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I found this debate to be helpful in my understanding of the UBI: http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal-basic...
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Negative income tax is just Friedman's name for UBI. They're functionally identical.
UBI (at least in all the circles I've seen) refers to basic income wherein the government gives an unconditional sum of money to citizens. Negative income tax is not unconditional.
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 hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor. Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists. People who have money, and therefore power, in the Unite…
Maybe instead of UBI, we should consider a scheme where we grant an ownership interest in productive property.
One naive way to implement that is to just grant shares in an index fund that tracks the robotics/automation sector, such as the ROBO Global Index (http://www.roboglobal.com).
Obviously, that's not the best way to do it, because if I've just been laid off and have to pay my mortgage, I'm going to turn all my shares into cash.
But there might be some more sophisticated way to grant ownership of productive property that would both generate income and also give influence to the very workers who are most affected by the technology's success.
From Henry Hazlitts 1946 classic "Economics in One Lesson": You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemploy…
One thing that might cushion the displacement of workers by automation is if the workers themselves had an ownership interest in the automation technology. Yes, they would lose their jobs, but having an ownership interest would allow them to generate income. Maybe instead of UBI, we should consider a scheme where we grant an ownership interest in productive property. One naive way to implement that is to just grant s…
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Set the income tax rate to 100 %, give an equal share of that money to every citizen. That should check all three boxes, shouldn't it?
Personally I wouldn't bother working very hard if income tax was 100%.
That might or might not be the case depending on the behavior of the people but given that universal basic income proponents argue that people would not get lazy and exploit the system I am happy to make that assumption. In case that turns out to be false, it is certainly possible to tweak the scheme in such a way that there remains an incentive not to become lazy, for example by lowering the 100 % tax rate but still keeping it high.
Also some argue this time is different because we're now automating jobs which require thinking. They conveniently forget that many jobs were automated before. E.g. in WWII an army of women used to calculate artillery ranges, now it's all handled by computers. New jobs will be found just like before.
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> 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…
I think the only realistic way for a small player to beat Amazon at selling physical goods is to charge more and convince customers that it's worth it.
Those are tiny tweaks that they could make easily.
Plus Amazon is much more than just a place to buy. They are data services, logistics, analytics, seller services, infrastructure etc...