You don't mention the fact it's completely unworkable mathematically. In the UK I believe it'd cost £240 billion a year. Where the hell would anyone be able to find that money from? (Tackling tax avoidance from Starbucks isn't a credible answer).
Just to put it in context, that's twice the entire NHS's budget, or 5 times our defence spending.
To put it further into context £240 billion is slightly less than what the UK government spends on pensions and welfare. Since basic income would replace much of the need for pensions and welfare, it might just end up more or less balancing out.
Note that this £240 billion will have the overheads of running the welfare system built into it too. So the actual pension checks are only a percentage of that figure, with a basic income that's not means tested the government has far less overhead.
We wouldn't need money for most benefits any more (pensions, income support, etc) so that's about £120bn of the £240bn found immediately. You mention the NHS - we'd be able to spend a lot less on that if people didn't have poverty-induced health problems, so there's another £35bn (assuming a 30% reduction of the £110bn). It's not unreasonable to assume that the difference of £85bn would essentially pay for itself by increasing the tax revenue from people spending their basic income. over time the country's GDP and tax revenue would increase due to people being better off (they go hand-in-hand).
> It's not unreasonable to assume that the difference of £85bn would essentially pay for itself by increasing the tax revenue from people spending their basic income.
If the idea is to give everybody money so that you can tax it more, you're engaging in economic waste. Without being able to increase productivity in other areas to cover the lost value, you will, hopefully slowly, but eventually trend towards zero, and a failure of the system overall.
Encouraging economic productivity in an environment in which nobody has to be productive may or may not be possible, I honestly haven't any idea, but its certainty doesn't seem terribly obvious to me.
It's also worth remembering that at the moment everyone in the UK gets a tax free allowance of £10,600 and an NI free allowance of about £8000 (in 2015/16). The basic income is expected to replace that as well, which means if everyone continues to earn the same amounts that's an extra £2000 per person earning more than £10k (roughly, assuming it's now taxed at 20% in the first tax bracket). NI would be less, and is probably more complex as employers pay some of that, but just assuming that only the employees contributions are now paid on what was previously NI free you're still looking at another £1k each. It's not much individually, but when you take out the costs of administering all of that it'll add up.
Why would poverty related health problems disappear unless the basic income is significantly higher than the current unemployment or disability benefits as you're saying those are being replaced.
A basic income doesn't remove the potential for poverty.
Yeah I'm sure you could find that missing £85bn down the back of a sofa in whitehall.
Sorry, but the whole idea is laughable. Not to mention the fact that it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families because the state will give you more money.
My inner pessimist is expecting to see a "there was this Daily Mail article one time".
Everywhere I look, I see the opposite. Families with a comfortable amount of disposable income have the 2.4 kids, but those in poverty (and particularly the working poor) have 3, or upwards. Anecdotal, but I'm yet to see evidence to the contrary
is it a smooth relationship, or is it more of a step function with 1 steps?
I always suspected that the reality was more like "people who are able to afford children and able to make long-term plans tend to have only as many children as they want, when they feel they are ready, but people who aren't able to afford children or who don't make long-term plans will tend to take a more devil-may-care attitude towards procreation."
From what I heard, in very poor countries children are often treated as investment. A child can start paying itself off by working as soon as even 5 years after being born. As a parent, you want someone to take care of you when you're old, and given high children mortality, you're better off making more of them in hope at least one survives to adulthood. Basically, those people are too poor to afford not having many children.
This is rapidly becoming ancient history. There's a wonderful youtube video showing all the countries on earth, moving on a multimensional chart by infant mortality and standard of living. The origin is ideal. All countries but 1 or two have shot like arrows toward the origin over the last century.
Across countries this is a very noisy cloud of points where, if you go out and calculate a regression it's pointing down. Like every other social variable.
Since population explosion has felt out of fashion, there's a long time that I didn't see such plot. But what I've seen has a much clearer tendency than most social correlations people use at real decisions. It's about as clear as most correlations of quality of life with GDP.
Ok, I think I should have written "international scale", I apologize for the confusion.
I don't know of any study on national level, i.e. of families in a single country. The only thing I know of are anecdotes and stories about very poor families having 5+ children.
Basically if you have two groups of American born, collage educated men, with of the same age then income positively correlates with number of children. But, if you compare collage dropouts vs. people that have PHD's then the PHD population makes more money and has fewer kids. So, education is a huge confounding factor.
We went from 14 being a reasonable age to start a family to 24 or even 34 being the 'reasonable age' that's a huge impact. But, ‘wealth’ as an independent factor aka adjusted for age, education, country etc becomes a positive factor.
PS: Historically, starvation also limited family size.
Checking the latest figures for 2016: 155B for pensions and welfare 56B. I assume the point is to replace both of those completely with the basic income so the net cost is not 240B, it is 29B. Not cheap, but not pie in the sky either. Sell a bank or two :)
£240 billion / 64.1 million people in the UK = £3,744/year (assuming no government overhead).
Seems low. That works out to be £312/mo/person. That certainly wouldn't seem to replace many costs (especially pensions and the like).
Let's say you wanted it to be £500/mo/person. That'd run you £384.6 billion/year. Add in, say, 5% overhead and you're at £403 billion/year. Where does that money come from? If you stick with the idea that the income is universal, you're dishing out £6,000/person/year, waiting a year, then taking it right back via taxes. Which seems incredibly wasteful, and might drive up that 5% overhead number.
You also have to factor in the fact that for most government welfare-type agencies a large portion of their budgets are spent running the bureaucracy, rather than going out to the people. Universal Basic Income greatly reduces the overhead costs. So £1 of Basic Income doesn't replace £1 of a current welfare program; it replaces £2 or £3 of the current program.
Put another way, if the current welfare spending is £120 billion/year, the recipients are only getting £40-£60 billion/year. So that's all of the Basic Income you need to replace the welfare spending, leaving you with a £60-£80 billion/year surplus.
Obviously, the actual amounts depend on the detailed overhead costs for each agency that would be replaced by a UBI program. But I'd be willing to bet on anywhere from 20% to 60% savings for each agency. UBI can be highly automated; with electronic payments and ties to a tax database, it can be as little as a smallish office of administrators and DevOps, and a server farm.
Eh, government bureaucracies in first-world aren't as inefficient as some people make a living claiming. In the US, administrative expenses for Social Security run less than 1% of the budget. Medicaid and Medicare run with similar margins. Compare this to private-sector insurance in the US, where 80-85% "medical loss ratios" (ie, the fraction of premiums paid out for medical care, as opposed to the fraction kept for administration, advertising, and profits) are common; even in the good old days (before the excesses of modern executive compensation, profits, and advertising) MLR peaked at around 95%.
The simple fact is that many social welfare programs are just expensive, because there are a lot of people being helped and the quantity of money you need to spend to make any difference is just adds up.
Bear in mind that "administrative expenses" can mean one thing to ordinary people, and something quite different to a government-sponsored accountant.
When Medicare/Medicaid pays $150 for the same type of crutch that sells in a local pharmacy for $15, that difference does not go into "administrative expenses". I might prefer the expense of a human employee driving to Walgreens, buying a crutch off the shelf, and delivering it by hand to the patient that needs it, rather than paying a hospital that big markup just because that's the most they can charge without the benefits management program automatically denying the expense. Because even if it costs $135 in labor and transportation for a human to do all that, the mere possibility that might happen would discourage the hospital from charging significantly more than the pharmacy across the street for exactly the same item, or from charging different prices to different people based on their insurance plans.
It would even work to just give the patient $150 in cash, and tell them to buy a crutch with it and keep the change. Or carve one out of a tree branch and keep all of it. If they end up not having a crutch, it won't be because they couldn't afford it.
You can't rely on a bureaucracy's reports on itself to reveal the inefficiencies of that bureaucracy. There is just too much political pressure to cook the books.
What distinguishes normal accountants from these apparently corrupt "government-sponsored accountants" who "cook the books"? Do they have pointy ears or forked tongues?
Your basic math is assuming the money is distributed to everyone. Wouldn't it make more sense to only give it to adults? That knocks out probably about 25% of the population so you're looking at 48 million. That gets us to £5000/year. Of course the article mentions differences between what single people get and what couples/families get which would also bring down the numbers.
The reason for that is to cover the cost of raising kids (in my extremely basic example). If the idea is to replace things like welfare, food stamps or whichever programs cover the cost of raising children, I think it's easiest to assume that everybody gets the same dollar amount (the de-facto average amount). There's a lot of ways to try to dice up the numbers (family size, married/unmarried, etc), but I think as a basic example, the numbers are fairly solid.
I did a back of the envelope calculation on this last year (so using 2013 figures) which I've pasted below. It works out not too bad; it's certainly within the realm of reason. I think it would probably be better to start it very low, around £20 a week, and slowly scale it up and let it replace welfare payments gradually.
If you think my figures are significantly out, I'd appreciate any corrections.
[There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.]
Firstly, I prefer to refer to this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as I know for a fact that anyone on a low income would prefer to get a guaranteed £20 a week extra rather than hear a politician say, "We can't afford to pay £75 pounds a week to everyone, so we're doing nothing." Tell me if I'm wrong. But "Basic Income" if the preferred name, so I'll refer to it as that from now on.
The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion.
That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit!
Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far:
Who loves me:
- Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party.
- Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle.
- Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job.
Who hates me:
- Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party.
- People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage.
- Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally).
Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%.
That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week.
There is a problem: we've neglected the people who require more than that either because they're owed it (e.g pensioners) or because they have extra requirements (e.g. orphaned children), so having increased the BI up to £80, I'm now going to cut it again down to £60 a week. This will cover pensioners, people claiming benefits which are currently in excess of £60 and support for vulnerable children (note that children also receive the BI, so 'child benefit' has seen a massive boost from the regular £20 per week maximum).
I'm assuming that 20% of people fall into one of the above categories, so cutting £20 off the BI gives us £160 a week to help these people. This is more than the current basic state pension (£113.10/week) so that's a fairly big increase. I don't want to complicate the calculations any further, so the small number of people who require more than this will have to be paid out of the £50 billion we haven't borrowed.
That's us at £60 per week basic income and up to £160 per week for pensioners and vulnerable people.
And I think I'll leave it there. We might still need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls, but as long as these borrowings total less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £50 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.
Do a thought experiment. Imagine that the entire UK were walled in by an impenetrable barrier enclosing the country out to the boundary of its exclusive economic zone, and every record and memory of ownership were wiped away, such that no one could be entirely certain who owned what. Stimpson J. Cat pushed the History Eraser Button.
On the morning following the event, some boffins assemble and work out an emergency plan for re-establishing a workable economy, on the assumption that one existed before everyone forgot what it was.
Now, with no memory of the past, does the UK have the land, labor, and capital to completely provide for the needs of its people? If that costs £X per year, can the people of the UK produce £X of economic output per year, and with the correct proportions of goods and services?
(For your reference, the UK represents approximately 4% of the global economy.)
I reached my own conclusion as a result. It is completely workable mathematically. It just doesn't work within the existing legal tradition. That's the one that respects property and contracts--the one we all like because it's what we rely on to assure ourselves that the car we drove to work will still be there when we knock off for the day, and the house we go back to won't be full of grubby squatters when we get there.
But as much as we like it, those with more wealth, who lack the will or the imagination to spend what they earn--to keep the production-consumption economy circulating efficiently--like it more. It keeps the grubby middle class from building ugly-but-productive anthills and beehives within sight of their beautiful-but-inefficient homes, yachts, and luxury resorts. And that is what stops the socialist schemes to erase poverty--we just don't have the stones to commit armed robbery to do it. The middle class largely pays for itself, and no more, so the only available source for the necessary resources to haul the lower classes out of poverty is the rich, including the synthetic rich people better known as corporations.
So you swallow your lofty free-market, shalt-not-steal ideals, abandon your pipe dreams of one day being in the upper class, and you tax the rich at near-extortionate rates. Naturally, they would want to flee such a tax regime. Let them. Just stop them from taking the productive capital with them as they go.
It might work out like France. It might work out like Venezuela. It might work out like the USSR. But if it doesn't work out, it won't be because it is a mathematical impossibility. It will just be because someone made a wrong assumption in one of the thousands of possible places to make a mistake when trying to re-engineer an entire national economy.
People starting companies are driven, determined people who want to create things.
The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream. (Step outside the startup bubble for a while). Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit others is a bit far fetched.
Communism (Which is what this is), has failed. Why this generation seems determined to try it again is beyond me.
This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit. It's a fantastic way to reward failure and penalise success, and society will suffer because of it. The numbers are also staggering - it just doesn't work mathematically unless you can magic up billions from somewhere each year.
Also be under no illusion - if a basic income was implemented, the chances are (Assuming you're better off than the average person) you would have to reduce your quality of life substantially to pay for it.
> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed. Why this generation seems determined to try it again is beyond me.
A bit of a stretch there and i should know i was born in a communist country. The reason Communism has failed is because of the lack of checks and balances on power compounded with corruption not because of concepts like this.
> This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit.
Be realistic most rich people are not rich because they are extraordinarily successful it's because they are born rich and there's entire companies with the sole goal of taking advantage of the system (in some cases doing morally wrong things that are technically legal) in order to make rich people get richer. Over the past 5 - 10 years the middle class has been getting poorer while the rich have been getting richer even with the economy collapsing. If you start off rich a lot of doors that are closed for regular people are wide open to you so you don't have to be successful just don't be a fool.
I see basic income as more of a equalizer so people who can't afford billion dollar companies and robotics to replace the workers get to eat as well.
The real reason Communism couldn't succeed (not necessarily the reason it failed) is because none of the countries trying it were or are advanced capitalistic economies before the revolution. Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario, where robots generate so much material wealth as to provide it to everyone, and no one HAS to work, and technology married to political science in turn allows more distributed forms of governance by the people for the people. Once you have that, and of course less bigots running the roost, you have a shot, as a society, to completely do away with 'marginalization', since every city and every community will be self-contained and no one will have to do commutes to serve a master.
Communism, for all I know, is the alternative to Totalitarism (be it from American corporate overlords or from so called extreme "left") in a future where jobs are no longer to be found lying around. It probably won't be called communism, though. China or Germany (and other smaller european countries) may have a shot, but the US seems destined to be ruled by corporate emperors.
> because none of the countries trying it were or are advanced capitalistic economies before the revolution
revolution was the least common way to turn communist. Far more common was "forced by nearby communist country"
Also for example Czechoslovakia was advanced capitalist country. It's often overlooked - it was very industrialized country, with long capitalistic traditions, and democracy before WW2. It also went through war relatively unscratched. In 1950 it had GDP per capita roughly equal to Italy and Ireland, 50% higher than Spain.
> Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario
From the POV of medieval people We're already in a less-scarcity scenario. We just don't like to share, as a species. I highly doubt technology will change that.
> From the POV of medieval people We're already in a less-scarcity scenario. We just don't like to share, as a species. I highly doubt technology will change that.
It seems to me that technology will force that change on us. In a world when a robot can do every job you can, only faster and better, and doesn't eat, sleep or complain, there's little use for you and me. So either we get rid of the whole concept of jobs or starve (or stop the progress, but good luck with that, the very system that threatens to destroy us is the one that's driving progress).
Did it have sufficient over-production that redistribution would remove "common wants" for everyone?
As early as 1845, Marx set that out as a central criteria that would have to be met before a socialist revolution would have any hope of succeeding.
> We just don't like to share, as a species.
And in fact, this is a central aspect of Marx' argument for socialist revolutions: We don't like sharing, and so for the vast majority of workers, the only way of getting a reasonable share is to join up and force the upper classes to surrender their wealth.
Marxism is basically founded on two ideas: 1) Capitalism will eventually make production efficient enough to produce substantial surpluses. 2) Workers will only get "their" share by cooperating to fight the ruling classes, and if they don't they will eventually get marginalised as capitalist competition starts driving down employment and/or incomes.
Nothing assumes people wanting to share. On the contrary, the Marxist focus on revolution is basically based on the idea that there's no chance you'll get wealthy ruling classes to voluntarily give up their wealth.
It assumes once workers won the surpluses won't decrease.
This turned out to be false assumption, because people don't like to share, so they don't work as well if they only get part of the fruits of their work, as they would if they got most of the fruits of their work for themselves.
From what I learned, Communism has this successful capitalism as an assumption, as starting condition. They tried to speed up the process (with bloodshed), so it's no surprise it didn't work, just like you wouldn't expect a baby born 5 months premature to survive. It's not developed enough.
No doubt. Had companies in general not taken advantage of employees nobody would even be considering this option. This is what you get when companies look at the bare minimum they can pay somebody for the work they want.
> communist country. The reason Communism has failed is
> because of the lack of checks and balances on power
> compounded with corruption not because of concepts like
Socialism did not fail because of corruption - capitalism has this too. Socialism failed because of its inability to put pricing on a product due to lack of a market place.
On the other hand, Socialism had tremendous growth. Hitler (another socialist) said, "The Soviet Union is a rotten house - kick in the front door and the whole house will collapse". This was true in the WWI but in WWII the Soviet Union was a different country, they probably had a higher GDP than Germany. Why? Because Stalin achieved growth rates that may have dwarfed China (controversial, but he may have achieved up to 500% Growth in 13 years based on some estimates).
So socialism failed, back to capitalism. Yes, capitalism survived. But how much longer?
>The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream.
I've always felt that this argument against basic minimum income said more about the arguer than society at large. In my experience, everyone has a personal project that gets sidelined for their work.
No it isn't. That isn't their personal project. That's all they have the choice of doing. Most people do those things because they're tired after working hard all day for a wage that doesn't give them enough money to do anything but sit in front of the television. If people had the opportunity to work a bit less in their job so they could do something worthwhile and fulfilling in their spare time, most people would take that choice.
Just look at people who inherit or win large sums of money - a few of them end up just enjoying themselves, but most use the money to follow a cause that they think is something worthwhile. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't be true (on a smaller scale) for a minimum income.
Exactly this. After 8h+ of work for little pay, 2h of commute, doing dishes, dinner and cleaning up, you'll have little energy to do anything creative and constructive. Grabbing a beer and turning on TV is a way to relax before turning in and beginning another day of work. I don't know of a person who doesn't have dreams, hobbies, things to do and create. Many just put it off until they can buy a house, until they can have children, until they can give children education, until they retire...
I think it's even more than necessarily being tired: people who struggle to get by are in a constant state of alert and stress that precludes developing their creative dreams (they will have them, but can't advance on them). When you're stressed you'll turn to addictions to relieve yourself: chocolate, TV, MJ, and some will even become workaholics through some basal twisted work ethic.
That's true, and I know this from first-hand experience. Having an unstable financial situation, constant worrying about how to support 4 people and pay off debts pretty much shuts down your ability to do anything creative. It didn't stop me from having ideas, it didn't even stop me from starting to work on them - but it always stopped me from advancing on them - either because lack of money for required components, or being too stressed out worrying to focus on doing the theoretical/software work. So in the end I ended up opting for watching stuff and reading books as a way to tune down before another day of struggle.
And yes, I am a programmer. You can end up in shit as one too. I made some bad work choices before and ended up pretty much not being paid for half a year.
I think especially because us programmers can get high salaries early on, divorced from both having to save and from the experience of handling money well, we can fall hard. I also speak from personal experience :)/:(
Basically, the argument is that "poor people do stupid stuff" because their "intelligence bandwidth" is being sucked up by worry about where to find the next meal/rental payment/etc. leaving no brainpower for what we well-off and spoilt folk would call "constructive pursuits".
> Just look at people who inherit or win large sums of money - a few of them end up just enjoying themselves, but most use the money to follow a cause that they think is something worthwhile.
Can you link to the source you're talking about? I'd like to know more about what you're referring to.
The studies about people that win money that I've seen paint a different picture: 75% lose it all within 5 years by not spending wisely. It's the same with professional sports players and it's gotten so bad, they have started getting them mandatory professional money managers. I believe there is a Netflix documentary about it called "broke".
People that inherit money also end up losing their money at crazy rates unless they already had good money management skills/work for a living/were taught these skills by their parents.
I don't see how this would be any different with a basic income. Not to mention the inflation caused by it. For starters, all businesses will have their prices raised automatically to pay for the new taxes imposed on them.
In the very beginning, it might be okay in terms of economics. However, as the years go on, more and more people will start relying on this basic income and we will have entire generations of people depending on it to live.
Costs will only increase and there will be less people actually contributing to the tax base, so the only way to continue to pay for it is tax increases on the middle class and everyone else making a living. It's basically just another wealth transfer scheme to people that never earned it.
The sad fact is that the vast majority of people never really appreciate things they haven't earned and although a basic income sounds nice in theory, it's a flawed idea that is doomed to fail.
With all due respect, I think you're really confusing two arguments here; that of wealth distribution and the concept of basic income.
The idea of a basic income does not imply a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the poor or indeed anyone. You could set up a basic income system tomorrow in your country of choice and set the level of basic income and tax levels so that everyone, at least in the beginning, was receiving the same amount of cash they were before.
One advantage of the idea is that the poor would be more likely to find work because the marginal reward is so much better, leading to more wealth overall and sharing out the tax burden more. At least in theory.
"With all due respect, I think you're really confusing two arguments here; that of wealth distribution and the concept of basic income."
With all due respect, you are only thinking about basic income at step 1. I laid out what will happen at step 10..which is essentially a wealth distribution system.
"You could set up a basic income system tomorrow in your country of choice and set the level of basic income and tax levels so that everyone, at least in the beginning, was receiving the same amount of cash they were before."
Where do you think the money comes from to support a basic income? Who do you think pays for it?
"One advantage of the idea is that the poor would be more likely to find work because the marginal reward is so much better"
How so? Many poor people will be content with not finding work and just living on basic income. Minimum wage will also need to be well above what they are getting from the government, further contributing to inflation.
"leading to more wealth overall and sharing out the tax burden more. At least in theory."
You are only looking at it from one very small part of it.
> In the very beginning, it might be okay in terms of economics. However, as the years go on, more and more people will start relying on this basic income and we will have entire generations of people depending on it to live.
The problem here is the rate of job automation vs. job creation right now. There's a lot of indicators suggesting we're reaching - or have reached - the tipping point here. We need a strategy for giving people breathing space to adapt to job destruction. That might be a basic income, or a government backed re-training program perhaps. But the latter supposes that there are enough jobs to go for when they re-train. And the one big growth area, IT, is really limited to those with some some degree of innate talent. Think about all those truckers and taxi drivers who are going to see their jobs eliminated by maybe 2030.
I think you should come out of your elitism bubble and actually interact with some "dumb" people (dumb according to you, you sound like a 1930 eugenics propagator with how you treat IQ).
You'll find that there are a lot of people with drive but lack of opportunities there, just like there are a lot of lazy smart people.
Just provide any reasonable explanation for your claim. I can't imagine any. IQ is a metric that works like this: you do a test on a population, then take the median result and call it IQ 100. If suddenly God Himself put intelligence-enhancing drugs in the rainwater, making everyone smarter than Solomon, you'd still have half of the population below IQ 100.
I know one single person like that. Wanting this is very rare and is a symptom of mental illness. Most people want to be proud of something. Granted, MacDonald's will have problems finding workers, but is that so bad?
Living in Norway it is perfectly possible to slack off on the taxpayers' bill if you want to, but society doesn't collapse. People would rather avoid the low status associated with living on the dole than avoid work.
Norway is extremely different than for example US. With all due respect, I'm sorry, I can't see Norwegians happily supporting social programs if they are mostly designed to help immigrants. US is immigration based. What about Norway consisting in 15-20% of Blacks, than the other 80% coming from all over the world. I believe that about 75% of all Americans are immigrants, their children, or their grandchildren. Would you not mind supporting Latinos, Blacks, Poles, Russians, Germans, Brits, Indians, Pakistanis, and whoever else is there in this pot?
I think in Norway it would end up with much worse results than in the US. I think Norwegians in this case would vote for some kind of nazi stuff. It's enough for you to have a few immigrants here and there to become extreme right.
So, please don't compare and don't think you are any better. You are not.
I don't think the point was saying that Norway is better than the US. The point was saying that in Norway, it's already possible to live with tax payers money, but most people choose to work. So based on the assumption that US people are as good as Norwegians, most US people would still choose to work even if they didn't have to.
> It's enough for you to have a few immigrants here and there to become extreme right.
If you refer to the current government, consider that the junior partner in the current government that is considered "extreme right" by Norwegian standards would mostly be Democrats by US standards. E.g. a substantial proportion of them are in favour of continuing most of a welfare system that would get even many Democrats in hysterics over socialism.
By Norwegian standards, the majority of the US Congress is "extreme right" and threatening "US conditions" is a well established way of scaring people.
...in which we learn the real reason you're against UBI—dirty immigrants.
I really fail to see how this can be anything other than an argument for more fair/equal wealth distribution in the world. If most countries had similar schemes, then why would the "good for nothing immigrants" go to supposedly scrounge in the US?
Yeah, at that rate, I'd only be very slightly worse off than I am now. Maybe I'd lose... $10k-$20k to Horrifying Socialism. But hey, I could restart my life from a capital base of $51k.
That's a lie and you know it. Isn't the refrain parroted here all the time something about bootstrapping your own company? Self funding and all that? While a couple people like you might throw a tantrum and decide not to participate, I imagine there would be 5x that many in poorer places in the world who would be able to more than make up for it and start amazing companies.
No it's not. That's what they do to try and escape the stress from having a shitty job. Which they have to do in order to have a roof over their heads.
Human nature is people wanting to reap rewards for their work (that includes having private property). UBI doesn't take away that.
Speaking of "removing all incentives to do something useful in the long term", this is what capitalism does today. There aren't many businesses or even people caring about long-term in their lives, because you have to pay your rent next month, you have to be competitive today, you have to reach your company's quarterly goals, etc. Competition makes things inherently short-term. UBI is a way to remove some of the pressure from general population, so you'd have an option to say "fuck it, I'm gonna do something for long-term payoff" and not starve in the process.
> Human nature is people wanting to reap rewards for their work (that includes having private property). UBI doesn't take away that.
How are you going to pay for UBI? With taxes. If you already receive a tax free UBI, this means the percentage of taxes on your extra income will drastically increase (with factors, not percentages). This means that when you work for someone else (sell your time/products), only a tiny percentage will go into your pocket.
If daycare of your child costs $500, and your full-time job gets you $500, how many people in this situation will drop their job and become a stay at home parents?
Good point! More stay at home parents is another benefit of BI that I haven't even thought of yet. I get more sold on this idea the more I read about it.
Who is going to pick up the trash, bake bread, repair your car, build your house, build streets, build cars on an assembly line? Less and less people. And less people producing, means less people consuming. Your BI won't be able to support you for very long because prices will increase (less supply). It won't take long before your economy is screwed.
I thought BI was mainly a response to the question "What will we do when most menial jobs are automated with better AI?". Tech that could pick up trash, bake bread, repair your car (If owning a car even makes since at that point in the future).. etc. Honestly its all speculation right now. I think its cool that they are doing this experiment right now, but they may be jumping the gun. However, I also think its jumping the gun to assume it will never work.
Yes indeed you are correct, I forgot about that. But in such a case I think it's still a good idea to own plenty of those robots or be able to do something that a robot can't :).
There is a huge difference between everyone gets exactly the same regardless of merit* (communism) and everyone gets a guaranteed income on which you can just barely make a living (basic income).
The second doesn't disincentivize working, as you still get increased rewards if you work or work harder.
* Unless you are in a position of power of course, then you deserve more.
> There is a huge difference between everyone gets exactly the same regardless of merit* (communism)
Everyone getting exactly the same regardless of merit has nothing to do with communism. So much so that Marx spent a lot of time criticising this idea and tearing it totally apart whenever someone raised it (Critique of the Gotha Programme has a substantial section on this subject).
> and everyone gets a guaranteed income on which you can just barely make a living (basic income).
You realize that basic income will just become another campaign promise to secure votes, right? Couple that with "I can barely live on my basic income!" sob stories and we'll quickly find that basic income won't be so "basic" given enough time.
Seriously? Do you not think you're in a bubble of 1%ers? Most people aren't itching to start a company you know... Most want to watch American Idol and do nothing.
Why does everything have to be an extreme at each end of the spectrum? Either starting companies or doing nothing?
I'd like to believe, possibly naively, that for a lot of people there would be a middle ground. Spending their time on personal growth, creative pursuits, general fitness and well being. In essence, living well.
Just because you're not attempting to start the next social media, it doesn't automatically mean that you have no other interests or internal framework for living.
That's exactly what would happen. Many people would transition to part-time jobs to spend time with their families/friends/volunteer or civic organizations they are already involved in.
You can see it when an 'Average Joe' gets a windfall. Anecdotal evidence is all I have, but having observed several people inherit money from older relatives who have passed, the general first focus is on creating free time to spend with family and friends. Then they focus on those organizations they are already involved in. Then they focus on fun nonsense like large TV's and dumb cars.
Listen bra, if you're not crushing it you ain't worth .
Welcome to the hyper-individualist bro culture based around status and money. The self-worth crutches for people with low self-esteem/ huge uncontrollable egos.
There are also a lot of things that can and need to be done for others (as opposed to personal growth, general fitness, etc.) that don't make sense as companies, or that are perverted beyond recognition when exposed to market pressures. Starting a company is one of many ways of doing things useful to the public, but not the only one.
Who says it has to be a company? How about that guy that wants make music but doesn't have the time to practice due to work. The girl that wants to paint, but is to tired after work.
Why does everything have to be about companies and money? Can't you really imagine any useful social, artistic, or other things these "dumb, lazy" people might want to invest their time into? How about just being a stay at home parent and investing more time in their kids? Do you really think society would not improve from any of these things?
How about science or engineering? Imagine how it would be if scientists actually had time to read papers in their field, perform experiments and pursue some research goals, instead of cranking paper after paper in order to stay employed?
What about all those social projects that people want to do, but don't have time to really support?
Struggling everyone. Why the hell is some bank CEO making several hundred million a year and we have people that can't even reliably be home in the evening to tuck their kids in because they're working 5 jobs. I'm all for taxing high-end income (coporate and private) even more to pay for this.
Why would everyone need to work anyway? It's not tenable. A few more years/decades and we'll have automated so much it'll be impossible to actually employ everyone. So unless you suggest we let everyone who is in a now obsolete field starve, I suggest we start thinking of how we're going to manage a society where it's just impossible for everyone to work.
EDIT: Also, where's this 240 billion figure coming from?
The level of koolaid here is just too large a mountain to attempt to scale.
Automation will just move a few jobs around, like it always has done. And yes - we don't need jobs. But no - that doesn't mean the state should give everyone free money.
Why is it laziness? As I pointed out, repeatedly, above. There's two ways we can go with this discussion. You can state "There is nothing worth of value, except economic value". If that's what you believe, fine. But I think that is a very shallow and hollow belief and then there is not much sense in further discussion.
Alternatively, you can agree that there are pursuits that, while not producing any economic value, are very valuable to society. Such as arts, social projects, research, etc. and that those of us who are good at maximising economic value (but, most likely not spending as much time/effort in other areas) should subsidise those of us who ARE taking care of our elderly, raising kids, or otherwise fulfilling socially and artistically important roles. In which case we can discuss whether basic income is a good way to accomplish this or whether there are better ways.
And what is so terrible about subsiding laziness? Why do you care? If you have more than enough money to do whatever you want, what does it hurt you that someone manages to "not starve" even though they don't "do anything"? Is that really so bad? You would honestly prefer thousands, if not millions, starving to avoid "subsidising laziness"?
The irony that you chose American Idol as the TV show is delightful. It's a prime example of people often from impoverished background trying to better them selves rather than sitting around doing nothing :)
Alternatively you could interpret American Idol as people spending one day a year pursuing an unlikely dream of lavish wealth before going back to the couch to see how the few contestants that made it through get on :)
I'm not sure "practising for reality TV shows" falls into the category of self-actualisation I'm particularly keen to uproot the economy as we know it to fund.
The more I read your posts, the more I imagine you're just someone who's scared that they won't be able to have a bunch of employees paid minimum wage at his beck and call, that he can treat however he wants because they're dependent on him for a job.
Wrong. The majority isn't lazy, the majority is rebelling, in a passive-aggressive way. Faced with a job that they easily recognize as worthless economic make-work, they do as little of it as they must. Faced with having their mental energy drained down to nearly nothing, they prefer no-effort recreational activities like TV.
Basic income will unleash a temporary plague of laziness, as people snatch back control of their own life, raise a middle finger to the world that has hurt them, and seek comfort activities and recuperation. This will continue for a month or two, and then they'll get intolerably antsy for something constructive to do. It's at this point that you'll start to see how much human creativity was stomped upon by "the 9-to-5".
Communism: "A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community, and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs."
Basic Income: "An income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement."
Communism: From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.
Basic Income: From each according to his willingness to work; to each according to his need, plus a share of society's surplus production proportionate to the market value of his contributions.
In the event where people are as a whole unwilling to contribute an amount greater than necessary to meet everyone's basic needs, Basic Income is very similar to Communism. There is no additional incentive to work harder, because any excess you produce is immediately applied to the shortfall. If you really bust your ass instead of skating by, everyone gets an extra roll of toilet paper this year.
If people are generally willing to contribute more than is strictly necessary to keep everyone else alive and healthy, they are very different. Once everyone reaches that critical tipping point, additional voluntary effort is rewarded by the ability to get things you want in addition to the things you need. And that is probably incentive enough to keep the economy from tipping back into "looks like Communism" mode. If you bust your ass instead of skating by, you, personally, can get your very own expensive thingamabob. And that allows someone else to work a job making those expensive thingamabobs, which in turn allows them to get an uncheap doohickey.
As such, it seems rather important to always calculate the "needs" in such a way that people are always incentivized to work, or to work harder than they otherwise would.
Yes, but the state will take more than it gives from the billionaire. This is actually more bureaucratically efficient than manually means testing every possible recipient.
How would they take more from the billionaire? Means test them? What if they're asset rich, cash poor... or if they have no income?
The whole idea is unworkable. It's like it's been dreamed up by a 5 year old.
In the current system, yes. But at least we do away with one set of means testing. I would actually argue for a flat tax rate in the presence of a basic income. As for "asset rich, cash poor, no income" there are plenty of ideas out there for capital or capital gains taxes.
The point of it is that our technology is far outpacing our own capabilities, and pretty soon you'll have to literally become a robot in order to compete for basic income. Instead of allowing only the 1 percent of the rich people to own everybody else, we'll have them pay for everyone to live comfortably so they can do good works, while the rich continue to have their robots do all the work. Everybody wins.
So what if some people decide to use their money to watch TV all day? Its a trade off, in return for some people being able to do things improving society they couldn't have done otherwise, or being able to spend time with their kids rather than work a bullshit job which mostly pays for childcare so they can do their job, we have to put up with a few people having more reality TV to bore us about in the pub. Sounds good to me.
Unless you cite any scientific sources I am going to be blunt here: You are dead wrong. About every point you try to make. Its exactly the other way around. Give people minimum wage with no perspective and they will learn to love the TV. Give people opportunities to be creative and they will flourish.
Be under no illusion: the reason why our culture is so fucked up and our common psyche is so damaged is the capitalist system, that robs humankind of its humanity by stripping humankind of its dignity. We are not cheap resources. We have rights.
Communism is something else entirely (C & P from wiki: "is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production, absence of social classes, money, and the state."). Clearly we can see that UBI is not communism by I will take the bait anyways.
Every single person I know has a passion they would pursue outside of work. Some of them would be productive for society (startups or SME's) and some would be largely neutral (self-indulging in sports for example) but none would be destructive. Contrasting that to their work lives I have witnessed some of them taking part in activities that are largely destructive to society because it is the only thing that will put food on the table. Surviving at a minimum level of comfort should not be merit based. Living in opulence perhaps but not at bare minimum level.
Finally with your last point if society is stabilized through UBI and we leave behind our guilt based protestant work ethic and crime through desperation ridden society I can't see how I would be worse off. I would be able to pursue any project I deemed worthy (even some that are not profitable but would have a profoundly positive impact on society) and not fear financial ruin. The quality of society would improve and therefore the quality of life for everyone also.
Your post is heavily emotional but full of glaring factual inaccuracies that reflect on you more than they reflect on society itself.
> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed. Why this generation seems determined to try it again is beyond me.
Isn't communism about central economic planning? Basic income is explicitly capitalist. No-one decides who ought to do what. We just distribute money, and let the market determine what to fund with it.
Though because you bring up central planning - I think that we should reconsider this idea. In a technological society, central planning run by supercomputers executing global optimization algorithms doesn't sound like that bad of an idea. Historically, central planning failed mostly because there was no way for flesh and blood humans to react fast enough and to optimize well enough (that and usual human corruption). Not to mention we didn't have properly developed optimization theory before the 60s.
It's extremely funny how every argument for Basic Income completely ignores the fact you will have to centrally plan how you're going to get all this endless money to give people. You're going to decide where to raise taxes.
The other problem is that if implemented, any future elections would boil down to which party is going to raise basic income the most (Bribing the electorate).
> This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit. It's a fantastic way to reward failure and penalise success,
That implies that being poor is a product of a personal 'failure'. Sometimes it is. From what I understand though, the vast majority of times it's not. Much like the vast majority of wealthy people aren't wealthy because they really worked at it, but because maybe they worked at it and mostly they were given opportunities that the less fortunate weren't.
I believe you are making yourself upset by arguing from the point of the ideal.
Its not a matter of meritocracy vs basic income. Its the current welfare state vs basic income.
People like you and I are already paying loads of money to the masses in the form of (from an American perspective) Food Stamps, continued Federal make-work programs (like the USPS/military), Social Security, Disability Insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.
Just as a freebie example, The US spends ~$3000 per capita on its military. Cut that in half and give everyone $1500/year no strings attached. That alone would relieve a lot of stress for a large percent of Americans.
No one's arguing that only a small percentage of people are geared toward pursuing high risk/high cost opportunities. But it's not really relevant to the idea of basic income or an indictment of the majority.
The vast majority are happiest when they are doing meaningful work, not by sitting on the couch and eating ice cream while being void of engaging work. This is true for people of all walks of life, the super bright, the super disciplined, the super motivated as well as the other end and everything in between. The concept of basic income would free people to pursue engaging work. Meaningful work does not have to come in the form of trying to cure diseases or build sky scrapers, or start a tech company.
Meaningful work is abundant and not limited by the arbitrary limitations created by a material-consumption-based society what was ushered in by the industrial age, which for the the majority has dictated what is economically viable to make a living. Meaningful work can come in the form of volunteering, gardening, looking after elders, helping the environment, creating beautiful neighbourhoods, social support, skilled crafts, the list is endless and not limited to people with above average intelligence or motivation. Right now these types of endeavours are not economically sustaining for people to focus on.
Given that technology will drastically cut down the amount of jobs required it is beyond obvious that the current orthodoxy just isn't applicable in tomorrow's world. It is obvious today and it's only get worse tomorrow. Autonomous cars and trucks alone will kill millions of jobs, how do these people find economically viable jobs? Office jobs will decline at an exponential pace, because there will be no economically viable reason to employ people for work that is done more efficiently by software.
Given that we can actually sustain billions of people's material needs with most of the work being done by our tools, rather than people, it is complete lunacy to handicap the population by limiting it because the majority won't actually be able to find economically viable work according to yesterday's economy. It is also completely arbitrary. The conditions have changed dramatically and the sooner we adjust the system to fit the new conditions, the better.
“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin.
Practically, I believe you have an argument (though it may not be correct). But I think it's worth reassessing your moral framework: if there's any correlation between wealth and moral worth I expect that's purely a consequence of an increased ability of those with greater resources to act morally; a lifestyle choice.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Basic income is a form of income transfer -a practice that is considered civilized and expected of modern nation states in a scale or another. This is not communism. It is to enable stable societies with people who are content and not prone to be recruited for an armed mob for populist causes.
Income transfers were implemented as tools to block communism by no one else than the benevolent, friend of the people, Iron-Friggin-Chancelor Bismarck, not because of fairness, but of social stability.
Most successful North European countries can implement basic income in cost neutral way. For example, in Finland 560 EUR basic income would not increase overall taxation.
> This is about stealing money from the successful, and giving it to everyone, regardless of merit. It's a fantastic way to reward failure and penalise success, and society will suffer because of it.
Then those people starting companies you mentioned are not interested in creating things; they are interested in making money.
I think the basic argument for testing this is that in the future it might very well be the case that only a small portion of society can do "meaningfull work". Think of an AI future or a vastly automated one.
Sure one solution is pushing the wages of say a factory worker up so it's enough to sustain them. In reality we'll probably reach a point where lots of manual labor jobs shouldn't rationally be done by humans. It's a very hard problem to solve imo and naive "comperative advantage though" isn't the answer.
I mean I can see a ton of reasons against base incomes but I also don't see many good answers for a scenario where say half the currently working population could be "optimized away".
With just basic income, how will the majority afford buying a TV or ice cream? Neither of those two products are basic necessities, and ice cream specifically is kind of expensive and would require a job in order to be afforded.
> The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream.
I'm sure you can cite evidence of this claim from basic income pilot programs, then? (there has been a few).
> Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit others is a bit far fetched.
Here we agree, but it's beside the point as there's a very good reason for them to do things to benefit themselves that will have the side effect of benefiting others:
They'll make more money. The point of basic income programs is to create a lower threshold that is predictable, simple to administer and unconditional. It's not to create a ceiling on income.
> Communism (Which is what this is), has failed.
This is quite comical, because it has nothing to do with communism, and indeed the idea predates socialism by about 300 years.
It has over the centuries had supporters spanning large parts of the political spectrum. One of the important aspects of basic income is that it is not particularly ideological in its basic form:
There's no implication that the basic income is meant for widespread redistribution, though some proponents wants it to be high enough for that. Many proponents, in fact, specifically makes the argument that done properly it may potentially reduce government expenditure by eliminating a whole host of benefits programs that are expensive to run and hence cut administrative costs. This is an argument often made by liberalists (as in classical liberals by the European definition) for example.
In fact, if you were to push for a form of basic income that would be high enough to make it something most people would happily live on if they could otherwise work, it would be fundamentally at odds with Marx ideas of communism. In "Critique of The Gotha Programme" he skewered the idea that communism involved equal pay, by pointing out that this would be extremely unfair:
People have different needs. Instead, according to Marx, the goal for a communist society should be from each according to ability, to each according to need - in other words: while a basic income could fit within a communist framework, as the only source of income it would just create different problems: it would overpay people who choose to not contribute even though they are able to, and would underpay people with special needs.
This, incidentally is also the reason pretty much no proponents - regardless where they fall on the political spectrum - advocate a basic income that is particularly high. It's called basic income for a reason.
And even if your dim view of people is true - that all but a minority of people are so lazy they would all just sit on the couch and do nothing - it would not matter. When our tools are providing all of what the population needs, what is the realist, capitalist, economic argument for employing them?
What you say may or may not be true, but such a sweeping statement about humanity needs to be backed up with facts. Has anyone studied whether people are generally lazy?
Are you that scared that it might work? It's a social experiment carried out by the government, not judgement day. Let's see what result it produces before rejecting it.
"People starting companies are driven, determined people who want to create things."
Most of them are also extremely lucky in that they either don't need things like healthcare, or don't have families.
"This is about stealing money from the successful"
No, it's not. Those people would not have been successful in the first place if not for the advantages and benefits they had growing up in a first world country.
This worked for me. My account was suspended in error years ago (Suspect logins or something), and the only way I got it back was by calling up an adwords representative and telling them I couldn't login to adwords and spend money until they unsuspend my email account.
Yes. I had to fax them something (I forget what) to prove it was my email address. It took about a week to get it sorted.
I'd echo others though - Google is awful at support. They're awful at communication. They decide to shut down products at the drop of a hat without telling people. Avoid Google if you can.
It's going to be great when these cars are around a bit more. You could have some pretty good fun trying to get one of the self driving cars to crash into you. Won't be that hard to do I'm sure.
Google plans to make their self-driving car available to the public by 2020 [0]. Perhaps they aren't going to hit that deadline but I doubt they'll miss it by 80 years.
Great, they're saying that, but, on the other hand, they only operate them in a small area in Mountain View because the level of detail the things need to operate is just not there anywhere in the US. In addition, the driverless cars have trouble dealing with temporary road closures and the like -- the kind of stuff human drivers have to deal with regularly. It's not at all clear that this is going to be a practical technology anytime soon, despite all the hype.
> Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn’t be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole?
> If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014.
Self driving cars are essentially a software project (and more) and I've never heard of a software project having an estimate that far out and ever being even close to making its deadline.
My personal opinion is that self-driving cars that are reliable enough to literally not have a steering wheel will be perpetually a "few years away", similar to how we're always saying nuclear fusion or true AI is just a few decades off. It's like the 80/20 rule but more like 99/1... That last 1% of capabilities required to make cars truly driverless are going to take 99% of the effort.
Making them available in California isn't the same as making them available in a). Countries that have weather, and b). Countries that have curved roads.
As another poster comments, it's as close as several other science fiction things that are always "A few years away!".
Is there any basis for thinking this is 100 years away when we have working prototypes now? Compare other technologies which had working prototypes; did any take 100 years to get to operation? (The longest/closest I can think of is 'flying cars', which first ran in '47 and don't have a clear road to success today. There are many counter-examples.)
There's a lot of examples. Just watch Back To The Future Part II for some obvious examples.
When they landed on the moon, do you think they thought we'd still be faffing about doing not much in space 50 years later? I'm betting they thought we'd be colonising mars by now.
You get what you pay for. If you're happy to entrust your life into a random untrained uninsured stranger, then go ahead and get the cheaper unregulated taxi.
Regulations didn't save John Nash from dying in a traditional taxi. If you're happy to entrust your life to a random stranger that's shielded from market conditions/feedback, then go ahead and get the regulated taxi.
You think market conditions will make taxis safer? Why do you think we have OSHA? Why do you think selling products with lead paint in them is illegal?
Market conditions have made transportation safer. Two way rating systems, accessible GPS, drivers #, drivers picture, driers location, arrival time etc.
These qualities are present because they were superior to the previous market provider, in order to compete in a free market your product or service has to be superior in some manner. Competitive market forces like safety, efficieny (both price and liquidity) are what makes Uber successful.
No laws dictated these qualities, no legislation demanded this level of safety. These practices were conceived via market forces, and safety was a by product.
The entire point of Uber is that the taxi industry is not a free market, therefore the things necessary to compete in a theoretical "free market" are not relevant and can't be assumed to be why Uber is successful.
Uber uses roads that were designed to comply with government safety regulations and their drivers drive cars designed to comply with a different set of government safety regulations. Those regulations exist because experience has shown that they need to.
Unless I'm wrong you're arguing that Uber is safe and efficient because market forces made it so. It's efficient because of technological advances and it's safe literally to the extent required by law.
Because they've opted out of the regulations their competitors are subject to Uber could offer a a more dangerous and less efficient service than current taxi companies and still "compete".
Safety precautions are in fact codified by law. Uber is in the business of breaking the law and ignoring all regulations. The fact that they have a substitute that follows the spirit of the regulations if not the letter and provides safety is the only reason governments have chosen to allow Uber to exist. The safety precautions Uber has ARE required by regulation, though implicitly; they act as a substitute which makes Uber's lawbreaking far less egregious.
I'm pretty sure that the taxi that was being touted for the first time was also unregulated, so it's extremely unclear here what 3x my money was going to get me.
Quality of black cabs and mini-cabs in London in also wildly variable. At least with uber you can actually leave a bad review (I'm not sure what comes of those) but I get a response on bad reviews at least.
Almost every black cab ride I've ever had has been great - and they most certainly know how to get round London better than a newly minted uber driver with google maps. However if you've never had a black cab with the driver spouting racist/misogynist/anti immigration rhetoric they whole journey, then you haven't lived ;-)
A lot of taxi drivers grew up when London was part of England, before it became a "global city". It's unsurprising that they miss those days when it was still culturally part of England.
Just to put it in context, that's twice the entire NHS's budget, or 5 times our defence spending.