it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole
I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea.
* Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.
In turn, I'm sceptical of people who say we can't entertain any non-trivial, non-cautionary, non-evolutionary changes to the status quo ... while downplaying the fact that the situation we're in now - 9-5, mon-fri, 20-65yo - was not piloted or effectively tested on a smaller scale before all of us inherited it.
We supposedly even had podcasts to make menial work bearable back in... 1865: https://mashable.com/feature/cigar-factory-lectors
Otherwise it couldn't have gotten so popular and we couldn't have inherited it.
heh. go away and take your UBI and 38 hour work week. they are implementing a law to enforce this. so you will work for twice a 38 hour work week and still be paid less because why not.
It was obviously valuable and workable from the smallest scale possible: a verbal message carried by a runner.
Presumably the government could have actuslly piloted the USPS if they wanted to, only supporting the northeast for example. They just didn't need to, the leap from private courier systems to a government run courier service didn't have many unknowns to test out first.
There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices.
The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.
It's a creeping expansion of social benefits...society will adapt around it
If it appears that there will be an expansion of social benefits, the wealthy class will work to sabotage it (a la ACA; not that there weren't benefits, but net-net the shareholders and executives of insurance companies won). There's nothing stopping them.
What's more likely to happen, IMO, is that as the cost of existing increases, the birth rates will continue to decline. Rather than address this population crisis, the wealthy class will continue to advance automation. LLMs, AI, robots, autonomous driving, etc. With their left hand, they'll import cheap labor. With their right, they'll pit the rest of us against this cheap labor to distract from reality. The corporations want this cheap, imported labor -- they just don't want to pay the taxes to support social services for anyone.
The wealth gap will continue to widen without a voting base willing to increase taxation. And to suppress this, the wealthy will use a narrative that is driven by the media consolidated and owned by these mega-rich. There are increasingly few politicians on either side that feel like they are genuine about solving this issue. The flood of money in politics feels like it's broken the system.
The end game is something like the planet Solaria from Asimov.
I do think social benefits are expanding in the USA also, more and more people find it viable to be a NEET. The wealth gap will surely widen; this implicit UBI is certainly not communism in any way. Truth is, today western societies can afford to provide the basics for everyone, so ultimately withholding in order to keep the masses in the jobs is not tenable.
I agree, in the sense that I think UBI proponents would do better to lobby for that than a big, deus-ex-machina version of UBI. But I don't see it happening "naturally", without a lot of political effort.
Imagine a technological reset and/or war: Under those circumstances one could still argue for a socialist system of work, but not for people doing nothing getting UBI.
while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.
People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end.
And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job.
But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset.
This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief.
But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work.
So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless.
Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.
This is an oversimplification naturally but the gist of it is spot on. Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere. One thing leads to another, and that's how most wealth is created by robbing the future. But the future actually arrives some day, and we're seeing some of that now.
There's no exit strategy for this behaviour though. Since so many people did exactly what they were incentivized to do, they of course don't want the rules to change now. The current generation will always need to pay 10x whatever a house is worth, because otherwise all of the people in the last generation can't afford to settle debts / retire / pay unreasonable amounts for healthcare. This puts the current generation in debt, so that they have to rob the next, and so on until there's some collapse. Most millennials have had a rough time waiting for that collapse though, so lots have bought something on credit to build equity rather than continuing to throw away money on rent. Soon instead of cheering on any kind of collapse in the housing market, they also will want it postponed because they will need to rob the next generation. But each iteration of this same game isn't exactly the same, because every generation does a little worse while more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.
2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.
Much more generally: Think in terms of supply and demand. If nobody is going to work any more, then the price of work goes way up. So does the price of things that work produces.
If a person is really does view money as smoke and mirrors, and is concerned that it can be printed whenever it's needed, tangible assets like land or tools at least useful if you no longer see value on money.
That said, I'm not advocating for that view necessarily and very much agree with your take here. People do seem to be losing faith in money, at least a bit, and that can be very dangerous if the faith continues to erode.
- affordable to begin with (max 3-4 figures)
- not mass produced (so they’re not already hyper-efficiently distributed to market)
- demand for them will continue to exist (so you can be assured to liquidate them when necessary)
- their value is likely to appreciate (at the very least in line with inflation).
The only example I could come up with is hand-crafted (unique) collectibles, like figurines and such.
Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.
With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.
If everyone should have access to water, federalize water utilities and don't charge anyone. You will them have to deal with access rights though. How much water is enough for everyone to have access to? How do we avoid water rights issues even worse than what California has?
Defining certain resources as a fundamental right while still forcing them to operate as a free market is a risky game of chicken. If prices are still able to fluctuate in response to market supply & demand then we really aren't saying we truly believe everyone should have water, shelter, etc. A UBI is only an agreement that some amount of money is a fundamental right, nothing more.
Honestly, I don't. First, perhaps it's small minded but I don't really feel responsible for every human on the planet, or even a significant percentage.
Second, the value, even to the end recipient, of vast majority of education and healthcare is dubious at best. Similarly to the study on which OP is commenting, there was a famous Oregon Medicaid health experiment and the benefits of healthcare services expansion were minimal. Same for education with various headstart initiatives.
One of the goals of UBI, as I interpret it, is to reduce the cost of living closer to zero.
And that's the literal cost of living - not the macroeconomist's use of the term. That phrase, once you contemplate it, is a ludicrous reflection of how our society has gone wrong.
Why should it cost to live?
(You can consider the answer in terms of > 11kya anthropology, or in terms of our current, advanced food production capabilities + other technologies - take your pick.)
Because that's how life works. With sufficient energy input into a system, the system can sustain complexity. Sun -> single-celled life -> plants -> animals. The food chain is an economy of energy. Money is a proxy for many different kinds of energy. It will never be cost-free to live, not for single-celled life, not for us.
A Universal Basic Income absent substantial other changes in our economy, would be a disaster because we no longer have a closed economy. It would simply flow out to other nations. UBI + open borders + bureaucratic dictatorship sends us right back into serfdom...
There used to be restrictions on the number of serfs allowed for a single geography, because the lord was expected to provide for them (schools and hospitals... etc.). We're replacing an oligarch with a bureaucracy which is just a transitive oligarchy as the bureaucracies ultimately get captured (Big Tech, Big Oil, Big you-name-it). All good intentions erode over time to neglect and malice, especially in systems where nepotism and dynasty rule instead of merit.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
But also, not it's not more feasible either. One is the government taxing money and distributing it by law, the other is a deep and complete intervention on the economy in ways that people don't even can't predict completely.
Even considering an alternative to UBI like forcing all prices lower, i.e. price deflation, requires first taking that assumption as true.
The government never could allow prices to lower anyway though. Price deflation would make our national debt that much worse.
UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.
Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.
Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.
Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"?
Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."
Sick days, vacation, and parental leave are also good examples at a small scale. It definitely doesn't hold for every jobs, but if a person can be out of the job for days or weeks without a huge impact on the team it may very well be a mostly bullshit job.
I don't see how this idea holds up to scrutiny. People who do actual work need time off regularly to keep concentration and motivation up, especially over long periods of time. These factors don't matter for bullshit jobs - who's gonna notice if their output is reduced?
The impact of time off is instead directly related to quality of management. People will need time off for various reasons. You can either work together and plan around this, or you can act like it's not the case and have a) less chance of properly planning, b) greater risk of the full team being affected (e.g. when sick colleagues come into work), and c) less happy workers with higher turnover.
As to why the situation is not clear or why the answers are not easy to present:
"I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533670
> There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI.
More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis.
What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.
Plus after all recommended remedies have been tried, the only possible solution is to implement something that is not recommended.
You're going to need a different kind of oil . . .
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually, you're making a lot of sense all over the place, along with many others.
We're in uncharted territory here, at least in modern history. At best experts can hypothesize about different interventions but they are ultimately making assumptions that frequently go unspoken.
The biggest category of remedies that I rare, if ever, see recommended is removing interventions from a complex system that has gone awry. In this case, instead of adding more layers to the economy by having the government give most people free money, potentially by racking uppre debt, maybe we should be reducing costs and liabilities. I wouldn't pretend to know what can or should be removed, but I would love to see honest research and consideration going towards what a remedy may look like if we come at it from the angle of subtraction.
It been called many things from social safety net to welfare.
You can look at Social Security and its money woes as an example.
That system is going insolvent with people contributing.
It is mandatory to contribute if you are gainfully employed..
> the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed.
To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc.
Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society.
It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way.
We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies.
The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
People aren't okay with having shelter, food, water, and community. We want the smartphones, huge TVs, ridiculously expensive cars, access to fly anywhere in the world, etc. We absolutely could have all the basics cover, and then some, with 20% of the work we all put in today but few people want that world.
Because you can cover your necessities with 20% of your income doesn't mean everyone else can.
I know several people on SSI who had to take under the table jobs because their checks wont cover their food and shelter. And that's with food stamps. If they get a regular job they lose their SSI.
Ive got a friend who had to take a part time job dashing after work as a supervisor at my factory.
I think about this stuff when I'm working overtime- how lucky I am to be able to rather than have to find a second job.
I make over 6 figures as an electrician/instrumentation technician. I have a surgery coming up in September that's going to cost me 40k+. Instead of feeling it's so much and all the other things I could use that money for, I try to remind myself I'm blessed to be able to afford it without saving for years. I, again, know people who work full time and don't make that in a year.
I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food.
I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions.
We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.
Raising enough food for a small family is very doable when you don't spend 40+ hours per week working for the paycheck. Building a small house is definitely a big project, but very doable as long as you aren't attempting to wind the clock all the way back and milling your own lumber. It can be done with a surprisingly small set of tools if the house is reasonably sized and designed with your tools and skills in mind from the beginning.
Is the average person going to build their own 2,500 square foot two-story house and grow enough food to feed everyone? Obviously not. But could a person build a 900 sq ft ranch, have a garden feeding their family, and raise animals for their own meat, dairy, and eggs? They absolutely can, I'm doing it today, and if climate change concerns you the reduced impact on the environment is huge.
For that matter, I was at work a bit ago, using the restroom, and this janitor guy came in and started refilling the toilet paper rolls in the stalls. And it struck me that his job was really important. I don't want to do his job, but I absolutely don't want to work somewhere where nobody does it...
That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well.
UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor.
And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.
Can you explain what you mean by "confiscatory" and how it differs from normal income tax?
Here's a different take, with modern China as an example:
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/chinas-thi...
Hesitant about the latest gene therapy, no money for you.
Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
We've uh, we've known this for millennia. "When no longer required to do something that they hate, people will often choose to stop doing that hated thing." is not even a little bit surprising.
> ...and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
Nah. Most folks don't give a shit about whether or not their work has "meaning". They work to fund their hobbies and fun, they don't work to find "meaning". Terminally-management-brained middle managers sure THINK that it's important for rank-and-file people to understand that their work has "meaning", though. They can't fuckin seem to shut up about it.