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An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

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Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#21

Post by rocketpastsix »

m1117 wrote: post #2

People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.

>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment

hasn't this been debunked repeatedly? While yes, Im sure there are some people who do their hardest not to work to collect money, most people want to be out there working.

I dont think youre correct per se, but I do think that part of the reason people linger on unemployment is because jobs that they are able to get dont pay nearly enough as unemployment, thus there is no incentive to get back to work.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#22

Post by xienze »

danenania wrote: post #14

It feels like the combination of Yang's presidential run and covid has broken the seal on the idea of UBI in the US. After having the experience of the government sending everyone direct payments, I think it's all but inevitable that we'll arrive at some level of formal UBI in the future. Given its sky high bipartisan popularity, it's hard to imagine how any non-UBI supporting politician will be able to compete with…

> It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher.

Exactly. Every president's platform is going to be centered around "the UBI is too damn low!" And if it gets high enough you're going to find lots of people who you could otherwise depend on for the tax dollars that keep this scheme afloat deciding to retire and live off UBI the rest of their lives. I mean I make six figures and have a modest, paid-off house in a relatively low COL area. Get UBI up to say $4K per month and I'll sure as hell think hard about dropping out of the workforce. And don't say UBI will never get past $1K per month...

Also, there will also have to be a reckoning on immigration of unskilled workers if UBI came to pass. The whole argument around UBI is that there's so many unskilled workers in the US who are going to find themselves automated out of a job, so we need to pay them UBI. Meanwhile we... continue to import huge numbers of unskilled workers who are destined to do soak up UBI? Something's gotta give.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#23

Post by dx87 »

gumby wrote: post #12
m1117 wrote: post #2

People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.

> People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.

As an anecdote, my wife used to work in the front office of a low income apartment complex, and she said it was common for tenants to purposefully stay on welfare/unemployment, while getting paid under the table for stuff like landscaping and handyman work. Getting a normal job would have effectively been a pay cut for them.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#24

Post by jkingsbery »

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement..." - Frederick Hayek

Whether or not UBI is a good idea, a useful idea, or a moral idea is an interesting question (I generally think not, but it seems that position is losing the debate). Arguing for UBI (or any other aspect of the economy) from an engineering perspective is a mistake though. An economy is not an elevator. When we put failsafes in to elevators, we know what they do. When we put failsafes in to economies, they behave in bizarre, unpredictable ways.

A lot of things went in to the 2008 financial collapse, but at least part of it was due to a large group of smart (but in retrospect, unwise) people assuming that a math equation accurately represented the financial system.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#25

Post by Proven »

> We have engineered a life support system without fault tolerance, and we did it because engineers didn't design the system. Politicians did. Special interests did. And it's built on antiquated job-centric moralism instead of contemporary life-centric realism.

You're wrong, nature built it and it works.

One is supposed to fail safe by getting help from family and then community (if they weren't kicked out). If both of those fail, you probably go down in a fail safe manner, without taking down others with you.

It's worked very well until engineers and progressives took over. Read The Fatal Conceit.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#26

Post by xibalba »

Whatever happened to the "large scale" UBI pilots that were being conducted over the last few years? I believe some were being conducted by Altman/et al.

Instead of (very) poorly fit conceptual models (this article), let's just look at the data.

From what I recall from other UBI pilots around the world, results have been mixed to outright disappointing.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#27

Post by leetcrew »

tengbretson wrote: post #17
leetcrew wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is true, but kinda misleading. a very large portion of that 6 figure debt is going to be a mortgage on a home. as long as you're not upside-down and you can afford the monthly payments, it's not bad to have a mortgage. you have to go down to the tenth percentile of american households to find negative net worths. of course, net worth doesn't tell the whole story either, but it's a lot better than presenting debt…

I don't think its really all that misleading. The article is talking about basic income being needed as a safety-net for events like losing your job so that you can continue to feed your family. I suspect that absent a car, mortgage and credit card payment coming due every month most people would actually be able to weather this sort of event. The reality of these monthly liabilities doesn't change all that much rega…

I'm disagreeing that "the average american has a six figure debt load" is a problem to begin with. if you take the total outstanding consumer debt in the US and divide by the number of households, you get about $110k for the mean, which is pretty close to the median household net worth. unless the distributions of debt and net worth look quite different, this implies that a typical household has a debt-to-assets ratio of this is independent of whether I think UBI is a good idea in general (I do, actually).

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#28

Post by nrclark »

Site is hugged for me, so I can't check to see if the author addresses this. I've been wondering - wouldn't UBI tend towards an inflationary spiral?

I'm sympathetic to the goals of UBI. But without price controls, what would prevent rent/mortage/food/entertainment prices from just rising to absorb everybody's newfound income?

College tuition has been going up exponentially since the introduction of federal student aid. Is there any reason to assume UBI wouldn't do the same thing (albeit without the debt)?

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#29

Post by dane-pgp »

danenania wrote: post #14

It feels like the combination of Yang's presidential run and covid has broken the seal on the idea of UBI in the US. After having the experience of the government sending everyone direct payments, I think it's all but inevitable that we'll arrive at some level of formal UBI in the future. Given its sky high bipartisan popularity, it's hard to imagine how any non-UBI supporting politician will be able to compete with…

> Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels?

You might also ask: Once corporations get a taste of increasing the national debt, how do we prevent them from lobbying politicians to push it to unsustainable levels?

As to your actual question, don't worry, the wishes of voters have very little effect on US government policy.

> Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, ...

Removing UBI from that equation doesn't lead to a better outcome in terms of motivation and purpose, unless you include the motivation and purpose of the unemployed masses fighting an (unwinnable) war against the elites who control the economy and the killbots.

Perhaps we need to accept that jobs are just leaky abstractions for motivation and purpose, and governments should be trying to create positive outlets for people's talents and social instincts, rather than constructing ever more dehumanizing ways of punishing people for being poor as incentive to work in pointless jobs.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#30

Post by ouid »

I have a simpler argument. The necessity of being fed, clothed, and housed, comes with a monthly price tag. The price of an annuity which pays for these things is the amount of debt that you are born with. That debt is completely undischargeable in bankruptcy, and is, in fact, the zero value to which you are set should you declare bankruptcy. The (inflation adjusted) price of that annuity varies wildly with the economic circumstances, even if the monthly payout does not. Being born in a time with low annuity rates could mean that you intrinsically owe hundreds of thousands of dollars more than someone born in a period of high annuity rates. This is obviously a knob that should be turned.
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