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It actually holds back economic growth to have all that money up there. Theoretically, the economy could be growing three times faster, because each dollar in their hands adds 39 cents to GDP, and each dollar at the bottom adds $1.21.
I don't think enough people fully grasp the effects of this. People can suggest that buying yachts is good for the economy, because it creates jobs and yadda yadda, but what we need to focus more on is the hugely depressed money velocity and what that means.
Think of the economy like an engine running at 3500 rpms and going 20mph. Yeah, that's solid performance, but we could also easily shift to a higher gear such that we reduce the rpms to 2500 and yet start going 60mph. That's going farther, faster, with less fuel. Everybody wins. And yet we're not doing that.
Essentially, the rich could choose to buy a spaceship instead of a yacht, if they just stopped accumulating and hoarding so much of everything, and instead put that money back towards the bottom to move things along faster. The more evenly distributed resources are (to a point), the faster we create new businesses, innovate, invent, etc. By concentrating so much money at the top, the entire engine is slowed, and this affects even them.
They're just too busy sailing on yachts to understand they could be enjoying space travel instead.
Here's some further reading about the effects of inequality.
Nixon was primed to begin a form of basic income until a Ayn Rand loving libertarian dredged up a 100 year old flawed study. From the excellent Utopia for Realists
Why Richard Nixon once advocated for basic income — and then turned against it.
I seriously don't have much hope that will happen. After reading Andrew Yang's War on Normal people. I believe that automation and it's cascading effects will devastate the workforce in America, in turn causing massive social upheaval. That is not taking into account problems beyond automation. Ultimately a systemic collapse will likely happen in my opinion at some point in the future.
We are a point in our history during which we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. A "terrifically dangerous" situation, to be sure.
The reason the world is fucked up is because our wretched, inadequate little monkey brains evolved to deal with mud, sticks and running down our lunch. We are in the midst of the process of adapting now to our accidental self-awareness.
Humans are fucked. No, seriously. We had our chance, and we blew it.
We are just apes with delusions of grandeur.
We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. It is the Calvinistic puritan work ethic and rabid anti-socialist dogma dating to Cold War era propaganda which will kill us all.
> Entrepenurs: We know that Entrepenurs are the life blood of Capitalism. Without low entry barriers you cannot have competition, and without competition you cannot have efficiency. Therefore, any system that encourages and makes easier Entrepenurs is a successful one.
Everyone always forgets how conflicted capitalism truly is on the issue of competition. On paper every capitalist touts the virtue of competition, but in practice every businessman abhors competition, views it as a destructive force, and tries to kill it by ANY means necessary, legal and illegal and everything in between (gray areas).
Capitalism is much more about the accumulation and control of capital than it is about competition. Competition requires equal access to capital. And capitalism detests the notion of equal access to capital.
So I think while the capitalist ideology often pays lip service to competition, in practice the actual participating living and breathing capitalists see competition as a dark and evil force that is to be avoided at all costs.
Just think about what Warren Buffett means by "deep moats" in the business sense. Seriously. Deep moat. Look it up.
Take sales. I heard an NPR story about car salesmen. It was called 129 cars. The dealer had to sell 129 cars a month to get a bonus from Chrysler.
One salesman, Manny, uses tactics out of The Art of War to sell cars. He thinks of sales like combat. You lure the customer, surprise him by accepting his first offer, get him off guard, then you attack and win. This is not about supply and demand or efficient pricing. This is about suppressed violence.
The deadlines seem created with a desire to create stress, anxiety, pressure. Why not have a better system that allows customers to customize a car, personalize it themselves? The capitalist system prizes control. The boss creates artificial scarcity to get attention. He gets to emote, you get to watch. Sales is about playing games.
GDP counts those games as production. When you report sales, you include the salesman's wages. Salesmen sell whatever, they don't care. At least the Manny-type salesperson does. I contend most things are over-produced, like sugar, and salesmen sell the overproduction, by inducing other food manufacturers to add sugar. Food scientists are paid to find "bliss points" which are the optimal quantities of sugar, salt, and fat to make you overconsume the overproduction. GDP growth fetishism calls for more overproduction. The more the better, it's rational. We must be rational, because economists tell us.
I included a good amount of numbers in this latest piece here.
Basically, to provide a UBI of $1,000/mo for adults and $300/mo for kids will cost about $3 trillion.
We subtract what we can from current expenses on welfare, subsidies, pensions and disability equal to or less than the UBI amount, and we're left with a funding gap of about a little under $1 trillion for a NIT and a little over $1 trillion for a UBI.
How do we cross that gap? A flat tax or a land value tax would both single-handedly accomplish this. But a combination of other options would as well.
It doesn't end there though. Because a UBI would eliminate so many other costs we don't even see as costs (see article link above), we actually end up spending less money than we already do, even though we're spending more in one particular area, which would be providing the basic income.
So the question really isn't how basic income can be considered affordable.
It's how not having a basic income was ever seen as affordable.
This sub is somewhat split, but a large number of UBIers are pro-capitalism. The socialists among us are extremely_skeptical of basic income under the present capitalist system, for reasons described in those threads.
Capitalism is a system premised on exploitation of the world-wide working class. That exploitation of the world's poorest workers is what would fund your first-world UBI.
This article covers the question extensively. More briefly, inflation is a bit more complicated than just the amount of money being printed - moreover, proposals for the UBI usually don't fund it by printing, but instead some variety of taxes and reforms.
Corporate Socialism is just a similar term for Corporate welfare. Read David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch if you haven't already. I got nothing against corporations by the way. I want to start one!
Seriously, this sub has a hard-on for the most ardent capitalists being proponents of Basic income. These people are literally part of the problem.
Reddit rejoiced when SpaceX had to pay their employees a settlement for exploiting them continuously for months. That settlement was an average of a few thousand dollars per person - probably a fraction of the overtime they actually put in.
I recently listened to The Wealth of Nations and Adam Smith literally states that capitalists have an obligation to keep their labourers alive, but that is all. And that's exactly what people like Musk will do - provide the minimum they have to to keep labourers alive and continue extracting labour surplus until we are replaced by machines, and then bribe the public to not commit revolution.
I don't know how much you follow cryptocurrencies but ethereum is pretty damn amazing. It's pretty much money creation, transfer as well as a way to provide all the services the financial institutions can provide without the need for the institutions themselves.
Hell it could even be used to set up a real direct democracy.
If you're on Steemit, this one's over there too: https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/the-cost-of-universal-basic-income-is-the-net-transfer-amount-not-the-gross-price-tag
The net transfer aspect of UBI is extremely important for everyone to understand, so I'm trying to make this one as visible as I can.
Who will pay?
Well, there's a lot of ways of going about a basic income. So it depends.
Another question is who is already paying and how much?
We already have indirect costs we're apparently fine with, like spending $40,000 on every homeless person to keep them in the streets instead of $12,000 to prevent them from ever being homeless.
As for people saying screw it and living off of their basic incomes, is that really something to fear? Science doesn't show us that's something to fear.
And what about unpaid work? Why is it "work" when you raise someone's else's kid and "doing nothing" when you raise your own?
Why do so many of us worry that other people will do nothing? What does that even mean? What is doing nothing exactly and how long is it even possible to do it? Is reading a book doing nothing? Seems like that's education. Is watching a movie doing nothing? Seems like that movie was made to be watched. It may even inspire the watcher to make their own movie.
Basic income is just basic common cents.
Unless we together provide for our basic needs, we're going to continue paying the even higher costs of not having them met.
It is well worth listening to the speech in its entirety, before jumping to conclusions, I think it was an important speech overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j20a3c371mM&feature=youtu.be&t=1h34m55s
EDIT: since this thread is getting, popular, heres a UBI 101: http://list.ly/ubiadvocates/lists
Hate to break it to you, but that image doesn't represent the facts very well. Basically the data used grouped jobs inconsistently.
This Article explains it well.
I think they just mentioned that's how much we spent on corporate welfare, it then went on to discuss flat tax proposals, cutting military spending, etc.
It does beat around the bush as far as exact numbers go honestly, but politicians in general love to do that to make their ideas sound more attactive. I think when I throw around 40% flat tax and stuff some more conservative readers spit their coffee on their monitors. So I think it's more obfuscation than anything else. It's not much different than Obama going around in 2008 talking about change and using catch phrases like "yes we can" without really going into the details of his proposals and stuff like that.
Quite frankly, I support a similar proposal (UBI with flat tax), but what we'd be looking at in practice is a flat tax of around 30-45%, depending on the exact benefits, other government spending, collection efficiencies, etc.
To give the $800/month benefit, let's say $10k a year, roughly. With 2.6 trillion in other government spending (assuming barebones government + universal healthcare), that would be a 32% flat tax or so under perfect condition sif given to 230 million adults.
"A permanent bailout state" is what Basic income should be. The Fed (which created some $3 trillion on balance sheet, and many more - at least $16 trillion more, according to Bernie Sanders's Fed Audit - off balance sheet) proved it can backstop any amount, with no taxpayer funding needed. The "Austrian school" predictions of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation proved to be hyperbolic paranoia.
The Fed should have bailed out individuals instead of banks. Even Republican darling Kenneth Rogoff says as much:
"Without question the best and most effective approach to the problem would have been to bail out the subprime homeowners directly, forcing banks to take losses but keeping them manageable. For an investment of perhaps a few hundred billion dollars, the US Treasury could have saved itself from a financial crisis whose cumulative cost, counting lost output, already runs into many, many trillions of dollars. Instead of “saving Wall Street,” a subprime bailout would have been targeted, almost by definition, at lower-income households. But unfortunately, this approach too would have been politically impossible prior to the crisis."
The question of political feasibility is crucial. We can fund a Basic income without taxes, but everyone, including the Fed, is afraid to say it. I suggest that we, the People, educate ourselves about how money is created all the time by banks, and how we can use that creation tool that the private sector exploits so well, to benefit us.
Coursera's Economics of Money and Banking MOOC, Parts One and Two, is a great place to start.
I also wrote this article not too long ago that focused on why our current welfare system in America makes so little sense:
"Driving Without a Spare"
It's less about appealing to emotions and more about appealing to rationality and economics. You might find it valuable as well if you haven't yet read it.
Just FYI, it was this segment that inspired me to write this post on Medium about payday loans and basic income:
One argument I've heard and have actually been caught out by is that it gives the state unreasonably high levels of leverage against citizens, and if you're the type to be skeptical of state overreach that is a potentially scary idea.
There is also a great, mature discussion here.
Good eye...I hope it doesn't take that long!
If anybody wants wants to volunteer to proofread my videos before I make them public (I clearly need help), pls join my Patreon. You don't even need to donate (just type $0 / month). Or pm me.
Income taxation is only one way to fully or partially fund a basic income. There are other ways that do indeed make far more sense in a world where half of all jobs are automated.
This article here goes into some of the many options.
We could go the way of Alaska and charge rent for common resources, with this rent paid back to everyone equally. We could use value added taxation to tax consumption and carbon taxes to help reduce global warming while also funding basic income. We could tax transactions (universally or just financially), or we could tax the value of unimproved land. We could tax wealth or stocks. These are just a few options. There are more.
We've got a lot of options. Pick your favorite and push for it.
Maybe his problem is with the term "wage", which implies working to get the wage? Maybe Ng isn't yet familiar enough with the idea of a Basic income to get the terminology right?
I think Ng, whose Machine Learning MOOC was one of the first and one of the best, means by "giving people the skill sets" more free MOOCs. The work comes in making them more customizable to each individual's customized needs, I think.
Then (my own idea, not Ng's as far as I know) hold lots of challenges to stimulate individuals (on a Basic income, or not) to work on great unsolved problems, with disruptive ideas. Take the best ideas and let the private sector do what it does best: incrementally innovate.
Fund the basic income at zero cost, through the Fed. The resulting innovation from the people freed from having to work for a boss, to work on challenges (of their own or others' devising), will increase standards of living faster than ever before.
Why would inflation occur, when knowledge is being advanced faster?
Please read this as a primer, as it answers some of your questions and probably a few more you haven't yet formulated.
Now for some quick answers:
The money can come from a variety of sources, purely, or as a mix. It can come from income tax, consumption tax, transaction tax, land value tax, etc. It doesn't even need to be a tax and can instead be a shared royalty from shared natural resource ownership like the annual Alaskan Dividend.
Here's a recent answer of mine in response to this commonly asked question.
All work that needs to be done can always offer a sufficient wage for it to be done. Where this price is too high compared to automation, automation will be chosen and we will all be better off with yet another job having been automated away, instead of the current situation where the loss of a job due to automation hurts us.
Robots and various machines are doing more and more of the work and will continue to do so.
It's better, safer and cheaper for the ~1% hoarding the fruits of technological progress and automation to share a fraction of the work(products and services) done by robots and machines via dividend/UBI with people, than live in an environment where you have to constantly guard yourself from roaming hordes of displaced by automation hungry people that will kill you for less than $30k.
I'm at $600/mo in basic income right now and I'm already feeling the benefits. When people offer to pay me to write something, it needs to be high enough, whereas previously I'd really have no choice but to accept.
We don't need a lot of money coming in every month that we can fully depend on, in order to feel the benefits of being able to actually count on something no matter what happens.
also, Scott Santens, aka /u/2noame is doing sterling work for the cause. I think supporting his campaign might be the single best donation toward the Basic Income movement (at least at the moment).
Whether or not he pulls it off this time, it will eventually happen. There is no profession that is safe from this inevitability. We are going to have to start questioning the fundamental rules of our current economy and consider alternative solutions to resource distribution besides jobs, such as Basic Income.
I think the effect on patents and copyright is actually a very interesting discussion to have here.
I read something recently about all the works that would have been released into the public domain on Jan 1st this year, had legal monopoly protections not been extended on them:
One of the books on this list really caught my eye.
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
Kind of crazy isn't it? To realize that such an important work very much related to basic income, is locked up behind legal lock and key despite the death of the author at 97 over 8 years ago.
Patents and copyrights were never supposed to last this long. Their entire purpose is merely to provide a head start for the originator of ideas. Even 10 years is more than enough of a head start, but to see things last for 70 years after someone's death?
To me, it seems as if patents and copyrights are being treated like basic incomes. If someone can write a book, and live from the proceeds his whole life, and the proceeds continue to go to his kids and grandkids after his death, this seems like a form of basic income. Because income isn't guaranteed, it's like people feel they need to hold on tight to anything they create for their entire lives and even decades after.
Maybe if income was guaranteed, people wouldn't see the need to hold on so tight? Maybe exclusive revenue for 10 years or less would be sufficient?
I think there's a valid argument for that, and considering how important patent and copyright reform is here in the 21st century, I think this added potential side effect of basic income makes it that much more important.
I think we do need to take a good amount of our welfare system and replace it with cash, but not all of it. It has to be done in a way that makes the most sense. Replacing Medicaid and Medicare with cash does not make sense. Health is different. Replacing SNAP and TANF does make sense, along with others.
The higher it is, the more programs we can replace, but also the more revenue we can raise. However, there are plenty of ways to raise this added revenue that make a lot of sense.
If you look at the numbers, we can eliminate many of our current programs, and implement a basic income of $1,000 per month for citizens over 18 and $300 for those under 18. The revenue we will need to raise is around $1.3 trillion. We could also make it sound cheaper by doing a negative income tax instead, (the programs can be identical), at an additional cost of around $800 billion.
If you want to learn more about the funding methods, I suggest this article.
And if you want to learn more about our current welfare system in the US, I suggest this article.
Here you go:
If you read the entire article, plus the included appendix articles, you will have a much better understanding of this part of the basic income discussion.
Edit: As for what a basic income can/should cover, this goes into it pretty well in arriving at the number of $12,000 per year in the US.
> We propose that the first target Basic Income in the US match the following criteria: > > 1. Be enough for basic necessities: food, water, sanitation, clothing, health care, & shelter in a reasonably inexpensive location in America. > > 2. Provide some capacity to improve one’s lot in life. > > 3. Be large enough to eliminate existing means-based social support programs, such as unemployment. > > 4. Be large enough to enable the elimination of regulatory disincentives to hire, such as minimum wages or minimum benefits. > > 5. Be small enough to provide incentives to work and the economy to flourish. > > 6. Increase over time to ensure automation improves the standard of living for the unemployable. >
> Abstract: > > Many writings in economics have documented the importance of a stock of non-cognitive skills accumulated during childhood in predicting higher wages. This paper however studies the reverse. Using surveys of lottery winners, we analyse the effects of unearned income on the well-known Big Five personality traits. After correcting for potential endogeneity problems associated with the size of lottery prizes, we find that unearned income improves traits that predict pro-social and cooperative behaviours, preferences for social contact, empathy, and gregariousness, as well as reduce individuals’ tendency to experience negative emotional states; all of which are known in the economics literature as incentive-enhancing personality traits (Bowles et al., 2001a). Our results lend supports to the idea that there may be scope for later interventions which could improve the personality traits of adults.
I got my degree in psychology and finding this paper bowled me over. Here is psychological support for basic income, and its potential to foster a psychologically healthier society. I included this finding in "Exhibit D".
This finding is in direct opposition to any argument someone can make that "unearned income" is somehow "bad" and that only "earned income" is "good".
To the contrary, unearned income can change the world.
Ok, 3.45 trillion budget, right?
Well, SSI would be funneled into UBI since it's essentially SSI for all, so that's $800 billion right there. Get rid of most welfare and that's about $400 billion. make some other miscellaneous cuts for $100-200 billion and you're down to about $2.1 trillion.
Use this calculator made by u/jaydurst, we have a $2.1 trillion budget other than UBI, we have 230 million eligible adults. Set the personal income and corporate tax rates to 40%. Perhaps adjust the income to around $11-11.5 trillion vs the $13.4-14 trillion total, to account for nontaxable income in that (it's unclear how much would be taxable, $11.5 trillion is a reasonable estimate though eliminating certain forms of government benefits and nontaxable employer benefits from the equation).
At a flat tax of 40% both on income and corporate profits, a 2.1 trillion budget, and 230 million eligible people, we can afford a basic income of around $14,500 to every adult in America. For reference, that's about $1200 a month, which is the average SSI payment today. People on SSI who make more than this could be grandfathered into their SSI plan, but newer people who are not on it nor are too young to be close to the retirement age will just recieve basic income.
The numbers work, at least in theory. Much more detailed than Bush's social security plan at least.
This idea is similar to the platform in development called OpenBaazar. Think Ebay meets torrents. You may be able to implement your ideas within this platform as crowdfunding events.
If you aren't in the cryptocurrency community, you should get interested, it's all about free trade and getting away from corruptible middle men and bureaucracy.
This sort of thing already works, for example I can use code to pay you for volunteering for a good cause: /u/changetip $5
>Poor people can't afford to cut emissions, the rich can.
I agree in some ways, but a carbon tax would not be regressive if it funds a UBI, and carbon taxes are exempted on food. Carbon consumption and income are very correlated
The brick and mortar jobs are really going fast....
Sears and The Atlantic Casino are each laying off 1600
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sears-canada-cut-more-1-223723881.html
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20140114_Atlantic_Club_casino_shuts_its_doors.html
Have you read this yet? There are a lot of factors involved and it goes into them.
Welcome to the sub!
I call this the "New Zero Argument", and believe it to be entirely unrealistic, nor supported by any evidence other than our own personal beliefs of how markets work.
There are so many factors involved to consider that are not being considered with such a belief, especially competition and existing examples of price behavior like in Alaska.
Please read this if you'd like to go deeper into this concern of prices rising to eat up any basic income.
Someone, please display this article prominently in the FAQ.
EDIT: This one, which your article links to, is also very useful.
Tax rates would go up on nearly everyone. It is still a tax cut for most people if they get a cheque for $12k, but their tax rate goes up 10% points. Its a tax cut if they make less than $120k.
In the US, a $15k UBI is affordable on top of existing budget with 30% flat personal and corporate income tax. http://jsfiddle.net/3bYTJ/11/
Everyone alive right now paid into it.
Everyone alive now will (as a worst case scenario) still receive 75% of the promised amount.
And this problem would be mitigated by a number of plans, one of the most popular ideas being removing the earned income tax and disallowing high earners from collecting.
The setup isn't a ponzi scheme. It's a forced savings program that started with a deficit to keep people from being ruined in their old age.
It really feels like you're just looking for ways to represent the data to suit your purposes, rather than looking at the data and making observations.
> Current retirees are getting paid for by current workers, it's a ponzi scheme more than anything.
The fund has money that is sitting in bonds right now. It's not a purely in-out system yet. It may make it there 30+ years from now though, unless we make a change.
> There is no return on any investment because the money has never been invested.
Oh, and the money does earn market rate interest.
In other news, "unearned income" can have positive effects on the same Big Five personality traits:
> Using surveys of lottery winners, we analyse the effects of unearned income on the well-known Big Five personality traits. After correcting for potential endogeneity problems associated with the size of lottery prizes, we find that unearned income improves traits that predict pro-social and cooperative behaviours, preferences for social contact, empathy, and gregariousness, as well as reduce individuals’ tendency to experience negative emotional states; all of which are known in the economics literature as incentive-enhancing personality traits.
> Our results suggest that economists may need to revise their standard conceptual apparatus and come to accept that there may be scope for later intervention to improve the personality traits of adults after all.
You can read the full paper here.
Yes, there will be net-payers, just as there already are, but the system is oriented in such a way that they are earning more and paying less than they used to when the system had better outcomes like a strong middle class for example.
It is my belief that a basic income compensates for a flawed system.
As long as you don't see the system as flawed, you may think it's wrong to tax people more so as to create the condition where people can choose to work instead of being forced to work.
We also don't need to focus on income taxes. Are people in Alaska being forced to pay so that people can work less? Are oil companies being unfairly treated by being charged rent to drill into oil-filled land?
If we start charging companies rent everywhere for common resources like land, air, water, and they willingly pay those fees as part of doing business, as is done in Alaska, and we distribute those revenues to everyone, who exactly is being forced to pay?
If I sell you something which you freely buy, and I then give a portion of my profit to everyone, how have you been forced to pay for everyone?
There are so many ways of going about a basic income. And if we like the idea of voluntary labor, it's kind of important.
A UBI should be protected by law and immune to garnishment. A loan lender would then see someone with a total income of $20,000 thanks to a UBI of $12,000 as having an effective income of $8,000. Since $12,000 is untouchable, it in their eyes should not exist.
What someone needs right now to get a loan, should raise by the same amount of UBI. It would be stupid for lenders to lend to those with money they can't touch if they don't pay the loans back.
I also wrote this piece about basic income and payday loans that has some information about the effects on loans and debt we've seen in basic income experiments that may be of interest:
I wrote this article about the idea of basic income and rising prices. It should help you in understanding many of the factors involved.
You do seem to already have a handle on how there will be a market correction, which is great, but don't forget to consider corrections in the opposite direction.
Example: A job in the labor market that people love, will likely see an increase in the size of the applicants applying for it. What effect do you think this will have on salary negotiation?
One possible answer to the morality question is that data suggests that first world countries with more equal distributions of wealth also tend to give more money to help those in need in other countries. Source: The Spirit Level.
You mean all the big numbers or the inflation concern?
If numbers:
First of all, it wouldn't cost that much. The plan I prefer for the US of $12,000 for adults and $4,000 for kids runs a total of $2.9 trillion.
Next, we take a percentage of what we are currently spending on welfare and pensions and shift that over to our basic income.
Now the total bill is about $1.3 trillion.
Does that number look like an impossible number to achieve?
Note: This article goes into our funding options.
If inflation concern: Click
This line right here to me screams basic income.
> "I think he's not a person who was meant to work from nine to five," says his mother. "Now he probably works 18 hours a day."
As someone who almost has a basic income myself at this point, I too find myself doing what I love, and as a result working more than I've ever worked in my life.
This is what I see happening with basic income, not a bunch of people doing nothing, but a bunch of people doing more than they ever have in their lives.
Pinging /u/2noame, who recently made an overview post on his Patreon page (tried to find it but was unable to in a few minutes) where he details all the different ways interest in basic income has been growing in the past few months, in ways that are not always readily visible.
Thankfully, there are more people that respect and appreciate evidence than do not. We need to reach them with this above and this ASAP: http://list.ly/list/1RdG-ubi-research-links-universal-basic-income-evidence
People generally overestimate the 'cognitive resources' problem. Only 5% of the population is under an iq of 70, less than 0.5% is under an iq of 60%. So 95% of the population can potentially become literate and learn some calculus, etc. The vast majority of predatory situations are a result of a-symmetric power and information. And they tend to create/exploit psychological challenges, mostly resulting from trauma (physical and psychological). This is a big part of why UBI is so much better than jg, one of the most basic determinate factors of whether some thing is fun and improves your psychological welfare or causes 'bad stress' and harm. Is the legitimate opportunity to choose not to participate. JG, aka work or destitution, does not encourage esoteric understandings. The opportunity to play and compete, does. [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hunter-Gatherers_and_Play]
Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian societies. It wasn't until we started embracing hierarchical religions, that we started concentrating wealth, and justifying prolonged poverty.[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hunter-Gatherers_and_Play]
I listened to a 'better courses', sieries of lectures on the economics of early human history since the 1400's, by Professor Donald J. Harreld Ph.D. He points out that the extremeness of poverty has been going up since we started farming. In many ways poverty has never been as bad as it is now. Ie, your individual opportunity to harvest your needs from nature, and your opportunity to compete with peers continues to become more consolidated to those with preexisting wealth.
The Roosevelt Institute has suggested that UBI paid for by debt, would effectively pay for itself, by growing the economy at least as fast as it would grow the debt, over the long term. This is relatively the same logic they used to pass paul ryan's tax cut.
>if automation truly displaces most workers how do we keep natural incentives for people to pursue work and knowledge?
People will 'naturally' pursue both work and knowledge, that is how we play. Here is an interesting article on the topic, [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hunter-Gatherers_and_Play]
It's not philosophy. Don't insult philosophy like that. Philosophy can actually demonstrate that is has done tremendous good for humanity. For examples: the existence of democracy, the recognition of blacks as human beings, female suffrage and, most recently, respect for gays. For a scholarly treatise on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's The Better Angels Of Our Nature.
Economics is more like alchemy or astrology. A lot of superstitious nonsense mixed up with bumbling attempts at understanding a complicated phenomenon. This is how science began, and there's nothing wrong with it so long as one does not confuse the two. The problem is that it still hasn't excised the political ideologues from its membership, and is tragically deluded about its own rigor and conclusions. Rather than being concerned with what works for the betterment of humanity, it's preoccupied by trying to "prove" a certain political viewpoint. Because we, as a species, still haven't evolved beyond the existence of petty personal corruption, abuse of prestige and power.
Asimov was right. A mature science of "economics" would resemble Hari Seldon more than ranting ideological manifestos and mere measurement of the past.
For now, we have paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions which haven't kept up with our godlike technology.
For the "field" of "economics" to mature, we first need a radical improvement in the philosophy of the masses, rather than advanced philosophy being virtually the sole purview of a privileged and elite, educated few. What is holding us, as a species, back from making progress on that front is not difficult to guess. It's the usual suspects.
That sort of pithy, petty pseudo-explanation might feel good as a sound bite, but what's happening is more nuanced.
We're miserable, wretched little monkeys who have found ourselves with novel technology surpassing the reputed powers of ancient gods. People are selfish and they hoard resources and power when they can because that's what we evolved to do. That we no longer need to worry about how well the hunt will go tomorrow is not something that our primitive brains are physically capable of intuiting.
Today's great moral problems are, ultimately, physiological. We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. Technology has made leaps of mythical proportions in the last two hundred years while our brains and our philosophy have simply not been able to keep up, let alone disseminate to the masses.
They don't have to take it as far as massacre to want it to happen - see : "The Shock Doctrine" ; disruption favours those with the resources to exploit it, they get to grab a lot more power than they had before.
We've already seen this happening both recently and in the past.
- The wealthiest have doubled their wealth since the 2008 banking crash
- Halliburton et al made pots of money from the conflict in Iraq
- Various firms made pots of money from the flooding in New Orleans
- IBM made pots of money from the Nazi's in WWII
Disruption to society means you can impose a new order and have it accepted as necessary.
Some of the plutocracy regard this as dangerous ; see the Citibank "Plutonomy" memos where they lament that one of the main risks of democracy is that eventually the poor people are going to vote themselves a larger slice of the pie - the rise of inequality can only aggravate this, and this is probably why chaps like Nick Hanauer are so keen on measures like raising minimum wages, because these measures operate within the current, known, economic framework.
But it's not outside the bounds of possibility that some players see the storm coming and are unconcerned about doing anything about it because they can both weather it, and profit from it. And slightly less credible, but still possible, that some are working to accelerate it.
I disagree that, once you have something approaching "enough stuff" that saving is for more future consumption. Most wealthy people aren't going out and buying a Lamborghini, just because they made an extra $50k for the past four years. As per The Millionaire Next Door, they are running their F-150 or Civic into the ground. I would say that once you have as much stuff as you think you need, you will spend more on experiences, but that only means just so many jobs, too. Eventually, there is just only so much a population of any size can consume, and that means that there will always be a limit to the need for human labor.
The word "capitalism" is Rorschach test. For some people it means a rigged system, powerful corporations, exploiting labor, monopolies, or the Gilded Age. Others see the chaotic complexity of markets, innovation, problem solving, The Wealth of Nations, or Henry Ford and his assembly line.
Most can agree that oftentimes the system is falls short in one place or another. I agree with your observation. There is both freedom and servitude. It is necessary that we increase the former.
Japan has 350 people per sq km which isn't particularly overpopulated but is at the high end for a big country. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?year_high_desc=true
An issue for japan is that people are congregating more in big cities and leaving the countryside. 4 million have moved to urban areas in the last 8 eight years, on aggregate. The overall population of japan has declined by a million in the same time frame. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/
I suppose if people are going to live more and more in cities then you're going to get population pressures in those places which is probably reflected in the shortage of construction workers.
It's an interesting country especially for future gazing but their social and immigration policies make them an outlier.
Currently, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
I think it's pretty obvious that what we desperately need, as a species, if for people to shut up, sit down and improve themselves. More people engaging with philosophy and art would help tremendously. The only way to accomplish that is to ensure that people aren't threatened with destitution just for doing it.
I was highly skeptical upon first learning of the idea. You should check this out- studies showed that inflation didn't increase: http://list.ly/list/1RdG-ubi-research-links-universal-basic-income-evidence
There's no evidence of increased substance abuse: http://list.ly/i/2103473 there may always be a small percentage of people who 'can't take care of themselves' but that statement ignores that those individuals are likely to require psychological assistance, of which UBI can provide access to, studies have also shown that UBI increases social cohesion, meaning others are more likely to be 'in a position' to help. I'm a UBI advocate but I don't agree in funding UBI by entirely removing social-assistance programs, better to refine existing programs & combine funding sources
Anecdotal evidence from a de-facto company town fails to scale to a diverse industrialized economy of 36 million citizens. A robust network of free market actors in nationwide competition with one another precludes the possibility of nationwide collusion.
Hence, inflationary concerns are unfounded.
I would highly recommend her book on UBI. She did not invent the idea (obviously) but played a huge role in popularizing it, and her book helped inspired people like Yang and others to push for it as policy.
We need to tax rent-seeking activities. Effectively this taxes wealth. Also, we need to reduce the amount of money that banks are allowed to create and make a certain amount of debt-free money which is directly distributed via UBI. UBI only really works alongside monetary reform. I strongly recommend https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grip-Death-Slavery-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408 (it's great, but not without flaws), you should read some standard economics stuff like The Wealth of Nations too, but it's a useful viewpoint to understand)
“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.” ― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I agree we seriously need to change this as well, and included STV along with a few other ideas besides basic income we should look at as a means of improving our systems, like patent and copyright reforms.
That's where you calmly reply, no taxes are necessary. You point to this chart of all the money in the world, and note the tiny size of the Fed's balance sheet relative to the derivative market. You note that world capital is growing at a rate of $30 trillion a year, according to the Bain report, so if the Fed started increasing its balance sheet by $6 trillion a year to fund a basic income, it would still be shrinking relative to the world capital total. You write simulations that demonstrate how a basic income funded with created money works.
I think trying to dumb down the discussion to appeal to the least common denominator is a misguided tactic doomed to failure. Instead, raise the knowledge of the lowest common denominator.
I suggest we educate ourselves about the current money system. I have tried to educate myself through MOOCs such as Perry Mehrling's Economics of Money and Banking. Then use the knowledge to attack popular conceptions that the money supply is fixed, that government can only fund itself with taxes, that inflation automatically results from any increase in the money supply.
This article here goes into a lot of the factors involved in a question like this. If you'd like a better understanding of basic income and rising prices, please give it a read.
Also, you might be more interested specifically in the Supply and Demand Variables appendix.
This piece answers these kinds of questions if you'd like to read it. And if you click on each of the four sub-articles, you can get even more in-depth.
I didn't do this one. This was done by Kristin Eberhard.
But yeah, I agree it's about time we start thinking of defense concerns other than being blown up or shot at. Plenty of people die for plenty of other reasons, and if governments are created together by us to protect us all, we should make sure to protect ourselves from everyday harms.
Economic security only makes sense, and so does having an economic voice as a First Amendment issue.
The downsides are relative.
Because of basic income having the effects of increased self-employment, paying off debts, savings, decreased needs for loans, etc., it's moneylenders and shitty employers that have the most to lose.
> “The only group to complain about the [basic income] pilots were moneylenders.”
So I think that's a good example of one group seeing a downside that another group sees as an upside.
Are there other examples like this?
Well, here are some more relative-to-some downsides based on known effects:
Effect: People visit hospitals less because of increased health | Downside: Decreased profits for health insurance companies
Effect: Crime goes down | Downside: Decreased need for policing, so police forces are reduced
Effect: Government assistance programs are consolidated | Downside: Government employees lose their now unnecessary jobs
Effect: Reduction in hours worked by single parents | Downside: Kids spend more time with their actual moms and dads instead of those paid to care for them
Effect: Increased social cohesion | Downside: Decreased power of those who benefit from turning us against each other
This is an interesting topic to consider, and I'm sure there are many more downsides.
Thanks for the discussion idea!
Maybe not yet, but give it a couple decades. It'll be awhile before this kind of thing is widespread, but automation is already removing jobs, not highly specialized jobs or jobs requiring high levels of education, but the amount of minimum wage low level jobs are indeed shrinking due to automation. As I already talked about, self-checkout lanes at the grocery store take about 1 guy to monitor four to six different lanes that used to have at least one cashier each and a couple baggers between them. McDonald's has already started replacing cashiers with automated kiosks and it's only a matter of time before fast food is easily just 3D printed instead of prepared by an actual employee. You are right that we are a long way off from self-driving taxis and self-programed computers, but that doesn't mean that the job market as a whole won't be shrinking due to automation in the near future.
This particular argument also isn't super important to the main part of my comment. It was a tidbit thrown in at the end as part of the conclusion.
Congrats on your crowdfunded basic income! I'm working on one of those myself. Which platform did you use for yours, how much did you crowdfund, and how long did it take your campaign to reach your goal?
Also, what's one of the things you most notice about having a personal basic income?
Also, the SEC is in the process of allowing companies to crowd source their IPOs.
> IMHO many Americans I know don't take vacations not because their job won't allow them time to, it's because they can't afford it.
I believe many Americans don't use their <em>paid</em> leave. So it's not just an issue of not being able to forgo the pay that keeps everyone working. I mean, obviously that's an issue, too, but it's not the only one.
> Unfortunately, many of the ideas we proposed in the preliminary report will never materialize.
What exactly does this pessimistic concluding line mean?
What specific ideas were proposed and why will the actual experiment fail to implement them? For those among us unfamiliar with the preliminary report, it'd be fabulous to get a slightly less ambiguous tl;dr.
Are the authors attempting to shift preliminary blame for any statistical flaws and failings of the actual experiment onto unreasonable deadlines and hence poor management? That seems fairly... premature.
Why not get something so critical to the socioeconomic survival of future generations at least halfway right the first time? If the authors already have a reasonable expectation of unfavourable outcomes before their final report has even been authored, why even continue blindly steamrolling ahead into the ominous taxpayer-funded dark?
This has all the hallmarks of a recipe-laden disaster. Leave it to the Finnish to get everything wrong except melodic death metal.
1. I think 1,000/mo is more affordable and arguably just as effective.
2. If basic income works so well that it helps more people produce capital (i.e., helps more get through college and take entrepreneurial risk, etc.) then we will not be so worried that our taxes are going to it.
3. Often the people who work best are the ones who do it for the love of it, not because they HAVE to. A generation that never HAD to work to survive would probably have the best idea on why they would want to work to better their lives and the lives of others.
This guy has written a lot of helpful stuff related to your concerns if you wanna browse: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens?ty=a
After reading through the article, I noticed that nobody else has posted this yet: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens?ty=h
I don't normally like the patreon setup, but in this case I think that giving someone the means to pursue the cause of basic income is worth it.
That's because plans vary.
I think the most reasonable approach would be replacing our convoluted system with a flat tax. 35-40% should cover it, depending on other spending and the UBI amount. It's hard to put things in hard numbers because of all the variables that go into calculations, so you'll never get more than a rough estimate.
Id recommend fooling around with this calculator by u/jaydurst to get an idea of how it works.
Basically, eligible population is how many people recieve UBI, there are sliders for income, corporate, and consumption taxes, and you can put a number for non UBI spending.
You can change the variables based on research at will. But generally, I come up with generally taxing income and corporations around 35-40% to fund a $12-15k UBI to a 230 million eligible population, and funding a $2-2.6 trillion government. Again, variables depends a lot. You might wanna shrink the income base to $11-12 trillion or so if you research the numbers, you will have different budgets depending on what programs are eliminated and what remain, what new programs are created, etc. I figure with our current healthcare spending you would have a $2-2.1 trillion budget, but with universal healthcare it could be closer to 2.6 trillion.
A 35-40% flat tax sounds massive, but it's really not in practice...keep in mind everyone gets UBI. So they pay the tax, and then get a refund via UBI. People who are near the bottom come out ahead, people near the top pay in more. People in the middle probably would remain about the same. Only people who would see a significant tax increase is the top quintile.
Not if you get rid of all the loopholes and enforce FATCA.
VAT just gives people money only to erode its value.
If we were to tax 25% of consumption, it would only give us $11,000 and subsequently erode that value to around $8700.
If we taxed INCOME at 25%, we would get $14,500, and it would actually be worth $14,500. To get the same nominal number with VAT, you'd need 32%...and this would be worth only $10k. Heck, looking at the trends, you literally CANT get $15k real value from UBI with a VAT because the more you tax, the more you devalue the money you give. I plugged in stuff like 50, 60, 70%, and as the nominal values raised, the real values stayed around $9-11k.
Did you read this article already?
Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?
> i. ill sit around and eat garbage and play video games. im not contributing anything to society.
Studies have shown that people with a basic income generally don't waste it, they use it to better themselves and their community: http://list.ly/list/1RdG-ubi-research-links-universal-basic-income-evidence
> Now mental / emotional tasks will certainly take a lot longer for AI to skill up on.
I understand relative inequality is a difficult concept to wrap one's head around. It doesn't sound like there should be effects, because even though you have less than those around you, you have more than those far away. But it does appear to matter, and the costs to society are real.
> There is a very robust correlation between socioeconomic status and health. This correlation suggests that it is not only the poor who tend to be sick when everyone else is healthy, but that there is a continual gradient, from the top to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, relating status to health. This phenomenon is often called the "SES Gradient". Lower socioeconomic status has been linked to chronic stress, heart disease, ulcers, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, certain types of cancer, and premature aging.
...
> Lastly, it has been found that amongst the wealthiest quarter of countries on earth (a set stretching from Luxembourg to Slovakia) there is no relation between a country's wealth and general population health - suggesting that past a certain level, absolute levels of wealth have little impact on population health, but relative levels within a country do. The concept of psychosocial stress attempts to explain how psychosocial phenomena such as status and social stratification can lead to the many diseases associated with the SES Gradient. Higher levels of economic inequality tend to intensify social hierarchies and generally degrade the quality of social relations - leading to greater levels of stress and stress-related diseases. Richard Wilkinson found this to be true not only for the poorest members of society, but also for the wealthiest. Economic inequality is bad for everyone's health.
If you want to watch a debate about this, so you can see the evidence from both sides, I suggest watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqiKULsBzHU
You can thank your (Republican) state legislators for not expanding medicaid.
If they did expand medicaid, you basically would have health insurance for almost nothing.
https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/medicaid-expansion-and-you/
http://daviddegraw.org/the-economics-of-revolution-interviews-roundup-1-peak-inequality-basic-income-the-emerging-revolution/ Contains part 1 and part 2 (part 2 contains Degraw's direct views on Guaranteed Income.
I thought I'd placed this url when I posted. Apologies that it wasn't there. Scroll down the page to locate the interview on the above page. This one may be more direct. http://www.frequency.com/video/david-degraw-on-peak-inequality-basic/191253387?cid=5-130491
This is the sort of move that has potential to ignite exponential growth in automation capabilities. Millions of smart developers given access an advanced toolkit on which to learn from, extend and take the project in directions Google has yet to. Interesting times ahead I think.
The project site is here <strong>Tensorflow</strong>
>Jealousy
Hello. I will be your grammar nazi for the day. The word you are looking for is not jealousy. It is envy. Jealousy has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
http://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/envy-jealousy/
If that's too much reading, here's the 16 second version
Also, I'm not sure that lying people to trick them into supporting something is a good idea. That could very easily backfire, once the people you've tricked realize what you've done. For example, they might associated UBI with lying, manipulative people. Not helpful. Or, if they conclude it was "only a psych test, and not real," then the next time they see UBI come up for real, they're going to remember that it "wasn't real."
I don't think either of those reactions are likely to help us.
There was a slashdot article a while back about a strategy where players recognize team members through a series of interactions; then one player always defects while the team member it is playing against always cooperates:
> Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect.
This strategy won, and bears an eerie resemblance to workplace strategies ...
>Taking away copyright before any basic income
Oh, as I think basic income is the more pressing issue I'd have no problem at all to first get that done and afterwards discuss the abolishment of intellectual monopolies.
>would only serve to bankrupt pretty much every artist the new laws affect.
Don't think that this would necessary be the case. It would necessitate some huge business adjustments for sure. But there are ways to make profits from music which are not dependent on copyrights. You could make money using crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Patreon or doing live performances for instance.
But as I said I am totally fine with getting basic income first :)
I'm actively crowdfunding my own basic income through Patreon, and am about 20% of the way there. I'm also encouraging others who create content to do the same.
I don't know if the assumption that everything low-paying will be automated is a logical one to draw. There are already websites like MTurk that pay small amounts of money for menial work that can't be automated, like opinion surveys and transcribing. Of course there won't be enough paying tasks like this to fill the job void that automation will leave behind, but it's all just way too speculative at this point.
> I challenge you to go into your "local area" and get the rare metals you need for any kind of modern electronics.
Recycle. The metals are there in things ppl throw away.
> Specialization has been the driving force since early agriculture that has allowed us to produce surplus.
Knowledge produces surplus. If we know how to automate, we no longer need to specialize.
Example: A team writes a software application; one guy does the db, another the interface, another the credit-card processing, etc. Once it's written, a user doesn't have to know any of those specializations anymore. Since the program can be copied for free, essentially, the specialists are no longer needed.
Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" made the argument for specialization using a pin factory. But we've automated pin-making today. We can 3D-print pins so we no longer need a factory. Smith's specialization argument is quaint and obsolete because of the advance of knowledge.
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
In addition to his relative 'balance' (with regards to the topics addressed in Wealth of Nations) he counted his prior book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, as more important.
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At the risk of a gross over-simplification Adam Smith predicated his model (addressed in The Wealth of Nations) on models of moral behavior of individuals and society. Going as far as to warn that should the moral standards of individuals fail the state will have to step in; that indeed the greater failure they were the more the state would have to act.
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TL;DR: People don't understand Adam Smith. But Hayek and Schumpeter make (arguably) far better modern cases for the importance of a 'hands-off' government.
In addition to his relative 'balance' (with regards to the topics addressed in Wealth of Nations) he counted his prior book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, as more important.
--
At the risk of a gross over-simplification Adam Smith predicated his model (addressed in The Wealth of Nations) on models of moral behavior of individuals and society. Going as far as to warn that should the moral standards of individuals fail the state will have to step in; that indeed the greater failure they were the more the state would have to act.
--
TL;DR: People don't understand Adam Smith. But Hayek and Schumpeter make (arguably) far better modern cases for the importance of a 'hands-off' government.