I think the reality is that such people will always be with us and a certain number will always find some way of achieving that.
The economic reality appears to be trending that way at present in any event. We need far fewer people doing “useful” things than there are people.
However, as you say:
and most people eventually come to that on their own.
Given the opportunity to do things, most people will find something to do. Whether it’s ‘useful’ or not depends on your viewpoint and I suppose how ‘useful’ a measure you find utility to be.
I know a lot of people working very hard at essentially useless work.
Some people would say my work is useless (perish the thought).
London, Vancouver, San Francisco, etc. are all their own special cases and not all that meaningful for a typical person — not what I had in mind anyway. They very well might be unaffected. Also, no realistic UBI could service rent at their existing prices, anyway.
Oh, it would be one neck of a wild ride! It would transform the economy and change employment to it’s core.
I see the people willingly “falling out of the labor market” as offsetting increased automation and reduced labor needs. I think we are going to see less demand for labor over the next several decades, this keeps them from starving.
But perhaps the coolest thing is that I don’t think most people will want to just sit and do nothing all day. They are going to create art and music and do entrepreneurial work AS LONG AS the UBI isn’t set up stupidly in that they don’t keep it if they make other money. I think there would be an explosion of creative small businesses, more passion projects and more businesses that may not support the primary employee for the first year.
And that is why it is important that it is universal, and that it doesn’t matter how much savings you have. Everyone should get the check. There will, I am sure, be income taxes to eventually offset the check, but everyone from the homeless dude who hasn’t got two pennies to scrape together to Bill Gates should get the check. Everyone. So that there aren’t any disincentives to working or finding ways to work for yourself- you pay taxes, but you don’t loose your check.
That is a really good question, and especially if you want to maintain access to the credit markets for people who mostly being their income from the UBI.
I mean, you could do some interesting things with bankruptcy law and making sure that if one goes through it they may loose physical assets but not their UBI, so they essentially “start over”… But this could curtail credit except for assets that can be seized.
I accept that. What I worry about is that UBI could potentially cause the incidence of such lifestyles to increase exponentially. And I personally define useful endeavors pretty broadly. Poets are useful.
I think the difficult question for me is what is society to do with the ‘drones’ (in the P G Wodehouse sense)?
Is ensuring that other people are ‘doing something’ for themselves worth hamstringing ourselves for? Is it any of our business whether they live as lotus eaters if it doesn’t harm us?
UBI is an awesome idea, but it simply cannot be transplanted into the current system without other changes…
Take housing rents for example, UBI might take the current rents and just add the current level of private rents ON TOP of the UBI amounts…
Rent control is one option, something like a 50+% public ownership of housing at cost prices is another (leave the top end to private, but have a cheap social fallback) otherwise you’re just directly subsidising parasites with public money and it breaks the whole system.
Talk about your shill. Wow, the idea that UBI is a scam because of flaws in our tax system is ridiculous on its face. It’s the tax system that’s the scam buddy, not the idea of making sure people can eat.
In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of. - Confucius
Let’s feed the poor. At the same time, let’s fix our tax system.
Its both ways though, for the most part the money is pooling at the top and the wealthy are taking that money and either spending it on stuff of detriment to the economy or investing in stuff that doesn’t help grow the economy. Like how is buying an expensive foreign car help? Or artificially inflating the cost of realestate in popular cities so the middle class is priced out of the market.
It’s a fair point because if everyone could afford an apt, then yes, some rates would change. But not all rates would change and certainly not the current level PLUS UBI.
If this was true, the then whole concept that “if everyone was gainfully employed and people still couldn’t afford rent” it should show that the system itself is broken some how.
Housing is like any commodity - it is supply and demand. But just because the demand increases it won’t automatically raise the price unless the supply is also taxed.
So this is a totally manageable problem - make sure housing meets what is required. Of course today there are some areas with housing shortages, and we can see the sky rocket costs. Some areas like NYC are already taxed on population density. Where as some place like where I live, we have lots of room and barely build up like we could if neede
Dude is straight-up Socialist Tom Friedman, swapping Taxis for Ubers, and you guys are lapping it up because it has some gratuitous SV bashing. Under-and-marginal employment wasn’t invented with the internet; people in subaltern classes have been side-hustling since the beginning of civilization, pushed into low-status jobs that reinforce social hierarchies, to think that would be any way changed by swapping cash for stock options is nonsense.
Again, this POV is coming with absolutely no statistics, no evidence, just pure mushy ideology, from someone who was born rich and spent their whole life giving Ted Talks to other rich people. There’s actual UBI pilot programs happening as we speak, from which we will be able to draw some conclusions, we don’t need some Media Studies schmuck to weigh in on this, at all.
Surely we will probably have exactly the same propensity to spend marginal funds on investments in microloans or co-operatives as we currently do. I cant see why that propensity would be considered likely to change.
Don’t follow you. With standard upward sloping demand and supply curves then if the demand increases it does “automatically raise the price”. A fair number of people question whether demand and supply curves are as conventionally characterized but if they are then it sort of a definitional thing.
It depends on how quick the change is. If the new housing is keeping pace with demand, it should be stable-ish. But housing is also greatly affected by location, schools, and a host of other issues.
In a more simple example - let’s say Apple sells 25% more iPhones than it did the ear before. A decent increase in demand. Would the price increase? If they can increase production to meet that 25% demand, then no, probably not. If they can’t, then yes, they may increase prices because they can. Or… maybe not, because they still have competitors that aren’t iPhones, and a cost increase may reduce their demand.
So back to the housing example, if more people could afford rent, then yeah, it will lead to an increase, but not a 1:1 increase with the UBI. And if things are actually PLANNED right, it could be managable.
And again, widely varies. There isn’t a huge homeless population in Kansas City, and our population increase rate is modest. More people affording housing won’t have the same effect as say San Francisco.
Now you are taking me back. I remember writing an essay on the difference between reproducible and non-reproducible commodities.
So mass production of iPhone is one of the best examples of why people question whether supply curves should be upward sloping. For a 1950s Chicago economist (or Greg Mankiw) its self-evident that the higher the price the more of a commodity will be produced - like say Uber surge pricing drivers. But its pretty damn obvious to the rest of us thats not how mass production of electronic components works - if anything the more of something electronic you produce, the cheaper it is to produce it.
With land, this is clearly not true, cos its not reproducible. Accommodation is a bit like land (where we have zoning laws) and a bit like electronics (cos construction is amenable to mass production efficiencies (to some extent). But generally its not really so easy to reproduce housing cos a lot of production cost is appropriately located land.
Where landlords have a dominant market position, I suggest they will be able to extract a lot of the increase in income from tenants. That shouldnt necessarily put people off from a UBI policy because you would just need to adjust the tax code a bit to make it less of a giveaway to landlords. But it probably is the case that a UBI would be extracted by whatever or whoever is currently extracting rents.
You need a UBI to be accompanied by a better tax code. But you probably want a better tax code anyway.
It is probably none of my business is a person decides to use their UBI to sit in a tenement and watch TV. It becomes a societal problem when a growing percentage of people do that long term.
As far as the “drones”, if you are speaking of the idle rich who produce nothing ( It has been a long time since I read Wodehouse. ), I don’t have a solution.
I wish we could use the money to pay people a stipend to apprentice to craft guilds. It would be a better world if becoming a master stone mason or the like became a viable career choice.
It’s already happening on a smaller scale in the U.S., and not amongst those “lazy” coastal urban types who vote for the Dems (supposedly to get their handouts) but with hard-working Real Americans™ in the Heartland who can’t stop voting for the party that wants to cut benefits (the same party that’s spent the past 35 years hollowing out the labour market they used to depend on).
The GOP keeps the suckers on the hook by claiming that they only want to cut benefits for “undeserving” urban types (dogwhistle for PoCs) and selling the idea that prosperity is just around the corner for Joe Duh (unlicensed) Plumber.
But the societal problem of a growing percentage of Americans (mostly white ones) feeling they have no choice but to use their disability payments to sit in a double-wide trailer and watch TV is a real one now:
While I share your optimism and my own experience agrees with that, empirically, it’s clear there are people who will fall into that.
The possible unintended consequence that fascinates me is that the typical way we think of jobs being compensated could be turned on its head, or at least turned sideways. As it stands, unique and rare skills are the highest rewarded, while the most common skills are least. Under a UBI, it’s easy to imagine that that would be changed to from least pleasant/interesting ==> most pleasant/interesting. I could see something like a nuclear engineer commanding a lower salary than a janitor. Because we’re going to have to pay out the nose to get people to scrub toilets (or have the toilet scrubbing robots ready to go) and empty trash if there is no immediate need for unskilled labor to have to work. Obvs not necessarily a bad thing but just something to consider when trying to craft a system to make sure the golden egg laying goose doesn’t get strangled.
I’d really like to hear what those very good reasons for means-testing are. Speaking from an abundance of anecdotes (including personal ones), means-testing seems to create more of a disincentive to work than just giving someone money unconditionally would. If you’re just scraping by on disability or welfare, you have an active and powerful incentive not to do anything that would increase your financial stability, because often even working a few hours a month is enough to push you over the means-testing line. Now you’re not allowed to claim benefits from the government anymore, but you’re still worse off than you were on welfare.
Long-term, there will not be enough jobs to employ everyone. There aren’t enough jobs now, and the really sophisticated automation hasn’t even kicked in yet. There’s simply no way to ensure that everyone has what they need to survive by tying those needs to a requirement that a person be doing something. It’s why I think a federal jobs guarantee is a useless dead-end idea. There are over 7 billion people on this planet. Not everyone can be engaged in full-time hand de-idling, and it’s only going to get worse as more people enter the population and more jobs get abstracted away.
Idealistically-speaking, the end goal is fully automated luxury space communism (read: Star Trek), where the basics of agriculture, plumbing, manufacturing, etc. are largely handled by machines, and people who do things like cooking in a restaurant do it because they have a passion for such endeavours, not because they need to do so in order to keep a roof over their head. Practically speaking, though, we’re not quite there yet. A well-administered UBI system is perhaps the best interim solution we have to prevent people from starving while capitalism replaces more and more of its employees with touch-screens.
