The US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes. The US's vast welfare/entitlement system ensures few indeed net less than that line, shoring up their shortfall with trillions of $.
What constitutes "poor" keeps shifting. There will always be a bottom 10%. There is ongoing increase to the standard of living, instilling a sense of "nobody should go without X" (when X didn't exist not long before, broadband internet being the latest). Affordable housing gets overrun by population growth & attracting mobile opportunity-seekers, living space naturally going to the highest bidder; property taxes being a thing, there is no recognized natural right to real estate. Health care relentlessly advances, new lifesaving care objectively costing a great deal ... vs a public sentiment of a right thereto.
We need an objective redefinition of "poor", predicated on a baseline of nutrition, housing floorspace, basic tools (stove, disposal, etc), care (minimum optimistic odds of longevity), information access, etc and an understanding that the baseline cannot be shifted - that those doing better are not poor, that accessibility thereto is largely attainable (whatever the sociopolitical system), and acknowledgement that when/if all are above that line, poverty services are officially out of a job.
As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great number of people have a vested interest in covering a consistent, if not growing, population.
Nearly all Kings and Emperors were 'poorer' than most Westerners under the poverty line of today. They had no refrigeration, antibiotics, electricity, etc. But we still agree that there are 'poor' people today, and I think we're correct to say so. Yes, it is a moving target, and thank God that it is such. If 'progress' means that we have to drag the least lucky of us up to levels of decadence that Cesar could never have though of, I'm more than on board for that. Quibbling about the exact definition of poor for all of time is useless. Charge ahead, have the 'poor' of our grandchildren's time be the wealthy of today.
If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of minor financial catastrophes because they will further constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and also leads to physical health issues down the road.
By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with the knowledge that everything possible is being done to save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed.
It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in thinking about this question.
There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage, above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now."
Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard of living, whereby people don't existentially need X but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or opportunity thereto).
> many people have a vested interest in conflating the two.
Just like you are conflating being poor and being a bad person:
> your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now.
This implicitly suggests that you are only poor because you were too lazy/stupid/<insult> to follow that path. Maybe there are people like that, but many people are poor because being poor is expensive.
At some point it's up to a competent adult to do with their lives what they see fit under the circumstances dealt them by life. They are not automatically the charge of others just because they don't achieve some nebulous whim of strangers. Each has their own dependents to prioritize.
And that's the core problem: everyone is tossing around the word "poor" to fit their ulterior motives (yours currently being to demean me for no apparent reason) without any agreed-on definition thereof. You're beating me up for suggesting there be an objective common definition, which happens to not be what you want it to mean (which, apparently, is whatever implication you see fit to win an unprompted argument with a stranger).
I don’t even agree with this. Even for starvation there’s no clean dividing line. Malnutrition leads to reduced lifespans and health problems. I think that quality of life both can and should increase as society improves its technology and wealth.
If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e. raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the economy is doing better in ten years and that allows someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a problem?
Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip where the market sorts pricing out) because rent & broadband just increased price according to everyone now having UBI. If anything, more won't afford essentials and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will rise.
It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low productivity, coupled with an increased population unable to earn at all because they simply don't produce $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).
The other thing missed by UBI advocates: money is merely a representation of value, it is not value itself. Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many would) has all their basic needs met without their effort ... except that those basic needs are not provided without effort. This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing a UBI recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that the $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy go".
Only if we do nothing about housing supply constraints and nobody decides they'd rather move to areas without those constraints given a UBI. But we should do something about housing supply constraints, and people would move away from high housing cost areas either way, but moreso if we do nothing about housing costs. Either one invalidates your premise.
> Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many would) has all their basic needs met without their effort ... except that those basic needs are not provided without effort.
We already do this for people with disabilities etc. It's not a problem unless the number of such people is large.
Meanwhile most people are not satisfied to live in a studio apartment and eat nothing but rice and beans forever. Anyone with more ambition than not starving to death would still have plenty of incentive to go out and do productive work, so the majority of people would continue to do so.
This is also another reason to fix the amount of the tax. If hypothetically too many people started to live off the UBI and not work, the tax would generate less revenue, the UBI amount would decrease and fewer people would be inclined to live off it.
> This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing a UBI recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that the $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy go".
Giving everyone $1 doesn't cause prices to rise by $1. Some people would buy things with elastic supply whose quantity rather than price increases with increasing demand, some people simply wouldn't spend all of the money. (The second is more commonly done by corporations, but it's still very common, and the economic effect of the money being removed from circulation after being spent one time isn't that much different than zero.)
Also, that still only happens if you print the money. If it comes from someone then it doesn't cause price changes unless the two people would have bought different stuff -- which is not the case if they were both buying housing.
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The aforementioned Greeks & Romans had to go hunt & kill & skin & dry a good-sized animal to make a shirt.
You can buy an entirely respectable modern shirt for $5 today, 42 minutes of mundane commodity labor in a comfortable environment.
Lower unemployment would be associated with a greater availability of goods and services, so that would get it out of the trap. Higher wages would also be associated with a supply increase if they came with increased productivity, but if you raised the minimum wage then prices of low-end products might actually go up. Of course, the typical supply and demand picture predicts both an increase in price and an increase in volume if the demand curve gets "richer," so you are not entirely off the mark, although your argument is not valid.
That's assuming the goods and services are locally consumed, which in a global economy they're commonly not.
A jet engine factory that moves in and hires a bunch of people reduces local unemployment, but that doesn't mean any of the local workers are in the market for jet engines.
> Higher wages would also be associated with a supply increase if they came with increased productivity, but if you raised the minimum wage then prices of low-end products might actually go up.
Same problem again. If a jet engine factory opens up in a place with already-low unemployment and pays better wages, people quit their lower paying jobs to take the higher paying ones, but that doesn't mean any of the productivity increase is relevant to local housing markets. The workers still aren't in the market for jet engines, but they'll bid up the local housing stock if zoning constrains any more from being built.
The premise that a UBI would increase housing costs is also basically assuming that the money comes from nowhere. If the money was printed that would be the case -- but that's an instance of "printing money causes inflation" rather than "UBI causes inflation." If it comes from collecting taxes then the people who receive it have more money, but the people who pay the tax have less, which more or less cancels out. (Especially when, as with the people in the middle, they're actually the same people and the UBI and the tax directly cancel out.)
But in a global economy that's irrelevant: the greater availability of jet engines where they are used will cascade eventually into a greater availability of bowling balls in the town where they make jet engines.
This is still a "constraining the housing supply is bad" problem, not a "higher wages are bad" problem.
It doesn't cancel out because the people receiving the UBI tend to buy different goods than the people paying the tax. Fewer people bidding up prices on yachts and capital, more people bidding up basic goods and services.
Of course it can. Why, in the US, almost a million of disabled people stopped being disabled and entered employment in recent few years, because of good economy:
https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1230489362883678210
The truth is that millions of people on disability in the US aren't actually so disabled that they cannot work: as the above shows, they will work if they consider the employment conditions good enough. Yes, there are plenty of disabled people who really cannot work, but majority of disability in the US is created, not alleviated by Social Security. One needs to remember that by creating programs to help poor and disabled, along with helping poor and disabled, one also creates more poor and disabled.
"The conclusion of this argument is deeply inconvenient, therefore the argument is wrong."
It's actually true that rising wages result in higher rents. It's plainly obvious that this is the case - otherwise why would anyone care about rent explosion wherever Amazon decides to put HQ2?
It's true in places with a constrained housing supply, i.e. restrictive zoning. Which is common in urban areas. But what you have there is a zoning problem, not a UBI problem -- evidence being that it's also true of higher wages and lower unemployment etc.
In unconstrained areas higher demand for housing causes more housing to be built, which prevents housing costs from absorbing anywhere near 100% of the new money.
I think it's more likely we'll see UBI proponents want to factor in a cost of living adjustment based on the place one lives, which will be a nightmare of political administration and unintended consequences.
Then remove the restrictions in the places people do want to live.
> I think it's more likely we'll see UBI proponents want to factor in a cost of living adjustment based on the place one lives, which will be a nightmare of political administration and unintended consequences.
Terrible idea, do not want.
We know how to build 100 story buildings but there is no place on earth where you can find a hundred square miles of nothing but 100 story buildings.
For a fixed supply, higher rents are caused by a larger number of people demanding housing at the current prices. Higher wages only affect that by (a) causing immigration into the area, or (b) raising people out of poverty so that they can afford housing when they couldn't before.
Do you have a study you can point to, since this is trivial?
> I empirically analyze the causal impact of the minimum wage increase on housing rents in the United States and Japan. In both countries, minimum wages hikes increase housing rents in urban areas: 10% minimum wage increase induces 1%-2% increase in the United States and 2.5%-5% increase in Japan.
Now imagine a 10% raise for every earner.
This shows that absolute rent is going up. Relative rent, the proportion of income going to rent, is going down. This frees up folks' money for other things and improves living conditions.
> Now imagine a 10% raise for every earner.
If everybody made the same exact amount, that would be relevant. With a $25k UBI, you'd see folks who previously earned $50k getting a 50% raise and those making $500k getting a 5% raise. Right now, people in poverty are often spending 40-60% of their income on rent. Not so of people making $500k.
Good luck with that. UBI is barely tolerated by the left and progressives but only under the constraint that it doesn't replace any existing social welfare programs. The minute UBI advocates start pushing it as a replacement is the minute that progressives will squash it.
Where can I read some of these articulated positions for myself? Any particular articles or writers that made a substantial impression on you with these positions that you'd recommend I read?
Imagine if you were to come up with a policy where you increase senior pension rates by $3000/mo but you get rid of Medicare - do you think Bernie Sanders would go for that deal? I'll tell you right now: ZERO chance he would support it. And that doesn't even take into account that there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of jobs that support the current entitlement programs. Do you think those employees will just let you lay them off without a fight?
I don't have any links, but I have gone out of my way to find out what different groups think of UBI when I was excited about UBI a few years ago. My excitement has since deflated and I now think UBI isn't a solution to any actual issues with automation. Specially it doesn't solve the following:
- It doesn't get rid of existing entitlement programs.
- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developing world which can't afford to pay its citizens and will be hit especially hit hard by automation.
- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developed world since people derive meaning and self-worth from work (there's a difference between working and supporting yourself and being supported by government handouts). To reinforce this point: communities that are supported by government welfare programs tend to have issues with drug and alcohol abuse and crime. Furthermore, the social welfare programs in the developed world are already extensive enough that healthcare, food, and shelter will always be available regardless of the state of automation.
This predates Yang. Yang like all libertarian-UBI advocates, typically side-steps this issue.
UBI simply redefines $0 income to a higher number functionally equal to $0.
The problem with this argument is that it proves too much. It's true of anything that causes the poor to have more money. Lower unemployment, higher wages, anything. Heck, it's true of lower healthcare costs, because people would have more money for housing, or vice versa.
Housing costs and healthcare costs are problems, but they're independent problems.
On top of that, you're assuming the UBI actually results in the poor getting more assistance rather than merely different assistance. Right now there are explicit subsidies for housing and healthcare. If they get replaced with a UBI in the same amount, maybe people just use it to buy housing and healthcare anyway -- but maybe some of them don't, and that causes those prices to go down.