> But when you recognize that income is the fuel that makes work possible, it’s easier to see that basic income will enable far more work for multiple reasons. For one, having basic income means that people can choose unpaid or paid work. It also means that people are more able to choose self-employment.
I think there is a cognitive bias in play here that the author has not realized: a bias towards believing people will think and act like they will.
I like to use the analogy of a moving walkway or escalator. Some people get on it and use it as an opportunity to go faster- I walk and it moves, so together I move really fast and get where I'm going sooner. Other people step onto it and stop. Usually it's moving even slower than they would be walking otherwise, but their goal isn't to get places faster, it's to do the least amount of work possible.
Those two extreme attitudes can apply to how people react to something like UBI. Some people will use it to accomplish more. Others will use it to put in less effort. And most people will be somewhere in the spectrum between those two.
I still think UBI is a good idea. I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.
It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical. Having an ideal and working towards it is a great way to make progress, but setting expectations based on ideals is a recipe for disaster
> It's basically the reason idealism/utopianism is never practical.
It is interesting how people can follow the same path and reach different conclusions. To me, UBI makes sense BECAUSE of decreased production. I do not want people who do not want to work a particular job to have to work at that job. I think we have enough food that nobody in this country has to go hungry, even if they choose to not work. Having these people at work does not help productivity (even though it might help production) where I define productivity as production per worker. In fact, I'd say if you reduce the worker base by a lot and only decrease production by a little, you have raised productivity.
Now we're right back to the exercise where we give everyone in class the average grade and see what happens. This punishes work.
Worse, economically speaking, UBI would get swallowed by the inflation it causes, and we have the worse problem of running out of other people's money to pay for UBI.
> Now we're right back to the exercise where we give everyone in class the average grade and see what happens. This punishes work.
Giving everyone an average grade isn't wrong because it hurts the kids who worked harder to learn. Those kids already have their reward. It's wrong because it hurts the kids who need extra help but now won't get it because their understanding is seen as equal to everyone else's and adequate when it isn't. We could eliminate grades entirely and it wouldn't matter at all so long as we ensured everyone actually had a solid grasp of the material.
If UBI is well implemented it actually would raise everyone to an acceptable minimum standard of living set by society. That would mean that everyone has shelter, food, clean water, and enough money to comfortably live, improve themselves, and pursue their own passions.
It doesn't punish work. There are always rewards for doing work that you find meaningful and so the people who work will still obtain those rewards.
> and we have the worse problem of running out of other people's money to pay for UBI.
That will never happen. Money is just a proxy. It's not even tied to anything meaningful anymore, it's just a ledger of credits and we all just put our faith in the ability to exchange those credits for actual goods and services.
The real fear with UBI is that we will run out of material goods. Right now, we have the resources to meet everyone's basic needs, but that will not always be the case. Clean water, healthy food, and even clean air are becoming harder and harder to obtain.
UBI is still a good idea while we can set and provide a decent standard of living, but it can't be sustained forever while the most basic resources we need for survival are being destroyed.
Sci-fi gets away with utopian societies because they are post-scarcity, but for us even drinking water is becoming increasingly scarce. UBI could help us to more efficiently manage what resources we have left until we are able to either reach a state of post-scarcity or push the timeline back by exploiting new reserves of resources by doing things expanding to other planets.
Post-scarcity doesn't exist in the real universe. It will always come down to energy, whether it is bound up into matter or not.
Providing actual necessities, instead of money, would be far better. Money is a proxy, and just giving it away makes it worth less... So you get inflation. Meanwhile, the people working are also drowned in the ever rising costs of funding UBI, and the ever rising prices from inflation. The government has financialized everything, and the bottom falls out when growth stops, which it always does, even if temporarily.
UBI may be a wealth transfer to the poor, who'd get first crack at the cash (unlike QE), but the overall economy is still devastated either way.
> Post-scarcity doesn't exist in the real universe.
It could... at least for the things that matter to our survival. There will always be scarcity for some things, like works of art, time, etc. Those things will always have a value and people will always work to obtain those kinds of things.
> Providing actual necessities, instead of money, would be far better.
Some amount of money will always be needed since people couldn't pursue their own interests or better themselves without it, but we could just give people houses and set up stores that didn't accept money for things food and medicine and household products. One nice thing about giving people money though is that it eliminates the problem of hording. If I can go into the store and take whatever I want without paying for it, what's to stop me from taking everything? Giving a set amount of money means people will have to budget it according to their needs and wants.
> Money is a proxy, and just giving it away makes it worth less... So you get inflation.
When people's basic needs are met, money can be worth less and it won't matter. The entire valuation of money will shift, but ultimately people will still set their own prices for the goods and services they provide. It doesn't matter if a loaf of bread cost $5 or $500. If you were a great architect and I asked you to design my new house you'd set your asking price accordingly. If owning a home designed by you were my goal, I'd look for work and set my asking rate accordingly. The economy would continue chugging along regardless.
> UBI may be a wealth transfer to the poor
That wealth is already being spent. We already know that it's much cheaper for taxpayers to give homeless people houses. That's not a wealth transfer to the poor though, it's putting money back into the pocket of taxpayers instead of burning it on problems we don't bother to take the time to solve. UBI could (in theory) save wealthy people a lot of money and more importantly, the money we aren't throwing away on dealing with the costs inherent to abject poverty can be put into making more wealth and improving things for everyone.
You see the problem here. As money continues to be worth less, UBI would have to increase to meet "people's basic needs." As UBI increases, inflation gets worse, until everyone is worse off, and UBI collapses.
If you want to destroy the middle class (which we've been doing a darn good job of), this would pour cement over the coffin.
UBI doesn’t stop people making more money. What it will do is help people be more mobile so they can find a job they like. The downside is people won’t spend 12 hours a day as an Amazon slave unless there is a financial reward commensurate to the employers demands.
Some people will participate simply because it is the only paying work available, some will participate because they need structure to their time.
Earning a wage is not comparable to earning a B in school. That B doesn’t put apples or oranges on the tables, earning a wage gives you both.
I was going to respond with the standard argument that UBI doesn't necessarily increase inflation. A sane UBI plan is revenue neutral -- you increase taxes so that the average taxpayer has taxes increase by exactly the UBI amount. Since the median taxpayer makes less money than the average taxpayer, the majority of taxpayers benefit, yet the UBI does not increase the money supply.
But the author advocates for printing money, so it's not a sane UBI plan.
No, it does not. I wouldn't call it a punishment. It forces people to rethink their priorities. Something about extrinsic motivation vs intrinsic motivation. What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning and do something?
I think UBI will open up a lot of vacancies and will do wonders in improving quality of life for workers who do want to do the job. Sure, the economy might contract a little but I don't think ordinary people like me need to worry about that.
> Sure, the economy might contract a little but I don't think ordinary people like me need to worry about that
Sure it would be just those “un-ordinary” people who have to to deal with the resulting stagflation and don’t really have the elite income generating job skills to be able to afford how much it costs to feed their family.
But I am sure they will continue to provide the manual labor needed to run our society…or they can just learn to code.
> I think we have enough food that nobody in this country has to go hungry
I think we have already solved the problem of food distribution in the US - hardly anyone dies of hunger these days. Happy to be corrected on that one, if you have contrary data.
I think we have also have cheap abundant housing as long as one doesn't want to live in highly desirable locations like Manhattan. And introducing UBI is not going to solve homelessness problem in Manhattan anyway.
> I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.
I suspect it will, but only because our current system demands a lot of very unproductive workers. There will no longer be people sitting at desks watching the clock and putting in as little effort as possible until 5pm. There are plenty of people on the moving walkway right now just coasting. With UBI people will choose their work. They'll be doing what they are passionate about it and will be free to move on to something else if they aren't. Cutting all that dead weight, should help productivity considerably.
I'm not an expert but I think some people believe (me included) that even if people become lazy because they have UBI, it's not a big deal, because the money the're "earning" will flow into the economy anyway (because they'll be buying food, Xbox games, etc...). The utopian idea is that they'll be inspired to do work to earn beyond UBI because of motivation (maybe it's because they want to help people, maybe it's to buy a fancy car).
>because the money the're "earning" will flow into the economy anyway (because they'll be buying food, Xbox games, etc...)
This betrays a lack of understanding of how the economy works. Goods come from people producing them. If less people are working, fewer goods are being produced, and thus there are fewer goods to go around. This leads to either inflation, or UBI payouts dropping.
As a simplified model, we can treat the purchase of consumable goods as using up a finite resource, which ultimately relates to human labour. The amount of effort put into creating xbox games is determined by the profitability of selling them, which is determined by the number of people who buy them. At the time when you buy the game, this labour has already been expended, but in the long term your action will cause more investment to be made into the development of video games. This investment will redirect effort - of programmers, designers, marketers, etc - from developing other products, towards making video games. You get less (or poorer quality) of the other thing, because you redirected effort into video games.
>The utopian idea is that they'll be inspired to do work to earn beyond UBI because of motivation (maybe it's because they want to help people, maybe it's to buy a fancy car).
Of course, some people will choose to do this. The difficulty comes is how this plays out on a generational level. Western countries broadly have below replacement levels of fertility. Individuals who don't work will have lots of time to raise children, and many of them will be motivated to do so. Their children would be liable to adopt their lifestyle. Thus, the number of people who are not working will grow at an exponential rate.
I think there is a cognitive bias in play here that the author has not realized: a bias towards believing people will think and act like they will.
I like to use the analogy of a moving walkway or escalator. Some people get on it and use it as an opportunity to go faster- I walk and it moves, so together I move really fast and get where I'm going sooner. Other people step onto it and stop. Usually it's moving even slower than they would be walking otherwise, but their goal isn't to get places faster, it's to do the least amount of work possible.
Those two extreme attitudes can apply to how people react to something like UBI. Some people will use it to accomplish more. Others will use it to put in less effort. And most people will be somewhere in the spectrum between those two.
I still think UBI is a good idea. I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.