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Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

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Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#351

Post by jsnk »

zxcdw wrote: post #313

I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs ), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper. Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so…

Historically speaking, automation in various fields greatly increased number of jobs, productivity and quality of life.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#352

Post by sliverstorm »

pi18n wrote: post #240
sliverstorm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but notice that most volunteer work has a special feel-good element to it? Feeding the homeless. Saving lost animals. Helping disadvantaged children. There aren't many volunteer organizations that, to borrow dgallagher's example, mow lawns or rake leaves, and the ones that do, only do it for special places. Perhaps for a monument or a park.

Obviously people would mow lawns but the price would be higher because they don't have to. If you wanted someone to mow your lawn, you would probably need extra income. Or, since you have more free time, you can now mow it yourself and enjoy it instead of feeling like it's cutting into your only spare 48 hours.

The point is that volunteer work is not going to grow dramatically and fill the void left by paid work.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#353

Post by dragonwriter »

absherwin wrote: post #333
dragonwriter wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that the vast majority of wealth in this country in held in liquid assets or in real estate Source? > There will be some complicated edge cases but there will be relatively few and the ability to game them is less because wealth is a simpler concept than income. How is wealth a "simpler concept" than income. AFAICT, income is far simpler (and, in fact, involves a strict subset of the assessments necessary in…

Non-financial non-real estate assets account for 5.8% of the total according to the Fed's flow of funds report (Z.1) table B.100: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1r-5.pdf . Note this also includes non-profits but that's a relatively small distortion. Wealth is the value of everything you have less what you owe. Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it, which is usually just i…

> Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it

"What people would pay for it" is a controversial quantity that can only be speculatively and uncertainly answered unless you are actually selling it in an open, unrestricted auction (even actual sale under real-world conditions often doesn't answer this, since its possible that both buyer and seller have non-financial interests which motivate the sale decision such that the purchase price does not represent the market value.) For pure interchangeable commodities with robust markets, this is less of a problem, but for many real world assets (including real estate) this is not the case.

Note that while real estate is already subject to ad valorem taxes (and other value-based policies, such as eminent domain), valuation is not at all free from contention even with those taxes as just one piece of the overall tax picture; if wealth-based taxes were the primary tax system, that problem would be magnified.

> How do you determine income objectively?

If you can value wealth objectively, you can value income objectively, since income is just a subset of the changes in wealth. The problems in income valuation are problems in wealth valuation (which is why, e.g., capital assets are valued at sale for income purposes, which becomes less viable of a solution to the problem of valuation if you aren't taxing the change in wealth but taxing the wealth in each year it was held.)

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#354

Post by wwweston »

crazygringo wrote: post #73

> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…

> If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels.

This has never seemed like a strong argument or an accurate description of what actually happens to me.

If it's true that businesses just pass along taxes, then:

1) I'd think businesses wouldn't be so concerned with minimizing/fighting taxes. What we seem to see instead is that businesses seem to be concerned they will be carrying the cost and investors seem to be worried it will cut into profits.

2) I assume that's true for me, too, of course -- presumably, I don't pay income/payroll taxes either, I just pass along the cost of those taxes to my employer. My employer, as given, just passes those costs along to consumers. Consumer just figures in the costs of goods/services and calculates their asking price for their market offerings accordingly...

So nobody pays taxes?

It seems more likely to me that rather than people "just" passing costs along whole is that everybody pays the tax by finding some economic balance between what they can/must pass on and what they can/must absorb. How much is passed along probably depends on how competitive the market for each exchange is along every cascade and how price sensitive buyers are.

> Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money

I don't think anybody really thinks it does. The idea is to distribute the load, which taxes (passed along or not) do.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#355

Post by tomjen3 »

danielweber wrote: post #129
alexvr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc.

Yes, public housing projects worked so well. You can go look up economics papers on Google Scholar or SSRN about the benefits of direct payments versus in-kind payments. You might worry that someone will use their direct payment and spend it on hooch, but you can't stop that: if you give them food stamps they will trade that for money and then spend it on hooch.

Actually you can stop it, by doing exactly what he says - you can eat free food at this particular place, but so can everybody else. It stops hunger, but it has a resale value of 0.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#356

Post by tomjen3 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #110
alexvr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc.

> Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc. The problem that BI advocates see with that is that there is much greater overhead in managing a default shelter program, food plan, non-food-non-shelter-necessities-of-life-plan, etc., than just establishing and managing a single universal cash allowance plan.

It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI?

Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#357

Post by absherwin »

mistermann wrote: post #348
DuskStar wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would probably qualify as raising pay. And I'm honestly wondering - what percent of payroll is the typical CEO or CEO bonus?

It is somewhat the same as raising pay, except is it not true that the average worker's pay has been flat for many years now (even those employed by corporations" while executive pay has drastically increased? And I personally don't think the harm is in what percentage of the profits is paid to them per se, I think the more harmful aspect is the perverse incentives that are created when executive compensation is tied…

You're absolutely right about where the risk lies. That's why large shareholders have become increasingly concerned about alignment. CEO pay is increasingly in equity and they are subject to minimum equity holding requirements and clawbacks. I'd like to see larger minimums relative to their equity compensation but in the grand scheme of things this is a small issue.

It's also worth noting that short-term investors are a greater threat to long-term focused decisions than pay incentives. Most CEO's aren't actually foolish enough to risk destroying their company for more money in the near-term. They like their jobs so what does terrify them is an investor demanding more leverage or adopting a riskier strategy on pain of advocating removal or a hostile takeover. When Chuck Prince said he couldn't sit down until the music stopped, he wasn't worried about a smaller bonus but about posting lower profits that would have led to calls for his removal. "There was a merchant in Baghdad..."

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#358

Post by hackinthebochs »

tomjen3 wrote: post #343
zxcdw wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation. Can you imagine the consequences of a driverless car on transportation industry for example? Or automated cashing machines on cashiers? Or cleaner robots for cleaners? You see, simple jobs are going to be replaced in the future. These people will go unemployed, because there will be no simple jobs for them . This is a trend, yes, and it won't happen overnight. But there's one crucial fact -- it doesn't ju…

You point has been argued a lot recently, but if it were true then surely nearly everybody would be unemployed by now? After all how many of you are scribes, weavers, carpenters and farmers (or farmers helpers)? Less than 20%? Then why don't we have 80% unemployment? Because we found other jobs for those people, the economy is much, much bigger, life is much, much better and everybody is better of. And it isn't like…

I'll tell you why this time is different. Each time we had growth in technology that had the potential to displace a huge number of workers that technology also enabled a massive decrease in the costs of transactions (railroads, motor vehicles, the internet, etc). This allowed a massive growth in the economy which enabled these displaced workers to find new jobs. Also consider that the growth in technology didn't eliminate jobs, but it shifted them. The technology of old still required a mostly proportional human energy input to produce output. New technology decreased that proportion, but it didn't eliminate it.

This last point is the difference that this new wave of automation has compared to the waves of past. It is unprecedented in human history to be facing a future where human effort can be multiplied by such enormous multiples that the value of labor approaches zero. This coming automation revolution would have to simultaneously grow the economy to greater proportions that automation reduces the cost of labor. I don't believe this will ever be possible, but definitely not in the time period that a properly developed AI and robotic technology could corner the market in labor (once developed, less than a decade). Society is not prepared for what is coming, and it will be disastrous.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#359

Post by dragonwriter »

effn wrote: post #51
astrodust wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately. The Mincome experiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome ) dabbled with this idea and the results were rather surprising. Most people seemed to want to work rather than loaf around and collect benefits. Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates o…

> The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately. This idea does not stand up to any scrutiny at all. The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program. > Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate looph…

> The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.

Most of the cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is in validating and enforcing the conditions on beneficiaries. Unconditional Basic Income avoids these costs quite directly.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#360

Post by ahoy »

tomjen3 wrote: post #303
btilly wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem with "targeted social welfare programs" is that it is very easy to dislike programs that someone else (particularly someone that you don't like) benefits from. A program that you yourself benefit from tends to be less likely to get eroded by future politicians. Compare welfare and social security for a classic example of the difference.

Ah, but that is a feature, not a bug.

I don't follow, do you care to elaborate? Are you suggesting that welfare programs are designed to be unpopular/to be stigmatizing?
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