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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

#61

Post by ihsw2 »

sp332 wrote: post #50
bandrami wrote: 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.

"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you.

We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.)

Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.

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

#62

Post by shafte »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #46
shafte wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

You may be right. Although I'd claim that a trend piece + a modest change in demography aren't quite the same as a "mark of social status".

I'm applying the following standard: if someone told me that their friend had 3 kids, would I infer something about their social status? At least for me, not really? Like you said, the poor and rich both have >3 children. ymmv of course

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

#64

Post by bcoates »

Sneering about $500-$1000/month and talking about being able to afford a medical emergency[1] tips the author's hand: He's not worried about the actual poor, he's worried about the losers, mid-income aspirational types that will never be able to afford the lifestyle they're intensely integrated into and aware of.

UBI would make their misery even worse, asserting their status over people who "flip burgers for a living" is all they've got.

[1] If you're in the US and poor enough that UBI would be life-changing, you're almost certainly either on Medicaid or in a place where the first-line medical treatment is going to an emergency room and skipping out on the bill.

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

#65

Post by torstenvl »

Everything about this post is based on supposition, speculation, and a fundamental misunderstanding of UBI. No, Mr. Filloux, nobody is advocating for a $500/mo dole in which recipients have to pay out of pocket for emergency room visits.

Nor, dear Sir, is the Revenue de Solidarité Active anything even remotely close to Universal Basic Income, because it is not universal.

The straw men are piled so high it constitutes a fire hazard.

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

#66

Post by notahacker »

shafte wrote: post #20

The author makes a false equivalence between the RSA in France and the typical UBI proposal. An individual's RSA benefit decreases as their work income increases. This has the effect of making an individual weakly indifferent to working, since it will provide no marginal increase in income. Most UBI proposals involve a benefit that doesn't phase out with income (or phases out at an income level so high that it doesn'…

As I understand it an RSA recipient who switches to a full-time minimum wage job more than doubles their annual post-tax income even with some (not all) of their benefit being cut back. If that still disincentives work, UBI probably will too.

UBI advocates do tend to overplay the marginal income incentives. And don't forget that UBI, which would be paid to far more people than current social programmes, requires taxes to cut in somewhere (probably at a lower bound and steeper rate)

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

#67

Post by sp332 »

ihsw2 wrote: post #61
sp332 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you. We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environme…

Ok... back in reality, lots of people are unemployed or underemployed, our markets aren't that free, and again, capital is not the best way to decide whether someone is worth keeping alive (e.g. with universal healthcare).

To your example, a life of complacency is fine. (Edit: I guess you were commenting about someone else, but I still wanted to make the point.)

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

#68

Post by tatersolid »

TomMckenny wrote: post #12

Perhaps UBI does require thinks like universal health coverage but that would not make it "deeply flawed" that would mean tweaking is needed. And that UBI requires low unemployment is directly contradicted by the head of the article where UBI is described as a potential solution for loss of jobs due to automation. But either way theorizing beforehand why it will or won't fail is comparatively unproductive; we can act…

> we can actually experiment and see if it works.

Actually, we can’t test UBI without enormous risk.

If the number of people involved isn’t close to 100%, it isn’t universal. Any societal effects for good or ill cannot be reasonably extrapolated to the full population. What might “work” for 5% of the population getting UBI might cause the next Great Depression at 100%.

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

#69

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

repolfx wrote: post #57
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the me…

Maybe your mom would, I'm sure she's a lovely woman. But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser". I encouraged her, again and again…

I've had long-term unemployment as well (over 18 months) and I think that is an entirely different phenomenon that's not connected to what people would do if they had some financial security of a basic income.

Long term unemployment creates a type of inaction/depression for some people (this happened to me, and it sounds exactly like what happened to your ex partner). Because so much of my identity was bound up in what job I had, what career goals, how much money, etc., it made the feeling of being unemployed severely distressing. I really wanted to do things like volunteering, or even basic self-care like exercising, but I could not due to the distress of unemployment and the feeling like I absolutely had to find an "acceptably good" job (for social status) and neurotically do nothing but dedicate all my efforts towards that.

If the status of having a basic income is a positive thing, like framing it as an opportunity to pitch in with civic duty and give back, I think it would satisfy the status and "sense of accomplishment" requirements for a lot of people.

But either way, the extremely distressing feeling of long-term unemployment is really not comparable. I would say, for example, that what you observed from your ex partner does not give you any capability of predicting what your ex partner would have done with basic income during that unemployment period. The situations are just too drastically different.

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

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

tatersolid wrote: post #68
TomMckenny wrote: post #12

Perhaps UBI does require thinks like universal health coverage but that would not make it "deeply flawed" that would mean tweaking is needed. And that UBI requires low unemployment is directly contradicted by the head of the article where UBI is described as a potential solution for loss of jobs due to automation. But either way theorizing beforehand why it will or won't fail is comparatively unproductive; we can act…

> we can actually experiment and see if it works. Actually, we can’t test UBI without enormous risk. If the number of people involved isn’t close to 100%, it isn’t universal . Any societal effects for good or ill cannot be reasonably extrapolated to the full population. What might “work” for 5% of the population getting UBI might cause the next Great Depression at 100%.

> Actually, we can’t test UBI without enormous risk.

Yes we can.

> If the number of people involved isn’t close to 100%, it isn’t universal.

Right, so your test has 100% coverage but not at a level that completely displaces all other means tested benefit programs. Maybe it initially just displaces, say, General Assistance type programs. Then you can gradually scale it up and continuously evaluate.

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