Discussion

Foreword to Civilization

shahmeern: Does UBI really solve the problem, wouldn’t it just make everything more expensive?

wstrange: UBI will require a more progressive tax system. The Oligarchs are having none of that.

Detrytus: Yes, it does cause huge inflation, but that's not even the biggest problem with it. That would be: people do not really like to share fruits of their labor with strangers, so UBI would significantly undermine the motivation to do anything other than bare minimum.UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid of "those useless humans")

satvikpendem: Isn't UBI just a sort of tax, which people pay already, whether they like it or not? I agree with your second paragraph though.

randerson: I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (unconditional and for all residents) so its all theoretical.Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.

bryanlarsen: Not necessarily. It's straightforward to make it revenue neutral.You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though they don't get more money, they have a safety net.People making less than average get more UBI than the tax increase, and those making more pay more.Most people get more money because the median income us a lot lower than the average.

lotyrin: Right, but people with lower incomes spend, and mostly on necessities, I think the idea is that most of those necessities would become more expensive (naturally or artificially due to price-fixing) if the poorest suddenly had more financial power. In the system as it stands, it seems to me like it'd just result in a bunch of money going to grocery giants and their suppliers, landlords, medical, etc.

ciwchris: I recently came across the idea of Universal Basic Capital (UBC): "granting every person a meaningful ownership stake in productive assets from birth." UBC would be enormously difficult to implement, as well as have its own weaknesses. It doesn't seem realistic, but introduces a new idea into the conversation.https://www.digitalistpapers.com/vol2/autorthompson#:~:text=...

nostrebored: This assumes all goods are wanted and consumed equally. Housing, milk, meat, eggs, etc. do not see downward pressure from this.

alpaca128: If UBI is so high that people can afford paying extra without working for it then maybe, but I don't think that is the idea behind UBI. There still needs to be an incentive for people to work, they should just be in a place where they actually have a choice instead of living in survival mode every day.

K0balt: Unions the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods.Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems.But wouldn’t it be great?An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)

estearum: Doesn't matter at all how much it is. It'll be (almost entirely or entirely) eaten by landlords.I am a landlord.I am setting prices for renewal.I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base now has $200/mo more to spend.I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will find a renter.Congrats, mission accomplished.

SoftTalker: How do you control what other landlords do? Why won't any undercut you by $200 and get your tenants?

kbelder: In a normal market, they would. But housing is highly regulated with artificial shortages, so that pricing is very distorted.

ambicapter: The only way? What about built out infrastructure? What about universal health care? What about enforcing laws? What about enforcing truth in advertising? What about punishing various types of crooks in the various markets and transactions, financial and otherwise, that ordinary people take part in?The only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the common idiom says doesn't exist?

Spooky23: [delayed]

georgemcbay: > What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to?I have no faith in Musk's vision of an abundance utopia for many reasons, but I suspect a lot of people would still want to do the job of being a human therapist or hair stylist even if they technically didn't need to for money.They may want to work less than 40 hours a week, but most people do have an inate need to feel like their life has some sort of productive value beyond just base level existing.

neversupervised: UBI will likely be necessary but that won’t appease society. Everyone wants to have a chance to climb the ladder. If it becomes self evident that humans can no longer have a meaningful impact on their outcome, there’ll be riots whether they have a roof and food or not.

Spooky23: [delayed]

lotsofpulp: > I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?This does not have to be the case if higher taxes decrease purchasing power for some.

nostrebored: This does not address the relative purchasing power change on the left of the bell curve.

lotsofpulp: The whole purpose of UBI is to increase the relative purchasing power on the left of the bell curve.But inflation (sum total) is a moot point if total supply of dollars for total demand stays the same. Prices might temporarily increase for staples, such as shelter and food, but that should incentivize sellers in the economy to supply more staples, and fewer luxury goods.The additional supply will eventually bring prices down, but end result is more people have more of the basics.

iso1631: Unless of course that UBI is funded by a land value tax.

shahmeern: Yeah this is the downstream effect I had in mind. You could say we'd increase supply to meet the demand but that hasn't really worked out with housing for example

JumpCrisscross: > most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoodsWhat are the falsehoods in complaints against police unions?

jmyeet: So there are two basic versions of UBI:1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation.As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that.A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is.So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing. That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy.If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China.[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY

throwaway94275: In places that consist of many people with subsidized incomes, like elderly housing complexes, why aren't local grocery stores and gas stations higher than elsewhere?Also, aside from that question, prices will only rise if there's no competition. In a working market, if more people can afford a higher rent more apartments will be built.

estearum: Because the subsidies aren't on top of base income?The subsidy isn't the problem per se, it's the net increase in income.It is obviously self-evident everywhere that high incomes create high cost of living, which can be traced through higher costs all the way down to the land rents (the rent someone is willing to pay to have market access to the high local incomes).

NicuCalcea: I don't see why UBI would necessarily be an increase of income for everyone. It could be that, but it could also be a decrease in hours worked, or a more equal distribution of wealth, or any combination of these.I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by having more time to do things I like.

shahmeern: I don't think that line of reasoning has worked our particularly well for shelter.

lotsofpulp: Just because supply of shelter in certain locales has not kept up with demand for that specific locale, and/or is affected by numerous legalities regarding things like eviction and zoning codes and fire codes and animals, does not mean invalid the theory of higher prices incentivizing sellers to increase supply.

dmitrygr: > most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods.Ah the “I am sure we can all agree … that I’m right” argument.In actuality, there are plenty of very good arguments against unions. That you don’t like them changes nothing

ambicapter: "Solve the problem" probably not, but trigger inflation, probably not, since the amount is so low, it will have very little impact on the behavior of the richest, but it would have a massive impact on the behavior of the poorest, and their purchase habits generally don't impact inflation as much.UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.

kbelder: The purchase habits of the poor impact the products purchased primarily by the poor quite a bit.Cheap rental properties. Basic phone plans. Cheap food. The poor buy vastly more ramen noodles than the rich.

markus_zhang: UBI is good on paper but far from enough. Without Universal Ownership of the State, UBI is easily removed by inflation.A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.

xixixao: If you believe UBI can work, why do you think communism failed?

MrDrDr: I'm not sure UBI would work. But what's that got to do with communism? Communism failed (IMO), because it was incompatible with human nature. People form social hierarchies and like to own property. Would UBI prevent that?

zer00eyz: > Unions the actual solutionNo, they are not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.Changing the table stakes is what needs to happen: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a counter example.Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.

advael: Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)

AndrewKemendo: This is correct and the proof is that police do not strike with labor they fight labor on behalf of capitalThe core premise of a union is that you have solidarity primarily across unions which is actually how you get collective-bargaining at larger scales

GeoAtreides: instead of UBI, we could just reduce working hours, while keeping the same pay. Easier to manage shifts than to upend the whole economy. Something like 3 days a week, with a german approach to sundays (everything closed).

SequoiaHope: The goal we all seek - liberation - is a distant one. That said I’m skeptical that UBI is the right way. UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits. But as we’ve seen, such class members will organize to penetrate the state and contort it for their own ends. Thus any successful UBI will be a compromise or it will be dismantled by the powerful class that owns the economy.In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership.But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense?I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.

PaulDavisThe1st: > UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits.It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all. It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is no need for community ownership of the means of production (though that might have some different benefits, along with some different disadvantages).You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial.Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A with workers in sector B. UBI does.

estimator7292: Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever.Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them.Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.

PaulDavisThe1st: Everything you've written here presupposes a housing shortage.Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they may ever actually accomplish this).

estearum: Housing will always fall short of demand. Nobody, progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an oversupply of housing.

PaulDavisThe1st: I am a progessive state government.I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year.I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we introduced last year.I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on precisely how progressive we're feeling this year).Congrats, mission accomplished.

estearum: Yes! Excellent work. Now there is no incentive for anyone to build housing for our growing population!

PaulDavisThe1st: Indeed, a critical problem. But wait ... what's that? You say there are places where the state builds housing? How could it be?

Anon1096: You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.> Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price.is very obviously not true, otherwise prices right now would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?The answer is always supply and demand. As long as the supply is constrained or demand goes up faster the price will rise. But UBI doesn't change that math at all. (I say this as someone not actually a fan of UBI)

chr1: That extra 200 will also allow some people to move to a rural area, decreasing demand, which means you won't find a renter.

estearum: Yes if you simply assert an upside down reality, this is a good solution.However, people actually move toward higher COL areas as their income permits them to.If more income meant people moved away from high COL areas, cities wouldn't exist. We'd have a flat distribution of people across approximately all land with ultra-low COL and ultra-low productivity everywhere.

SoftTalker: It would not be inflationary if it's paid for with a tax on real value or income. Maybe somewhat inefficient, and prone to political meddling, but it's not introducing new money into the economy.If it's just printed money, it would be.

randerson: It would be in a sense, because that money is otherwise mostly hoarded by the wealthy, whose spending would look the same whether or not they are taxed. If money is saved and not spent, it is not really part of the economy in this sense.But if the money is transferred to others and spent on additional goods & services that is when it increases demand and raises prices.

PaulDavisThe1st: Ah yes, the old "we should actually be grateful to the ultra-rich, because by not spending all the financial resources they accumulate, they save us from inflation!"

PaulDavisThe1st: This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.

estearum: > There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.Yes, bad places at bad times.Can you name good ones?

estearum: > Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?No, because local wages cannot sustain those pricesIf local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all rents would rise to that new higher local income levelThat is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally high in ultra high-income areas like SFEvery single landlord is setting prices by the same metric: what can the people who would live here be able to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil, which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to set prices: by local wages.

estearum: Regulation is not what suppresses production, but the actual profit margins. It's extremely hard to make money building housing because the cost of land and labor are so high. These costs are high because we now live in an advanced economy where land can do much more valuable things than "be housing", and laborers can do much more productive things than "build housing."

K0balt: Sorry, my AI autocorrected “ubi is” to “unions”. When I came back to all these “unions bad” comments I was like WTF are they on about??? lol.But, I will say, often, unions are very positive things. Other times, basically evil. So, I think unions are a mixed bag. But the threat of potential unionization is almost a universal good, so it’s a right worth exercising once in a while.

estearum: > I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by having more time to do things I like.Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount of hours you're currently working?

phil21: > Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount of hours you're currently working?Show me the job like mine where this is an option, and I'll take it in a second. Hire another me and we'll split duties.These sorts of "professional job that pays a professional hourly rate but is for 20 hours a week" are exceedingly rare. You'll usually be taking far less than 50% pay - far worse if you include benefits in the calculation.I've been halfway keeping my eye open for such an opportunity so I could fund the basics of my life, plus have time to do personal projects with utterly no chance of monetary payback. Just stuff like paint the house, teach myself how to weld, work on backyard art, volunteer, etc.I could certainly find a job that pays 50% of what I get now for working the same number of hours though. Perhaps moderately less stress and no "off hours" chance of being called in for an emergency. But that's not a great tradeoff since I'm looking to trade money for time.

JumpCrisscross: > UBI is easily removed by inflationSource? A $20k UBI wouldn’t likely secularly increase food costs on a per-calorie basis. Those folks are already eating. There will just be supply-chain friction as the system adjusts to their newly-expressable preferences.

markus_zhang: Just my hunch, as no major country has really rolled out UBI for everyone.For example, how about supermarkets increasing prices? We already saw that happening for a few years since the COVID. And how about landlords increasing rents?

NicuCalcea: Money.

estearum: More precisely: purchasing power.And that's my point.Your purchasing power will not change.

EGG_CREAM: I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.

estearum: Yes, so un-complicated that we're now talking about state-built housing just to make UBI do anything other than enrich landlords.UBI is a bad idea.State-built housing is not necessarily a bad idea.You can just do the latter and skip the former.

EGG_CREAM: I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don’t really understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or without it, it’s just that the floor of what “affordable housing” is gets risen. Unless you think that an unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn’t produce expensive housing? Which, I think we have many real world case studies in almost every major city in rich countries to disprove that assertion.I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?

SoftTalker: How does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the above scenaro).

larsiusprime: This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...

SoftTalker: The argument seems to be "that landlords are already charging the maximum that tenants are willing to pay for access to a given location and so cannot arbitrarily raise rents when a LVT is imposed."But, if the tenants now have more money in the form of UBI, then that argument doesn't hold.

whattheheckheck: If its an easy 100m do a startup and get funding

K0balt: I’m working on that, but there’s an incentive alignment problem for early stage investment capital that requires investors with a little longer view to avoid kneecapping the value proposition, as well as the potential positive aspects to society.(Am I allowed to be a little ideological when we are facing the potential extinction of humanity?)

JumpCrisscross: > core premise of a union is that you have solidarity primarily across unions which is actually how you get collective-bargaining at larger scalesPolice unions in New York regularly join hands with other public-sector unions.

AnimalMuppet: Community ownership does share across sectors if the community owns both sectors. Why would it not?Also, you haven't really answered the point. You may be able to get this established. But how do you keep it established? How do you keep the elite ownership class from dismantling it? (Based on historically observed behavior, the default assumption is that they will try.) If you don't have a plan that accounts for that, you don't really have a workable plan.

JumpCrisscross: > Police unions aren't the same thing as other unionsWhat about California teachers’ unions? European notaries?

estearum: No the argument is that the landlord will raise rents, but they will not keep them. The gain generated by UBI, by virtue of raising the value of the land underneath the unit, would be recouped by the LVT at tax time.UBI is passed from the tenants to the landlord in the form of higher prices, but is recouped by the LVT, which cannot be passed in reverse from the landlord back to the tenant.

AnimalMuppet: Is it straightforward to get Congress to make it revenue neutral? And to keep it revenue neutral? I don't think so. Politicians find "free money for everybody" to be too easy a way of getting votes.

bryanlarsen: Straightforward? Yes. Easy? heck no.

randerson: I see it more as, we should have taken their money sooner so that we don't have this problem now!

bryanlarsen: Most of those are commodities, where the price is set by the cost of marginal supply.Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI gives people the freedom to move from the former to the latter.Healthcare is screwed up, UBI or no.

bequanna: So in this version of the future, everyone lives in government housing?

PaulDavisThe1st: I didn't say that tackling the elite class wasn't important.But saying that the existence of an elite class implies regulatory capture is a step beyond that.Regulatory capture is absolutely a problem. While one could advocate for eliminating the elite class (e.g. wealth taxes, confiscation, execution ... as you wish), I'd probably go for tightly controlled political donations & spending, combined with a strong anti-corruption culture (which has been severely damaged by, ahem, recent administrations).

jacquesm: I don't think anybody but those that are really close to the halls of power and have sufficient capital to engage in large scale lobbying is going to be able to achieve regulatory capture. So I suspect there is significant, maybe even perfect over lap between the groups that could achieve regulatory capture and the ones that actually do, and that outside of that group it is pointless to even try. You can get into the club by lucky accident, you stay in the club through regulatory capture.

davyAdewoyin: It doesn't matter, because land is scarce resource

gruez: Land might be scarce in the technical sense, but not in the practical sense. Housing is only expensive because people want to live in superstar cities, which in turn is because that's where all the jobs are. If UBI eliminates the imperative to live in superstar cities, that makes scarcity a non-issue.

estearum: Just need UBI, unlike all other forms of marginal increases in income, to spur people to move away from cities rather than towards them.

UncleMeat: Of course there is an incentive to build housing. Developers build homes and then sell them to people who live in those homes.

keeda: My take is that UBI is the most obvious solution but not one we should count on happening. There is just too much political resistance and a population-level mental block against it, at least in the US. Not to mention, Capitalism doesn't like if it can't push labor around. (Which is largely why the mindset exists, but I digress.)I say that we need to realize that by the same token(s) that AI reduces the need for labor, it also reduces the need for capital. A single motivated, disciplined individual can now do, using AI and public elastic clouds, what used to require an entire team. So companies can decimate teams, but companies are largely a source of capital. If you don't need so many people, you don't that much capital either! You could potentially parlay an insight or domain expertise into a viable business. Your moat could be the obscurity of your niche, or relationships, or IP (yes, patents. Suck it up and use every leverage you can.)Easier said than done, of course. This essentially means everyone becomes an entrepreneur. Most people are not cut out for that because (besides hard-to-acquire domain expertise) that requires being immersed in an ocean of uncertainty at all times. None of our education systems prepare people for that, or for what is coming.I expect a time of disruption, but we need to realize that AI not only a tool for the Capital class. It's a tool for us too, if only we can adapt.

lyu07282: This is kind of like social security, medicare or the 5 day work week, if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.

bryanlarsen: And UBI would give people the freedom to move to a place with cheap rent and groceries. Rent is high in places with jobs and low in places without.Supply and demand will work better, lowering prices.