And as this equilibrium shifts in favor of the wealthy, you'll see the effects of inequality get more and more exacerbated. You might even get to a point where the inequality is so extreme, that the "masses" have much more to gain through wealth appropriation, as opposed to wealth creation. And when that point comes, democracy will collapse and give way to a communist or fascist revolution.

Basic income offers an escape valve to the corrosive effects of inequality. It distributes more fairly the fruits of globalisation and automation. It gives every citizen a share in the national prosperity. It gives us all a reason to cheer for the greater good, and not just our own advancement.

I think this hits the nail on it's head; opponents of basic income (usually rich or might-become-rich people in my experience) do not see this clearly. We would be able to cheer for greater good as we do not have to struggle for money anymore in our own tiny world of our household.

I think that UBI would be a good plan with or without robots taking over. But robots forces us into it as people will simply die; sure there might be some other jobs (although I think this revolution is so different than past ones that it will not happen like that, but we can only see as everyone of their generation says this) but for many people these jobs will come too late or are not achievable.

In the factories we work with, most people were replaced by robots, there are only a few people in the very big buildings. Some of the assembly line people I did speak to because I was curious, but really, they have no up potential: they cannot do anything else but actual robot work. I would be highly surprised (and so would the owner of the factories who tried this) if anyone could retrain them for a non robot like task. These people will not die (I am told) in China as thr gov find something for them, like standing on a street corner to watch the traffic or sitting in front of a building to see who goes in and out (but nothing else: not like a porter), but in many other countries it means you cannot buy food or pay rent. And that is it without UBI.

I am in no way for a distribution of wealth equally; we know that will not work as countries tried, but we are now at a complete opposite and that does not work for many either. When there are less (well paid) jobs it will not work for most suddenly.

The greatest danger is that people may be comfortable near the BI level until they are about 30, and not really work or educate themselves much (lacking motivation). Then, they want to have a family, and all of a sudden their desires for consumption skyrocket. They can't just join the workforce then, because it will be 10 years before they advance enough to get what they want.

Then you have a bunch of undereducated, inexperienced people who want a lot of stuff.

I'm not saying it will happen, but we have to be careful.

A direct, fixed cash transfer will never, ever have the properties you suggest. It's sort of the point of money that people can allocate it according to their priorities. You'll have a hard time stopping someone from taking a 100 fewer sqft apartment in exchange for a smartphone. Or colluding with the landlord to kick back part of the rent reimbursement in exchange for a smaller apartment.

To get what you're talking about, the government would have to directly issue housing, food, and clothes, or run another one of its extremely complicated and unintended-consequence-laden means-testing systems to tailor the amount of cash transferred for your exact situation a moment-to-moment basis, if it wishes to give you exactly enough cash to buy the things on your list and no others.

Once it's playing this game, you've lost the small government/simplicity/low overhead aspect which caused many to favor UBI over the existing welfare state. A UBI like you suggest is really not UBI, it's just government-issued basic necessities, an idea with substantially less traction.

The weird requirements are there to satisfy impulses like yours: make sure that we only give welfare to the truly needy, and to make sure that their lives on welfare are not too good. The whole idea of UBI is to replace that with an unconditional transfer of a fixed amount of cash to every person.

If it's a fixed amount per person, people who choose less desirable housing will have more purchasing power for luxuries. I claim that any attempt to counter this effect will quickly devolve into another system of "weird rules," probably subvertible, and certainly with unintended consequences. For example, what if I am cohabiting and want to stop? Do I need to justify to the state that it must now house me and my partner separately at twice the expense? What if I'm faking the separation in order to rent out "my" apartment on the black market and keep living with my partner? What if I'm being abused? What if I'm sick of exurban Iowa and my "grandmother" "needs" me to take care of her in Haight-Ashbury?

The insight of UBI is that the government's attempt to untangle questions like this is doomed to fail, and attempting to do so is an unacceptable degree of interference in private life, so it should not try.

From what you're saying, I'm pretty sure you actually oppose UBI, and just want changes to the existing means-tested, strings-attached welfare system.

In what way is this anyone's business? In a UBI system, you get, say, $600 a month. That's it. It's cash. No one is asking what you're spending it on. If you want to stop living with someone, you just... do it. Like you do currently. Can't manage it? Get a part-time job on the side to pad your wallet enough to do what you want.

Not trying to bash you, but I think you're misunderstanding the basic concept and assuming a level of government attention that isn't part of the equation.

'little else' = TV in your example, so these amount to the same thing

Because the cost of 'bare necessities' varies by region (housing prices in particular), the only way you'll make this work is if there's a government bureaucracy somewhere that looks at market prices and then calculates some formula that gives you exactly the amount of money it takes to buy X amount of housing, food, etc.

But then you can always turn around and bunk with a friend and then spend it all on luxuries and video games, or secretly move someplace cheaper to live and pocket the extra money. So either you allow people to nakedly game the system, or the government is now in the business of monitoring where normal people live.

There is, the government pays cost-of-living adjustments to its own employees on the GS pay schedule. But cost of living stats measure medians. Paying the median would be insufficient for half the population, and "too much" for the other half.

You'd need to tailor this figure per person.

Like, if the rule is you get median housing no matter what zip code you happen to live in, then there's no downside to picking the most expensive zip code in the nation and choosing to get UBI there. OTOH, if you define limits, then government has made some zip codes effectively UBI-free.

A person receiving UBI who lived in San Francisco proper and got free housing would essentially get 5x - 10x effective benefit than someone living where rent is $500 / month. Cue the inevitable conflicts over who gets to live where, and caps on what level of UBI will be provided.

But conversely, if the UBI benefit were a fixed monetary amount, then you'd be consigning UBI beneficiaries to never live in an expensive area where urban professionals work, so you would create a geographical and social divide where UBI recipients are consigned to live in low-income slums.

I don't see any way to resolve these dilemmas that would make all people happy, unfortunately.

A "low-income slum" is not a problem so long as people can live decently. It's "universal" so everyone receives it, what differentiates people in low-income areas will be that they inherited no capital and have no means of acquiring capital which is a problem that already do exist, so I don't really see your point.

Areas that are expensive to live in also have a need for jobs like cleaning the streets. If people have the choice of living somewhere cheap on UBI then the pay for lower skilled jobs in these expensive areas will have to rise to get people to take them. I would expect the cost of this to have to come from higher property taxes in these more expensive areas which could act to bring down the difference in costs between the different areas.

I absolutely agree. I'd push it further though. Not just children but anyone who is not in a capacity to freely spend the money. To make a contrived example, someone may not simply kidnap a person and take their universal basic income.

I go farther to say that local/state/federal government may not take the money for people in their custody. There ought to be some way to protect it from being garnished as well.

I think we should not oversell this. There might be a lot of people who are perfectly content with being able to survive and get by. If they do not want to participate further in the economy, I think we should say that's fine. The ax I have to grind in this is that maybe if people are not scared of starving to death after leaving a job they don't like doing, maybe we will have more people doing jobs they do like doing and maybe just maybe me and others will have a better shot at doing what we love doing even if it is at a slightly lower (after taxes) pay than before.

At $1500/mo for everyone in the US, that comes to just shy of 6 trillion USD. For comparison, the total federal tax revenues for 2016 are going to be approximately 3.5 trillion USD, including payroll taxes.

At $1500/mo/person, this one program would present 5/3rds of all federal tax revenues.

A more realistic figure is probably much closer to $650/mo, assuming you take ALL of the current federal spending on healthcare, social security, veteran's benefits, pensions, and welfare and direct it into UBI. This says nothing of the legality of cancelling existing or contractually promised federal pensions, nor the morality/practicality of changing the existing social security and Medicare systems, of course.

$650/mo/person still leaves us with a deficit (as today) and is a pretty meager existence for sure!

Nevertheless, the money is going to come from somewhere and that somewhere is taxes. It would be unreasonable to not calculate the total sum of taxes required for various levels of UBI funding, IMO.

It is the same way infrastructure investment works. Nobody wants to do it because the upfront bill looks big. But the decades long projection of efficiency of most high-demand projects would eclipse the cost by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile special interests (mainly those who would not immediately benefit from the infrastructure themselves) keep phrasing the conversation around "how much it will cost" these projects never get done, and the national economy suffers as a whole for it.

If not, you need to plan spend less than double what you're currently spending.

This is the reason I think UBI will be disastrous, but it's going to take a generation or two for the rot to set in.

Worse than that, lots of people have no choice, they inherited no capital and thus can't afford to educate themselves to get a good job since they need to work to supply for themselves and their families, effective UBI would give those people breathing room to work/study what they want and actually achieve enough to have a good family.

it's already happened, and it caused the subprime mortgage crisis and the college debt crisis. not to mention the up-and-coming problems of payday loan debt, credit card debt, and subprime auto loans.

It's already kind of happening with startups; to a significant extent, startups are essentially luxury goods for the super-rich. They've become a collectible/status symbol. Like a yacht or a private jet. Wealthy investors love to brag about all their big exits.

If income inequality and unemployment gets too great, maybe there's a phase transition. In that case, a little bit of communism could help alleviate the pressure.

Regardless of whether you believe it could actually work, it certainly means that it's not absurd to consider, at least not for the reasons you've stated.

True - as a whole. But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer.

My concern is this. In ten years time, trucks and taxis will be automated, and vanishingly few truck drivers will be able to retrain as truck computer techs. Truck and taxi driving is the last bastion of badly-educated men, (apart from the military, but automation will be gutting military employment too). So we're going to have a huge (many millions) population of (to generalise horribly) redneck men who like guns and feel worthless.

Even now, 2/3s of gun death in the US is that exact demographic suiciding. I believe these guys gave Trump his victory, and when they realise even he's let them down, those that don't kill themselves are going to revolt.

A UBI could be part of the solution to this nightmare, because it would take the economic aspect out of the equation. It would mean unemployment lost its stigma, because at least some people chose to do their own thing (playing music, carving wood, reading at schools) instead of working for the man. So it would become socially acceptable not to have a paying job.

Sadly I think it's very unlikely to happen, unless the rich figure out that their wealth is going to be redistributed violently if they don't do voluntarily.

Increasing automation of lower skilled jobs has been going on for a long time. It's hard to see that correlating with any increase in the suicide rate.

I don't believe you are analyzing this considering the context. What that implies is that we have not made any significant advances in preventing suicides and treating the root causes despite the many resources being allocated to it.

In the last 50 years, there has been more total wealth and prosperity. Most importantly, there has been a revolution in how mental illness is viewed by not only medical professionals, but by society at large, and we have developed better treatments for it From suicide hotlines to modern police training that includes how to deal with the mentally ill.

The curve SHOULD be trending and that is isn't is a potential cause for worry.

There has already been civil revolting in recent times. The police being shot at during the BLM stuff is what it looks like. The days of organising a 'continental army' and taking the current government head on are long gone (in developed countries, at least). Making an organisation large enough to even start to annoy the US military would be nipped in the bud long before it happens. But there will be lots of small-scale or individual revolting.

The methods of government in the US are not going to change (eg: the Electoral College) because fairer systems would work against the current parties in power, and changing the constitution itself is extremely difficult, even for something as conceptually simple as 'no more alcohol' ('new electoral process' doesn't stand a chance). So, barring massive social disaster, things will carry on as-is. Trump will do a lot of damage to convention and will highlight lots of edge-cases, but the underlying systems will barely move.

There will be revolts, but it's not going to change anything structurally.

Do you really think this will be possible in a decade? With the advances in technology such as the military robots, you yourself describe, it seems increasingly unlikely.

I agree with this sentiment. Looking into the (very long term) future, it's interesting to look at a fictional post-scarcity society (Star Trek) (with a grain of salt - it's really the writer's imaginations and what you see in the movies/shows) and see what the impact would be. My key takeaways are:

* everyone still works, or studies, and the culture is that you still contribute to society rather than sit around and do nothing. This requires a significant culture change from our current society.

* They often visit colonies and planets that are decidedly not post-scarcity - they are often poor or middle-class colonies, with an agricultural bent. In theory this shouldn't be the case in a post-scarcity society, but it becomes apparent that there's still a cost (resources and time) associated with production and transport unless you want to be ruled by AI overlords.

I'd say you're more likely to find that kind of worker here than most other forums on the net.

If (a) is true, people will still work (because they want money above their UBI), and will still create progress (i.e. little will change). I'm not sure how (b) connects. Perhaps it assumes people will do less work towards automation under UBI?

I would like to think people will still work on UBI. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage that don't is similar in some respects to drug use in those places where all drugs have be decriminalized (and perhaps similar to true unemployment numbers now). There is a question of what people will do with their freedom to choose what they will do. Would we get more and more creative art? More inventions and entrepreneurs? More things that are "useful" (by whatever metric: technological progress, preservation of the environment, internal well-being e.g.) or less?

Trying to speculate seems fairly silly, though perhaps one could look to history (patronage, for example). I think it'd be even more silly to think we have things right right now (esp. considering fairly objective things like suffering that could be prevented or environmental damage that could be checked) and the idea should be given a shot at least in a limited setting.

My point is, until recently, I believed it was absolutely the only way forward, we wouldn't be able to avoid it, because this time "robots will really steal our jobs". My realizations imply that this is not the only way forward, even if robots take 100% of the currently existing jobs.

There is no such thing as trickle down economics. Wealth does not get distributed in equal to its gain, it is distributed based upon many other markets. For example, if your company makes double this year, you're not going to get paid any more than you were, but if what you said was true, you should be getting paid near double. Infact, how much wealth your company makes has little to do with how much you will be paid when it comes to investment. You're going to get paid what you can negotiate for, which will be competative to the market of other individuals. Just because your company is doing good does not mean they're going to pay anywhere near double for their employees when they can get them at market rate, which is always pressured to be lower.

The products also don't have to be cheaper. Infact I don't know of any good examples of automation making things cheaper that aren't just competing with other products. Products do not have to be priced near what they cost to make, as examplified by apple products and tech in general. They're priced to what people give it value, which is manipulated by advertising and patents/copyrights that give them the ability others need or want.

The historic share of labor as a % of GDP is pretty constant. It has dipped slightly in the last ~15 years and some people see this as the beginning of a major change but that's highly speculative.

What time scale are we talking about? I'm pretty sure that 5000 years ago, labour was close to 100% of GDP. I'm equally sure that it's well down below 20% now.

And no, it's not at 20%. More like a bit over 50%. If you take out depreciation and gov't because what you really care about is return to capital & labor it's about 30/70.

Apple and tech in general are actually a good example of my point. Why is it that in several third world countries, lacking basic sanitation for a large part of the population, it's so common to see people in slums with last generation smartphones and big flat screen TVs?

What I meant about everyone getting richer is not that the money flows equally, but that when you need less money to buy goods and services you are, in a way, richer. Another example is Uber: I don't get a single dollar of what they make, but I have access now to a service that it wasn't accessible before (taxi cabs).

Problem 1: the economic notion of value is weighted by wealth, but the notion of "human desire" you discuss is not. Entertaining a king is valuable, in the economic sense, but feeding and housing a poor is not. It doesn't matter if there are plenty of things that people want to be done, it matters if there are plenty of things that people with money want to be done. If all the money flows into a few hands, the demands of the many do not count towards stimulating the economy, and the economy is not stimulated.

Problem 2: leverage. The economic value you create is an upper bound to what you earn, not a lower bound. The lower bound is determined by your next best option, which effectively, in light of correlated risk, means there is no lower bound. The service you provide may be critical to the functioning of society, but if you are easily replaced, well, you aren't going to earn very much. In other words, even if demand increases exponentially forever, and you play a critical role in satisfying that demand, the economy does not guarantee that you will be able to extract money for yourself out of the process. See: crowd of artists trying to pawn their wares off on the king. Also, farmers.

Problem 1 and problem 2 combined are what make the "capitalist dystopia" a plausible, stable, and terrifying state of affairs.

Problem 3: deregulation does not necessarily return markets to a pristine state of natural excellence. No such state exists. Quite the opposite, in many cases. Regulatory capture is a real problem, a big problem, but it's only one of many factors that lead to sclerotic, anti-competitive markets. I'm regularly floored by people's ability to talk about network effects, economies of scale, information asymmetries, moats, winner-takes-all games, and mergers/acquisitions with one breath -- all of which are non-regulatory market forces that suppress competition and innovation -- and then with the next breath assert that deregulation is the most straightforward way to spur innovation and competition. See: Enron, where deregulation of the energy markets led to artificial supply shutdown (the infamous rolling blackouts) in order to drive prices higher and profit. Listen to the recordings of the traders literally giggling as they order plants offline, and tell me again that deregulation is a cure-all. Sometimes more regulation leads to better functioning markets. Utilities are the canonical example.

It's the natural mechanism that balance demand and supply, and ensure we'll always have enough food for everyone. It's the natural incentive that draws more people to an area that is under-served (e.g. IT) and away from another that is over-served (e.g. farming). The examples may not be the best possible, but you get my point.

About deregulation: I agree it's not a single factor, but it's a pretty important one on the subject of "creating new jobs". I understand there are several other factors getting in the way of a competitive market, but monopolies aren't all created the same. The kind of monopoly that Facebook or Google have is not the same kind of a state-enforced monopoly which rules out competition by force of the law.

I understand how markets balance supply and demand and I consider the injustice of its methods to be a necessary evil for which I have no substitute. That wasn't my original complaint, however. Rephrased in terms of supply and demand, my complaint was that the market's insistence on weighting demand according to wealth made it inherently inept at addressing unweighted demand (i.e. the actual needs of the people). I have no trouble believing that the market will continue to meet wealth-weighted demand. I am much less certain that it will continue to meet unweighted demand. We've seen it fail before, but only in pockets. I fear that automation may eventually see it fail on a much wider scale.

> monopolies aren't all created the same. The kind of monopoly that Facebook or Google have is not the same kind of a state-enforced monopoly which rules out competition by force of the law.

We are in agreement then. Perhaps not on the relative magnitude of the various problems, but it's a start.

As long as human beings can use their muscles and brains in the time to change outcome of some events and as long as people vary in their ability to do so, I think jobs will always exist.

That term is meaningless. An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem. The bottom 5% in USA today are living lives much better than middle class Americans of 1917. There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

Precision of the sort you seem to be after would come at the cost of inviting people to bicker over where exactly the line should be drawn, when the precise location of the line is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making.

> An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

Looks like you didn't need an invitation. Don't let me stop you. The rabbit hole of defining "good enough pay to survive and thrive" goes much deeper than conditioning on geography.

> If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem.

You're still just putting words in my mouth.

> There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

Quite right. The problem is that while the news is positive in aggregate, a large pocket of people have experienced a severe regression in the quality of their social contract, and we have good reason to fear that the phenomenon will spread. History counts in the market's favor, but past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

No, actually. The economic notion of value is subjective. Economic thought, despite popular perception, does not view value in purely monetary terms. Instead, value is seen as subjective: something is valuable because humans value it. Human desire is the very definition of what makes something valuable.

I don't deny that there is a notion of value apart from the economic one, in fact I would even go so far as to argue that the terms "economic value" (and "market value" etc) give markets entirely too much credit by suggesting that economic value and market value do a halfway decent job of approximating or approaching the philosophical notion of value, which is the term I'd ascribe to your definition and to general use of the word "value" without additional qualifiers.

http://www.efi.int/files/attachments/e45/meetings/31hanemann...

Yes, it is often defined in terms of money. That is because if you actually value something you would be willing (but not neccessarily able!) to pay for it.

But let's not get bogged down in an untractable argument over the meaning of words. My point really boils down to: economics does concern itself with value which is different than the market value. They study the cases where the market value will refect people's true perferences, and when it will not.

The more concerning problem which comes up in this article is that you cannot have both UBI and lax immigration/easy freedom of movement. The first country to institute a UBI would be quite appealing to the billions of people living in destitute poverty, and they would all want to emigrate, making it almost impossible to get into the country. How do you decide who gets in? Do you require the person was a citizen for 18 years before qualifying? You certainly can't have open borders or the welfare system would quickly be overrun.

This assumes the existence of a "good" distribution of generated wealth. This tends to not be the case.

How does that factor into your thoughts?

You don't need a direct money transfer from big companies to benefit from them.

Perhaps it is the case that what the market decides is best for people who cannot perform any task more efficiently than a computer is to simply stop being powered.

I love what I do and don't intend to stop anytime soon, but when the time comes that I do want to stop, I want to make sure there's more than ample money in the retirement and investment accounts to fund our lives post-career.

I disagree. I believe the better place where one should do this is where it's needed the most.

People tend to believe that when given money, others will just sit back and get lazy doing nothing. Matter of fact is you need money to do anything; to give your children a better education, to buy tools to help you at your job, to buy appliances that free your time to have other projects, etc. Do you think these people are comfortable with their lifestyle? Handing them free money, IMO, more than being an excuse to "hinder progress", will be an investment that finally allow them to get over working to "just survive" and into the realm of working to actually ensure their kids are better off than they were.

This is similar to how YC funds startups. Or in fact, how anyone funds startups. No one says "Oh, if we give you a nice economic cushion, that'll probably hinder your progress, you need to be under the constant stress and problem of having no money to really get clever and do cool things." Of course not, that's nuts. You invest money to make money.

As mentioned in the article, the pay would be a meagre Rs. 7000 per annum. To put it in perspective, I found it hard to keep my expenses per month to under Rs. 8000, living frugally as a student, with basically free housing and subsidized food.

Sure there are millions of people who would appreciate this sum and might gain some benefits from them, but it would be inconsequential to about 70-75% of the population. That's a lot of money wasted. It might br better to have focused welfare programs which would put this money to better use. For instance, government sponsored vocational training programs. India has a vast network of NGOs, and many of them have such programs. Another venue to invest this money might be on rural education systems. A disturbing number of them are not functional, where both teachers and students infrequently visit a shabby one room building to have free mid-day meals (I don't have any woes with this program, btw). Better infrastructure, better teacher training programs, are all venues that would benefit from the money. Ofcourse these venues are riddled with a corrupt administration which would substantially diminish the returns, but UBI distribution too might have similar problems.

Basically, in a country with this population, and with a huge wealth divide, I think UBI is a very ineffective welfare program.

8k a month is good for a huge chunk of our country.

The poverty line is in the mere tens of rupees per day when I last checked.

32 rs/day for rural india and 47 rs/day in cities.

32x30 is ~1000 rs.

Additionally, 25% or so are below the poverty line.

That's how bad it is. I think discussing welfare programs without knowing what the poverty line is resulted in misplaced goalposts.

Are you basing this off of any familiarity with poor Indian culture?

Why do you expect "free money" to translate into "lesser progress" rather than "progress of their choice"?

Here's a different question: Have you learned more through self-directed learning, or other-directed learning? How have you chosen what to learn, and would you still have that drive-to-learn if you had free money?

Remember that UBI is in addition to salaries / wages, not instead of.

You hear this same thing about food stamps in the US, to the point that Republican lawmakers start calling for big-government style drug testing (at the taxpayers expense) of welfare recipients.

Wasteful spending and big government bullshit coming from one hand, while the mouth can't stop talking about cutting back on both.

I don't know if basic income works, but that's why experiments in the field are required. None of the reasons you have pointed out seem to be apply only to India.

A lot of money does get earmarked for this purpose, and then gets funneled into the pockets of corrupt officials and politicians. I think that's what this income is supposed to help prevent. It's not the only way -- tracking money flow in general helps.

(The previous demonetization move was also supposed to help accomplish something similar, i.e. track if money is going to corrupt politicians instead of the impoverished people it is meant for.)

I travelled to India for 3 months some years ago. I could live there with 300 EUR a month in a nice little hotel in Himachal Pradesh no less. I could have gotten a room for just 1 EUR a day which I saw with my own eyes, simple room clean in a Tibetan run building. But this hotel had wifi downstairs which they changed the password only every few days, I had a TV, full size bed, private bathroom and toilet with running water (no carrying buckets or rationing like the people living in the area), etc.

I remember back then, 2010 is not so long ago, I could eat plenty for less than 300 INR a day (so approx. 2-3 EUR). Like a nice bowl of Tibetan noodles was 80 INR if I remember, and that was filling for a third of the day, and that's not even 1 EUR (Of course if I bought a coca cola then I would have paid 100 INR or more).

When a foreigner can live there with 300 EUR a month and be quite comfortable;, just imagine the change of quality of life it makes to people in poverty if they had just 100 EUR a month.

Or just spend the money and build it directly.

The idea that UBI should be higher on the priority list than basic infrastructure is pretty crazy.

It is the human thing to do. But it also aligns with economics and politics.

Redistribution: because more money at the bottom, means a larger overall market, and I think a more stable economy.

Progressive tax: any paying work will always improve your situation. (So people stay motivated to work.)

Taxing wealth creation (and to a lesser extend, wealth) makes sense. It needs a society with law and order and property rights. That needs to be payed for. But of course not so much as to discourage wealth creation.

Most societies already redistribute wealth. Minimum wage, social programs, health programs, pensions, some form of subsidies. UBI is a more disciplined way of doing this. And just like these programs, you can tune that knob from low to high.

A single mother with 2 children needs more money to make ends meet than a single student in their 20s. Subsidies take that into account, the negative income tax does not. People with a physical or mental handicap need assistance. The negative income tax has abolished the programs that help you, so good luck. Pensions? Same. If you've not invested wisely during your working years you'll have to eat dogfood when you're old, because social security is gone.

The problem with the negative income tax is that there's no way to make the math work, because you can't raise the minimum amount every citizen gets high enough so that every citizen can live a dignified life with that amount of money. Not even when you tax the highest earners at 90% does the math work. The special aid programs we have today exist for a reason: they specifically help vulnerable groups in society, who would otherwise be in desperate straits.

Make no mistake: the proponents of the negative income tax want to shrink the government to the size where it can be drowned in a bath tub. It's a far right idea that, if executed, would have horrific consequences for the poor. I urge people on the left of the political spectrum to stop and do some napkin math on how the negative income tax would end up redistributing wealth.

In my country there are both subsidies, and tax breaks for such situations. Is anything I said implying we abolish that? I would suggest it translates to more negative tax for such situations.

"It's a far right idea that, if executed, would have horrific consequences for the poor."

It is wealth redistribution. Which is not a far right idea. Any kind of wealth redistribution is good for those who have little. (Unless you redistribute it only to the rich, but that is not commonly understood with the term.)

But you imply it does not? Would you mind doing that "napkin" math and show us what you mean?

It's very simple. Not all people need the same amount of resources to live. A healthy college student needs very little, a sickly elderly person needs a lot. The complex social support system in place today attempts to redistribute the tax money allocated for social services in the most fair way possible. The negative income tax either replicates this complexity (but then what's the point) or the negative income tax seeks to abolish the social support system in order to redistribute money to the rich.

Now as a proponent of the negative income tax it should be on you to show how it could work, not on me. But whatever, I can do some numbers. Since you mentioned you wanted to get rid of social security the negative income tax has to be at least that (or the elderly will have to eat dog food like they did before FDR), and social security is about $30,000 in 2017. There are 240 million adults in the US, 240 million * 30k = 7.2 trillion. That's the same as all local, state, and federal government spending put together. Whoops! So clearly, there is not enough money to give every adult citizen the equivalent of social security. So what are we going to do now? Means test the negative income tax so the elderly get more and young healthy people get less? Means test it so disabled people get more? So that single parents get more? Is the negative income tax just going to replicate the entire social support system it has just senselessly abolished?

If you want to think clearly about the negative income tax think about which demographics end up paying more and which demographics end up getting more. If the goal is just to redistribute wealth from the rich to the needy, you can easily accomplish that by adjusting the income tax brackets. So clearly negative income tax proponents don't want that. Is the goal to increase efficiency? No, because social security has less than 1% in administrative overhead, and negative income tax supporters still want to get rid of it. So clearly that's not the goal either. Is perhaps the real goal to demolish the entire social safety net while giving tax cuts to the rich? Why yes, it is!

Hmm, where have I heard that before?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

The term wealth redistribution is generally understood as wealth going from the rich to the poor and is a "left" idea[1]. And even it it is not, I cannot think of a (sane) negative income tax system that can be described as wealth going from the poor to the rich.

But you seem worried that a student is different from an elderly, and to give both negative income, the elderly will be worse off than in a system like today? All I can say is that nothing in what was described so far implies that. If you have special needs, you might be eligible to more negative income tax.

"there is not enough money to give every adult citizen the equivalent of social security"

Sure there is, because a 125[2] of the 240 have a job, those who earn little, might still get some money from tax, those who make medium pay a some tax, those who make a lot, pay a lot of tax. But it will imply more tax on the rich, both income and wealth. (Though nothing ridiculous.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_income_and_w... first line "Redistribution of income and redistribution of wealth are a concept of socialism"

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...

Why I am in favor (of UBI or NIT)? I cannot be described as a right wing, nor as rich. And any reduced administrative overhead would be nice, but not a goal per se.

But giving more money to those without a job, or low income jobs, has a few advantages:

1. economically speaking, money to those who have little represents more wealth, and will be spend in the market

2. a shrinking economy, means even more pressure on low incomes jobs, and less who have an income at all, that shrinks the market, and shrinks the economy, NIT can work like a buffer

3. low income people have no power on the labor market, a NIT or UBI gives them more power, with room to switch jobs, or go back and study

And a last one, but this depends a bit per country/state, people are usually eligible for benefits or not. Some of those tests are income earned, or money in the bank. So when people are almost eligible, but have too much money saved, they buy an expensive car and become eligible. Or you refuse a job, because the pay is not that much more then their benefits, but suddenly they have to work 40 hours a week and commute, etc.

Especially a NIT makes sure that these things are always a line, never yes/no. Made some money? You get to keep that, and most of your NIT benefits.

Neither can I, but that's because I think all plans are either (a) mathematically impossible or (b) intended to distribute wealth upwards by dismantling the social welfare state as we know it.

> Sure there is, because a 125[2] of the 240 have a job, those who earn little, might still get some money from tax, those who make medium pay a some tax, those who make a lot, pay a lot of tax. But it will imply more tax on the rich, both income and wealth. (Though nothing ridiculous.)

50% of full time workers in the US earn less than 30,000 a year, so their income would get supplemented to 30k, and they would not make any net tax contribution anymore.

There are 94 million US adults not in the labor force at all (40%), so they too are not contributing to the tax pool.

So out of the 60% remaining US workers 50% earn more than 30,000 a year, so that means 30% of US adults will have to carry the full tax burden, which will be many trillions of dollars larger than today.

NIT would be 7.2 trillion, non-welfare gov't spending is 5 trillion, so government spending would total 12.2 out of 17 trillion GDP = 71% of GDP. So for this to work taxes would have to go up massively (which I support, incidentally, but most people will balk at this).

As I said, wealth redistribution is knob, currently set to around 5% (my guess) in the USA. I think 20% should be the aim over time, which translates to ~15k income in some form of UBI, and +15% tax for the rich.

That would mean a 30k income for an average 4 person household.

"Even with the highest tax bracket at 100% I don't see how it could work."

That is entirely lack of imagination on your side ... just add up all the money the top 10% makes. And it must work mathematically, because 30k is lower than average income at 51k.

The economics are also not always destined to fail, they depend a lot on local conditions, such as how much it costs to survive.

UBI may be a huge boon to India's largest rural population without significant cost.

Just to note, Negative Income Tax is mathematically equivalent to UBI, in that given any NIT scheme you can produce a UBI scheme that results in the same income function.

However, I think the framing can make lot of difference here, in terms of expectations, and likely implementation.

It's true that you can make UBIs and NITs equivalent, but I think it's important to emphasize the implementation part: they are very unlikely to be implemented the same way. This is because, for them to be equivalent, you need the drop-off rate as incomes increase for an NIT to be equal to the increase in taxes on income earners below 2x the UBI level.

In other words, an NIT is likely to come with a high marginal "tax" (aka loss of NIT) rate for low earners, while a UBI is likely to keep marginal tax rates for low earners low.

It also means a lot of people simply won't get the benefits. In the U.S., a lot of people who are eligible for welfare programs never take advantage of them because of the administrative hurtles (to take one example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it"[1]). I'm starting to think more and more that this is by design.

Even if you're one of the people that gets the benefits you're eligible for, it's still a burden (imagine having to do your taxes several times a year), and you are subject to the whims of policy makers that want to beat up on you for political credits. So you had some states requiring that welfare recipients get drug testing. If you had a similar requirement for Social Security, people would be livid and through the politicians out on the street. But when this kind of stuff is done to the poor, a lot of people have the attitude that the impoverished deserve to be treated badly.

[1] www.npr.org/2016/08/21/490822086/the-financial-trials-of-child-care-for-working-families

Or if a person makes errors in two directions, but then only bothers fixing the ones in a single direction. I'd say that person is malicious.

On the one hand, it's a labour subsidy, so employers theoretically don't need to pay as much to offer a decent quality of life as an incentive. But on other hand, people no longer need a job to survive, which reduces the incentive to work.

I think the end result here might be a notable improvement in job quality. When you're not struggling to survive, it's much easier to weigh job quality in your decisions, and take less money in exchange for a more pleasant job. In particular, I think a lot of service jobs, could be more enjoyable if companies actually had to care about work environment.

One of the points is to give power back to those who on the labor market are almost powerless. Both forms would do that. What would the impact be? Likely price for labor goes up.

Describing only one of the options as a subsidy is not likely correct.

"Over a fifth of its population lives below the poverty line. The scheme outlined this week by the chief economic adviser to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, would cut that figure to less than 0.5% by transferring about $9 a month to all adult Indians. If doled out to everyone, that would cost around 6-7% of GDP; the 950 welfare schemes soak up 5% of GDP." http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21716027-india-should-...

Fascinating as few people probably would have thought UBI would be remotely feasible in a country of 1.3B people. Yet there is also massive inequality, as well as corruption and inefficiency in handling all the various aid programmes. Plus the country has Aadhaar, a digital-identification scheme that covers 99% of adults.

Probably still not feasible for now, but interesting to see how relatively cheap it would be to lift so many people out of poverty.

In country's with high poverty level where people don't possess the minimal quality of life, I highly doubt the spirit of basic income will even be recognized but seen more of a cash grab where you'd be considered stupid for not taking advantage of. Such is the effect of poverty-removes the ability to seek long term societal gains for short term selfish gain at the cost of rest of society.

There may be cultural differences but they all boil down to economics of that specific region and country. My feeling is that a basic quality of life and the infrastructure to support it must be present for universal basic income to work. It's just too easy to cheat when so many of your peers will undoubtedly do it at your expense. It's expensive to cheat when none of your peer are willing to do it due to social stigma and shame.

I actually think it is the opposite. UBI might work better precisely because corruption prevents other welfare schemes reaching the target population.

At least in theory, the direct cash transfer should help pull out a lot of people from abject poverty. The article quotes a jump from 22% absolute poverty to 0.5% - if it does that, it would go a long way in accelerating growth in India.

A UBI would be much easier to audit. Your problem might be identity theft or the creation of entirely fictitious person.

Dumbphone banking is possible for more than a billion people (as long as they can afford a dumbphone service and have Aadhar - biometric ID). I say billion and not all Indians, because there's < 300 million Indians who are yet to get their Aadhar ID cards. With UBI even the poorest should be able to afford a dumb phone and a phone service.

India has all the needed infra to dispense money to a billion people. All it needs to ensure is, if UBI is implemented, remove every single subsidy thats currently given.

What would be worse, is to have a haphazard implementation of UBI without removing subsidies, and people revolting at removal of either of these schemes.

The explicitly stated purpose of UBI here is that it can be implemented via direct electronic transfers to the recipients. That's pretty easy to audit electronically, particularly with biometrics which India is implementing.

In contrast, something like the LPG subsidy (which involves the physical delivery of gas cylinders) is insanely hard to police. How can the central government ensure that cylinders don't go to people who don't need them, that they contain the appropriate amount of gas, etc? It's virtually impossible.

Another anticipated benefit of UBI is that once people are out of desperate poverty there is less incentive to cheat.

(We have seen that paying police officers a living wage is one way of reducing police asking for bribes: I imagine that a similar dynamic would be at play with UBI)

The analogy could be a land in the great plains of US. In San Francisco or New York the value and the price of land is ridiculously huge, while in plains it is almost free - no one needs it. Similarly, free money will simply lose any value and some new form of wealth storage and accumulation would emerge very quickly.

BTW, in India there is a free food available in many big temples, but for some reasons lots of people prefer to eat at home. In India people do not run after money per se, but for social status, which is a cornerstone of the Indian culture.

India is special. They have many local government programs to give nutrition to the poor, which does not work well due to rampant corruption. Simply distributing money to a bank account will obviously eradicate some corruption, the problem is that, perhaps, a third of population in some areas have no bank account.

Okay, it needs some clarification :-)

The free meal is supposed to be for people who need it but can't afford it but not supposed to be on a regular basis - for the destitute and people in general who find it difficult to buy a meal. But they (called "langars" at Gurudwaras, run by the Sikh community) never turn anyone away (regardless of faith or background or anything). Never! Some other temples and even some mosques do that, but it's not at all "all are welcome" like langars. So not the temples. So purpose isn't to be the meal provider even though they wouldn't return anyone.

So those langars aren't meant for eating in general for people. Also, people are not often alone. There are families with them and it would be very hard to conceive eating at those temples with entire families.

> In India people do not run after money per se, but for social status, which is a cornerstone of the Indian culture.

That is not entirely true. Like any other place people of course go for status and respect but saying that Indians don't go for money is missing the point. As a matter of fact money is a driving factor here. Especially for the people for whom this plan might be aimed at - the people below the fringe. There's a term here "BPL" - below poverty line. And trust me when I say it "Poverty Line" is estimated so generously that it is a shame even from a developing country standards. Otherwise a lot more people would have fallen below poverty line here.

You are spot on about rampant corruption which is uniformly present at every level - bottom to top. But remember that starts right at the top or bottom - depending at how you want to look at it.

Govt is aiming at giving the people bank accounts too and hope it catches up and succeeds.

Whether they do that or not, it is not likely to cause much inflation. Funding for the scheme is meant to be taken from other, existing, programs, so the total stimulus is zero or near zero. Even if it does boost the price of some luxury items, and I am skeptical that will do so to any significant degree, that would simply reduce the consumption of said luxuries. Also, you aren't going to buy much gold with 7k p.a..

overall inflation will be determined by how the plan is funded.

Simply distributing money to a bank account will obviously eradicate some corruption, the problem is that, perhaps, a third of population in some areas have no bank account.

The economist Harrison Price used to talk about there being two different sorts of people - the "no, because" people and the "yes, if" people[1]. A "no, because" person will look at a seemingly impossible idea and state why it won't work, with some pretty damning reasons. That's what you're doing here - universal basic income won't work in India because people will spend the money on status symbols if they can get it, and many won't be able to get it due to not having a bank account. Those are fair criticisms.

A "yes, if" person would look at this idea and say "yes, if we can persuade Indian people living in poverty to spend their income on things to lift themselves out of poverty, and we can figure out a way to get them bank accounts, then this could work."

There's nothing wrong with being a "no, because" person, but "yes, if" tends to be a better approach for creative problem-solving.

[1] https://toddpack.com/2011/09/07/saying-no-gracefully/

Evolutionary and social dynamics, caused by environmental constraints and necessary following competition for everything related to passing genes to a future generation, and so called human nature, which is, basically, the behavioral answer to these fundamental challenges, cannot be dismissed by any amount of empty hipster's "progressive" rhetoric, used to gain attention.

Any proposal should be viewed as a constraint-satisfaction problem against the closest possible approximation to the actual reality. This is the only valid approach - to perform reality checks first, and it is habit for a scientifically inclined, trained mind and almost unknown skill to hipsters obsessed with their feelings and abstract, based on disconnected from reality oversimplified views and theories, like that naive "ethical" philosophy based on theology, wrong premises and naive assumptions.

In other words, I did some simplest constraint-satisfaction checking, and the idea seem to fail to pass the first few fundamental social constraints. According to laws of logic, a single flaw is enough to destroy the whole thing. I found at least two.

Sure, but with the understanding that "actual reality" is not some fixed point that can never be changed. You're saying that Indian people will always spend this money unwisely because that's what they do now and it's what they've always done. I'm saying that Indian people living in povery are intelligent and can understand a rational argument that basic income would be great for them if they use it well. People can change, especially if they're give the incentive of, say, free money.

Perhaps, I failed to emphasize, that in India the "social" is much stronger aspect than Western "personal success". In India it is about finding one's place in society, instead of outperforming everyone else. That is a fundamental difference. Even the decade of third-rate western satellite TV still failed to create a significant shift into western consumerism and obsession with the cosplay of success (and the cosplay of absent intelligence, which we call hipsterism). There are some converts, of course, but not that many.

That was probably true before demonetisation.

That's easy: just wrap it in social stigma.

I'm sure there's plenty of (socially) lower-middle class Britons who are eligible for one or other benefit scheme that they either don't realise, or couldn't bare to enrol in.

My perspective is that the problem runs way deeper than this and any kind of social welfare scheme will be abused in India. This is because majority of the tax paying population thinks that they don't get enough for their taxes.

This might be somewhat justified because taxes in India can jump quite high (up to 30% of income) without seeing much increase in your net savings in major cities. This is compounded by the fact that a very low fraction of the eligible population actually pays taxes (this is due to most people being employed in the unorganized sector) which leads the government to try to maximize whatever it can get from the ones who actually pay.

This is evident in how so many relatively well off people haven't given up their LPG subsidy even after repeated requests by the government.

1. http://isa-global-dialogue.net/indias-great-experiment-the-t...

In fact, this might be a good idea in general - sumptuary laws based on net payments to the government. Contributors to society would gain visible social status while those who are a net drain lose status but do not materially suffer.

Of course, I doubt you could implement this in India. I'm pretty sure everyone will shamelessly take the money.

The problem is the entire principle only works because it's universal. Having lower or middle income people opt out of it would defeat the entire purpose of having it, and having upper income people opt out of it wouldn't save you very much money because they're not a large enough percentage of the population to make any real difference.

Changing that so the middle class pays $75 in tax but receives no UBI is exactly how you bring about the sort of hollowing out of the middle class we've seen recently in the US. It makes the middle class pay for the subsidies to the poor so that wealthier people can pay lower taxes.

And phasing out the UBI for middle class people so they don't have to pay the tax would imply having a UBI phase out rate that just substitutes for the equivalent tax rate, which is mathematically the same as having the higher tax rate and giving them the UBI, but is less transparent about what is actually happening.

Incidentally, your scheme wouldn't work so well in India. In India there are far fewer rich people (proportionately) than in the US. Europe needs to tax the middle class for much the same reason.

If you want to have massive wealth redistribution that skips the middle class, the only way to make that viable is to increase inequality.

But that's the same thing. The only way you can get people out of poverty is by either causing them to legitimately have jobs that without-subsidy pay wages above the poverty line (the problem being they aren't qualified for those jobs), which if anybody knew how to make happen we would already be doing it; or to to subsidize them by taking money from wealthier people and giving it to people in poverty.

Doing this by taking money from middle class people instead of wealthy people only pushes the middle class people towards poverty and exacerbates the problem.

> Incidentally, your scheme wouldn't work so well in India. In India there are far fewer rich people (proportionately) than in the US. Europe needs to tax the middle class for much the same reason.

This is a problem that solves itself. Where there is less inequality you can pay a smaller UBI. If everyone had exactly the same income then you wouldn't need one, but neither would you have anyone in poverty. (Or everyone would be, but in that case you have no options.)

It isn't that you never take money from "middle class" people, it's that it makes no sense to take money from them at a higher rate (via a phase out) than you do from people who make more money than they do.

This is a problem that solves itself. Where there is less inequality you can pay a smaller UBI.

This does not follow. Europe has less inequality than the US but a higher cost of living. Therefore you can pay a lower UBI in Europe than in the US?

Concretely speaking, why do the French and Swedish leisure class need less money to live than the American leisure class?

There are only two real options. Either they earn enough money or someone gives them the difference. The first is obviously preferable but unless you can do it for everyone you still need the second. If you could somehow have literally everyone earn an unsubsidized living wage then it would actually solve both problems, but there is no known way to do that.

> This does not follow. Europe has less inequality than the US but a higher cost of living. Therefore you can pay a lower UBI in Europe than in the US?

Typically if you have a high cost of living it's because there are some fat cats taking the money and therefore high inequality. What's happening in "low inequality" European countries is that the money is really going to taxes which go to not always very efficient social programs, or is the inefficiency cost of employment laws that prevent employers from downsizing unnecessary workers and so on. If those things were replaced with a UBI then the cost of living there would be lower than it is.

You have a point in that inequality is not the only determinant of cost of living, but it's certainly a large factor.

Let me restate what I'm getting at here. If you have the resources to lift your country's people out of poverty through social programs then you have the resources to do it with a UBI. Because having the money go to the lowest income people is the entire point, and letting it go to everyone is just the same thing as saying that the phase out rate is equal to the tax rate. An explicit phase out on top of taxes is equivalent to charging a higher tax rate to low and middle income people than higher income people, which makes no sense.

As a thought experiment one could imagine other enforceable variations, however - displaying on Facebook/Twitter/Tinder/etc whether you are a social benefactor or parasite, for example.

I think it's better to just push through with the idea and accept the inefficiencies of everyone getting it -- once a given country has the tax base to pull it off.

I can't wait to see the ways the state will now find excuses to impinge on my freedoms.

It's also rather spooky how India has followed the NWO playbook. It has only accelerated under Modi's term.

Does anyone believe that a state which can barely provide education/ healthcare can really take this forward ?

the income is not much and you probably can't live of it without working, but it is universal!

Likewise, it is not enough to live off.

Alaska found a source of income (oil), and chose to spend it by giving a no-strings-attached check to every (eligible [0]) Alaskan citizen; instead of any other thing the government could chose to spend money on.

As a side note, my understanding is that the payment is not a direct dividend of oil profits, but rather from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is funded principle from oil, but designed to be able to continue payments in perpetuity despite the eventual lack of oil income. As a result of this, payments are corralated with the general market which (from a macro-economic point of view) is probably the opposite of what we want from a basic income, which could double as a form of stimulus during economic downturn.

[0] It is not, however, means tested. Eligibility is based on being a permanent resident, and not having been convicted of a crime in the preceding year.

Yes there is a pretty big difference. Its not wealth redistribution. You are just spending the money created by natural resource. Its Govt/Peoples wealth to spend as they see fit.

1. First of all, diverting funds from vital food and fertilizer supply to the poorest of the poor in order to fund this scheme is a self-defeating idea.

2. Corruption in cases involving direct money would be far higher than schemes involving food.

3. The poorest of the poor would not have a bank account and therefore, would not be able to benefit from this scheme. A large population of India happens to live in slums. This is the population that is in the most need of such a program but would not receive its benefits. Just because of these conditions, UBI is far more likely to help the rich than the poor.

Fundamentally, UBI would only work for advanced societies. For poor societies, there just wouldn't be enough wealth to be distributed amongst everyone. This is the reason why UBI has worked well in the Scandinavian countries - their GDP per capita is already in the $50K-$70K range compared to India's $3K-$5K.

It is far more likely that the politicians floated this idea to appease the citizens after the hardship they faced during the demonetization scheme.

Another big problem is the gender inequality prevalent in the nation. This will simply lead to income getting concentrated at the hands of the male head of family. Buying nutritious food (which govt is directly providing as of now) or educating girl child (govt subsidise it as of now) may not be his priorities, not out of malice, but simply because he doesn't know about it.

Superimpose the corruption and caste dynamics, where wealth transfer has to go through a bureaucratic sieve that is dominated by upper caste or privileged Indians. The atrocities we hear from the average govt. office are gruesome because majority of govt employees simply doesn't understand the plight of the poor Indian.

To make an understanding for Indians and others, I will suggest the book "The Feast of Vultures" a book that metes out excellent objective treatment to the state of govt affairs in India. It is penned down by a veteran journalist named Josy Joseph. If we start to appreciate how this huge system that thrive in chaos, you will almost instantaneously pick up why this won't work. I am not going to the objective arguments for UBI even given a perfect system to disburse it. This won't work for India.

To put in perspective Indian per capita income is just 3% of USA. Even with PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) it is still 1/10th of US. I think most generous implementation might not even be able to provide 2 basic meals a day, forget housing and healthcare etc.

₹7000 per year is an absurdly small amount. Why wouldn't everyone opt out of it?

I'm kind of stunned that this small amount of money every year is enough to wipe out poverty down to 0.5%

I'm also perplexed at how the rich will gain from it. If you force people to jump through a few minimum hoops to get it, most of the working class will not even bother trying to claim it. Am I correct?

And the cost of living in poorer countries is much lower, so the necessary UBI is that much lower.

Have to get to it via a google search now:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=http://www.economist...

No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago.

The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.

We've also banned this account for seriously abusing HN, which you can read about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600908.

US Hourly Wages for nonsupervisory workers has certainly grown over the last 20 years, but not in the past 40 years [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

http://csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-...

The world is certainly doing better, but I also have to wonder how much of this is thanks to automation, and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.

This is different. In the past, technology has been a multiplier for the productivity of workers. The confluence of robotics and AI will mean the eventual evaporation of low-skill and/or laborious jobs as they are completely replaced by automated agents.

Unless we somehow go through a revolution in education in one generation, start augmenting humans, or place greater value and importance on artistic/creative endeavors, there simply won't be many things that humans are better/more cost-effective at than machines. Certainly not enough to make up for the displacement of jobs.

For example, there are ~3.5 million truck drivers in the US currently. Add those to the number of Lyft, Uber, taxi, etc. drivers. In less than 10 years, those jobs will most likely be completely gone except for bespoke, upscale professional drivers as a luxury. These people do not have a unique skill set they can apply to something else. Remember, low-hanging fruit jobs like working at fast food restaurants and jobs involving manual labor are also gone. That's not even mentioning jobs like customer service via phone or online chat, air traffic controllers, etc. which will be gone.

> The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.

Globalization can only happen once.

We've also banned this account for seriously abusing HN, which you can read about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600908.

Moreover, it's not clear that your premise is accurate. Neanderthals constitute 3 percent of Eurasian human genes, meaning that their genes were evolutionarily successful (3% * 6 billion > 100% * 100,000), and this is ignoring the success of their close kin, with whom they already shared >99% genes.

Your second point is baffling to me. Why not include mice, they have 97.5% of our genes, as being successful? Why not all mammals? Oh, except horses, of course, because you said in a previous comment we are different from them. If you can call neathenderals successful, then I don't know what you are actually arguing for.

There are plenty of counterindications to that. For instance, many forms of technology are becoming increasingly widely adopted, at a rapid pace. I gave the adoption of smartphones as one example.

>Why not include mice, they have 97.5% of our genes, as being successful? Why not all mammals? Oh, except horses, of course, because you said in a previous comment we are different from them.

I would say the success of human beings is by some metrics a success for mice, mammals etc as well..

>I would say the success of human beings is by some metrics a success for mice, mammals etc as well..

But, again, as you stated previously, not horses? Seriously, you are moving the goalposts all over the place.

I agree that the loss of privacy is a huge concern, but like I said, there are positive trends as well that you are simply hand-waving away.

>But, again, as you stated previously, not horses?

Horses as well!

> Seriously, you are moving the goalposts all over the place.

I directly addressed your argument and then I also made an additional argument that your premise is not necessarily true. That's not defined as moving the goalposts.

You've stated or implied:

1. Property rights is the reason that technology is augmenting humans 2. Unified global culture is the reason that technology is augmenting humans 3. Having a genetic legacy is evidence my "premise is not necessarily true"

You are definitely moving the goal posts by #1 and #2.

Also, you've failed to address:

1. Why Neanderthals were augmented despite not having property rights (#1, above) 2. What my premise has to do with genetic legacy. From what I gather, you assume that as long as the people alive today share genetic material with other species, either alive or dead, my premise is inaccurate. Why? 3. What your premise actually is. Are you talking about genetically legacy, or something else? Is all that you are saying is that those alive tomorrow will at least share some DNA from those already dead? Not much of a shocker, is it?

You are being, seemingly intentionally, unclear about many things, as well as bringing up several different threads of thought at once, muddying the conversation.

"CEO of multibillion corporation" won't be made obsolete by technology because he/she comes to own the technology. Everyone else, could.

For 2012-13 FY, 12.5 Million (1%) paid any Income tax, averaging Rs 21,000 ($350). The 3 individuals in the top-bracket of Rs 100-500 crore ($16M-$83M) paid a total tax of Rs 437 crore ($72M) — resulting in an average tax outgo of Rs 145.80 crore ($24M).

Indian statists cant help but screw the country funders even more. Disgustingly inhumane.

Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers):

http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...

and it is redistributing downward with social welfare spending, with the US massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...

Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%

>Healthcare: 5.7%

>Welfare: 4.1%

Annual economic growth over the time frame:

>2.7%

The only thing it has to show for giving people more "free money" to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:

http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...

But hey, since 40 years of social democracy has failed, let's keep doubling down and giving people more "free" money.

The end result of this bidirectional forcible redistribution is the productive middle class being destroyed, and two classes becoming increasingly significant: a small upper class controlling a growing share of national output, and a large unproductive underclass that is dependent on the taxes that upper class pays, constituting an increasingly large portion of the population.

We've also banned this account for seriously abusing HN, which you can read about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600908.

The fundamental issue addressed by positive incomes is simply that money serves two processes in economies that are at complete odds with each other, 1) a store of value and 2) the fluid that drives economic activity. The more money that is held in the fewer hands, the less well it is able to fulfil the second and far more important purpose. In the limit, all the money is held by very few people, and shortly after that, those people find themselves at the hands of a very angry mob.

Which just never ends well.

From the brief experiment we've had with massive forcible income redistribution (social democracy), we've seen the following:

* slow down in wage growth and improvements in life expectancy

* slow down in productivity growth

* explosion in the rate of single parenthood (perfectly in line with economic theory on how availability of resources affects child rearing choices)

But hey since 40 years of social democracy has failed so utterly, clearly we should keep blaming the free market and doubling down on social democracy.

This has more to do with the evolution of freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Any economic theory rooted in rational decision making is incomplete at best. We could lower this rate by going back in time when marriage was treated like a contract with the intent of producing viable offspring.

> * slow down in improvements in life expectancy

You mention that you're against any regulation. Cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States, making it by far the leading cause of death from cancer and on its own the second leading cause of death. This is nearly one in five deaths. I shouldn't have to bring up the behavior of the major tobacco companies in the past and how life expectancy would be now without government regulation.

Also, if you're going to blame this on social democracies and not that we may be reaching what the limits of human lifespan are in the anthropocene era, I don't know what to say.

What I can say is that we will likely see an uptick in human lifespan due to CRISPR related technologies (discovered at a public, government funded university with research grants provided by public and private sources).

Free market ideologues make the same fatal mistake that economists did when creating decision theory. They eschew psychology and replace it with the mythical rational, utility maximizing individual. Also, humans are horrible at pricing things and rarely take externalities into account. For example, is the cost of submerging pacific islands and displacing the inhabitants taken into account when doing things that release greenhouse gases? It's like a cult or religion that thinks they uniquely have the solution for all the world's ills.

> But hey since 40 years of social democracy has failed so utterly,

There is more to life than simply money. I'm not the biggest fan of social democracies, but I am thankful that I have things like the right to vote after Jim Crow was shut down. I am thankful my cousin was finally able to come out of the closet and marry the person he loves. But I guess since I can't put a value on that, social progress is irrelevant =P

And if there's an explosion in single parenthood due to woman having more choice, because of these benefits - well maybe their partners should think about that a little.

Forgive me for the double post, but part of a sibling comment of mine is especially relevant here:

> I'm regularly floored by people's ability to talk about network effects, economies of scale, information asymmetries, moats, winner-takes-all games, and mergers/acquisitions with one breath -- all of which are non-regulatory market forces that suppress competition and innovation -- and then with the next breath assert that deregulation is the most straightforward way to spur innovation and competition.

I agree that eliminating rents should be a (if not the) primary goal of government, but I don't agree that eliminating regulation is synonymous.

That's a sickening utopian vision, but luckily we live in the real world.

... you mean the countries with the highest quality-of-life measures? The Scandanavian nations, Canada, Australia, NZ, all of which have vibrant economies, high average wages, and strong middle classes?

The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly characteristic example of social democracy.

Europe and Canada have seen stagnant wage and economic growth since adopting social democracy. What are you basing your claim that these policies are working on? I strongly advise you to stop assuming that what you're told by the media and echo chambers on the internet is correct, and actually do research on these issues, by looking at statistics.

Social democracy has not worked in Scandinavia. The author of Scandinavian Unexceptionalism explains how it has harmed Sweden:

"From 1870 until 1970, Sweden was a free market success story. Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world. .. [After taxes were raised in the late 60s and 70s] Sweden stagnated":

https://youtu.be/D0hnA341AWE?t=5m23s

Sweden was the 3rd wealthiest country in the world in 1968. After it created a massive welfare state in the 1970s and 80s, its growth stagnated, and by 1991, it was 17th highest income country in the world.

Other important facts:

http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...

• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.

• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.

If you want a more equal society, you need a more free market. It is regulatory prohibitions (anti-free-market policy) on economic activity that are contributing to growing income disparity:

"Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it":

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2...

>The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly characteristic example of social democracy.

By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms in the US. The raw statistics show that the US has by every objective measure moved drastically in the direction of social democracy over the last 40 years. The same applies to every other major Western economy.

Nice, you take a word I introduced to the conversation, explicitly redefined it in a way I wasn't using it, and then proceed to demand I prove your new definition. Why should I bother, if you're just going to change the way I was using a word and then tell me I'm sheeple?

And since you like statistics so much, population growth, a foundational element in economic growth, also stagnated in Sweden starting in the '80s. If the population stagnates, then of course you expect growth to stagnate. So not only are you missing the point and creating a strawman, you're also being hypocritical about your own patronising demands on 'looking at the data'. Likewise this crazy expectation that human lifespans just linearly expand with improved circumstances - but what would you expect when you're citing data from a source whose raison d'etre is specifically promoting the free market? Hardly a neutral source.

But I will leave you with this: economic growth isn't everything. That's the point of quality-of-life measures. People have a high quality of life in Sweden. Whereas China has recently had a rapidly-growing economy, and life sucks there. People escape it when they can. The gradient of the growth chart doesn't tell you much about freedom of expression or the happiness of citizens.

It doesn't really matter how you define it. What matters is that they have not improved much from the position they were at when they adopted social democracy, and the reason is because their rate of economic growth has stagnated.

The way to measure the success of a policy is to see how much a country has improved from the position it was at when it adopted the policy relative to other countries.

>And since you like statistics so much, population growth,

Gee why would anyone base their views on large-scale phenomena on statistical evidence!? Why don't I just base my ideas on what's culturally popular and which notions give me warming feelings!?

>If the population stagnates, then of course you expect growth to stagnate.

You're taking an amateur approach to this, in missing all sorts of facts to arrive at your predetermined conclusion. The fact is that per capita GDP growth has slowed, not just GDP growth. Moreover, wage growth has slowed, and wages are a per-capita measure.

>Likewise this crazy expectation that human lifespans just linearly expand with improved circumstances

There's no indication that it's a "crazy expectation". The point I was making is that there is no evidence that social democracy has actually made anything better in the countries where it has been adopted. The trends in place before the adoption of social democracy were superior to the trends that came into effect after its adoption. So there is no objective evidence to support your ideological inclinations.

>but what would you expect when you're citing data from a source whose raison d'etre is specifically promoting the free market?

There's absolutely no evidence that the source's raison d'etre is to promote the free market. It's entirely possible that they want to further public welfare, and have concluded, based on empirical evidence, that the free market is the best way to do that.

>But I will leave you with this: economic growth isn't everything. That's the point of quality-of-life measures. People have a high quality of life in Sweden. Whereas China has recently had a rapidly-growing economy, and life sucks there.

More bullshit logic indicative of an amateur approach to economics and society.

China is still extremely poor relative to the West. But people in China are FAR better off now than they were 30 years ago, and that's primarily down to the massive economic development the country has experienced. Wages growing by a factor of 4-5X is hugely important to quality of life.

'number of humans' is a statistical measure, not a huggy feeling, you dolt. You are the living definition of selection bias. And for proof:

> There's absolutely no evidence that the source's raison d'etre is to promote the free market.

https://iea.org.uk/about-us - they explicitly say it themselves.

Stop calling other people amateurs and bubble-dwellers; you're in no fit state to make such accusations.

You'd prefer people being thrown in prison for refusing to surrender their private property rights, or for engaging in a voluntary economic interaction that some other party created a prohibition against?

Please help me understand your preference for authoritarian violence against peaceful people.

> your preference for authoritarian violence

We've banned this account for egregious ideological flamewar and repeated incivility. Indeed, you've been using HN for almost nothing else. That's a serious abuse which destroys the culture we're hoping to build—thoughtful discussion—and stokes the flames the rest of us are working hard to damp down.

It's not a matter of the politics you espouse, much as it doesn't matter what brand of matches arsonists use. The patterns of flamewar are invariant across ideological flavor.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow HN's rules in the future.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13595551 and marked it off-topic.

Yes, I'd prefer people be thrown in prison for refusing to feed the starving, rather than people starving to death.

I think property rights are valuable in-as-far as they improve overall utility, but insisting on enforcing them to the point where it could cause people serious harm is clearly beyond that point.

We can argue about the extents of property rights, but suggesting there be no limits is arguing for legalised economic murder.

EDIT: Just to note that I edited this quite extensively after posting.

So I guess you won't complain when some self-righteous modern-day Robin Hood engages in armed robbery against you to feed children in an orphanage in Africa. And if you resist? Well, the consequences fall on you. Who are you to deny others who are in need your income.

That actions that are unconscionable by any normal moral standard suddenly become socially acceptable to endorse when done through the political process shows how detached political ideology has become from humanity/morality. The political ideology you endorse is sociopathic and narcissistic to the extreme.

An ad-hoc process controlled by an individual? Of course I'd complain.

A world-spanning democratic process? Well, it's hard to know if I would truly be willing to give up the standard of living that I'm used to, but in principle I would happy to do so if it would lift the entire world out of relative poverty.

>That actions that are unconscionable by any normal moral standard suddenly become socially acceptable to endorse when done through the political process shows how detached political ideology has become from humanity/morality.

Actions on behalf of a democratic system are different to actions of an individual, because they have the consent of a majority of the governed.

How do you intend that property rights be enforced? Who decides who owns what, and what gives them the right to make that decision? Would it be acceptable for an individual who disagrees (i.e. doesn't consent) to take action on their own to reallocate property as they see fit?

Morally there's no difference. You just want the armed robbery to be done in a more organized and deliberative process. That doesn't change the moral quality of threatening you with violence to deprive you of your property, when you have not committed any offence to warrant such a violation of your rights.

>Actions on behalf of a democratic system are different to actions of an individual, because they have the consent of a majority of the governed.

Violating people's rights with the "consent of the majority" is just two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner. The justification is just an ideological cover for violating others rights.

>How do you intend that property rights be enforced? Who decides who owns what, and what gives them the right to make that decision?

Property rights would ideally be enforced by the government, with common law, which is based on protecting people's human rights (including the right to not be robbed to provide for the poor), determining who owns what.

>Would it be acceptable for an individual who disagrees (i.e. doesn't consent) to take action on their own to reallocate property as they see fit?

I don't know, because there are many factors to consider. If the judgment is unjust, but resisting it with force leads to far more violence against the innocent, then it could wrong to resist in such a manner. The best course of action in my opinion is to strongly argue for what one believes is justice as long as the freedom of speech exists.

And how exactly do they determine that? What happens when people disagree about ownership? What makes the government's decisions more valid than the individuals'?

>If the judgment is unjust, but resisting it with force leads to far more violence against the innocent, then it could wrong to resist in such a manner.

So it's okay to ignore property rights if enforcing them would cause harm?

>The best course of action in my opinion is to strongly argue for what one believes is justice as long as the freedom of speech exists.

And what will this achieve? What mechanism is there for government to recognise and rectify its mistake?

>is just two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner.

As opposed to two wolves agreeing that they own the grass, and enforcing that until the sheep dies. Power imbalances will always enable abuse, but democracy at least ensures that the power imbalance benefits more people than it harms.