Articles like this are so annoying and no surprise coming from a Manhattan Institute guy.
Of course UBI is effective. We have hundreds of studies to look at to determine this, not just two.
The NYT article was shit too. It's one thing to say that $333/mo of UBI to a family of 2 or more didn't appear to have brain development impacts that were measurable within the first few years of life. It's another to say UBI isn't effective.
We know that a guaranteed monthly income floor has all kinds of positive impacts especially on kids, and especially if kids are prevented from living in poverty for their entire childhood.
And never forget that a key component of UBI is universality. It's one thing to study the impact on an individual. It's another to test the impact on an entire community.
In the Dauphin pilot where an entire town got it, crime went down 15%, violent crime went down 37%, and hospitalization rates went down 9%. You aren't going to find stuff like that in any pilot that isn't a saturation pilot testing universality.
According to the logic used in this, Alaska is an autocratic regime. But when I look at Alaska, I see a state with the lowest poverty, lowest inequality, and highest well-being of almost all 50 states. I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on.
It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example:
> "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?"
Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction.
I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express.
Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects.
With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented.
Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others.
Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.
The highest the Alaska oil royalty has ever been was $2,072 in 2015. I think they are now capping it at $1000.
The median household income in 2015 was $73,355, the third highest in the country. Certainly the royalty was enough to move it from number 5 to number 3.
I suspect the royalty does not have much to do with this high income. And this is EXTRA money, not money taken from the populace and then given back to them as UBI would be.
Interestingly, "Alaska has more residents on welfare, per capita, than any other state in the nation" according to the Alaska Dispatch News.
And, yes, not many rich people live in Alaska. Maybe the climate is a reason. Maybe it's the lack of big cities.
> Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times?
The numbers are overblown, but I see this as a real issue with utopian interpretations of UBI. I.e. those where, to quote the article, proponents expect "a majority of non-workers to live off the fruits of the labour of a small minority", as opposed to a more realistic UBI where the working poor use that free money to maybe cut one or two of their multiple jobs from their tight schedule.
But in the "utopian" version, a huge group would be left without anything to strive for. If the payout would be too generous, adding an entry level work income would not make a noticeable difference. When people are depraved of all other kinds of achievement, they are likely to use breeding as a substitute. If you can't climb or defend any ranks, you can still move up one level by spawning "subordinates". Instant status.
I feel bad just for thinking thoughts that cynical, but I can't help expecting that kind of outcome if it isn't openly addressed. A "nonutopian UBI" that just creates a smooth, regulation-free ramp (I almost want to say "interpolation") between welfare and full self-support would leave the cynic in me much more at ease.
Humans will strive to rise to the top in any game we choose to play together.
Competitiveness like this does not require that people are competing for basic needs.
Free people from the Puritan conceit that the majority should struggle and suffer, and observe what happens.
Independent of how you feel about it in other respects, Burning Man offers a fine large scale experimental environment into which observe the social organization that occurs in circumstances of plenty rather than scarcity. (Because it operates on a strictly enforced gift economy. Not barter. Not sale. Never mind people who don't play by the rules for now; as a 25 year attendee I have seen first hand the reality behind the cant.)
Humans will "strive" plenty whether they are fed or not. There are more needs than the ones we can and should provide for all (housing, food, education).
Humans will always find a way to self segregate and award status, whether it's in terms of karma or dollars.
At a social level, dollars too are a consensual fiction and useful primarily as a crude proxy for status and success and desirability. (Not talking about utility, talking about social status.)
I would like to think this as well, but the issue is complex.
I think the fear comes from 2 things.
1) Think about the children of the wealthy, if you are born with a trust fund you essentially already have a UBI. These children tend to grow up and do well. But the pressure on them to produce comes from family/social expectations. These children really DO have serious problems understanding the value of money. The "spoiled rich kid" is a real thing.
2) Now take that same "spoiled rich kid" and put them in a family that doesn't expect anything from them. Without the social pressure associated with the upper classes, will they have the incentive to work as hard?
I think UBI experiment would be interesting. My guess is that 1/3 of people would work just as hard at jobs they hate, trying to get ahead and "play the game". 1/3 of people might still work, but slightly change the course of their lives towards professions that gave them more fulfillment because the need for money was less. But 1/3 of people will absolutely optimize their lives to work as little as they possibly can.
There is nothing wrong with that. The movement towards "minimalism", "tiny houses", and frugality is already in full swing. But lets not delude ourselves, it would absolutely result in lower GDP.
Which is possibly a good thing, allowing humanity more time to adjust as robots take all the jobs.
Thought experiment: lock people up in a permanent Burning Man and measure the time it takes until it resembles a refugee camp more than the Burning Man of a handful of days per year. I do not share your optimism that it would last, and that's already factoring in the very self-selected group of Burning Man participants. Now imagine the same with a random selection of those who don't make up the "working caste" of utopian-UBI. (I do not think any of this would apply to a "regulation free interpolated unemployment benefit" kind of UBI)
I don't think BM itself would last, for sure; the scale of the vent is already greater than many people can hold up to.
That said, I think the gift economy element itself can be separated from all the rest and would stand up.
Maybe the TLDR for my optimism is,
Give humans a competition they can take seriously, e.g. because the social status accrued wins real rewards of various kinds–and we will be happy productive and competitive.
The part of the UBI skepticism I am eager to see tested pragmatically is that this competition must necessarily be for "that amount of money needed to lead a dignified healthy productive life worth living."
IMO the value proposition of the UBI is that we can do have it both ways. Free people from _fear_ first and foremost; then give them a motivation as well.
Maybe another way to put this is: keep the carrot, remove the stick. We've learned from evolutions in parenting that sparing the rod leads to better emotionally adjusted [and productive] kids.
Well, "possibilities for achievement" - after a few years of electing not to work, few people will be able to revoke that decision and take up a career. Parenting is the most accessible leadership role, all takes is the approval of one other person.
> Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times?
I think 10-20 is hyperbole but the inverse relationship between GDP and birth rates is well documented -- a chief argument being unemployed people have time to make babies.
> With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
This is where UBI loses me. So many of it's advocates are convinced people freed from labor will become scholar poets. Proles will be proles whether you call it Marxism or UBI.
So what if they're not poets, or whatever you consider worthy? If we don't need their labor (we might now, but someday we probably won't), what difference does it make what they do with their time?
The one exception to this is that children might not finish school if they think they won't need to get a job. To avoid this, we might limit UBI to those who have at least made an effort to get a high school education.
Because now you've structured your entire society around having a class of consumers who don't even have the pretense of contributing back to the greater good via productive labor. To the point of the original article this creates a situation that's ripe for exploitation.
Not to mention this opens the door to a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions: should we continue to subsidize childbirth as the economic value of a citizen tails off? Why spend money educating people who will never enter the labor force? What happens to immigration when immigrants statistically no longer provide economic value?
>should we continue to subsidize childbirth as the economic value of a citizen tails off? Why spend money educating people who will never enter the labor force? What happens to immigration when immigrants statistically no longer provide economic value?
That was one of the purposes of early universal healthcare in Europe and Canada at the end of WWII. To subsidise it even more. After the war, Europe needed babies.
My farmer grandparents had one child during WWII, in 1944, then another in 1947. After this point, maternal and infant healthcare became subsidised, and my grandparents went on to have ten more children. Their prosperity over the next thirty years was eased by this, and the extension to all citizens helped even more.
This enhanced the boom generation effect in my country, and small towns really started growing.
My family did much much better than equivalent farmers in the USA(we have cousins there), and everyone ended up as productive members of society. Instead of paying for healthcare insurance, they sent their kids to university.
People eating, getting educated, driving on the roads, taking vacation, all grow an economy. Non-working citizens, ie children and students, have economic value. Always have, always will.
Increasing native birthrates will drop the need for immigration, and the attendant terrors thereof, which will please a lot of people.
The early Australians were written off as useless, non contributing members of British society, and were consigned to transportation to the Antipodes. But instead of being lazy ne'er do well types, they rose above their reputations to craft a shining egalitarian society.
Good and productive people will come from big, poor families.
(I'll get downvoted as usual..) You seem to consider it "worthy" to get a high school education. That would make you someone who wants to "govern" the "citizens", right? What would be the basis/authority for that?
I won't downvote you, but a lack of government is pretty much anarchy. That's just the beginning.
See, you too want your fellow citizen to be educated. Their education leads to greater individual prosperity and that enables your greater prosperity.
Why is prosperity important? It affords one the chance to maximize the value of their liberties.
So, you could say that wanting food servers to wash their hands after going to the bathroom is governing - and you'd be right. There needs to be some form of governing because we humans don't do well without it at scale.
No, really, we suck at it. A good example is pedestrian traffic in crowds. We are too busy trying to get out the door to realize that we are unable to see the people in front can't open the doors to let us all out.
Fortunately, the government has usually mandated those types of doors open out, or sideways.
Is there too much governing? Absolutely. Those are authoritarian states and they come in many forms. The question is not all or nothing, but where we draw the lines and what we protect.
No, I won't downvote you - but I'm happy to hear you out and engage in a productive dialogue with you. We don't even have to agree with each other.
I don't want to think of it as being "worthy". I do think that it is important for people to get an education, entirely apart from its economic value, and that children may not realize this. I'd rather think of some other way to discourage them from deliberately dropping out (you'll note I did put in an exception for those who are simply not capable), but I couldn't think of something better. Can you?
Perhaps this only serves as an example of what I see as one of the main problems with UBI - it won't stay universal.
> I think 10-20 is hyperbole but the inverse relationship between GDP and birth rates is well documented
The observed inverse relationship is between birth rate and strength of social support systems; this roughly tracks GDP, but it also explains the outliers, like the US which (among developed countries) has both a high birthrate and a weak social support system.
UBI strengthens the social support system (it also removes bureaucratic drag on the economy and replaces systems which disincentivize certain economic exchanges, which should also increase GDP.)
> a chief argument being unemployed people have time to make babies.
That is an incredibly stupid argument, and I've never heard anybody make it, chief or not.
It's easily proven by comparing across time: being a peasant in the middle ages didn't come with a lot of leisure time, yet they had plenty of children.
Reproductive rates are driven by education, health care (esp child mortality), women's agency, and alternative methods of ensuring one's welfare in old age.
It's the reductionist view but certainly not wrong. You're saying the same thing: time is more valuable for educated women with agency. Women in poor countries have more time on their hands because it's undervalued, and that excess of time tends to translate into a larger family.
over the long span of history (things may have changed) reproductive rates are chiefly driven by whether not having children is a economically a liability.
> It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name.
TFA's author bio: "Shai Shapira is a computer programmer and writer."
Poli-sci academics usually don't construct their premises so obviously poorly and proceed to build a castle on sand like this article does. Typically they're at least good enough that any, "wait, what?"s aren't apparent at first glance.
> Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible?
Religious extremists.
In the early days of the State of Israel, the largest secular party needed the support of the parties of religious extremists, in order to form a majority in parliament and create a government. Those parties set a price: they would support the government, but only if the government exempted their young men from military service, and pay them a living stipend, so that they could spend their days engrossed in religious studies. All told, about 400 men would be granted such an exemption and stipend.
At the time, the secular party's leader thought that religiosity in Israel was going the way of the dodo anyway. He didn't have a problem with setting up a kind of living museum for religious study, so he accepted.
The official birthrate for those religious-extremist families is around eight, but it is not uncommon to find families with a dozen or even more children. Because of how Israeli parliamentary politics works, the religious extremist parties often served as kingmakers for parties which sought to form governments, and they kept that price as the price for support. Today there are more than 10,000 such people receiving such exemptions and stipends, and more than 25% of all children in Israeli elementary schools come from ultra-religious families, in spite of such measures being almost universally unpopular outside that sector and continually struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court every few years.
To finally answer your question: it's not just theoretically possible, it's a guarantee. And demography is one hell of a time bomb.
I like to think you're right, but given the cheaty nature of men, most would trick the system by having a large number of children, even with different women, it doesn't matter.
That's what they already do where children are subsidized by the state welfare, imagine what they would do if it would mean another salary in the house.
Basically, more and more money only chases the same amount of goods if the UBI does not exist as a transfer of existing money from top to bottom and middle as described in this piece, and instead exists as continual expansion of the monetary supply through newly created money.
Additionally, UBI does not eliminate forces of market competition. In fact, I argue it will even increase competition through increased entrepreneurship. It would be really stupid to raise your prices in a competitive market where your competitor does not raise prices, or even lowers them.
As a quick example, every year when Alaskans get their dividend checks, there are a lot of sales as businesses compete for that money. It would be a really stupid business in Alaska that increases its prices every time the dividend is distributed, in the knowledge people have more money to spend.
Your argument that rent won't rise to absorb most of any additional income relies on low-income people moving out of high demand areas to super-affordable "Google Homes" in remote ex-burbs and formerly rural towns. I think you're fighting history, culture and even human nature on this one.
If the Great Basic Income Migration doesn't occur, and if basic income is indexed to inflation, or worse, to a local 'cost of living', then you are deliberately engineering a hyper-inflationary spiral that will make Venezuela's seem tame by comparison.
Let me suggest you read the history of the Irish Potato Famine.
In a nutshell: During the initial part of the crisis, landlords let people live for free in units when they couldn't pay their rent. Then the government decided to tax the landlord on occupied units, even if they weren't getting any rent. The landlords could not afford this, so they began throwing families out into the street wholesale.
Most people did not actually starve to death during the Potato Famine. Most died of disease due to eating raw food in desperation and already being weakened from malnourishment. The families that took it the hardest were those with less than X amount of land who also had many children because you can nearly live on potatoes alone, so such families exclusively grew potatoes and nothing else. They were wiped out by the potato blight and had nothing to eat. Families with fewer kids and/or larger plots of land had other crops too, not just potatoes. They were hurt, but muddled through.
Farms under a certain size essentially disappeared due to the Potato Famine.
Famine was widespread during that time. Most countries were hoarding food and trying to buy it. Ireland was on a short list of countries selling food to make a buck during the crisis. This is part of why Ireland was hit so very hard.
Magicking up money does not solve the problems of the lower classes. They need access to affordable housing that genuinely works for them. They need rights. They need access to paid work that fits their crappy lives.
The UBI provides none of that. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
That's very interesting indeed. Hopefully a basic income entirely paid for by a land value tax (which would presumably be extremely low in cheaper farming areas) would have helped the guests/squatters.
Landlords will just raise the rent to compensate for the tax. It guarantees the post-UBI rent increase, because landlords will feel justified. If the tax is somehow indexed to rent, once again you are engineering an inflationary spiral.
What's the reasoning that a land value tax could be helpful?
Edit: after some reading, the apparent intent of the land value tax is to encourage landlords to build denser housing to share the burden of the new tax among more renters. But this is like proposing a Slow Driver Tax while ignoring that the speed limit has been set at 15 mph everywhere in the city. Landlords already want to build multiple housing units, but they are prevented by zoning laws. Attempts to change zoning laws are some of the most vicious political battles in existence. Everyone knows that more density/supply is needed to make housing more affordable, but it just hasn't happened (at least in the US).
No. Landlords will not just raise their rents. They are already charging the maximum the market will bear. However the result of LVT would increase the disposable incomes of those that rent, from which they will apportion some of on purchasing more/better location, the rest of more goods and services.
Rents will rise for this reason, and so will the amount an LVT can collect. But this isn't an infinite spiral. There will reach an equilibrium, as there is now, where renters apportion are certain % of their income on valuable locations. Which is collected by the landlord and taxed away by the LVT.
The LVT would not make landlords build denser housing, they have exactly the same incentive anyway. It would how ever reduced vacancy and under occupation among owner occupiers, and would increase the average size of dwellings, even if that meant they were more densely clustered by building upwards.
> No. Landlords will not just raise their rents. They are already charging the maximum the market will bear. However the result of LVT would increase the disposable incomes of those that rent, from which they will apportion some of on purchasing more/better location, the rest of more goods and services.
The day after the BI-increase, the housing supply and demand will be exactly the same, but renters will have a greater capacity to pay. The maximum amount that the market will bear will have risen exactly by the extent of the increase. It is hopelessly optimistic to think that landlords won't increase rents to claim almost all of it.
Until zoning laws permit greater density/supply (building upwards is great but often prohibited by local laws), the situation won't change, and a tax linked to rent will just cause an inflationary spiral.
I won't even go into the difficulties of separating land value from building value, since it's clear that objective land value isn't intended to be a factor in setting the tax level.
No, a tax on the rental value of land would move the demand curve over to the left. This would reduce both rental incomes and selling prices. ie a reduction in demand. So the rise in rents would be cancelled out by the fall in selling prices. ie No inflation.
Landlords do not currently claim most of peoples disposable incomes. That ratio hasn't, nor would it change because renters get more income via the BI.
Landlords would in fact be keeping a lot less of peoples income once equilibrium has been reached.
There are no difficulties in separating the value of location from that of the buildings. Easy to do. Besides as far as LVT is concerned, its the structure rather than value taxed that is important. But I'd need to write more than I've got time for here to explain why that is.
Net rental income will remain steady, since landlords will raise the rent to pass along the tax. They may even list it on the lease: "Rent $1000 + UBI tax $400." Everyone will have more money and be able to pay the higher total. The only way the rents can be prevented from rising is instituting price controls.
The percentage of income claimed by landlords will increase slightly ...
before the BI-increase: say $12k rent of $36k income = 33%
after the BI-increase: $17k rent of $41k income = 41%
The only way rents drop is that zoning laws change to allow massive increase in rental space supply, or demand for rental space drops because people are enticed by low rents elsewhere and move. Since zoning laws will change only glacially, if at all, rents less than $(pre-BI rent + new disposal income) will require the Great Universal Basic Income Migration (GUBIM) from urban to exurban and rural areas. The GUBIM is possible, I just think it is vanishingly unlikely.
Well, first, there are a few different versions of land value taxes, and a few different rationales for them. I'm not an expert on this but do find it interesting and important.
In the version that I was thinking of, a land value tax would pay for the basic income. If the land value tax provided all of the funds for the basic income, then there would presumably be no excess for landlords to siphon off, except maybe as one region gained in popularity at the expense of another, etc.
The eventual goal would be to have all or almost all income from rents within a country be distributed to the citizenry. Land owners would also receive the income.
The reason why a Basic Income paid out from a LVT is a good idea, is because it reduces costs by leveling the field for all participants in the immovable property market. So that market can then allocate resources at optimal efficiency.
A UBI paid out of taxes on produced factors (income,capital) distorts resource allocation, so we all end up poorer.
Rents would go up, but then so would the LVT and then the UBI until an equilibrium point is reached.
In the US, without any other changes to your tax/welfare system the LVT/UBI would result in every man,woman and child getting around $4000 each. That would rise as rents went up.
That would go up even further if other taxes and benefits were reduced.
As I'm sure you've been thinking, it seems important because of the looming threat of human labor becoming an obsolete means for the satisfactory distribution of wealth and necessities throughout society.
Do you have any other thoughts about how to address this problem?
I don't think humans adding value with their time, and selling it on the market will ever stop. This has been a misplaced fear for thousands of years, yet we work just as hard as ever. Technology just makes us more productive. So will robots.
The argument for the LVT/BI is that it is not a benefit or a welfare payment, but should be view as a basic human property right. Without which, we are not free.
The LVT really only means we would all be equal share landlords of the value derived from scarce resources supplied for free by nature/god. Basic Income/Public spending is that equal share.
Without that, humans cannot share this Earth as equals, thus will not have taken the final step from being savages to truly civilized beings.
As for comparisons with welfare, it's the strings that are the problem with welfare. Think about it. If you are receiving $12,000 in welfare and get a job earning $20,000 you are likely to have a new total of around $20,000. That's because welfare gets pulled away with paid work.
With a $12,000 UBI however, getting a job earning $20,000 would leave you with a new total of $32,000. See the difference? With UBI there is more incentive to work because it's not pulled away with work. UBI doesn't punish you for working. Welfare does.
You know what's interesting? This gun analogy of yours, Penn Jillette has a great video about it. The video is of a talk he gave at the Cato Institute, explaining why he's a libertarian. I think you'd like it.
I've also written about this fear before myself, and I suggest everyone look at Social Security and the Alaska Dividend for evidence. Do these programs make for more compliant citizens? No, the opposite is true.
Basic income has no conditions, and because everyone gets it, it will quickly be seen as a right of citizenship. Good luck as a politician touching that third rail. I'm sure seniors would have no problem whatsoever being told what they can or can't buy with their SS checks.
https://jacobin.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-an...