[wyager]

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote.

From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win for a sufficiently narrow group of people. You're basically taking wealth from the top X of society and transferring it to the bottom 1-X, where X is probably somewhere in the range of 30-70%. This is too wide for the strategy to work effectively. Either no one really feels like they're winning that much, or the cost to the losers is so high that they're going to fight tooth and nail to stop it.

That's just the implementation challenge I see from the political angle. I also think there are a ton of problems with UBI and it would probably be very economically and socially destructive, but that's a separate argument from the fact that it's going to be very difficult to implement in a democracy.

[Svip]

The largest problem for UBI - from a state and political standpoint - is that you are actually taking away power from the civil service and politicians, because they would no longer have the power over people's benefits. UBI reduces the amount of benefits you could afterwards give to specific political groups you favour.

[ksec]

Actually do what the electors want instead of leaving us to do it our way while they do the fame and glory bit.

Reforming the Civil Service would remove his life-support system.

It would kick away the ladder that's put him where he is.

While he's still standing on it.

The only way to reform the Civil Service system is to reform the political system.

No government's going to reform the system that put it into power.

- Sir Arnold Robinson

[sofixa]

> Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote.

Do you have any source on that? One of the original welfare systems, in Imperial Germany, was introduced by conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to preempt the popularity of the Social Democratic party which was gaining popularity with its proposals.

Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states. There were wealth transfers, of course, but they were to the state, not citizens, and welfare wasn't linked to it.

[wyager]

> Do you have any source on that?

Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal. If you read the thread under my comment, you’ll find plenty of people pointing out researchers and historians who came to the same conclusion, e.g. (apparently) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose book I have ordered.

> Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states

This is entirely compatible with my observation. They aren’t democracies.

[sofixa]

> Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal

As you might have noticed from the rest of my answer, i disagree with your observation, hence the question about sources or any extra information to help me understand how you got there.

So, some of the original and most popular welfare states - Imperial Germany, post-wars UK disagree with your observation.

[slg]

I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.

[short_sells_poo]

I'm not a political scientist, but it doesn't seem too far fetched? What OP seems to be saying is that it's easier to capture a small but strong follower base with focused effort, than a large (or any) follower base with diffuse effort. If the current social and political climate is any indication, people (at society level) genuinely don't seem to be receptive to efforts of unification and the betterment of mankind.

The agendas that are most successful are those which are laser focused to benefit particular groups, or even worse, to ensure that certain vilified groups have it worse. In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people. Even worse, some of the most ardent opposition is from the social class would most stands to benefit from liberal policies.

The whole game theoretic aspect of rational actors is out the window. Instead we have ever more isolated groups of people who don't care that they have it bad as long as their presumed opposition has it worse.

In light of all that, I'm actually inclined to agree with OP that a campaign that would benefit north of 50% of the population could easily be unpopular as a punchy opposition riles up the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to vote against their own interests.

[wyager]

> In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people.

I don't think it's certain that it would benefit the majority of people. In fact, I think it's unlikely.

One of the tremendous advantages of the US (and why we're so rich compared to almost all EU countries) is that our cultural programming includes the implicit understanding that higher taxes introduce deadweight loss and other higher-order losses of efficiency. Taxes aren't as simple as "taking from A and giving to B" except in the very short term. Over time, it results in less efficient resource allocation, capital resources leaving to less distorted markets, etc.

This happens on both a personal and institutional level. The gamble you're taking when you raise taxes is that "stickiness" (social ties, pre-existing legal and technical infrastructure, procedural momentum, etc.) won't just cause your tax base to leave. However, stickiness only slows the process down, rather than stopping it entirely.

This is encoded in American culture's sense of economic fairness, which precludes aggressively shafting people with more stuff just because you want their stuff.

[slg]

When would you say this cultural identity developed? Because there are millions of people in this country that can remember a time when the top marginal tax rate was above 90%.

[wyager]

It dates at least back to the earliest Scots-Irish immigrants to the US. The wartime stuff was an aberration and not sustainable.

[slg]

What is considered "wartime stuff"? Because the US has been preparing for, engaging in, or recovering from war for basically the entire history of the country including today as we are currently engaged in the longest war in US history.

[mypastself]

I assume the hypothesis is that the potential benefits would be spread too thin across the population to be considered particularly valuable.

[hn8788]

I listened to a Tulsi Gabbard interview, and she said that was one of the reasons Obamacare seems half-assed. She said that the Democrats and Republicans both had opportunities to make compromises that would have benefited everyone, but they decided not to work together because it gives both parties something simple to argue about during election season. Democrats get to say "Obamacare sucks because Republicans are holding it back", and Republicans get to say "Obamacare is another big government program that doesn't even do what they said it would". Both parties are right, and both parties have no desire to fix it.

[PKop]

In a democracy, where votes are there to be bought, but perhaps not other regimes have this specific flaw.

[theptip]

You can analyze this from the perspective of Public Choice theory. I think the claim would not quite be that the policy would be unpopular _with the population_ - just that it wouldn’t be in the individual interest of any politician, and therefore, as rational actors, they wouldn’t take the action to enact the policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interest...

[samatman]

On the contrary, it's a straightforward application of selectorate theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory

That doesn't make it correct, but it's not 'wild' at all.

[haram_masala]

The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has done some very significant work in showing exactly that, and has built robust and successful empirical models demonstrating and predicting it. His book “The Logic of Political Survival” covers it in fascinating detail.

[xondono]

It’s not really that rare, there’s a reason for the common saying in public choice, “concentrated benefits, dispersed costs”.

Think subsidies. Industry specific subsidies (e.g. farmer subsidies) are popular, while industry wide subsidies (e.g. tax cuts for business) aren’t.

[FPGAhacker]

They are talking about dilution.

[heavyset_go]

Germany got universal healthcare in the 1800's while ruled by a monarchy.

[wyager]

That is compatible with my predictions.

[sofixa]

It's not, because it was a constitutional monarchy with elections and everything.

[systemvoltage]

I am worried about how cost of living would explode to untenable levels. Low skilled labor prices would get out of control I am guessing since it is a basic supply/demand issue - when you put a floor with UBI, minimum wage to take up manual labor jobs would rise dramatically. It is actually incredible how much of our society depands on manual labor. Most people on HN are out of touch with this reality. The world runs on physically moving, stacking, filling, driving, cleaning, joining and constructing things. UBI I can see can diminishing the ability for the same laborers to obtain affordable food, housing, and transportation.

[colechristensen]

The problem is price distortion and that whatever you do, prices will be raised until a section of society can barely survive because essentially enough people tend to make bad decisions and live beyond their means that sellers will raise their prices to whatever the market will bear, and there are always people willing to buy things they can’t afford.

Attempts to shape markets tend to do this.

[zozbot234]

When you make physical labor more expensive, it gets automated out of existence. And the part that can't be automated away gets reassessed to improve work conditions and make it more convenient to pursue that line of work. This is precisely what you want to happen.

[systemvoltage]

It doesn't and won't. Automation is useful in certain areas but impossible in many. There is a reason why Tesla factories still have manual steps in assembling a car - it can't be automated away with reasonable costs.

Look at Switzerland (it is not UBI, but they have some of the highest labor costs): https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Zurich . A meal at an inexpensive restaurant which relies on low skilled labor (not just cooks and waiters, but the entire food supply chain) costs $27 USD. I am all for improving labor conditions though.

[js8]

> UBI I can see can diminishing the ability for the same laborers to obtain affordable food, housing, and transportation.

I don't understand how this follows. I was with you until then, but IMHO UBI might negatively affect middle/upper class who relies most on lower class paid labor (things like cleaning, delivery, cooking, repairs). But people who provide these services already can and have to do them themselves, I don't see how UBI causing rising labor costs hurts them.

[systemvoltage]

Building new housing requires low skilled labor.

[chalst]

> Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population.

I think this isn't true. The UK got single-payer healthcare (with the creation of the NHS under the postwar Labour government) because it was felt that a national regime could deliver better health outcomes, following the experience of WW2. The NHS was enormously popular, thus it was embraced by the Conservatives, who beat Labour in the next election.

This is normal: successful welfare policies do not grant the party that introduced them lasting popularity and competent politicians understand this. A better model is that they are introduced because the party base wants the party to do it.

[nr2x]

Many people have more than a billion, and I can't really think of any sort of luxury you get with 10 billion you can't easily have with 1B. Above the 1B mark you are solely holding wealth to further manipulation of macro-level power structures to your advantage. UBI is a means to forcibly redistribute anything above a certain "unlimited life of luxury" threshold to keep it below oligarchy.

Also, I want fun, cool, tech and if the masses are being put out of work by fun, cool, tech we will have problems, and thereby see far less fun, cool, tech.

[nradov]

There are under 3000 billionaires worldwide. In order to generate enough revenue for any sort of meaningful UBI the government would have to raise taxes on more than just billionaires.

[colechristensen]

Many of the 1B+ people out there aren’t in it for the cash but the B comes from valuation of things that they own, those things usually being big chunks of corporations, and what they own isn’t stuff but power and influence in that entity.

You do away with those people and that power leaving gl everything else the same, what you are doing is giving more power to the other existing social structures and ensuring no single person outside them can check their power.

So? More outsized government official power and more power to faceless corporations no longer under individual control but an entity up for its own best interests at the whim of a complex social structure bound by law to do the best for that entity which often ends up very bad for the interests of individual freedom.

You want to take away multibillionaires you have to start with structural changes to prevent mergers and pseudomonopolies, you need ten companies fighting for what two or three have now.

If you don’t you end up further encouraging next quarter profitability targets and megacorp best interests.

in other words there is probably something to fix, but you can’t just target a few of the symptoms or trying to make things better you drive us further into dystopia

[ralph84]

These ideas always start out targeting the “rich”, then end up falling squarely on the middle class who can’t afford tax advisors.

[zozbot234]

Wealth is not income; one is a stock, the other is a flow. This is not even Econ 101, it's grade-school level knowledge. You can't have a policy of draining "wealth" to fund an income subsidy without very severe side effects.

[andyana]

You don't need to ridicule. Can you explain why such a policy doesn't work? I must have skipped that day at school.

[zozbot234]

There was no intent to ridicule. The answer is that the policy is (1) unsustainable, not unlike a Ponzi scheme, and also (2) even prior to its inevitable collapse, such a policy distorts investment choices and thus makes society as a whole increasingly poorer. Note that there are similar policies that can be more sensible. For example, you can tax wealth and use the proceeds to gradually pay off some of the national debt. (Note that even these policies are typically only resorted to during emergencies, such as war.)

[andyana]

Its not like a Ponzi scheme, though. Nobody is getting rich from such a policy.

[rad_gruchalski]

> Many people have more than a billion

Yes, exactly 2755. I’m having two and a half men flashbacks.