Isn't an analogous situation that of private loans for tuition? Tuitions have risen across the board to eat up all the new "free" money in the system.
Won't UBI make goods much more expensive for everyone and also increase our taxes? Wouldn't a better expenditure be providing healthcare?
I'm earnestly curious.
It's no problem because supply can adjust to compensate - the exception to this is land, which is why a UBI ought to be funded with a land value tax. This is why Yang's UBI isn't very good, because it is sales tax funded (he's too much of a centrist to tackle land and capital, touching either of these things upsets rich people's delicate feelings too much).
An underdiscussed advantage of UBI is that it's good even for those that don't get more out of it overall than they put in, because it spreads income out more evenly over the whole lifecycle (people generally have not enough money early in their careers and during child-bearing, and too much during later life and death).
The ideal scenario in my mind is a property tax, of some kind, that funds a UBI for children. Ideally, this would be at the federal level, but unfortunately property taxes have been deemed unconstitutional. This is likely true for wealth taxes as well.
But there is nothing to prevent states and cities for instituting a property tax -> UBI setup. It would no doubt help greatly with the problem of "buy properties and do nothing with them" aspect of rich foreign investors in some regions.
One of the things that Yang seems focused on is stuff that can actually be done. A wealth tax sounds nice, and he agrees with the spirit, but that is simply not a federal level option at this time. A constitutional amendment would be great to fix this, but that takes a long time and would require people to get out of survival mode to make this happen.
So Yang takes the practical approach of getting money in the hands of everyone now using a tax scheme that seems to be inoffensive to wealthy people. It probably is not, but the only way to really know is to do it.
As for the children, I am hoping this is also just a pragmatic thing. While it is hard to get this country to accept giving free money to other adults, it is even harder to imagine this country supporting giving money to "those people" with "lots of children". This is why schools are funded locally and why a UBI for children would need to be locally funded as well for now, particularly if the desire, as mine is, is to use land taxes.
Excluding others from a valuable natural resource is deeply immoral unless compensation to those excluded is paid.
The difficulty(or not) of measuring the "true value" of that compensation isn't a justifiable reason that we should as close to it as is reasonably possible.
Housing isn't expensive because of the cost of labor/materials, for example. It's expensive because the government literally says "you can't build that here". So the 100 old parcels of land where you want to live have 1000 people bidding for them.
UBI maybe on paper would cause additional inflation in that scenario. But it might also be the catalyst that allows people to move elsewhere for work, such as to a low cost of living area, because UBI can be relied on to survive.
The total legal occupancy of SF is smaller than the number of people who want to live there. The city delays the issuance of permits for expanding occupancy.
The bay area is rich and the rents follow suit. They are still limited to the overall supply of money in the area. Obviously increasing supply of real estate would help the issue of course.
Ask any Native American how empowering a UBI-esque system worked out for them.
Not that I’m rejecting the idea of UBI out of hand, but I’m very concerned about the lack of such discussion.
https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-...
Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? How much do the wealthy make in dividends a year? Do they stop working? Maybe to ensure that the wealthy continue to work, we should prevent any kind of returns on capital investment. Maybe people should only make money through their labor?
But seriously, who wants to do nothing all day long? The UBI money takes away stresses and maybe some will stop working for a boss, but they will find other things to do with their time and, if it is valuable to others, they will profit from it and do it more. So it goes.
As someone having participated in a support group for people excessively using online/digital media: It might not be a very satisfying life, but it's seems easier than ever to distract yourself while unproductively wasting your time.
For some of those individuals, this was about not wasting their limited time outside work. But a significant share had their lives entirely supported by e.g. gov or parents. And external factors in many cases caused the necessity to change.
I agree with society ensuring people can have their basic needs met. But why does it have to be an unconditional monthly check? Beside strong support offers in areas like psychological, guidance or life advice, I'd prefer the right to trade X hours per week (preferably more like 20ish than the current 40) to your gov to get what you need to live.
It would act as a minimum wage. It would incentivize finding something better, especially if not satisfied with the work assigned by gov to you. It would still guide those living on autopilot towards something at least somewhat productive. And yeah, it would be tricky to implement well :/
I often wonder how many people feel this.
I don't feel quite as dire about it, but I absolutely agree that my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord. Unfortunately, I too have many ideas, yet so little time to work on them.
It's too risky to quit work and embark on my own, so I only get 1/10th of my vision done during the evening and weekend hours I can spare. And even then I'm burning the last remaining cycles of effort I have during the day. It's a slow, painful slog. But I am making progress.
If I were in the flip side position of being a CEO with a product vision and lots of workers to see my ideas through to fruition, how many of my employees would be stuck in the same trough of apparent underutilization and under-fulfillment? If I empowered them to follow their own path and dreams, wouldn't they quit and leave me with nobody to work on my vision?
If you get rid of the perhaps boring and mundane "keeping the lights on" jobs, which are ever so important, then the product dies.
This is a hard problem.
This is pretty much the essence I was getting at and what the goal is to solve
Anecdotally, having grown up in and around various tribal communities, people will consistently replace work as a source of purpose with some other purpose of their own devising. Unfortunately, most of the time people will choose a purpose that is socially destructive in the absence of a default purpose that is socially beneficial. A consideration for designing a constructive UBI system is institutionalizing new sources of socially beneficial purpose that can be easily adopted by people that lose work as a purpose. Insufficient thought is put into this latter problem, I have seen little evidence that this will happen organically.
Wow this is fundamental misunderstanding of what inflation is.
> Economists generally believe that very high rates of inflation and hyperinflation are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply. Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied.
The freedom dividend can cause low to moderate inflation, if the extra tax is high enough to cause recession. But the only path to hyperinflation is government printing more money.
For example, imagine a government subsidy for smartphones that gives up to 2k for any phone you buy. The predictable effect of that is all phones would be at least 2k because there is no downside to the customers paying 2k. It would probably be 2k + pre-subsidy prices for many phones, particularly the high priced ones.
But if you just give everyone 2k in money, then why would they all want to spend it on smartphones? Maybe the price goes up a bit since there is more flexibility in spending, but there is not a specific pressure on that category alone. It gets spread out to the entire field of the economy including savings and investments.
Competition is still in place. The amount of the UBI also matters, of course. If everyone got a million dollars, a 1k phone would be a trivial price and could easily be raised in price dramatically. Basically, the spreading across the people would no longer dissipate the upward price pressure effectively. Targeting the level at basic poverty level seems like a reasonable first step to try to end poverty without spiking the prices.
As for healthcare in our current system, this might also address a lot of it. There is, of course, the removal of survival stress conditions and food deserts (by making poor regions not poor) which improves the health of people directly. But the UBI is also money that can be used for both insurance premiums and the max out of pocket levels. Much of the currently uninsured are not the desperate poor (Medicaid covers most of them), but are people in either states that did not expand Medicaid and are too poor to qualify for Obamacare subsidies or are just above the cutoffs and can't afford the full premiums. While directly changing how the subsidies work could fix that, the UBI is another approach that avoids a healthcare legislative debacle. For reference, in my state, an individual without subsidy can get health insurance for somewhere between 3-4k a year.
The other aspect of healthcare costs for consumers is the deductible/out-of-pocket. At least for the plans I see, 6kish is the max for out of pocket costs and that is half the proposed UBI. So this would seem to greatly solve the health insurance problem for US citizens. In summary, someone who needed the UBI for both premiums and out of pocket would be entirely covered with maybe 1-2k left over. Not ideal, but this is a worst case scenario.
Most UBI advocates, including Yang, do not believe that a UBI alone fixes the healthcare industry mess, but I believe it does help plug in the holes in a way that can avoid the healthcare debate dysfunction in our politics.
In the long run UBI promotes innovation and competition. Therefore those industries with competition would not suffer from rampant inflation.
Businesses without competition (monopolies) would on the other hand experience huge inflation simply because there is no pressure to keep the price down. This would be the case of natural monopolies (eg. banks or networks such as telecommunication, railroads, water systems) and government guaranteed monopolies (pharma, US healthcare, various overregulated industries).
If Indian reservations in the USA are any indication, it clearly doesn’t.
Many of these tribal UBI systems have been in place for decades, so they are a good laboratory for studying the effects of UBI on population behavior.
First, you assume that having multiple competitors is pointless if one product is the clear winner. Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now, and the reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation. They would argue that even if breaking up Twitter just resulted in 2nd-best Twitter, the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now.
Second, you assume that there would be a clear "best" product. In truly competitive fields, it's often difficult to point to one product and say, "that's the best, and everyone else is settling for a worse product."
Take iPhone and Android. Why does anyone use the 2nd best phone operating system? Why don't we have one OS? Because there isn't a clear 2nd best operating system. The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases. It seems obvious to me that the smartphone market is broad enough that other niches could be served better by more targeted alternatives to the two major OSes, if those alternatives were allowed to mature to the point where they became competitive.
Finally, you misunderstand what the proposals about breaking up tech companies often entail. Most commonly when people talk about breaking up big-tech, I find they're talking about Warren. Warren's proposals are (roughly speaking) about separating product offerings and platforms. Her plan isn't to take Apple and force them to split up and create a second iOS. Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.
It's not about blindly making a second Apple, it's about trying to remove conflicts of interest from platform maintainers.
I'm not going to say whether or not I think that plan is good. I do think it's pretty unlikely to happen even if Warren is elected. But regardless, it's a very different, much narrower plan with very different goals and implications than what you're describing.
They may be required to provide interoperability with other networks. This kind of federation is what tech people claim is what makes the internet good.
Then there is the question of if all their sub companies need to be under one banner. Must they own WhatsApp? Instagram?
Seems like they don’t need to but just swallowed up competitors.
They're talking about reversing mergers that many people claim were problematic (WhatsApp and Instagram). They're talking about forcing companies to give up the benefit of 1st-party access to the platforms they maintain.
That's a much more narrow, targeted change than saying, "let's just make another Facebook", which is what I see people interpreting it as.
Based on what criterion?
> reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation
Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?
> the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now
If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo. It's not as if it's technically difficult to create a product similar to twitter, thus any attempt to break up big tech companies would mandate the retirement of the incumbent domain and brand. How would this be implemented practically? Also, what happens to all the user PII? Does it just get copied over to a new corporate entity which in effect doubles the risk of the data being hacked or leaked?
On a more speculative note, I am not sure if it is a given that "innovation" in the realm of social media is necessarily a good thing for the consumer, especially considering that the barometer for social media success is engagement. Social media "innovation" inevitably means "getting more people to look at ads".
> The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases
Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.
> Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.
How would this work? Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store? It seems pretty impractical to prohibit a company from selling their own products on a platform they own.
My understanding is that, for example, Valve might be broken up into two companies:
- Valve: Produces video games such as Half Life, TF2, and Portal
- Steam: Sells video games
If Steam then sold Half Life 3, it would no longer be 1st party software because it is made by Valve not Steam.
Granted, that will never happen because Valve will never make Half Life 3. -_-
They just aren’t using the name.
This is obviously subjective, but based on the criterion that the sites don't work very well. Recommendation systems on all of these platforms are abysmal, and they don't seem to be improving -- they seem to be getting worse. Most changes being made on sites like Twitter are poorly received by users. When the last time there was a change on Twitter that everyone liked?
Most of these sites are slow. Gmail is actively getting slower over time, to the point where it now has an extra loading screen. It's not clear to me what features have been added to justify that.
On sites like Youtube, creators are now at the point where they view the website like an existential threat. Youtube provides almost no real mechanisms for creators to fight copyright claims, its monetization rules and promotion algorithms are opaque and difficult to navigate.
Again, it's subjective whether you should look at that kind of stuff and say, "well no one could do it better." I look at platforms like Mastodon and say, "well, clearly some people are doing stuff like moderation and open API access better than sites like Twitter/Facebook." I look at sites like Nitter and think, "well, if one person built this, and even as just a blind proxy it seems to work better than Twitter's site in multiple ways, then Twitter isn't trying very hard."
> Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?
On Facebook: the email dump that came out late 2019[0] is a good place to start. In it, you can see Facebook design "open" data APIs where access was restricted to partners who spent certain amounts of money on ads. Companies that were considered competitive with Facebook's offerings were excluded from that already problematic agreement. If Facebook saw you as a potential threat, you were essentially banned from the platform.
On Instagram: users were threatened with loss of status and verification if they linked to other platforms in their bios[1]. Eventually, the code was changed to detect "add me" links and outright block them from being included on bios at all. This is a very bold, open attempt to hold a userbase hostage, counting on the fact that Instagram/WhatsApp users have too much to lose to go against the policy.
I know you specifically asked about social media, but if I can broaden that out a tiny bit: on Google's front, Chrome is advertised prominently in every one of Google's products, for free. Google offerings are also built to work best in Chrome even to the point of breaking standards[2].
This kind of "by default" push for Chrome on Android devices and in Google products is, in my mind, very reminiscent of the IE antitrust case the Microsoft got slammed with.
We could go on, but I don't want this to get too long. But it really shouldn't be difficult for you to imagine why someone might claim tech giants are anticompetitive, even if you disagree with those reasons. Heck, a new accusation gets posted to HN at least once a week -- just look at the conversations around AMP's search-result placement.
> If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo.
Based on Facebook's reactions to Instagram, Snapchat, and other similar competitors, this isn't the case. Every time Facebook has felt threatened by a competitor, in the brief period before they bought them, they were forced to uptake user-friendly features. In regards to Snapchat, some of those features were more privacy-friendly than what Facebook was currently offering.
A better argument that I'd be more sympathetic to here would be that Facebook already regularly feels the pressure of competition, and breaking them up isn't necessary. But it seems strange to me to argue that competition wouldn't do anything at all, given that we have a lot of examples of competition making these platforms better.
> Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.
No, but simply having an unserved niche in the market also doesn't mean a product will fill it. That's what people are getting at, that there are niches that would be filled by competing OSes and products if there weren't anticompetetive forces keeping those products from existing.
You need two things for a niche product to exist -- you need a real niche that's unmet, and you need an opportunity to create that product. Proponents of breaking up big-tech argue that we have the first, and not the second.
Once again, I think there is a case to be made that the situation isn't as bad as people say -- that we do have competitors starting to pop up for Facebook/Twitter, and talk about forcing the market is unnecessary right now. I'm not going to get into that argument, but I don't think the people who make it are dumb.
> Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store?
Roughly speaking, that's the intent. Google would be able to sell software on the Play store, but then Google couldn't own the Play store, it would need to be spun out into another company.
Similar rules have been proposed for media companies and ISPs; people argue that a company like T-Mobile shouldn't be able to simultaneously operate an Internet service and merge with a media provider on that service -- that would create a conflict of interest that would threaten Net Neutrality.
This sounds extreme on the software front because we have a pretty long history of companies doing exactly that -- creating a search engine and then using it to promote Chrome, creating a Play store and then using it to make sure that Gmail has prominent placement. People like Warren argue this is just as anticompetitive as an ISP operating a streaming service.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/12/05/email-dum...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11157124/instagram-blocks-...
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...
However, it's possible to see how Amazon being broken into at least one online retailer, a web services company, and a logistics provider and how that may increase competition in each of those markets.
Further, even in your social example, people used Instagram before Facebook bought them and likely still would if divested, and Snap, Tik Tok and more are going strong as independents.