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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are real limits to everything, because the universe has a finite mass and volume. But, that doesn't mean that it is not possible to engineer a working UBI.

Productivity is usually value/worker or value/hour worked. There's no indication, as far as I'm aware, that value (inflation adjusted money) is a conserved quantity. In fact, most of the productivity increases are in industries where the value produced is not directly coupled to the resourced consumed. The software industry is a great example.

The relationship between value produced and resources consumed may not be linear, but that does not mean that it is possible to have infinite production, or to produce a change in value from zero resources.

If production is not limited, then we can instantly transform our solar system into a Dyson sphere, right now. What am I not understanding, of this theory?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#52

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

[deleted]

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#53
post #27

The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…

> New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. Oohh, this very much. Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next. For two years, my…

That's actually a .09MP screen. Makes it sound as pathetic as it is.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#54
post #13
post #9

>> I noticed iPads on the tables They're tablets, from Ziosk. iPad is the Kleenex of this generation. I rather like those, nothing like paying (and leaving) when I want instead of trying to track down the waiter for 20 minutes

Yeah, those are the best of both worlds when you're not dining at an upscale place. Don't have to use cash, don't have to wait for them to complete two round trips just to leave. I never understand why waiters don't give me a chance to hand them the card immediately when they drop the check. I don't need to sit with it for 10 minutes, especially after it took 10 minutes to flag you down for it. Years ago I was a wait…

I always keep my card out when they're giving me the check. I send them back with it.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#55

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

I think one of the biggest problems in the world right now is how much money is simply captured and not moving through the economy. A huge amount of money is sitting around adding very little economic value. Redistribute that money to people who will use it to consume products and services and you get a much more active economy.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#56

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

Look at Alaska which has a long-term state-run form of UBI. It's about $100 per person per month. Even at such a low amount, to your point, it creates some measurable inflation and other distortions in the market. UBI may only work as a low, supplemental amount to start, so it could be a fair analog. The idea that we'll start with UBI that's enough for each individual to rent a studio, cover transportation costs, and put food on the table seems improbable.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#57

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#58
post #5

Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two. It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.

No, by counterexample of USA.

The 2015 average income per capita was $57,540 [0]. The 2015 poverty guideline for a family of five was $28,410 [1]. Clearly there is more income per capita than required to keep everybody out of poverty.

A second source, the Census, is pretty reputable too: "Median household income in the United States was $56,516 in 2015." [2] Edit: This statement isn't helpful since it is a median, not a mean. A better source from the Census is [3], which lists the mean average as $75,738. As a reply pointed out, the heavy income inequality in the USA is expected to cause this sort of skew in the median.

Either way, I propose that taking everybody's income away and then splitting it evenly would apportion enough money to keep everybody out of poverty, that it would be sustainable (based on trends of past amounts of income per capita and poverty guidelines), and that it would clear the poverty guideline, a well-known bright line for "basic life necessities."

Is this a good solution? Maybe. There's probably better ones. But they do exist.

Edit: Specifically, would this system remain stable? It's hard to say. We can imagine that anybody on the sad side of the Pareto curve, which is a majority of the typical employed people in the USA, would not mind effectively having a big check from Uncle Sam raising their income to healthy levels. At the same time, we could also imagine that the wealthy few who are hit hardest in this scheme would try to find some way to get their income to be non-taxable, whether by lobbying for a proportional tax or inventing new capital transfer techniques. I'm not going to claim that this scheme is in any way socially workable over the long term, though. I personally feel that any UBI scheme is still socially unworkable; we need more small-scale evidence that UBI works.

Still edit: As an example, imagine that the UBI payments were only sufficient to bring the impoverished up out of poverty, and not necessarily any higher. That means that over half of the income marked in my original scheme would not be needed, so the wealthy could keep it. This would effectively be a two-tax-bracket system, with the brackets labeled "below" and "above." Does it still work on paper? Yes. Do I think that people will like it? No. Do I think that people like taxes? Not really.

[0] http://data.worldbank.org/country/United-States

[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

[3] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/cps/hinc-06.htm... (Warning: XLS sheet!)

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#59

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

The argument for UBI over NIT, as I understand it, is that if rich people but UBI too they'll be less likely to attempt to defund it.

I don't find this especially convincing, since from a purely rational point of view decreasing UBI increases net income for the rich. But maybe there are complex psychological/political factors at play.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#60

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

Most western social democracies already have an overlapping network of benefit systems that are essentially a patchwork UBI in disguise. The system is designed not to go without food and shelter, but the exact mechanism varies depending on what population group you belong to. There's assistance for the temporary unemployed, for students, for people with disabilities, people with long-term illnesses, etc. There's pensions for those that have aged out of the workforce, there's assistance for children. And this is only scratching the surface. Even working people get a fixed basic tax deduction under most taxation systems.

I'm not convinced that the sum total of all these benefits plus the current infrastructure that is needed to maintain, dispense and detect/punish abuse on them is significantly larger than the total expenditure on UBI.

Of course, all the people that you let go from the benefits departments initially will end up on UBI, so that's not really a big win. But eventually they will find employment elsewhere, hopefully.

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