In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average.
I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen:
• We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford college, or by providing on-the-job training, etc.
• Society will reach a point where it no longer makes sense for so much of the population to be in the workforce. We will need some form of Universal Basic Income to allow people who choose not to work to still live. The amount of money distributed would be set according to the number of workers needed—we'd raise the UBI when there's too many workers, and lower the UBI when there's too few.
> We will find new industries which replace the old jobs
Reading the book Janesville, I'm very pessimistic on the effects of programs aimed at retraining people for new careers once jobs in a town are lost. I'm convinced for the next generation that it's a net benefit, yes, but that many people who lose their job never really recover and the people who try to switch industries end up on average the worst off.
We should be honest about the role we play. Even if it's a net positive, it's not a net positive for every person. For many people it can be devastating. (This actually bolsters your second point and helps make the case for a strong safety net.)
> If there is less work to be done in the world, everyone will work less on average.
Another solution would be that we end up with fewer people, through any of several rather nasty mechanisms.
I'm not as optimistic as you that society values animals which don't provide anything -- horses haven't gone extinct, but they're certainly not doing well either.
In the age of thinking machines, monkeys are the new horses.
But now (i.e., the short term) is when we're all living. I don't pay my rent based on the long term benefits of the elimination of my job.
By using "them" to generically refer to all workers, past present and future, it sounds like you're saying "Today's workers are screwed, but the next generation of non-rich people will be fine".
You can't just tell people that a machine eliminated their job starting next month therefore they should be happy. It's going to get a lot rougher for a lot of people before UBI is implemented.
As someone who's been on employment insurance before. I can't understand the appeal of ubi. Getting a small amount of money to do nothing is excruciating. It's really not a fun way to live.
It's a small amount of money so that you can dedicate more time to your children (instead of picking up another part-time job), more time to your education (instead of picking up employment during your highschool years), more time to your training (so the poor can actually educate themselves with certs instead of working 3 jobs to afford insulin or some other healthcare), more time to volunteer organizations, more time for political engagement, so on and so forth. It's not to do nothing. It's to enable people to do what they want when time is money and both are scarce.
this is exactly why I find UBI appealing. For those who are unable to work, it will provide minimum means not to fall into abject poverty, but it will still carry enough incentive to improve oneself, find meaningful work and be a net contributor.
Minimum wage here is $15/hour. If you make that you are below the poverty line. The poverty line here is $41,866/year. I work 6 days a week most weeks and make a bit above that and it's still a struggle sometimes affording bills and other expenses and I really don't live very extravagantly.
So unless you're giving that out...you will be living in abject poverty with a ubi.
I really think people who advocate for this have never been poor in their lives or spent time around poor people and have no concept of what it's really like to live with very little money.
Especially on hacker news. Though i'm guessing it's hard to see from the ivory out in silicon valley.
Then there's the fact that the way our economic system works, the value of currency and inflation is based on the amount of money in circulation. A ubi just makes all the money worth less.
If you have UBI, you don't need a high minimum wage. By getting rid of high minimum wages and of a host of heavy and intrusive labor regulations that keep marginal workers out of the market, structural unemployment can be expected to fall and earned-incomes at the low end to increase. You might be living in abject poverty if UBI was all you had, but that's not the point. It's a supplement to your existing income.
BTW we already have something very much like this for low-wage workers, known as the EITC - there's nothing unrealistic about this as a policy proposal! UBI is a bit simpler and doesn't require the recipient to be working at all times, so it can make a lot more sense for marginal and "gig" workers, and for people who are just entering the labor market.
It's not about the minimum wage it's about what's considered poverty. If you make below $41866/year here you are living in poverty.
> heavy and intrusive labor regulations
I'm curious as to what you consider heavy and intrusive labour regulations? All of the regulations in the industry I work in are focused on worker health and safety. Without those regulations I would be working in dangerous hell hole breathing in toxic dust constantly, where I wouldn't be paid overtime wages, be legally eligible for breaks and my shifts could be whatever the fuck my boss wanted.
>but that's not the point. It's a supplement to your existing income.
Several other posts in this comment thread alone seem to disagree and believe it's a reasonable amount of money to live on.
>will provide minimum means not to fall into abject poverty
>actually do see it as solely sustainable, in the scenario I outlined.
There's also comments on here from people talking about how it will give them time for this that or the other.
Lets see, for me at least I would need to get $1200 every month just to cover rent and i've lived in the same place for 8 years now. Rent in that time has doubled around me to the point where a one bedroom apartment is $2400/month. My internet bill is just under $100/ month, phone bill is about half that, travelling to and from work is about $200 a month, groceries and expenses and such another $200 or so if not more. Leaving whatever I have left for saving and fun.
I'm just really trying to imagine what kind ubi could be given to anyone that would really make a difference.
I understand why people want this and I understand the wanting to believe people will take this money and be alright and use the extra time they will suddenly have to better their skills still feel ok when low skilled work becomes unavailable.
The reality will be something more along the lines of an underclass living in ghettos being unable to move up. As it is even the most unskilled work around requires expensive tickets and certifications. Hell apparently even burlesque dancers here can't get work without a ticket saying they went to burlesque school.
This is going to keep happening and the barrier of entry to things will keep being raised to the point where these people won't be able to enter the workforce even if they tried. Even i'm not doing what I went to school for because I can't afford the $15,000/year fee to register as a professional. So despite my education,degrees and my work experience, I don't get hired because I can't pay to have that little R.P. appended to my name.
Having extra time and a little bit of extra money means nothing when the fees for entry are beyond what you can put together without already working.
And i'm not even going to bother going on about the reality of what happens when you give poor unmotivated people free money...but maybe look into council estates and what happens there in the UK.
> Lets see, for me at least I would need to get $1200 every month just to cover rent and i've lived in the same place for 8 years now. Rent in that time has doubled around me to the point where a one bedroom apartment is $2400/month. My internet bill is just under $100/ month, phone bill is about half that, travelling to and from work is about $200 a month, groceries and expenses and such another $200 or so if not more. Leaving whatever I have left for saving and fun. I'm just really trying to imagine what kind ubi could be given to anyone that would really make a difference.
So, part of the problem here is that UBI means different things to different people. When I wrote the comment that started this thread, I was talking very specifically about UBI as a way to offset advancements in automation, if and only if those advances reach a point where we don't have enough work left for humans to do. This may very well never happen, but it also might!
In a world like this one, most of the stuff you buy would have very little human involvement. You say your groceries cost ~$200 per month right now; imagine if those groceries were planted by robots and harvested by robots and shipped to stores in self-driving cars. Those robots don't need to get paid (even if they cost some money to run), so the food they produce would be much cheaper!
The same mechanism that makes UBI necessary is also what makes UBI feasible.
Now if you live in a city, your rent probably wouldn't go down, because it's driven by scarcity much more so than production costs. Robots can't magically add extra space inside of a city. So I suspect most of the people living in wealthy cities would still need jobs, and the people who opt to live on UBI alone would move to cheaper locations. That could be worth the trade off if it means more time to persue hobbies or raise children, etc.
I've seen people use UBI to mean "employment insurance" but that's misuse of the term.
From wikipedia: "A Basic Income would vary with age, but there would be no other conditions: so everyone of the same age would receive the same Basic Income, whatever their gender, employment status, family structure, contribution to society, housing costs, or anything else."
So it's not a small amount of money to do nothing, but just an "extra" small amount of money coming out of either welfare budgets and/or additional taxes.
It's effectively the same, because most people will be paying more taxes than they'll receive in their UBI check. So only a relatively small part of the population would actually receive money, with the rest effectively subsidizing them.
The main advantage over doing explicit means-testing is that this all is much simpler to maintain - you just need to adjust the amount and the tax until you end up with the cut-off (the point at which people are paying more into the system than they are receiving) is where you want it to be. It can even be dynamic, depending on how well the economy is doing.
It's not meant to be solely sustainable. Lots of people get this wrong though, which means the name Universal Basic Income probably isn't the best name for it. Maybe Universal Supplemental Income? Could very well be the idea needs a rebranding before a larger adoption ever happens.
I actually do see it as solely sustainable, in the scenario I outlined.
If the world gets to a point where it doesn't make sense for everyone to have a job—because there aren't enough jobs to be done—we'll want to let some people live in relative comfort without working, at all. Less comfort than the people who do still have jobs, but enough that it's a real choice.
Researchers have tried using different names for it and comparing people's reactions. Terms like "national dividend" or "citizen's dividend" got the most favorable results.
At 1$/vote , those masses will be swayed by the social and "news and commentary" media at whomever pays to focus their ire. And that very news media can also sway people that 'their vote doesnt count'.
I remember when Fox News was running "ObamaCare is Evil Socialism", at the same time talking how the ACA was helping people. Or how they were railing about "illegals" while at the same time discussing Southern farmers' plight because there weren't enough immigrants to work on crops.
I don't know why media companies aren't into school privatization. They could bus the kids on work trips and put their channel on the bus TV. Might have to get some changes in the child labor laws.
Or, critically as another comment a few days ago put it, "automation crowds out those who are just starting their careers, more than those who have already started". Automation can easily prevent you from entering the workplace and moving from low-skill to high skill through experience.
Automation is just "Outsourcing to a computer" Seen that way, many outsourcing companies are just a halfway house to stuff that isn't quite fully automatable yet, but which might become so soon.
1) QA - the tech industry bleats about its automation putting people out of work and then creates millions of jobs mindlessly clicking buttons. shrug
2) Lean startup - creating jobs that are designed to be automated but giving them to Indians to do manually first to test if the idea has legs and the job is even worth doing. This type of work isn't going anywhere even if the individual jobs get automated (as they were designed to be).
3) Semi-skilled work - reading contracts and picking out relevant terms. So far most attempts at solving this problem have been a riotous joke.
