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Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

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Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#91

Post by goatinaboat »

harimau777 wrote: post #77
goatinaboat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.

I'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting). It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled…

For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl

Sure, this is an argument often made by self-driving car enthusiasts, let’s just remake all the roads, ban all pedestrians and non-self-driving vehicles and so on. But it’s another instance of the same paradox, instead of radically underestimating the computation involved in actions that nature has given us dedicated hardware for, underestimating the vast cost of doing so.

In this case not only would you need to standardise the toilet bowl, but the route through the house to get to the bathroom and what to do about any unexpected obstacles...

The paradox in general applies to everything that humans take for granted that we can do without fully appreciating that it took us a billion years of evolution to get here.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#92

Post by GarrisonPrime »

tempsy wrote: post #40
baron816 wrote: post #33

Andrew 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.

I wish for your assessment of human nature to be accurate, but I’m quite doubtful.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#93

Post by GarrisonPrime »

tells wrote: post #41

The most exciting thing about UBI is how versatile its benefits are for human resilience. Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income. Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money. Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every comm…

Yes, free money magically appearing would make life easier for the individuals receiving it (at least, in the short term). No one is arguing otherwise. The concern is that it may have even greater negative effects on the economy as a whole.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#94

Post by hacknat »

intuitionist wrote: post #26

Altman 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…

Labor productivity is a very simple calculation. It’s real GDP divided by total labor hours. Do you see the problem already? Let’s leave aside for a second that even the creator of GDP thought that, as a top level economic metric, it was useless (yes, useless). But, yeah...have the benefits of GDP been spread around evenly in our society? Of course it hasn’t. Our national GDP has probably been, mostly, generated by a small number of people. It’s impossible to tell how, but income inequality is probably a good proxy (though not an extrapolation) of how uneven GDP generation has been.

It is impossible to know. GDP is a team effort, but if you think through some of the examples in tech I think you will realize that the labor productivity metric is lying to us.

A lot of paid labor going on in the US right now is probably not actually all that important to the overall economy, or unevenly important.

Ironically, a lot of the unpaid or highly under compensated labor in our society (teachers, social workers, stay at home parents) are probably adding economic value. One of Yang’s main points is that we need to start valuing this labor.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#95

Post by barrkel »

3131s wrote: post #66
kyledrake wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using a regressive VAT tax to pay for UBI you are not redistributing wealth, you are disproportionately taxing the poor to distribute to themselves ( https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive ) much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium. Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices. If the primary concern is t…

> If you're using a regressive VAT tax to pay for UBI you are not redistributing wealth, you are disproportionately taxing the poor to distribute to themselves ( https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive ) much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium. Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices. A flat value added tax is…

Taxing transactions other than capital purchases isn't going to make much of a dent in inequality. The reason we have such inequality is from capital income and appreciation. Taxing ordinary income or outgoings won't help much.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#96

Post by barrkel »

tells wrote: post #61
kyledrake wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not inflammatory or false. VAT taxes are regressive consumption-based taxes, and poorer people disproportionately bear the costs compared to the wealthy. It's very well established among economists https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive > I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have…

on the presupposition that the VAT is flat across all goods. look at Yang's plan. this is not the case. https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

VAT is a tax on goods and services. Wealth inequality comes from people owning future streams of income, not stuff; rentiers, in other words. To the degree that VAT decreases wealth inequality, it's only by harming the net present value of those future income streams. It would be better to have a more equitable distribution of ownership without harming wealth production.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#97

Post by o_p »

kyledrake wrote: post #50

"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort…

>A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.

This defines pretty much every social system we ever had, unless you propose some sort of decentralized utopia, you need to trust power in the hands of a few. Money is just a vehicle of this particular system.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#98

Post by GarrisonPrime »

tells wrote: post #32
ColonelSanders wrote: post #3

It'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/mont…

If history is any indication, the recipients are likely to become just more complacent and detached. I fail to see how people would become “mobilized” and towns revitalized when they have even less incentive to leave the house.

If anything, I see UBI shifting power even more into the hands of the elites, as massive numbers of the lower classes drop out of the workforce and no longer care about anything the politicians or big businesses do, so long as the cash keeps flowing.

This could very well be the intent.

Take a look at any Native American reservation, or any caged animal for that matter. Hardly vibrant.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#99

Post by jostylr »

echelon wrote: post #18
sak5sk wrote: post #2

Great 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…

The main difference is that money specifically for something, like tuition, disappears if it is not used. The UBI money can be spent on anything or not spent at all.

For example, imagine a government subsidy for smartphones that gives up to 2k for any phone you buy. The predictable effect of that is all phones would be at least 2k because there is no downside to the customers paying 2k. It would probably be 2k + pre-subsidy prices for many phones, particularly the high priced ones.

But if you just give everyone 2k in money, then why would they all want to spend it on smartphones? Maybe the price goes up a bit since there is more flexibility in spending, but there is not a specific pressure on that category alone. It gets spread out to the entire field of the economy including savings and investments.

Competition is still in place. The amount of the UBI also matters, of course. If everyone got a million dollars, a 1k phone would be a trivial price and could easily be raised in price dramatically. Basically, the spreading across the people would no longer dissipate the upward price pressure effectively. Targeting the level at basic poverty level seems like a reasonable first step to try to end poverty without spiking the prices.

As for healthcare in our current system, this might also address a lot of it. There is, of course, the removal of survival stress conditions and food deserts (by making poor regions not poor) which improves the health of people directly. But the UBI is also money that can be used for both insurance premiums and the max out of pocket levels. Much of the currently uninsured are not the desperate poor (Medicaid covers most of them), but are people in either states that did not expand Medicaid and are too poor to qualify for Obamacare subsidies or are just above the cutoffs and can't afford the full premiums. While directly changing how the subsidies work could fix that, the UBI is another approach that avoids a healthcare legislative debacle. For reference, in my state, an individual without subsidy can get health insurance for somewhere between 3-4k a year.

The other aspect of healthcare costs for consumers is the deductible/out-of-pocket. At least for the plans I see, 6kish is the max for out of pocket costs and that is half the proposed UBI. So this would seem to greatly solve the health insurance problem for US citizens. In summary, someone who needed the UBI for both premiums and out of pocket would be entirely covered with maybe 1-2k left over. Not ideal, but this is a worst case scenario.

Most UBI advocates, including Yang, do not believe that a UBI alone fixes the healthcare industry mess, but I believe it does help plug in the holes in a way that can avoid the healthcare debate dysfunction in our politics.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#100

Post by hacknat »

kyledrake wrote: post #50

"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort…

I agree with you that VAT by itself is regressive, but coupled with UBI it is not even close.

Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you?

I agree with you that money is power, but you are not going to stop the existence of Billionaires and Trillionaires. That would need to be a coordinated global effort.

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