The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter. Indeed, the arguments that we should do otherwise are to the benefit of the rich, because the proposed cutoff invariably comes somewhere in the middle income range, resulting in higher marginal rates on middle income people rather than higher income people.

In other words, a cutoff allows the rich to pay lower taxes in the amount of the money that had been going to people in the middle.

> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter.

There's a more subtle reason: if everyone gets a check, the program is more politically popular, making it harder for the rich to build a political coalition to kill it. That means the people who really need it will continue to get it.

IIRC, FDR opposed mean-testing social security for this reason. Almost everyone gets it, and the middle class gets enough to make some kind of difference in their lives, even if they could get by without it. Compared to other welfare programs, it's been unkillable.

That's an answer, not the answer. A similar question is: “how much should UBI pay per month?”, and a similar answer is that “it's much simpler to just pay gazillion dollars than spend time figuring it out”. After all, the only difference is the cost.

IMO there's a proven balance in having a system (“bureaucracy”) to find out who need financial assistance, and simply assisting those. But then again, I fundamentally disagree with UBI because I have a differing view on society and the rights and responsibilities of its members, along the lines of “society takes care of you if needed for the price of you helping make this possible if you are able”.

Suppose we have some kind of assistance programs for food and housing. If you don't make enough money you can get a card and with this card you can buy specific kinds of food, but not alcohol and not restaurant food. You get housing assistance but you have to live in designated government housing.

Then somebody suggests that we extend these benefits to everybody. But that's stupid -- why would you want to pay taxes in cash in order to get a food allowance card which requires you to buy what the government says, or live where the government says, instead of just keeping your money and buying whatever you want with it?

So all of those programs have phase outs, because people who "don't need them" don't want them. They'd rather have the money instead.

A UBI is money to begin with. Lowering your tax rate so that you don't have to pay to give yourself a UBI is a no-op. It cancels out. The tax you would have to pay to fund it and the phase out you would need to not receive it are mathematically equivalent.

The difference is that by putting it into the tax rate, you can see what you're doing better. If you have a 25% tax rate and then implement a 50% phase out rate, you're effectively imposing a 75% marginal rate on lower and middle income people and then a lower marginal rate on higher income people. Requiring it to be set as part of the tax rate makes it more blatantly obvious how silly that is, and that's all. And then, seeing that more clearly, people might choose more sensible marginal rates than that, so that you're never taking more from people who make less.

Hum... No, on the case of paying everybody (with increased taxes) or just the poor there is no difference in cost or total distributed.

What you do lose is the hability to focus your help into an specific group. Every UBI proponent will tell you this is a positive, because governments just suck at this, but it's a very powerful politic tool.

I am always shocked by the general lack of awareness people have about world intricacies.

Social welfare, fiscality and related issue in modern developped countries is one of the most complex systems I know of. I am 100% serious. It's a huge mess of rules, exceptions, directives, conflicting aspirations, unforceable & not unforceable || not unforced rules, outdated scheme, 0,1% population targeting welfare, federal, state, regional, city size rules and much more.

It crosses to healthcare, food, housing, education and more.

This whole mess was built bit by bit, step by step, over decades.

Thinking "we could send everyone a check" is right down heresy to anyone having truly worked aroung these fields.

* Else the check amount is the same for everyone and good luck to 4 kids families in high rent area

* Else the check is calculated depending on all the above factors and this system will never roll out (check Obamacare implementation issues)

The people in the high rent area can move to a low rent area if they can’t hold a job: they have nothing holding them there under the UBI rules. As for kids, perhaps they should also receive (smaller) UBI that would go to their parents.

Seems even easier to increase the standard tax deduction we already have and are familiar with. Then you can increase tax rates to make sure those evil rich people don't see any benefit.

The EITC does, but it has a cutoff with the aforementioned problems, and if it didn't (and the amount was high enough to replace the other programs) it would be hard to distinguish from a UBI, outside of the easily-gamed income requirement which does little more in practice than discriminate against honest homemakers who don't get to claim it.

Realistically what you have to do at that point is to use a flatter rate structure instead of a phase-out so that the credit is paid back by the time you get to higher income levels, but that's much better than the existing nonsense where the marginal rate structure goes all over the place from sometimes >90% at low income levels (from phase outs) to ~20% in the middle and then back up to 30+%.

You get a strongly progressive effective rate just from the credit, so at that point you can use something like a 35% fixed marginal rate and simplify everything else too. Interestingly this also means it doesn't even have to be an individual income tax. You could use VAT or charge payroll tax to employers and get the same result without individuals even having to file tax returns anymore.

Meaning, your problem is only a one-time, short-term problem. You aren't arguing in good faith if you try to use that to discredit his proposed solution.

Because then you need to test for means, and that means you have to hire new bureaucracy to conduct those tests, and then pay their benefits and pensions and travel expenses, and then you need to hire additional bureaucracy to address occasional loopholes in your checks, and then 10-20-50-100 years later you're back to square one with massively bloated self-serving bureaucracies conveniently appropriating dollars to save pennies.

That's what drives UBI advocates bonkers about the current benefit programs. For example, food stamps benefits. I say anyone with an SSN should be able to apply for one and get it electronically. It helps farmers, helps food availability, and is generally spent locally. Instead we have layers and layers of bureaucracy ensuring Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are prevented from receiving SNAP benefits.

In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.

I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.

Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place. So this statement you made is false:

> This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.

> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.

This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.

No; it may obscure that distinction slightly but it very much still exists. Anyone who receives more in UBI and other desired services than they pay in taxes will remain a "leach". Those who pay more in taxes than they receive are the providers, without whom the whole UBI system could not exist. (The relevant pre-UBI terms are "net tax payer" and "net tax receiver".)

No that's not true at all. So what if you're not the only one benefitting from your UBI payments; they're still coming from someone else's effort, not your own. To be a "giver" you first must earn the things you're giving away. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.

> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.

You aren't alone, so your $1200 would not go as far in that future as it does now. There would be some inflation (perhaps only localized increased costs to some industries), but I'd suspect that people working less would be a feature, not a bug.

UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all. Work provides income, meaning, and dignity. Some people would move from industries which have lots of crappy manual jobs (like janitorial services) to industries which are currently only hobbies, but with UBI subsidies could be sustainable as a career. I imagine lots more Etsy shops.

So let's think about what it would mean to do that.

In one case you could have some people who are just above the poverty line and if you took a little bit of money from them and gave it to people below the poverty line then the first group could end up below it while the people already below it don't get enough to end up above it. In theory that's "increasing poverty" but only in a strict technical sense which isn't even inconsistent with the result still being a net positive. Also, that wouldn't be possible under plausible rate structures because anybody in the approximate vicinity the poverty line would be receiving more than they pay in taxes and the net payers would be making significantly more than that with no reasonable possibility of falling into poverty as a result.

The other possibility is that the program somehow causes such a dramatic amount of economic damage that more people end up below the poverty line than started there as a result of increased involuntary unemployment etc. But the poverty line in the US is $12,760, whereas the most commonly proposed amount for the UBI is $12,000, so that seems incredibly unlikely -- people would have to be unable to find a job making $760/year, in an environment where employees have greater leverage. And you could preclude the possibility entirely if desired by making the UBI e.g. $13,000, which would just outright directly eliminate poverty.

If different people had money than currently do then they might buy different things with it, and then the demand for the things they want would go up and demand for some other things would go down. That isn't inflation, it's a demand shift. And for most types of products it would only cause increased production of those things rather than significant price changes. Meanwhile for other things (e.g. things which are artificially scarce), the price changes themselves would shift demand elsewhere -- who is going to pay $10,000 rent in San Francisco if it's <$1000 in Pennsylvania and the difference in local wages doesn't close the gap?

Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.

“UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“

Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessity of doing things in exchange for money. Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.

It is widely observed that many people work far more than is necessary to supply their basic necessities, because people's desires don't tend to end with those needs.

You may have quite limited desires, but there is no evidence that that is true of humans generally.

Which serves to further increase inflation.

So you increase the amount more, and shortly thereafter inflation increases more again.

And so you increase the amount again, and so on, and so on until suddenly you have hyperinflation and your economy collapses, see for example the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or any of a dozen other examples throughout history.

Most of the proposals I've heard of UBI / negative income tax are good supplements but don't completely replace work-based income. $1000/month per adult is among the largest benefit I've heard.

That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.

I'm pretty sure there have been various studies all but disproving the "common sense" notions people have about UBI and laziness. Or the fundamental idea that if you don't make it hard on poor people they won't do anything of value. Or that poor people are lazy, and that they are poor because they are lazy. Etc, etc, etc.

That work still has to get done though. Somebody has to be the janitor. If you then increase the pay of a janitor then lots of people that would otherwise increase their skills to do with that requires more skills would end up as a janitor instead. This triggers a pay increase in those jobs too.

I don't see how you don't end up with just a lot of inflation. The money a job pays doesn't matter on a societal level. What matters is the products/service doing the job provides. No amount of money shuffling is going to make 2 apples turn into 3.

The highest paid jobs (eg. CEO) inflate very little and the lowest page jobs inflate quite a lot. There is currently an anti-inflation effect in the lowest paid jobs when inflation would help these workers have a better living.

Jobs thought of as "minimum wage jobs" in the USA (eg. hourly workers at McDonalds) pay a decent living in Denmark. They don't have runaway inflation. We should examine why there is a such stark difference in expectation between the USA and these other countries.

That said, I don't think UBI is the only way to solve the issues I care about. I might be satisfied simply by easier and fairer access to existing welfare programs (which are already subsidizing those low-wage employers).

The issue is that you have few of the highest paid jobs and many of the lowest paid jobs. The labor cost of a giant factory isn't so much the director, it's the thousands of workers. If you double their wages, you double the cost. If you double the director's salary, you'll hardly notice in the balance sheet.

"Since 1978, and adjusted for inflation, American workers have seen an 11.2 percent increase in compensation. During that same period, CEO’s have seen a 937 percent increase in earnings. That salary growth is even 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market, according to the Economic Policy Institute."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/heres-how-much-ceo-pay-has-i....

Because it's simpler and avoids duplicating effort, since the means testing is rolled into the tax system, and avoids perverse consequences, since with a single payment system you don't end up with a combination that has greater than 1:1 reductions in benefits without outside income for some recipients at some income levels.

> Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs.

A negative income tax is, in terms of who gets what payment, exactly equivalent to a UBI funded by a progressive income tax.

A monthly UBI with the usual annual income tax filing and reconciliation payment/refund is a better mechanism than simply rolling the UBI into the income tax calculation and annual reconciliation, though.

> I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.

I think people like you overestimate it, because they ignore the well-established effects of general deprivation and voracious human wants. They may also overestimate their own tolerance for non-work, as do many people leading up to retirement.

> I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.

Some people would. But many more people would also be willing to work a little bit more for a little bit more, which UBI makes easier than existing means-tested programs.

And many people who initially would reduce work for the novelty of leisure would turn around later and work to have the things they couldn't afford on the basic stipend.

> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.

Unless you are the poorest of the poor, that outcome isn't actually contrary to the design or problematic.

But, practically, anything a UBI plan gives you can be undone with an equal and opposite tax. The net effect after taxes is what matters and it's going to redistribute money or there's no point in doing it. Some people pay more taxes than others and raising the top income tax rate is enough to ensure that the wealthy don't benefit.

It can be made exactly equivalent to a negative income tax.

It seems that rents are going down a bit in San Francisco because some people who can suddenly work remotely are moving out (among other reasons). UBI is an income that you can take with you wherever you go, much like social security, so it's likely to make living in cheaper places more attractive.

1) Allow actual competition. Adopt Japan-like zoning to make it easier to build. Landlords cannot freeload if they have competition. Make it harder for small special interest groups to veto new development.

2) Set property taxes appropriately or implement a land-value tax so that landlords have to pay for part of the surrounding improvements.

City expansion is hard because there isn't enough money to uniformly develop every growing areas in all directions.

This is very similar to any investment you will ever make. Including things like education.

If we walked down this route. Everything needs to be free.

You're right that cities do not expand uniformly, and city improvements are also not uniformly distributed. This is why a flat property tax does not make sense. Use land-value-tax to balance. If one area is very desirable, increase land taxes in that area and use the revenue to fund improvements like parks, libraries, schools all around the city.

- You can "claw back" the money other, cheaper, ways (e.g. income tax increases).

- Negative income tax don't work for children, disabled, or the elderly like UBI does. If they don't work, it doesn't work. Therefore, you wind up with two schemes.

People keep on tacking on complexity, which breeds costs, which makes the whole scheme disproportionately expensive. It is universal because universal is cheap to run.

If something changes (like a job loss) you submit a form and they send you the money. They can figure out if you owe them the money back on your next tax filing.

This does work for children since they would be counted as a dependent. This would probably change your tax filing which could change the calculation.

This would also work for elderly since they would still be filing taxes.

It would be easier to do it universally but it would likely cause other issues like more inflation.

This posits the capability of the government to put together a really remarkably competent administration, that knows everyone's tax filings, everyone's citizenship status, where everyone lives, the cost of living in every part of the country (or the world?), and can speedily process paperwork continuously throughout the year. Certainly no such administration currently exists. It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.

Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.

> everyone's citizenship status

A government has to know one's citizenship already.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/2019...

The US government does not have a list of citizens. No such list exists.

On a case-by-case basis it's generally pretty straightforward to determine whether someone is a citizen, but there isn't a list. The closest thing is probably the social security administration's register of people who have applied for a social security number, but even that doesn't cover everyone.

I agree that it would be more difficult than just doing UBI. I am not a fan of just taking the easier path just for the sake of ease. Only giving money to people who need it would be better for everybody.

The US already has cost of living numbers. Just to be clear I am saying they could use these numbers not that they have to use them. Receiving $5,000 in the Bay Area is different than $5,000 in Wyoming and making $50,000 in the Bay Area is different than making $50,000 in Wyoming. This is why I was suggesting using the cost of living numbers.

>Certainly no such administration currently exists.

UBI doesn't exist either so it already would need to be set up.

If they can set up actual tax equations it would allow for a more stream lined IRS. This would help modernize the whole tax process which would be beneficial for all of us. I recall a country (maybe state?) that released the tax program they wrote. You could download it and run it yourself if you wanted. This would be great for people. There would be no need for most people to buy Turbo Tax or go to a tax guy.

>It would probably be very expensive, and the individual-filing-based workflow would be burdensome both to all people and to the administration. Lose your job? File a form. Get a raise? File a form. Get an inheritance? File a form. Move? File a form. Get married or have a kid? File several forms! There's a reason individuals only have to file taxes once a year. Bureaucracy is waste.

You would not have to file forms. You would only need to file a form if you wanted to receive money or stop receiving money. If you are fine waiting until the next tax filing you would be free to do so.

This is no different than the current welfare system. If you wish to receive welfare or stop receiving welfare you have to fill out a form. What I am suggesting is less manual validation than the welfare system since I would go with the assumption the person should get the money. It would automatically be fixed after filing your taxes.

>Aspects of this hypothetical administration would need to exist for any UBI scheme, but in a UBI scheme with equal payments the burden on the individual would not be more than ensuring the bank account or address they use to receive their tax refund is current throughout the year, and continuing to file taxes once yearly.

I am in favor of replacing welfare with a negative income tax. If you want money from the negative income tax and your income did not automatically qualify you from your previous year's filing then you fill out a form. This would be less work for many people since there would be an automatic enrollment based on the previous year's tax filing.

I agree that UBI is easier. I just don't think people like Jeff Bezos needs government money. If Bezos receives a few thousand extra he is probably not going to spend more or invest more. It would be a waste to give to somebody like him. We could in turn provide extra money for people who actually needs help. The people who need help are more likely to actually spend the money than Bezos so it could benefit the economy.

That is how the welfare program operates today. It's expensive to manage and at its current position not inclusive enough which then leaves a number of people worse off when you are just above the cut-off.

But one of the features of a UBI is it causes people to drop out of the labor market. Especially for shitty low end unskilled labor jobs. And this is great because the reduction in supply will drive up labor rates and help inequality in a far more natural way than a minimum wage.

UBI doesn't.

Policing benefits hurts the poor, not the rich.

Where people would otherwise have no income UBI will increase spending. Where they don't it has other benefits. But if you want to save that cash then that's also good.

The problem is that a small loophole or exception paves the way for larger exceptions, and so on, which continues until the original concept is gutted and bleeds out to the status quo

Two major reasons.

The principled reason is that it is, well, universal. If you're a citizen, you get certain rights and responsibilities, end of story.

A more realist perspective notes that historically, if you make a program for the poor, it becomes a poor program (underfunded). A scheme it is more likely to succeed the more people who buy in to it. (Notice how the ACA is becoming more popular over time? Or look at Social Security vs. SNAP.)

> I definitely would choose not to work

I think people both pro- and con- are not really thinking through how this would play out in reality. Income, wealth, type of work and social status are intimately linked, especially so in the US.

There will immediately be some slur for people who choose not to work that will probably replace the "your momma's on welfare"-type crap. Lots of people's shallow, status driven dating rules will expand to exclude the voluntarily-unemployed. It will become obvious that there's a very low glass-ceiling over their heads that limits them in all sorts of ways. It will also become harder to crawl out of over time, both for individuals who don't maintain useful skills, and as a social class, because that's how humans act.

Some people will of course choose that life. But I think it will be a lot less appealing than you think.

this is not an unforeseen circumstance, but a desired outcome

> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government.

Is that a bad thing? Say We went from participation rate from ~65% to 40%. That could be good, we stop trying to force people into jobs unnecessarily as we automate + it might encourage dirty jobs like cleaners to be better paid and balance the wage market as people have a way to walk away.

Point 2: Generally I agree that UBI is a bit of a pipe dream for now. I think we'd be better off doing some 'guaranteed job' system where we focus on societal roles that add value but dont compete with free market. Give people a guaranteed 3 day a week job for basic living wage type deal and earlier retirement ages. Use this as a transition point to hopefully automating much of the world and some system of UBI as we slim workforce needs.

- ends up being more expensive than just giving to everyone

- prevents some people who need it but are somehow obstructed by the bureaucracy from receiving it

- gets it's conditions increasingly narrowed to reduce the costs until it stops helping anyone

One reason to include the rich in UBI is that it reduces administrative overheads. If it's means-tested, that means monitoring, investigating and ultimately punishing the poor. Why bother?

For a middle to upper income earner their overall tax rate would be the same, the income tax rates could be adjusted so someone on $100k still pays the same overall amount of tax.

Second it is gets rid of the high effective tax rates that low income earners deal with. While low income earners pay low or no income tax, they lose their benefits the more they earn, so a dollar earned could mean up to a dollar less in benefits, which is a disincentive to work. Something that is often missed by the people who say having a UBI would be a disincentive to work.

I think UBI is easier to swallow for some people, cause they'd get it as well, they might be more willing to open up to the idea.

That said, I think the amount you'd get on UBI would balance itself out to what can be given. If everyone becomes lazy bums that rather not work, we'd all see our UBI payments decline year over year until we can't live off it and would need to go back to work. A bit of a simplification, but it's possible that the system thus finds a stable level on its own that works.

I have never understood this obsession with 100% employment.

Employment means income and tax revenue and social security funding. 100% employment means more people have personal income, the nation's social security system is not exhausted, and the state has more revenue to invest in public policies.

The point is to have a guaranteed floor for all in society, much like the idea of bankruptcy (before the conservative demonization of the idea particularly in the 1990s and Bush era, in the USA) it’s a way to ensure people can start over or continue to build momentum without fear of being homeless, starving and/or being unable to provide the basics for their family or themselves

This lowers the barrier of entry for people to free themselves of being shackled to giant corporations or dead end jobs just for “security”

Furthermore, "unforeseen consequences" are effects that we don't know will happen because they lie beyond our ability to predict them. There will always be unforeseen consequences of any major policy decision.

Public services should be public. There's extreme social value in equal access and you reduce an extreme amount of bureaucracy and debate in the process.

>If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.

WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK.

Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.

Agreed. "Indeed, in 2006, the top twenty per cent of earners were twice as likely to work more than fifty hours a week than the bottom twenty per cent, a reversal of historic conditions." [1]

1 - https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont...

They're not remotely comparable. The jobs themselves have gotten better even if the hours might have gotten worse.

I spend my day listening to music, watching YouTube, doing largely what I'd be doing anyway but with GitHub, Slack and a terminal open. Why do I care if it's 15 hours or 60 if I'm getting paid to do what I'd be doing anyway?

Why don't we just drop the act?

The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries.

The only reason you think you are so productive is because almost all your clothes, technology, medical supplies, house appliances and most of your food was produced outside the US by foreign workers; you had nothing to do with it. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR, YOUR SUPERIOR PRODUCTIVITY, OR ROBOTS.

The US is living off the back of illegal miners in the third world and it tells itself "yeah, we should do less!".

I am not making a point against automation, we clearly need more. But the world is so big and the people so numerous all the automation we have pales in comparison with the needs of us all. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.

It's not because the number of people existing globally has increased? People in poor countries didn't work at all until developed countries started shipping their work overseas? What did they all do then?

That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little. In developing countries everyone works because it's a matter of survival.

Housewives obviously do something they don't stay in bed all day, and what they do is very valuable for society. But they do not directly contribute to the GDP and hence they are not part of the workforce, industrial or otherwise.

I'm talking about worker productivity within the US. Hour for hour we're outputting more and getting paid less. Before overseas labor you weren't less productive because you had to make your own clothes or something. That time had already long passed. I'm talking about what has happened since the 1950s, not the 1850s.

Why do you want to force me to follow your priorities?

It's objective that productivity has increased while pay and leisure time have decreased. This isn't a result of any increase in material goods. People are spending less because simply because they're getting paid less.

In 1956 the federal minimum wage was $1 (roughly $10 adjusted for inflation). Today it's 3/4 of that at 7.25.

It’s possible to both make less on average (inflation adjusted) and have access to much nicer things. The equivalent computing power of an iPhone would have cost you millions of dollars in 1990. Food is cheaper, any automated manufacturing output is significantly cheaper, etc.

When so many people point something out to you that you think “doesn’t even follow basic logic”, it usually means you’re making a bad assumption somewhere.

Unless a corporation (or cartel) can monopolize an increase in productivity, society will reap the benefits through lower prices even if wages don’t increase. Competitive forces ensure that. If you’re interested in learning more, check out what happened with the mini mills and steel prices.

Most people choose to spend their money increasing their standard of living instead of buying time at a low standard of living.

As Picasso said, “I’d like to live as a poor man with a rich man’s money.”

Nobody should have to work like crazy

I didn’t graduate high school, my dad waited on tables to raise me. Get out of here with your privilege crap.

This sounds a bit like the Mr. Money Mustache philosophy -- live very cheaply, save like crazy, retire early -- which is all great advice, but elides the level of fortune involved, e.g., getting and keeping a high-paying job straight out of college, having no college debt, quickly marrying someone else who also has a high-paying job and is down with both combining incomes and practicing Extreme Thriftiness with you. IIRC, he made the rather bold claim that he could both live and retire on $25K a year -- which is something a lot of people would, well, prefer not to do. With all respect to Picasso, I'd at least prefer to live as a middle class man with a rich man's money.

Well, yes, sure, and sure, there are different levels of "luxury," e.g., there's getting a BMW 5 series, and there's getting a Honda Insight but springing for the Touring model -- and that's not counting the choice between used and new (what if the person with the BMW 5 series bought it used for about the same as someone else paid for a new Honda Civic). But, particularly at the income levels the average HN reader seems to have based on comments, "build up savings" vs. "afford small luxuries" is often a false dichotomy, which is what I was getting at.

Your job isn't paying less and outputting more because video games exist. When cars were introduced pay didn't suddenly stop tracking productivity.

The standard of living has improved massively. I agree wholeheartedly that there are issues (e.g. people are giving more free time, but they don't know what to do with it and engage in unhealthy habits to kill the free time they've been given), but generally, it's not even close.

There is nothing stopping you from working 10 hours a week and living like a person in the 1920’s. Local doctor who will put a $1 poultice on your skin cancer, no AC, no car, 10 to a house.

We're working more and getting paid less for that work. This isn't because of the standard of living. Standard of living can still increase while pay tracks productivity, and it does in other developed countries.

This is the most frustrating HN discussion I've seen in a while. People are coming here to peddle this "quality of life" argument with zero evidence. You're not even stopping for a second to consider that the US isn't the only country in the world.

If you compare the American GDP to other countries, the average individual is getting very little bang for their buck as far as quality of life goes.

You’re proposing that people should be happy with what we had back then by reducing output. I’d rather work full time and have the better quality of life, thanks.

>Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades.

Speak for yourself. Not everybody's comfortable spending most of their time lounging around doing nothing that anybody else even values enough to pay for.

I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.

Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.

You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse.

Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking.

Cars need far less maintenance.

TVs are practically free.

My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time.

I could go on and on.

Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher.

You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit.

Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.

> all

I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.

p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.

Today, just do the edits, hit [print].

Hours, hours, hours saved.

Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland!

(He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)

People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion.

Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.

One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on.

The list is near endless of things to do.

Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.

And you're making the argument that the effort of aspiring novelists is wasted. It's not. Or else we would have no novels.

Also, I think you missed the point about novelists. It is more about if you suck at writing novels, sitting around and writing one for yourself isn't very valuable for society. There are some people who have natural talent, but the average Joe sitting around not working and instead writing a novel for fun will likely not be producing much value--at least, not as much as if he were working.

How do you know you suck at writing novels until you try?

For the writers, I didnt say dont try. There is a difference between trying during spare time while off work vs. doing it as a hobby while not working and thus not contributing to society yet taking money from it.

Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.

It should be very obvious that raising children well or taking care of the elderly are hugely valuable activities, yet the market almost completely ignores them.

And yeah, raising children and taking care of the elderly are certainly important. I know that in tech cities that childcare can be very hard to find and incredibly expensive, so maybe it is becoming more valued? But the key is that the value of the service itself is not based solely on how 'important' it is, but also how many people are performing it and how much is needed (supply&demand). Or maybe a better way to say is that importance is also a function of supply and demand. Take oxygen, for example--super important, but I'm not buying tanks of it.

Software development is pretty hot right now, but if almost everyone in the world were trained to do it, the price of that labor would be quite low. This is another feature of markets--it helps to allocate resources (jobs) to what is needed at the moment. With UBI, I think you would be missing out on that to a large extent.

...have you talked to your sales guys?

They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do.

Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.

In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?

The people on space ships all have a form of UBI and choose a profession so that they can accomplish something of meaning. Space exploration is one of those.

But others turn to art, literature, etc.

I know which I would rather do.

Your always welcome to work harder for more.

The problem is, there is quite literally not enough valid, useful, and productive work to go around.

We've reached a point there isn't enough work for everyone to do. What does that mean if you want to work full time?

It means you're taking work away from someone else.

I don't think anyone minds that, what they mind is that you're also taking their livelihood away.

If there isn't enough work, but there is enough resources, what does that tell you about the system?

Either those who can't secure work will suffer, or we need to redistribute the outputs of those who can secure work.

Its a really basic question whether you agree with ubi or not:

Do you want people to suffer so you can work full time? Or would you rather everyone gets what they need, and we work for what we want.

People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work.

Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.

But this is a point the article somewhat addresses - the graph for marketing-budgets shows that pretty nicely in my opinion.

At some points, its just easier to make more money/profits by trying to increase demand for your product than by improving it (or reducing costs of its production). And I think that's what we're seeing more and more on an ever increasing scale right now: "Actually productive" jobs (e.g. manufacturing) are already outsourced, and the gains from the cost-savings are spent on e.g. marketing.

This might make sense economically (in terms of profits, emplyoment), but arguably less from a "benefit-for-society" point of view.

I think David Graeber adresses this quite nicely (but rather aggressively) with his 'Bullshit Job'-theory.

I have heard about the Bullshit Jobs theory and I find it unconvincing (I admit I haven't read the whole book). The meaningfulness and value of a job is not determined by the laborer - as suggested by the "do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world" surveys he cites - but by the employer.

The value of something has always been determined by other people who want it. It doesn't matter what David Graeber and his unhappy laborers think or say, something isn't bullshit just because they say it is. Many of the examples he mentions (doormen, content curators, PR) are valuable things that people want enough to pay for, yet his opaque judgment deems them "bullshit" simply because he or someone else thinks they're worthless.

History shows us economies that failed because some people thought they could plan them with isolated judgments of what society should value. UBI as a solution for Bullshit Jobs follows in the same tradition by personally judging whole swaths of jobs to have no value, then proposing a plan to get rid of them.

Thats why the definition is what it is. He knows it's a subjective phrase that means many different things to many different people. He also admits there will be some people who find value in the same job someone else does not.

I think it's a bit strange to hinge your opinion on this definition though, its really only defined that way so it doesn't piss people off, the book isn't about how you define bullshit jobs, the book is about what we should do now we know they exist.

Which you're sort of ignoring.

What do you think we should do since we do know bullshit jobs exist.

Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people.

There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case.

Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer.

I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available.

I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available.

This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths.

> Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that.

What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution.

> What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital

I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it.

> and it worsens inequality.

This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner.

Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class.

On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now.

At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.

From my POV having job as au pair for example is still better than working hard in the field.

IMO we should focus on reducing much duplication od work, so I am happy that OSS, Wikipedia, SciHub, KhanAcademy, MIT, translations services, open hardware design and similar efforts are in progress.

IMO more focus should be shifted into education. I guess education problem isn't solved in western rich countries only because it's easier to brain drain from less developed ones, so people don't feel the pain.

When this will start I hope they start taxing more at very top and shift economy to more valuable stuff than zero-sum Tinder clones.

BTW in my country(Poland) they introduced small version of UBI (like 500$ per child per month for family). It cost 5% of whole country budget. It's quite controversial but IMO it was good move but we still need to see long term impact.

Caring about the elderly is entirely besides the point I'm making

Building the #1 best economy obviously shouldn't be one's sole purpose in life. But if you really think it doesn't matter at all, why not leave the developed nation you probably live in and find happiness in the third world. Or just ask one of the many people who seek a better life in the first world every year.

There's a troubling number of people in this thread who seem think that wealth creation and strong economies is some pointless goal that we've been tricked into caring about. Let's not forget that we work to build wealth for ourselves and our children. We've already worked so hard to build wealth into our buildings and streets and health and technology and culture. Apparently that's why you can dismiss the value of a strong economy from the comfort of your laptop/desk in the first place.

So you’d need to prevent that, but in order to prevent it you’d have to become somewhat isolationist, right? Sounds bad.

Though I’m curious if anyone has thought about how to prevent all of the expensive skilled jobs from leaving.

Have you played Civilization? If you don't strive to be "the best", eventually you're the guys with spears or even muskets being bombed by F-15s. In other words, lag behind the leaders for long enough and you can say goodbye to your freedom. That's basically how the XVI-XIX century colonization happened.

This is where you are completely wrong. I'm not even going to bother explaining, because there are too many obvious counter-examples.

Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.

Despite minimum wage, there is extensive child labor in agriculture in the US, because there is a gap in child labor law.

Which suggest that minimum wage didn't make child labor obsolete, banning child labor did.

That is of course not true, because as you yourself point out, there is still child labor going on. Banning something has nothing to do with it existing, just look at drugs.

Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.

In specifically the area where it wasn't banned.

> Banning something has nothing to do with it existing

Odd, then, that child labor has been vastly reduced in exactly the domains where it is prohibited, and not where it isn’t.

> Minimum wage law made child labor mostly unprofitable, is what I should have said.

Were that the case, and not prohibition being the limiting factor, you'd expect child labor to exist where minimum wage is inapplicable, but not where it is, even independent of whether it is allowed.

But in agriculture, where it is prevalent and not prohibited, minimum wage applies and hasn't limited it. Yet it's not found in most of the other places it existed before being banned, and where it is, in fact, prohibited. It's prohibition, not minimum wage, that did it in.

Although there is a technical sense where “minimum wage law” is the deciding factor, because it was actually the same law (though the applicability of the minimum wage and the child labor prohibition pieces differ) that implemented federal minimum wage and the child labor prohibitions and restrictions, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Banning and prohibition are just ways of increasing the cost of hiring children: they now have to pay the wage + fine. And it only works if that is too expensive compared with the alternatives.

Money is not a public service.

Also, to the OP Milton Friedman's 'Negative Tax' is the same thing as UBI - in the end, 'rich people' would not get a cheque in the mail because on the whole, they'd make too much money.

Also - the top 10% taxes would have to go up radically in order to pay for UBI.

This also applies to the negative income tax.

For administrative simplicity.

But for every you, there's a me. I get satisfaction out of working. I had a job in college where I completed all of my work in the first week and did absolutely nothing for the next 6 months and I was MISERABLE. I needed a task to complete, a job to finish, to feel productive.

Furthermore I like having things - whether that be a boat, or a nice car or insert whatever. And that's not some "you've just succumbed to the capitalist monsters" - I buy things that I get enjoyment out of, I don't get enjoyment out of buying things. Quite frankly I feel disgusting anytime I buy something, so if it isn't something I enjoy I have borderline permanent remorse. The car I bought at 16 still hits a nerve because it was a pile of garbage I paid too much for.

I completely understand and respect and quite frankly envy people that don't want things, don't need to work to feel "complete" and can get by doing nothing all day. And with all of that said, the fact there's a you, and a me, tells me there's a very good chance UBI can work. People that don't care about having nice things can do fuck-all and get enough to survive, and people who want more can work until they have it.

Everyone agrees that there will be people who will want to work, and people who won't. The question is what is the ratio, and is it enough. No one can predict this with a high level of certainty. We all just have "a feeling", which coincidentally happens to align perfectly with whether or not we believe in UBI.

Whether you agree with UBI or not you better have a solution for how those people are going to survive when they are eventually replaced by a machine. The alternative will be endless war and famine or genocide.