I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.
You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index. No need to wait for the State to do it for you.
> Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today.
I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
The greatest mass-pulling out of poverty I personally witnessed in my lifetime was when the communist states of Eastern Europe moved to capitalism. More of that, please.
Capitalism is very good at allocating capital and as a result innovating to increase the "ceiling" of the human experience.
Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor".
UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees).
If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc.
The floor of the human experience is not what got us to the moon and invented the transistor.
> Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen
Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
The point I’m making is about the floor. I agree with your statement that the market is amazing for the average, even the 25th percentile. But there is some percentile after which the market no longer prioritizes the people (except to rent seek). It’s simple market dynamics: At a certain point, the marginal value of acquiring users is no longer worth the marginal cost of acquisition.
For example, not everyone in the USA has smartphones[0]. The biggest discrepancy is by age, which we can possibly factor as a choice. The second biggest discrepancy is by wealth. There is a 2000bps difference in rates between people making more than $75k vs people making less than $35k. There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan. So the poorest will consistently be excluded.
This isn’t a market failure. Markets are in their nature utilitarian on a single metric and truly aren’t designed to improve the floor of the human experience.
Take the trolley problem for example. It’s supposed to be a hard problem because of all the nuance. The market “solves” the trolley problem trivially by running over the least wealthy group of people.
Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor. At best, the market is punting the problem (until that group of least fortunate dies) and at worst the market is rent seeking, exacerbating the problem.
The link you sent shows a heavy bias towards age being the major contributor of people not having smartphones. According to it, 96% of age 18-49 have smartphones. Knowing the income distribution of the US, it's not possible that there's a 2000 bps gap caused purely by income disparity given that 96% number. What's more likely is that for older low income people the smartphone adoption rate is very low, but for younger generations it's very high (even though they're poor). That lines up with what I anecdotally see - even homeless people have smartphones.
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?
I have a few ideas. There are 3 problem-areas in the world holding back poor people today: education, health and housing. Look at what worked in other areas to raise the floor and apply it here. There is just one answer: free markets.
Not a coincidence but education, health and housing are heavily regulated everywhere and even governmentally run in some places. De-regulate them, allow the free markets to do their magic to find solutions, reduce prices and thus raise that floor.
Then remove artificial barriers in the jobs market like minimum wages. Allow people to be employed no matter how little their added value is worth. Free companies from onerous regulations and make creating a competing company easy and cheap instead.
Finally, separate the Economic power in state, just like Executive and Legislative powers are separated. Make it illegal for governments to engage in, regulate or influence economic activity. Focus their role on ensuring freedoms and applying externalities to markets through taxation. Also accept and use taxation's role in shaping societal behavior.
Oh, and re-energize private charity by removing the corrupt and ineffectual state welfare crutch.
A better analogy is that you already an ownership share in the nation state with citizenship - you have voting rights, a court system that works for you, you benefit monetarily by having a secure military and police force (thus not needing to directly pay for bodyguards or protection from some sort of mafia).
That's just objectively not true - welfare systems stop people from becoming homeless or starving in the street all the time.
Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
It’s not about caring, it’s about results. Capitalism is the only system that pulled both countries and people out of poverty, because it’s the best system at motivating people to create value.
Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
It is entirely possible that a system that has worked well in the past finds itself in need of replacement or significant modification due to circumstances it has created. Monarchy was useful for pulling disparate tribes into larger nations via conquest. Government private land granting incentivized rapid expansion of a colonial people across lightly-defended foreign territory, which was then conquered and parceled up.
But when there is no more land to grant, what happens? When there are no more tribes to conquer, what happens?
When there is massive abundance and most of it is owned by 1% of the population... What happens?
> Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating
In a country where 1 in 100 people own a total of 40% of the nation's total wealth, a back-of-the-napkin guess strongly suggests the net motivation of spreading that wealth around would be positive.
No other system we tried was better at reducing global poverty and advancing the society. The reason capitalism works so well is that it works with human nature, not against it: it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create. The majority of that value though, goes to the society, rising it.
> demotivating... to the people who end up with less
No, demotivating to the people creating value.
> spreading that wealth around would be positive
That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
> No other system we tried was better a reducing global poverty and advancing the society.
What systems have we tried, and who and when are you talking about? What are you comparing to? Some of the best examples we have today are the ones that aren’t exactly pure capitalism, like Norway and Finland. If capitalism is so great, why are countries that hold capitalism back and provide more social services raking better than the US on nearly all economic, development, and social measures?
> it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create.
Do you recognize this spin, or is it unintentional? It’s motivating to lose some of the value you create by working to someone else?? Wouldn’t it be a lot more motivating to keep all the value you create? Wouldn’t it be even more motivating to not work, and get to keep some of the value other people create? Yeah, I think it probably is.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
This feels like the McCarthy school of economics. Russia’s problems didn’t stem from lack of proletariat motivation, it came from authoritarian abuses of power. You seem to be forgetting about China entirely.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving
There were a lot of overlapping factors that killed the Soviet experiment. A major one, and the real root cause of "people started starving," is that Russia is a massive country that is historically vulnerable to famines because food is relatively hard to grow at those latitudes; people had starved under the czars of the past, and the main reason we think starvation will be minimized in the future is a global revolution in how agriculture is done of which Russia was a part, not anything particularly virtuous in the modern Russian practice of capitalism.
Another major factor was a combination of central planning and failure to grasp modern science which resulted in error being expanded. Stalin famously supported a Michurinism view of trait growth through stress over the Darwininan view of natural selection, which led to some bad conclusions when agriculture was centrally-planned under a bad model. While central planning can aggravate error (and there's a reasonable discussion to be had about how tax dollars are allocated), a capitalist society is extremely vulnerable to similar failure modes; while ideally, damage gets contained via the "firebreak" of a few companies failing when their heterodoxy proves wrong (or succeeding and displacing other companies when their heterodoxy proves right), bad memes spread widely still cause damage. Consider the dust bowl, or the housing crash; both happened under capitalist models.
But all of this is a bit of a distraction because the fact the communists spread wealth around doesn't imply spreading wealth is communist. Indeed, the US, while actively engaging in McCarthyist anti-communist suppression of free speech, had a maximum marginal tax rate of 91% and was fifteen years into its own project of guaranteeing a basic income (via social security) for the elderly, because we as a society had grown weary of the elderly dying from poverty when the winds of fortune had blown them to a circumstance where they had no savings and no ability to work. Even capitalist societies agree that taxation and use of taxes for social benefit is a good thing; the only argument to be had is how much, and "taxing the rich is communist" is a doorstop meme that doesn't contribute to that conversation.
Its interesting you keep using the word ‘redistribution’ for social services, when capitalism is by definition a redistribution from the poor to the rich. It’s also demotivating for people to be trapped in poverty while their employers’ relative slice of the pie is growing year by year. Capitalism may well have slightly democratized the wealth generation process compared to some authoritarian regimes, and some economies have increased average standard of living while doing well under Capitalism, it’s not all bad, but there is certainly lots and lots and lots of room to improve. It’s also interesting to put the onus on the poor to be motivated, in a system designed by the rich that begins to fail, and we take corrective action, if our unemployment goes too low.
There is nothing to redistribute when we all have nothing - and that is our initial state. Then through capitalism value is created. Part of said value is retained by its creator - thus providing the motivation to create it in the first place. But the most value is distributed in the society (through regular consuming of goods and services), raising its level and thus pulling more people out of poverty.
Just check out how dramatically poverty was reduced when Eastern European states switched from communism to capitalism.
I though the poor were living from social security checks.
Working people trade labor for money. Are you claiming that you cannot make surplus from a salary? It seem you're claiming agreed upon salary is preventing you accumulating capital and the rich are to be blamed somehow.
Which question were you attempting to answer there? I assume it’s how does capitalism create value. Unfortunately, you just described labor, something common to all economic systems including communism. This doesn’t address how capitalism creates value.
Repeating your answer doesn’t help much. Have you studied any economics? Unfortunately, that’s not what capital means, it squarely contradicts the definitions of capital and of capitalism, and again, completely fails to answer the question. Communists have heads, hands, and environments. So do socialists, and feudalists, and aboriginal tribes, and, well, everyone. If you’re interested in learning how capitalism creates value, here are a couple of places you might start: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalism.asphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
>>Communists have heads, hands, and environments. So do socialists, and feudalists, and aboriginal tribes, and, well, everyone.
Of course they do, but they aren't allowed to use them to their full potential.
I don't think you have read your own links. Hint: read the first sentence of your wikipedia link. And yes I have partially studied economics and have family members who are trained economists.
Poor people have labour. Everybody labours in a company (except the shareholders) and then everybody is paid a wage and the shareholders keep the profit. Thus the rich get richer as the surplus value created by labour is kept by capital.
That's the core mode of capitalist production, better known as the M-C-M' cycle.
I'd love to know where this has actually happened. It seems to me that this idea is often trotted out as a conservative scare tactic.
I'd also like to know how you think we should maximise people's happiness and wellbeing. Because that's my primary interest, and economic productivity is valuable insofar as it enables that utility maximisation.
Taxes are rising around the globe in developed countries. Also red tape and regulations which are a different type of "tax" with the same result: demotivating value creators.
You can't maximise happiness by definition. Happiness is fleeting, a peak, it exists only through comparison to our regular state. Evolution made sure of that, or we'd've stopped evolving. The only way to cheat it is with drugs.
I want to maximise humankind's potential instead. Gain infinite knowledge, spread through the stars. I think that is a much more worthwhile goal than happily dying out on a small planet at the edge of the galaxy.
I don't mean happiness like the temporary pleasure state. I mean the minimisation of undesired suffering and maximisation of freedom for all people to pursue their preferences.
I don't think "potential" is worth anything if it isn't used to benefit people and make their lives better. The imperium from 40k has much greater technology and planet span than us but it's deeply dystopic - I'd rather live here than there.
I also think minimising suffering and maximising freedom are worthwhile goals. I just don't think using the State power is the way to do it.
But I believe becoming multi-planetary is imperative and urgent for mankind. The dangers while all of us are on the same planet are simply too great to sit and enjoy the view.
I'm an anarchist so I'm inclined to agree with you about state power - but in terms of relative goodness, a social democracy is demonstrably better than a neoliberal state. I can say that from experience of Conservative rule in the UK - essential public services just get worse and the savings are collected in the pockets of the already-wealthy.
I do agree about becoming multiplanetary too, but if we're talking about existential risk then climate change is the most urgent one and we need state power and institutional change to avert that one.
Don't judge governing systems using a small number of countries, try to look at more. For example, with their work ethic maybe Nordics can arguably make Social Democracy work, but would it work in say Bulgaria?
The only way to solve climate change is through technological evolution. I see almost zero progress with policy changes. BTW, we wouldn't even be in this mess if would've completed the previous energy tech transition from hydrocarbons to nuclear as planned. What stopped us? Politics.
You need a taxable base to implement social democracy - so yeah you'd need a functioning economy in order to fund social services, and Bulgaria is, AFAIK, pretty corrupt. But solving corruption is a political issue.
We'd also need to move off of ICE cars, and it was the car industry that tried to suppress that. Also the fossil fuel industry that puts out propaganda against new forms of energy - capital and the state are in alliance. Some parties can be better (left wing ones) but there's a ton of propaganda against them by corporations too.
I lived under communism so please don't tell me about left-wing parties. Not that I find other-wing parties that much better, but leftists have destroyed countries.
Politicians are by definition corruptible - that is why they are there. They failed to succeed through merit in the free market so politics is their last resort. That is why power to the State and politicians means yielding to corruption.
The biggest opponents to nuclear were not corporations but parties: greens and ecologists. Ideologists and luddites. We are living the world the anti-nukes protests of the 60's built.
Yeah I don't consider Marxist-Leninists to be part of the left wing - I know they declare themselves to be, but in reality they're just petty tyrants who want to dominate others. By left wing parties I mean labour, green and democratic socialist parties.
Politicians are corruptible, but the free market actively promotes corruption - when the only motive is profit, morality goes out the window in favour of the dollar.
As I said I'd rather we had neither, but between the two only politics has the possibility of significant change in any direction that isn't inherently profitable.
Profit is the only motive for everyone, all the time, no matter what. The only difference is that in a free market that motivation is aligned with societal goals and it is in the open, a game with rules and laws. Free markets allow you to make a profit and keep it, legally.
Without free markets, the deals are made in power and influence, in fiefs and networks. Leftist politics are not only ipocrit (no left politician cares for "the poor") but also feudalistic and corrupt by default, from definition, because that is the only way to make a profit in such a sistem.
That's quite the negative view of humanity. People only care about profit? I care about the wellbeing of all people, and I think most people do, they just have little ability to help others because they are atomised as individuals with little power under capitalism. A society where everybody only cares about personal gain is a society of sociopaths - granted, that's the sociological influence of neoliberalism, so you can see in more neoliberal communities that people are more greedy and materialistic, but that's not an essential trait of human beings; just experience more communal cultures or groups, or check out historical social structures. The only reason many people are profit-oriented now is because they're pushed to be so under capitalism.
You remind me of the communists of 30 years ago. They also kept talking about the "new man" which altruistically worked to the max of his powers for the betterment of mankind and everyone else, while keeping for him only what the state deemed he needed.
They were also very frustrated that the regular people were… simply not like that.
Yeah no I'm not making some "new soviet man" argument. It doesn't help that in the USSR everyone was suffering deprivation, but it's well known that there's a hedonic drop off point once people have enough money to not have to worry about bills any more and have some disposable income. Most people have a degree of empathy (not self-sacrificial altruism, which genuinely is rare) and when their needs are reliably taken care of most would want to reduce the suffering of others.
If you don't care whether your friends, neighbours or kids in Africa live or die, that's a you problem. For the rest of us, we'd rather reduce the suffering of others.
Again, I lived this experiment. I have never seen people so dehumanized and so insensitive to other's suffering like when their basic needs were "taken care of" by the state. I am talking orphanages full of children with deformed bones because they never saw the light of day. Prisons where abject torture was wide-spread and routine. Gulags.
Today's Western people, in comparison, are angels.
You know why communes failed? Because everyone was stealing - from workers to guardians, even those in charge were stealing. You know why they stole? Because they were starving. You know why they were starving? Because they couldn't buy the food they needed. Why? Because there was no profit motive for others to provide that food.
People don't work the way you think they do. Until you understand that, you'll spread suffering instead of reducing it.
Given that capitalism describes a mode of production, it literally is still capitalism. Capitalism is not feudalism in that serfdom is not the primary working relationship between classes in capitalism - though Yanis Varoufakis seems to think that we're headed that way.
> Given that capitalism describes a mode of production, it literally is still capitalism
Given that redistributive taxation and benefit systems labelled “social democracy” designed specifically to mitigate the adversity that provides the whip behind the capitalist mode of production modify both the property system and the mode of production that together are labelled “capitalism”, social democracy literally is not capitalism. It retains substantial elements of the property system of, and it's mode of production has important similarities to that of, the system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (as does that system with pre-capitalist aristocratic systems), but it's not the same system.
It's not Marxist socialism, either, and I know Marxists like to deny that any system that isn't pre-capitalist that fails to be Marxist socialism can be anything other than capitalism-under-a-different-name, but that's a giant false dichotomy.
A mixed economy still has private property and the capitalist-worker class dynamic, still experiences the crisis cycle - so it's still capitalist, it's just a better form of it. If your qualifying rules for "capitalism" require no welfare system whatsoever, then capitalism hasn't existed in the West for at least 100 years.
Bearing in mind that I'm using "capitalism" as a descriptor, not a snarl word. The snarl one is "neoliberalism" ;)
I conceptualize it as a cryptocurrency w/ single identity, a max wallet amount (10 million perhaps -the rest is taxed 100%), and a utilization score...basically where those who make more transactions and hold less in their wallet get more UBI paid into it... then there just needs to be a mechanism to make the coin 'stable' to where 1 coin is about a loaf of bread... it'd need to maybe have separate account types though and gets a little murky around how businesses accept the coin.... and how that plays into the max-limit (goal being to limit inequality..and basically have a max un-equalness, where you've essentially "won the monopoly game" and now you can go out and help others win too...).
