I would assume the burden of proof to be on you (and supporters of UBI) to prove that opposite will happen and people won't just slack off once their basic necessities are covered.
Most people who have the opportunity now don't slack off once their basic needs are covered, though the marginal effort needed to go beyond that is greater than it would be with a UBI. It is UBI opponents who are positing something contrary to all human experience in arguing that people in general would stop seeking improvement in material condition if the marginal cost of that beyond basic survival were reduced by UBI, so I think the burden is on them to, at a minimum, a rationale for believing that to be the case.
Though dealing with concerns like this (which, rational or not, are clearly significant) is among the many reasons why I think a gradual phase-in of universal income, gradually phasing out means-tested safety net programs, is better than trying a radical transition.
So again, can you please provide objective evidence for your assertions? Eg. "vast majority remains productive in some capacity." - I have no idea whether its true or not. Why should I trust you when you haven't provided any data to support that claim?
This is only true if the existing system does not keep on worsening. As the technology progresses human working hours has become more and more. How is this even fair when the whole point of technology is to make human life easier. So the Burden is on the people who want the current system not to change.
What if it is impossible to bring the proof before the change has been tried? There is essentially no test scenario which can replicate, accurately simulate and predict the behaviour of people when millions of them suddenly receive a UBI.
At least if one agrees with the claim I just made, then following your logic, the change could never happen, for the simple reason as advanced proof of the effects is impossible to provide. So you would simply never find out if the proposed system would be better or worse than the current one.
Having said that, I do think the article makes a point worth considering.
... big changes could never happen... FTFY!
Which is what we are seeing: non-trivial health care changes happened in 2010 after 1965 (45 year gap), needed massive majorities in Congress and incurred huge political backlash. i.e. a smaller step was possible only after all the stars perfectly aligned.
Instead of volleying opinions back and forth, I think we would do better by discussing the ins and outs of current problems to which UBI is a single proposed possible solution.
How many well-off people that have their basic necessities covered just slack off?
Well to some level we can handle that right. If taxis are driving themselves, and other jobs get replaced by tech havent we liberated these folks?
If people want to work to feel useful great, but the point of technological advancement is that not everyone will have to.
However I do think their is a non-trivial risk that a Basic Income depending on how it is implemented can result in a sever limiting or loss of liberty. We have already seen that with the welfare system today, and in other segments of the legal system where basic human rights are under continual assault to the point that most people do not even recognize properly the level of oppression that exisits in the world as it is today. They have assimilated the general rules and laws into their lives to the point they no longer "miss" the freedom they lost, or the freedom was lost so long ago no one alive even remembers a time where the law or regulation was not in place. The most common manifestation of these can be found in things like Airport Security, Drug Raids, Police Checkpoints, and about 1000 other things I can list.
Any form of UBI will just be used as a wealth transfer to landlords that rent.
Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.
If you're going to make that argument you have to correct for the fact that many welfare state programs implicitly encourage people to slack off. If you're 'caught' going to school or taking courses, working part time or trying start your own business you can, in many cases, end up kicked off of welfare. Earning an extra dollar while on UBI will leave you with an extra dollar to spend. Earning an extra dollar while on welfare can in many cases leave you a lot worse off.
Also many welfare programs require you to jump through regular bureaucratic hoops that will eat up a lot of your time and energy. We don't really know what will happen if we remove those restrictions.
Edit: added "still"
Some welfare (aka workfare) does indeed require the unemployed person taking a full-time job, for which they are paid their jobseeker's allowance and no more, and if they refuse they get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom
I am not working in a menial job I hate or at a company that treats me like a human drone.
Further is not really about giving up your job, basic income is for people that will simply be phased out of the employment system due to automation, and other factors that simply will make them unemployable. They have no skills, not education, and often times will be unable to trained to do other more high skilled jobs
It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots
Maybe a future where nobody has to do those things isn't a bad goal. We don't have ten year olds breaking coal in the mines any more, nor do we have a peasant/slave class whose masters can beat them with impunity.
"It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots"
Yes. So what do you propose we do about those people?
I think that is what we "do about those people"
I completely agree it will be a good day where you do not have people burning out their bodies in 40 years from working on the factory line then having to work another 25 years in pain because they can not afford to retire due to the low pay...
The problem is, today we just simply tell these people "get a job you loser" and assume anyone that can find said job is simply too lazy to work
With no basic income, and very limited welfare we have a massive problem today, that will grow exponentially in the coming decades unless we do something like Basic Income
The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits -- not to leave a small elite in work while the rest are reduced to idleness.
I am aware, my comment on retraining is that most times when I am involved in a conversation about Job Displacement enviably people respond by claiming everyone can just be retrained as a programmer.
As a programmer and sysadmin myself I am fully aware of the current state of the Job market for IT workers both on the operations side and the development side. I also know right now if a programmer can not find work it is often because they are unwilling to relocate to a market where the jobs are, and I am not just talking Silicon Valley which IMO is about the worst place to look for a job as a Dev right now.
>>>The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits
The purpose of Basic Income is to provide people a basic income to cover the necessities of life including Food, Shelter, etc. Allowing them freedom to persue other economic opportunities that will provide them with a higher standard of living,and to take some economic risk including possible starting small business or working for higher risk employers with out having to worry about their rent or if they will eat that day.
Because it's already happening
Most people don't have the skills to get a better job neither they have the will
Look at the numbers of hartz IV in Germany
The choice is a basic income or a shitty job with no basic income
And they are almost forcing people to work in what they call "mini jobs" to lower the number of unoccupied people, but it's not really working
If they could all have a basic income, regardless of working or not, they would not work, but have more children and more income for the family
I use to be a proponent of UBI, but now I genuinely fear what it would do to society at large.
I knew that it couldn't last forever, that I needed an education / skill and a career. UBI changes that and IMO, incentivizes failure to launch.
Ultimately, I think UBI is both a launchpad for high performers and a cage for those not so talented. I think our focus should be on building employment opportunities for everyone, instead of giving up prematurely and creating such a bright lined class system.
If people want to live on the bare minimum and hunt and fish with the rest of their time, more power to them. They value their time doing those activities more than the money they can trade for it. But when they get tired of it or want something more they'll have the freedom to pull themselves out. There might be a bright line, but it will be easy for anyone that wants to step over whenever they feel like it.
The vast majority of people are already living a fulfilling basic existence
It's the minority of people from big cities and great ambitions that maybe would not like it
1. If people can get a lot of money just by working hard, why don't they already have a lot of money, but rely on the UBI?
2. For people that's really poor and can only live on UBI, well, more money is never a bad thing, but they can live without the money. That's what they had been doing all this time after all.
1) Because, right now, there is a huge market distortion that is difficult to see because we've been living with it since we've invented agriculture and specialization -- people must earn money to live. This is a market singularity with a rapid drop off. If you need water within the next hour or you will die, you will pay anything to get it from whomever has it. If you will be homeless in three weeks unless you come up with rent it loses a bit of urgency but you might find yourself selling your time for less than it is worth under conditions that aren't so existentially dire. If that horizon is pushed out to three months then it might be remote enough that it only occurs to you every once in a while how important it is to keep a steady income.
Those that are continually on the brink of disaster constantly have to worry about a very short time horizon until their existence, or, at the very least, living without pain, is threatened. It is like a weight on the other side of the scale for them. And worse, the people and entities negotiating on that side of the scale know it. So, they offer just enough to keep them alive and struggling. It is not in their best interest to offer more. So these people on the brink remain on the brink, selling what little they have (time , usually) for less than it would be worth without that distorting weight on the other side of the scale.
This is very difficult for people who have not been in that situation or who have not been in that situation or who have outside support structures to keep them from that state to understand. If they don't think about the full context of the decision and the invisible but very real cost of the alternative to a negotiated agreement then it is very easy to think that everyone is making the same choices with the same freedoms. Most need to work to eat, after all, right? But they discount the time horizon, the urgency, and the expectations of future income that they might enjoy compared to someone else.
2: Anyone can live without money much money as long as basic needs are met. Some might enjoy their free time so much that no matter how much they can make if they give some up they would refuse. But, for the reason of the distortion I described above, a huge swath of the poor and working poor aren't being offered enough to get ahead, just enough to keep afloat. So now the choice is 'work your ass off and barely stay afloat or have lots of free time and barely stay afloat'. I know which I'd choose.
But you can't if you have to go to work in the city
In general, women already prefer even amateur musicians, athletes, etc. over couch potatoes.
For example, it's a 'universal' income right? Do people still get it when they're in prison for rape/murder? How about in jail for a few weeks on shoplifting? What if a citizen is living in another country? What if they're here illegally? Do you get one for each kid the moment they're born? What if the kid is born in the US and parents are illegal immigrants? And just how much UBI should everyone get? Your answers to these questions will not agree with your neighbor's answers.
A UBI would become more corrupt than anything else we've seen because there will be even more power in it. The power hungry will seek it and corrupt it because we will never agree on who has a right to that giant pile of money.
In what ways would UBI be different?
Basic income will certainly (in its initial implementation and with any increases) have some effect on price levels of goods, increasing the prices of goods demanded more by net beneficiaries and reducing those demanded disproportionately by those who are net payers in whatever the funding mechanism is.
But those should be such that the net beneficiaries still have increased buying power and the net payers have decreased buying power.
Government deficits¹ generate inflation, what is a completely orthogonal concept to UBI.
1 - Among a few other factors, but the deficits are the one relevant here.
I agree that inflation is a synthetic construct and doesn't necessarily need to exist. However, it persists because regardless of what name we assign the effect, it is a truism that market forces are never in perfect equillibrium so we'll always have some degree of inflation or deflation. Inflation is not an instantaneous metric, instead relying on prior and publically available CPI data (1) via the Bureau of Labor Stats site.
In general, as wages increase, the increase in buying power drives demand, driving increased product prices (2). Price increases are difficult to reverse. So, the OC is correct to question the impacts of UBI on inflation. I think it will increase inflation at inception, but the impact would probably quickly wane as UBI becomes standard (Caveat: I am strong against UBI for other reasons, I'm just making a point about inflation here)
Needless to say, plenty of discussion on this specific topic is found (3) by performing a search of the world wide web (www).
1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/headline-inflation.asp
2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
3. http://basicincome.org/news/2016/11/will-basic-income-cause-...
Indeed not.
> It is /basic/, which is to say, it will cover the basic necessities.
Honestly, I think this is one of the fundamental mistakes UBI proponents make: proposing the idea that there is some particular level that UBI should reach.
UBI is much more coherent of an idea if the "basic" is recast as representing simply a baseline, rather than targeting basic necessities, which are, critically, not a fixed target anyhow, but a moving baseline determined by social expectations, which UBI itself will affect.
> The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons. Mostly, ignores a lot of basic observations of human behavior and the difference between UBI and the systems it displaces:
(1) People strive for more material wealth, so long as that provides perceived marginal utility (there's some evidence that beyond certain very high incomes -- IIRC, studies ~10-20 years ago had this in the neigborhood of $200K/yr in then-current dollars in the US -- but even so people strive for more when they have that much because of perceived utility.)
(2) People's expectations and self-perceived "basic needs" are strongly influenced by comparison to others visible in their society, not merely absolute conditions; UBI improves the absolute condition of those without capital or labor income, but it doesn't remove the incentive to strive for more (in fact, compared to a system with a means-tested safety net, it increases it.)
(3) Capital income is still a thing with UBI: this is perhaps them most significant oversight in UBI criticism. Its true that UBI is often posed as a protection against a world in which an ever increasing share of the population is unable to find work with significant value, reducing (at least, in a relative sense) the income of workers, it is not intended for a situation where there is no opportunity to strive for more. Between UBI and what people can make from work, there are opportunities to acquire capital, which is the route to development which remains open even if labor opportunities become scarce.
(4) But labor opportunities won't disappear in the near term, though many may pay less per hour (especially at the entry level.) But UBI makes lower-pay labor both viable (by providing support which isn't removed with additional labor income) and legal (as it is usually posed as replacing minimum wage -- I personally prefer a phase-out where minimum wage is reduced as UBI ramps up), which increases rather than decreasing work opportunities.
> We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution.
Well, UBI won't drive that, at any rate, and largely opposes it. There's a very good argument that the first part is largely true, and you could argue that the one thing that's been happening in recent years is the fine tuning of just how little is necessary to hit just the point where the second half is true, too.
Looking at what's already happened, one can only say it's the most probable outcome.
Look at what happened in USSR.
Or what happens right now in Switzerland where pay checks are so high that almost nobody works at 100%, they all have some kind part time job.
Any other assumption is, well, an assumption, and a risky one.
Doesn't Switzerland have high productivity and wealth? Does it matter that people are just working part time there or is that a Really Good Thing (do we all need to be working 40+ hours?)
They had a system where every citizen had an income, no matter what
The difference is that you could not make more than that
> Doesn't Switzerland have high productivity and wealth?
No, Switzerland salaries have been rising a lot in the past 20 years, but labour productivity has been slowly but steadily going down.
Most of the salaries are high compared to siblings western countries (for example Italy, where I come from) but they are just enough to live in Switzerland.
So the answer is no: not everybody needs to work 40 hours a week, they just need to work enough to gain a basic income that's enough to have a decent life.
In Zurich a 40 sm (430 square foot) costs between 1.600 and 2.300 euros/month.
In Italy that's a very good salary. And you can rent a house of more than 100 sm (1,000 sf) in the centre of a big city like Rome or Milan.
Switzerland recently rejected the idea of an UBI set at 2,500 Swiss francs/month =~ 2.100 euros, in Italy for many families that's around 2 salaries.
Imagine being Swiss, having more than 2 thousand euros of UBI from your country and living in Italy. A family of 2 could afford a villa in Como lake, next to George Clooney have his.
The same can be said for someone receiving an UBI in Bay Area and Missisipi.
Making it work is already very hard, making it right is next to impossible.
Pretty big difference. A core difference, as a matter of fact.
Switzerland has the 9th highest GDP per capita (higher than the US) in the world. They rank 4th in a tight bunch at the top of the world happiness index. It seems that UBI hasn't collapsed their country or turned it into a dystopian tyranny.
Not as much as you think
USSR collapsed under war debts and lack of freedom, not because people wanted more money
And the first notable consequence were people dying for home made vodka: they couldn't afford to buy vodka in the stores and poisoned themselves
> It seems that UBI
They rejected it!
That's why it did no harm
> Switzerland has the 9th highest GDP per capita
It matters only if you, as I said, live outside Switzerland
It's the 9th highest GDP per capita, but it probably ranks higher for living cost
If you live there, as I did, I can assure you that for your basic needs 30,000 Swiss francs (around 31,000 USD) are barely enough to survive
40 minutes away there's Italy, Milan, where 30,000 euros/year is more than enough to have a decent life
Don't you think this would put some pressure on Swiss borders?
It's what happened when Schengen allowed people to go to Berlin and live on allowance
UBI is a delicate matter, it make citizen dependent on the state providing, without giving bak
Now we in Europe have a pretty decent public health care, superior to the US one, and a pretty decent state welfare
It's based on the fact that everybody is contributing (well, if we don't count tax evasion, but that's a different matter) in proportion to their personal income
if a small part of the population is gonna live on UBI (say 15%) and nothing else, it's gonna put even more pressure on taxation of the productive segment of the population, which is already heavily taxed (in Italy on average is 47%, in Denmark it can reach a wobbling 60%)
It would destroy welfare as we know it
I'm not against, but I don't share the enthusiasm
I would be very careful
The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity.
I think the opposite will happen: once people have the basics taken care of they will become more economically active. They will take risks they couldn't before because of the overhanging risk of complete destitution. They will negotiate for better wages because everyone will know they have a perfectly viable alternative. They will invest time in themselves because they won't have to worry about how they will live if they don't have a job while they study or launch a business.
Further, there will be more money sloshing around and creating broad-based demand for goods and services that these self-same people can try to capture through their own industriousness.
I strongly believe that we have as many on welfare right now because we have a huge sector of our population that have the following choice: live in poverty on welfare with lots of free time or live in poverty while working your ass off treading water. And the reason they remain in poverty is that their employers know that there isn't a great alternative for those marginal employees so they pay just enough to keep their employees afloat but not enough that they can get ahead. UBI or negative income tax (my personal preference) would deeply change this calculus. People could spend their time and energy to truly better their situation rather than merely not lose everything.
We're not going to turn into a banana republic where only the economically elite and the political class keep each other happy and everyone else are kept just happy enough to avoid revolution. There isn't a lot of democratizing of economic power in those regimes.