True. In addition, from an employer's perspective, it unlocks easy employment of people without massive commitment from either side.

Can I do a few hours work for this guy without losing my unemployment? Yes.

Can I employ this person for a few hours without having to pay them while on paternity leave to make sure their kid gets a good start to life? Yes.

> Can I do a few hours work for this guy without losing my unemployment?

UBI doesn't really make sense as a replacement for unemployment insurance, unless benefits are really high. If you replace UI with a poverty-support-level UBI, it makes unemployment a lot worse for anyone but the lowest-paid workers.

UBI might reduce the perceived need for public funding of additional unemployment benefits in extended downturns (though if the be benefit level is poverty-support-level, probably not that much; that's more of a support for middle-income dislocation.)

UBI doesn't really make sense as a replacement to almost any traditional welfare programs for the simple reason that by limiting the money to only those who qualify for it, you can give more. Yet unfortunately UBI is often presented as an alternative that would supplant traditional welfare.

It replaces more than just welfare. There are lots of different programs to prevent people from falling into poverty, whether due to long term unemployment, disability, retirement without savings, or part-time work at minimum wage. UBI can replace all of them. Progressive tax rates tend to have a 0% tax rate for the lowest bracket because people with a very low income need it all to just get by. If they get UBI on top of that, it could be an option to compensate that by raising the tax rate on the lowest tax bracket (and others maybe too).

The point is not simply to give people more money (though in some countries that might not be a bad idea), but to ensure that they don't lose that money if their situation changes. Often it's more attractive to remain completely unemployed than to work part time at minimum wage. With UBI, every bit of paid work you do, leaves you better off financially. It removed disincentives to work, because working people get it too. The costs of UBI are easily balanced with taxes. And because you don't have to qualify for it, you can save a lot on bureaucracy; it leaves people at the bottom of the economic ladder with a lot more freedom in their lives.

> UBI doesn't really make sense as a replacement to almost any traditional welfare programs for the simple reason that by limiting the money to only those who qualify for it, you can give more.

For means-tested programs, you can replace means-testing with unconditional benefits and appropriate progressive tax rate changes, and acheive exactly the same effects (modulo differences in definitions of income, but is there really a big benefit there?) while eliminating duplicate bureaucracy. Most UBI proponents don't prefer as rapid of a claw-back (which sometimes exceeds 100% in some ranges) as the aggregate of existing means-tested welfare programs, and would instead claw-back at a slower rate but extend the claw-back higher up the income distribution so that the drag is on the rich rather than the lower middle class, to improve upward mobility compared to existing means-tested welfare, but if you wanted to optimize only for bureaucratic efficiency without moving the claw-back higher up the income distribution and keeping it below a 100% marginal rate to eliminate perverse incentives, you could do that with UBI and tax changes, too, and still have a (smaller) net win.

The standard counterargument is that the current welfare system uses a shambling bureaucratic apparatus which forces people to go through an onerous, dehumanizing process of filling out endless forms to determine whether they're the "deserving poor" or the "undeserving poor". UBI, in dispensing with with this expensive process, is claiming back money that's essentially just being hurled into a void for no reason.

I have no idea whether that's enough to make up the difference.

Yeah, your point is strongly supported by this experiment. The majority of the UBI recipient subjects switched to standard unemployment, which was of greater value.

Which is why ubi mostly make sense if there arent any jobs left not if there still is a substantial jobmarket.

I am not surprised at all with this result. Why would anyone expect that conditional assistance would lead to people finding jobs. A good number of people might just be comfortable with the assistance and might decide to just stick with it.

And while doing that, cut the bureaucracy and stigma of having to continuously apply for welfare, food stamps etc. Not that this would offsets the cost of basic income.

If we picture a dystopian future where due to the rise of automation, increases in population, lack of education and ability, ~90% of people cannot realistically work in a productive jobs, I think it's a good time to experiment now what and how to keep all these people busy, preoccupied, and happy.

I don't picture a dystopian future. I picture a post-scarcity future.

So I am all for these experiments but judging them based on whether people stay jobless is missing the point of UBI in such a fundamental way it's hard to understate that.

I always think of Star Trek. It isn't really explored in depth but there isn't money and people don't have to work, transporter rationing is alluded to though. I guess in a world where everything can be made in a replicator, 'employment' becomes untenable. You still need some way of rationing scarce resources, and allowing people to 'vote' for what they want more of though.

Scarcity is beyond just stuff. Land for example is a finite resource.

If we are efficient enough in our use of land, the demand relative to the supply will shrink enough that it's no longer scarce.

I suppose lots of people enjoy owning their own land-- large tracts of it in fact, and not sharing it with anyone. That's a little tougher to conceptualize as post-scarcity as there's a limit to making land enjoyment more efficient with advanced technology. But in a world where other resources are less scarce perhaps we can think about colonizing other planets and terraforming as ways to increase supply.

Land will always be scarce because it isn't quantity of land (though that too can be a separate issue) but quantity coupled with positioning of land. Most people could afford to purchase four acres of land in Alaska or VT's north east kingdom, but four acres along central park is quite expensive because, due to the location of the site relative to all the services of NYC and the access to greenery, it is rather exclusive... and I don't believe (including references from all the SciFi I've ever read) that there is any situation society could be in that would nullify the difference in value of two parcels of land - Judge Dredd and Mega City one I believe come closest, even though land overall is much more of a limited supply, most of the inhabitable land is equally worthless - but there are still a few Oasis of dystopian high society around that have vastly different value.

If we draw even to Hitchiker's Guide's concept of built planets, and we considered the cost of making planets would eventually trend to zero... there is still the concept of locality that would influence price.

Presumably, if you have unlimited resources, you can create most, if not all, of what makes that land in NYC valuable. You could create enough city districts to meet demand.

There's lots of factors that go into the value of land. Available amenities, jobs, being near other people, quality of schools and other resources, transportation, etc. But those all seem to boil down to scarce resources being pooled in one area. If you could mass produce amenities, buildings, school supplies, etc, then NYC wouldn't have any inherent value, because its equal would exist everyone someone cared to plop one down where there was enough demand to fill it with people.

I don't know if post-scarcity must mean perpetual motion machine. I'm not certain if you're familiar with the societal concept of systems collapse but it may be that attempting to do that would result in a maintenance burden that's untenable... Also I think a large chunk of NYC's value is in its people and I believe there's always going to be advantageous positioning from rarity, maybe this eventual society still has a government that has a capitol building and people congregate specifically around that... or perhaps it's more artificial - if the whole world was a city perhaps it'd get less significant and value would come from living at exactly 0' 0' or 3'14" 15'92" and so on.

I think there's a bit of innate petty jealousy in human beings so land value differentials will always exist.

But, that angle is pretty thin, so maybe I'm just stretching the argument at this point. Quite interesting to ponder!

I think that the problem is that the time when technology causes dramatic unemployment is likely to happen long before the time when technology can provide unlimited resources. So the question is: what do we do in-between?

The idea of land ownership is as mythical as Thor's hammer. You don't own land - you own a right to do certain things on that land to the exclusion of others. Only sovereignty gives actual ownership of land - transferring it to another jurisdiction, setting up your own laws, destroying said land and doing whatever the fuck one would do when one is literally "law onto oneself".

Also - money is no longer representative of a thing you can hold. Money is a share of wealth of a nation, which includes trust, culture, people, land and buildings.

How is land ownership different from anything else, say like the Thors hammer I bought on ebay?

It seems to me that colonizing other planets would only be a viable solution if we first developed faster than light or at least near light speed travel; and those may or may not be physically possible. Otherwise we would just end up with a scarcity of planets within practical travel distance of each-other.

Not really. Even if we triple land use efficiency, population growth will increase the demand to compensate

Not at current fertility rates. If the current trend continues we're in for a world-wide population decline.

Other replies addressed the issues with assuming that population growth will continue as-is, but I also wanted to mention that humans are pretty creative so if we did continue to grow we'd likely start doing ecumenopolis things, deepening ocean trenches to concentrate oceans more and increase the usable land area on earth, start seriously considering the moon/mars for terraforming, building more vertically (above and below ground).

I don't think the volume of land will ever be an issue for humans, but I think that land will never be equally valued.

If you increase education, you'll learn that population will not grow that fast.

Population growth has been steadily slowing down since 1960s.

Broadly speaking, that is because we're approaching something like a carrying capacity, estimated to be somewhere around 10B.

If we increase land use efficiency dramatically, that effectively raises the carrying capacity and population growth can continue much longer

The population growth decline is not tied to the carrying capacity but to the development of the economy. Countries that are further economically developed have lower birth rates and vice versa. For example Finland is mostly a country of deserted forest, yet it has a very slow growth rate. The country could carry a population of 50 million easily, but is hardly growing anymore at 5 million.

It is and it isn't. Land in Manhattan is scarce. Land in the non-coastal western US or most of Canada or Australia is theoretically scarce too, but not so much in practice.

If humanity lived at the density of Paris (21,438/km^2), we could all live in an area half the size of Texas (695,663 km^2).

So if we're talking about material post-scarcity, land is more than plentiful.

If humanity lived at the density of Wyoming (5.97/mi^2), we would have to get rid of 50% of the U.S. population or 98% of the world population, because only 147M people could fit on the habitable land on earth.

So yes, it is and it isn't. The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities, given the elimination of any cost constraints.

> The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities.

Do they get a choice? I want to live in Disneyland, but there's sadly a distinct lack of real estate available.

That's sort of the definition of a post-scarcity world. If people want stuff but can't have it because there's not enough to go around, that's pretty much the definition of scarcity.

The idea of a "post-scarcity" world is silly. Some resources will always be limited. Land, diamonds, prestige, etc.

What matters is, how scarce are the necessities of a moderately-comfortable life? I would posit that people who live in cities do just fine. If some people want more space, well, you can still work for it. Not all jobs are going to disappear.

> Land in the non-coastal western US or most of Canada or Australia is theoretically scarce too, but not so much in practice.

If the acquisition cost is >0, it is scarce in practice as well as theory.

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is."

Land in these places can be something like $500/acre. That's not zero, but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.

> Land in these places can be something like $500/acre. That's not zero

...and thus economically scarce...

> but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.

It's very cheap. But very cheap things are still scarce. Something that isn't scarce has no price and everyone (even the poorest of the poor) who wants any quantity of it will have as much as they want without sacrificing anything.

Land in the places you describe is cheap. The price may even seem negligible to people in the upper middle class in the developed world. It's very much still scarce.

The difference between scarce and not scarce is not a matter of price, it's a fundamental difference of kind.

Horizontally maybe, but not vertically.

So post-scarcity we should all join the Space Force and subject ourselves to the Captain's whims?

I'll take scarcity, thank you.

This isn't a dystopian future, it's a dystopian present.

Most of the work people do today doesn't really need to be done, but we force people to do it anyway for various reasons. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (there's also a pretty decent free ebook on the subject by the author)

The Expanse (books and TV show) use that idea pretty well

Amos was such a happy child :-)

Usually war served to reduce that surplus, but with automation in the military as well, this is uncharted territory.

The Black Death in the 14 century killed a third of the population of Europe, which lead to a surprising rise in wages and standards of living.

It's weird and uncomfortable how tragedy sometimes leads to very good things. Similarly in the opposite direction, automation should have been a good thing yet it leads to unemployment and poverty.

So Thanos was right all along, no?

In a sense, yes. But if he has that power, he could just as easily have doubled the resources in the galaxy, and that possibility never even occurred to him.

It seems like to him it's more a convenient excuse to kill lots of people.

Don't forget that all that bureaucracy is the source of thousands of good paying jobs that now also are worse off even when they get added to UBI. Also, don't forget that now that they have less money, their collective reduced spending means the business they used to patron will have to lay people off. Now those people also need UBI. This doesn't spiral to infinity but their is a huge ripple effect.

Yes, bureaucracy provides a lot of jobs, but they're not jobs that produce anything useful. You're just paying people to check if other people should also get paid. Just pay everybody and be done with it, and maybe let people do something more productive or fulfilling.

The overhead for condional basic income is huge, if most things are done by machine the cost of those will drop quite substantially whichmeans you need much less to get by.

Why not just optimize human output like China did and incentivize education in fields that provide large scale value to society (STEM primarily) so that children are likely to deliver commensurate value to society to their costs?

That's kind of missing the point, if theres 90% unemployment, unless you arrange is so people are in education or retirement for all but circa 5 years of their life, most won't get a chance to use their skills, and no one will have money to buy the things they make anyway.

In Finland there's no tuition and almost all students get financial aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_(Finland...

Has there been any exploration of a version of Basic Income in exchange for community service?

There's a virtually endless amount of unskilled work that could be done to improve the environment and people's lives.

Paying people in exchange for work is called a job, not UBI.

Kinda except you get to pick any "job" you want, work any amount of hours you want but still know you will get paid exactly the same amount. People might be happier reading to seniors 10 hours a week but not for minimum wage.

So how do you determine want amount of community service is necessary? Does picking up one piece of trash off the sidewalk count as community service?

As soon as you tie the payment to a certain type of task, you have to enforce a standard of time/quality.

Sounds sort of like the New Deal "Civilian Conservation Corps" that built up many of the national park facilities we now enjoy in the USA.

I have proposed something similar here:

https://medium.com/s/free-money/guaranteed-minimum-agricultu...

(I use agriculture as the catchy example because almost every community could use some amount of it, but it goes well beyond that)

I think this is a great idea. I have also been pitching it in conversations with people who oppose UBI for years and it is generally very well received by them. Unfortunately I am unaware if this has actually been implemented anywhere.

I think it'd be a great idea.. you either are on disability, work an average of at least 20 hours a week at a paid, taxable job (under the table work won't count), or you volunteer for registered services programs for 20 hours a week.

20 hours a week is just my suggestion as a minimum that would allow for people to still job search if they choose to and could be averaged over a quarter or year or similar. Exceptions would be for those who would traditionally be on Medicare. Note: I think if UBI were implemented that Medicare and a lot of other programs should be replaced by it.

> Note: I think if UBI were implemented that Medicare and a lot of other programs should be replaced by it.

Medicare is a program that solely exists for the retired who over 65 and disabled people.

Medicaid, on the other hand, is available to those who live in states that accepted federal funding via the ACA and are within a certain percentage of the federal poverty line.

Those who don't qualify for Medicaid, but are under a certain income level, have their health insurance premiums subsidized via the ACA.

If you plan on eliminating Medicaid, you'll need to acknowledge the fact that even people who earn many multiples of the federal poverty level are still eligible for subsidized health insurance due to burden of costs. If people who are not poor by federal standards need to have their health insurance costs subsidized, that means people whose income is derived from UBI-esque make-work programs will have a hard time affording health insurance if they're considered eligible for Medicaid, but it was eliminated.

This is why many proponents see UBI as an adjunct, not a replacement, for existing programs.

I specifically said medicare... also, I meant medicare. If there's a program for UBI, then medicare should be part of it. I said nothing of medicaid, or the ACA subsidization, and you are assuming a lot here.

Similarly, I think socialized insurance programs should also fold in VA medical benefits, medicaid and other subsidized programs under a single umbrella. I'm not a fan of bureaucracy. That said, the post you replied to mentions no such thing.

Most of the discussions of UBI are amounts too small to cover e.g chemotherapy. Or are you picturing a collapse in prices of healthcare as well?

Again, I'm not talking about touching medicaid, I'm also not talking about any specific limits for given age brackets. Only suggesting that any such new organization should fold in one or more existing organizations.

> It's a general misunderstanding that Basic Income is some sort of job program, it's not.

The problem is that I've heard many proponents of UBI sell it as exactly that, a way for people to get better jobs. And I can't really blame them, framing UBI as a way to make unemployment more comfortable is not going to be very successfully politically.

> framing UBI as a way to make unemployment more comfortable is not going to be very successfully politically.

Not least because in developed countries alternative redistribution systems exist to make unemployment more comfortable (much more comfortable than UBI, potentially, since fewer people will be net recipients), but on the assumption that people will actually take a job if offered it. Arguing it's worth redistributing funds from those who need or want to work to those who prefer leisure is a much harder sell...

I'm not sure I'd call it a "general misunderstanding", because people seem to have very different thoughts on what UBI is or should be for.

I generally align with your view, but I'm not convinced our definition is more "correct" than others. It would be nice to get the terminology straightened out.

The misunderstanding is that UBI in the first world is some kind of benevolent gift to the unemployed. UBI is the government's and elite's way of making sure people don't revolt against them because they have no way to support themselves.

The big fail is that the proposed way of giving it is the no "strings attached" method. A total waste of resources. If people get so lost, that they can't provide for themselves; how is money going to solve the situation? It can't and it won't. A societal characteristic is that their will always be levels. People that are taken care of are always at the lower level. UBI will only keep people at the lower rungs of society.

If UBI is ever going to be a reality it needs to come with guidance that helps people get out of the hole they are in.

The idea of a future with no jobs is silly. It will only come to be if that's what we make it. A job can be anything. I go out and I see ads for a local Palm reader. A BS job if there was ever any. But yet, it's been a business for at least 20 yrs. Don't tell me that people can't be creative and create jobs but without any force or guidance to help people out of the problem there will never be a solution.

I will go as far as saying that a future with a widespread no strings attached UBI will cause a future with no jobs.

Andrew Yang (pro-UBI candidate for U.S. President) lists as the first benefit of UBI:

> UBI encourages people to find work. Many current welfare programs take away benefits when recipients find work, sometimes leaving them financially worse off than before they were employed. UBI is for all adults, regardless of employment status, so recipients are free to seek additional income, which most everyone does.

Not increasing employment contradicts this claimed benefit.

https://www.yang2020.com/blog/ubi_faqs/benefits-universal-ba...

We shouldn't just accept a future of joblessness. It's a terrible waste of human capital. Rather than simply paying people to be unemployed, we should find work for them to do that benefits society in some way. To an extent we need to be investing more in our people, especially in the U.S., but there are also things we could do like large scale infrastructure projects that could help fill the gap for people that don't have the knowledge/skill for many of the jobs that can't be automated.

> we should find work for them to do that benefits society in some way

introduce basic income and people will make themselves useful.

There is little to no evidence to support this claim. Whereas what I'm talking about was done after the great depression and developed a lot of infrastructure, especially in rural America, that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

how many of those who have enough money to never work again, never work again?

you severely underestimate the psychological desire to be useful and live a fulfilling life.

the evidence is there - it's ideological convictions that prevent you from seeing and accepting it.

Besides the job thing, there are a lot of UBI criticisms around the "dignity if work" and how UBI will make them unhappy, so I am glad this exists as a counterargument.

> there aren't enough jobs for everyone because technology have taken over most.

And yet the US has full employment.

Could it be that Finland lacks jobs for some reason other than technology?

The US does not have full employment. The actual percentage of working age people who are employed is below peak levels. Also quite a few people are working part time.

Also, the unemployment rate communicates nothing about the dignity of a job. The 45 year old former factory worker who is now fighting for hours at a retail job counts as employed. He also counts as angry, depressed and ready to burn the system down.

> The US does not have full employment.

* Citation needed.

Here's the Fed saying we are:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan/feds-kapla...

From a similar time frame: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/the-unemployment-rate-is-...

Just like the cost of living index, Politicians often use misleading techniques to calculate "employment rate"

Alright then, let's look at this index that article proposes:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

At 79.9, it's not quite record high employment, but it's close.

Someone working an hour a week counts as employed.

I wonder if the rise of gig-economy type work has dirtied the employment data pool? If you're out of work and looking for a employment, yet you're still scraping by a few bucks every week due to Uber or Lyft or something similar, and you're a part of a significant percentage of people doing the same then unemployment numbers probably aren't as pretty as some would like us to believe.

U6 unemployment numbers include workers who are employed part time but would prefer to be full time, and U6 is near all time lows.

But labor force participation rates are still very, very low. If you'd like a job but don't have one, you don't get counted in any unemployment stats except the aggregate labor force participation.

This caught my attention so I looked for a source. Looks like this rate is the number of people who are Employed (60.7%) or have been actively seeking work in the last week (4%) out of the total population of people who are 16 years or older, not institutionalized, and not active military.

The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?

Overall (all ages) labor force participation rates are low, but labor force participation among people 25-54 are very high.

All ages LFPR are probably low because the Baby Boomers are retiring and Millenials are still in college.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

So, an Uber drive that's in the app available for calls 35+ hours a week but gets few calls, are they part-time or full-time?

Don't worry they are getting paid 80 cents an hour.

No, it doesn't count.

> And yet the US has full employment.

The US has “full employment” only under a definition of “full employment” that allows significant involuntary under- and un-employment to exist while still applying the label.

That an entirely different discussion.

My point is that saying "people are happy but jobless" is missing the point of UBI.

UBI at this point is more an experimental pilot project to see what it does to people not to actually figure out how to pay for it which is another discussion also.

What it's not a pilot project for is to see if people get jobs as it's a proposed solution for a jobsless future for most.

The existence of Marie Condo would suggest we have too much stuff, as would the fact that we are using the earths resources faster than we can replenish them. Growth at the moment is predicated on buying ever more 'stuff', theres a limit to how long we can keep doing that.

At the other end we get better at making ever more stuff with less labour. That widget factory that used to employ 1000 people 50 years ago, now employs 10 for the same output. Now from a stuff buying point of view that's good, your products are cheaper so people can buy more. But what happens at the extreme. 0 employees in a factory? If everyone does that there aren't any employees to buy the stuff you've made.

Both of these trends are happening, both are unsustainable, sooner or later we are going to have to address them.

right, this is why whenever I drive through any major metropolitan area in the U.S the only thing I ever see is people being gainfully employed. What, this U.S you're talking about - it really is Utopia.

It's neither (at least, exclusively) a jobs program nor a jobs replacement program, but it has elements of both; it makes more work available (when replacing minimum wages as a floor-setting system), improves capacity for labor market realignment via retraining, and better addresses the needs of those who, even with that, cannot find adequate work.

I think that's the wrong premise.

UBI is based on the assumption there will be no jobs because no one can deliver better value than technology rather than just a small job market. We already have the other Conditional Basic Income which is probably optimal as long as there is a solid jobmarket.

> UBI is based on the assumption there will be no jobs

No, it is not. UBI, under a variety of names, is an idea much older than, and not at all dependent on, the idea of a situation where there are no jobs.

How does one contend with inflation when money is free? Is the idea that goods are produced so cheaply that the basic living costs are stable?

In my mind, yes! We would implement basic income to offset the number of jobs lost to automation. Because robots don't need to be paid, the cost of goods would decrease in a more-or-less proportional amount to the number of jobs lost.