Basic income

more drunk Karl Malone in this bitch imo

Paul Campos fisked this one too: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/bad-arguments-against-a-universal-basic-income

He calls them out for the same issue re: counting the eligible population, also blows up the nonsense about the labor force and how many people are working (hint, it is not eight out of ten people).

The NYT apparently felt the need for this piece because of UBI ideas percolating in the tech sector, which IMHO is basically the snake eating its tail of dumb economic discourse in this country

nytimes editorial pages increasingly off the rails, seemingly no basic standards of competence required for its contributors

i guess some of the numbers in that nyt piece are misleading. UBI skeptics gotta step up their game. this guy, an ecumenically polite canadian tax/welfare economist, is currently my favourite https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan. imo an actually good robust welfare state is better than UBI, but question is if that's politically realistic/sustainable

re: the nyt article, while it seems bad, it's not trivial to calculate and impossible to do in short space. there's always something you can leave out to make it seem cheaper/more expensive. i expect future pieces to be met with endless tedious rebuttals over whether prime age labor force participation is 81% of 76% and such, but that isn't really a zinger either way.

i posted some longform good faith/show-your-work efforts to calculate cost of a basic income upthread fwiw

One trouble with the actually good robust welfare state is it is means-tested, and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody. I probably posted this point already but whatever.

Drunk KM OTM

and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody.

yup

"this probably isn't worth mentioning but i really hate all of this, this line of thinking. the word "worthless" to describe people is emblematic. fuck people who think this way."

ok, yeah, but capitalism inherently conditions people to think this way! ubi is not simply an economic equation, but requires a radical reshaping of the structure and values of western society. so we'd better get started!

hearteningly even within capitalism it is kind of off-putting when salaried professionals talk about about the soul food of Work as if everyone in a call center or a mcd's rejoices each day to have escaped the brutalizing corruptions of leisure, and ime even those born to the hu$tle can tell

a few weeks ago in chipotle the team leader made all the frontline staff do a cheer. it was terrible for everyone in the building

tbf just guessing about that salaried professional thing because for all i know nyt economic op-eds are now tenuous piecework, so maybe they're down here building character with the rest of us

One trouble with the actually good robust welfare state is it is means-tested, and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody. I probably posted this point already but whatever.

Drunk KM OTM

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 10:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody.

yup

― de l'asshole (flopson), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 11:05 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

should add: the same white supremacists are also libertarianish/don't want to pay 15% more taxes. between a racist rock and a libertarian hard place

my grandparents, who lived most of their prime age working lives in raw dog pre-welfare capitalism, talk about work that way. but i think division of labor-driven alienation has probably increased (or polarized) since then. my parents don't like work

i believe in the 'work is good for the soul' thing to some degree, i think everyone does tbh. but i don't think that precludes sympathy for people working shitty jobs or even support for UBI. also just practically if ur trying to convince ppl of this policy that will be paid for by raise income taxes on those who do work it's probably not a good idea to be like 'and then we'll lift false consciousness and everyone will stop working!', strategically

A robust welfare system should always be preferable given the choice. UBI runs the risk of the state abrogating any responsibility to make society better. Yes, we could build cheap, good quality subsidised social housing but here is $10k now run along and find a private landlord to take half of it. Yes, we could implement universal health care free at the point of delivery but here is $10k and we'll let you decide whether to spend it on food or medicine. We may have created an environment where rewarding paid employment is a pipe dream for millions but at least we're giving them enough money to avoid dying of 19th century diseases, etc. If there is no political alternative then you can take what you get but it should be resisted where welfare systems exist, as should most ideas tech bros and the Swiss agree upon.

Leaving aside self-worth through work, which is a real thing irrespective of whether people think it should be conditioned out, one of the key issues would inevitably be social mobility. Work is a hugely flawed system for solving intergenerational poverty but it can help. Unless social change goes radically beyond the simple provison of basic necessities as a right, there would be a huge risk of entrenching social divisions even further.

Youse guyses takes on this?:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income

I view UBI as a both/and plank in the post-neoliberal platform. Universal health care and the systematic redress of institutional racism are also important things to accomplish. UBI in the form of cancelling the existing US safety net and cutting everyone a check is not the point (or isn't my point, and isn't e.g. S+W's point in Inventing the Future which for better or worse is my manifesto on this topic). I view UBI as an important policy effort because mandatory participation in the market for labor is a shitty kind of freedom, and in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

I think the ycombinator project has a good chance of setting the political momentum behind UBI back by a decade when it blows up.

That might get the tech bubble crowd to move on to more useful and practical efforts like the robust welfare system discussed above, but it also might make them flounce off and resume the usual neo-feudalist bullshit

in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 1:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what?

i don't really get the experiment. what do you expect to learn from it? giving people money for a few months or even years, see if they quit their jobs, we've done that and not too much happens. but that's not really what a ubi is. it's the permanent and universal parts of it that make it interesting.

in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 1:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what?

― de l'asshole (flopson), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 10:58 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like, capital is going to stop having a use for people who are new to the world of work and don't happen to have whatever the skill du jour is. Uber has a billion-dollar valuation because speculators think they can avoid getting regulated into oblivion long enough for self-driving cars to drive their labor costs down. Every fancy new factory being built in the US is heavily automated. Being "able and willing to work", to use a familiar canard, is increasingly less likely to be enough to ensure a person an autonomous, stable, and healthy life. (It never was sufficient, but it's what people seem to be talking about when they talk about the postwar period.)

It is weird that you had to explain that

my progress toward death is not going fast enough to outlast my economic independence.

Mass unemployment may be the inevitable result of market economics but it's not, in itself, inevitable. The infrastructure of the U.S. is crumbling around your ears but there is no political will to invest in large-scale public works that could bring millions into employment with the right training. An ageing population is going to require millions of carers and nurses, whether it is profitable or not. At the moment, most countries seem to be assuming that an endless supply of migrant labour will fill that gap but there is no reason why, with proper investment in education and decent rates of compensation, domestic workers couldn't meet those needs. Barring an unprecedented level of automation, people will still be required to do stuff. There needs to be a strong safety net but the idea that 'full employment' is no longer a realistic goal to fight towards doesn't seem like something to give in to.

like, capital is going to stop having a use for people who are new to the world of work and don't happen to have whatever the skill du jour is. Uber has a billion-dollar valuation because speculators think they can avoid getting regulated into oblivion long enough for self-driving cars to drive their labor costs down. Every fancy new factory being built in the US is heavily automated. Being "able and willing to work", to use a familiar canard, is increasingly less likely to be enough to ensure a person an autonomous, stable, and healthy life. (It never was sufficient, but it's what people seem to be talking about when they talk about the postwar period.)

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 2:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It is weird that you had to explain that

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 2:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's weirder to believe it imo. 200 years of technological unemployment fears being wrong doesn't give you pause?

if any of that that actually happens UBI will be a shoe-in... but in the same way marxism would have been a shoe in had wages never risen above subsistence and the profit rate tended to zero

200 years of technological unemployment fears being wrong doesn't give you pause?

not what anybody is actually talking about! Developed economies are exporting "labor" jobs in a race to the bottom and even knowledge work that has traditionally required years of formal training and education is being cost controlled by similar globalized outsourcing, by pushing temporary work visas to their very limit and by turning education systems into more and more "focused" (read: restricted) vocational gymnasiums. Technological unemployment fears are not what anybody is talking about when discussing the income inequality problem, it's the fact that working is now a subsistence activity and less and less a means to upward mobility.

There needs to be a strong safety net but the idea that 'full employment' is no longer a realistic goal to fight towards doesn't seem like something to give in to.

I don't disagree but the work opportunities you point out are seasonal-ish; there's not always a necessary demand gap for useful work that needs publicly funded intervention to solve.

a better welfare system and jobs programs are great though I'm not trying to argue with any of that

that all seems wrong. sounds like the story ppl infer that Trump supporters believe or something. i'm not really down with the style of Left nationalism, generally think more people should be given work visas and/or allowed to immigrate. i know there is a lot of pain and rancor about outsourcing but do you have any evidence that it/globalisation is causing permanent net unemployment in developed countries?

(xp times two)

imo SV libertarian types want a basic income because they think there's a finite amount of economic power in the system and more people drawing a basic income means less protest about the automation and outsourcing or well-paying jobs.

the difference between UBI and a job's current market rate would be money in the tech overlord's pocket

flopson, the net unemployed is the rural/semi-rural worker base Trump has as part of his target audience!

'some rural and semi-rural people lost their jobs' is a far cry from 'it's weird that we have to explain why wages will go to zero in the developed world'

OK, I'll give you that I didn't take "cost of labor approaching zero" literally because, uh, that would bring back all the jobs instantly, and even the robots can't compete with free

if you have some stats to prove that the middle class is doing just fine in first world economies please share

*posts utubue to built to spills perfect from now on*

so the swiss vote on sunday

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-swiss-are-about-to-vote-no-on-basic-income/

Tombot: most of the damage from trade to middle-class jobs has been done, reversing PNTR now wouldn't bring the jobs back. middle class not doing well = incomes stagnating, not falling. middle class incomes would have to fall precipitously for significant portion of the current middle class to be net-receivers of UBI money. a UBI large enough to eliminate poverty is not a middle class program because most of the middle class will pay more into it than they receive. the argument for is that you need to exploit a cognitive bias where people are happy to be getting money and don't notice that they are paying more for it, i.e, social security is popular even among rich old people who paid way more into it throughout their lives than they will ever get back.

imo SV libertarian types want a basic income because they think there's a finite amount of economic power in the system and more people drawing a basic income means less protest about the automation and outsourcing or well-paying jobs.

For me, as an SV-type who supports a UBI, it has nothing to do with these shitty, self-serving motives (although I'm not a libertarian!). I think it's that we all watched Star Trek, read Iain M. Banks, and are in a hurry to get to one of those utopias where people don't have to work if they don't want to.

isn't Star Trek a post-scarcity society and relatively money-free, with some cultures holding on to currency policy fetishistically?

I had to google SV there, thought you were accusing ShariVari of being a libertarian!

sorry, there's a little cross-pollination between this thread and the silicon valley ideas thread

I feel like UBI right now is very necessary right now as a cure to the broken welfare system, which is in some ways the opposite of the motivations espoused by people trying to realize egalitarian future visions

Seems like potentially a bridge/first step toward those futures, though, right?

if you are taking Star Trek as inspiration, basic income would be a distraction, not a bridge, to abolishing money.

I disagree. You put a UBI in-place, and then when enough jobs disappear/become automated that most people are living on a UBI, you take the step of moving to a post-scarcity-type system. I mean, it's not the only way to get there, but seems like A way.

To run an essentially planned economy you need to build the kind of bureaucratic infrastructure that can wisely allocate resources (even in Star Trek there are so many ships that can be built, so many slots for incoming freshmen at the academy, so many lots of vineyards for Picard's family to make merlot), and basic income runs opposite to that -- "we gave you money so how about let's dismantle everything that stands in the way of free markets"

Maybe UBI should be tied to GDP rebranded as "product-sharing". Alaska-style. Like all citizens are entitled to their fare share of what we collectively earn as a nation.

with low wages, which could be supplemented by a basic income, there is no incentive to automate those jobs. things like harvesting fruit and certain vegetables (but not grain plants and cotton) is highly labor intensive but very difficult to automate. that's just one example -- with support for people at the lowest rung of earnings and no economic incentive to make their jobs easier...

I guess maybe I'm thinking that UBI could bring us a Star-Trek-style world (where one is free to pursue one's interests without having the constant burden of working to survive), but with a more realistic structure than a utopian, wisely-planned command economy.

However, it sounds like what UBI is more about (at least in some circles) is destroying the welfare state and imposing a libertarian UBI that sounds more like a choose-your-own-benefits deal. Not sure how down I am with that. In one sense, it would probably mean more competition and lower prices for benefits, but I'm sure it would also be accompanied by the usual casino-capitalist crap (HSAs, for example) that already plagues us.

I guess I want a UBI + a welfare state. I'm a communist?

Yeah. The trick/hard part of the UBI as a counter-hegemonic political goal is to not sell it out to the false compromise of replacing all other welfare and entitlement programs with it. For me at least the premise is "one should not have to work to have a stable, healthy, autonomous life" and if a version of UBI gets us closer to that I support it, and if it gets us further from that I oppose it.

This is why as I think I've said upthread I see the $15 min wage movement as a wedge and not a distraction. My political project (as far as labor goes) is that work isn't virtuous, and the USian idea that citizens can be reasonably expected to work as much as they are able for whatever they can get in order to merit consideration or assistance can be dismantled. I'd rather get to UBI slowly, through attainable victories decoupling survival further from labor, than all at once by striking a corrupt bargain with the neoliberal establishment and declaring success.

I just want lagoon to have plenty of time to post pictures of beers and coffees to ilx and not worry about a job