I don't think it'll work. UBI is a dole. The Romans had that-- when they acquired enough slaves so that the farmer class were no longer running many little farms it turned the core the empire-- their capable farmers, into clients.
I think however, that UBI may be worse than the Roman bread doles. Those were after all only food, but money are every kind of resource. There was also still a need for the client class, since they were in fact still a source of soldiers of the empire.
The change that UBI makes in modern times is that it changes people who are important and who co-operate in order to make things and get them to others are turned into just a cost which never produces anything. Consequently it'll always be appealing to get rid of them.
The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it.
Consequently I don't see how UBI can be a solution. It must be something else. I believe a reduction in working hours could work for a while, at least a decade, but won't be enough in the long run and I'm far from certain that there is a solution.
Another problem we've had here in Sweden is that people try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners etc., so it's a rebalancing within the working class while the genuinely rich are unaffected. Because any rebalancing of tax from ordinary people to the rich will cause inflation and reduced investment due to the fact that ordinary people spend a larger fraction of their incomes on consumer products it'll always be appealing to make this purely a rebalancing between workers.
Most of the schemes listed on that page fall short of what I consider to be UBI. In particular, most fail to provide enough money for someone to fund their basic needs (food and shelter).
Are you aware of any UBI experiments where the recipients are confident that both:
1) the amount will cover their basic needs, and
2) the scheme will last forever?
The reason I'm asking is that if either of these conditions were not met, the recipient would be crazy to stop working.
If someone were to commit to giving you $10k/month forever, increasing with inflation, you might quit your job. If it were only $500/month, you'd probably keep working. If it were $10k/month, but the payments might stop after a year, you'd probably keep working.
(Not 'you' specifically of course. I know nothing of your personal situation.)
You seem to be assuming that UBI qualitative effects are scale invariant for both population and time. Why do you assume that?
There is a tendency among many people to give precedence to a scientific study over pure reasoning even when the degree of relevance of the scientific study is tiny. It’s like schools don’t teach how to determine if a study is applicable and so people often do it very clumsily. This is a dangerous error.
Because the same potential issue has been rised every time. And every experiment on a scale bigger than before shows the problem doesn't happen. I wish more people were saying "let's keep scaling the experiments up to see where it stops working" rather than repeating that it won't.
I'm not saying I'm 100% certain it is invariant. Just that we should stop repeating the tropes that so far haven't been shown true.
What potential risks of UBI do you think the existing studies rule out?
I think pro UBI people often straw man anti UBI arguments as a disguised belief that Group X is lazy. I think pro UBI people do this because they are morally triggered by discriminatory work ethic beliefs (fair enough). I think that people who cite these studies might see the studies as ruling out the straw man, which makes them feel fuzzy self righteous feelings, but to me the studies do not even remotely address what I see as the actual risks of at scale UBI deployment.
It's simply: So far almost every experiment I've seen had positive outcomes in terms of employment, physical and mental health, overall happiness / stress reduction. That means we should keep expanding this until either we find actual problems to deal with or everyone is on UBI. We can spend ages trying to come up with various risks to rule out, but... what's the point in practice? We're basically agreed that we don't really 100% know how people will behave at scale. Worst case, we can discover and deal with real problems. Best case, it works great at scale as it does in small tests.
Unfortunately you can’t apply your Agile methodologies to UBI. I want to know about every possible tax edge case funding it because inevitably the upper class will find ways around paying for UBI. You don’t want it to become like Social Security where there is risk of insolvency in future generations.
The risks of UBI don't exist at the level of the individual. They exist at the system level. Studying individual level effects does not tell us anything about system level effects.
That's not the sense I meant it in. Yes, people will of course not be idle while they get the UBI, but they are no longer likely to be these integrated cogs in a machine.
If you work in a team programming something or similar, then you are co-operating to produce a product, and if you've got a civilised company you'll all end up friends. You've had a common goal and you've worked towards it together in an honest way. Furthermore, you are necessary to society. Even if the political and economic elite are not in on this work, and are not participating in it in an honest way, the success of your work is something they need, thus they need you.
But here the reason why we're instituting UBI is that people are no longer necessary to production.
This is similar to something about the resource curse. When countries need their workers for wealth they tend to need to ensure that their workers have good conditions, but if they can get away with just extracting oil or natural resources, then the good conditions disappear. AI will reduce the need for workers to the point of UBI, so it will become more like the extractive work in these states with less good conditions.
So my objection isn't to UBI as such, it's that I think UBI doesn't go far enough. Having thought some more since yesterday evening I think it may even be so that for the situation to be stable the people on UBI need to basically rule the country full-time. A mega-parliament with very great power. So as society moves away from work ordinary people need to move away from work and towards ruling.
"This paper has two purposes. First, it documents the historical context of MINCOME, a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment (1974 to 1979). Second, it uses routinely collected health administration data and a quasi experimental design to document an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate for participants relative to controls, particularly for accidents and injuries and mental health. We also found that participant contacts with physicians declined, especially for mental health, and that more adolescents continued into grade 12. We found no increase in fertility, family dissolution rates, or improved birth out comes. We conclude that a relatively modest GAI can improve population health, suggesting significant health system savings"
You mean like the one across Iran running from 2011? Yeah, I agree at this point we should just run it globally for over a decade to see if the result is in any way different than almost every single test done so far.
As an aside, linking to vox.com as proof of some claim doesn't really help your cause. If you want people to take you seriously try to at least cite data from a source that isn't one of the most biased and tarnished major media organizations in the country.
It's enough to do minimal search to find the referenced programs. If anyone's actually interested in how UBI experiments worked so far, they don't need spoonfeeding.
>The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it.
The problem is not much that the rulers can end it, but that they'll continue it in perpetuity. Or if you wish, that they will only selectively end it, or threaten to end it, for some - as a punishment of disobedience.
UBI's allure from the point of view of those in power is it turns citizens into dependents. So people not working, and not having power, thus turning into "clients", is kind the whole point.
So, yeah, the version of UBI that doesn't have that drawback, is UBI in a society where the masses have seized the control and are actively exercizing it too (not eager to give it back).
UBI has already worked. We hunt and forage food and water, but air and gravity are supplied for free, the latter being inescapably mandatory (good luck ending it, rulers). They're not nothing, not "but that's different", there's wattage in all.
We talk about tax and money like they're natural theories, when we could easily pursue compatible, interoperable regimes that meet the UBI design brief. If price is value then change in price is a proxy for externalities, so tax transactions based on change in instantaneous price. The power to do so is in divide and conquer, between rentiers who value stability and those who cultivate volatility. The Not-In-My-Back-Office corporate leadership creates gigahertz iPads but never seems to buy their way out of overnight transaction clearing and filing labyrinthine returns for some reason.
I hate being livestock in the "incentive" farm. We almost all do. And while I appreciate insights about the Roman Empire as much as any white male...it's less the done thing these days. :)
> try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners
The capital will just flee to other places if they do that. In fact it already does.
But I agree, UBI will never work. It will just generate inflation and drive prices up, like the Biden Administration's America Rescue Plan did by giving away $1400 checks to people.
"While labor and nonlabor input costs have played a role in price increases, corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic. Comparatively, over the 40 years prior to the pandemic, they drove just 11 percent of price growth."
Yes, but I believe that this can be solved if capital comes from wages-- i.e. large-scale mandatory savings as a fraction of wages, set by each country's central bank and raised in times of inflation, lowered in times of deflation.
I view payments to low-income people as the state "buying low", with the expectation that they will be able to "sell high" when those same people pay taxes later when they gain a higher income. Such payments are investment by the state in its people. Sure, not every investment pays off, but investors still invest in high risk ventures. Societies should similarly invest in low income people.
A UBI would go to everyone, but the benefits would accrue largely to low-income people, hence my focus above.
Not really, it's an insurance against rebellion - just as Bismarck intended with first social programs. If you give people some low levels of safety, but consistent, predictable safety, they will happily hand the billionaire class the real fruits of their labor.
> The concept of a universal basic income amounts to the government paying all individuals a set salary regardless of their means.
> Critics say it would be extremely costly and divert funding away from public services, while not necessarily helping to alleviate poverty.
I'm not sure why the reporter wrote this. Have there been any failed UBI studies, ever? (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer... purports to list all of them, and doesn't list any failed studies.) The illusion of balance should not come at the expense of truth.
The Alaska Permanent Fund funds more than just the Permanent Fund Dividend (their UBI initiative): it's a source of funding for the whole government. These issues seem specific to that. Per your second link, the budget issues are due to wider changes in the economy, and affect everything. Given how long the Permanent Fund Dividend existed without causing any issues, is there anything specific that can be blamed on the PFD?
Your first link is just about politics. Per the data table on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Fund_Dividend#Annual...), the massive increase described in that article didn't happen. In 2018, the PFD payout was $1600; in 2019, it was $1606. Not $6700.
If adequate, long-term funding can be acquired, I don't see why a UBI initiative should have these issues. The general principle "money represents other people's labour" applies, so if UBI prevents people from performing valuable labour within the economy (i.e., working for money), that could cause problems (though my instinct says that performing valuable services for others should be enough to avoid problems, regardless of whether payment is involved). Is there evidence of that happening in Alaska? doi:10.2139/ssrn.3118343 (also from "my" article) argues not.
For somewhere that isn't Alaska, the money would presumably have to come from taxes. I don't know enough to design that, but I don't see why it shouldn't be possible – especially if UBI has positive effects on the economy, as some theorists claim. (I don't tend to trust economic theorists.)
If adequate funding can be secured then everyone can be a billionaire.
But since that’s hard, supporting the PFD, which is now a political must have, has required cutting public services which is what you said critics were unfounded in warning about.
Why are you special-casing the PFD? I could equally say "providing polling places, ballot counting, and all the other democratic infrastructure – which are now a political must-have – has required cutting public services such as the PFD", and it'd be just as true.
If the knock-on economic effects of the PFD are putting more money into the system than it's taking out, it's obviously worth keeping (even when money is tight, unless that's expected to be temporary and certain other conditions are met). If the PFD is valued directly, then it's also worth keeping, regardless of the economic effects. We don't kill the elderly once they retire, even though that policy is of greater cost to the economy than benefit.
The naïve "it costs money that could be spent on other things" claim can be used to criticise any policy. The real question isn't whether it's good or bad, because we know there are circumstances that it's good. The question is, under what circumstances is UBI bad?
UBI seems to work in theory, so I'm mighty suspicious that it seems to work universally in practice. ("Economic theory just doesn't work that well," I continue to insist.) But the only failure mode I've seen, anywhere, is "it costs money" (e.g. https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/news/universal-basic-in...). All other criticisms appear hypothetical, so I don't get why we pay them so much heed.
> Ballots are a political must have in the sense that they are required for the political system to function
No they're not. Many countries have unelected leadership, and their political systems function. Ballots (and the rest of the democratic infrastructure) are something that people want, because they see them as good to have.
> The PFD is a political must have in the sense that voters are now telling the government they would rather cut other services to keep it
The cuts described in your first link didn't happen, because of public pressure against the cuts.
But let's pretend the Alaskan electorate did demand cuts elsewhere, to maintain or increase the PFD. If the budget reduces, "people would prefer to cut something else" is a sign of a service being valued by the populace. How is that an argument against the service?
You're saying "this cost is bad because if we don't cut this cost, we have to cut other costs", but that's true for the other costs as well. The original claim was asymmetrical (that UBI programmes cost money for no benefit; i.e., that they're a waste of money). You can't use a symmetrical argument to support an asymmetrical claim.
It seems impossible that they would not continue to work.
Some of them would not either because they want to do nothing or because they want to invest in their skills; and so there would be a labor shortage and wages would rise and prices would rise and it would all equilibrium out to the point where people need to work to survive again (or UBI is raised to meet the B) and the whole economy gets a little less competitive with outsourced labor that doesn’t play this game.
That’s not a complete loss, mind you. A situation where poor people need to work to survive but a large percent of their income is guaranteed has merits.
I quite like Sam Altman's recent take on UBI being given a resource which has value rather than being given dollars directly.
He was suggesting the people could be given "compute" which they then decide how to use. Though I don't deny this could be a loop-hole to create value in something like WorldCoin, my hope is that it would change the considerations of the people who have it.
When we think of UBI, we don't often think of money as the resource, but rather as the thing people use to buy things.
If that conversation changed to providing a resource which the person could use to earn, does that make the recipient more of a farmer or fisherman, rather than just being given a fish.
We rarely think of UBI as cash payment as something that the recipient would use as an allocation to create something for themselves.
Though I don't think this is a simple answer, I'd like us to think in these terms more, and Sam Altman has recently opened this window to my thinking.
The issue I take with that is that it's another layer of abstraction that can be warped /inflated/etc. Similarly, mobile games often have a "game currency" that you purchase to obfuscate the true cost of a purchase.
It's easier to splurge with a card than it is with cash because it feels more abstract, particularly if it's credit.
> If that conversation changed to providing a resource which the person could use to earn, does that make the recipient more of a farmer or fisherman, rather than just being given a fish.
Tieing UBI to working pretty much is counter to the word Universal.
Existing schemes which aren't UBI but are tied to working have caused a lot of problems where an individual is unable to work for some reason (possibly dealing with keeping access to the scheme) lose the benefits from the scheme and not cannot work as they needed those benefits.
Although I think the larger issue is that whatever resource you need to have enough of it and fungible enough to distribute. Distributing just one fish to 300 million Americans is actually nearly impossible. There's a reason the stimulus checks were done through the IRS; it's pretty hard to do things at this scale.
I may not be understanding what you mean by "working". The Universal is that everyone gets a guaranteed amount, maybe every month, which they can allocate. They can use it themselves to earn, or they can be paid by others to use theirs.
Money is actually no different really, except that we trade money directly goods. I look at this as a layer of abstraction which provides a re-framing. I don't think we're going to get rid of money, and will money move to be an allocation of AI credits? Maybe, but I hope not.
When someone is given $500/month, I believe the reaction for most people, outside of covid times when spending was a challenge, is, what will I spend this on. Given a resource that has an intermediate step and could be valuable to many people, the mentality may change to "what should I sell this for?".
The person can chose to donate it to a cause they feel valuable, sell it to the highest bidder, or multiple options in between.
That's my hope anyway, but if it was just dropped in tomorrow without the right social guardrails in place, I doubt it would work out like this.
As far as scalability, with hundreds of billions being spend on compute in order to train AI, I doubt scalability of distribution would be a major issue.
> I may not be understanding what you mean by "working" ...
> They can use it themselves to earn, or they can be paid by others to use theirs. ...
> Given a resource that has an intermediate step and could be valuable to many people, the mentality may change to "what should I sell this for?".
Well, with your initial comment it sounded much more like you intended for people to get a resource (compute) that they themselves exploit to generate revenue (cash) as opposed to just giving people revenue (cash). Which to me defeats the whole point of UBI and is likely to be worse as whatever resource picked is in no way going to be exploitable by everybody or sellable for the same price as it was obtained by the government.
> As far as scalability, with hundreds of billions being spend on compute in order to train AI, I doubt scalability of distribution would be a major issue.
I guess with the covid stimulus being in the trillions, spending just billions wouldn't have the same scalability problems.
It does seem inevitable that there would be a UBI as there is continued centralization of wealth and power (see tech giants for example), increased automation (in factories now but soon in other things), and reduced need for human labor. We either find a way to make those people live good lives (not just bare minimum lives) or we can except destabilization in our societies - as in either people revolt or the country turns authoritarian. I’m not sure where all this leads - like do people have the “right” to keep having children that may not contribute economically but do create an economic cost? But I think we’ll need UBI before we confront those bigger questions.
While we're at it, how 'bout vending machines for sufficient free food ? Insert an ID and get a day's supply of fortified biscuits, not guaranteed to be particularly tasty, resale/arbitrage value is low, manufacturing cost is low. In less dense areas, an autonomous bot shows up like a bookmobile or the ice cream truck.
I’m not commenting on this way or another, but if we went to UBI, what would the incentive be for me to work, presuming a basic income is suitable to raise my family on in safe, clean housing, and also presuming that the resources to implement a UBI will be extracted from people like me whose labor is more valuable?
Has anyone ever explained how UBI would be funded? The US has 300 million people so at, say $500 monthly per person, it’ll cost $1.8 trillion annually just for this one program.
Pretty much every serious proposal, because that't the essence of the "basic income" part.
In a system with income-dependent benefits, poor people usually have the highest marginal tax rates. Often something like 70-90%, and sometimes above 100%. Not because of nominal taxes but due to losing benefits when their income increases.
Basic income can be largely cost-neutral. It would replace most common benefits, and it would be funded by most people paying a flat tax rate for all of their income. Typically you would see it only as an accounting trick: your nominal income tax is higher, but you receive a large automatic tax credit. People receiving benefits would have more incentives to work, which is the primary effect.
So offer tax deductions if they have a family, for each kid they have, if they pay rent etc. France is already doing that for individual enterprises. No need to give away cash or checks and people do have an incentive to actually work. And don't call it UBI when it's not.
This was about the basic income aspects of UBI, which are orthogonal to the decision who is entitled to the benefits.
What you are suggesting is already done, and it's exactly what's wrong with the current system. When there are multiple separate low-income benefits, it's easy to accidentally create incentives against working. You try to work harder, but you lose 80% or 110% of the additional income to taxes and lost benefits. The latter because you cross one or more thresholds for the benefits.
Basic income avoids this with better coordination. There are no income thresholds for "low-income" benefits and no lower tax brackets for low to medium incomes. Everyone receives benefits in some technical sense, but most people pay them back through higher nominal taxes. In practice, most people would not receive basic income and would not pay any higher taxes. They would just do their tax calculations in a different way.
Implementing UBI doesn't mean everyone gets money. Those with jobs, for example, or those with millions in the bank, won't. But you likely know this already.
If it doesn't go to everyone, it fails the first descriptor "Universal".
Never mind cutting off "those with jobs" would introduce all sorts of problems like we see with similar "benefit cliffs" for just basic welfare systems.
Part of the promise of UBI is lower administrative costs and reduced political pork. Adding in conditions like the ones you propose would be expensive and arbitrary.
In Brazil, many benefits occurs like that by age, gender, low-income or other discriminatory rule and multiple times to drive this group to vote into specific parties, perpetuating the low-income and maintain as maneuver mass or a ventriloquist dummy.
I was thinking about UBI the other day, and was unable to reconcile how it could work given people have different needs. For example, 'the poverty line' here is just under $24,000/yr. But someone on disability support may well be getting $70,000/yr or more to pay for special needs (real example of MS sufferer). With a 'proper' UBI, other forms of welfare would disappear to help pay for it, which would require giving everyone $70,000/yr (or leaving the disabled to their fate). And at triple the current poverty line UBI, getting the in-home help necessary to survive independently would likely be impossible as care industry workers are already in short supply. So we would need to retain at least disability support, and have a much lower UBI, probably below the poverty line. And we would likely still need everyone not on disability support to work, to drag their income up to at least the poverty line so they can survive with some dignity. So without full employment, we would need unemployment benefits as well. In which case, what has the UBI given us? Maybe we just need less wasteful and more compassionate unemployment, disability and aged care support?
Or maybe things change when we consider hereditary wealth? With a below poverty line UBI, middle and upper classes could survive and maybe live quite comfortably with the income boost from investments, with the lower classes having to work to earn enough to pay their landlords.
no this is unconstructive as it gets even worse than your example with special medical needs .. the way this evens out in that case is to expand the capacity of medical treatment such that they can provide acceptable intervention and monitoring for the special needs person.. A different angle is that somehow, in the West, the family unit has been morphed into something in the background.. many places in the world with dense populations rely on extended and long term family definitions to accommodate basic needs and special circumstances for individuals
So keep disability and aged care support, but drop all other welfare in favor of a UBI at around the poverty line or higher if budget allows? I can now see that working, and needing to pay care workers much more to get enough willing participants is probably a good thing.
I don't think we can rely on family or extended family any more. Even in countries with strong extended family and community support structures, people get left behind. And usually the people who need the most support, with mental illness or addiction or social problems driving others away.
I think however, that UBI may be worse than the Roman bread doles. Those were after all only food, but money are every kind of resource. There was also still a need for the client class, since they were in fact still a source of soldiers of the empire.
The change that UBI makes in modern times is that it changes people who are important and who co-operate in order to make things and get them to others are turned into just a cost which never produces anything. Consequently it'll always be appealing to get rid of them.
The only way ordinary people can survive is by having power, and UBI is not enough. If you need UBI you should probably have already had a revolution and seized control because the rulers can always end it.
Consequently I don't see how UBI can be a solution. It must be something else. I believe a reduction in working hours could work for a while, at least a decade, but won't be enough in the long run and I'm far from certain that there is a solution.
Another problem we've had here in Sweden is that people try to fund these things by taxing successful workers instead of capital owners etc., so it's a rebalancing within the working class while the genuinely rich are unaffected. Because any rebalancing of tax from ordinary people to the rich will cause inflation and reduced investment due to the fact that ordinary people spend a larger fraction of their incomes on consumer products it'll always be appealing to make this purely a rebalancing between workers.
Thus there isn't just one failure mode, but two.