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India floats the idea of a universal basic income

economist.com

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Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#141

Post by closeparen »

smallnamespace wrote: post #136
bitJericho wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else. If you can also buy a tv, good job. If done right, it should be hard to do that. Basically exactly like how welfare is now, just do that, but without any of the weird requirements that differ state to state. As fir medical care. All insurance should be made redundant. Universal healthcare wo…

> isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else 'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formul…

> if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula

There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians. Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half.

You'd need to tailor this figure per person.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#142

Post by smallnamespace »

closeparen wrote: post #141
smallnamespace wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else 'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formul…

> if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians . Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half. You'd need to tailor this figure per person .

Yeah and once you get into that level of detail, what exactly is 'bare minimum housing' for a person?

Like, if the rule is you get median housing no matter what zip code you happen to live in, then there's no downside to picking the most expensive zip code in the nation and choosing to get UBI there. OTOH, if you define limits, then government has made some zip codes effectively UBI-free.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#143

Post by aminok »

vacri wrote: post #132
aminok wrote: post #71

Forcibly redistributing income from low resource generators to high resource generators creates an incentive for people with fewer resources to have more children than they are capable of supporting. This dynamic will in the long run lead to more people that produce fewer resources. Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers): http://cepr.net/publications/report…

> But hey, since 40 years of social democracy has failed, let's keep doubling down and giving people more "free" money. ... you mean the countries with the highest quality-of-life measures? The Scandanavian nations, Canada, Australia, NZ, all of which have vibrant economies, high average wages, and strong middle classes? The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly…

They don't have "vibrant economies". They have strong economies, that long ago stopped being "vibrant" (by vibrant, I mean fast-developing).

Europe and Canada have seen stagnant wage and economic growth since adopting social democracy. What are you basing your claim that these policies are working on? I strongly advise you to stop assuming that what you're told by the media and echo chambers on the internet is correct, and actually do research on these issues, by looking at statistics.

Social democracy has not worked in Scandinavia. The author of Scandinavian Unexceptionalism explains how it has harmed Sweden:

"From 1870 until 1970, Sweden was a free market success story. Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world. .. [After taxes were raised in the late 60s and 70s] Sweden stagnated":

https://youtu.be/D0hnA341AWE?t=5m23s

Sweden was the 3rd wealthiest country in the world in 1968. After it created a massive welfare state in the 1970s and 80s, its growth stagnated, and by 1991, it was 17th highest income country in the world.

Other important facts:

http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...

• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.

• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.

If you want a more equal society, you need a more free market. It is regulatory prohibitions (anti-free-market policy) on economic activity that are contributing to growing income disparity:

"Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it":

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2...

>The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly characteristic example of social democracy.

By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms in the US. The raw statistics show that the US has by every objective measure moved drastically in the direction of social democracy over the last 40 years. The same applies to every other major Western economy.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#144

Post by aylmao »

aminok wrote: post #94
MarkMc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1995 the real median US household income was $52,664. In 2015 it was $56,516 [1]. US Hourly Wages for nonsupervisory workers has certainly grown over the last 20 years, but not in the past 40 years [2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

The US isn't the world. The US has many traits that are peculiar to it, and not universal to economies that are becoming increasingly automated. The world has seen more wage growth over the last 20 years than any other period in history: http://csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-...

Well, but doesn't that mean that you already have a counter-example? In the US it IS the case that rich is getting richer and the rest aren't really benefiting too much from all this automation.

The world is certainly doing better, but I also have to wonder how much of this is thanks to automation, and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#146

Post by anonnyj »

ManlyBread wrote: post #137
harigov wrote: post #17

In other developed countries, I think universal basic income makes sense, but not in the case of India. India has several systemic problems and a significant portion of the population has little to no education. Any income that can sustain a household without any pressure to grow as people will probably hinder their progress more so than help them. For a country with no lack of problems to solve, they are much better…

I find it amusing that people went from "raising a minimum wage is a bad thing to do" to "unconditionally giving everyone a set amount of money will be the best thing ever".

Different people.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#147

Post by aylmao »

aminok wrote: post #127
ouid wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, I failed to perceive the connection. I'm sorry.

Humans cannot be made obsolete by technology because we come to own the technology.

Problem is "Humans" is not a singular.

"CEO of multibillion corporation" won't be made obsolete by technology because he/she comes to own the technology. Everyone else, could.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#148

Post by aminok »

aylmao wrote: post #147
aminok wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans cannot be made obsolete by technology because we come to own the technology.

Problem is "Humans" is not a singular. "CEO of multibillion corporation" won't be made obsolete by technology because he/she comes to own the technology. Everyone else, could.

I'll just quote my own comment from further up the comment chain:

"Computers and horses don't have property rights or the means to exercise them. All of this automation is augmenting humans because we do. We've gone from 122 million people owning smartphones in 2007 to 2.5 billion people owning them at the beginning of 2017 for example."

The last sentence is particularly relevant to your point.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#149

Post by aminok »

aylmao wrote: post #144
aminok wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US isn't the world. The US has many traits that are peculiar to it, and not universal to economies that are becoming increasingly automated. The world has seen more wage growth over the last 20 years than any other period in history: http://csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-...

Well, but doesn't that mean that you already have a counter-example? In the US it IS the case that rich is getting richer and the rest aren't really benefiting too much from all this automation. The world is certainly doing better, but I also have to wonder how much of this is thanks to automation, and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.

There are other factors at play in an economy besides automation, like forcible income redistribution. That the rich are benefiting from automation while the rest are not could be due to one of these extraneous factors.

>and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.

It has to do with massive economic growth, and economic growth is really just a measure of automation. The wage growth accelerated after the fall of Communism, as market institutions gained strength.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#150

Post by tn13 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #70
tn13 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that doesn't mean there is an infinite source of jobs if we just try hard enough. Job = Time. As long as human beings can use their muscles and brains in the time to change outcome of some events and as long as people vary in their ability to do so, I think jobs will always exist.

It's not about jobs existing, it's about jobs existing at . We're far from that point now, so how am I supposed to take comfort in a technical argument that it won't get worse than ?

> good enough pay

That term is meaningless. An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem. The bottom 5% in USA today are living lives much better than middle class Americans of 1917. There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

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