This kind of thing pops up now and again but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Human behaviour is non-linear.
The study doesn't cover the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have (increase in the money supply) or the broader socio-cultural changes that would likely accompany it.
In short: scale matters for this kind of thing. Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
> Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study.
Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed. Of course people given the choice between working less or making more money usually choose the money. People who choose otherwise are already part-timing/episodically employed/on unemployment benefits/getting subsidized by their family.
Presumably there's a level of UBI where most people wouldn't see the need to work anymore, but if they quit permanently, this will reduce the supply of goods, increasing prices and limiting how much UBI can buy, to the point where people are incentivized to start working again. So it's a self-regulating system. Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases, instead of starting high and letting inflation sort out the rest.
I think the nuance here is that the income in Universal Basic Income is a stand-in for "everyone's basic needs should be met". But income doesn't guarantee that, because prices go up and down for a variety of reasons.
What people actually want is Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments, and as the original commenter laid out, none of these research experiments are running that experiment.
I mean, even that's something of a misconception. Let's start with an axiom: there are enough people and resources, both locally and universally, to provide every human being with enough to eat every day and a safe place to sleep every night (acts of God notwithstanding). That's an objective truth; technologically and logistically, we are there as a civilization. So a guarantee of access to something that already exists is a matter of policy, not economy. The doomsayers are just wrong on this one, unless the first act of UBI recipients would be to burn farms, blow up the rail network, and release pests into vacant housing, or something (though I don't doubt that this scenario is precisely what they expect; after so many studies, it's safe to call anti-UBI rhetoric a rationalization of unsubstantiated class hysteria).
And we have been producing enough to feed and house everyone for about 40 years now. Henry Ford introduced 5 day workweek and with the productivity trend we should be working one day a week by now.
It is not happening because in eyes of capitalism a person is only valuable and accepted if they have an occupation that produce value, whether needed or not.
Consequence of that, 50% of workforce is “bullshit jobs” made to keep people employed, like marketing, finance and such.
Because people sadly are brainwashed to be working from cradle to grave, it will take few generations for UBI to become unconditional and part of life, like we have with free healthcare (not you, U.S.).
In a similar vein: a lot of studies have shown that most of the cost of a UBI could usually be paid for by two existing expenditures, the first being current welfare programs, such as employment insurance, welfare, disability benefits, etc., and the second being the cost of the time and labor the government has to pay for to ensure that the programs in point one only go to a limited subset of people who qualify.
In other words, we're spending so much on making sure that most people don't get social programs that we could fund a huge chunk of just giving those people social programs instead.
Likewise, we spend more on policing and jailing individuals convicted of minor crimes than it would cost to implement social programs to reduce the amount of crime in the first place; the US spends more on their medical system per capita than most (any?) other countries because it all goes to insurance companies whose job is, ostensibly, to pay for medical treatment, but who spend a large amount of it on departments dedicated to not paying for medical treatment.
Studies have shown that a lot of people (mostly right-leaning individuals) would rather go without something that could benefit them (e.g. healthcare, UBI, etc.) if it meant that people they see as "undeserving" (the poor, the homeless, immigrants) also didn't get it, so there are a lot of people out there who would rather spend money keeping people from having positive outcomes than spend less money to give those people positive outcomes.
> Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments,
I think AI could make UBI + moving to a lower cost of living much more appealing if it solves education and healthcare.
The housing is solved for by market forces.
First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children and augment the kind of high grade services first tier locations have, especially education and healthcare with AI. Or at least that's 90% of the reason me and many people I know don't move to smaller towns
> First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children
That seems unfair to me. Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
> Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
My point was mainly that that kind of first tier city would attract those kind of people, not specifically that they should be targeted.
If you lived in a 2nd tier zone you shouldn't pay extra in taxes even if you're childless.
But specifically to your question, I do think that it's fair that childless people should pay more taxes, because having a stable population is a requirement for a stable society and single/childless people aren't doing their part.
That duty can be offloaded to parents with more children, but they should be compensated for that.
You can frame it whatever you want -- they pay more taxes, parents pay less taxes, parents get tax rebates, parents get higher UBI per child, the outcome is the same.
I do think that first tier cities leach and profit from the work of the parents, educators of the people who migrate there (and generally the whole area -- it takes a village to raise a child), profit from exorbitant property taxes so, I think the only way to solve this curse is higher taxes (if it's required) on those areas and subsidized living in less desirable places -- provided that those 2nd tier places produce competent citizens.
Progressive income tax already does this "taxing first-tier cities a higher percentage" thing. The tax bands are the same in all cities, so people living in the cheaper, low pay provincial cities already pay less tax as a proportion of income. This effect is very stark in comparing London to the rest of the UK.
Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
children are the future of our society. even in today's system, children will be the ones paying your pension when you retire. putting that burden on parents alone is what is unfair. how would you like your pension to be measured based on the number of children you raised? maybe if you have no children you shouldn't get any pension at all?
do you expect not to get any pension at all and just live on your own savings? do you live on a farm growing your own food?
you can't live in this society without relying on others, and they can't live without relying on you. and unless you want humanity to die out, future generations need our support.
i was using it as a general term for whatever money you receive after you retire except personal investments or savings. i could not find out how 401ks work, specifically i did not find out whether 401k works like any other pension scheme or not. the wikipedia page on pensions does not say that 401k is not a pension, therefore i figure it is included in the definition.
i just checked the 401k page, and it says: a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored, defined-contribution, personal pension (savings) account.
so it's a pension.
but what we call it doesn't really matter. more important is the question if the payout depends on future generations paying in. in my brief search i could not tell whether the 401k is protected against that or if it even can be protected. but if it is i'll have to retract my claim. my apologies.
> I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education.
I have a theory that every nation with a natural advantage in some product range should make it available as a birthright.
For example, Finland's relative endowment/strength is forestry products and paper production. So every citizen should be able to claim a monthly allowance, at nominal charge or for free, of TP, paper towels, and writing paper / notebooks. Contracted by the government via a bid process.
There is a documentary out there showing someone who could quit their regular job and become an artist thanks to an UBI pilot (Canada IIRC). It is presented as a positive example in that they did not become lazy, but just work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
How many people will become artists with UBI introduced nationally? Who is going to buy all that art?
There's lots of different kinds of art, some of it more commercially viable than others. Consider 3D designers selling print models, people like myself who are interested in restoring old cars or other endeavors that are artistically rewarding and aren't just painting or sculpting. Hell, people seem to do pretty well currently as content creators on YouTube.
My point is immediately jumping to the idea everyone's going to be pumping out shitty paintings and music that no one will want is lacking in imagination.
Food production is already absurdly automated. At least for grains, in theory you don't even need humans to drive the tractors on the fields any more, drones and RTK GPS systems automate all of it from seed to harvest. Cattle is fed and milked fully automated as well, with precise tracking of how much each cow ate and how much milk it yielded. Chicken also don't need much human work to lay eggs.
Most societies up to industrialization had a primary (i.e. agricultural) sector of around 50-70% of employees (numbers vary). Today, it's more like 1-2%, and the number is bound to fall - especially when lab-grown meat really takes off, because slaughtering and butchering farm animals _at the moment_ cannot be done by robots at scale and IMHO it's more likely that lab-grown meat succeeds before we entrust sharp knives to robots to actually kill animals.
> Who will fix our cars?
Modern cars - particularly electric cars - are much less maintenance intensive. That's part of why many established car brands are in serious trouble with their historically grown dealerships... "life long oil fills" and general improvements in technology already cut back on a lot of income from repair and maintenance of dealerships, and electric cars have far fewer failure points (other than crappy software) than ICE cars. We simply won't need anywhere close to the current number of service points, and we also won't need gas stations with trucks that fill up their tanks as the cars will be charged through the existing grid.
> Who will fix our potholes?
I 'member a story of some bloke holding up a sign like "I filled the potholes, pay me instead of your taxes". Local politics is on a downward slope across the Western world (with a common factor being the central government depriving local governments of revenue or loading off expenses to local levels), I think we're going to see a lot more of such incidents.
In any case, the price of trades labor will have to increase to be an effective incentive. And if you ask me, better pay the tradespeople than the vampires and vultures of Wall Street. At least the tradespeople do something to keep this society alive, the banksters do not.
The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money. Notwithstanding, a lot of people enjoy the work of being a mechanic.
> The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money.
The incentives are changed dramatically, though. The unworkability of the plan comes down to a very simple question: Why work for forty years, scrimping and saving to afford a meagre retirement, when a meagre retirement is on offer the moment you turn 18?
People have the option now to live like the meagre retirement of this proposed UBI while working, saving a ton more, and retire with a lot more than this UBI in far fewer years than 40. Instead, they spend more, because people always want more stuff. A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
Or with this proposed UBI, why wouldn't people work 20 years and have a good retirement instead of the a meager one out of the gate? Why not work 40 for a great one?
The median 65 year old has 200k in retirement savings. That's 8k per year at a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Hardly worth 40 years of work.
> A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
The option of shacking up with some buds and playing videophones all day will be utterly irresistible for many (if not most) male high school grads. Basically the college experience, for free, forever.
Well, we're apparently significantly more wealthy as a society and individuals than XXX years ago. Yet, most people still seem to be working and the economy is stronger than ever (On a multi-century scale).
I wouldn’t mind farming if it wasn’t for the need of money. There’s a lot of risk involved. I also don’t mind fixing cars, it’s just in today’s world I can work and make more money in an office - and it requires enough hours that I can’t do mechanical work at all, there’s not enough time and I have to pay for those.
Somewhat related: when do we get a truly user-serviceable automobile, something like a four-wheeled motorized version of a Fairphone or Librem. Set a max speed on them to simplify the safety requirements. Urban putt-putts.
Who cares if anyone buys the art? In a world with basic income where people didn't have to worry about survival wages, people could make art just because they were moved to make art.
To be fair, there is a massive percentage of non-productive jobs that are mostly security guards for goods and locations, and many inefficient roles related to ticket clipping, inefficient distribution and marketing that all stimulate the economy without being productive.
>>went from productive work (someone paying them to do it) to unproductive work.
Umm, that is literally wrong, by your own definition.
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
I.e., they went from an employer paying them to do work to a variety of clients/customers paying them to do different work of nearly the same value.
OFC, if everyone did it, the price of art might decline. Or demand might go up. Or both, or neither. We don't know. But either way, the example subject did NOT convert from productive to unproductive work.
Good qstn. The phrasing does leave room for ambiguity, but "make revenue close to" certainly indicates meaning closer to "$X from old job ~= $Y from art-gig"
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art
> Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Right, GP was clearly referring to to
> Does a basic income make people lazy? This assumption has been widely discussed, but never substantiated. The Basic Income Pilot Project demonstrates that the opposite is true.
If you knew you could get by forever without a job, that's very different from having a 3-year period where you can get by without a job. Especially when it comes to people coming of age. Think about the average 18 year old: if they could just 'get by' for a long time, it'd be awfully tempting.
Alcoholism happens to people who have jobs as well. Though there's a policy of being sober at work which limits drinking to off hours.
Another possibility is that Basic Income alone doesn't solve all problems. Life direction & perceived opportunity to better oneself is needed. Basic Income may enable destructive behavior. But the underlying root cause may still be present even if the person is employed.
Most people need more than mere "opportunity to better oneself". It's almost always a shortage of motivation. UBI would reduce this motivation, I believe.
Native Americans may be the best modern example of a group who's poorly habituated to urban living settings.
For centuries, White Man has tried to assimilate the indigeneous into cityfolk and teach them our languages and our ways, and there's been so much resistance to that. In fact, I propose that most human beings don't like being corralled into individualistic "cells" and so far removed from "nature" or subsistence farming/shepherding that we completely lose touch with other living things. Urban living was such a moral affront to indigeneous cultures, and even the Irish were sort of upset by the imposition, y'know?
Many homeless people on the streets simply don't know how to live. They don't know how to care for a home, how to run a kitchen, how to keep their clothes clean, how to do medical care, how to run household finances and pay bills. They're feral, essentially: how many people adopt feral cats or wild animals? They're nightmares.
Anyone who simply says "housing first" or "UBI" will solve poverty and homelessness, you're in an ivory tower and you've never been on-the-ground with actual people who can't be housed. Look at a population of 100 and you'll discern 100 reasons for that homelessness and poverty.
I'm lucky and privileged that I got independent living situation under control and was able to rehabilitate and habituate to a sort of ordinary middle-class lifestyle, because it was essentially reverting to my childhood environment. Other people came from abuse, addiction, and shitty circumstances, and they have no idea what it's like to be clean and clear-headed.
The reason that entitlements are this way currently is to ensure that qualified people can get and keep their benefits. Section 8 HUD housing has a lot of strict rules around the owners, landlords, and the tenants, and learning those rules helped me know what a decent and well-maintained household looks like. Maintaining HUD standards was paramount to me keeping that assistance.
Likewise food stamps (SNAP) can't be used for liquor or non-nutritious goods and other food programs deliver wholesome stuff you can use and eat, so it sets good examples to otherwise feral humans that it's important not to live on Doritos and beer, because they will try!
UBI is absurd to me where if you're just handing me fistfuls of cash I can do anything I want, and people will run with that, I guarantee ya. UBI is no solution to the symptoms or root causes of poverty.
Personally, I believe we need a return to collectivism, an end to rugged individuality, and more communal-style housing situations. Independent living is a real grind, because of so many responsibilities, and I have tons of neighbors but no friends. Many people would do better with shared spaces like kitchens, bathrooms, cafeterias, but those types of residences are essentially illegal in the US by means of zoning, except in unique circumstances like a special work-train-live program. And placing feral or mentally ill people into shared spaces can be a recipe for disaster, unless it's a professional institutional setting, and that's precisely what the Reagan administration eliminated from the "bad old days".
> Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Didn't something similar happened during Covid due to stimulus checks? People were confident on applying for new jobs since they had the stimulus check as a backup.
Yeah, this kind of mobility (or lack thereof) is what keeps a lot of poor people poor. Moving is expensive, leaving your current job is expensive, job searching is expensive, upskilling is expensive... Most people don't have the financial freedom to do any of those, thus they are stuck. This also means that their potential is never fully met, because they just gotta makes ends meet.
Nominally retirement is "forever" in that once you are retired your pension/savings/whatever is funding your existence needs. Having lived most of my life in the SF Bay area I've watched as my cohort came here as college grads, went through the various tech life cycles, and then aged out into "retirement." I put it in quotes because some retired voluntarily, others did not. Involuntary retirement or "funemployement" as the euphemism goes, was typically below the level of flexibility that they had imagined they would have being retired.
Various life events, health issues, marital issues, Etc. spread the spectrum even further. As a result the 'basic income' for this cohort ranges from just below 'covering groceries, utilities, and rent in a low cost of living area' to an annual travel budget, replacement budget for cars/boats/etc, and possibly a second property with some 'feature' (like a ski cabin, a beach bungalow, etc).
What is consistent across the spectrum is a desire to "do something productive with their time." That skews towards volunteer work if their basic life needs are met, piecework if having extra money would meet some currently unmet needs. I don't think I know anyone who could sit in the rocking chair on the patio every day and watch the sun come up and go down, or spend every day at the golf course or some other leisure activity, choose to take that path.
That said, pretty much everyone I know who has retired took an extended amount of time (typically months) to 'unwind.' Once unwound, life seems to assert itself.
Now I don't think this is scientific, its a very specific group of people. Generally professionals who worked in office jobs vs trades. And a number of them 'fail' at retirement which has them going back to work because they didn't have sufficient tools for creating their own direction or something. But laziness isn't a trait I've seen. A completely different direction perhaps, but a direction rather than standing still.
And, to point out, these are people coming to the end of their effective working careers, with things like medical problems and disability to inhibit their productivity. The idea that, given some paltry basic income ala current social security payment levels, young adults would just bail out is pretty strange to me. People already more or less have that option through disability and not very many people utilize it. I would expect to see something in that range, certainly below 10%, if we had a minimal basic income.
I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.
You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
Why wouldn't they? It's an easy and profitable way to pump their property values. Obviously they make an exception when they stand to profit, but I invite you to attend any county zoning meeting ever if you think this doesn't happen. The meetings are nothing but catfights of this exact description.
I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.
Rent is charged monthly, and everyone consumes the value at the exact same pacing of 1/30th the rent per day. Consumers has no leverages, save for weak protections that won't be statistically significant, against price hikes. I think it's reasonable to assune it's more efficient at capturing UBI than regular commodities that can be rationed or splurged on.
> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
what if UBI led people to think "i can go live wherever i want, regardless of job/market conditions"?
herds of young idealists and artist-types deciding to take over cheap realestate in rust-belt towns and rural areas because they no longer need to be next to a big urban center to 'make it'.
we started to see this during covid WFH, but true UBI would be even bigger
This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline.
Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build.
Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
The human nature. The moment UBI is set at X amount, the cheapest rents will jump, so will the price of a coffee, of a burger & fries in a fast-food, etc.
Greed will take over and try to get the _most_ out of the UBI as if we/you/they owe it to those people.
Wouldn't reducing the profitability of landholding via taxation discourage the creation of apartment buildings, thus reducing the supply of housing and making it more expensive?
It would make land cheaper and improve the profitability of doing the conversion. Paying people to sit on land is hilariously inefficient. Welfare for the rich.
> increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders
More than 200 million Americans own their home. They are your real estate holders. So what if they absorb some of these increases?
If your concern is housing for those who don't own a home yet then say that, and the solution to that isn't not doing basic income, but to relax the obsolete local zoning laws that require e.g. 1 acre per home in rural area or "nothing higher than 30ft" in suburban areas, basically flat out banning any density increases.
I don't think "most economists" have a favorable view of it. It is a fringe theory from the 1800s that has never been implemented.
It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.
It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.
It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
Teacher can’t afford to live next door because a retired couple that bought for 2 times their salary in 1975 live in a million pound house. They instead rent an hour away and already pay a tax for land use, just they pay it to the land owner.
i haven't read much about this, but i think that the point is that land taxes should incentivize people to make their land work ad produce an income. the problem is that this only works if you have lots of land that can be meaningfully exploited. if the tax is applied equally to every one then small landowners will suffer because you can't make a profit from a house and a garden that you live in yourself.
You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards
I don't know whether you can tie that inflation to ubi-like measures(alone). The whole world suffered high inflation, not in the least because of the global disruption of the supply chain.
I agree with the sentiment, but it matters very much how it's implemented. You would need to find a way to keep the money in your country, while also taxing more. It's actually very complicated, but yes, I agree with the notion.
- Does it liberate people from meaningless employment?
- Does it give a sufficient platform to people to bootstrap their own trade?
- Does it give people the runway for meaningful creation / artistic self-actualization?
Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior.
Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval.
This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
I argue the studies don't have to answer these questions, because we already have the (uncomfortable) answers.
> 1. Does it cause inflation
On its own, yes, it would create inflation if rolled out globally. However, this is why serious advocates of UBI also point out that we need policies that ensure it isn't turned into a wealth pump into the upper/ruling classes. This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, which also requires substantial public investment in those areas to deter or discourage privatization of those necessities. In other words, it means pissing off every landlord, upscale grocer, private hospital, utility company, telecom, private university, rideshare company, rail company, and Taxi owner for the sake of the public good.
> 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity
Generally speaking, humans want to do something productive with their time - it's the definition of productivity that varies from person to person. Those who think solely in economic output will say that negative-profitability employment isn't of value, even if that output has knock-on positive effects in the economy (such as the disparaging compensation for teachers and first responders despite the immense value they create in the long run). It's also why people sneer at the homeless or panhandlers as being "problematic" and "undeserving" of assistance for failing to "pull themselves up [by their bootstraps]."
In reality, taking into account the whole picture, these sorts of individuals could (and studies show, often do) contribute to society better if they had support structures in place that prioritized long-term stability instead of quick KPIs for grant money. It could even be argued that UBI enabling humans to stay home and not work is itself a profitable exercise, since it removes friction from systems that those individuals might create by being forced to exist and interact with modern society and its lack of safeguards. Not only that, but the productivity gains could likely increase as we can finally eliminate "bullshit jobs" and give people the safety nets needed to start their own businesses instead - more restaurants, service experts, inventors, researchers, teachers, and other jobs that are high risk/low reward in the current system, wouldn't be in an economy with UBI and associated policies to provide for necessities and essentials.
> 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense?
We can, but this is arguably the hardest opposition to surmount because it fundamentally means higher taxes on everyone, and that's a bitter medicine nobody wants to swallow. Countries with successful social safety nets have higher tax rates, but also higher quality of life as a result. Unfortunately, the current technocrats and their sycophants (not to mention their industrial predecessors and their decedents) have managed to convince a plurality of powerful people that the world would be perfect if everyone just worked harder and became billionaires themselves so we'd have no more poor people and thus no need for taxation in principle - a fantasy so high and lofty it makes the MCU look plausibly accurate.
It would mean building a society of high taxes, rigid policies, and a massive reduction in (or outright elimination of) loopholes for wealth preservation, especially across generations. It'd mean punishing hoarding of wealth, as that would (rightly) signal exploitation rather than success. These are things most people simply aren't ready for, because they still believe themselves to be one lottery ticket, one inheritance, one startup, one IPO, or one crypto boom away from being billionaires themselves, and don't want to accept that the outcome of the 99% is to work for the rest of their lives before dying in destitution of some form under the current system - a depressing reality to be sure, but all the more reason to change it.
So there you have it. If all you look at is the current system as-is and shoehorning UBI into it, then obviously you have a slam dunk case for why it's a bad thing. UBI advocates like myself, however, acknowledge that it's merely one component in a larger transformation of society itself towards more equitable outcomes, one where colorful pieces of paper are inherently devalued for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, while increased in value for actual luxuries. It's an inversion of our present society for the betterment of all, and that's why it's incompatible with the questions you raise above (which seek to preserve a broken status quo).
> This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities...
> substantial public investment in those areas...
> discourage privatization...
Ah, so we are just looking at communism with extra steps. Good to know. UBI, despite its size, was just the motte all along. Thanks for telling us the bailey.
If you’re going to deliberately straw man someone’s argument with cherry-picked quotes just to justify your pre-existing and ill-informed biases against a topic while simultaneously demonstrating your ignorance of said topic, then you’re going to live your life in the grays.
Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
and #3 at least as already been well modelled economically, UBI replaces many other welfare programs, so we can definitely afford it
> Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
As GGP said, this doesn't compare. There's even nothing magically non-linear about it: people stay employed, because they know the UBI study will only last a few years, after which they'll need to get back to normal. It makes no sense to interrupt your career for it, as the "hole in your CV" will just turn into a severe and compounding disadvantage in lost years and experience.
It's not just that. I fear tha UBI will be 'frozen in time', so let's say it's something insanely generous, EUR 5000 per month. After that happens, every month we will have a record inflation, and soon enough the EUR 5000 will rent you Harry Potter's staircase-'flat' and 3 pizzas.
The only way I see this being sustainable is get as far as possible from the big cities, buy a tiny piece of land, by a durable tiny home, buy solar panels, get a tablet with all Gutenberg books, and find a soulmate that will follow you to that journey.
No kids, no private schools, no parties, no nothing. Everything will be swallowed by inflation.
Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway.
I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this:
The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory:
The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero.
I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely.
(EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
> The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Oh yes!! This very thing!! A quick DDG search didn't return anything, but yes, 300% yes. This is the rule/law.
Once people get some money, forces tend to (try and) take it away.
EDIT: Ideally, your disposable income must be a little less than zero, so your needs/wants outpace your income, so you get a credit card with $2k limit, then you expand that to $5k limit, and that to $7k limit, until you cannot any more.
EDIT2: I once dated a lady (the most beautiful woman I've dated in my life) and she was in debt for €40k, ALL spent in clothes. She was SO gorgeous that when I feel for her she was wearing a €50 jeans and a €10 white tshirt. She walked in to the room and people stopped breathing. After 1.5 years of dating when I wanted to get very serious with her and she told me her 'dark secret', I suggested a Dave-Ramsey-baby-steps plan to pay off her €40k debt but to chop up her credit cards (and I would gladly generously contribute to pay off that debt - but with a different lifestyle). Long story short.. I haven't seen her in ~15 years :)
If somebody offered me 1200 GBP a month, tax free, no strings attached, guaranteed for the rest of my life, there is no way I would continue working for somebody else. I would tinker around with open source and pet projects for the rest of my life.
That's almost twice the aged pension here in Australia. (550 GBP)
I guess I would also need some iron clad guarantee that the cost of living would not skyrocket.
The government creates a new currency called $UBI, with the same legal tender status as the official currency for that country ($FIAT). I.e. people can use it to pay taxes, and people are required to accept it when doing commerce. Both currencies exist in parallel.
In the true spirit of ubi, everyone is entitled to an equal amount of it, and no one should be worse off by it. So they need to issue the currency new currency to give away.
They set up a system so everyone gets the same amount of money, at the same time, for maximum fairness. Everyone's income just goes up, equally.
$UBI officially has 1:1 parity to $FIAT, and this parity is used to calculate how much they'll need to "print" out at a given month. Let's say it's living_wage*population_size. That amount can be adjusted once a year by factoring in the government reserves built up exclusively from tax returns. In other words, the monetary base is a known, deterministic quantity.
They allow free exchange between $FIAT and $UBI, but the government does not officially exchanges it. They also allow people to set prices to their products and services freely.
It's funny, people like you will say a study is too small and focused to be worthwhile.
But then we have the case of Alaska, an entire state receiving a yearly stipend(basic income). And the same type of people will say well it's too broad you can't possibly pinpoint any direct effects. https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-we...
Science is not made for perfection and many studies are _not possible_ it doesn't mean there's nothing useful to gain from it for policy makers. It's also simpler to study smaller groups than effects on entire countries.
That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.
As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level.
Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted.
This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed.
The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name.
The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words.
We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence.
However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.
Supermarkets in poor areas get reliable cash flow from EBT - it is arguably UBI in action. Its patrons tend to have lower rates of vehicle ownership and free time to seek better priced alternatives.
Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions.
They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement.
The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue.
An inconvenient truth.
And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall.
If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.
but even if you are right about retired people stopping to work, you also need to consider their age, and maybe the feeling that they have earned it after working for decades?
the same isn't true for young people, so the comparison is not conclusive.
What age do you think that “feeling” kicks in and how do you “feel” about policy operating according to vague feelings?
I’m old enough to have income generating assets but not enough to call it a day completely. Reduce the state pension age to 18 (which is what a Universal Basic Income is) and I will.
Then you’ll be working to support me and the tax will have to be high enough to force you to generate a surplus that can be passed on to me.
will it become a capped negative sales tax, in a way? I don't see how amount of currency smaller than individual UBI amount make tangible sense under its presence.
Perhaps, but they have actual arguments for their claim, and you have just hypotheses. Scientific studies like those are the best approximation we can have to a full rollout. So perhaps results won't be exactly the same with a full rollout, but at least they have already taken out the "people will just behave nonsensically / be worse off" hypotheses
If they really wanted to answer the question, they'd have to gather several millions of dollars, and then go to some island somewhere and provide UBI to everyone (without publicizing it, if at all possible). Then observe the changes in that group of people. For best results, choose an island in a developed part of the world.
One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI.
You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.
> but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Would it though? Do people really trust their governments that much?
Poor people who this would be most applicable to tend to deal with the government a lot more than UBI proponents so their trust levels are probably different.
Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits?
But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
>> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be.
In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy.
The money supply argument seems flawed to me. As long as poorer people gain a larger share of the money supply, their increased spending power would outpace inflation. That’s because inflation is a function of the money supply in total, not the money supply of those with lower income.
> the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have
It's interesting to describe as "likely" something for which there is no evidence. This is an actively anti-science belief. It seems to me as if you really don't like the idea of UBI and so are saying that, if it actually happened, the effect would be the opposite of what experimental data shows. This is pretty clearly biased.
> (increase in the money supply)
There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes.
> Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
You can gradually expand the pool of people receiving UBI to see how these effects scale. Begin in one city, then increase to a larger region, then do it nationally.
> There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes
Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.
He doesn't have a money vault. He has almost zero cash holdings. If you tax him, then he will have to sell assets to pay for those taxes, which removes money from the economy as that money was being actively spent on his assets. The only situation when money supply changes is if someone has a literal mattress full of cash hidden away. Even if you just have money in a savings account, it acts as a fractional reserve for the banking system meaning that there is a net decrease in money supply when you give it to the government as banks can no longer use it as the backing for loans.
To split hairs slightly that is the "velocity of money" (basically how often does the average dollar get spent and passed around per year). Money supply is the total amount of (a given type of) money in existence. But yeah, the effect on inflation is the same.
The cost of an annuity that pays your basic, fundamental living expenses: Food, shelter, water, etc. can be thought of as a debt that all
people are born with. In the US, you can obtain a room in an apartment, basic food, internet access, and transportation (minimal versions of all of these), for something like $15,000/year.
such a lifetime annuity would cost the average 18 year old on the order of 200-300 thousand dollars. This means that an 18 year old starts with about the same level of implicit debt, that a doctor who has just finished medical school has explicit debt, except that student debt doesn't scale with inflation.
A key feature of a society which values social mobility is reducing the debt burden of its children. I don't think the answer on basic income is cut and dry, and I do think its important for people to sustain themselves via their own efforts, but since you likely wouldn't increase the debt burden of a teenager, and you also didn't select the debt burden of the average teenager. You should at least consider the possibility that you would actually choose to reduce, by some amount, the debt burden of the average teenager.
Not that it’s the point of what you’re saying, but at 300k, a 15k yearly payout would be 5%. I'm almost certain that no-one would ever give a 5% inflation adjusted annuity to an 18 year old for 300k.
All that to say that the value you propose is probably even higher than what you lay out.
UBI is great on an individual level, but as we saw with the Covid Stimulus payments in the US, they cannot help but be quite inflationary. That's my biggest worry about injecting huge amounts of money into a system that is truly universal.
And if it's not truly universal, then it's a bad idea. Means tested money is just an incentive to fit the criteria.
Yes, the problem is you have more money chasing that same quantity of goods and thus you get inflation.
IMO a better way to achieve the UBI goal is to instead focus on universal basic goods. We're already nearly there with staple foods. For example bulk rice is now so cheap it's basically free. We could do the same with housing via prefab high density similar to Japan (mostly not done because it is illegal in the US). Internet and water is also near zero cost.
You would achieve the goals of UBI good-by-good without the inflation.
Sure, a true safety net. The "worst case scenario" would be that you're eating government rice and beans, living in a dorm, safe and able to get the basics including internet so you can get back on your feet. This type of thing shouldn't even be means tested. If you want to just live in such a place, then ok. Everything beyond that is what people can strive for, but you can always count on it.
I don't know enough about the reality of it, but I want to say the Nordic nations have something like this in place? I had a friend in Copenhagen who fell out the bottom of society due to an addiction and he was placed in an apartment, given support, and got back on his feet. That's what we should be aiming for in the US. People end up costing us a lot more money when they have zero help.
>If you want to just live in such a place, then ok.
Even if you're the sort of person who will light your dorm on fire? Or stuff clothes into the toilet and flood the whole building? Or turn their dorm into a smelly orgy of sex and meth? Not even prisons have found perfect solutions to preventing issues like these, making everything out of concrete and metal helps but they still have guards 24/7 to step in when a prisoner acts up.
The visibly homeless are generally people with severe mental illness and/or hard drug addiction, and they are the ones most likely to destroy such places. This is to the detriment of the sorts of homeless that are just temporarily down on their luck and need help getting back on their feet who could actually make good use of such a thing.
Sure, my post was not expansive enough to account for criminals and the mentally ill. The bottom I referred to is for people without means, but with capacity to care for themselves.
The hard part of that conversation is that we consider criminal offenses as the only grounds for forcibly incarcerating a person. Mentally ill people need policies that will better protect them fron themselves and their neighbors BEFORE they commit crimes and end up in prison. We likely need new models of mental institutions and new laws which allow people to be committed when it is in everyone’s best interest… yet somehow avoid the abuses and horrors of the past. A very hard problem indeed.
Sorry if this offends, but I am deeply skeptical that the effect of UBI is independent of common culturally influenced behaviors of where it might be implemented. Try it in an opioid epidemic stricken rust belt town in the American Midwest, or an urban ghetto (I'm not totally sold that the selection criteria for the Stockton study were unbiased) and let us know how it goes.
I always think, instead of UBI in $$, UBI in items is a lot better. This alters the social-economic reality more dramatically than UBI in $$ but I think it is a better option.
So basically, instead of throwing a bunch of $$ to everyone every month and hopefully inflation doesn't happen, give everyone a basic condo with a reasonable number of electrical appliances in an UBI apartment (being UBI doesn't mean low quality, it should mean reasonably good quality but without those fancy stuffs), send everyone food package every week, free library card, free online university admission (they don't have to take them if they don't want to), etc., and maybe a bit of $$ just for entertainment and such.
However, I think it's more important to help people to find meanings in their life. If I get UBI but feel lost, how do I find a sense of belonging? How do I find meaning in my life? Sure, if I'm smart or if I'm affluent, I might get into some really meaningful and well paid jobs, but UBI does not magically give people more job, it merely gives them more time to figure out -- and a life of time is not enough without guidance and help.
To help people find belongings and feel "being useful", the government can also encourage volunteering, mass infrastructure maintenance projects, and promote many other activities, so people can earn some pay, learn some skills AND find meaning in their life.
Governments try stuff like that pretty regularly (you can only buy certain things with food stamps, etc), but it's typically expensive to administer and inherently prone to abuse. Buy groceries with food stamps, sell groceries, buy drugs. On top of that, it's just inherently difficult to structure this in a way that's fair and useful to every person. If I inherited or built myself a nice rural home, I don't want a government-issue apartment - either instead or in addition to what I have. Do I get nothing? That's unfair. Do I get the stuff I don't want?
"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.
All sorts of benefits get scrutiny along the lines of “what if they spend it in ways I disapprove of?” Inherent in UBI is the notion of increased personal freedom.
The study showed that people used the money in unusual ways, spreading it around and sharing it, usually in ways that benefited the economy, but would not be allowed by a more heavily-regulated system like food stamps.
also dietary needs and preferences. it's way do complicated. it adds a burden not only to the administration but also to those who sell the goods and services received.
another problem is that if i earn extra money i can't combine it with the basic income to eg afford a better apartment. everyone would be stuck with the apartment given.
you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.
i don't believe that. if you spend your income irresponsibly you are out of luck. change your habits. wait until the next payment and do better. if you can't do that then a social worker will help you.
While cash like UBI offers flexibility, criticizing targeted aid like food stamps misses the point. These programs are essential safety nets for the most vulnerable. While some misuse might occur – often signaling deeper needs requiring more services, not less food – focusing on that minority ignores the vast majority who rely on this aid to simply survive.
Suggesting it's "unfair" if you don't need specific help ignores the purpose of a safety net. How a society supports those facing hardship is a measure of its character. Worrying about potential misuse at the lowest rungs seems disproportionate when compared to massive government spending elsewhere. Ultimately, denying essential aid based on assumptions about how a few might misuse it is counterproductive and lacks compassion.
Yeah I agree there are a lot of problems in this kind of schemes. I don't have answers for any of them, because giving a concrete answer to any of these questions probably leads to more questions.
You can still have some $$ in that package, so it's not entirely out of flexibility. I also guess people who receives food packages, as you said, may be willing to exchange for other stuffs. TBH the most important reason I pick provisions (with a bit of $$) over 100% $$ is because of the scale.
I see where your head's at, but I think a huge portion of the reason for using dollars is that it's simple and easy to manage. You don't need to find suppliers, manage inventory, match individuals with housing, or audit for fairness. Potentially more importantly, you don't need to pay for those activities either!
Yeah, but I think with a government-initiated program, it's going to be a lot cheaper because of the scale. It definitely doesn't solve the problem of corruption or other political issues, but hopefully UBI creates better citizens (for a start, now whoever wants to participate in politics have the time to do more research and participate more) so that those issues get called out.
I agree that execution is the key, and I don't have the answers for a lot of the questions.
I guess we (humans) will never achieve the equality that everyone agrees to, because every one has his or her own idea of equality, but maybe that shouldn't prevent us from trying.
When you're planning on taking the money for your utopian pipe dream from other people by force, you really ought to have a better justification than "it doesn't hurt to try!"
Government cheese was created when the country didn't have enough resources. What I'm talking about is abundance of resources. We never tried anything like that before.
To be fair, government cheese (from what I understand) was actually created in order to save extra milk the government bought up as part of a price control effort. In other words, there was an abundance of milk (because the government subsidized it, causing more to be produced than the market needed).
Once it was already sitting around, it's been used to address citizens in the country not having enough resources. Which is kind of the same thing your semi-universal basic provisions would address.
Literally the exact opposite. Government cheese was created because due to subsidies, there was way too much milk that was going to be dumped into the nearest river until the Govt paid the farmers to convert it all to cheese and bought it and shoved it into storage to prop up cheese prices.
It is the definition of over-abundance, since all the farmers were going to have to shoot their dairy cows to actually afford to keep some around and continue producing milk
I’ve had a similar line of thought.. basically what you are proposing is sort of a voucher system. But, here is where my mind went, what if it is implemented as a bunch of tokens issued via a blockchain or even through a central authority. They can be freely traded if needed and prices can go up and down, but regardless of the price, there is a set number of them that get issued.
Similarly, you can get issued tokens/rewards for doing needed work.
I’ve wanted to spend more time thinking through this more thoroughly and flesh out the idea more.. without ever having the chance to
> If I get UBI but feel lost, how do I find a sense of belonging? How do I find meaning in my life?
That's rather a separate problem. The point of UBI is to make individuals and families more economically resilient. This should have a lot of beneficial spillover effects, but it's not a cure-all for every ill.
This is basically the communist vision (in its original, positive sense) -- Universal Basic Provisioning achieved through automation and a moderate amount of community service. People are always quick to point out how governments will inevitably screw this up, likely making things even worse than they are now, but I think the idea has merit at least in principle. Unlike the idea of Universal Basic Income. Free markets and free money just don't go together. Especially if this money is given to the "productive underlayer" of society rather than investment bankers. That will just collapse the house of cards from the inside out. Administrators, middle managers and VPs of sales do not a functioning economy make.
I agree that historically such movements always ended up badly, e.g. Russia and China. I'd argue that Russia and China picked Socialism not because they had abundance of materials, but on the contrary, because they were too weak back then, so that Socialism gave them the tool of collectivism to fight against external threats and built up industries quickly.
We have never tried something like that (as you said UBP) in a rich country. I guess Norway and Sweden are closer? But I'm not sure.
I do wonder sometimes how UBP would play out in a developed country... Would it remove the need for bullshit jobs and refocus the market-oriented part of the economy towards real progress? Would it make people happier? Or would it make people spend even more of their lives scrolling, swiping and retweeting? In any case, this is a purely theoretical exercise -- even more so than UBI, the idea of UBP is very much incompatible with neoclassical economics, which thoroughly dominates economic and societal thought in most of the developed world.
Maybe there should be a universal basic job. jobs can be rated by how much value is created- it can’t be moving rocks from one location then back again. maybe that’s too hard to calculate. weekly, if you create enough value, you’ve earned your basic income. This might be 2 days of road work. you get 40k for this. take responsibility and up your skills with the remaining time. I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to give money out just for being- i understand there are sales taxes etc. I hate the idea of creating jobs, it has always felt wrong. If the jobs fulfill a valuable and timely need, sure. But i’d rather kill jobs, i say, if you can automate your job with no loss in value, you should be paid at least double that for the rest of your days. If we focus on creating value, we’ll all benefit. it’s just a matter of measuring value i suppose.
things like teaching a valuable skill should be of enormous value- as an example. call me crazy.
The problem is that substantial number of people are actually shit employees who create no real value to companies or society. They may be able to pull off the bare minimum requirement to get the money they need, but it'll be like pulling teeth to get them to consistently show up and do their jobs to even a half-decent level.
What you need is a job that's largely self-evidently-verifying (can't be faked), doesn't really need to interface much with other humans (especially customers), and can be self-started/managed. For some homeless people, that job is picking up cans and bottles for recycling money, but it's hard to come up with more and better ones.
Hitler for one always bragged about eradicating all unemployment in a stroke by ordering the autobahn projects.
The core of the problem today is this: With modern tools, a modern worker gets 100 times more work done than a worker without modern tools. And you need to hire people who can use those modern tools and are trustable. Now, for most jobs you can train anybody to do it, but you cannot train people to be trustable and not destroy or steal your modern tools.
The massive infrastructure projects and massive industrial projects of the past could swallow all the workers you could throw at them. And it didn't matter much at all if a worker was any combination of a drunk, a brawler, somebody who didn't speak the language, involved with organized crime at his spare time. As long as he did his job. But today, the very specialized and efficient tools are too sensitive and you want to be careful who gets near them and operates them.
Putting the unemployed to do big infrastructure projects or similar is still better than them doing nothing – but mostly for their own development and spirits, rather than the actual work being done.
Wow, that's an amazing take; thanks for that. I really feel that is on track with reality. Because didn't they formerly have chain-gangs breaking rocks in the hot sun, and making license plates and other manual labor jobs? There are indeed still prison-based industries. I've heard entire call-centers are staffed by prisoners and many on work-release are at normal restaurants and the like.
As for construction, yeah. I worked day-labor for 2-3 days total in my entire life, and it was hell. I have always been groomed as an intellectual knowledge-worker in offices. Assigned by a day-labor office, the contractors set me to working machinery I was totally unfamiliar with. Every day laborer was required to own our attire and safety equipment at own-expense. There was no way anyone could move up without specialized training and experience with the machines they put us on. I had to ride the bus around to time-sensitive jobs at random sites. Then blew the paycheck on a hotel with a shower. I was never gonna learn that heavy-equipment stuff if I had a bunch of computer savvy and risking injury. I literally couldn't operate the machine without my glasses falling off!
It's interesting how you allude to the Irish and Chinese rail workers, and dockworkers/longshoremen of bygone days. It's sort of amazing to think that my able-bodied ancestors could just throw themselves into some milieu and get paid for sweaty physical work. That doesn't seem possible in today's mechanized economy. President Kennedy warned us all from Butler County. Here we remain.
Seems like an efficient way to recycle wealth that keeps pooling too much at the top. I think we can all agree that there's a limit to how much wealth inequality is healthy for society, and most people would agree that we're past that point now.
Important to note their findings only apply to a smaller subset of people, and do not include those with the most need.
> The findings of the pilot project will be generalizable not to the entire German population, but to 21- to 40-year-old individuals in single-person households with middle incomes.
The reason:
> We were thus faced with the decision of selecting 122 people who represented the entire country but did not provide scientifically reliable data on the effects of a basic income, or selecting 122 people from a more limited group from whom we could draw definitive conclusions. In the end, we chose the latter.
1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.
2. We obviously can't afford UBI. Most governments have severe deficits even without UBI. "Tax the rich! Then we'll be able to afford it!".. yes well that's orthogonal. Let me know when you figure out how to do that.
There already is something similar to UBI. People don't starve, they have shelter, and they generally get taken care off when they have medical emergencies. That's true in most countries. What you get at that level is typically not great. But it is provided for by societies and governments across the world and lots of people are dependent on that.
That current system is actually more expensive than UBI. At its best it would be about as expensive. For example, some countries spend almost as much on unemployment programs as they do on the actual unemployment benefits. Which, if you think about it is mildly ridiculous. People that show up at a hospital are not going to die abandoned in the gutter (well mostly, Michael Moore documented a few negative examples for this in the US). And of course, having your life saved might bankrupt you in the US. Even if you are insured. And even there they'll likely patch you up at least. And in most other countries, everybody is insured so it's not a problem. The modern sign of poverty is being morbidly obese because of the excess of low quality nutrition people seem to be able to get their hands on via food stamps and what little benefits they can scrape together. Which then causes health issues. Which further burdens the unemployment and benefits system.
All this is stupid, inefficient, costly, and not that great if you are on the receiving end (to put it mildly). But formalizing the status quo in UBI form might make things a bit more efficient and better. It would still not be great or that attractive as a lifestyle. But then the message becomes "just get a job if you want/need more". Don't worry about starving. Worry about getting something nice for yourself and work to secure that. Most people have more ambition than just coasting on benefits. And would you employ the ones that don't?
People think of this in closed world terms (somebody has to pay for it), not realizing that most economic growth is a complex system with money being created and distributed (in complex ways) by central banks, which then causes inflation to happen, and spending to compensate for that. A lot of jobs are more about distributing money to people and getting them to spend it than getting people to do something that adds value. The most important function many people have in our economy is just spending their money. Skipping the part where these people pretend to be useful in some bullshit job isn't that big of a deal.
1. This isn't at all obvious to me. Look at the number of people who continue working well into retirement or the people who volunteer their time. I tried sitting on my ass for three months after college and it drove me so crazy I picked up WebGL despite having zero intention of using it in my career.
2. Most UBI proposals I've seen involve replacing existing programs with UBI. My personal favorite proposal is a flat tax that's fully redistributed. There's no deficit possible here, if tax revenue goes down, so do payments.
That was an example off the top of my head. Is that the most represenative sample? Another group that doesn't need money includes doctors, lawyers, and executives in their 40s and 50s. I don't see many of them quitting the moment they're able. What do you feel the appropriate rate for the entire population is? What's the rate required to sustain society?
The only decision I intend to make (and the only one I feel qualified to make) is that I'd like to see more data. We shouldn't be making decisions off of assumptions either way.
No idea, but the low numbers still working suggest that for most people UBI would lead to a significant decrease in the amount of people working and the amount of work each person does.
> 1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.
Tons of people work jobs they don't like, instead of jobs they would prefer, because the former pays a ton better than the latter, even though they could (barely, perhaps) get by on the lower salary.
They do this because they like stuff, want prestige, and maybe want to raise a family in circumstances other than poverty.
It's not obvious to me at all that UBI at levels anyone is even half-seriously proposing would cause more than a very few people to stop working.
> 2. We obviously can't afford UBI. Most governments have severe deficits even without UBI. "Tax the rich! Then we'll be able to afford it!".. yes well that's orthogonal. Let me know when you figure out how to do that.
That's not at all obvious. I'm not rich, but I recall when I made far less money and was taxed at a marginal rate which was 4% higher than the one which applies to me now. In the U.S., we've made a conscious decision to keep cutting taxes and running large deficits. We could decide to raise taxes and pay for UBI. Yes, that's a political problem, but it's not at all the problem that we can't afford UBI.
==1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.==
You are arguing against a proposal nobody is making. In this study, €1,200/month isn't really enough that people wouldn't need to work. The average wage in Germany was €4,479/month in 2023.
Yes, the studies are a waste of money when you've already made up your mind about the way the world "obviously" works, and aren't willing to test your assumptions or change your mind.
1. If this was true the wealthy would not work, and yet a large majority still do, socialites and other classes are very small minorities of the wealthy.
> With a basic income, the participants receiving a basic income saved an average of €450 more per month than the control group.
So where did the other 1050 euros go? It says their consumption habits went up slightly then back down. And they donated a tiny amount more and gave a bit to their community. There still seems to be 500 euros or so missing?
This group consisted of people between the ages of 21 and 40, living alone, with a net monthly income between €1,100 and €2,600 – in other words, middle-class individuals who were still relatively early in their careers and could move around flexibly in the labour market.
Seems like one of the primary themes in responses here is inflation, which seems like it makes sense.
But is the point of this study to provide a basis / justification for larger tests? And if so would the next step be to test a UBI for the full population of a small city or state?
The discussion around inflation though is making me wonder if any non-global plan for a UBI would be enough. Is it something that would have to be adopted universally / globally before the real effects on inflation / economies could be determined? If so is this just a doomed concept?
While I'm not opposed to studies like this, we won't ever really know the impact until a country creates a permanent UBI for realsies (even then, it'll probably be a while until the true impact is known).
Being in a temporary study is simply not the same thing as feeling that you could just never have a career ever and still be financially okay.
This may sound like I'm opposed to a UBI, but actually I think getting one eventually would be rad. I just don't think we can easily extrapolate out from a study like this.
Of all the things which are never going to happen, I put universal basic income at the top of the list. Faster than light travel seems vastly more likely than universal basic income.
I don’t believe we can pay for it, nor do I believe that it’s remotely politically feasible.
Studies like this are perfectly nice but I can’t imagine they are actually designed to confidently predict the general equilibrium effects of rolling out UBI on an entire society. (The studies may not be designed with that in mind but it’s crucial.)
The oil dividend (likely what they are talking about though I didn’t look) is something like $1,300/year. That’s not universal basic income in the pie-in-the-sky way the phrase is usually used. No one is interested in whether the Alaska dividend makes people not work.
If UBI is limited to a low amount that you couldn’t possibly live on then sure, it’s perfectly possible.
Pretty much any policy can work (to some extent, for a while) in a society with sufficiently high social trust. But that trust is not static and can be built or depleted over time by those same policies.
My big questions that do not seem to be answered in the paper:
1. Did any participants drop out? Were there exactly 107 treated participants at both the start and end of the trial? Previous UBI experiments I've seen have huge biases where dropped out participants are excluded, but dropping out is affected by treatment.
2. The ~1700 participants were selected from the 20,000 applicants via a procedure that accounted for their opinion about UBI, "the sample was supposed to contain an equal number of proponents and opponents of a universal basic income". Why was this done? Can we see how these survey responses correlate with outcome? Maybe the participants are much more/less supportive of UBI than the German population.
3. The participation criteria required that participants "had a personal, monthly income between EUR 1,100 and 2,600" and "were not unemployed for more than one year". This seems like it would introduce a lot of bias, participants are all members of the 94% of Germans I would expect to have their labor participation least affected by UBI.
Seems quite a bit better overall than the studies in the Bay Area over the last few years
A far more interesting study would be to give its to a bunch of graduating high school students, guaranteed for the rest of their lives, and see how many are contributing meaningfully to the economy at the end of a few years.
This really does not seem like a balanced take, e.g. it does not address the main question of inflation destroying whatever value might be created.
If we redistribute money (which is a proxy for scarcity) to a small number of people, it is hard to observe the aggregate effect on the rest of the economy. If we redistribute money to everyone, we reduce the value (e.g. velocity of money increases without a commensurate change in economic output), so there would be massive inflation. It's possible that the continual massive inflation will cost less than the stability created by UBI, and it's possible it could be the extreme opposite. So, it would be a Grand Experiment, like Communism, and like all grand experiments it could end very poorly, and these studies do nothing to address that.
As long as lower economic strata gain an increased portion of the money supply, they ought to be able to purchase more than they did before, even after inflation. At a high level inflation is a function of the money supply not the money supply of the lower strata.
It can be done on the scale of a city or region within a country. The idea it would have an inflationary effect is somewhat misguided. There are only so many goods available in the economy, and redistributing money can't decrease that. Your real wealth, that is the quantity of goods and services you have access to, will go up if you are below the mean, and down if you are above it, under a scheme of redistribution. The inflationary effect is actually a desired result, as it will increase the economic incentive to produce goods appealing to people on the lower end of the income scale. In the long term, you should expect a real terms decrease in the price of essential goods and an increase in the price of luxury goods as the spending power of the rich falls in comparison to the middle and lower classes. You can see the precise opposite of this at play currently. Rising inequality, the exact opposite of redistribution, has driven massive increases in the production of luxury goods and simultaneous inflation and decreases in the production of essential goods.
TL;DR A free market serves the consumers with money, and redistributing money re-balances the market towards serving a certain group of people. I believe a downwards redistribution would be favourable to the present upwards one.
I feel as though this study is only addressing the bottom percentile of questions about UBI, the kind of complaints from people who think "those lazy poors shouldn't be given money". I think most people are able to understand that, yes, people's lives improve when you give them more money. My real questions are macroeconomic. Does UBI create a Keynesian stimulus effect on the economy, or is it primarily inflationary? What is the saving on means testing benefits? How does tax law need to be adjusted to ensure proper dispersal of funds?
Edit: I should emphasis that these questions come from a place of genuine curiosity, rather than simply throwing things up to get in the way of a policy being implemented. I believe larger trials are required to gather better data, with a view towards expanding the pool of recipients.
€1200 per month is around £1000, there are 43.1m working age people in the UK, that's £517.2 BILLION per year.
The NHS costs £181.7b per year and climbing & we struggle to afford that.
HMRC collected £828.9 billion in taxes in 2023 to 2024
UBI would cost 2.8 NHSs per year and 62% of all the tax revenue.
"Tax the rich!" You're probably thinking... "The combined wealth of the 350 wealthiest individuals and families in the [Sunday Times Rich] list totals £965 billion," even if you took every penny real and imagined from the rich, you'd only manage it once and get not even two years of UBI from it.
The money naturally flows from those who don't own assets, to those who do. So, to keep the economy flowing healthily, the cycle needs to be completed by taxing those who own a lot of assets.
Some people think that basic income is the solution to the problem. I’m not sure. But I’m open to it. Maybe a basic income could serve as a transition for former millionaires and billionaires who didn’t have real jobs. Transitioning to a real job via a jobs program might not be in the cards for them considering their skillsets. But a basic income could help them transition over a few years.
But eventually they should try to find some kind of full-time, real job. Like the rest of us.
Who in their right mind wants that? UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
During COVID, my friends and I were temporarily retired. Lamenting every moment since having to come out of retirement. We were all laid off and received about $2k/mo for awhile and what happened was we ended up hanging out every since day working on whatever we were working on, and feelings of inadequacy faded into the background. It was a micro golden age for us and that period of time has cemented UBI for us. It was a small amount of money and we lived with our parents but we were never more productive and happy.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
East side bowery was very cheap back then (it was also a pretty rough part of town, which is easy to forget). You just need to convince a hoard of like minded folks to congregate somewhere cheap and you can live like this. There's plenty of cheap places to live in the US. I kind of feel like we need to learn how to build new cities, we have the land, it's mostly cheap, we just continue to choose to reside in expensive places chasing jobs that help us cover the rent while working us to death.
Idk man, I wouldn't call bowery rough or cheap by any stretch - 20 years ago, during covid, or now. For rough during covid or now, head to east new york. For cheap, head deeper into the other boroughs.
Absolutely. More generally, as a taxpayer, I'm very unlikely to vote for anything that is justified in terms of how great the USSR was. One of several comments in this thread that give away the game: scratch a UBI bro, find a commie.
You were the beneficiary of a bullshit short term policy that has wrecked the global and national economies and think that means it was a good thing to replicate?
Your fun time was extremely damaging to people everywhere but of course, we can pretend "it was necessary because COVID" which we then knew and now it's undeniable, was an absolute farce of hygiene theater.
The people who worked paid for you to do nothing at your parents home. That's all there is. Meanwhile, there also were massive transfers of wealth with the same excuse, from tax payers to the wealthies company owners.
The only good Soviet art was the stuff that expressed the suffocating oppression of the communist regime and warned the world to never to do it again. Some of it was oblique, but all of it was human. If you and your friends lack the taste to understand that, then I am really glad that my tax dollars are no longer funding your arts and crafts projects.
> Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
This is pretty good example why UBI is dangerous. Those funded artists were very happy to suck it up and go along with the regime. The censorship was in place, but self-censorship was even stronger.
Meanwhile a lot of art existed outside of the system with people working some shitty jobs and doing arts in free time.
Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was published.
The premise was that people were self censoring even outside of what was being officially approved, so not really.
That book was published during Kruschiov era. Which was definitely not representative of the rest of Soviet era. Let alone that the book was peanuts compared to Gulag archipelago.
Eventually Solzhenytsin was kicked out from USSR and had to take exile in west. Do you really want to use him as an example of Soviet artistic freedom?
So, one dude did not censor himself, during a cultural warm up era, ended up being kicked out to exile. Which was a fortunate outcome due to his previous fame. Hmmm, is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR? :) Is that more like an example how dangerous it was to not self-censor even to well known people with support (for some time) from the ruling elite?
Hearing parents and grandparents stories... And having talked to older artsy people who did grow up before the fall of USSR... Self-censorship was the default modus operandi. Sure, few didn't do it. Most of those paid the price either in gulags in earlier years or mental asylums later.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Edit: Several of your recent comments are in breach of the guidelines and are being flagged by other community members.
We need you to keep to the guidelines if you're going to keep commenting on HN, thanks.
Born in USSR and growing up in then ex-USSR I’ve pretty good experience of arts created during USSR period and both official and underground artists.
But yes, maybe some delusional USSR loving academics in west wrote some BS study how awesome life in USSR was. Which is very funny because those people would have ended up in KGB blacklists if they were on the other side of the iron curtain.
the problem here was the USSR not the UBI. you need to disconnect the two. the USSR and the associated political repression came first and it's no surprise that any handouts thereafter were in service of that political system.
we are discussing UBI in a democratic system, and i feel it is rather unlikely that implementation of UBI would turn a country into something like the USSR.
I agree. It was OP up the thread who brought up USSR artists funding as an example.
USSR and UBI is an interesting combination though. Being unemployed was illegal. And for common man it was very hard to get laid off. Just show up, even if intoxicated (and continue drinking at work), sleep at work (e.g. drive your tractor to the field and just park there) and you'll still get paid crappy salary as anybody else and roof over your head. I guess it was closest it was to real UBI. Yes, it was not exactly UBI, but it was still universal income where you get food & shelter regardless of your work performance.
Regarding UBI turning countries into USSR, I don't think UBI would turn countries into totalitarian regimes. But it may turn countries into similar inefficient slacking-off culture where vast majority of people do as little as possible in least involving way.
Sure, some of them may claim they're super productive and creative in their hobby adventures. But if thousands of programmers create awesome ToDo apps in their free time... Is that really productive from society perspective? Society needs a lot of bring stuff, not thousands of great ToDo apps...
i accept that the risk of turning into a slacking-off culture is there. the problem is the exploitation and the lack of perspective for a better future. this can be addressed with better education. we need to teach people to motivate them to do something meaningful to the benefit of humanity. see my other comments here for more thoughts on this.
Better education or propaganda to brainwash people to keep producing? :) Funnily enough, USSR loved all sort of propaganda of the worker of the month, stachanovists and all that jazz :) Yet it didn't work. Maybe the real better education would be to teach people to enjoy peaceful idleness and live with less?
Ultimately people don't need that much to live. Once you remove consumerist desire to keep up with the jones, the only motivation is to get roof, food and some supplies to have fun with. Currently passing this threshold requires quite a bit of effort. Then there's relatively little extra effort to get somewhat nicer toys. Yes, some people will work extra hard and make €€€€, but vast majority of people ain't workaholics. If that base threshold was removed with UBI, then it'd be a massively different effort to get somewhat nicer toys. This would change the equation a lot. I've a feeling the jones might be in trouble then.
Particularly if you live overseas on base. The military provides everything for you, albeit often through vendors such as AAFES. But yeah, free healthcare for sure.
Those living in poverty. Speaking from personal experience.
> UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription.
I trust a functioning government over free market human participants. People always overweight their own ability to succeed, when the stats tell a different story.
How are the governments and economies in the happiest countries structured, for example.
(I think it was probably downvoted because it was too far over the line into ideological battle and other things that the site guidelines ask commenters to avoid here.)
lol the state(aka society's strong arm) will always have an immense say in your life even if you are so oblivious to it. Government exists to redistribute money, might as well distribute it to the poor and do it universally.
This study didn't say, we gave 1200 to people and then dictated their lives like a dictator.
Read a constitution and tell me where it states that the goal is to redisteibut wealth. I've read significant parts of the constitution of my country and it absolutely does not state that.
The goal of the government is not stated as such. It's not "the social contract".
But hey, your phrase sounded confident so you have that going for you.
> who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
Entirely unlike modern America, where utility providers for food and water are regulated for what's healthy and representative legislature decides when to draft you for Vietnam 2.
The state gets more power over you without UBI (assuming a social safety net of any kind already exists) - without UBI it needs a larger apparatus to decide how to distribute funds, and it can pick arbitrary reasons to cut off your funds. Under UBI administration would be far simpler and cutting off your income for political reasons would be far more noticeable, since it's supposed to be universal.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. I grew up in a country that did exactly this, until collapsed. Strong social nets, free housing, free medicine for all, free education, no unemployment, sounds like heaven, right?
The only problem is that every person is a government-owned livestock unit. Their thoughts, knowledge, career paths, kids, even their private life, everything is controlled by government, that also obligates you to watch after your neighbours and co-workers. You can't even leave the country without government permission. You can expelled if you don't like the government though. You can't work where you want after getting your degree, government will send you where they think they need you to be. School is never ending propaganda. We literally had "political information" every Monday, since grade 1. Also, since grade 1 you're in one of the tiers of the only allowed political party of the country. There's tier for grade 1 to 3, then for 4 to 8, then from 8 to 10. Every 18yo is drafted for 2 years for armed forces (3 for navy). I can go on and on.
I remember it too well and would never trade messy and chaotic capitalist society to that labour camp with "free" rations.
It's frightening that so many people in 1st world want to live in a cage with 3-times-a-day meal.
that is a false dichotomy, just because a bad government that didn't give you any freedom implemented these benefits doesn't mean that any government implementing such benefits will automatically take everyone's freedom away. the freedom was taken away first. it did not understand that benefits are not enough and that freedom is also needed. we are discussing UBI as a means to give people more freedom, and not as a way to turn them into slaves.
Many alleged benefits of basic income can be explained by flaws in the study design. No I will not quit my 40h if the 1200€ are paid out for three years only.
But i will use the money to hire cleaning ladies or baby sitters -> more spare time than control group.
This ranks among those things that are obvious and yet we “study” them expecting a different outcome.
“If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread.” - 2 Thes 3:10b-12
I see lots of people claiming massive positive economic impacts of UBI, but whenever the results are released its always, saved money and is happier.
Like yeah fairly obvious conclusions.
Closest I have seen to the economic impact was a study done on a charity that makes a pseudo UBI in african villages, but thats skewed in a place that has no other monetary investment mechanism. Its probably true that UBI can be used instead of targeted industrial investment by government.
> Its probably true that UBI can be used instead of targeted industrial investment by government.
In a small village, maybe on the metric of wealth per capita. But there are going to be massive externalities because there is nothing intrinsic there to perpetuate or grow that wealth through industry. That old proverb rings true, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish…”
The report I read, and your statement is very true, but their findings were that instead of buying a meal, when they had capital, they began businesses (or larger capital investments, like livestock) so they could take care of themselves long term.
The issue is that, sort of like you say, theres a lot of low hanging fruit in a poor village that just a bit of money can set someone up. And the comparison was other charity, apparently another charity had sent this village a shipping container full of beach balls. So comparatively money is easily the victor.
Those are federal services, that's not the same as UBI. The premise of UBI (in my limited understanding of it) is that, especially in more socialist countries, you can get rid of a lot of programs that support the poor / sick / etc in favor of a system where everyone gets the same amount, and the bureaucratic systems in place that check to make sure people are entitled to these benefits can be dissolved.
For example, I live in the Netherlands which according to Americans is a really socialist country; if you lose your job from getting fired, you are entitled to unemployment benefits. However, only if you prove you are actively looking for a different job, if you don't or can't prove that, you get shorted.
There's the dole (bijstand), but a lot of counties put a lot of conditions on there; some even told people to grab some tools and get to work on maintaining the public spaces as part of keeping their benefits. Which is employment, which should mean they get a contract and wage, worker's rights, etc.
Paying someone who provides no return on investment is simply a bad investment. Of course extra money doesn't hurt the person getting paid. It hurts the government. They are now giving someone value (payng them) in exchange for no immediate value in return. This kind of expenditure at any business or organization would be recognized as one of poor judgement. Value can't be generated out of thin air. People must pay for what they use, either by money or sweat. Lack of recognition of these basic facts isn't good. UBI is not viable.
Ok, so what do you propose to do instead as AI gradually eats the world? A stated goal of most companies in that space is essentially to make human work redundant, so shall we just kill off all the ones who aren't needed anymore?
Not the grandparent, but I've been waiting for somebody to ask!
The gov should guarantee a minimum wage job for everybody. You get out of bed, do something useful, you get a pay check. You might even learn a trade or develop skills.
Don't like your boss, or the work not right for you, there can be plenty of other jobs for you to move into.
What are all these jobs? I'm glad you asked!
We need to plant billions of trees to soak up CO2, then tend the forests.
We could use a few massive desalination projects.
We can convert the world to green energy.
We can care for our elderly better.
We could use a lot more teachers. (How does 10 kids per teacher sound!).
Of course would could have more homes and nicer cities. (How good would it be for the gov to pay you to build your own house!)
There is a very long list of cool stuff we could do if you don't need rich people to invest in it first!
this! there is so much potential that we could develop if we trained people to work in meaningful jobs and if we actually funded these jobs. everywhere we hear complaints about how there are not enough teachers. never mind getting a teacher per 10 kids. some countries don't have enough teachers to get one per 30 kids. but there is no limit here. same goes for healthcare. nurses and doctors are hopelessly overworked. we could easily do with having 3x as many people work in those areas. even in science and research. we have a replication crisis because research is given the wrong incentives. how about awarding more reputation who replicate and verify existing research and without reputation for anything that can't be replicated.
there is absolutely no reason for anyone to be out of work. there is enough good work to do.
GP: Paying someone who provides no return on investment is simply a bad investment
this thinking is the big mistake. the return of investment in letting people work on meaningful things is massive.
here is the kicker though. the examples we gave so far don't even need UBI. we could just fund education and those jobs.
however there is still a large benefit to UBI. it gives people more flexibility. it allows them to work less hours and spend their time on other things that can't easily be paid like caring for the environment in a more active way. keep your neighborhood clean. care for animals. help neighbors. socialize. spend more time with your children. these are all beneficial for our society. it is absolutely false that there is no return of such an investment.
I've been waiting for somebody to ask
i have been making this argument many times over the years. here on HN and elsewhere. the key is education. UBI is a great idea. but only with better and more education can the world really benefit from it.
Who owns the AI, demanding payment for its use? Who owns the GPUs that the AI runs on? Who sold those people the silicon? Who owns the real estate upon which the GPUs run? All those people will demand payment for services rendered or goods delivered.
My personal favorite: Who fixes the AI when it breaks?
The lawn mower replaced human work, but it needs _just enough_ direction that it's still worth money for humans to run them, auto-run lawn mowers notwithstanding.
AI will make people faster, but humans will only do work for other humans that do their share by giving value back.
I don't believe we will ever live in a world where people won't want people working for them, or doing something for them.
How about get educated/trained in something AI can't eat? Become a HVAC technician, Nurse/Doctor, lawn care maintenance owner, teacher, industrial shop owner, etc. There are plenty of fields that don't require AI to compete. They just require effort on your part to become educated and participate.
I think you are overestimating some of these fields resistance to automation. I'm actively working on automating HVAC and Lawn care. It's gonna take at least 3 years to see AI impact there, maybe its 20...but the road to automation is somewhat clear and progress is happening.
Interesting. How will (physically) AI install a new HVAC system? There must be some form of physical presence to get the job done. And, the current set of installers have a difficult time as it is (running duct work, low/high PSI lines, etc).
Again, how will (physically) AI take over lawn maintenance? Do you expect a fleet of self-driving lawn-mowers to take to the streets? How will they get to your place? Who will be managing them? So many questions.
Personally, I think the AI hype is way overblown. Sure, AI can help give better data for these areas, but I highly doubt AI will take over. I think AI can help smart people get even smarter (better ways to mow, more efficient ways to run HVAC lines, etc), but at the end of the day, you still need physical presence for many/most jobs.
> This kind of expenditure at any business or organization would be recognized as one of poor judgement
The purpose of a business is to generate a return on investment.
Are you suggesting that the purpose of a government is to generate a return on investment?
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I am suggesting that buying something that has no worth is a bad idea no matter what organization you are. It's less a bad investment in the context of government and more a misappropriation of funds.
Government money represents hard earned cash of the people. The ability for the government to borrow -- its credit -- deals with its reputation as an entity that is capable of paying its debts. This reputation reflects on the people governed.
The people's money and its reputation should be respected. Money should be borrowed carefully to protect the people's reputation. Taxes should be spent wisely to protect and defend their purse. Wise expenditure is an important part of good stewardship, good government, and good politics.
Thanks for this. Young people think UBI is great since they don't have much invested in the system. Instead they just have propaganda from media/social sites telling them how the world is falling apart, how they don't have a chance to succeed, etc. The answer: UBI! It is the "easy" answer since it literally requires no effort on their part to participate in society. They get up, eat free food, live in a free house, and enjoy the day without any worry.
Sounds great until they realize the human condition eventually kicks in. People will decide not to work - they will just take and not give back. In the end, we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate.
we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate
we need a society where people are MOTIVATED to put forth the effort to participate. only education can provide that motivation. (education is not just school, but also parenting, etc, but school is the place where new ideas are shared with the next generation). UBI can then provide the freedom to act on that motivation.
to be greedy is not the human condition. it is a protection mechanism because everyone else is perceived to be greedy and selfish as well. change that perception and give people the means to not need to be protective and the world will change.
my own life is testimony to that. i am from a country where i know that i will get support if i need it. i am using this perception of safety to wander out into the world with my children and live in places where we can make a meaningful difference. and i do that without getting any financial aid. finances are tough. my savings have run out. life is not easy. but i keep going because it is worth it. the children are getting the education of their lifetime and i am able to take the risk because i know that if all else fails i still can go back home and get support.
This kind of thing pops up now and again but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Human behaviour is non-linear.
The study doesn't cover the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have (increase in the money supply) or the broader socio-cultural changes that would likely accompany it.
In short: scale matters for this kind of thing. Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
> Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study.
Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed. Of course people given the choice between working less or making more money usually choose the money. People who choose otherwise are already part-timing/episodically employed/on unemployment benefits/getting subsidized by their family.
Presumably there's a level of UBI where most people wouldn't see the need to work anymore, but if they quit permanently, this will reduce the supply of goods, increasing prices and limiting how much UBI can buy, to the point where people are incentivized to start working again. So it's a self-regulating system. Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases, instead of starting high and letting inflation sort out the rest.
I think the nuance here is that the income in Universal Basic Income is a stand-in for "everyone's basic needs should be met". But income doesn't guarantee that, because prices go up and down for a variety of reasons.
What people actually want is Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments, and as the original commenter laid out, none of these research experiments are running that experiment.
I mean, even that's something of a misconception. Let's start with an axiom: there are enough people and resources, both locally and universally, to provide every human being with enough to eat every day and a safe place to sleep every night (acts of God notwithstanding). That's an objective truth; technologically and logistically, we are there as a civilization. So a guarantee of access to something that already exists is a matter of policy, not economy. The doomsayers are just wrong on this one, unless the first act of UBI recipients would be to burn farms, blow up the rail network, and release pests into vacant housing, or something (though I don't doubt that this scenario is precisely what they expect; after so many studies, it's safe to call anti-UBI rhetoric a rationalization of unsubstantiated class hysteria).
And we have been producing enough to feed and house everyone for about 40 years now. Henry Ford introduced 5 day workweek and with the productivity trend we should be working one day a week by now.
It is not happening because in eyes of capitalism a person is only valuable and accepted if they have an occupation that produce value, whether needed or not.
Consequence of that, 50% of workforce is “bullshit jobs” made to keep people employed, like marketing, finance and such.
Because people sadly are brainwashed to be working from cradle to grave, it will take few generations for UBI to become unconditional and part of life, like we have with free healthcare (not you, U.S.).
In a similar vein: a lot of studies have shown that most of the cost of a UBI could usually be paid for by two existing expenditures, the first being current welfare programs, such as employment insurance, welfare, disability benefits, etc., and the second being the cost of the time and labor the government has to pay for to ensure that the programs in point one only go to a limited subset of people who qualify.
In other words, we're spending so much on making sure that most people don't get social programs that we could fund a huge chunk of just giving those people social programs instead.
Likewise, we spend more on policing and jailing individuals convicted of minor crimes than it would cost to implement social programs to reduce the amount of crime in the first place; the US spends more on their medical system per capita than most (any?) other countries because it all goes to insurance companies whose job is, ostensibly, to pay for medical treatment, but who spend a large amount of it on departments dedicated to not paying for medical treatment.
Studies have shown that a lot of people (mostly right-leaning individuals) would rather go without something that could benefit them (e.g. healthcare, UBI, etc.) if it meant that people they see as "undeserving" (the poor, the homeless, immigrants) also didn't get it, so there are a lot of people out there who would rather spend money keeping people from having positive outcomes than spend less money to give those people positive outcomes.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta...
I’m actually blown away by that article. Fucking clever shit. Gonna save the other parts and read em later.
> Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments,
I think AI could make UBI + moving to a lower cost of living much more appealing if it solves education and healthcare. The housing is solved for by market forces.
First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children and augment the kind of high grade services first tier locations have, especially education and healthcare with AI. Or at least that's 90% of the reason me and many people I know don't move to smaller towns
> First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children
That seems unfair to me. Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
> Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
My point was mainly that that kind of first tier city would attract those kind of people, not specifically that they should be targeted.
If you lived in a 2nd tier zone you shouldn't pay extra in taxes even if you're childless.
But specifically to your question, I do think that it's fair that childless people should pay more taxes, because having a stable population is a requirement for a stable society and single/childless people aren't doing their part.
That duty can be offloaded to parents with more children, but they should be compensated for that.
You can frame it whatever you want -- they pay more taxes, parents pay less taxes, parents get tax rebates, parents get higher UBI per child, the outcome is the same.
I do think that first tier cities leach and profit from the work of the parents, educators of the people who migrate there (and generally the whole area -- it takes a village to raise a child), profit from exorbitant property taxes so, I think the only way to solve this curse is higher taxes (if it's required) on those areas and subsidized living in less desirable places -- provided that those 2nd tier places produce competent citizens.
Progressive income tax already does this "taxing first-tier cities a higher percentage" thing. The tax bands are the same in all cities, so people living in the cheaper, low pay provincial cities already pay less tax as a proportion of income. This effect is very stark in comparing London to the rest of the UK.
Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
children are the future of our society. even in today's system, children will be the ones paying your pension when you retire. putting that burden on parents alone is what is unfair. how would you like your pension to be measured based on the number of children you raised? maybe if you have no children you shouldn't get any pension at all?
Where did you get the idea anyone will be paying my pension when I retire?
Capital Accumulation without labor is a fiction. If nobody had any more children all stocks would gradually decline to zero
Pension is also a fiction (as in, I do not have one).
do you expect not to get any pension at all and just live on your own savings? do you live on a farm growing your own food?
you can't live in this society without relying on others, and they can't live without relying on you. and unless you want humanity to die out, future generations need our support.
This is more of a "100% certain" situation than an "expect" situation. Are you mixing pensions up with 401ks and social security?
i was using it as a general term for whatever money you receive after you retire except personal investments or savings. i could not find out how 401ks work, specifically i did not find out whether 401k works like any other pension scheme or not. the wikipedia page on pensions does not say that 401k is not a pension, therefore i figure it is included in the definition.
i just checked the 401k page, and it says: a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored, defined-contribution, personal pension (savings) account.
so it's a pension.
but what we call it doesn't really matter. more important is the question if the payout depends on future generations paying in. in my brief search i could not tell whether the 401k is protected against that or if it even can be protected. but if it is i'll have to retract my claim. my apologies.
Basic social security yield math.
> I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education.
I have a theory that every nation with a natural advantage in some product range should make it available as a birthright.
For example, Finland's relative endowment/strength is forestry products and paper production. So every citizen should be able to claim a monthly allowance, at nominal charge or for free, of TP, paper towels, and writing paper / notebooks. Contracted by the government via a bid process.
It also matters what jobs they change to.
There is a documentary out there showing someone who could quit their regular job and become an artist thanks to an UBI pilot (Canada IIRC). It is presented as a positive example in that they did not become lazy, but just work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
How many people will become artists with UBI introduced nationally? Who is going to buy all that art?
There's lots of different kinds of art, some of it more commercially viable than others. Consider 3D designers selling print models, people like myself who are interested in restoring old cars or other endeavors that are artistically rewarding and aren't just painting or sculpting. Hell, people seem to do pretty well currently as content creators on YouTube.
My point is immediately jumping to the idea everyone's going to be pumping out shitty paintings and music that no one will want is lacking in imagination.
What I'm worried about is: who will produce our food? Who will fix our potholes? Who will fix our cars?
Food production is already absurdly automated. At least for grains, in theory you don't even need humans to drive the tractors on the fields any more, drones and RTK GPS systems automate all of it from seed to harvest. Cattle is fed and milked fully automated as well, with precise tracking of how much each cow ate and how much milk it yielded. Chicken also don't need much human work to lay eggs.
Most societies up to industrialization had a primary (i.e. agricultural) sector of around 50-70% of employees (numbers vary). Today, it's more like 1-2%, and the number is bound to fall - especially when lab-grown meat really takes off, because slaughtering and butchering farm animals _at the moment_ cannot be done by robots at scale and IMHO it's more likely that lab-grown meat succeeds before we entrust sharp knives to robots to actually kill animals.
> Who will fix our cars?
Modern cars - particularly electric cars - are much less maintenance intensive. That's part of why many established car brands are in serious trouble with their historically grown dealerships... "life long oil fills" and general improvements in technology already cut back on a lot of income from repair and maintenance of dealerships, and electric cars have far fewer failure points (other than crappy software) than ICE cars. We simply won't need anywhere close to the current number of service points, and we also won't need gas stations with trucks that fill up their tanks as the cars will be charged through the existing grid.
> Who will fix our potholes?
I 'member a story of some bloke holding up a sign like "I filled the potholes, pay me instead of your taxes". Local politics is on a downward slope across the Western world (with a common factor being the central government depriving local governments of revenue or loading off expenses to local levels), I think we're going to see a lot more of such incidents.
In any case, the price of trades labor will have to increase to be an effective incentive. And if you ask me, better pay the tradespeople than the vampires and vultures of Wall Street. At least the tradespeople do something to keep this society alive, the banksters do not.
The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money. Notwithstanding, a lot of people enjoy the work of being a mechanic.
> The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money.
The incentives are changed dramatically, though. The unworkability of the plan comes down to a very simple question: Why work for forty years, scrimping and saving to afford a meagre retirement, when a meagre retirement is on offer the moment you turn 18?
People have the option now to live like the meagre retirement of this proposed UBI while working, saving a ton more, and retire with a lot more than this UBI in far fewer years than 40. Instead, they spend more, because people always want more stuff. A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
Or with this proposed UBI, why wouldn't people work 20 years and have a good retirement instead of the a meager one out of the gate? Why not work 40 for a great one?
The median 65 year old has 200k in retirement savings. That's 8k per year at a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Hardly worth 40 years of work.
> A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
The option of shacking up with some buds and playing videophones all day will be utterly irresistible for many (if not most) male high school grads. Basically the college experience, for free, forever.
Is there enough to sustain the entire economy though?
Well, we're apparently significantly more wealthy as a society and individuals than XXX years ago. Yet, most people still seem to be working and the economy is stronger than ever (On a multi-century scale).
I like fixing cars, I enjoy doing it for my friends and prefer to do it for free.
I love to do a little paving, once in a while, it's surprisingly satisfying.
I actually really like to work, I just hate having to be employed.
I expect that I'm fairly normal in that.
I wouldn’t mind farming if it wasn’t for the need of money. There’s a lot of risk involved. I also don’t mind fixing cars, it’s just in today’s world I can work and make more money in an office - and it requires enough hours that I can’t do mechanical work at all, there’s not enough time and I have to pay for those.
I will happily fix potholes and produce food for UBI, after being horribly burned out by 20 years in software companies.
Couldn't you do that now already? you wouldn't make as much money as on software but construction or farming are both viable careers.
> Who will fix our cars?
Somewhat related: when do we get a truly user-serviceable automobile, something like a four-wheeled motorized version of a Fairphone or Librem. Set a max speed on them to simplify the safety requirements. Urban putt-putts.
Then you'll find enough mechanics.
> when do we get a truly user-serviceable automobile, something like a four-wheeled motorized version of a Fairphone or Librem
Those used to be ubiquitous! Today none are available.
Buy a largely any car from the 60s and it will be fully user-serviceable essentially forever.
Who cares if anyone buys the art? In a world with basic income where people didn't have to worry about survival wages, people could make art just because they were moved to make art.
I don't know, they went from productive work (someone paying them to do it) to unproductive work.
This is the old Keynesian argument I never bought that you can pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in and it would stimulate the economy.
To be fair, there is a massive percentage of non-productive jobs that are mostly security guards for goods and locations, and many inefficient roles related to ticket clipping, inefficient distribution and marketing that all stimulate the economy without being productive.
"still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art."
Read more closely.
Arts & entertainment is (at least) 1% of USA's GDP. Roughly $1 trillion / year.
Production of culture seems important and worthwhile to me.
Probably apocryphal: UK's (then generous) dole led to the British Invasion (eg The Beatles).
>>went from productive work (someone paying them to do it) to unproductive work.
Umm, that is literally wrong, by your own definition.
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
I.e., they went from an employer paying them to do work to a variety of clients/customers paying them to do different work of nearly the same value.
OFC, if everyone did it, the price of art might decline. Or demand might go up. Or both, or neither. We don't know. But either way, the example subject did NOT convert from productive to unproductive work.
Was it:
or:Good qstn. The phrasing does leave room for ambiguity, but "make revenue close to" certainly indicates meaning closer to "$X from old job ~= $Y from art-gig"
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art
And where will the money for UBI come from when everyone quits their job for non-income generating hobbies?
Tax the AI companies? Their bots are built on the plundered wealth of all mankind and that wealth belongs to the commonweal by right.
It's funny that this board can easily imagine AI destroying humanity but can't imagine a world where it enables them to quit their job.
>Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases
This is a very good point that I haven't even heard made by proponents of this idea before. Thanks!
> Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Right, GP was clearly referring to to
> Does a basic income make people lazy? This assumption has been widely discussed, but never substantiated. The Basic Income Pilot Project demonstrates that the opposite is true.
If you knew you could get by forever without a job, that's very different from having a 3-year period where you can get by without a job. Especially when it comes to people coming of age. Think about the average 18 year old: if they could just 'get by' for a long time, it'd be awfully tempting.
i'd argue that many will get bored after a few years. encourage everyone to do something meaningful and the problem will go away.
I remember living somewhere where native americans got guaranteed income each month.
There was a group of them that would spend their life outside the liquor store, sitting on the curb drinking.
Alcoholism happens to people who have jobs as well. Though there's a policy of being sober at work which limits drinking to off hours.
Another possibility is that Basic Income alone doesn't solve all problems. Life direction & perceived opportunity to better oneself is needed. Basic Income may enable destructive behavior. But the underlying root cause may still be present even if the person is employed.
Most people need more than mere "opportunity to better oneself". It's almost always a shortage of motivation. UBI would reduce this motivation, I believe.
The current state of things is insanely demotivating, so I wouldn’t be so sure
Native Americans may be the best modern example of a group who's poorly habituated to urban living settings.
For centuries, White Man has tried to assimilate the indigeneous into cityfolk and teach them our languages and our ways, and there's been so much resistance to that. In fact, I propose that most human beings don't like being corralled into individualistic "cells" and so far removed from "nature" or subsistence farming/shepherding that we completely lose touch with other living things. Urban living was such a moral affront to indigeneous cultures, and even the Irish were sort of upset by the imposition, y'know?
Many homeless people on the streets simply don't know how to live. They don't know how to care for a home, how to run a kitchen, how to keep their clothes clean, how to do medical care, how to run household finances and pay bills. They're feral, essentially: how many people adopt feral cats or wild animals? They're nightmares.
Anyone who simply says "housing first" or "UBI" will solve poverty and homelessness, you're in an ivory tower and you've never been on-the-ground with actual people who can't be housed. Look at a population of 100 and you'll discern 100 reasons for that homelessness and poverty.
I'm lucky and privileged that I got independent living situation under control and was able to rehabilitate and habituate to a sort of ordinary middle-class lifestyle, because it was essentially reverting to my childhood environment. Other people came from abuse, addiction, and shitty circumstances, and they have no idea what it's like to be clean and clear-headed.
The reason that entitlements are this way currently is to ensure that qualified people can get and keep their benefits. Section 8 HUD housing has a lot of strict rules around the owners, landlords, and the tenants, and learning those rules helped me know what a decent and well-maintained household looks like. Maintaining HUD standards was paramount to me keeping that assistance.
Likewise food stamps (SNAP) can't be used for liquor or non-nutritious goods and other food programs deliver wholesome stuff you can use and eat, so it sets good examples to otherwise feral humans that it's important not to live on Doritos and beer, because they will try!
UBI is absurd to me where if you're just handing me fistfuls of cash I can do anything I want, and people will run with that, I guarantee ya. UBI is no solution to the symptoms or root causes of poverty.
Personally, I believe we need a return to collectivism, an end to rugged individuality, and more communal-style housing situations. Independent living is a real grind, because of so many responsibilities, and I have tons of neighbors but no friends. Many people would do better with shared spaces like kitchens, bathrooms, cafeterias, but those types of residences are essentially illegal in the US by means of zoning, except in unique circumstances like a special work-train-live program. And placing feral or mentally ill people into shared spaces can be a recipe for disaster, unless it's a professional institutional setting, and that's precisely what the Reagan administration eliminated from the "bad old days".
Amen
> Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Didn't something similar happened during Covid due to stimulus checks? People were confident on applying for new jobs since they had the stimulus check as a backup.
Yeah, this kind of mobility (or lack thereof) is what keeps a lot of poor people poor. Moving is expensive, leaving your current job is expensive, job searching is expensive, upskilling is expensive... Most people don't have the financial freedom to do any of those, thus they are stuck. This also means that their potential is never fully met, because they just gotta makes ends meet.
You could argue it's a self-regulating system as well with UBI at zero.
I'll give you a counter example. "Retirement."
Nominally retirement is "forever" in that once you are retired your pension/savings/whatever is funding your existence needs. Having lived most of my life in the SF Bay area I've watched as my cohort came here as college grads, went through the various tech life cycles, and then aged out into "retirement." I put it in quotes because some retired voluntarily, others did not. Involuntary retirement or "funemployement" as the euphemism goes, was typically below the level of flexibility that they had imagined they would have being retired.
Various life events, health issues, marital issues, Etc. spread the spectrum even further. As a result the 'basic income' for this cohort ranges from just below 'covering groceries, utilities, and rent in a low cost of living area' to an annual travel budget, replacement budget for cars/boats/etc, and possibly a second property with some 'feature' (like a ski cabin, a beach bungalow, etc).
What is consistent across the spectrum is a desire to "do something productive with their time." That skews towards volunteer work if their basic life needs are met, piecework if having extra money would meet some currently unmet needs. I don't think I know anyone who could sit in the rocking chair on the patio every day and watch the sun come up and go down, or spend every day at the golf course or some other leisure activity, choose to take that path.
That said, pretty much everyone I know who has retired took an extended amount of time (typically months) to 'unwind.' Once unwound, life seems to assert itself.
Now I don't think this is scientific, its a very specific group of people. Generally professionals who worked in office jobs vs trades. And a number of them 'fail' at retirement which has them going back to work because they didn't have sufficient tools for creating their own direction or something. But laziness isn't a trait I've seen. A completely different direction perhaps, but a direction rather than standing still.
And, to point out, these are people coming to the end of their effective working careers, with things like medical problems and disability to inhibit their productivity. The idea that, given some paltry basic income ala current social security payment levels, young adults would just bail out is pretty strange to me. People already more or less have that option through disability and not very many people utilize it. I would expect to see something in that range, certainly below 10%, if we had a minimal basic income.
yeah, there are basically three questions people have for UBI.
1. Does it cause inflation
2. What is the impact on employment/productivity
3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense?
These studies answer none of these.
I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.
You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
Why wouldn't they? It's an easy and profitable way to pump their property values. Obviously they make an exception when they stand to profit, but I invite you to attend any county zoning meeting ever if you think this doesn't happen. The meetings are nothing but catfights of this exact description.
I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.
Rent is charged monthly, and everyone consumes the value at the exact same pacing of 1/30th the rent per day. Consumers has no leverages, save for weak protections that won't be statistically significant, against price hikes. I think it's reasonable to assune it's more efficient at capturing UBI than regular commodities that can be rationed or splurged on.
> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
One workable version of UBI was Communism
what you describe doesn't sound workable to me...
It lasted just over 70 years. The current proposals - if implemented - would implode in less than a decade.
as long as we're floating what-ifs...
what if UBI led people to think "i can go live wherever i want, regardless of job/market conditions"?
herds of young idealists and artist-types deciding to take over cheap realestate in rust-belt towns and rural areas because they no longer need to be next to a big urban center to 'make it'.
we started to see this during covid WFH, but true UBI would be even bigger
This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline.
Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build.
Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
The human nature. The moment UBI is set at X amount, the cheapest rents will jump, so will the price of a coffee, of a burger & fries in a fast-food, etc.
Greed will take over and try to get the _most_ out of the UBI as if we/you/they owe it to those people.
Wouldn't reducing the profitability of landholding via taxation discourage the creation of apartment buildings, thus reducing the supply of housing and making it more expensive?
Georgists want building apartment buildings to be profitable based on the value of the building, not the land.
The idea would be that holding land becomes less profitable, but buying land for development becomes cheaper.
It would make land cheaper and improve the profitability of doing the conversion. Paying people to sit on land is hilariously inefficient. Welfare for the rich.
> increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders
More than 200 million Americans own their home. They are your real estate holders. So what if they absorb some of these increases?
If your concern is housing for those who don't own a home yet then say that, and the solution to that isn't not doing basic income, but to relax the obsolete local zoning laws that require e.g. 1 acre per home in rural area or "nothing higher than 30ft" in suburban areas, basically flat out banning any density increases.
Fund a UBI from a land value tax. The more land rents increase the higher the UBI
Land tax is one of the least ethical forms of taxation. It would be far better to fund it with income, sales, or capital gains taxes.
Most economists argue the opposite, that LVT is more ethical and efficient than other forms of taxation.
I don't think "most economists" have a favorable view of it. It is a fringe theory from the 1800s that has never been implemented.
It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.
It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.
It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
Teacher can’t afford to live next door because a retired couple that bought for 2 times their salary in 1975 live in a million pound house. They instead rent an hour away and already pay a tax for land use, just they pay it to the land owner.
It basically says everyone has an equal share of the unimproved land in a country.
If you use more of your fair share you pay more. If you use less you receive an income.
Instead the ultra wealthy owns the land and receives the income.
Far more ethical than either no tax or taxing productive work.
i haven't read much about this, but i think that the point is that land taxes should incentivize people to make their land work ad produce an income. the problem is that this only works if you have lots of land that can be meaningfully exploited. if the tax is applied equally to every one then small landowners will suffer because you can't make a profit from a house and a garden that you live in yourself.
“Based on nothing I disagree”
You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards
I don't know whether you can tie that inflation to ubi-like measures(alone). The whole world suffered high inflation, not in the least because of the global disruption of the supply chain.
We need to get serious about wealth taxes. The amount of money locked up in assets and land is staggering and has been under taxed for far too long.
I agree with the sentiment, but it matters very much how it's implemented. You would need to find a way to keep the money in your country, while also taxing more. It's actually very complicated, but yes, I agree with the notion.
Said assets and land are already being used though. It's just a case of people wanting to "redistribute" them.
My questions are more along the lines of:
Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior.
Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval.
This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
>1. Does it cause inflation
Our current system has inflation baked in, so im not sure how big an issue it is, so much as how much inflation?
I argue the studies don't have to answer these questions, because we already have the (uncomfortable) answers.
> 1. Does it cause inflation
On its own, yes, it would create inflation if rolled out globally. However, this is why serious advocates of UBI also point out that we need policies that ensure it isn't turned into a wealth pump into the upper/ruling classes. This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, which also requires substantial public investment in those areas to deter or discourage privatization of those necessities. In other words, it means pissing off every landlord, upscale grocer, private hospital, utility company, telecom, private university, rideshare company, rail company, and Taxi owner for the sake of the public good.
> 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity
Generally speaking, humans want to do something productive with their time - it's the definition of productivity that varies from person to person. Those who think solely in economic output will say that negative-profitability employment isn't of value, even if that output has knock-on positive effects in the economy (such as the disparaging compensation for teachers and first responders despite the immense value they create in the long run). It's also why people sneer at the homeless or panhandlers as being "problematic" and "undeserving" of assistance for failing to "pull themselves up [by their bootstraps]."
In reality, taking into account the whole picture, these sorts of individuals could (and studies show, often do) contribute to society better if they had support structures in place that prioritized long-term stability instead of quick KPIs for grant money. It could even be argued that UBI enabling humans to stay home and not work is itself a profitable exercise, since it removes friction from systems that those individuals might create by being forced to exist and interact with modern society and its lack of safeguards. Not only that, but the productivity gains could likely increase as we can finally eliminate "bullshit jobs" and give people the safety nets needed to start their own businesses instead - more restaurants, service experts, inventors, researchers, teachers, and other jobs that are high risk/low reward in the current system, wouldn't be in an economy with UBI and associated policies to provide for necessities and essentials.
> 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense?
We can, but this is arguably the hardest opposition to surmount because it fundamentally means higher taxes on everyone, and that's a bitter medicine nobody wants to swallow. Countries with successful social safety nets have higher tax rates, but also higher quality of life as a result. Unfortunately, the current technocrats and their sycophants (not to mention their industrial predecessors and their decedents) have managed to convince a plurality of powerful people that the world would be perfect if everyone just worked harder and became billionaires themselves so we'd have no more poor people and thus no need for taxation in principle - a fantasy so high and lofty it makes the MCU look plausibly accurate.
It would mean building a society of high taxes, rigid policies, and a massive reduction in (or outright elimination of) loopholes for wealth preservation, especially across generations. It'd mean punishing hoarding of wealth, as that would (rightly) signal exploitation rather than success. These are things most people simply aren't ready for, because they still believe themselves to be one lottery ticket, one inheritance, one startup, one IPO, or one crypto boom away from being billionaires themselves, and don't want to accept that the outcome of the 99% is to work for the rest of their lives before dying in destitution of some form under the current system - a depressing reality to be sure, but all the more reason to change it.
So there you have it. If all you look at is the current system as-is and shoehorning UBI into it, then obviously you have a slam dunk case for why it's a bad thing. UBI advocates like myself, however, acknowledge that it's merely one component in a larger transformation of society itself towards more equitable outcomes, one where colorful pieces of paper are inherently devalued for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, while increased in value for actual luxuries. It's an inversion of our present society for the betterment of all, and that's why it's incompatible with the questions you raise above (which seek to preserve a broken status quo).
> This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities...
> substantial public investment in those areas...
> discourage privatization...
Ah, so we are just looking at communism with extra steps. Good to know. UBI, despite its size, was just the motte all along. Thanks for telling us the bailey.
If you’re going to deliberately straw man someone’s argument with cherry-picked quotes just to justify your pre-existing and ill-informed biases against a topic while simultaneously demonstrating your ignorance of said topic, then you’re going to live your life in the grays.
Okay. Have fun planning the whole economy. Let me know how it goes.
Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
and #3 at least as already been well modelled economically, UBI replaces many other welfare programs, so we can definitely afford it
> Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
As GGP said, this doesn't compare. There's even nothing magically non-linear about it: people stay employed, because they know the UBI study will only last a few years, after which they'll need to get back to normal. It makes no sense to interrupt your career for it, as the "hole in your CV" will just turn into a severe and compounding disadvantage in lost years and experience.
It's not just that. I fear tha UBI will be 'frozen in time', so let's say it's something insanely generous, EUR 5000 per month. After that happens, every month we will have a record inflation, and soon enough the EUR 5000 will rent you Harry Potter's staircase-'flat' and 3 pizzas.
The only way I see this being sustainable is get as far as possible from the big cities, buy a tiny piece of land, by a durable tiny home, buy solar panels, get a tablet with all Gutenberg books, and find a soulmate that will follow you to that journey.
No kids, no private schools, no parties, no nothing. Everything will be swallowed by inflation.
Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway.
I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this:
The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory:
The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero.
I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely.
(EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
> The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Oh yes!! This very thing!! A quick DDG search didn't return anything, but yes, 300% yes. This is the rule/law. Once people get some money, forces tend to (try and) take it away.
EDIT: Ideally, your disposable income must be a little less than zero, so your needs/wants outpace your income, so you get a credit card with $2k limit, then you expand that to $5k limit, and that to $7k limit, until you cannot any more.
EDIT2: I once dated a lady (the most beautiful woman I've dated in my life) and she was in debt for €40k, ALL spent in clothes. She was SO gorgeous that when I feel for her she was wearing a €50 jeans and a €10 white tshirt. She walked in to the room and people stopped breathing. After 1.5 years of dating when I wanted to get very serious with her and she told me her 'dark secret', I suggested a Dave-Ramsey-baby-steps plan to pay off her €40k debt but to chop up her credit cards (and I would gladly generously contribute to pay off that debt - but with a different lifestyle). Long story short.. I haven't seen her in ~15 years :)
And #3 implies that it's not going to cause inflation, any more than those other welfare programs do now.
In general, as long as we're funding it with taxes instead of by printing money, it's not going to cause any extra inflation.
If somebody offered me 1200 GBP a month, tax free, no strings attached, guaranteed for the rest of my life, there is no way I would continue working for somebody else. I would tinker around with open source and pet projects for the rest of my life.
That's almost twice the aged pension here in Australia. (550 GBP)
I guess I would also need some iron clad guarantee that the cost of living would not skyrocket.
This is the UBI experiment I want to see:
The government creates a new currency called $UBI, with the same legal tender status as the official currency for that country ($FIAT). I.e. people can use it to pay taxes, and people are required to accept it when doing commerce. Both currencies exist in parallel.
In the true spirit of ubi, everyone is entitled to an equal amount of it, and no one should be worse off by it. So they need to issue the currency new currency to give away.
They set up a system so everyone gets the same amount of money, at the same time, for maximum fairness. Everyone's income just goes up, equally.
$UBI officially has 1:1 parity to $FIAT, and this parity is used to calculate how much they'll need to "print" out at a given month. Let's say it's living_wage*population_size. That amount can be adjusted once a year by factoring in the government reserves built up exclusively from tax returns. In other words, the monetary base is a known, deterministic quantity.
They allow free exchange between $FIAT and $UBI, but the government does not officially exchanges it. They also allow people to set prices to their products and services freely.
What is the benefit of all this extra complexity?
It's funny, people like you will say a study is too small and focused to be worthwhile.
But then we have the case of Alaska, an entire state receiving a yearly stipend(basic income). And the same type of people will say well it's too broad you can't possibly pinpoint any direct effects. https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-we...
Science is not made for perfection and many studies are _not possible_ it doesn't mean there's nothing useful to gain from it for policy makers. It's also simpler to study smaller groups than effects on entire countries.
Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend for 2024: $1,702, or $141.83/month
https://pfd.alaska.gov/
> “It’s awesome! I wasn’t even aware that we were even close to being number 1, so seeing that was really nice to know,” Brown said
It seems to have come as a shock to a lot of them to find out they were so happy.
That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.
As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level.
Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted.
This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed.
The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name.
The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words.
We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence.
However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.
> That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.
If that were true, supermarkets in wealthy areas would be much more expensive than in poor areas, but they aren't.
No one likes overpaying for groceries, and a modest government income isn't going to change that.
Supermarkets in poor areas get reliable cash flow from EBT - it is arguably UBI in action. Its patrons tend to have lower rates of vehicle ownership and free time to seek better priced alternatives.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions.
They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement.
The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue.
An inconvenient truth.
And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall.
If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.
funny, this sister comment here makes the exact opposite argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593
but even if you are right about retired people stopping to work, you also need to consider their age, and maybe the feeling that they have earned it after working for decades?
the same isn't true for young people, so the comparison is not conclusive.
What age do you think that “feeling” kicks in and how do you “feel” about policy operating according to vague feelings?
I’m old enough to have income generating assets but not enough to call it a day completely. Reduce the state pension age to 18 (which is what a Universal Basic Income is) and I will.
Then you’ll be working to support me and the tax will have to be high enough to force you to generate a surplus that can be passed on to me.
That’s how UBI will work in reality.
will it become a capped negative sales tax, in a way? I don't see how amount of currency smaller than individual UBI amount make tangible sense under its presence.
> completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term
If we were in a “long term UBI situation” how would people really trust that the cash would keep flowing?
If current benefit programs (Medicare, social security, ACA, food stamps) are under attack how would it work with UBI ?
It would be fine for older workers to step back, but what about young adults coming into the workforce - would they just skip learning?
Perhaps, but they have actual arguments for their claim, and you have just hypotheses. Scientific studies like those are the best approximation we can have to a full rollout. So perhaps results won't be exactly the same with a full rollout, but at least they have already taken out the "people will just behave nonsensically / be worse off" hypotheses
If they really wanted to answer the question, they'd have to gather several millions of dollars, and then go to some island somewhere and provide UBI to everyone (without publicizing it, if at all possible). Then observe the changes in that group of people. For best results, choose an island in a developed part of the world.
One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI.
You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.
> but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Would it though? Do people really trust their governments that much?
Poor people who this would be most applicable to tend to deal with the government a lot more than UBI proponents so their trust levels are probably different.
> Do people really trust their governments that much?
In Europe? Yeah. Safety nets are not suddenly taken away.
Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits?
But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
>> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be.
In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy.
(to be clear, I think this is atrocious)
The money supply argument seems flawed to me. As long as poorer people gain a larger share of the money supply, their increased spending power would outpace inflation. That’s because inflation is a function of the money supply in total, not the money supply of those with lower income.
Even a lifetime study would take an even longer time to cover the effects of children of people who never worked.
We do have some data on that, because of SSI (not to be confused with SSDI), results not great. It may be a selection effect, of course.
> the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have
It's interesting to describe as "likely" something for which there is no evidence. This is an actively anti-science belief. It seems to me as if you really don't like the idea of UBI and so are saying that, if it actually happened, the effect would be the opposite of what experimental data shows. This is pretty clearly biased.
> (increase in the money supply)
There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes.
> Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
You can gradually expand the pool of people receiving UBI to see how these effects scale. Begin in one city, then increase to a larger region, then do it nationally.
> There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes
Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.
He doesn't have a money vault. He has almost zero cash holdings. If you tax him, then he will have to sell assets to pay for those taxes, which removes money from the economy as that money was being actively spent on his assets. The only situation when money supply changes is if someone has a literal mattress full of cash hidden away. Even if you just have money in a savings account, it acts as a fractional reserve for the banking system meaning that there is a net decrease in money supply when you give it to the government as banks can no longer use it as the backing for loans.
To split hairs slightly that is the "velocity of money" (basically how often does the average dollar get spent and passed around per year). Money supply is the total amount of (a given type of) money in existence. But yeah, the effect on inflation is the same.
The cost of an annuity that pays your basic, fundamental living expenses: Food, shelter, water, etc. can be thought of as a debt that all people are born with. In the US, you can obtain a room in an apartment, basic food, internet access, and transportation (minimal versions of all of these), for something like $15,000/year.
such a lifetime annuity would cost the average 18 year old on the order of 200-300 thousand dollars. This means that an 18 year old starts with about the same level of implicit debt, that a doctor who has just finished medical school has explicit debt, except that student debt doesn't scale with inflation.
A key feature of a society which values social mobility is reducing the debt burden of its children. I don't think the answer on basic income is cut and dry, and I do think its important for people to sustain themselves via their own efforts, but since you likely wouldn't increase the debt burden of a teenager, and you also didn't select the debt burden of the average teenager. You should at least consider the possibility that you would actually choose to reduce, by some amount, the debt burden of the average teenager.
Not that it’s the point of what you’re saying, but at 300k, a 15k yearly payout would be 5%. I'm almost certain that no-one would ever give a 5% inflation adjusted annuity to an 18 year old for 300k.
All that to say that the value you propose is probably even higher than what you lay out.
I just got a quote for 16k/year for an 18 year old for 300k, so I think I did a pretty good job with my estimate actually :P.
Does that 16K/Year adjust for inflation?
no, I was just the tiniest bit salty for being called out on extremely back of the envelope calculations that turned out damned close.
UBI is great on an individual level, but as we saw with the Covid Stimulus payments in the US, they cannot help but be quite inflationary. That's my biggest worry about injecting huge amounts of money into a system that is truly universal.
And if it's not truly universal, then it's a bad idea. Means tested money is just an incentive to fit the criteria.
Yes, the problem is you have more money chasing that same quantity of goods and thus you get inflation.
IMO a better way to achieve the UBI goal is to instead focus on universal basic goods. We're already nearly there with staple foods. For example bulk rice is now so cheap it's basically free. We could do the same with housing via prefab high density similar to Japan (mostly not done because it is illegal in the US). Internet and water is also near zero cost.
You would achieve the goals of UBI good-by-good without the inflation.
Sure, a true safety net. The "worst case scenario" would be that you're eating government rice and beans, living in a dorm, safe and able to get the basics including internet so you can get back on your feet. This type of thing shouldn't even be means tested. If you want to just live in such a place, then ok. Everything beyond that is what people can strive for, but you can always count on it.
I don't know enough about the reality of it, but I want to say the Nordic nations have something like this in place? I had a friend in Copenhagen who fell out the bottom of society due to an addiction and he was placed in an apartment, given support, and got back on his feet. That's what we should be aiming for in the US. People end up costing us a lot more money when they have zero help.
>If you want to just live in such a place, then ok.
Even if you're the sort of person who will light your dorm on fire? Or stuff clothes into the toilet and flood the whole building? Or turn their dorm into a smelly orgy of sex and meth? Not even prisons have found perfect solutions to preventing issues like these, making everything out of concrete and metal helps but they still have guards 24/7 to step in when a prisoner acts up.
The visibly homeless are generally people with severe mental illness and/or hard drug addiction, and they are the ones most likely to destroy such places. This is to the detriment of the sorts of homeless that are just temporarily down on their luck and need help getting back on their feet who could actually make good use of such a thing.
Sure, my post was not expansive enough to account for criminals and the mentally ill. The bottom I referred to is for people without means, but with capacity to care for themselves.
The hard part of that conversation is that we consider criminal offenses as the only grounds for forcibly incarcerating a person. Mentally ill people need policies that will better protect them fron themselves and their neighbors BEFORE they commit crimes and end up in prison. We likely need new models of mental institutions and new laws which allow people to be committed when it is in everyone’s best interest… yet somehow avoid the abuses and horrors of the past. A very hard problem indeed.
Sorry if this offends, but I am deeply skeptical that the effect of UBI is independent of common culturally influenced behaviors of where it might be implemented. Try it in an opioid epidemic stricken rust belt town in the American Midwest, or an urban ghetto (I'm not totally sold that the selection criteria for the Stockton study were unbiased) and let us know how it goes.
I always think, instead of UBI in $$, UBI in items is a lot better. This alters the social-economic reality more dramatically than UBI in $$ but I think it is a better option.
So basically, instead of throwing a bunch of $$ to everyone every month and hopefully inflation doesn't happen, give everyone a basic condo with a reasonable number of electrical appliances in an UBI apartment (being UBI doesn't mean low quality, it should mean reasonably good quality but without those fancy stuffs), send everyone food package every week, free library card, free online university admission (they don't have to take them if they don't want to), etc., and maybe a bit of $$ just for entertainment and such.
However, I think it's more important to help people to find meanings in their life. If I get UBI but feel lost, how do I find a sense of belonging? How do I find meaning in my life? Sure, if I'm smart or if I'm affluent, I might get into some really meaningful and well paid jobs, but UBI does not magically give people more job, it merely gives them more time to figure out -- and a life of time is not enough without guidance and help.
To help people find belongings and feel "being useful", the government can also encourage volunteering, mass infrastructure maintenance projects, and promote many other activities, so people can earn some pay, learn some skills AND find meaning in their life.
Governments try stuff like that pretty regularly (you can only buy certain things with food stamps, etc), but it's typically expensive to administer and inherently prone to abuse. Buy groceries with food stamps, sell groceries, buy drugs. On top of that, it's just inherently difficult to structure this in a way that's fair and useful to every person. If I inherited or built myself a nice rural home, I don't want a government-issue apartment - either instead or in addition to what I have. Do I get nothing? That's unfair. Do I get the stuff I don't want?
"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.
All sorts of benefits get scrutiny along the lines of “what if they spend it in ways I disapprove of?” Inherent in UBI is the notion of increased personal freedom.
The study showed that people used the money in unusual ways, spreading it around and sharing it, usually in ways that benefited the economy, but would not be allowed by a more heavily-regulated system like food stamps.
also dietary needs and preferences. it's way do complicated. it adds a burden not only to the administration but also to those who sell the goods and services received.
another problem is that if i earn extra money i can't combine it with the basic income to eg afford a better apartment. everyone would be stuck with the apartment given.
you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.
i don't believe that. if you spend your income irresponsibly you are out of luck. change your habits. wait until the next payment and do better. if you can't do that then a social worker will help you.
While cash like UBI offers flexibility, criticizing targeted aid like food stamps misses the point. These programs are essential safety nets for the most vulnerable. While some misuse might occur – often signaling deeper needs requiring more services, not less food – focusing on that minority ignores the vast majority who rely on this aid to simply survive.
Suggesting it's "unfair" if you don't need specific help ignores the purpose of a safety net. How a society supports those facing hardship is a measure of its character. Worrying about potential misuse at the lowest rungs seems disproportionate when compared to massive government spending elsewhere. Ultimately, denying essential aid based on assumptions about how a few might misuse it is counterproductive and lacks compassion.
Yeah I agree there are a lot of problems in this kind of schemes. I don't have answers for any of them, because giving a concrete answer to any of these questions probably leads to more questions.
You can still have some $$ in that package, so it's not entirely out of flexibility. I also guess people who receives food packages, as you said, may be willing to exchange for other stuffs. TBH the most important reason I pick provisions (with a bit of $$) over 100% $$ is because of the scale.
What am I going to do with a second home?
I see where your head's at, but I think a huge portion of the reason for using dollars is that it's simple and easy to manage. You don't need to find suppliers, manage inventory, match individuals with housing, or audit for fairness. Potentially more importantly, you don't need to pay for those activities either!
Yeah, but I think with a government-initiated program, it's going to be a lot cheaper because of the scale. It definitely doesn't solve the problem of corruption or other political issues, but hopefully UBI creates better citizens (for a start, now whoever wants to participate in politics have the time to do more research and participate more) so that those issues get called out.
And where exactly is that free furnished condo located? Do I get to live in Beverly Hills for free if I want to?
I agree that execution is the key, and I don't have the answers for a lot of the questions.
I guess we (humans) will never achieve the equality that everyone agrees to, because every one has his or her own idea of equality, but maybe that shouldn't prevent us from trying.
You have a very strange idea of "everyone". I never agreed to economic equality.
Yeah that's one view of equality (by not agreeing with the concept from the start), and why I said there is no single answer every one agrees to.
>maybe that shouldn't prevent us from trying.
When you're planning on taking the money for your utopian pipe dream from other people by force, you really ought to have a better justification than "it doesn't hurt to try!"
Ahh going back to the days of Government Cheese I see!
Everything old is new again.
Government cheese was created when the country didn't have enough resources. What I'm talking about is abundance of resources. We never tried anything like that before.
To be fair, government cheese (from what I understand) was actually created in order to save extra milk the government bought up as part of a price control effort. In other words, there was an abundance of milk (because the government subsidized it, causing more to be produced than the market needed).
Once it was already sitting around, it's been used to address citizens in the country not having enough resources. Which is kind of the same thing your semi-universal basic provisions would address.
Literally the exact opposite. Government cheese was created because due to subsidies, there was way too much milk that was going to be dumped into the nearest river until the Govt paid the farmers to convert it all to cheese and bought it and shoved it into storage to prop up cheese prices.
It is the definition of over-abundance, since all the farmers were going to have to shoot their dairy cows to actually afford to keep some around and continue producing milk
I’ve had a similar line of thought.. basically what you are proposing is sort of a voucher system. But, here is where my mind went, what if it is implemented as a bunch of tokens issued via a blockchain or even through a central authority. They can be freely traded if needed and prices can go up and down, but regardless of the price, there is a set number of them that get issued.
Similarly, you can get issued tokens/rewards for doing needed work.
I’ve wanted to spend more time thinking through this more thoroughly and flesh out the idea more.. without ever having the chance to
that sounds like it's just a different currency. so then we have to deal with two kinds of currency. i don't think that is beneficial.
I think expecting the government to figure out your meaning off life is putting a bit of to much responsibility there.
But what is wrong if there is an extra option? You don't have to take the pill if you don't need it.
What's wrong is expecting other citizens to support people who are perfectly capable of working themselves.
> If I get UBI but feel lost, how do I find a sense of belonging? How do I find meaning in my life?
That's rather a separate problem. The point of UBI is to make individuals and families more economically resilient. This should have a lot of beneficial spillover effects, but it's not a cure-all for every ill.
This is basically the communist vision (in its original, positive sense) -- Universal Basic Provisioning achieved through automation and a moderate amount of community service. People are always quick to point out how governments will inevitably screw this up, likely making things even worse than they are now, but I think the idea has merit at least in principle. Unlike the idea of Universal Basic Income. Free markets and free money just don't go together. Especially if this money is given to the "productive underlayer" of society rather than investment bankers. That will just collapse the house of cards from the inside out. Administrators, middle managers and VPs of sales do not a functioning economy make.
I agree that historically such movements always ended up badly, e.g. Russia and China. I'd argue that Russia and China picked Socialism not because they had abundance of materials, but on the contrary, because they were too weak back then, so that Socialism gave them the tool of collectivism to fight against external threats and built up industries quickly.
We have never tried something like that (as you said UBP) in a rich country. I guess Norway and Sweden are closer? But I'm not sure.
Agree with your points on UBI.
I do wonder sometimes how UBP would play out in a developed country... Would it remove the need for bullshit jobs and refocus the market-oriented part of the economy towards real progress? Would it make people happier? Or would it make people spend even more of their lives scrolling, swiping and retweeting? In any case, this is a purely theoretical exercise -- even more so than UBI, the idea of UBP is very much incompatible with neoclassical economics, which thoroughly dominates economic and societal thought in most of the developed world.
Maybe there should be a universal basic job. jobs can be rated by how much value is created- it can’t be moving rocks from one location then back again. maybe that’s too hard to calculate. weekly, if you create enough value, you’ve earned your basic income. This might be 2 days of road work. you get 40k for this. take responsibility and up your skills with the remaining time. I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to give money out just for being- i understand there are sales taxes etc. I hate the idea of creating jobs, it has always felt wrong. If the jobs fulfill a valuable and timely need, sure. But i’d rather kill jobs, i say, if you can automate your job with no loss in value, you should be paid at least double that for the rest of your days. If we focus on creating value, we’ll all benefit. it’s just a matter of measuring value i suppose. things like teaching a valuable skill should be of enormous value- as an example. call me crazy.
The problem is that substantial number of people are actually shit employees who create no real value to companies or society. They may be able to pull off the bare minimum requirement to get the money they need, but it'll be like pulling teeth to get them to consistently show up and do their jobs to even a half-decent level.
What you need is a job that's largely self-evidently-verifying (can't be faked), doesn't really need to interface much with other humans (especially customers), and can be self-started/managed. For some homeless people, that job is picking up cans and bottles for recycling money, but it's hard to come up with more and better ones.
Hitler for one always bragged about eradicating all unemployment in a stroke by ordering the autobahn projects.
The core of the problem today is this: With modern tools, a modern worker gets 100 times more work done than a worker without modern tools. And you need to hire people who can use those modern tools and are trustable. Now, for most jobs you can train anybody to do it, but you cannot train people to be trustable and not destroy or steal your modern tools.
The massive infrastructure projects and massive industrial projects of the past could swallow all the workers you could throw at them. And it didn't matter much at all if a worker was any combination of a drunk, a brawler, somebody who didn't speak the language, involved with organized crime at his spare time. As long as he did his job. But today, the very specialized and efficient tools are too sensitive and you want to be careful who gets near them and operates them.
Putting the unemployed to do big infrastructure projects or similar is still better than them doing nothing – but mostly for their own development and spirits, rather than the actual work being done.
Wow, that's an amazing take; thanks for that. I really feel that is on track with reality. Because didn't they formerly have chain-gangs breaking rocks in the hot sun, and making license plates and other manual labor jobs? There are indeed still prison-based industries. I've heard entire call-centers are staffed by prisoners and many on work-release are at normal restaurants and the like.
As for construction, yeah. I worked day-labor for 2-3 days total in my entire life, and it was hell. I have always been groomed as an intellectual knowledge-worker in offices. Assigned by a day-labor office, the contractors set me to working machinery I was totally unfamiliar with. Every day laborer was required to own our attire and safety equipment at own-expense. There was no way anyone could move up without specialized training and experience with the machines they put us on. I had to ride the bus around to time-sensitive jobs at random sites. Then blew the paycheck on a hotel with a shower. I was never gonna learn that heavy-equipment stuff if I had a bunch of computer savvy and risking injury. I literally couldn't operate the machine without my glasses falling off!
It's interesting how you allude to the Irish and Chinese rail workers, and dockworkers/longshoremen of bygone days. It's sort of amazing to think that my able-bodied ancestors could just throw themselves into some milieu and get paid for sweaty physical work. That doesn't seem possible in today's mechanized economy. President Kennedy warned us all from Butler County. Here we remain.
Seems like an efficient way to recycle wealth that keeps pooling too much at the top. I think we can all agree that there's a limit to how much wealth inequality is healthy for society, and most people would agree that we're past that point now.
I wouldn’t agree to either of those things.
Important to note their findings only apply to a smaller subset of people, and do not include those with the most need.
> The findings of the pilot project will be generalizable not to the entire German population, but to 21- to 40-year-old individuals in single-person households with middle incomes.
The reason:
> We were thus faced with the decision of selecting 122 people who represented the entire country but did not provide scientifically reliable data on the effects of a basic income, or selecting 122 people from a more limited group from whom we could draw definitive conclusions. In the end, we chose the latter.
https://www.pilotprojekt-grundeinkommen.de/en/blog/how-the-p...
1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.
2. We obviously can't afford UBI. Most governments have severe deficits even without UBI. "Tax the rich! Then we'll be able to afford it!".. yes well that's orthogonal. Let me know when you figure out how to do that.
These studies are a waste of money.
There already is something similar to UBI. People don't starve, they have shelter, and they generally get taken care off when they have medical emergencies. That's true in most countries. What you get at that level is typically not great. But it is provided for by societies and governments across the world and lots of people are dependent on that.
That current system is actually more expensive than UBI. At its best it would be about as expensive. For example, some countries spend almost as much on unemployment programs as they do on the actual unemployment benefits. Which, if you think about it is mildly ridiculous. People that show up at a hospital are not going to die abandoned in the gutter (well mostly, Michael Moore documented a few negative examples for this in the US). And of course, having your life saved might bankrupt you in the US. Even if you are insured. And even there they'll likely patch you up at least. And in most other countries, everybody is insured so it's not a problem. The modern sign of poverty is being morbidly obese because of the excess of low quality nutrition people seem to be able to get their hands on via food stamps and what little benefits they can scrape together. Which then causes health issues. Which further burdens the unemployment and benefits system.
All this is stupid, inefficient, costly, and not that great if you are on the receiving end (to put it mildly). But formalizing the status quo in UBI form might make things a bit more efficient and better. It would still not be great or that attractive as a lifestyle. But then the message becomes "just get a job if you want/need more". Don't worry about starving. Worry about getting something nice for yourself and work to secure that. Most people have more ambition than just coasting on benefits. And would you employ the ones that don't?
People think of this in closed world terms (somebody has to pay for it), not realizing that most economic growth is a complex system with money being created and distributed (in complex ways) by central banks, which then causes inflation to happen, and spending to compensate for that. A lot of jobs are more about distributing money to people and getting them to spend it than getting people to do something that adds value. The most important function many people have in our economy is just spending their money. Skipping the part where these people pretend to be useful in some bullshit job isn't that big of a deal.
1. This isn't at all obvious to me. Look at the number of people who continue working well into retirement or the people who volunteer their time. I tried sitting on my ass for three months after college and it drove me so crazy I picked up WebGL despite having zero intention of using it in my career.
2. Most UBI proposals I've seen involve replacing existing programs with UBI. My personal favorite proposal is a flat tax that's fully redistributed. There's no deficit possible here, if tax revenue goes down, so do payments.
> Look at the number of people who continue working well into retirement or the people who volunteer their time.
And those people are a fraction of people who don't continue working when they don't have to.
You can't make decisions based on the behaviour of such a small minority.
That was an example off the top of my head. Is that the most represenative sample? Another group that doesn't need money includes doctors, lawyers, and executives in their 40s and 50s. I don't see many of them quitting the moment they're able. What do you feel the appropriate rate for the entire population is? What's the rate required to sustain society?
The only decision I intend to make (and the only one I feel qualified to make) is that I'd like to see more data. We shouldn't be making decisions off of assumptions either way.
Well we don't have enough people working today to sustain society, so it seems to be in the wrong direction.
>Look at the number of people who continue working well into retirement or the people who volunteer their time.
Only 20% of people 65 or older in the US continue to work, and I imagine most of that 20% are doing part time or intermittent work.
Nice stat! The national average is 60%. Wonder how many of those half-retired folks still need the money?
No idea, but the low numbers still working suggest that for most people UBI would lead to a significant decrease in the amount of people working and the amount of work each person does.
> 1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.
Tons of people work jobs they don't like, instead of jobs they would prefer, because the former pays a ton better than the latter, even though they could (barely, perhaps) get by on the lower salary.
They do this because they like stuff, want prestige, and maybe want to raise a family in circumstances other than poverty.
It's not obvious to me at all that UBI at levels anyone is even half-seriously proposing would cause more than a very few people to stop working.
> 2. We obviously can't afford UBI. Most governments have severe deficits even without UBI. "Tax the rich! Then we'll be able to afford it!".. yes well that's orthogonal. Let me know when you figure out how to do that.
That's not at all obvious. I'm not rich, but I recall when I made far less money and was taxed at a marginal rate which was 4% higher than the one which applies to me now. In the U.S., we've made a conscious decision to keep cutting taxes and running large deficits. We could decide to raise taxes and pay for UBI. Yes, that's a political problem, but it's not at all the problem that we can't afford UBI.
==1. People will stop working if they don't need to and won't need to in future. This is obvious to anyone who has met people.==
You are arguing against a proposal nobody is making. In this study, €1,200/month isn't really enough that people wouldn't need to work. The average wage in Germany was €4,479/month in 2023.
Yes, the studies are a waste of money when you've already made up your mind about the way the world "obviously" works, and aren't willing to test your assumptions or change your mind.
1. If this was true the wealthy would not work, and yet a large majority still do, socialites and other classes are very small minorities of the wealthy.
> With a basic income, the participants receiving a basic income saved an average of €450 more per month than the control group.
So where did the other 1050 euros go? It says their consumption habits went up slightly then back down. And they donated a tiny amount more and gave a bit to their community. There still seems to be 500 euros or so missing?
This group consisted of people between the ages of 21 and 40, living alone, with a net monthly income between €1,100 and €2,600 – in other words, middle-class individuals who were still relatively early in their careers and could move around flexibly in the labour market.
That's a group where financial help can pay off.
Seems like one of the primary themes in responses here is inflation, which seems like it makes sense.
But is the point of this study to provide a basis / justification for larger tests? And if so would the next step be to test a UBI for the full population of a small city or state?
The discussion around inflation though is making me wonder if any non-global plan for a UBI would be enough. Is it something that would have to be adopted universally / globally before the real effects on inflation / economies could be determined? If so is this just a doomed concept?
While I'm not opposed to studies like this, we won't ever really know the impact until a country creates a permanent UBI for realsies (even then, it'll probably be a while until the true impact is known).
Being in a temporary study is simply not the same thing as feeling that you could just never have a career ever and still be financially okay.
This may sound like I'm opposed to a UBI, but actually I think getting one eventually would be rad. I just don't think we can easily extrapolate out from a study like this.
Of all the things which are never going to happen, I put universal basic income at the top of the list. Faster than light travel seems vastly more likely than universal basic income.
I don’t believe we can pay for it, nor do I believe that it’s remotely politically feasible.
Studies like this are perfectly nice but I can’t imagine they are actually designed to confidently predict the general equilibrium effects of rolling out UBI on an entire society. (The studies may not be designed with that in mind but it’s crucial.)
Elsewhere in this thread, someone saying this already exists in Alaska.
The oil dividend (likely what they are talking about though I didn’t look) is something like $1,300/year. That’s not universal basic income in the pie-in-the-sky way the phrase is usually used. No one is interested in whether the Alaska dividend makes people not work.
If UBI is limited to a low amount that you couldn’t possibly live on then sure, it’s perfectly possible.
All you have to do is look at all the people that get burgergeld and run some models. Some work extra under the table, some don't. It's a mixed bag.
Redistribute policies only work in countries with high social trust. There's a strong correlation between social trust and wealth inequality.
Pretty much any policy can work (to some extent, for a while) in a society with sufficiently high social trust. But that trust is not static and can be built or depleted over time by those same policies.
My big questions that do not seem to be answered in the paper:
1. Did any participants drop out? Were there exactly 107 treated participants at both the start and end of the trial? Previous UBI experiments I've seen have huge biases where dropped out participants are excluded, but dropping out is affected by treatment.
2. The ~1700 participants were selected from the 20,000 applicants via a procedure that accounted for their opinion about UBI, "the sample was supposed to contain an equal number of proponents and opponents of a universal basic income". Why was this done? Can we see how these survey responses correlate with outcome? Maybe the participants are much more/less supportive of UBI than the German population.
3. The participation criteria required that participants "had a personal, monthly income between EUR 1,100 and 2,600" and "were not unemployed for more than one year". This seems like it would introduce a lot of bias, participants are all members of the 94% of Germans I would expect to have their labor participation least affected by UBI.
Seems quite a bit better overall than the studies in the Bay Area over the last few years
A far more interesting study would be to give its to a bunch of graduating high school students, guaranteed for the rest of their lives, and see how many are contributing meaningfully to the economy at the end of a few years.
This really does not seem like a balanced take, e.g. it does not address the main question of inflation destroying whatever value might be created.
If we redistribute money (which is a proxy for scarcity) to a small number of people, it is hard to observe the aggregate effect on the rest of the economy. If we redistribute money to everyone, we reduce the value (e.g. velocity of money increases without a commensurate change in economic output), so there would be massive inflation. It's possible that the continual massive inflation will cost less than the stability created by UBI, and it's possible it could be the extreme opposite. So, it would be a Grand Experiment, like Communism, and like all grand experiments it could end very poorly, and these studies do nothing to address that.
As long as lower economic strata gain an increased portion of the money supply, they ought to be able to purchase more than they did before, even after inflation. At a high level inflation is a function of the money supply not the money supply of the lower strata.
It can be done on the scale of a city or region within a country. The idea it would have an inflationary effect is somewhat misguided. There are only so many goods available in the economy, and redistributing money can't decrease that. Your real wealth, that is the quantity of goods and services you have access to, will go up if you are below the mean, and down if you are above it, under a scheme of redistribution. The inflationary effect is actually a desired result, as it will increase the economic incentive to produce goods appealing to people on the lower end of the income scale. In the long term, you should expect a real terms decrease in the price of essential goods and an increase in the price of luxury goods as the spending power of the rich falls in comparison to the middle and lower classes. You can see the precise opposite of this at play currently. Rising inequality, the exact opposite of redistribution, has driven massive increases in the production of luxury goods and simultaneous inflation and decreases in the production of essential goods.
TL;DR A free market serves the consumers with money, and redistributing money re-balances the market towards serving a certain group of people. I believe a downwards redistribution would be favourable to the present upwards one.
I don't think UBI will work. Once it's universal, it will be soaked up somewhere in the economy. I would bet on land/real estate.
I'm not sure that I understand, are you saying that UBI might not work because real estate could become more expensive?
They're implying that landlords will immediately raise rents by the amount of UBI, rendering it pointless.
I feel as though this study is only addressing the bottom percentile of questions about UBI, the kind of complaints from people who think "those lazy poors shouldn't be given money". I think most people are able to understand that, yes, people's lives improve when you give them more money. My real questions are macroeconomic. Does UBI create a Keynesian stimulus effect on the economy, or is it primarily inflationary? What is the saving on means testing benefits? How does tax law need to be adjusted to ensure proper dispersal of funds?
Edit: I should emphasis that these questions come from a place of genuine curiosity, rather than simply throwing things up to get in the way of a policy being implemented. I believe larger trials are required to gather better data, with a view towards expanding the pool of recipients.
€1200 per month is around £1000, there are 43.1m working age people in the UK, that's £517.2 BILLION per year.
The NHS costs £181.7b per year and climbing & we struggle to afford that.
HMRC collected £828.9 billion in taxes in 2023 to 2024
UBI would cost 2.8 NHSs per year and 62% of all the tax revenue.
"Tax the rich!" You're probably thinking... "The combined wealth of the 350 wealthiest individuals and families in the [Sunday Times Rich] list totals £965 billion," even if you took every penny real and imagined from the rich, you'd only manage it once and get not even two years of UBI from it.
UBI isn't going to happen.
UBI doesn't even work algebraically. Where do you take the money out of the economy to pay for it?
The money naturally flows from those who don't own assets, to those who do. So, to keep the economy flowing healthily, the cycle needs to be completed by taxing those who own a lot of assets.
Some people think that basic income is the solution to the problem. I’m not sure. But I’m open to it. Maybe a basic income could serve as a transition for former millionaires and billionaires who didn’t have real jobs. Transitioning to a real job via a jobs program might not be in the cards for them considering their skillsets. But a basic income could help them transition over a few years.
But eventually they should try to find some kind of full-time, real job. Like the rest of us.
"Why do you think individuals deserve universal basic income?"
[dead]
Who in their right mind wants that? UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
During COVID, my friends and I were temporarily retired. Lamenting every moment since having to come out of retirement. We were all laid off and received about $2k/mo for awhile and what happened was we ended up hanging out every since day working on whatever we were working on, and feelings of inadequacy faded into the background. It was a micro golden age for us and that period of time has cemented UBI for us. It was a small amount of money and we lived with our parents but we were never more productive and happy.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
Time is more valuable than anything else.
East side bowery was very cheap back then (it was also a pretty rough part of town, which is easy to forget). You just need to convince a hoard of like minded folks to congregate somewhere cheap and you can live like this. There's plenty of cheap places to live in the US. I kind of feel like we need to learn how to build new cities, we have the land, it's mostly cheap, we just continue to choose to reside in expensive places chasing jobs that help us cover the rent while working us to death.
Idk man, I wouldn't call bowery rough or cheap by any stretch - 20 years ago, during covid, or now. For rough during covid or now, head to east new york. For cheap, head deeper into the other boroughs.
The art scene there was more like 40-60 years ago, no?
No, and I don't get your point.
As a taxpayer this kind of nonsense fantasy is exactly why I would never vote for UBI.
Absolutely. More generally, as a taxpayer, I'm very unlikely to vote for anything that is justified in terms of how great the USSR was. One of several comments in this thread that give away the game: scratch a UBI bro, find a commie.
You were the beneficiary of a bullshit short term policy that has wrecked the global and national economies and think that means it was a good thing to replicate?
Your fun time was extremely damaging to people everywhere but of course, we can pretend "it was necessary because COVID" which we then knew and now it's undeniable, was an absolute farce of hygiene theater.
The people who worked paid for you to do nothing at your parents home. That's all there is. Meanwhile, there also were massive transfers of wealth with the same excuse, from tax payers to the wealthies company owners.
The only good Soviet art was the stuff that expressed the suffocating oppression of the communist regime and warned the world to never to do it again. Some of it was oblique, but all of it was human. If you and your friends lack the taste to understand that, then I am really glad that my tax dollars are no longer funding your arts and crafts projects.
> Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
This is pretty good example why UBI is dangerous. Those funded artists were very happy to suck it up and go along with the regime. The censorship was in place, but self-censorship was even stronger.
Meanwhile a lot of art existed outside of the system with people working some shitty jobs and doing arts in free time.
Totally explains why the gulag archipelago was never written.
Well, that book was not officially published in USSR till the fall of the iron curtain. So in official sense your snarky comment is sort of correct :)
Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was published. The premise was that people were self censoring even outside of what was being officially approved, so not really.
That book was published during Kruschiov era. Which was definitely not representative of the rest of Soviet era. Let alone that the book was peanuts compared to Gulag archipelago.
Eventually Solzhenytsin was kicked out from USSR and had to take exile in west. Do you really want to use him as an example of Soviet artistic freedom?
I didn't. I even said that the premise was that people were self censoring outside of the censors. Clearly not though.
So, one dude did not censor himself, during a cultural warm up era, ended up being kicked out to exile. Which was a fortunate outcome due to his previous fame. Hmmm, is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR? :) Is that more like an example how dangerous it was to not self-censor even to well known people with support (for some time) from the ruling elite?
Hearing parents and grandparents stories... And having talked to older artsy people who did grow up before the fall of USSR... Self-censorship was the default modus operandi. Sure, few didn't do it. Most of those paid the price either in gulags in earlier years or mental asylums later.
> is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR?
Who are you even arguing with at this point?
You? That people did self censor indeed. And one example of one author not self-censoring and being made an example does not deny that.
ok, then look at the depression era US federal arts project
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Born in USSR and growing up in then ex-USSR I’ve pretty good experience of arts created during USSR period and both official and underground artists.
But yes, maybe some delusional USSR loving academics in west wrote some BS study how awesome life in USSR was. Which is very funny because those people would have ended up in KGB blacklists if they were on the other side of the iron curtain.
the problem here was the USSR not the UBI. you need to disconnect the two. the USSR and the associated political repression came first and it's no surprise that any handouts thereafter were in service of that political system.
we are discussing UBI in a democratic system, and i feel it is rather unlikely that implementation of UBI would turn a country into something like the USSR.
I agree. It was OP up the thread who brought up USSR artists funding as an example.
USSR and UBI is an interesting combination though. Being unemployed was illegal. And for common man it was very hard to get laid off. Just show up, even if intoxicated (and continue drinking at work), sleep at work (e.g. drive your tractor to the field and just park there) and you'll still get paid crappy salary as anybody else and roof over your head. I guess it was closest it was to real UBI. Yes, it was not exactly UBI, but it was still universal income where you get food & shelter regardless of your work performance.
Regarding UBI turning countries into USSR, I don't think UBI would turn countries into totalitarian regimes. But it may turn countries into similar inefficient slacking-off culture where vast majority of people do as little as possible in least involving way.
Sure, some of them may claim they're super productive and creative in their hobby adventures. But if thousands of programmers create awesome ToDo apps in their free time... Is that really productive from society perspective? Society needs a lot of bring stuff, not thousands of great ToDo apps...
i accept that the risk of turning into a slacking-off culture is there. the problem is the exploitation and the lack of perspective for a better future. this can be addressed with better education. we need to teach people to motivate them to do something meaningful to the benefit of humanity. see my other comments here for more thoughts on this.
Better education or propaganda to brainwash people to keep producing? :) Funnily enough, USSR loved all sort of propaganda of the worker of the month, stachanovists and all that jazz :) Yet it didn't work. Maybe the real better education would be to teach people to enjoy peaceful idleness and live with less?
Ultimately people don't need that much to live. Once you remove consumerist desire to keep up with the jones, the only motivation is to get roof, food and some supplies to have fun with. Currently passing this threshold requires quite a bit of effort. Then there's relatively little extra effort to get somewhat nicer toys. Yes, some people will work extra hard and make €€€€, but vast majority of people ain't workaholics. If that base threshold was removed with UBI, then it'd be a massively different effort to get somewhat nicer toys. This would change the equation a lot. I've a feeling the jones might be in trouble then.
How so? Universal Basic Income means, you get it no matter what. So if they require you to serve to get money, that's no UBI.
GP is being a realist. Just because it says "universal" in the name doesn't actually constrain the whims of the state.
I remember reading about how the US military is a socialist society. Housing, income, free education, free healthcare for life...
Funny how the biggest part of the US budget is funding that.
Particularly if you live overseas on base. The military provides everything for you, albeit often through vendors such as AAFES. But yeah, free healthcare for sure.
https://www.aafes.com/exchange-stores/
None of it is free, what are you talking about? It is very much earned.
Free means you didn’t do anything to get something.
Ever been shot at before?
> Who in their right mind wants that?
Those living in poverty. Speaking from personal experience.
> UBI just means signing your soul away to the state, who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription.
The state can already do this without UBI.
Not saying UBI is flawless though.
I agree. Much better to die because a free market health insurer denied your operation because it rather kept the money it would cost.
Why if the state provides a basic safety net should that preclude individual ambition?
Should we not move toward a society that can not go hungry?
The false dichotomy is that you need big government to have a society that does not go hungry.
"Universal" basic income.
"Universal" health care.
What the word in quotes means is they're unconditional.
I’m surprised by the down votes. Possibly you could have made your point better, there are pros and cons.
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
> ... to take from you everything you have.”
Nothing to do with UBI; the gov of the country you live in can do that period. Really no clue what it has to do with UBI.
I trust a functioning government over free market human participants. People always overweight their own ability to succeed, when the stats tell a different story.
How are the governments and economies in the happiest countries structured, for example.
(I think it was probably downvoted because it was too far over the line into ideological battle and other things that the site guidelines ask commenters to avoid here.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is still a shit argument.
Most people have nothing in the current system.
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>mandatory health procedures and even military conscription
Some people have these without UBI. In fact theres nothing stopping the state from doing these things right now.
lol the state(aka society's strong arm) will always have an immense say in your life even if you are so oblivious to it. Government exists to redistribute money, might as well distribute it to the poor and do it universally.
This study didn't say, we gave 1200 to people and then dictated their lives like a dictator.
> Government exists to redistribute money
Citation needed. Authoritarians always love to go dismiss anyone who doesn't just take anything they're given.
Citation: All modern society and the last 1000 years.
>Governments don't exist to redistribute money
Citation needed.
>Government exists to redistribute money
Citation needed
It works both ways.
Read a constitution and tell me where it states that the goal is to redisteibut wealth. I've read significant parts of the constitution of my country and it absolutely does not state that.
The goal of the government is not stated as such. It's not "the social contract".
But hey, your phrase sounded confident so you have that going for you.
"The authority to collect taxes and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."
Which doesn't mean it exists to redistribute wealth. See other comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639059
Taxes are a form of wealth redistribution, and all governments require a revenue stream
That a government levies taxes to sustain its operations, such as the monopoly of violence, does not mean that "it exists to redistribute wealth".
The wording was very intentional and very wrong. Specially because it's uses as an argument.
> who then can mandate your lifestyle completely including health procedures and even military conscription. No thanks.
Entirely unlike modern America, where utility providers for food and water are regulated for what's healthy and representative legislature decides when to draft you for Vietnam 2.
You're right. Better to sell your soul away to a corporation that can fire you at will.
Yes. And where you can leave at will. A more honorable existence on every level.
You have most of these limitations imposed on you as market effects anyways. You’re no freer than you would be with UBI.
The state gets more power over you without UBI (assuming a social safety net of any kind already exists) - without UBI it needs a larger apparatus to decide how to distribute funds, and it can pick arbitrary reasons to cut off your funds. Under UBI administration would be far simpler and cutting off your income for political reasons would be far more noticeable, since it's supposed to be universal.
> Who in their right mind wants that?
Anyone that is repulsed by a system that requires an underclass of desperate people for it to work.
> UBI just means signing your soul away to the state
As opposed to sign your soul away to corporations instead?
Military conscription has always been the role of the state.
In the US, health procedures are currently in the hands of oligarchical profit-maximizing middlemen; the first assassination has already happened.
I really don't know what your objection is to improving people's lives.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. I grew up in a country that did exactly this, until collapsed. Strong social nets, free housing, free medicine for all, free education, no unemployment, sounds like heaven, right?
The only problem is that every person is a government-owned livestock unit. Their thoughts, knowledge, career paths, kids, even their private life, everything is controlled by government, that also obligates you to watch after your neighbours and co-workers. You can't even leave the country without government permission. You can expelled if you don't like the government though. You can't work where you want after getting your degree, government will send you where they think they need you to be. School is never ending propaganda. We literally had "political information" every Monday, since grade 1. Also, since grade 1 you're in one of the tiers of the only allowed political party of the country. There's tier for grade 1 to 3, then for 4 to 8, then from 8 to 10. Every 18yo is drafted for 2 years for armed forces (3 for navy). I can go on and on.
I remember it too well and would never trade messy and chaotic capitalist society to that labour camp with "free" rations.
It's frightening that so many people in 1st world want to live in a cage with 3-times-a-day meal.
that is a false dichotomy, just because a bad government that didn't give you any freedom implemented these benefits doesn't mean that any government implementing such benefits will automatically take everyone's freedom away. the freedom was taken away first. it did not understand that benefits are not enough and that freedom is also needed. we are discussing UBI as a means to give people more freedom, and not as a way to turn them into slaves.
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Many alleged benefits of basic income can be explained by flaws in the study design. No I will not quit my 40h if the 1200€ are paid out for three years only.
But i will use the money to hire cleaning ladies or baby sitters -> more spare time than control group.
I don't get it. Where's the flaw?
This ranks among those things that are obvious and yet we “study” them expecting a different outcome.
“If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread.” - 2 Thes 3:10b-12
I see lots of people claiming massive positive economic impacts of UBI, but whenever the results are released its always, saved money and is happier.
Like yeah fairly obvious conclusions.
Closest I have seen to the economic impact was a study done on a charity that makes a pseudo UBI in african villages, but thats skewed in a place that has no other monetary investment mechanism. Its probably true that UBI can be used instead of targeted industrial investment by government.
> Its probably true that UBI can be used instead of targeted industrial investment by government.
In a small village, maybe on the metric of wealth per capita. But there are going to be massive externalities because there is nothing intrinsic there to perpetuate or grow that wealth through industry. That old proverb rings true, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish…”
The report I read, and your statement is very true, but their findings were that instead of buying a meal, when they had capital, they began businesses (or larger capital investments, like livestock) so they could take care of themselves long term.
The issue is that, sort of like you say, theres a lot of low hanging fruit in a poor village that just a bit of money can set someone up. And the comparison was other charity, apparently another charity had sent this village a shipping container full of beach balls. So comparatively money is easily the victor.
We already have UBI.
Social security disability, TSA, Federal and State Workers in education and "general services".
No we do not. None of those are UBI and are not universally distributed.
TSA, and to a large extent the US Military as well, is just a jobs program that avoids triggering the median American's aversion to "socialism".
The others that you mentioned aren't this.
And the point of "U" is "Universal", which isn't at all what you said.
We don't even have single payer healthcare my dawg. The "u" in ubi is for universal.
Those are federal services, that's not the same as UBI. The premise of UBI (in my limited understanding of it) is that, especially in more socialist countries, you can get rid of a lot of programs that support the poor / sick / etc in favor of a system where everyone gets the same amount, and the bureaucratic systems in place that check to make sure people are entitled to these benefits can be dissolved.
For example, I live in the Netherlands which according to Americans is a really socialist country; if you lose your job from getting fired, you are entitled to unemployment benefits. However, only if you prove you are actively looking for a different job, if you don't or can't prove that, you get shorted.
There's the dole (bijstand), but a lot of counties put a lot of conditions on there; some even told people to grab some tools and get to work on maintaining the public spaces as part of keeping their benefits. Which is employment, which should mean they get a contract and wage, worker's rights, etc.
Paying someone who provides no return on investment is simply a bad investment. Of course extra money doesn't hurt the person getting paid. It hurts the government. They are now giving someone value (payng them) in exchange for no immediate value in return. This kind of expenditure at any business or organization would be recognized as one of poor judgement. Value can't be generated out of thin air. People must pay for what they use, either by money or sweat. Lack of recognition of these basic facts isn't good. UBI is not viable.
Ok, so what do you propose to do instead as AI gradually eats the world? A stated goal of most companies in that space is essentially to make human work redundant, so shall we just kill off all the ones who aren't needed anymore?
Not the grandparent, but I've been waiting for somebody to ask!
The gov should guarantee a minimum wage job for everybody. You get out of bed, do something useful, you get a pay check. You might even learn a trade or develop skills.
Don't like your boss, or the work not right for you, there can be plenty of other jobs for you to move into.
What are all these jobs? I'm glad you asked!
We need to plant billions of trees to soak up CO2, then tend the forests. We could use a few massive desalination projects. We can convert the world to green energy. We can care for our elderly better. We could use a lot more teachers. (How does 10 kids per teacher sound!). Of course would could have more homes and nicer cities. (How good would it be for the gov to pay you to build your own house!)
There is a very long list of cool stuff we could do if you don't need rich people to invest in it first!
this! there is so much potential that we could develop if we trained people to work in meaningful jobs and if we actually funded these jobs. everywhere we hear complaints about how there are not enough teachers. never mind getting a teacher per 10 kids. some countries don't have enough teachers to get one per 30 kids. but there is no limit here. same goes for healthcare. nurses and doctors are hopelessly overworked. we could easily do with having 3x as many people work in those areas. even in science and research. we have a replication crisis because research is given the wrong incentives. how about awarding more reputation who replicate and verify existing research and without reputation for anything that can't be replicated.
there is absolutely no reason for anyone to be out of work. there is enough good work to do.
GP: Paying someone who provides no return on investment is simply a bad investment
this thinking is the big mistake. the return of investment in letting people work on meaningful things is massive.
here is the kicker though. the examples we gave so far don't even need UBI. we could just fund education and those jobs.
however there is still a large benefit to UBI. it gives people more flexibility. it allows them to work less hours and spend their time on other things that can't easily be paid like caring for the environment in a more active way. keep your neighborhood clean. care for animals. help neighbors. socialize. spend more time with your children. these are all beneficial for our society. it is absolutely false that there is no return of such an investment.
I've been waiting for somebody to ask
i have been making this argument many times over the years. here on HN and elsewhere. the key is education. UBI is a great idea. but only with better and more education can the world really benefit from it.
Who owns the AI, demanding payment for its use? Who owns the GPUs that the AI runs on? Who sold those people the silicon? Who owns the real estate upon which the GPUs run? All those people will demand payment for services rendered or goods delivered.
My personal favorite: Who fixes the AI when it breaks?
The lawn mower replaced human work, but it needs _just enough_ direction that it's still worth money for humans to run them, auto-run lawn mowers notwithstanding.
AI will make people faster, but humans will only do work for other humans that do their share by giving value back.
I don't believe we will ever live in a world where people won't want people working for them, or doing something for them.
How about get educated/trained in something AI can't eat? Become a HVAC technician, Nurse/Doctor, lawn care maintenance owner, teacher, industrial shop owner, etc. There are plenty of fields that don't require AI to compete. They just require effort on your part to become educated and participate.
I think you are overestimating some of these fields resistance to automation. I'm actively working on automating HVAC and Lawn care. It's gonna take at least 3 years to see AI impact there, maybe its 20...but the road to automation is somewhat clear and progress is happening.
Interesting. How will (physically) AI install a new HVAC system? There must be some form of physical presence to get the job done. And, the current set of installers have a difficult time as it is (running duct work, low/high PSI lines, etc).
Again, how will (physically) AI take over lawn maintenance? Do you expect a fleet of self-driving lawn-mowers to take to the streets? How will they get to your place? Who will be managing them? So many questions.
Personally, I think the AI hype is way overblown. Sure, AI can help give better data for these areas, but I highly doubt AI will take over. I think AI can help smart people get even smarter (better ways to mow, more efficient ways to run HVAC lines, etc), but at the end of the day, you still need physical presence for many/most jobs.
> This kind of expenditure at any business or organization would be recognized as one of poor judgement
The purpose of a business is to generate a return on investment.
Are you suggesting that the purpose of a government is to generate a return on investment?
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I am suggesting that buying something that has no worth is a bad idea no matter what organization you are. It's less a bad investment in the context of government and more a misappropriation of funds.
Government money represents hard earned cash of the people. The ability for the government to borrow -- its credit -- deals with its reputation as an entity that is capable of paying its debts. This reputation reflects on the people governed.
The people's money and its reputation should be respected. Money should be borrowed carefully to protect the people's reputation. Taxes should be spent wisely to protect and defend their purse. Wise expenditure is an important part of good stewardship, good government, and good politics.
The purpose of government is to generate opportunity for the masses so they can become self sustainable.
A better quote for you: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" (JFK).
Thanks for this. Young people think UBI is great since they don't have much invested in the system. Instead they just have propaganda from media/social sites telling them how the world is falling apart, how they don't have a chance to succeed, etc. The answer: UBI! It is the "easy" answer since it literally requires no effort on their part to participate in society. They get up, eat free food, live in a free house, and enjoy the day without any worry.
Sounds great until they realize the human condition eventually kicks in. People will decide not to work - they will just take and not give back. In the end, we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate.
we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate
we need a society where people are MOTIVATED to put forth the effort to participate. only education can provide that motivation. (education is not just school, but also parenting, etc, but school is the place where new ideas are shared with the next generation). UBI can then provide the freedom to act on that motivation.
to be greedy is not the human condition. it is a protection mechanism because everyone else is perceived to be greedy and selfish as well. change that perception and give people the means to not need to be protective and the world will change.
my own life is testimony to that. i am from a country where i know that i will get support if i need it. i am using this perception of safety to wander out into the world with my children and live in places where we can make a meaningful difference. and i do that without getting any financial aid. finances are tough. my savings have run out. life is not easy. but i keep going because it is worth it. the children are getting the education of their lifetime and i am able to take the risk because i know that if all else fails i still can go back home and get support.