Universal Basic Income - pro.s and con.s

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, ants said:

Yes. Because we need someway to decide who gets the next Mona Lisa.  Or that particular beachfront piece of land.  Or the last bottles of a scant vintage.  Or who gets which seats in a limited seat concert. 

Not to mention the hottest sex robots.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

9 minutes ago, ants said:

Yes. Because we need someway to decide who gets the next Mona Lisa.  Or that particular beachfront piece of land.  Or the last bottles of a scant vintage.  Or who gets which seats in a limited seat concert.  

Abundance in some areas won't end all scarcity.  

 

This all seems so small and selfish though. 

5 minutes ago, DMC said:

Not to mention the hottest sex robots.

Where are our Obama government sex robots, btw? We were promised these by some people, and the lack of delivery should really be a greater scandal. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Where are our Obama government sex robots, btw?

You're just gonna have to continue to settle with jacking off to Obama for the time being.

[Martell Spy]

22 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

This all seems so small and selfish though. 

Where are our Obama government sex robots, btw? We were promised these by some people, and the lack of delivery should really be a greater scandal. 

Obama merely promised not to touch your sex robots. You just didn't listen carefully to the promise.

[Iskaral Pust]

1 hour ago, ants said:

@Iskaral Pust, your post does seem a bit lopsided.  You capitalise the cashflows for the UBI, but not the welfare payments already in the current expenditure. 

Sorry, I didn’t intend anyone to compare mismatched bases.  I was comparing flows to flows: UBI would cost more than $5trn per year, which compares to current total federal expenditure (pre-COVID) of less than $5trn per year, of which half was for social safety net (including Social Security).  And total annual tax revenue pre-COVID was just $3.5trn — we were already running $1trn+ annual deficits even before COVID. 

I only showed the capitalized equivalent of the UBI promise because most people don’t grasp just what size of liability/obligation is being incurred by offering a perpetuity.  If you think the pensions crisis or the unfunded Social Security sounds like a big deal, then UBI would be at least a $100trn obligation in today dollars to be funded in the future (that’s discounting at a generous 2% nominal interest rate, but since it’s an inflation linked payment it should be discounted at a negative real yield today, which technically makes it an infinite liability).

[dbergkvist]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

With the fun disclaimer of *assuming we haven't made alien contact*, I would envision a lot of what we currently view as trade to no longer exist. For example. under the concept of abundance, agriculture largely disappears from our current construct. Once the infrastructure was set up you could run giant skyscraper farms and produce enough food to feed the world on a comparatively small scale staff wise.

But you accepted that people will have jobs, right? So it would be preferable that GRRM would have a mountain cabin so he can write in peace, whereas a stage actor lives in an apartment in a big city, than vice versa. (Even if the housing itself is abundant, the locations are still scarce). Let's say that you have an AI that calculates the optimal distribution of these things using some utility function. Then running this algorithm is a form of trade (it's just that it's done by the AI on behalf of the humans), and the utility of each possible arrangement is money.

[Iskaral Pust]

1 minute ago, dbergkvist said:

But you accepted that people will have jobs, right? So it would be preferable that GRRM would have a mountain cabin so he can write in peace whereas a stage actor lives in an apartment in a big city, than vice versa. (I.e. even if the housing itself is abundant, the locations are still scarce). Let's say that you have an AI that calculates the optimal distribution of these things using some utility function. Then running this algorithm is a form of trade (it's just that it's done by the AI on behalf of the humans), and the utility of each possible arrangement is money.

I think you’re on a wild goose chase here.  Tywin is either stoned, or thinks that Star Trek has a fully realized utopian economic system, or else is using the Star Trek wishful thinking as a parody of UBI.  Any of those is entertaining, but not a good basis for debate. 

[ants]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

This all seems so small and selfish though. 

....

There are these beings called "humans" ....  have you met any??????

[OldGimletEye]

1 hour ago, dbergkvist said:

But you accepted that people will have jobs, right? So it would be preferable that GRRM would have a mountain cabin so he can write in peace, whereas a stage actor lives in an apartment in a big city, than vice versa. (Even if the housing itself is abundant, the locations are still scarce). Let's say that you have an AI that calculates the optimal distribution of these things using some utility function. Then running this algorithm is a form of trade (it's just that it's done by the AI on behalf of the humans), and the utility of each possible arrangement is money.

On a prior thread dealing with socialism, I mention Hayek. I think Hayek got several things wrong, particularly his being pro-deflation (up at least to 1934) during the Great Depression, even after witnessing Heinrich Brunings disastrous deflationary policies in Germany, which sent about 1/3 of Germany to the unemployment line.

That said, Hayek did have some interesting insights, one being on intemporal exchange, and the other being on how prices transmit information in the economy in his famous article Use of Knowledge in Society. His theory highly suggest why pure command economies don't work. We have limited evidence on command economies, as we don't have a randomized controlled experiment on command versus market economies, but the evidence we do have suggest they don't work very well. In fact, many of them started to experiment with markets, after recognizing problems with  the command system.

I suppose in the future, you might advance AI tech to the point, where everyone could (theoretically at least) input their current demands and supplies into a system, along with their intended future demands and supplies and have an algorithm spit out the list of commodities to be produced. Though most people would probably be very skittish about inputting all their intended economic plans into a centralized system as that would seeming be an invasion of privacy. Plus such a system wouldn't allow for "impulse" buys.

Without such a system that leaves us with some kind of price system. Trying to calculate the relative prices of a whole host of commodities would be an enormous hassle and likely not even practical. Eventually people would adopt some kind of medium of exchange (ie money) in order to simply the process of making economic exchanges.

[dbergkvist]

17 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Without such a system that leaves us with some kind of price system.

You missed my point. My point was that even with such an AI system, you still have prices; it's just that those prices are used by the AI and the humans don't have to see them. And thus money still exists even in Tywin's stated utopia.

[OldGimletEye]

21 minutes ago, dbergkvist said:

You missed my point. My point was that with such a AI system, you still have prices: it's just that those prices are used by the AI and the humans don't have to see them. And thus money still exists even in Tywin's stated utopia.

Not really. The AI system acts as what is known as the Walrasian auctioneer. Know what the fictitious Walrasian auctioneer does? He figures out the vector of prices that will clear all markets at once ie matching all demands and supplies on each market.

Your critique of Tywin is correct. Prices would be implicit in such a system, assuming such a system could be built and people would be willing to use it.

[felice]

14 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

If you want to compare Bezo's wealth to financing UBI, its best to take the present values of all future flows to pay UBI. At a 2% interest rate (and assuming a very long horizon), and 1 trillion per year, that comes out to about 50 trillion dollars.

The funding wouldn't come from Bezos alone, though. Everyone with any income beyond the UBI itself would be contributing to some extent. And remember, the total collective pre-tax income of the population would be going up by one trillion per year, so even if there were no changes to current tax rates, tax revenue would be way up. But I'd suggest adjusting the tax rates so that the bottom 50% of the population are significantly better off, the next 30% are slightly better off, and the top 20% are progressively worse off than they are now (but still better off than the bottom 80%!).

[Larry of the Lawn]

Ty, been reading some Banks lately?

[Mlle. Zabzie]

34 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I love my job. Honestly, if I didn’t love what I do, I would do something else. 

I also don’t want work only a few days a week.

 

Not only do I love my job, but I’m probably less of a menace to society gainfully employed doing what I do as I do it.  Idle hands are the something something.  BTW, there are positions open in my quasi-benevolent post-apocalyptic democratic dictatorship.  You can invent your own GAAP if you want, but I’m open to other ideas. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I love my job. Honestly, if I didn’t love what I do, I would do something else. 

I also don’t want work only a few days a week.

 

Why? Do you not want more leisurely time?

57 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Ty, been reading some Banks lately?

Who?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

9 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I think you’re on a wild goose chase here.  Tywin is either stoned, or thinks that Star Trek has a fully realized utopian economic system, or else is using the Star Trek wishful thinking as a parody of UBI.  Any of those is entertaining, but not a good basis for debate. 

No, I just used it as an example. What we do not know is what kind of technological developments will happen over the next 10, 25, 50, 100, etc. years, but what we can assume is that there will simply be less demand for labor than there will be supply. What then? Eventually we'll have to change a great many things about our society. 

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

27 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Why? Do you not want more leisurely time?

Who?

Iain Banks, you might like his Culture series, its a post-scaricty, currency free society.

[OldGimletEye]

6 hours ago, felice said:

The funding wouldn't come from Bezos alone, though. Everyone with any income beyond the UBI itself would be contributing to some extent. 

Of course. But, the point is that its misleading to say because Bezos has 180 Billion billion dollars, it would be easy to raise one trillion dollars per year. Comparing stocks to flows is misleading.

6 hours ago, felice said:

And remember, the total collective pre-tax income of the population would be going up by one trillion per year, so even if there were no changes to current tax rates, tax revenue would be way up. 

I'm not sure what you mean here, but this sounds like magical thinking, sounding a lot like Republican assertions that "tax cuts pay for themselves:". If I'm at full employment and debt finance 1 trillion dollars, real income doesn't increase, and now I have a 1 trillion dollar debt that has to be paid for. And for long term financing purposes, it would be best to assume full employment.

 

6 hours ago, felice said:

 But I'd suggest adjusting the tax rates so that the bottom 50% of the population are significantly better off, the next 30% are slightly better off, and the top 20% are progressively worse off than they are now (but still better off than the bottom 80%!).

If you are going to have deficit neutral UBI, you have no choice but to raise tax rates. Basically you would have to raise taxes on the top 50% to make a net transfer payment to the lower 50%.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

38 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

No, I don’t. Because if I did, I would be out doing other things in a zealous manner, like enforcing HOA regulations and passing everybody off.

Work keeps me busy and happy and productive.

I’m telling you, join my dictatorship collective.  Our idle hands will have purpose and tyranny!

[Martell Spy]

Quote

Of course. But, the point is that its misleading to say because Bezos has 180 Billion billion dollars, it would be easy to raise one trillion dollars per year. Comparing stocks to flows is misleading.

Fair enough, but as you yourself pointed out we can tax. I was more speaking generally, in that our entire system functions in a way to funnel wealth in to the hands of a few. Sure this is just how the status quo functions, but during the pandemic in particular has demonstrated the ghoulish nature of it, with small businesses and regular people getting fucked and the billionaires growing fatter. And you yourself do not believe that can't change, although you may not believe in this particular tool to address it.

And no, I don't think it would be easy, although my comment implied that. Is raising the minimum wage easy? Yes, in the sense with the flick of a pen and some enforcement it happens. No in the sense that there is massive political opposition.

Also, I don't think anyone here that supported UBI proposed greater than $500/month. I could be wrong. I think it should be much smaller than that, at least at first. I don't think it's a silver bullet either. It could be a helpful tool combined with minimum wage, healthcare expansions, housing assistance, expanded Social Security, 

An alternative, or an addition might be to make the aid checks become a regular thing, either yearly or during recessions. I think the latter will happen anyway now that it's become normalized. Could make both UI increases and checks an automatic thing when the UE rate gets to a certain percentage. 

And the aid checks being normalized is important. The same thing would happen with UBI if it was implemented. No one ever expected the U.S. Senate of all things to support giving money directly to Americans before the pandemic. Same with the UE on steroids.