Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society?

I feel like treating UBI as a panacea has actually hindered its adoption, giving critics plenty of ammunition in the form of implementations that don’t quite live up to their proponents’ loftiest ambitions.

Can UBI transform society? Probably not! But why is that the bar? It can just be boring form of welfare that makes a lot of people’s lives easier. That’s still a good thing worth doing.

The thing I’ve never understood about UBI is how it wouldn’t immediately be counteracted by inflation.

Money is like water or electricity; its only ability to do work is when it flows. Just like a water wheel can’t do any work without a river flow, or a motor can’t do any work with a potential difference, money is useless when everyone always just has the same amount. It is only the transfer of money from one entity to another that causes work to be done.

The difference between 9V and 12V is 3V. The difference between 12V and 15V is still 3V. The amount of work you can do is the same, but the bar to entry is higher. So somebody explain to me, when everyone gets the same baseline amount of money, how that does anything but raise the baseline?

> Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) learns from the collective intellectual and creative output of humans and uses this to dispossess workers of their livelihoods,

Has anyone actually lost their job to AI yet? At best it helps some workers do their jobs faster as many innovations in the past have. Historically, this increases the amount of work expected to coincide with the capacity for doing work.

For example, CAD software replaced hand drafting. This didn't remove jobs, clients just expected things to be designed faster and in greater detail than they were before.

Maybe before we start patting ourselves on the back and handing out free money we should have a concrete example of an AI doing actual useful work without any human intervention.

The fundamental problem that I see with UBI is that it basically means that we are just paying people to be passive consumers of resources.

It'll always be a hard sell as a result. People want their neighbours to pull their weight. Even if it's just sweeping the street, painting their fence, whatever. Paying people to sit about watching TV is never going to work.

Annoyingly, the basic income pilot described in this article is not universal, and only helps people who could already afford to be artists. I'm sure the people working behind the counter in your local chipper would've liked to avail of it but they don't qualify as working "artists".

But being Ireland, I can't imagine they'd ever implement it without an enormous means test.

UBI makes most sense as a targeted way to increase wages by removing some people from the workforce.

It would be very good for society, for example, if we paid parents to stay home with the kids instead of sending the kids to day care and to homeschool their kids instead of sending the kids to school. We'd also benefit by paying creatives and scientists so they can pursue their calling without having to work a day job in the patent office like Einstein was infamously forced to and without having to work for a university where there are perverse incentives that discourage the most important work in favor of what is most likely to lead to publications and to governmental/corporate grants.

Of course UBI is only part of a plan to control the labor supply and thus drive up wages. We also need to preserve child labor laws, lower the retirement age (60 or maybe even 50 would be reasonable), tax outsourcing instead of subsidizing it and restrict the sort of immigration that takes our jobs instead of creating new jobs. In the case of immigration, that's why green cards for college graduates are preferable to guest worker visas because highly skilled immigrants seem to be disproportionately entrepreneurial but only if their immigration status isn't tied to a job. Prosperity for all rather than maximizing GDP needs to be the goal of economic policy.

The issue with most UBI proposals is that their supporters seem to have no understanding of economics and no bigger plan to achieve any real policy objective. So their proposals would just cause inflation unless corporations were able to automate away almost all jobs. In which case we'd basically have an imperial Roman style economy where most of the population is dependent upon the government for bread and circuses while a few accumulate great wealth from the machines (in the case of Rome, humans who had the misfortune to be born as "machines") that run everything. I don't think that's really the kind of future we should want.

The major issue I have with all the UBI studies is that it ends. If you know that UBI ends in say 2 years or 3 years, your actions will be different if it is a true UBI. That skews any of the results of people's behavior.

Oh it absolutely will. For the worse.

When you get something for nothing, you better believe that productivity will plunge.

Even a cursory glance at history will show this to be true. Argentina is a great example, of 'something for nothing'.

No.

The universal in UBI is key, it means everyone gets the same basic amount, no matter how rich (reframing on purpose to make a point). No one wants to give rich people more money, not even those who conceived of the plan.

When people start talking about UBI, they are really talking about a guaranteed minimum income. And that's effectively welfare, which we already have. So it becomes mainly a discussion about reducing barriers to access welfare.

The problem is getting political support for it. I'd be in favor of if it could be done without increasing government spending (aka by massively reducing/eliminating other government programs). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to resonate well with progressive voters.

UBI in effect would clean the most degenerate and ignored few in society while at the same time liberating the masses from aimless drudgery. It will inject cash into the consumer market and lower risk to seeking credit. I see it as the ultimate form of capitalism when everyone has a means to acquire goods and services at a mutually agreed upon standard. I also see it as the only option to avert a cataclysmic economic event when we all get layed off and replaced by robots. Read this article from McMaster about UBI in action in the Province of Ontario, it is short and clears up many pre conceived notions against such a program.

https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/28173/1/southe...

Our scientific revolution was based upon a hundred idle wealthy individuals who chose science as their preferred toy.

UBI could make that happen again.

Why do you want to control the lives of others?

It can transform society all right. Into a ghetto, most likely...

Can we just give everyone food, healthcare, and a place to live?

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes, per usual.

Most of the arguments seem to be that UBI will reduce labor participation. That seems logically correct, but why is it morally correct?

In US (and in western countries), we have the capitalists benefit from the increase in productivity and the working people penalized. Maybe, it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way? Why should the the wealth generated by the society not go to the society (instead of a few wealthy people, as it happens today)?

For all the arguments about how it can increase the cost of labor, I would say so what? The profits of the corporation can go down a lot and go to people who make it work.

It can transform the society into a poor one with shortage of goods.

just make it conditional: 21 hours of study and/or social work/field work per week.

- high school style tests, milestones and road maps to test study progress, good for citizen science but can be any subject, fugees start easy with the ABC

- social work including agriculture & farms, where the first year or two can count towards apprenticeship if combined with studies

solves low wages short-, mid-, long-term, increases buying power, creates jobs and tons of admin, org, bureaucracy work for those who dig it :)

make it enough to afford rent and healthy food and some culture per week. in Germany, that would be 1350 - 1500 per month, which is covered already, but the conditions are nonsense and lax.