Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the positive externalities to society are real.
Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.
Having these people on UBI would actually allow productivity to rise.
However, I'm really concerned about UBI because:
1) One way to get more money on UBI is to convince others to give you their money. Many people on UBI will stop producing positive or neutral work and start finding ways to trick their fellow citizens into giving them their money. We will still need some sort of welfare to provide food to people who are tricked into giving away all their money for worthless services or items.
2) Some people have terrible planning skills and just want to be happy now. They'll spend all of their UBI on worthless items and go hungry until the start of the next month. Worse, they'll spend their children's UBI allocation on worthless items as well (or trick their children into doing it if it turns out parents don't get direct access to their children's allocation). We will still need welfare to feed the children of these people.
3) Some people will decide that their calling in life is now to cause problems for others. The food check comes once a month, so now their full time job is dressing up as a clown and terrorizing random people. Don't have to get up for work? Be really loud until 4am. The people who actually do have to get up for work will naturally get the option to live in a gated community because we need the few that actually do produce more than ever. This very well may cause society to schism into people who work and people who don't.
4) The potential long term effects are pretty scary. If you never have to work will you worry about education, socialization, or how to function in a society? How many people will decide to never learn any skills whatsoever? Sure, we could build up a lot of automation to take care of these people, but the result is going to be a massive schism where some people only know how to take their UBI money card to the food silo. And their children are probably going to be in the same bucket.
Ultimately, I think we as a society have a responsibility to use our plenty to help those who are going without. However, I'm not convinced that UBI is the right way to make this happen.
That's sad only if we have the scarcity induced morality of associating "getting to have a living" with "earning it by working".
And some of how we got Perl. I had read some time ago that Larry Wall said that Tim O'Reilly was his patron, as in the medieval sense of the term (think Florence etc.), when the nobility or rich people used to patronize (i.e. financially sponsor and recognize) artists, craftsmen, scientists, etc.
And Tim did sponsor Larry (and others who worked on Perl, I guess), via publishing Perl books and organizing conferences, etc.
The actual best argument against UBI is that if you used the total of US government Social Security, Other, and Nondefense spending (At least portions of them seem to be UBI-replacable) on it, divided by the population of the United States (326,000,000), you end up with about $7,000 per person, per year. If you take the entire budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...) of $4,000,000,000, you end up with $12,000 per each, per annum.
$1000/month?
I also imagine that if vast amount of people suddenly had more time on their hands there would be lot less need for services now optimized to keep them employed. Day care, schools and such would perhaps change into something more participatory.
I doubt this. Everyone has dreams or long-term things they enjoy working on. And UBI wouldn't be enough for most people, so they'd at least pursue some form of cash-generating work.
Nah, that's called rolling in it. Not UBI.
In fact, their initial foray into leisure generally leads into negativity and moral ineptitude.
Given with how normalized 1) consistent drug usage (ie alcohol) and 2) prioritizing pleasures like watching TV or playing video games for the majority of one’s free time have become in western society, I can’t see UBI being of any productive benefit to society. A major problem is who is going to pay for it? The productive, taxing paying folk, who will be receiving UBI as a paltry percentage of their existing, work-based income? It doesn’t seem fair to penalize the most productive, those who choose to work, in order to subsidize those who don’t wish to contribute to the game we called society.
One of the best arguments for universal health care falls into this same category: tying health care to employment greatly increases the risks of being self-employed. I know more than one person who's stayed with a job they don't like -- even a job that doesn't pay particularly well -- because of this concern. The concept of a UBI expands this freedom past just health care. The point isn't to pay someone a handsome wage so they can sit around and do nothing; the point is to cover an absolute bare minimum so choices that might not otherwise be available become open.
The F/OSS developer support case seems like a perfect candidate for a microtransaction-funded model. The kind of thing cryptocurrency enables, where one can passively receive as little as fractions of cents from a pool of millions of people without any transaction costs.
We just need to integrate the solutions better.
F/OSS developers work hard and provide value to many people. If there were a way for me to automate a tiny monthly donation to the projects I most use in Debian, without involving credit cards or routing numbers or other personally identifying information, where 100% of the contribution reached the intended people, I'd already be doing it. The kernel, Xorg, vim, firefox, screen/tmux, systemd, all these things would be on my list, and I doubt I'm alone here.
The distributions should be working on this problem. Forget 'popcon', give me an integrated solution to distribute cryptocurrency from a wallet I occasionally top up somehow to the developers and package maintainers I implicitly love.
That said, UBI and working aren't mutually exclusive. It seems entirely reasonable to assume there will still be people working lower-end jobs to augment their UBI. If there aren't enough garbage workers, it seems only natural to also assume the pay for garbage workers would go up to entice more people to take the job.
I've always worked CS and CS-related jobs (but have volunteered at non-CS jobs), but I'd be very likely to take up some kind of monotonous-but-fulfilling service job like garbage collecting. Probably not full time, but I'd love to have the time to help out others more.
As a side note, there's probably also a lot of work to be done in transitioning these kinds of assumedly-low-interest jobs into a gig-based paradigm. I think more people would take up "shifts" in something new than committing to it as a career. Obviously there's a lot of logistical problems (training, accountability, insurance, etc) that need addressed, but that's part of the fun of figuring it all out. :)
I find it weird that on HN of all places, so many posters think that all other people would enjoy being poor.
Good luck Drew!
Plus, it's a cheap way to virtue signal, and goodwill is always good for business!
Are those people available to work extra hours for pay though?
I help maintain some open source software but if someone offered me money to work on it more then sorry but I don't have magic extra hours in the day to do that - I've got a full-time job and hobbies of my own.
I think it's better the companies step forward and put the hours in as well as the money.
Of course, with enough donations going on, it would be possible to quit your fulltime job like this fellow has done, freeing up even more of his time.
Anyone know of a nonprofit that pays for health insurance for ppl working on OSS?
Sweden, UK, Norway... the list goes on.
If you make $60,000 here in the USA, you can expect to pay about 22% in taxes (https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax-brackets.aspx) so ~$12,600.
You move to Sweden and make that same $60K USD equivalent. Their tax rate is 61.85 percent (https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-rate) so ~$37,110.
I bet you can stay here and buy some pretty great healthcare (plus a lot of other stuff) with that $24,510 difference.
There's no such thing as a free lunch (or free healthcare). Not only are your taxes covering your "free" healthcare, but they're also covering "free" healthcare for several people who aren't working while you are.
Mozilla is a non-profit, while I worked there I worked exclusively on free software. And the health insurance fantastic.
Much of what you work on a GitLab, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redhat, etc. is also open source, depending on what team you join.
Thank you!
>Will the revenue info be public?
Yes, I intend to publish quarterly reports, and I'm open with the financials whenever anyone asks. I generated this report just now for you: https://sr.ht/QOml.txt. This is combined with my donation income, which is already public: https://drewdevault.com/donate/
>Hopefully sustainability is not far off
I hope so too! The way I plan with these numbers is to assume yearly payments are added to the reserves and starts burning down immediately, then I do worst-case projections based on existing monthly donations with a churn factor built-in, then other projections assuming various degrees of growth based on historical numbers. The most pessimistic projections give me ~10 months and the more optimistic ones show sustainablity coming soonish.
>Are the current subscriptions close to replacing what you were making at your fulltime job?
No, but I hope it will be soon!
>I look forward to the day when you can hire other prominent contributors such as emersion.
Me too :)
Cheers!
Just be careful if this is your life savings.
Best of luck Drew, and thank you.
Good luck with everything. And thanks for checking out my project.
Odds are good for TrueCraft, though!
Looking forward to sr.ht being a success :)
My TV told me a "living wage" is at least $15 (but probably higher in liberal controlled areas like NYC / most CA cities / etc due to high cost of living & taxation), but we'll start with $15 to make it easy.
$15/hr at 40hr/week = $31,200 per year.
$31,200 * 328,300,000 population of USA = $10,242,960,000,000
Written out (for emphasis) that's TEN TRILLION TWO HUNDERD FOURTY THREE MILLION DOLLARS. That's just the handouts, not counting in any overhead / administrative costs to give out the handouts. It'll likely be more than that if you adjust it higher than $15 for people living in NYC, etc.
Meanwhile, the entire GDP of the USA is less than 20 Trillion. That's the current GDP where people are incentivized to work, so it would likely go down (perhaps drastically) when people are paid to do nothing under UBI.
Let me know how that adds up.
Keep in mind that when you are counting per person that means you are allocating that much for people not in the workforce like children too. A 4 person household is getting $50,000/year with the above number.
Expecting people who are just living on a UBI to move somewhere with a low cost of living also seems reasonable to me, I suspect you could substantially slash even the $12,000/person/year number and still have it be sufficient.
I also think that a partial UBI (e.g. $3000/year) would likely be nearly as beneficial as a full one, but it does increase overhead costs because then you can't get rid of the rest of the social services.
(Other people have addressed the fact that a comparison to GDP isn't valid because of taxes).
> not counting in any overhead / administrative costs to give out the handouts.
These costs are negative, in the sense that it allows us to remove the other low income services with much greater overhead.
Some you can get rid of, others you shouldn't. Even if you have UBI, some medical procedure might cost an individual more than they are getting in 10 years. So a proper healthcare system is still important.
Not unless you are providing means-tested relocation assistance (which is against the spirit of UBI), and ignoring that UBI and the associated taxes to fund it will:
(1) reduce CoL in high CoL areas and,
(2) raise CoL in low CoL areas.
And assisted relocation actually magnifies this effect.
"liberal controlled areas" is an indicator. People vote for policies that make sense to them. Most people like living in cities, and they like living in places where government provides services that aren't well-distributed by market mechanisms.
Let's go with your $10T number. Then, let's apply a standard progressive income tax, of the kind that has been operating your entire life. Numbers are chosen for convenience and being not too far off from realistic.
At 0 income, you now make $31.2K. No income tax due.
At $7.5K income, such as a $15/hour job you work at for 10 hours a week for 50 weeks, you take in $39K and pay $750 -- a 10% tax bracket.
At $15K income, working that job for 20 hours/week, you take in $46K and pay $1875 in income tax. 7.5K * 0.10 + 7.5K * 0.15
At $30K income, working full-time at minimum wage, you take in $60K and pay 7.5K * 0.10 + 7.5K * 0.15 + 15K * 0.20 = $4875.
At $45K income you take home 75K and pay $4875 + 15K * 0.25 = $6100.
At $60K income you take home 90K and pay $6100 + 15K * 0.33 = $11K.
At $75K income you take home 105K and pay $11K + 25K * 0.5 = $26K, and so you are a net contributor to taxes.
You can set the balance point where you wish: below it, people gain money; above it, people pay more in taxes than they take in from UBI.
While that's going on, you can have smaller government: you no longer need most pensions, most welfare programs, and lots of bureaucracy devoted to finding out whether people should get assistance.
And one more simple change: make income tax calculated by the IRS and you file changes against their preparation, rather than you sitting down and trying to figure everything out each April. Cuts down on frustration and tax avoidance.
Yes please. It drives me crazy that I have to waste time copying numbers between forms for my taxes.
...but this increase of taxes would not harm average people, because they would basically receive the same back in UBI as the increase.
Overhead would be lower than administering current welfare payments, since it's universal so they wouldn't need to do any eligibility checks - just making sure you're a real person so that you can't get it twice under multiple names or something.
Other than that it would be break-even for the government, and for the average person. It's just income redistribution. You're taking the money from the wealthy, and giving it to everyone. The average person will receive as much as they pay and will be in the same position as before. The wealthy will pay more in taxes and have less money after tax. The poor will pay less than them and will have more money in the end.
It's not that complicated, and it's not magic. UBI advocates are advocating redistribution large enough to support basic needs. Yes, that means taking money away from the wealthier people in society, but UBI advocates think we can afford this as a society.
1) People will realize they can work less and still get paid the same. This results in less work than we require getting done.
2) We will still need welfare because some people will spend all of their UBI on non-food items. They will also spend their children's allocation OR trick their children into spending their allocation on non-food items. The option will be to either let children go hungry or create a welfare system that provides only food.
3) It turns out that some people will get bored without jobs and decide that the meaning to their lives is to cause trouble for society at large. Without the need to get up for work they can now stay up until 4am every day finding ways to make life miserable for people who actually do the work that the rest of us rely on. At this point society gets schismed into those who do work and those that don't.
4) In the long term people decide that they don't need education, the ability to socialize with anyone, or the need to participate on any level in a positive fashion towards civilization. We'll have generations of people who only know how to go to the food silos.
5) Maybe there's some problems with actually paying for everything.
And Counting money is a bit harder than that. When I tip waitstaff, that income for them was my income before that and my employer's income before that and hospitals' income before that and, just maybe, that same waiter's income before that. But if instead it was medicare's money, it got an excellent ROI in terms of GDP output per tax dollar spent.
I think you underestimate the amount of people that are content with not doing anything.
I'm really not worried about the people who decide to do nothing (at least not in the first generation of UBI). I'm worried about the people who realize that now they can dress up as clowns and terrorize random people as a full time job because the food is coming regardless of what they do.
I think some people like it because it could act as a replacement for so many other government "aid" schemes. Disability allowances, Housing allowances, Health spending could all be cut to zero, as we would know everyone had money to spend on what they liked. Personal responsibility all the way.
Other people like the idea of money for nothing, and well, if we manage to automate everything then we might need money for nothing to keep the wheels turning.
There are two main differences of this system from true UBI: First, it's only paid to people who don't have any money at all (beyond a couple thousand euros). Any car, flat, house, expensive TV, etc. that you own is subject to that rule and if you possess those, you are required to first sell them.
Second, it's not additional. Once you do make money, your income will only rise if you make more than what you'd have gotten from the social services. This locks in quite many people into this system because even if they would seek employment, maybe what they get in the end is only €100 more than without the social services, but they gotta get up every day at 6 am.
In Ontario (before the new government killed it before the study could be completed), the system was going to include a progressive taxation system— essentially, the more you earn, the less you receive in UBI payments, until you are actively paying into the system. The system would have also included the end of our current welfare and disability payment systems— putting less pressure on the bureaucracy and on the people who are in need of assistance. Many people taking part in the study were using the additional help (it was actually around $23k CAD here) to start businesses and go back to school.
It's a little disingenuous to just shout about totals when I don't think anybody [serious, or to be taken seriously] has proposed such a plan.
Almost all of the Democrat 2020 field (that we know of so far) have come out with some kind of handouts-in-exchange-for-votes platform for their campaign https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-eye...
It's still early, but I'd expect to see them solidify over some of these types of income redistribution strategies as we near Nov 2020.
Sure, Social Security is not like a perfect, shining example, but it can be fixed/improved, and scaling it up by 10x (which is a gross overestimate, as other commenters have pointed out), is nothing to sneeze at. But at the same time, it's not really as ridiculous as your comments wants to paint it (i.e. "omg this is clearly patently absurd, why even entertain this nonsense?").
You've completely glossed over the fact that people generally don't hoard money, especially not those living on $15/hr. People will spend that money, and it could even grow the economy (by GDP). Your little mind experiment is not nearly rigorous enough nor realistic to justify dismissing UBI out of hand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States...
To start with, 24% of the population are minors, so that knocks a few trillion off that figure.
Secondly, a UBI isn't a living wage, so $15 in today to dollars is not a starting figure, because that is a wage in exchange for work.
UBI is meant to cover the very basics, like a food and varying amounts of housing (depending on the local housing market). For some, it operates as a dividend that helps make ends meet on top of their regular work, especially in high cost areas.
In low cost areas it could function as a living wage, and even cover a significant portion of housing.
This merely will keep wages low (what currently is happening) by subsidizing poor pay. Many cities have subsidized housing (and/or rent control). The net effect is these people can 'afford' to live in areas while making lower pay. Without subsidized housing, employers would literally have to pay more or rents would have to go down; there wouldn't be anyone able to sustain the rents.
The big difference is, with subsidized housing, society has created a captive poverty tier.
How does that work? Is the UBI of both parents (or, worse, the single parent) supposed to cover the costs of raising their children for those primarily dependent on UBI?
Beyond that, it looks like wages being roughly half of the GDP matches our current setup fairly well: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
nit: ten trillion two hundred forty two billion nine hundred sixty million and no thousands ;-)
How about "over $10.2 trillion"?
UBI is supposed to support people so that they can do the work that they believe is most valuable and to prevent people from being dis-incentivised from pursuing work. It has other goals as well such as eliminating other welfare services, removing minimum wage, and incentivising moving away from cities but those first two are the primary reasons.
In that light, something like $10-$12,000 is more like it -- should cover rent, basic food, electricity, and so on. It's to not have homeless, destitute, left behind people, not to cover nice living expenses.
For a family, $10 will be of course $20, and so on. A few friends could pool and stay in the same house with $1000 rent and get $40K between them, etc.
I'm not sure it's the right option, but it's something to consider. If you have someone below the poverty line and you tell them "I'll give you 30k, but due to inflation each dollar will only be able to buy half of what it can now." I think they'll take that deal.
Print money to fund government programs = Venezuela
Historically, was there ever a time that hyperinflation didn't end badly?
Most UBI proposals don't cover a living wage. They're usually something like $10k/year for all adults, which would come out to $2.5 trillion. Most proposals both cut benefits and raise taxes, so this is very doable.
Second, your example is kind of a socialism strawman, but let's take it to its logical conclusion. The current total income of the US is about $16.4 trillion (after Social Security, etc.). If we were to redistribute that across everyone in the US, that's close to $50k/yr. Considering that the average wage for men is $33k/yr and the average income for women is $19k/yr, that's a huge raise, 52% and 163% respectively.
But that's giving everyone $50k/yr -- from toddlers to the mega rich. If we just include adults, it's closer to $66k/yr. That's a 200% raise for men and 247% raise for women.
Of course, if you have an above average income you're losing money. And there are real questions about what such an egalitarian society and economy looks like. But you would eradicate poverty in the US and solve countless social problems.
Fundamentally, UBI policies are about _redistribution_ of wealth, not additional expenditures as you suggest. Any serious UBI policy proposal takes into account budget and administrative overhead. For example, this [1] proposal from AEI, a conservative think tank.
[1]: https://www.aei.org/publication/a-budget-neutral-universal-b...
Tell me where am wrong on this, because you can't start talking about UBI in the USA, while the political class in the country is super hostile even to the concept of universal healthcare, a policy that is uncontroversial in much of the developed, (even developing!) world.
What about paid sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave etc.? Here the USA does even worse, since not only does practically every developed and developing country have these, but in fact almost every country has some form of these. If USA is hostile to implementing social policies common in much of the rest of the world, you can't start talking about UBI in any serious manner anyway.
I'm going to assume you're not in the USA. Washington DC is over 70% Democrat (which is our left wing party) https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/housing-complex/blo...
Washington DC hasn't elected a Republican (our right wing party, about 6% of the population there) since the 1870s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Wa....
