France is a very bad example of UBI. I see it as a society where everyone expects their rights, but no one sees anything as their duties. People see all public (as in owned by the society) assets as responsibility of someone else, not themselves. In other words, it is a terrible place to implement UBI.
It is the worst type of selfishness: instead of "everyone should take care of themselves" it is "someone should be forced to take care of others, but not me". It is easy to see how that leads to the very bad Nash equilibrium of the tragedy of the commons.
Is that a product of the social support system, or is the social support system a product of that?
That being said, there is a lot that worked in the French system, specially around making maternity economically sustainable: France has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world, while maintaining a high female workforce participation rate. This should be copied by other countries, specially ones (such as Germany) facing a population crisis.
I agree on your point about innovation, I see France as a country far too worried about protecting its past: every tradition is sacrosanct and protected by law. When you protect the past, you outlaw the future.
As for maternity, it has to be seen if population growth is better than prosperity for happiness. The Swiss are at the other extreme: prosperity and aging population... yet they are the happiest in the world.
I'm not advocating for the French model (I do advocate the Swiss model), but to dissect it and try to adopt what works, ignoring what doesn't.
Of course, sometimes they're two sides of the same coin, so you can't have the cake and eat it too.
IMHO the largest problem humanity will face in the next 100 years might be decreased fertility rates. Unless our robot overlords solve that first.
Today we barely have the labor and productivity to assist the elderly, imagine if the situation worsens dramatically.
Sure, there's always the chance that AI and robotics and singularity will change everything and scarcity will be over and so one, but we shouldn't bet our chips on that.
We barely have the labor and productivity to assist the elderly for the same reason we barely have the labor and productivity to fix potholes on my street, or keep human waste out of a San Francisco alley (All while we sit at 7% unemployment.) We don't care to.
Compared to the problems of overpopulation, this doesn't even register as a crisis.
You're missing out on the dependency ratio. Take the Euro area, for example, today, for every 2 people in work age, there is 1 person being sustained (youth or pensioners), by 2060, for every 4 people in work age, 3 will have to be sustained, an increase of 50%, and it will be far more expensive than today, due to health care costs for the elderly.
Work age population will fall from 335M people today to 300M in 2060, while elderly will increase from 90M to 150M and youths will stay roughly the same.
So 35M fewer people paying taxes, and 60M more people needing support.
There are more empty homes in America then there are homeless people, but that doesn't mean that the richest country in the world cannot afford to have a roof over its head.
This is not even considering the easy way out, which is more immigration.
Not by much, and it's still not enough to renew generations.
France: 2.01
UK: 1.90
US: 1.88
Switzerland: 1.52
Germany: 1.38
Replacement rate for industrialized countries: ~2.1
Tragedy of the commons in the classical sense does not have a Nash equilibrium, because an actor can always chose to consume the extra unit of resources to benefit themselves more.
This lack of equilibrium is precisely why it's called a tragedy, because it inevitably leads to the over-exploitation (usually destruction) of the common good.
a) Use more resources: +1 for them, -1.5 for everyone else b) Use same resources: +0.5 for them, +0 for everyone else
There is only one Nash equilibrium: (a,a) with payout (-0.5,-0.5).
Repeat it again and again without cooperation and you have the tragedy of the commons.
Nash equilibrium isn't about a repeating game reaching equilibrium over time, but about the decisions multiple agents face in one specific round.
That outcome cannot be NE by your own given inputs, since both actors can improve their outcomes by switching to a different strategy.
The payout matrix is:
(-0.5, -0.5) (+1, -1)
(-1, +1) (+0.5, +0.5)
As you can see, from the [a,a] option, no agent can improve their situation by UNILATERALLY changing. In the case of [a,b], [b,a] and [b,b], one (or both) of the agents can always improve their own payout by switching from b to a.
So there's only one Nash equilibrium, at [a,a].
> I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice.
I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible.
> I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.
Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
[1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.
Then who is paying them?
Unless they are being payed by the government, they are obviously creating value for someone (their customers).
If the government gets involved, it's a different story; you have to pay for all government services whether you like them or not, and then the government (which doesn't efficiently respond to market demands) pays for a lot of things that aren't really worth as much to anyone as they cost, but the government buys them anyway because it's someone else's money.
I believe that quite a lot[0] jobs and companies do not create value for society, nor that they do create any value that is needed for anything else than perpetuating the market corner they're in. This is the kind of value that I personally care about.
Take marketing, which is my go-to example of industry that's increasingly a "loopy" kind. A lot of money goes into companies trying to outmarket one another, fighting over the same pool of customers. This here is a negative feedback loop that eats up increasing amount of resources for zero gain for the participants. Money for this often comes from marginal temporary gains (i.e. a company manages to sell more widgets before their competitors cancel out their marketing) and borrowing. The industry is big, so that the feedback loop is subdivided into many links forming a chain, one type of company doing work for another. Think about the graphic design studios that do work for on-line and off-line advertising. Their work is valuable to their direct customers (companies that run advertising for other companies), even though the whole value chain loops around and create little value outside of itself.
(Now add to that a lot of new adtech companies playing support roles, for which the business model is bullshiting their clients into believing their solutions actually make marketing more effective...)
The thing is, if most of the advertising industry suddenly disappeared, the world would not be worse off in any way except lots of people who suddenly found themselves unemployed. That kind of points out that a lot of those jobs were of the bullshit kind - a loops within the market that contribute nothing to society except providing employment.
Maybe in a perfect, efficient free market with no information asymmetry and spherical cows, such things would not be possible. But in real world, market is inefficient, and those inefficiencies is what lets such "loops" exist and grow.
[0] - I initially wrote "most", but I might be undercounting the amount of small businesses that support local communities; those are companies/jobs providing real value to a limited, local market, and there's probably very many of them.
So most of us create "value for people".
"Value for society" is perhaps "meaning"?
Baking bread has value, and no meaning: people pay for it, but it won't change the world -> it's a bad job, per your definition
People pay for bread to avoid cooking it themselves, and for the pleasure of delicious bread... Giving pleasure is getting closer to meaning, but it's an intrinsic feeling: only the baker can feel it, because made his bread with love.
But delicious bread is more expensive: maybe even "meaning" has a price... I think the "value" you're looking for, which is meaning, can be found in almost any job. A marketer can find meaning in a clever/funny ad instead of a phony one.
So don't expect to "find" meaning in a job, but add meaning to your job instead... and it will add value too ;-)
This is only true provided that a free and fair market exists.
Large corporations are often able to exact monopoly rents through a combination of outright monopolization of key resources or capital, favorable / gameable regulations, and by acquiring competition or substitutes, just to name a few strategies.
This means that you and/or your employer might not be adding value at all, but could actually be destroying value, just like any other sufficiently-ineffective bureaucracy.
I'm not sure that a concept drawn from explicitly utopian science fiction, whose creator also believed (for example) that workplace interpersonal conflict would cease to exist some time in the next three or four hundred years, is the best principle on which to attempt to develop a coherent real-world theory of economics or government.
Personally, I like to have this ideal that tells me people can get better every day, that we can make the world brighter for the future generation than we found it ourselves - than to keep looking at the real past and use its worst parts to excuse and justify perpetuation of wrong or evil behaviour. The latter is exactly what we're doing when we're saying "UBI smells too much like Soviet Union, so let's keep people working increasingly pointless jobs, hoping the Market will solve things before they all blow up in our faces".
Give people a UBI/healthcare cushion to fall back on, and then employers hire/fire people at will. Eliminate the minimum wage. Create a vicious job market with zero protections (other than safety, of course) that is geared entirely towards efficiency.
This will work out ok because a minimum wage will then occur naturally, because people will be able to make free decisions about whether it's worth it for them to work or not.
The real goal of UBI ought to be to collapse every other form of social welfare under its umbrella. Give people the basic resources they need to live: money and health insurance. After that, the name of the game is economic efficiency and productivity.
You have no choice to maintain some of the other social welfare programs since not everyone can live off just UBI (unless it's really high).
But both RSA and UBI need dirigisme. UBI is definitely a form of central planning, with a very wide reach, to shape the society, the people.
So UBI will never come with less dirigisme, but with more of it.
Disabled people will need more help than a fit 22yo guy for instance. Social benefits are individualized: UBI can't be the same for everyone and erase existing social benefits.
Also, governments HATE destroying public jobs ;-)
UBI probably for some extended time into the future would require some other social benefits, but to say that it requires "all" other social benefits is simply wrong. It wouldn't take a very high level of UBI to completely displace the need for existing General Assistance programs in the US, it would take a higher level to replace SNAP and TANF.
This is also a reason why it can be safer for a while to stay unemployed with no revenue than to work a low pay part time job.
Having plenty of kids might be the closest to a guaranteed financial help, except you actualy have plenty of kids and it's a workload and life style that you have to bare, and you still need to stay below a revenue limit.
I think not working in France requires a special set of skillset in itself. You need to be OK with a low cost life, stay away from any official and decently paid job, navigate the administration to find the right niche for you, and follow up with all the changes to stay in the sweet spot.
People with those skills will thrive in France, but most people are better off working and that's what they do.
Of them, about 1/4 receive it as a supplement to their low wage job.
Yes, the bureaucracy is daunting... and I don't pretend it's a life I'd like. I'm just saying it looks a lot like UBI and doesn't lead to prosperity nor happiness.
[1] http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/le-scan-eco/dessous-chiffres...
If it involves daunting bureaucracy, and how much you get depends on how little other income you have, such that only the less than 10% at the bottom of the income distribution qualify, it doesn't look a lot (or even at all) like a UBI.
RSA is a minimum income -- a kind of means-tested benefit of the type UBI is offered as an alternative to -- not something that looks at all like a UBI. The difference is that RSA has a 1:1 loss of benefits with additional income up to the RSA threshold (at which point the benefit is zero.)
UBI has no loss of benefits with additional income, which means that -- unlike a RSA-like minimum income -- additional income for someone earning less than the UBI benefit amount provides additional utility, while with a minimum income it does not. This is one of the problems with incentive and ability to improve one's own condition that is inherent to means-tested social benefit programs (and also a driver of bureaucracy in such programs) that UBI aims to address.
For instance, I could say:
" In 2013, child poverty reached record high levels in the U.S., with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households. Many of the neighborhoods these children live in lack basic produce and nutritious food. 47 million Americans depend on food banks, more than 30% above 2007 levels." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States)
That doesn't sounds like prosperity or happiness..
And I didn't say these statistics say anything about prosperity or happiness, but look higher in the thread: France has all sorts of UBI-like social benefits, and it doesn't bring happiness nor prosperity (that's what I wrote).
It seems to me that if you want to talk about happiness or prosperity, you have to compare it to other ways of organizing society (other countries), in other case, it's meaningless.
Actually France is the "other way of organizing society" (having something that looks a lot like Basic Income, see higher in the thread), and most other countries are "the baseline"... In this context, we observe no clear benefits (high unemployment, almost no growth).
Last time I checked (2 years ago), they were spending 12000€ annually for each and every homeless in France, which is great... Except they are still homeless, when this amount is similar to minimum wage (enough to NOT be homeless, and that's without social benefits). This money was basically wasted and didn't fix any problem.
So the point of heavy social programs is: people aren't happier, and in the end feel entitled to benefits... even when it downs the economy and employment.
The actual number is 2.53M families receiving RSA, with no soecific details on how many people by family (from the agency POV, the number of people actually doesn't matter much. They are taxed as an entity and receive RSA under the same conditions)
Now if you judge by the numbers, it's not really a success: high unemployment and low people satisfaction... plus even higher expectations about "the State". Administration is huge, costs a lot, and imposes a very rigid barrier between people and "the State": it's a country of bureaucrats. Employers and businesses are designated as "ennemies" in peoples minds, and the USA represents the ultimate Boss in the game.
In addition to RSA, France has every social benefits you can imagine... because RSA can't adjust to each situation: disabled? single mother? 6 kids? tough job?
So if you want to imagine your country with UBI, study France first. Then ask yourself if you'd like your country to be even more like France than France itself. A country where equality is the buzz word, and Liberty is totally absent of every speech.
I made the decision to leave this country because what I have in mind for my life is not 5 kids with no job... I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice.
I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.