Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income • Hacker News Board

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by Tiktaalik » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #222

Tiktaalik wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable. That's there the means testing has come in to try to limit that. Something more like a "guaranteed minimum income" where you can't have less money than what is required to have a good standard of living is a cheaper and more effective idea that accomplishes the same goals of ending poverty.

UBI is indirectly means-tested; if you make too much money, you end up giving back as much or more in taxes and/or partial UBI clawbacks than what you would get via UBI. This actually ends up working better and being cheaper than most alternatives (including the "guaranteed minimum"), because it's comparatively easy to structure a comprehensive tax system so that it minimizes distortions on people's behavior, and har…

It's actually a big bureaucratic problem to give people several thousand dollars and then demand most of it back later. Most people don't notice income taxes since it comes out of their paycheque. It would genuinely be tough problem to educate people to not spend their basic income, or to design a system where it's clawed back through paycheques.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by ethanbond » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #287

starpilot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By how much? Do you assume that the full UBI amount will be available for tenants to pay rent, and that no other prices will increase? I imagine that landlords in aggregate would understand that it would not be in their benefit to raise all rents by an amount equal to the UBI if they want to keep tenants. Yang's campaign estimated that prices would go up about 12%, so for higher income (like many on HN) this would be…

I think rents and other costs will rise to the equilibrium point where a lot of people are stressed by the price but just about able to pay it. Same as now. It's not a coincidence that the cost of living is equal to the amount which lots of people struggle with, yet are just about coping with. However, a key benefit of UBI is that the situation is stable and predictable for people on it. Currently, people who are jus…

You agree that UBI will not fix poverty and/or wealth inequality, as cost of living will rise exactly to the level necessary to guarantee "slight poverty," but are still a proponent?

I would be interested to see evidence that it's the welfare system itself that causes these stressors, rather than the poverty itself, which is what you seem to be stating here. Why would that be the case?

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by kerkeslager » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

nogabebop23 wrote: post #236

kerkeslager wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, what about areas that lag behind? Rural america that is too poor to afford robot trucks. The robot trucks are cheaper than the humans that operate the non-robot trucks, so your argument doesn't make much sense here.

>> The robot trucks are cheaper than the humans that operate the non-robot trucks not if you understand accounting. I can hire a guy today at <$20/hr operating cost to do it manually. That robot truck is a much more significant capital investment that will amortize over 10+ years.

1. Loans: it seems you've forgotten these exist.

2. Private garbage collection companies: just because a municipality doesn't have money to buy a robot truck in cash, doesn't mean the private garbage collection company that serves most of the surrounding municipalities doesn't.

3. If you actually look up the prices, the numbers are so skewed in the favor of automation that even without loans or private companies, I very much doubt there are any cases where this would take 10+ years to amortize. Your $20/hour collector translates to $30K/year if they works 30 hours/week, or $300K in 10 years. Is it your claim that robot trucks cost $300K more than non-robot trucks?

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by kerkeslager » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

ahdeanz wrote: post #288

kerkeslager wrote: post #257

While I think UBI is one of the better solutions to the poverty problem in the US, I think almost any solution to poverty will fall prey to inflation if we don't address income inequality. One way to do this is pay ratio caps at companies. It's pretty hard to argue against this: if you really believe that wealth trickles down, then you should have no problem trusting but verifying that.

This is a classic pre-distribution versus redistribution debate. I’d just note that they are not mutually exclusive strategies and can both be undertaken simultaneously. You can see Sweden has been able to do so but countries like US, France, Germany, UK all have similar levels of inequality before redistribution. The US inequality compared to those countries is primarily due to lack of redistribution: Around ~29 min…

I'll just point out that I did not oppose undertaking both simultaneously.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by sketchyj » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

palisade wrote: post #271

bananabreakfast wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, you're so right! Plumbers are all lazy pieces of shit that would all stop working immediately if they could feed their family.

It's not about lazyness. It is a matter of having all your needs and wants fulfilled and not needing to work. Where you can finally simply pursue hobbies. Why do any kind of labor if everything is met. Especially janitorial, plumbing, heavy lifting, dredging in miserable conditions, or any other number of difficult thankless jobs. Go watch dirty jobs the tv show, it's an eye opener. There are even people who climb do…

I think it's very likely that a UBI would make salaries for those types of jobs go up quite a bit. People wouldn't feel like they "had" to do them just to make rent. I don't have a problem with those people making more money for the jobs they do. I think they've earned that.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by jedberg » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

anonAndOn wrote: post #296

jedberg wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep forgetting that a UBI won't cover immigrants. Immigrants would end up doing all the jobs that citizens don't want to do. That's the biggest problem with UBI. It creates a default class system.

Doesn't that happen in the US already? Farm work, hotel cleaning, groundskeeping... all heavily reliant upon immigrant labor.

Yes. Which is why the UBI wouldn't make nearly as much difference as people think. Nearly all the "work people don't want to do" is already done by immigrants who won't qualify for UBI (but would still be paying the VAT taxes that fund it).

That's basically how the math works out. Immigrants fund a lot of the UBI by paying into it but not benefiting from it. We would need a lot of protections for non-citizen workers to protect them from being exploited.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of UBI and think it's a great idea, I just worry about the unintended consequences.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by nawitus » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

HideousKojima wrote: post #145

Press2forEN wrote: post #110

Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. What happened?

>What happened? Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. That's what happened. There simply isn't enough tax revenue, even if you seized 100% of the wealth and future earnings of the wealthy, to provide a basic income sufficient for most people to live off of. Also a lot of proposals would have ended up giving the poor and elderly less than they ge…

> Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both.

I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical.

That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by mc32 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #173

mc32 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you need a self-contained economy to test and prove things out.

There are no self contained economies anymore.

Can I apply for gov benefits from a neighboring staate I don’t have permanent resident status?

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by asdff » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

throwaway_jobs wrote: post #5

I don’t think there is any good way to test UBI at any small scale, I think there needs to be a critical mass of people who can pay their housing and food costs how society and economic activity would be reshaped under such a system.

We are currently with unemployment doing a great UBI experiment. Lots of people are earning more with unemployment than before. The benefits are only a year, but I'm willing to bet these people take their time finding work if it means a pay cut.

California is a perfect place to test these sorts of public welfare and social safety net initiatives. It's the 5th largest economy in the world, and medi-Cal already covers a third of the population, it only need be expanded.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Post by drak0n1c » Thu, May 21, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #228

zelly wrote: post #157

UBI only makes sense in the science fiction world that Andrew Yang and other non-technical journalists think is somehow imminent. We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die. We cannot survive forever on financial engineering by bureaucrats and importing all our nec…

1) The "U" in "UBI" means that working another job does not stop you from receiving UBI, which means it may still make sense to do so if you want more income. UBI is supposed to be enough to live on, not enough to have everything you might want; there are at least preliminary results that show UBI doesn't stop people from working. 2) UBI will tend to mean less people willing to work low-paying unpleasant jobs, which…

It's a gamble - either 2 will lead to 3, or 2 will lead to input and output prices of goods being raised. Probably some of both.

Hopefully more of 3 than the alternative, because the alternative scenario of prices rising has negative consequences in the form of economic deadweight loss even if UBI pays for the price increases.