[troosevelt]

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't.

People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.

[omikun]

People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.

[mvdtnz]

That's an absolutely enormous claim to make with zero evidence.

[contingencies]

The modern (social or economic) history of China, Europe, Russia, UK, US are all good case studies. In aggregate, I think they underscore the reality of the system. Every year we now have high profile people coming out of the system screaming about how insane it is: bankers, traders, politicians, military intelligence. If you had to boil it down to a single book debunking late 20th century pax Americana international macro-economics, it's hard to go past Confessions of an Economic Hitman, although not written formally. I've personally had chapter one verified by an Indonesian diplomat. Alternatively, take the quippy summary of a world-recognized capitalist, George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics.

[flashgordon]

Not to mention inflation. Whats not clear is whether UBI is cash or does it include access to "basic" facilities like health, education and housing?

[ggsp]

Fair warning: I’m quite ignorant in terms of economics, so this is a naïve way of looking at it.

The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?

[andriamanitra]

The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation.

Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.

But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.

[joquarky]

Also, UBI will inevitably become just as convoluted and corrupted as our current tax laws.

[animegolem]

And even if you did get the 60k and never can find work again are you gonna be happy about the next door neighbor working for 120k and getting his 60k on top?

[site-packages1]

Well I can tell you that I work 40+ hours a week and am very unhappy my neighbor has a more expensive house than me. Someone should do something!

[abakker]

All the proposals I’ve seen would set the marginal tax rate on the 120 so high that his earnings would end up more like 40k from the 120k job and then he gets his 60. So, still some benefit to working, but a very progressive tax rate on higher earnings. Not sure I agree with this, but that is what I’ve seen.

[baal80spam]

> 40k from the 120k job

I would not get up in the morning in such case.

[Aurornis]

Your neighbor would get $60K UBI but their tax bill would go up by $80K because the government needs tax revenue to pay the UBI.

For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.

[bobsmooth]

>Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies?

If we go back to a 60% corporate tax rate, for sure.

[what]

They’ll just find a way to have $0 of profit. You have nothing to tax.

[Aurornis]

You could put a 100% tax on revenues (not profit) of AI companies and it would come out to a low couple hundred dollars per person per year right now.

A 60% corporate tax rate wouldn’t get to the levels needed for UBI proposals either.

[hashmap]

You never see it how. Like in terms of raw resources or political will?

[troosevelt]

I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore).

That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible.

I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends.

I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing.

It's rough out there.

[hashmap]

Oh, yeah $12k would not do it. For a UBI to work we would have to shift a significant portion of the concentrated wealth. I too was laid off long enough ago that by now I would be in a bad spot without help, also no mortgage or anything, and I don't travel or go out much. UBI of any degree would do something, but it would have to be much higher than $12k to tread water just due to rent alone. Aside from UBI we would likely need to decouple housing from profit, it has the same problem as healthcare. Demand for it is inelastic to a certain degree, everyone needs somewhere to live.

[stale2002]

> do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't.

Almost definitionally it would. If society is saving a bunch of money on all that saved labor, that extra value is still there, it just needs to be appropriately redistributed

[ip26]

If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

[mschuster91]

The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.

[bluefirebrand]

This will still wind up with them paying UBI eventually

[DaSHacka]

For the Indians?

[xboxnolifes]

What if the machine in this context is 3x as productive as you?

[hettygreen]

Then it replaces 3 people's jobs, requiring paying 3 UBI's in this thought experiment.

[joquarky]

What un-corrupted person or system is going to perform this assessment?

[JeremyNT]

The solution to the subsequent devaluation of labor, and ability for tech oligarchs to pocket the cash instead, will not be found in capitalism.

Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table.

UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.

[fireflash38]

We are returning to feudalism, with a cyberpunk spin on it.

You will not own anything. You don't even really own your tech now.

The writing is on the wall: you will not be allowed to modify what you own.

[pydry]

Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g.

* A job guarantee like we had during the great depression

* Lowering retirement age

* Raise minimum wage

* Expanding medicare to everyone

It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby!

Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.

[WorldMaker]

The historic origins of UBI are from political parties that wanted most of those same things, too, especially raising the minimum wage and expanding medicare to everyone.

A strong minimum wage makes UBI more attractive. More people will want jobs in addition to UBI. UBI is also seen as a market force to naturally drive minimum wage up, because UBI offers workers more choices: more opportunities to build a startup or take a sabbatical instead of work 40 hours. The labor market has to compete with that "opportunity cost" in ways it doesn't need to care about today. It would increase liquidity in the labor market and in terms going all the way back to even Adam Smith, make the market more free. Wages would better reflect demand for the work if laborers had more choices at more times in their lives where and how much to work.

Medicare for Everyone and Universal Health Care make UBI simpler. Health risk is always going to be variable and insurance-like risk pooling will always be a good idea for society to defray costs in bad years from surpluses in good ones and defray costs from unhealthy people by considering how many people are kept healthy. UBI could be designed to try cover much of health care, but it is never going to be as efficient as a pooled single payer. If a country already has Universal Health Case, the conversations about UBI get a lot simpler. It is a lot easier to sell it is a flat universal grant. Your health care can be provided by a complex risk pool and smart accountants doing a lot of smart math on your behalf. Your UBI can be just a flat number. Simpler: you can think about how you spend your UBI without having to consider your predicted health outcomes in that period of time. UBI's flat universal value can be set on benchmarks that don't need need complex amortization schedules and risk analysis.

The Canadian Social Credit Party, formed to espouse UBI was one of the keys to building Canada's Universal Health Care and their priority was that first, then UBI. That still seems the best priority order to me.

[spwa4]

So the problem with 3 out of 4 of your challenges is that, right now, it means young people need to work more to achieve them. Money is an issue, but money by itself cannot solve it, it really needs to be backed with more people working. That's not going to happen, in fact, less people will work.

So without AI, the path forward is obvious: those 3 will become worse. Lowering retirement age, raising minimum wage, and expanding medicare won't happen without AI. They can't.

We already are reasonably close to a job guarantee. If unemployed people would accept any job, unemployment would drop by a lot. Not to zero, obviously, but a lot. Unemployment is also pretty low by historical standards, so fixing unemployment with a job guarantee can't fix much. We'll need something else.

> It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be hyperdeflationary so no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff.

So yeah, I disagree. If you're going to assume AI will just jump to how capable it'll be 100 years from now, then you need to think a bit deeper. What AI effectively does, it provides capital-based labor. You buy a robot. Robot costs a lot, but operational expenses are marginal, energy and (maybe) "tokens". Add solar power, and let's say local AI becomes a thing, at least for normal robots, and you need nothing other than the initial cost of the robot.

Okay, so this will mean everything can be staffed with tens of thousands of these robots. Remote mine? No problem. 500 robots in your house? Why not. Cleaning very large facilities? Not a problem. Farm hundreds of square kilometers? Fine. Dig a canal to avoid the strait of Hormuz and just do it with shovels? Let's get to it. AI can be a universal machine that can do anything labor can achieve.

Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.

[mschuster91]

> Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.

Historically, that "we'll figure something out" has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population, sooner or later followed either by some epidemic event or other "act of god" (like fires) that was a consequence of squalor and poverty, or by some sort of war to thin out the herd.

I'd prefer if history would not repeat itself for once.

[spwa4]

> Historically, that "we'll figure something out" has usually meant the economical wipeout of ...

Uh, historically everything has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population. It still means that in most third world countries. Economic power is not the huge differentiator here.

[fluoridation]

Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name. If you're giving people more money in exchange for nothing (or nothing of any value to anyone, as in the case of a job guarantee), it's effectively indistinguishable from UBI.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name

The extra steps reduce costs and encourage offsetting production. Those are important steps!

[pydry]

"When our grandparents built the hoover dam, the lincoln tunnel and the triborough bridge with a job guarantee that was just money for nothing - UBI with extra steps."

^ this would be an accurate representation of your opinion then?

[fluoridation]

That job guarantees exceptionally produce useful things doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth.

[JumpCrisscross]

> doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth

One could say the same thing about all the little art projects a hypothetical society on UBI might busy itself making. The pertinent difference seems to be one about scale and co-ordination. Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption.

[fluoridation]

>Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption.

Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor, compared to idleness.

[Lerc]

Like the post above says that there are multiple issues at play with AI. The same can be said about universal income.

The pay levels are not comparable because you are also recompensed with time. You may choose to spend your time in a number of ways that you find rewarding that also reduce your expenses. Making your own meals, clothes, furniture, beer, wine etc. There are a lot of people who would enjoy doing these things but are too time poor to do so.

Your expenses also reduce by the amount you must spend in order to make yourself available to work. Travel, work clothes, medical certificates when sick. You can spend a lot in order to be paid.

If you want a world with a reasonable distribution of income levels. It stands to reason that those receiving more right now should receive less. Certainly, the absolute wealthiest should reduce the most, but on a global scale, it is hard to defend that those in the top 10% of incomes should retain their position.

The proposal for how much a universal income should pay is a variable to be argued itself. I can certainly see it being argued for at a lower level than ultimately desired since something is better than none.

In a sense the end state of a universal income in an equitable world would be remarkably simple. The income available divided by the world's population,

Those reviving more than their share now may not be happy about it, but I'm not sure they have a right to their larger portion either.