topic.
One of my funny hypothetical: Say we rip all the roads out of the city and fill her up with chickens. Then, in stead of driving to your job you pick eggs and catch a chicken. Then, after 10 minutes your job is done for the day. If people don't like eggs or chicken that's fine, we can feed them to the chickens, or the delicious maggots that grow on them. I mean proverbial of course, no way you need to explain how it works to the chicken, it will do all that for free on factory settings.
I'm sure this is all very hard to understand, it might not make any sense to you. Then think of the UBI as the ultimate crypto currency. You take a unit of humans, a unit of time, multiply the two and hand the coins to the human. You get nice linear expansion and nice coin distribution. You only need proof of humans and proof of time. The white paper will be very short and (sadly) lack all the interesting math.
Communists shared alright 110 years ago in Russia, tens of millions of people failed to cope with that much prosperity and wellbeing, and then even more with unbearable freedom and peace.
I think folks may not realize that communism was more popular in the early 20th century US just because of how desperate a lot of the population became without any safety nets at all provided by the government. Educated proponents genuinely wanted to improve the plight of other folks. But, where it was practiced it became just a worse kind of power and resource monopoly - concentrated in the government instead of among a minority of robber barren types. I think the learning is you have to never stop pushing for no entity to have too much power - not the government and not private sector monopolies.
Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
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