
Basic income is the worst response to automation - atemerev
http://www.realclearfuture.com/articles/2016/08/15/basic_income_worst_response_to_automation_111934.html
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olegkikin
The author makes a classical mistake, thinking that the displaced low-skill
workers can and will gain high-tech skills. I think that's a complete pipe
dream. Yes, millions are employed in IT and engineering, but we're talking
about billions of uneducated or barely educated people who will lose their
jobs very quickly.

If you want to see what happens when people go into IT out of necessity, look
at the Indian IT market. It's full of "programmers" who can't solve the
simplest problems, who hate what they do, who produce really low quality code.
(And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys,
but the average case is rather bad).

Not only that, we don't have the IT jobs, even if all of them did learn to
code.

As far as I can see, welfare state is inevitable, as much as I'm against it.
It's still better than to let people lose their homes and/or starve.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Consider a Trump voting factory worker who lost his job. There is nothing
(besides his own pride) preventing him from taking up elder care, house
cleaning, nursing or something similar. This is a necessary economic
transition.

As the article notes, a BI makes it easy for this person to avoid making the
necessary transition into the pink collar economy. The result is that our
elderly are not sufficiently cared for, our high skill labor has dirty houses,
our patients don't get adequate nursing care, and similar things.

Why should the elderly suffer without adequate care simply because this
person's misguided pride is preventing him from taking on pink collar jobs?

~~~
wrsh07
At some point there won't be jobs to transition to, though. How do humans
survive when they simply aren't needed?

(And how do we make them feel valued by society?)

~~~
yummyfajitas
If that day ever comes then perhaps a BI might be helpful. It'll certainly be
cheap. Right now the problem we have is too little labor, not too much.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Evidence? 95 million adult Americans are currently out of work. That doesn't
sound like "too little" to me.

What you really mean is "too few willing to do scut work for a pittance".
That's an entirely different thing.

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15000000)

~~~
yummyfajitas
You realize that your number includes children, the disabled and retirees,
right?

It's not an entirely different thing that people are refusing work because
they prefer the laziness that government programs enable. That's the whole
point. BI only makes this problem worse.

~~~
Turing_Machine
The only "children" on that chart are those 16 and up (i.e., old enough to
quit school and go to work). While there have been increases in retirees in
recent years, that's not nearly enough to account for the spike on that chart.

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gcorneu
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the concept of universal basic income based
on the idea that everyone who is a citizen, regardless of
earnings/wealth/background, gets a set amount of money? Rather than the
scaling mechanism based on earnings as stated in this article.

~~~
Rekaiden
You are correct. The article is flatly wrong when it suggests that people
would lose the UBI as they start making money elsewhere. It is not global
unemployment insurance.

~~~
cderwin
There are certainly UBI proposals in which at some point UBI does scale back.
I don't see a good reason why it scaling back would disqualify it from being a
UBI, and I certainly see little likeness to unemployment insurance.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I guess the justification for not scaling it back would be that it makes it
more palatable for the people paying for it. If someone received $10,000 in
UBI and payed $10,000 in tax it would be neutral but their attitude to other
recipients might be different.

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majewsky
> The average annual income for tech industry workers is about $100,000.

Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?

> If the basic income will pay you $30,000 a year to do nothing, and that
> subsidy goes away as you make more money, so at an income of $100,000 your
> government subsidy disappears, you are paying an implicit tax rate of 30% on
> top of the taxes you are already paying to support everyone else's basic
> income.

The fallacy here is that not all taxes have to be on someone else's income.

> Officially, the poverty rate has only declined from 19% to about 16%—but by
> the admission of the War on Poverty's own defenders, "If government benefits
> are excluded, today's poverty rate would be 29 percent." That's what it
> means to make the poor more secure in their poverty.

Uhm... what? I think the author has a wildly different definition of poverty
than I do. In my book, poverty means "not having enough money to afford the
basic means of living and participation in society and culture". It's quite
irrelevant if that money comes from a state subsidy or from a loan. It just
means that I'm dependent on the state rather than on an employer. But for him,
state money seems to be non-existent as far as poverty is concerned.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Does anyone know what "tech industry worker" means here?"

Yeah, that's so vague it's almost meaningless.

You could argue that the guy who unboxes stuff at Best Buy is a "tech industry
worker", but there's a pretty significant gap between him and the guy who
creates market models for a hedge fund.

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beat
Of course, there are a lot of jobs that _aren 't_ done because they're
economically unviable - from dance to ministry to full-time parenting. The
author is working from a hidden assumption in most economic discussion - that
all value can be measured in dollars. If you can't put a dollar value on it,
it has no value.

That is, of course, bullshit. But it doesn't stop them.

Beyond food, shelter, health care, communication, transportation... what are
our _needs_ , exactly? What problem do we solve by having most adults devoting
the majority of their waking hours to something they actively dislike?

~~~
FussyZeus
This is _always_ the problem. I get it, activity that generates additional
wealth is always preferred but it's not the only way a given person can
contribute to society.

There's a economically solid argument to pay people to sit at home and not
commit crime, start riots, devalue property by being homeless, or anything
else vast numbers of people with no options currently do. Paying for someone's
apartment and living expenses is FAR cheaper than the economic value lost by
them devaluing property and tying up Emergency Services.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If the purpose of a BI is to protect productive members of society from
destructive bandits, why not just wall ourselves off from them? That seems far
cheaper.

Newark, NJ causes a lot of harm to taxpayers who are forced to funnel
resources to it. As far as I'm aware, bandits from Newark do not generally
stage raids into Hoboken to steal resources from the productive folks living
there.

Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how an
economically solid argument might work?

~~~
FussyZeus
I could but someone beat me to it:

[http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2012/mar/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2012/mar/12/shaun-donovan/hud-secretary-says-homeless-person-
costs-taxpayers/)

That was minus 4 years worth of inflation and even then, if you take the most
optimistic homeless numbers versus the most pessimistic housing numbers, it's
still only a few hundred more. Frankly I'd much rather my tax dollars went to
that than a ton of other things we blow way more money on.

~~~
yummyfajitas
That's not really what I was asking about. I was asking about a comparative
cost between a) paying people who would otherwise "commit crime, start riots,
devalue property" or b) just walling ourselves off from them.

You're just comparing two different versions of (a).

~~~
FussyZeus
Oh, I misunderstood what you were saying. My apologies.

Anyway addressing that point, putting aside the humanitarian issues of "if you
aren't going to behave the way we want you to, you get thrown out of society
and are left to presumably starve and die" the simple fact is that walling
them off is going to be exceptionally difficult to do, just for the logistics
and the construction required. Not to mention, even if you make the laws
pretty permissive, I have a feeling you'd have a lot more have-nots than
haves, and at the end of the day, numbers do matter...

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm not sure what's wrong with "if you become a dangerous bandit, society
doesn't welcome you". It's you who described the poor as bandits that are
cheaper to pay off than protect ourselves from, not me.

I agree numbers matter, which is why I asked if you had a ballpark on them. I
guess you don't?

~~~
FussyZeus
Woah woah woah, back up a bit. I never once said that all poor people are
bandits. I said that keeping people homeless who then in turn tie up emergency
services (because they can't practice hygiene, eat properly or go to the
doctor until they're on the edge of death) is more expensive that you'd think,
and that when a number of homeless people live in a given area that it impacts
property values, not to mention the image of the community. I'm not saying
they're malicious about it, I'm saying that's what happens when you don't have
access to basic services.

This study shows that just giving people a home is not only vastly superior
ethically, but helps these people get OUT of that situation and in many ways
can be cheaper too.

~~~
yummyfajitas
You said we should "pay people to sit at home and not commit crime, start
riots...".

I'm asking whether paying the dane geld is really the most cost effective
solution to this problem. I think we've now agreed that it's not actually a
real problem, and probably just a post-hoc justification for what you really
want to do?

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sauronlord
Data driven decisions please, all others are opinions and emotion.

If there is a greater (measurable) net benefit to society with Universal Basic
Income vs. our socialist agenda of getting into peoples lives more directly
(food stamps, healthcare, low income and child subsidies)... then who gives a
damn?

If you are unaware, or lacking a deep appreciation, of what money is
(fractional reserve banking) then you have little, if anything at all, to
contribute to this "debate"

~~~
Oletros
What is the difference between providing UBI and Healthcare?

If there is a net benefit for the society if Healthcare is provided, will you
agree with the government providing it?

~~~
wyager
Not the GP, but yes I would. The problem is that this is _very_ hard to
demonstrate for several reasons.

First, most analyses assume that healthcare is fungible, so anyone who "has
healthcare" is considered to be in the same boat. This is untrue. Most
government-provided healthcare systems rank quite poorly in terms of wait
times, fatality rates, etc. compared to private healthcare.

Second, it's hard to distinguish the benefit of government medical systems
from the benefit of freeing the private medical system from legal red tape.
For example, many people cite lower drug costs as a benefit of government
medicine. This is not an intrinsic feature of "single-payer" healthcare, but
rather a result of the fact that drug agencies in the US have the full weight
of the patent system behind them in order to create artificial scarcity and
drive up prices. In other countries, since the government both buys drugs and
controls IP, the government always has the threat of removing IP rights to a
drug if a company fails to provide a "reasonable" price, which simulates
actual competition. One could get the same effect by changing the nature of
medical IP rather than taking the drastic measure of publicizing drug
purchases. _That_ is a utility analysis I'd really like to see.

Third, one must include the utility of having a choice. There are both
psychological and practical components to this, but it's better when you're
not forced to pay for a service you don't want. I know how good private
healthcare can be; just go to a tourist hospital in Mexico or India. Truly an
awesome experience. A super easy way to get all the alleged benefits of
socialized healthcare (especially affordability) is just to deregulate the
shit out of hospitals. A lot of Americans are scared about that because they
think deregulation is synonymous with the triangle shirtwaist factory, but
it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in medically
deregulated countries.

~~~
Oletros
> Most government-provided healthcare systems rank quite poorly in terms of
> wait times, fatality rates, etc. compared to private healthcare.

I suppose that you can provide sources for your claim.

> but it's truly a mind-bending experience how good the healthcare is in
> medically deregulated countries

If you can afford it, can the Mexican and Indian citizens afford that health
care in "tourist hospitals"?

~~~
wyager
Not really interested in finding a study that happens to support that
particular claim, especially since "quality" in this case is 100% subjective,
so someone else could very reasonably disagree with me. All I can talk about
is my experience; take it as nothing more than an opinion. The NHS sucks,
Canadian healthcare sucks, US healthcare is good but expensive and
overcomplicated, Mexican healthcare is great. I have heard from friends how
Indian healthcare is similarly excellent, and French and German healthcare
suck (unless, in the German case, you are a US citizen with US insurance, then
they'll actually treat you well because they can get paid for it).

> If you can afford it, can the Mexican and Indian citizens afford that health
> care in "tourist hospitals"?

That's completely irrelevant. We're comparing the quality of care at the same
price point. Obviously poorer people in poor countries won't be able to pay
for the luxury healthcare that your average first-worlder can. They also
wouldn't be able to afford the kind of socialized healthcare we could afford.

Just to give you a price point, 2 hours with a doctor (not a nurse), 2 x-rays,
and an ultrasound was under $250 in Mexico. No paperwork, no waiting, no
bullshit. Happy medical staff, happy patients. The exact opposite of any red-
tape-encumbered first-world hospital.

~~~
Oletros
If you say that French system suck and Mexican system is great then we can't
discuss anything

~~~
wyager
Which of the two have you used personally?

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sp332
This article is just relentlessly wrong. People did die of starvation and
exposure after each of the revolutions mentioned. Working days did become
shorter and welfare expanded massively after each one. Best line: "The future
doesn't come that fast". How wrong can you be? It's hard enough to predict the
outcome of multiple nonlinearities interacting. But it's impossible if you're
not even looking. You definitely can't assume that things are going to turn
out like last time.

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mcguire
" _Yes, the transition can be harsh for some workers. But let 's be more
specific: it is harsh for those who are unable or unwilling to adapt and
develop the new skills required for the new work._"

Aye, and there's the rub.

The problem isn't economic, though, in the sense that economics can be
separated from politics; it's political. No one really cares about the poor.
The fact that people are unemployed is unimportant.

What is a problem is social and political instability. A large class of poor
are going to cause problems, from crime to religious extremism to good old
fashioned bomb throwing socialists. Those transitions cause that kind of
instability, in spades.

Unfortunately, hand waving that away with a minimum income probably won't work
any better than retraining does.

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henrik_w
Another critical voice: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-
income-a-sel...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-
sellout-of-the-american-dream/)

------
matt4077
Just because the predictions in the past were wrong doesn't mean they can't
ever be right...

I'd argue that when machines replaced the most menial tasks in the past,
people always had the opportunity to move upwards (in terms of required
skills). Up until now, they were replacing either animals (horse->tractor,
mule->truck) or people who were overqualified for the work they did.

The animals couldn't move to greener pastures, except for a few extremely
well-adapted creatures who found new jobs as pets, or in sports. Humans in
general were versatile enough to find something better, and the machines added
enough free productivity to the system to allow us to consume what they were
producing on top of the necessities previously consumed.

It seems plausible to me that we're getting to the point where algorithms
start to replace people actually operating at the limit of their capacities.

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holydude
Globalised world makes services and goods cheap but at what price ?

I see people and countries wanting self sufficiency and heavily taxing or even
banning mega corps. If production of goods will be so cheap that it will make
90% of workforce obsolete that will effectively leave countries at the mercy
of mega corps that can afford r&d and servicing the automation machinery.

People are already fed up with eating meat that has been transported from the
other part of the globe or just buying nails or some other basic commodity
items that could have been produced locally.

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wrsh07
I heard a proposal that UBI should provide 85% of a solid living wage, people
taking it may need to work some (or sell art etc) to reach their desired level
of comfort.

Then people pursuing education would receive 115% of aforementioned baseline.
The conceit here is that educating oneself is always good. This would, at
least, provide some impetus to develop new employable skills.

~~~
equalunique
I'm not a fan of UBI. Whatever this proposal is, I do not like it.

What incentive is there for real employable skills when sitting back in a
classroom is going to give one more than what is needed for survival? People
are more likely to take bullshit classes.

Real employable skills come from actual employment. If we're going to blindly
trust that actual employment will magically provide 85% or even 115% of the
cost of living, then we're making a dangerous mistake.

~~~
wrsh07
I don't think you understand that the proposal for ubi comes from the futurist
idea that humans won't need to work anymore.

If you take issue with that idea: fine. Let's hash it out not in a basic
income thread.

If you accept the above premise, then the notion of humans needing employment
is absurd.

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eximius
This article makes a few false assumptions, I think.

1\. That everyone _can_ transition into new jobs. Whether it be lack of
education, intelligence, or just being at an age where the brain isn't as
plastic as it used it, it is _hard_ to find a new job if your field ceases to
exist.

2\. He correctly assesses that this will be a slow transition (if at all).
This will actually inhibit people from trying to learn new skills because they
won't realize their job sector is dead until its too late.

3\. He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.

~~~
judah
>> He assumes that it is a bad thing to not require work.

And that's probably a good assumption. There's wisdom behind the old adage,
"An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools."

Experience tells us that people who don't work tend to spend their time not in
beautiful creative ventures, but in frivolous (TV, gaming, entertainment) or
destructive acts (drugs, crime, violence...).

A person who works is likely more well-rounded (better at handling
responsibility, working with others, contributing to society in some small
way, etc.) than a person who instead spends his day watching day-time
television.

~~~
projct
You'd need evidence for this position...

~~~
eximius
His position is self fulfilling. We only see the negative folks he's talking
about. There are plenty of financially independent folks who continue to work
because they want to.

