If people don't work on anything once they get UBI this isn't really a problem. Currently, there are many many people who already don't do anything. They only do a little as possible to avoid getting fired OR they do periodically get fired from every job they ever hold once their employers realize they're always going to be a drain on productivity.
Having these people on UBI would actually allow productivity to rise.
However, I'm really concerned about UBI because:
1) One way to get more money on UBI is to convince others to give you their money. Many people on UBI will stop producing positive or neutral work and start finding ways to trick their fellow citizens into giving them their money. We will still need some sort of welfare to provide food to people who are tricked into giving away all their money for worthless services or items.
2) Some people have terrible planning skills and just want to be happy now. They'll spend all of their UBI on worthless items and go hungry until the start of the next month. Worse, they'll spend their children's UBI allocation on worthless items as well (or trick their children into doing it if it turns out parents don't get direct access to their children's allocation). We will still need welfare to feed the children of these people.
3) Some people will decide that their calling in life is now to cause problems for others. The food check comes once a month, so now their full time job is dressing up as a clown and terrorizing random people. Don't have to get up for work? Be really loud until 4am. The people who actually do have to get up for work will naturally get the option to live in a gated community because we need the few that actually do produce more than ever. This very well may cause society to schism into people who work and people who don't.
4) The potential long term effects are pretty scary. If you never have to work will you worry about education, socialization, or how to function in a society? How many people will decide to never learn any skills whatsoever? Sure, we could build up a lot of automation to take care of these people, but the result is going to be a massive schism where some people only know how to take their UBI money card to the food silo. And their children are probably going to be in the same bucket.
Ultimately, I think we as a society have a responsibility to use our plenty to help those who are going without. However, I'm not convinced that UBI is the right way to make this happen.
UBI is not so attractive that most people will choose to do nothing with their lives. UBI is intended to keep people from starving, but it's not a very pleasant life, devoid of comforts and aspirations. Sure, there will be people who want that, but there will be many others who don't.
The most important tool there is a good education, which is mandatory for even the children of the laziest and most shiftless. That's where they get exposed to the possibilities of what they could do, and be engaged by. They'll be presented with role models in the form of teachers, who do get up and do work every day, and live better lives because of it.
Maybe they'll create nothing more than pointless forms of art. But even so, what would be wrong with that? Movies and video games are both pointless idleness, but they create genuine joy, and there were lots of mis-steps as people learned what forms of them would be worth doing. Similarly, a lot of the most advanced science seemed like navel-gazing until it turned into transistors and lasers and GPS.
I don't mean to be blandly utopian. There are many ways UBI can fail, and we will probably do all of them in varying experiments. But neither would I be so dystopian about people doing nothing at all with their lives. People enjoy comforts and they enjoy having purpose. Between the way our existing technology creates more than enough food and shelter at little cost, and the desire of many people to improve their lot in ways that also continue to move society forward, I think we can afford to experiment with letting some people live lives of complete (but unenviable) idleness.
I'm sorry but 1), 2) and 3) are ridiculous. What are you basing those assumptions on ? I don't see how any of these points relate to UBI. Why would we be obligated to provide welfare to people who spend their allowance on things other than food and healthcare ?
4) is a very good point. We don't actually know what keeps our civilization running. UBI assumes that people have a natural drive to be productive, but we got to where we are in a context of natural selection, survival instincts and greed. Removing those aspects from society is rightfully scary.
People make some pretty bad decisions. And people like to trick other people into making bad decision. I didn't think this was controversial.
Why is this relevant to UBI? One of the benefits of UBI is that it allows us to get rid of the welfare system. However, if people are tricked into giving away their money OR if they spend all of their money on non-food items, we now have to decide if they just go hungry or if there is a welfare for them. This is more complicated because some of the people going hungry will be children who have irresponsible parents.
To recap. One of the arguments of UBI is that it will be cheaper than it looks because we can get rid of welfare. This argument only works if we're willing to let people who misspend their UBI go hungry. I'm not willing to let people go hungry if I can help if, so I'm only interested in a UBI program if we also find a way to feed irresponsible people. OR I'm not interested in UBI being enacted.
Is this not already a problem with the current welfare system in terms of selling food stamps? In which case is there any reason to suggest that UBI would worsen the problem significantly?
As you say, there will be cases like this. Laws can provide for them to be declared incompetent and to appoint a guardian who would be responsible for distributing their UBI funds. If it’s necessary to institutionalize them, their UBI would go to that institution for the duration.
Why not welfare on top of that too, for the people who get tricked to waste their welfare money?
and what about those who waste their ubi money, welfare money, and backup welfare money? we need a failsafe fund for those too!
People are free to make their own decisions. It's good to help people and lessen the blow of mistakes, but at some point, a stupid person who keeps getting tricked into wasting their money, is not very helpful to anyone around.
If you're being given free money just for existing, and you can't figure out how to keep it? I think thats your problem, not society's.
None of those "tricking other people" problems you mention have anything to do with UBI, per se. They are all about human nature, both the trickers and the tricked. That is not going to change just because of UBI being enacted / implemented. The potential solutions lie deeper down the stack (of turtles).
Barnum may not have said it, but it holds true even today ... probably every millisecond, if you take the ratio of the world's population to the number of suckers/suckees/suckincidents ...
I don't think it's hard to find societies that subsist on income that comes 'for free'. Investors, traditional aristocrats - hell, the ancient spartan citizens. These are all people who had their wealth decoupled from their productive labour.
I'm also worried about inflation. If you give everyone $X/month to spend on essentials but the supply of those essentials doesn't change, then a very likely outcome is that the price of essentials, in aggregate, will go up by $X/month.
We already see some of this with student loans. The government decided that education is important, so it created federally-backed student loans that anyone can apply for, and effectively increased the amount of money available for education by a large amount. Some of this did go into increasing the number of kids that could go to college, but much of it just went into increasing the price of education. Plus, the supply of good jobs didn't really go up by much, so all those extra kids who went to college are now fighting over the same jobs they would've gotten in the first place, just with crushing debt burdens.
+1 on this also. I'm not sure how this would play out.
The prices might just normalize for the middle class, as if they ended up getting no UBI at all. But if rent and food prices go up across the board then it'll be as if it has no effect at all.
The upside is that the UBI will still support people that end up with financial shocks -- something unexpected happening in their lives. That little bit could help a lot
People keep saying that UBI will replace wages at the low end so those people won't have more money to spend. But for the middle class there will be inflation.
I'm still worried about this, and I can't get anyone to sketch a model showing this would not be the case (but see below, maybe it's way too easy to sketch a model showing anything you want).
Closest I got to seeing a counterargument is me vs. JoeAltmaier a couple of weeks ago:
Yes, this is my main concern as well, and I haven't seen a satisfying answer to it. I'm bullish on UBI anyway because it answers a lot of questions of how to handle poverty and what to do with our societal wealth, but this one unanswered and fundamental question remains.
Most people will want to do something useful to supplement their basic income because it will only be enough to pay for the basic necessities. Would you want to live like a poor student for the rest of your life, renting a bedroom and being only able to afford thrift shop clothes and ramen noodles? Most people aspire to have their own place, date other people, have friends, etc. Most people have some minimum amount of drive for status. That will ensure that they make some effort to rise above the bare minimum.
As for how to pay for this, consider that central banks have printed trillions of dollars and basically handed that money to corporations, bailing them out of their debt. We live in the world of corporate welfare. We could expand the money supply and give that money to the people instead. In some ways, this is more capitalist than the alternative. Why? Because corporations who get too far into debt should die. If you give money to the people, you at least ensure that corporations will have to sell people something that they actually need/want, instead of being able to count on a corporate bailout.
> Most people will want to do something useful to supplement their basic income
Most people will want to do something to supplement their basic income. It doesn't have to be useful. In fact it could be to scam other people out of their UBI. Additionally, if we schism society into people who work and people who don't work, then it will almost definitely be to scam other people out of their UBI because that will be the most obvious course of action to get more money having been isolated from people who do actual work.
I get the sentiment, but "bullshit jobs" are also a waste of time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ); those also have the same downsides as many jobs, like stress, abusive managers, etc.
There are also many jobs which are actively harmful to society and/or the environment (e.g. cold calling), where it would be better for everyone if those workers could just watch TV instead.
I think this is one of those areas that can't be solved by deduction, since there are valid arguments pushing both ways. It needs measurements, observations and experiments to see what the relative impact of those arguments are.
Bullshit jobs problem is entirely caused by labour being too cheap in turn caused by the only now industrializing third world. Same with poor working conditions.
If the corporations had to pay the full cost of employing people without the option to subsidize it witch cheap Chinese labour, they would long had to get rid of most bullshit jobs (some inefficiency is of course unavoidable) and make work much better organized.
No. Bullshit jobs are the consequence of markets being short-sighted optimization systems, with goals only partially aligned with human values. It's quite easy to make money in ways other than delivering socially valuable things; in fact, many of the most profitable jobs and endeavours are precisely that.
I watch a small amount of TV (about 30-60 minutes a day) and virtually all of it is useful. I use it as Japanese language training. Conversely I spend waaay too much time reading HN. Some of that time is useful, but I have to admit that most of it is not. For the average person, though, I think it's probably true that most of their time watching TV is not useful to them (and may even be detrimental). But probably some of it is useful (for stress relief if nothing else).
The point I was hoping to bring to the discussion is the fact that nearly all of our value-preferences (here, the value of time spent on various activities) come from social conditioning[1].
In this particular scenario it could well be the case that this particular value-preference (the belief that watching TV is wasteful) comes from the work ethic (as in 'working' is useful, and 'leisure' is wasteful).
There is no autonomous thinking in all of this and yet we claim to be living in an individualistic society. Doesn't that make anyone pause?
>Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that those people that'll end up doing nothing are already doing nothing. They're either unemployed, mooching of someone, or working some completely useless unproductive job that needs a slot to fill, that could easily be replaced by a machine.
As for actually productive people, I think very few of them would actually be happy with sitting around watching TV all day.
>Yeah, it's the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests. It's how we got science.
And some of how we got Perl. I had read some time ago that Larry Wall said that Tim O'Reilly was his patron, as in the medieval sense of the term (think Florence etc.), when the nobility or rich people used to patronize (i.e. financially sponsor and recognize) artists, craftsmen, scientists, etc.
And Tim did sponsor Larry (and others who worked on Perl, I guess), via publishing Perl books and organizing conferences, etc.
The actual best argument against UBI is that if you used the total of US government Social Security, Other, and Nondefense spending (At least portions of them seem to be UBI-replacable) on it, divided by the population of the United States (326,000,000), you end up with about $7,000 per person, per year. If you take the entire budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...) of $4,000,000,000, you end up with $12,000 per each, per annum.
$1000/month is enough to live off in many parts of the United States. I lived off it pretty comfortably a few years ago when I was in college – although I had four roommates, we all had our own rooms.
Obviously, it's not affordable everywhere, but I think incentivizing people to live outside of expensive areas is a good thing (adjusting for cost of living would mostly just funnel the extra money towards landlords, i.e. rent-seekers).
I’m quite happy if the vast majority of people doing active harm to society by working for evil corporations just do nothing instead. Quite possibly a net improvement just that.
I also imagine that if vast amount of people suddenly had more time on their hands there would be lot less need for services now optimized to keep them employed. Day care, schools and such would perhaps change into something more participatory.
Yeah people definitely end up doing unethical things out of desperation, whether it's committing a crime or working at an ethically questionable business
> vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.
I doubt this. Everyone has dreams or long-term things they enjoy working on. And UBI wouldn't be enough for most people, so they'd at least pursue some form of cash-generating work.
I'm just as cynical and misanthropic as the next HN poster, but I do wonder about this.
My hunch is that many people would indeed find something other than mindless TV if they weren't having their intellectual/emotional energy used up on a daily basis by a job. Not all people, maybe not even most, but many.
What they got up to instead is a whole nother question, but I do really think that the typical human would find something active to do, given no forced use of their time.
I strongly second this. Most people tend to be pretty used up after a day at work, and after commute, errands and household chores, TV is pretty much all they have energy for.
Personally, I hang out with regular "normies" as much, if not more, as with technical people, and all the boring TV-watching "normies" I know do have dreams and hobbies, but it takes getting to know them better to discover that. And those dreams and hobbies are generally blocked by dayjobs and errands.
Most people just want to waste time watching TV would be the good outcome. I'm more concerned that it turns out that once money is no longer a concern that a large portion of people would spend their time trying to figure out how to cause problems for others.
How many people would ignore education, socialization, and general societal cohesiveness if they knew that they would never have to worry about getting along with anyone else in order to survive.
I don't agree with this. People will still have to get along in order to survive. Two things:
First, crimes usually come with financial consequences I doubt that this would change even with UBI.
Secondly, its just as likely that the opposite becomes true and people learn to appreciate a sense of community much more deeply due to the lessening of competition. For instance intramural sports teams might become even more popular than they are now which could increase the general sense of camaraderie.
I believe of the people who discuss shows they watched, this is actualy used as a way to bond with their peers, whom they are stuck with 8 hours a day.
The best argument I know for UBI is that manufacturing is propped up by overconsumption because we have been able to make more than we need for a very long time. If one worker makes enough stuff for five people what do the other four do?
I don't think UBI would work like that. The thing is that you can essentially simulate UBI yourself if you work in tech. Go and work a high paying job, or contract, for 3-6 months. Then take the rest of the year off. The problem is of course that quality of life still costs money. So in general having time for other things is a cost issue, not an income issue.
My best argument for UBI is I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time, and that seems impossible outside of a fully free, stable, smoothly-functioning and affluent society. And given current economic trends, UBI is very likely a required part of any such society, at least in any reasonably large polity-- think the average U.S. state, or even the U.S. as a whole. So, it seems we agree after all!
I used to think this too. Then I grew older, observed more of the world around me, and realized a fundamental truth. The vast majority of the population, 95%+, when given free resources, will choose to not work or do anything productive.
In fact, their initial foray into leisure generally leads into negativity and moral ineptitude.
20% producers, 80% consumers; I think it’s unlikely that most people would choose to work if given the option not to along with being given a consistent, reliable amount of money to which they’d be able to use to settle into a repetitive lifestyle of creature comforts and pleasures.
Given with how normalized 1) consistent drug usage (ie alcohol) and 2) prioritizing pleasures like watching TV or playing video games for the majority of one’s free time have become in western society, I can’t see UBI being of any productive benefit to society. A major problem is who is going to pay for it? The productive, taxing paying folk, who will be receiving UBI as a paltry percentage of their existing, work-based income? It doesn’t seem fair to penalize the most productive, those who choose to work, in order to subsidize those who don’t wish to contribute to the game we called society.
Interesting. As I've grown older and observed more of the world around me, the fundamental truth that I've learned is that the vast majority of the population has something that they would like to work on, but can't make a living wage on it.
One of the best arguments for universal health care falls into this same category: tying health care to employment greatly increases the risks of being self-employed. I know more than one person who's stayed with a job they don't like -- even a job that doesn't pay particularly well -- because of this concern. The concept of a UBI expands this freedom past just health care. The point isn't to pay someone a handsome wage so they can sit around and do nothing; the point is to cover an absolute bare minimum so choices that might not otherwise be available become open.
I don't think UBI is a good approach to this particular case.
The F/OSS developer support case seems like a perfect candidate for a microtransaction-funded model. The kind of thing cryptocurrency enables, where one can passively receive as little as fractions of cents from a pool of millions of people without any transaction costs.
We just need to integrate the solutions better.
F/OSS developers work hard and provide value to many people. If there were a way for me to automate a tiny monthly donation to the projects I most use in Debian, without involving credit cards or routing numbers or other personally identifying information, where 100% of the contribution reached the intended people, I'd already be doing it. The kernel, Xorg, vim, firefox, screen/tmux, systemd, all these things would be on my list, and I doubt I'm alone here.
The distributions should be working on this problem. Forget 'popcon', give me an integrated solution to distribute cryptocurrency from a wallet I occasionally top up somehow to the developers and package maintainers I implicitly love.
I see this argument occasionally and it always blows my mind that people think there are careers that literally no one wants to do. With hundreds of millions of people suddenly free to do what they want to do, you're going to find a ton that will do every little job imaginable.
That said, UBI and working aren't mutually exclusive. It seems entirely reasonable to assume there will still be people working lower-end jobs to augment their UBI. If there aren't enough garbage workers, it seems only natural to also assume the pay for garbage workers would go up to entice more people to take the job.
I've always worked CS and CS-related jobs (but have volunteered at non-CS jobs), but I'd be very likely to take up some kind of monotonous-but-fulfilling service job like garbage collecting. Probably not full time, but I'd love to have the time to help out others more.
As a side note, there's probably also a lot of work to be done in transitioning these kinds of assumedly-low-interest jobs into a gig-based paradigm. I think more people would take up "shifts" in something new than committing to it as a career. Obviously there's a lot of logistical problems (training, accountability, insurance, etc) that need addressed, but that's part of the fun of figuring it all out. :)
Somebody suggesting nobody would want to do construction is probably more indicative of a person who has never had the privilege of ever building anything in their life, rather than any statement of reality. However, absolutely awful examples aside - I do think he is correct that there are plenty of jobs that indeed nobody would want to do. Toilets don't clean themselves, and won't reliably be doing so anytime in the foreseeable future. There's no fulfillment mopping up piss from somebody who thought it'd be fun to urinate all over something, just because it's not theirs.
Of course you're right that we'd see pay go up for these jobs as a result, but I think the thing that many don't consider is how relatively little money there is to go around. This is masked by scale. We see billions and think of just enormous amounts of money, yet that's of course less than $3 per American. That of course means the even more unimaginable trillion dollars is merely $3000 per American. We have so many people that it can be difficult to really intuitively grasp.
So one of the most important numbers here is the GDP per capita. The GDP being the total market value of absolutely everything produced within a nation over a set period of time. This is what makes GDP per capita so interesting. It tells us how much money each and every person would receive if the market value of absolutely every single good or service was split completely equally. And in the US it's shockingly less than $60,000.
With an absolutely huge motivation to overproduce everything imaginable, and a countless array of artificial demand being created and sated, our GDP is still less than $60k. That's not a particularly huge amount of money! And while we could debate to what degree, I think nobody would disagree that an UBI would depress overall production. So we're not even going to be getting to that $60k point, and probably not even particularly close to it.
And this amount of money needs to be used to provide a livable stipend to each and every person, and then also account for 100% of the market driven economic success for each and every individual. I'm sure you can see the problem. Exactly how much money is our janitor supposed to be earning? And where does this money come from? You have to keep in mind that when we talk about this < $60k GDP/capita this isn't "money" but rather real money that represents a share of access to a finite set of resources. In other words you can't just go above this number and call it debt - the resources that such "money" (as it would become at that point) would represent literally do not exist. It'd be like in a world of 100 with a total of 5 cars telling each and every person that they can have a car. It just doesn't work.
It would have to pay a good deal, with a pension. Generally don't think it would be enticing enough right now, which is why the turnover after the next phase in automation is a better opportunity.
Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.