My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
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Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#32It's not UBI, it's a rolling stimulus package :) That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy. And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.
In a way very true but also subsidized by the wealthy's spending habits. To mention UBI without the accompanying VAT would not properly show how progressive this system can be with higher taxes applied to non essential goods.
People concerned with it wiping out safety nets needs to understand how under equipped and under utilized they are for numerous reasons. The average benefits also average to only about $500/month. UBI is a new economic floor in which we can mobilize large swaths of the population and revitalize small towns that are falling apart. The shift in economic power will be massive and it's incredible to think about.
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-m...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#33Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#34Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?
Do the Chinese YouTube’s have positive cash flow? I don’t even know if youtube has positive cash flow.
I was curious about Youtube too, apparently around 2015 they started breaking even.
I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing.
https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le...
I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#35My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
Yes, prices will likely go up. However, they will not capture all of that money. And UBI will allow people to have more choice in where they live. UBI will give you the flexibility to move somewhere new and figure things out when you get there, rather than having to have a job lined up immediately. This should, at the margin, decrease the lock in effect of big cities, and maybe even cause rents to decline over time.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#36Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during…
Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI.
Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10,000 of a million is worth less to the millionaire than $10 to the poor person with only a thousand to their name. A flat tax isn't fair unless every other form of expense was flat as well. Which means rent would have to be some percent of your income and the same for power, healthcare and so forth.
You aren't actually responding to my argument. I'm arguing for a more effective and efficient tax system which would ultimately result in outcomes you ostensibly support. I'm done here it's new year in an hour and I'm not going to spend it arguing. ;)
I’m pretty sure flat tax was done before and people cheated on that too so it doesn’t remove the need for IRS and enforcement in general. Even if other forms of tax are not fair the immediate problems that causes are nicer problems to have than not enough revenue from flat tax.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#38My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
Yes, prices will likely go up. However, they will not capture all of that money. And UBI will allow people to have more choice in where they live. UBI will give you the flexibility to move somewhere new and figure things out when you get there, rather than having to have a job lined up immediately. This should, at the margin, decrease the lock in effect of big cities, and maybe even cause rents to decline over time.
I'm hoping UBI exists in 10-20 years. I could take on my parents' home on that kind of salary without thinking, and just dub along as a subsistence farmer/ occasional contractor.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#39Great to see tech leaders get behind UBI. Now is the time and Yang is the candidate of a lifetime. I never understood how people buy into the whole "break up the tech giants" argument. It makes no sense, just a great platitude with no real accomplishment. Who wants to use the 2nd best Twitter or Facebook? Not a single person.
How does UBI even work? Won't it just lead to rampant inflation where the basic income is spread thin, eaten up almost entirely by the rising cost of goods? It seems like this in turn will require an even higher basic income, which exacerbates the problem. Isn't an analogous situation that of private loans for tuition? Tuitions have risen across the board to eat up all the new "free" money in the system. Won't UBI ma…
It depends on how government would get the money for UBI. If it goes ahead and just prints more money then there will be rampant inflation, but if it redirects money from other programs, the prices of some goods may change, but there won't be inflation.
Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
#40Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.
$12K/year is hardly a free ride to a life of no work. There will be a tiny minority that somehow game it and live off that, but for the vast majority it’s a cushion and not a replacement for work at all.