= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
entirelyuseless comments on Open Thread June 6 - June 12, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (126)
"The output humanity will have anyway will run the world."
In the first place, at least some people would stop working. That would mean that less goods would be produced. That would mean that the price of goods would increase. If it increased too much, then the quantity established as a "basic income" would no longer be enough to support people. Then if you wanted to maintain the system, you would have to increase the amount of the basic income, and a cycle would ensue.
It is not clear where that cycle would end. It is possible it would end with enough people working to support everyone else. It is also possible that it would not, in which case money would become worthless, and each person would either survive on his own work, or die. I do not think it is a good idea to simply assume that the first thing will happen.
I agree with Lumifer that, to a first approximation, no one in America or Europe today dies of starvation because they are lazy. I would be surprised if anyone can find even a single example of this happening. But part of the reason for this is the existence of social incentives that move many lazy people to work anyway. If you take away those incentives, there is no guarantee that lazy people will not actually die.
Would you like to provide some data/arguments in support of this assertion?
That really depends on the details of the implementation. You can structure UBI so that it provides either independence from or dependence on the government.
The Mincome experiment in Canada is relevant. It's widely reported that reduction in labor supply was largely explained by teenagers in school and women with pre-school-aged children. Two groups with especially high opportunity-costs of working, and the former with generally low productivity - quite close to what theory predicts.
Is it? That experiment didn't involve that much money (if I'm reading the Wikipedia table right, between $3,800 and $5,500 annually) and explicitly reduced the payment if you were working -- so it looks more like welfare (granted, of the no-questions-asked kind) and less like UBI to me.
But there is a bigger question: what is a "not a bad outcome"? Obviously, if you pump external money into a community, that community's life will get better. But on the scale of a country, there is (usually) no external money, so you are just redistributing money from some people to some other people. At this point the issue is, basically, economic efficiency. If you give $X to a group of people, what happens to their economic output? If it did not grow by at least $X, well, you can justify this transfer by a variety of moral arguments (justice, fairness, etc.), but there is no economic justification -- the "achieving more that way" part does not work.
That's not how economics works. People differ massively in the value they would put on the marginal dollar that they earn, and this is the main reason why giving some "free" money to low-earners can make economic sense, even if that money is raised via taxes.
Yes, of course.
When you say "make economic sense", what do you mean? If you mean that the aggregate utility of the society would increase, that's not how economics work.
If there was a basic income, I would not work. And people who know me are extremely unlikely to identify me as someone who "wouldn't be doing much worthwhile at work anyway." So that's surely a false generalization. And since we have no measure of how false it is, there is definitely no proof that the resulting situation would be desirable.
That's a pretty major thing that routinely gets only vaguely handwaved at. What does "really, really low" mean, in numbers? "Comfortable living" is a very ill-defined measure and not usually associated with "really low" income, anyway.
Really really low basic income already exists, for example all residents of Alaska get a "dividend" each year which varies somewhere around $1,000-2,000. Presumably, UBI would be greater, but how much greater?
OK, cool, we have a ballpark number. Would that UBI (as is often said) replace all forms of welfare, unemployment benefits, special subsidies, etc?
And, what does this kind of UBI aim to achieve? It's not to prevent starving people from dying in the ditches because that already doesn't happen. It doesn't look like it will end poverty. So... make things a little better for the very poor? Is that all?
Well, not really live. He estimates how much money you need to spend in order not to die in the near future. Essentially it's the per-capita expenses of running a concentration camp in the tropics when you don't care much about life expectancy, never mind quality.
ETA: Here is Charles Murray arguing for a UBI that replaces everything including Social Security and clocks in at $13K/year (or $10K/year in cash after the mandatory health insurance takes $3K). And here is John Cochrane discussing Murray's proposal.
BTW, that's what a high-level discussion looks like.
Short-term unemployment insurance would still exist, as would special, largely in-kind support for children in poor families (free lunches in school, protective services etc.) Much of the rest could be replaced.
It makes sure that the very poor aren't altogether dependent on the labor market for their survival. This is a meaningful improvement in their condition - perhaps the only possible one, given that poverty in the U.S. is in fact quite materially luxurious compared to, say, middle-class life in Namibia.
Of course, and I said as much, but the interesting question is what you need to add to that in order to really satisfy people's 'basic needs' in a reasonably objective sense - and in a way that's sustainable in the long term. Many people in poor and undeveloped countries manage to adjust to remarkably low living standards, and are nonetheless quite satisfied with their lives. So material deprivation is clearly not an issue for them at least.
He raises some good points, but I think he overestimates the political unfeasibility of the whole thing. Market-based policy reforms have worked quite well in the past, and they might work here too, especially with 'bi-partisan' support. He also wants to make people go through a purposefully uncomfortable process in order to keep qualifying for the "benefit", which is a terrible idea. High-income people will be offsetting the UBI with their taxes anyway; they're not the problem as Cochrane implies.
But they are not, right now. The problem of starving people dying in the ditches by the side of the road has been solved without the UBI.
I agreed with you :-)
I am not sure what "reasonably objective sense" could mean. As you point out there are very poor communities (and historically, almost all communities were very poor by contemporary standards) but their members do not spend all their time in deep depression caused by the horribleness of their lives. From the point of "enough calories to not starve and enough warmth to not freeze" you have a continuous scale going up and I don't know on which basis will you decide that some point on this scale is "reasonably objective".
I am not so sure about this either. The US is rapidly progressing towards sclerosis and ossification -- it is losing the capability to just get things done (since we've mentioned Cochrane, see this). A UBI represents a massive new social contract which will upset a lot of people who gain something from the status quo.
A relevant quote from Larry Summers:
These problems have been 'solved' via a combination of welfare benefits (broadly understood; including food stamps, subsidized housing etc.) and heavy-handed labor market regulation which in practice leaves the most vulnerable unable to get a job at all, and in danger of losing their very freedom as they turn to crime in response. In other words, this is so costly a 'solution' to the issue that it's barely a solution at all. UBI would be radically simpler and more effective.
True. I think the closest thing an 'objective' answer is that it's not just about calories/food and shelter, but the ability to form something like a community, and pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps from that point. (The Amish, Memnonites etc are another interesting example here.) Living in a concentration camp won't cut it, true, but you don't need that much more.
Answered by private message.