And as this equilibrium shifts in favor of the wealthy, you'll see the effects of inequality get more and more exacerbated. You might even get to a point where the inequality is so extreme, that the "masses" have much more to gain through wealth appropriation, as opposed to wealth creation. And when that point comes, democracy will collapse and give way to a communist or fascist revolution.

Basic income offers an escape valve to the corrosive effects of inequality. It distributes more fairly the fruits of globalisation and automation. It gives every citizen a share in the national prosperity. It gives us all a reason to cheer for the greater good, and not just our own advancement.

I think this hits the nail on it's head; opponents of basic income (usually rich or might-become-rich people in my experience) do not see this clearly. We would be able to cheer for greater good as we do not have to struggle for money anymore in our own tiny world of our household.

I think that UBI would be a good plan with or without robots taking over. But robots forces us into it as people will simply die; sure there might be some other jobs (although I think this revolution is so different than past ones that it will not happen like that, but we can only see as everyone of their generation says this) but for many people these jobs will come too late or are not achievable.

In the factories we work with, most people were replaced by robots, there are only a few people in the very big buildings. Some of the assembly line people I did speak to because I was curious, but really, they have no up potential: they cannot do anything else but actual robot work. I would be highly surprised (and so would the owner of the factories who tried this) if anyone could retrain them for a non robot like task. These people will not die (I am told) in China as thr gov find something for them, like standing on a street corner to watch the traffic or sitting in front of a building to see who goes in and out (but nothing else: not like a porter), but in many other countries it means you cannot buy food or pay rent. And that is it without UBI.

I am in no way for a distribution of wealth equally; we know that will not work as countries tried, but we are now at a complete opposite and that does not work for many either. When there are less (well paid) jobs it will not work for most suddenly.

The greatest danger is that people may be comfortable near the BI level until they are about 30, and not really work or educate themselves much (lacking motivation). Then, they want to have a family, and all of a sudden their desires for consumption skyrocket. They can't just join the workforce then, because it will be 10 years before they advance enough to get what they want.

Then you have a bunch of undereducated, inexperienced people who want a lot of stuff.

I'm not saying it will happen, but we have to be careful.

A direct, fixed cash transfer will never, ever have the properties you suggest. It's sort of the point of money that people can allocate it according to their priorities. You'll have a hard time stopping someone from taking a 100 fewer sqft apartment in exchange for a smartphone. Or colluding with the landlord to kick back part of the rent reimbursement in exchange for a smaller apartment.

To get what you're talking about, the government would have to directly issue housing, food, and clothes, or run another one of its extremely complicated and unintended-consequence-laden means-testing systems to tailor the amount of cash transferred for your exact situation a moment-to-moment basis, if it wishes to give you exactly enough cash to buy the things on your list and no others.

Once it's playing this game, you've lost the small government/simplicity/low overhead aspect which caused many to favor UBI over the existing welfare state. A UBI like you suggest is really not UBI, it's just government-issued basic necessities, an idea with substantially less traction.

The weird requirements are there to satisfy impulses like yours: make sure that we only give welfare to the truly needy, and to make sure that their lives on welfare are not too good. The whole idea of UBI is to replace that with an unconditional transfer of a fixed amount of cash to every person.

If it's a fixed amount per person, people who choose less desirable housing will have more purchasing power for luxuries. I claim that any attempt to counter this effect will quickly devolve into another system of "weird rules," probably subvertible, and certainly with unintended consequences. For example, what if I am cohabiting and want to stop? Do I need to justify to the state that it must now house me and my partner separately at twice the expense? What if I'm faking the separation in order to rent out "my" apartment on the black market and keep living with my partner? What if I'm being abused? What if I'm sick of exurban Iowa and my "grandmother" "needs" me to take care of her in Haight-Ashbury?

The insight of UBI is that the government's attempt to untangle questions like this is doomed to fail, and attempting to do so is an unacceptable degree of interference in private life, so it should not try.

From what you're saying, I'm pretty sure you actually oppose UBI, and just want changes to the existing means-tested, strings-attached welfare system.

In what way is this anyone's business? In a UBI system, you get, say, $600 a month. That's it. It's cash. No one is asking what you're spending it on. If you want to stop living with someone, you just... do it. Like you do currently. Can't manage it? Get a part-time job on the side to pad your wallet enough to do what you want.

Not trying to bash you, but I think you're misunderstanding the basic concept and assuming a level of government attention that isn't part of the equation.

'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing

Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula that gives you exactly the amount of money it takes to buy X amount of housing, food, etc.

But then you can always turn around and bunk with a friend and then spend it all on luxuries and video games, or secretly move someplace cheaper to live and pocket the extra money. So either you allow people to nakedly game the system, or the government is now in the business of monitoring where normal people live.

There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians. Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half.

You'd need to tailor this figure per person.

Like, if the rule is you get median housing no matter what zip code you happen to live in, then there's no downside to picking the most expensive zip code in the nation and choosing to get UBI there. OTOH, if you define limits, then government has made some zip codes effectively UBI-free.

A person receiving UBI who lived in San Francisco proper and got free housing would essentially get 5x - 10x effective benefit than someone living where rent is $500 / month. Cue the inevitable conflicts over who gets to live where, and caps on what level of UBI will be provided.

But conversely, if the UBI benefit were a fixed monetary amount, then you'd be consigning UBI beneficiaries to never live in an expensive area where urban professionals work, so you would create a geographical and social divide where UBI recipients are consigned to live in low-income slums.

I don't see any way to resolve these dilemmas that would make all people happy, unfortunately.

A "low-income slum" is not a problem so long as people can live decently. It's "universal" so everyone receives it, what differentiates people in low-income areas will be that they inherited no capital and have no means of acquiring capital which is a problem that already do exist, so I don't really see your point.

Areas that are expensive to live in also have a need for jobs like cleaning the streets. If people have the choice of living somewhere cheap on UBI then the pay for lower skilled jobs in these expensive areas will have to rise to get people to take them. I would expect the cost of this to have to come from higher property taxes in these more expensive areas which could act to bring down the difference in costs between the different areas.

I absolutely agree. I'd push it further though. Not just children but anyone who is not in a capacity to freely spend the money. To make a contrived example, someone may not simply kidnap a person and take their universal basic income.

I go farther to say that local/state/federal government may not take the money for people in their custody. There ought to be some way to protect it from being garnished as well.

I think we should not oversell this. There might be a lot of people who are perfectly content with being able to survive and get by. If they do not want to participate further in the economy, I think we should say that's fine. The ax I have to grind in this is that maybe if people are not scared of starving to death after leaving a job they don't like doing, maybe we will have more people doing jobs they do like doing and maybe just maybe me and others will have a better shot at doing what we love doing even if it is at a slightly lower (after taxes) pay than before.

At $1500/mo for everyone in the US, that comes to just shy of 6 trillion USD. For comparison, the total federal tax revenues for 2016 are going to be approximately 3.5 trillion USD, including payroll taxes.

At $1500/mo/person, this one program would present 5/3rds of all federal tax revenues.

A more realistic figure is probably much closer to $650/mo, assuming you take ALL of the current federal spending on healthcare, social security, veteran's benefits, pensions, and welfare and direct it into UBI. This says nothing of the legality of cancelling existing or contractually promised federal pensions, nor the morality/practicality of changing the existing social security and Medicare systems, of course.

$650/mo/person still leaves us with a deficit (as today) and is a pretty meager existence for sure!

Nevertheless, the money is going to come from somewhere and that somewhere is taxes. It would be unreasonable to not calculate the total sum of taxes required for various levels of UBI funding, IMO.

It is the same way infrastructure investment works. Nobody wants to do it because the upfront bill looks big. But the decades long projection of efficiency of most high-demand projects would eclipse the cost by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile special interests (mainly those who would not immediately benefit from the infrastructure themselves) keep phrasing the conversation around "how much it will cost" these projects never get done, and the national economy suffers as a whole for it.

If not, you need to plan spend less than double what you're currently spending.

This is the reason I think UBI will be disastrous, but it's going to take a generation or two for the rot to set in.

Worse than that, lots of people have no choice, they inherited no capital and thus can't afford to educate themselves to get a good job since they need to work to supply for themselves and their families, effective UBI would give those people breathing room to work/study what they want and actually achieve enough to have a good family.

it's already happened, and it caused the subprime mortgage crisis and the college debt crisis. not to mention the up-and-coming problems of payday loan debt, credit card debt, and subprime auto loans.

It's already kind of happening with startups; to a significant extent, startups are essentially luxury goods for the super-rich. They've become a collectible/status symbol. Like a yacht or a private jet. Wealthy investors love to brag about all their big exits.

If income inequality and unemployment gets too great, maybe there's a phase transition. In that case, a little bit of communism could help alleviate the pressure.

Regardless of whether you believe it could actually work, it certainly means that it's not absurd to consider, at least not for the reasons you've stated.

True - as a whole. But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer.

My concern is this. In ten years time, trucks and taxis will be automated, and vanishingly few truck drivers will be able to retrain as truck computer techs. Truck and taxi driving is the last bastion of badly-educated men, (apart from the military, but automation will be gutting military employment too). So we're going to have a huge (many millions) population of (to generalise horribly) redneck men who like guns and feel worthless.

Even now, 2/3s of gun death in the US is that exact demographic suiciding. I believe these guys gave Trump his victory, and when they realise even he's let them down, those that don't kill themselves are going to revolt.

A UBI could be part of the solution to this nightmare, because it would take the economic aspect out of the equation. It would mean unemployment lost its stigma, because at least some people chose to do their own thing (playing music, carving wood, reading at schools) instead of working for the man. So it would become socially acceptable not to have a paying job.

Sadly I think it's very unlikely to happen, unless the rich figure out that their wealth is going to be redistributed violently if they don't do voluntarily.

Increasing automation of lower skilled jobs has been going on for a long time. It's hard to see that correlating with any increase in the suicide rate.

I don't believe you are analyzing this considering the context. What that implies is that we have not made any significant advances in preventing suicides and treating the root causes despite the many resources being allocated to it.

In the last 50 years, there has been more total wealth and prosperity. Most importantly, there has been a revolution in how mental illness is viewed by not only medical professionals, but by society at large, and we have developed better treatments for it From suicide hotlines to modern police training that includes how to deal with the mentally ill.

The curve SHOULD be trending and that is isn't is a potential cause for worry.

There has already been civil revolting in recent times. The police being shot at during the BLM stuff is what it looks like. The days of organising a 'continental army' and taking the current government head on are long gone (in developed countries, at least). Making an organisation large enough to even start to annoy the US military would be nipped in the bud long before it happens. But there will be lots of small-scale or individual revolting.

The methods of government in the US are not going to change (eg: the Electoral College) because fairer systems would work against the current parties in power, and changing the constitution itself is extremely difficult, even for something as conceptually simple as 'no more alcohol' ('new electoral process' doesn't stand a chance). So, barring massive social disaster, things will carry on as-is. Trump will do a lot of damage to convention and will highlight lots of edge-cases, but the underlying systems will barely move.

There will be revolts, but it's not going to change anything structurally.

Do you really think this will be possible in a decade? With the advances in technology such as the military robots, you yourself describe, it seems increasingly unlikely.

I agree with this sentiment. Looking into the (very long term) future, it's interesting to look at a fictional post-scarcity society (Star Trek) (with a grain of salt - it's really the writer's imaginations and what you see in the movies/shows) and see what the impact would be. My key takeaways are:

* everyone still works, or studies, and the culture is that you still contribute to society rather than sit around and do nothing. This requires a significant culture change from our current society.

* They often visit colonies and planets that are decidedly not post-scarcity - they are often poor or middle-class colonies, with an agricultural bent. In theory this shouldn't be the case in a post-scarcity society, but it becomes apparent that there's still a cost (resources and time) associated with production and transport unless you want to be ruled by AI overlords.

I'd say you're more likely to find that kind of worker here than most other forums on the net.

If (a) is true, people will still work (because they want money above their UBI), and will still create progress (i.e. little will change). I'm not sure how (b) connects. Perhaps it assumes people will do less work towards automation under UBI?

I would like to think people will still work on UBI. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage that don't is similar in some respects to drug use in those places where all drugs have be decriminalized (and perhaps similar to true unemployment numbers now). There is a question of what people will do with their freedom to choose what they will do. Would we get more and more creative art? More inventions and entrepreneurs? More things that are "useful" (by whatever metric: technological progress, preservation of the environment, internal well-being e.g.) or less?

Trying to speculate seems fairly silly, though perhaps one could look to history (patronage, for example). I think it'd be even more silly to think we have things right right now (esp. considering fairly objective things like suffering that could be prevented or environmental damage that could be checked) and the idea should be given a shot at least in a limited setting.

My point is, until recently, I believed it was absolutely the only way forward, we wouldn't be able to avoid it, because this time "robots will really steal our jobs". My realizations imply that this is not the only way forward, even if robots take 100% of the currently existing jobs.

There is no such thing as trickle down economics. Wealth does not get distributed in equal to its gain, it is distributed based upon many other markets. For example, if your company makes double this year, you're not going to get paid any more than you were, but if what you said was true, you should be getting paid near double. Infact, how much wealth your company makes has little to do with how much you will be paid when it comes to investment. You're going to get paid what you can negotiate for, which will be competative to the market of other individuals. Just because your company is doing good does not mean they're going to pay anywhere near double for their employees when they can get them at market rate, which is always pressured to be lower.

The products also don't have to be cheaper. Infact I don't know of any good examples of automation making things cheaper that aren't just competing with other products. Products do not have to be priced near what they cost to make, as examplified by apple products and tech in general. They're priced to what people give it value, which is manipulated by advertising and patents/copyrights that give them the ability others need or want.

The historic share of labor as a % of GDP is pretty constant. It has dipped slightly in the last ~15 years and some people see this as the beginning of a major change but that's highly speculative.

What time scale are we talking about? I'm pretty sure that 5000 years ago, labour was close to 100% of GDP. I'm equally sure that it's well down below 20% now.

And no, it's not at 20%. More like a bit over 50%. If you take out depreciation and gov't because what you really care about is return to capital & labor it's about 30/70.

Apple and tech in general are actually a good example of my point. Why is it that in several third world countries, lacking basic sanitation for a large part of the population, it's so common to see people in slums with last generation smartphones and big flat screen TVs?

What I meant about everyone getting richer is not that the money flows equally, but that when you need less money to buy goods and services you are, in a way, richer. Another example is Uber: I don't get a single dollar of what they make, but I have access now to a service that it wasn't accessible before (taxi cabs).

Problem 1: the economic notion of value is weighted by wealth, but the notion of "human desire" you discuss is not. Entertaining a king is valuable, in the economic sense, but feeding and housing a poor is not. It doesn't matter if there are plenty of things that people want to be done, it matters if there are plenty of things that people with money want to be done. If all the money flows into a few hands, the demands of the many do not count towards stimulating the economy, and the economy is not stimulated.

Problem 2: leverage. The economic value you create is an upper bound to what you earn, not a lower bound. The lower bound is determined by your next best option, which effectively, in light of correlated risk, means there is no lower bound. The service you provide may be critical to the functioning of society, but if you are easily replaced, well, you aren't going to earn very much. In other words, even if demand increases exponentially forever, and you play a critical role in satisfying that demand, the economy does not guarantee that you will be able to extract money for yourself out of the process. See: crowd of artists trying to pawn their wares off on the king. Also, farmers.

Problem 1 and problem 2 combined are what make the "capitalist dystopia" a plausible, stable, and terrifying state of affairs.

Problem 3: deregulation does not necessarily return markets to a pristine state of natural excellence. No such state exists. Quite the opposite, in many cases. Regulatory capture is a real problem, a big problem, but it's only one of many factors that lead to sclerotic, anti-competitive markets. I'm regularly floored by people's ability to talk about network effects, economies of scale, information asymmetries, moats, winner-takes-all games, and mergers/acquisitions with one breath -- all of which are non-regulatory market forces that suppress competition and innovation -- and then with the next breath assert that deregulation is the most straightforward way to spur innovation and competition. See: Enron, where deregulation of the energy markets led to artificial supply shutdown (the infamous rolling blackouts) in order to drive prices higher and profit. Listen to the recordings of the traders literally giggling as they order plants offline, and tell me again that deregulation is a cure-all. Sometimes more regulation leads to better functioning markets. Utilities are the canonical example.

It's the natural mechanism that balance demand and supply, and ensure we'll always have enough food for everyone. It's the natural incentive that draws more people to an area that is under-served (e.g. IT) and away from another that is over-served (e.g. farming). The examples may not be the best possible, but you get my point.

About deregulation: I agree it's not a single factor, but it's a pretty important one on the subject of "creating new jobs". I understand there are several other factors getting in the way of a competitive market, but monopolies aren't all created the same. The kind of monopoly that Facebook or Google have is not the same kind of a state-enforced monopoly which rules out competition by force of the law.

I understand how markets balance supply and demand and I consider the injustice of its methods to be a necessary evil for which I have no substitute. That wasn't my original complaint, however. Rephrased in terms of supply and demand, my complaint was that the market's insistence on weighting demand according to wealth made it inherently inept at addressing unweighted demand (i.e. the actual needs of the people). I have no trouble believing that the market will continue to meet wealth-weighted demand. I am much less certain that it will continue to meet unweighted demand. We've seen it fail before, but only in pockets. I fear that automation may eventually see it fail on a much wider scale.

> monopolies aren't all created the same. The kind of monopoly that Facebook or Google have is not the same kind of a state-enforced monopoly which rules out competition by force of the law.

We are in agreement then. Perhaps not on the relative magnitude of the various problems, but it's a start.

As long as human beings can use their muscles and brains in the time to change outcome of some events and as long as people vary in their ability to do so, I think jobs will always exist.

That term is meaningless. An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem. The bottom 5% in USA today are living lives much better than middle class Americans of 1917. There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

Precision of the sort you seem to be after would come at the cost of inviting people to bicker over where exactly the line should be drawn, when the precise location of the line is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making.

> An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

Looks like you didn't need an invitation. Don't let me stop you. The rabbit hole of defining "good enough pay to survive and thrive" goes much deeper than conditioning on geography.

> If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem.

You're still just putting words in my mouth.

> There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

Quite right. The problem is that while the news is positive in aggregate, a large pocket of people have experienced a severe regression in the quality of their social contract, and we have good reason to fear that the phenomenon will spread. History counts in the market's favor, but past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

No, actually. The economic notion of value is subjective. Economic thought, despite popular perception, does not view value in purely monetary terms. Instead, value is seen as subjective: something is valuable because humans value it. Human desire is the very definition of what makes something valuable.

I don't deny that there is a notion of value apart from the economic one, in fact I would even go so far as to argue that the terms "economic value" (and "market value" etc) give markets entirely too much credit by suggesting that economic value and market value do a halfway decent job of approximating or approaching the philosophical notion of value, which is the term I'd ascribe to your definition and to general use of the word "value" without additional qualifiers.

http://www.efi.int/files/attachments/e45/meetings/31hanemann...

Yes, it is often defined in terms of money. That is because if you actually value something you would be willing (but not neccessarily able!) to pay for it.

But let's not get bogged down in an untractable argument over the meaning of words. My point really boils down to: economics does concern itself with value which is different than the market value. They study the cases where the market value will refect people's true perferences, and when it will not.

The more concerning problem which comes up in this article is that you cannot have both UBI and lax immigration/easy freedom of movement. The first country to institute a UBI would be quite appealing to the billions of people living in destitute poverty, and they would all want to emigrate, making it almost impossible to get into the country. How do you decide who gets in? Do you require the person was a citizen for 18 years before qualifying? You certainly can't have open borders or the welfare system would quickly be overrun.

This assumes the existence of a "good" distribution of generated wealth. This tends to not be the case.

How does that factor into your thoughts?

You don't need a direct money transfer from big companies to benefit from them.

Perhaps it is the case that what the market decides is best for people who cannot perform any task more efficiently than a computer is to simply stop being powered.

I love what I do and don't intend to stop anytime soon, but when the time comes that I do want to stop, I want to make sure there's more than ample money in the retirement and investment accounts to fund our lives post-career.