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Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

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Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#41

"That’s why I remain fascinated by smart people in the United States being so misguided about the implications of the UBI in a country that has no decent healthcare system, a poor primary education complemented by a horrendously expensive higher education system. A state in which having more than two children is a mark of social status and in which any life crisis can lead to a social precipice." from the article

>A state in which having more than two children is a mark of social status? Really? I never knew that was a thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17536302

"Three kids — which a generation ago was considered a slightly smaller brood than ideal — now seems aspirational, even decadent."

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#42
post #35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s unpopular. That’s part of the reason why people like me support things like UBI. I mean, let’s be real here. I’m a mid-40s, above-average-IQ nerd millionaire, but if I graduated college today, I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t make it as well economically. And, I’m really certain that if I was born less-lucky in mental capacities (or other factors) I’d be pretty screwed, no matter how hard I worke…

Also, let's not discount the high probability that if you are successful, you are also probably extremely lucky.

Very lucky, no doubt

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#43
post #14
post #5

I'm a libertarian, and don't support a welfare state in general. I view UBI as a great replacement for current welfare programs including food stamps. It largely eliminate the "welfare gap", where when people earn more money, their benefits start dropping off, resulting in a reversed incentive structure leading to trapping people in poverty. UBI implemented as a negative income tax would result in much less waste and…

My preferred argument in favor is that depression can render government form-filled disability bureaucracy into an unnavigable hellscape and since it's one of the most common disabilities, a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible.

> a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible

You don't honestly think that those of us who have doubts about UBI are actually cackling and rubbing our hands together gleefully over all the human misery we're causing by denying living income to the miserable, do you? Of course that would be nice - and I do believe that humanity will eventually get to that point, but we're not there yet. We'll have flying, self-driving cars long before we have the level of automation we need to let everybody kick back and pursue whatever intellectual interests they find.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#44
post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

>uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks -- they all have a role in society and are economically worthwhile -- it's just that nobody has had a raise since the 90's and income inequality is the highest i…

> Someone still has to do the jobs.

I think GP's argument is that we won't need them too much longer. The jobs you mention don't need to disappear completely for there to be problems; if the demand for that class of fungible unskilled labor drops by 20% (not hard to imagine in the next decade or so), what happens to those tens of millions of people who have no way to provide for themselves and their families?

Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#45
For the working class, tech is disrupting faster than it's creating value, the results are more distributional then they are enriching. The self driving car removes the human behind the wheel but does nothing to reduce the cost of the average car. Transportation does not become too cheap to meter - it costs about the same, minus the human salaries, and also minus the cab city tax that was typically redistributed into infrastructure for all.

There is almost no venture investment into say nuclear, too cheap to meter electricity. There is no investment into radically new and automated ways to build cheap, quality housing from locally available materials, or refine more, cheaper ore with less impact on the environment, or manufacture more durable, upgradable goods.

The supply of stuff is not disrupted by massive abundance, just the social rules about who gets what. It used to be the guys building the stuff in every community who were rewarded; now, all their paychecks go to a single dude in San Francisco that wrote a marginally better algorithm for doing stuff and the next day it spread around the world over the Internet. It turns out, there's nothing unique or special about a human body, just a soon-to-be-outdated type of 3D printer - with a software update latency measured in years and limited write cycles.

A basic income capable of lifting people from survival and into knowledge building is on the order of $5000 at current purchasing parity - impossible to finance by any tax or industry unless we radically alter the actual supply of goods.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#46
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A state in which having more than two children is a mark of social status? Really? I never knew that was a thing.

It's not. I honestly can't even imagine where the author would get this idea. If anything, having fewer/no children is a mark of status, both globally (higher income countries tend to have lower birth rates) and in the US (vaguely implies both parents are working and have access to contraceptives, etc). To be clear, I don't think that there's much of a status signal either way.

It is very much a thing in the US. The middle class almost exclusively has 0, 1 or 2 children; only the poor and the rich have more.

21 percent of families earning > $200K had at least 3 kids in 2011, an increase from 15% in 2000. Every other demographic saw their numbers go down.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/fashion/The-Growing-Three...

Anecdotally I see that too. Almost all of my children's classmates come from 2 child families with the occasional single; almost all of my wife's surgeon friends have 0 or >2 children.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#47

I am really having trouble sussing out the author's thesis. What are they arguing, exactly?

Yeah, I had the same feeling, seemed like a long stream of consciousness.

UBI is bad! because the U.S. doesn't have free healthcare?

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks -- they all have a role in society and are economically worthwhile -- it's just that nobody has had a raise since the 90's and income inequality is the highest i…

> Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks Those jobs are going away.

Cooking has become vastly more efficient over the past 10,000 years, especially recently with labor-saving kitchen equipment. Yet there are still cooks. And we eat fancier food.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#49
There's a fellow I follow on Tumblr who got tired of all the talk about UBI without any concrete specifics, and so took it upon himself to look at actual, real UBI proposals with serious analysis. There are fewer than you'd think, considering how much talk there has been about it:

https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/tagged/ubi

To be honest, the results are sobering. There are depressingly few proposals to begin with, and they all seem to be fundamentally flawed: they either have a lot of fuzzy math to handwave away problems, or they are politically impossible. Each of his posts ends with "If this is the most serious UBI proposal, there are no serious UBI proposals" and it's a hard point to argue with. I was a strong UBI supporter even six months ago, but between this analysis and questions like "With a $2,000/month UBI payment, won't landlords just simultaneously raise rent by $2,000/month?" with no obvious answers, I'm really pulling back.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#50
post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

Sure but that's dangerous if you skip the step of recognizing that people can have value that's not based on their ability to create capital.
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