
Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’ - hinchlt
https://sociable.co/business/universal-basic-income-is-the-best-way-to-distribute-an-equity-stake-in-productivity-james-felton-keith/
======
jfgonzalema
I liked this phrase form JFK: "There’s nothing wrong with CEOs making more
than their employees, but that there’s something wrong when the head of a
failing company is making hundreds of times as much money as their
employees..."

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purplezooey
It's just never going to happen. The Howard Jarvis crowd will never let people
get something for nothing. Everybody has to suffer like them.

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ffrancis
Perhaps this thinking on UBI isn't bulletproof, but when you recognise the
distribution of wealth is so concentrated, at the very least this is a great
beginning to start thinking outside of the box in terms of how we approach
Human Rights.

------
egusa
Andrew Yang is getting a lot of traction with UBI in the Presidential race.
It'll be interesting to see if more candidates run on this platform for the
Senate & Congress.

~~~
folkhack
I absolutely love Andrew Yang's calm, "common-sense" demeanor. I got into him
thanks to the Sam Harris podcast. His platform is hard to ignore for someone
who's been around the block both in the bay tech communities and rural
America.

I really hope this is the start of a long and vibrant career in politics for
him!

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buboard
regardless of other arguments for ubi this piece is full of flawed thinking.

> Universal Basic Income means that we can create a universal ownership stake
> in productivity,

There is already a term for that, it's called communism.

> At any point that they publish evidence that they are leveraging knowledge
> or information from an individual, be it an employee or a consumer, they owe
> us a piece

They owe a piece to the government and military that ensure the infrastructure
safety and fairness of the economic environment they work in. They pay that
(and should pay that) through taxes. It doesn't make sense to say that every
time there is an economic transaction both parties should pay back to each
other because they somehow "we owe us" . That's just confused logic.

> am interested in raising income, so I can give people more humanity, more
> dignity, more piece of mind to really uncover what their callings might be,
> so they can be more effective and more contributive in their communities

What you 're giving them is more money to gamble/spend on drugs/ be just as
irresponsible as before. People dont suddenly become productive because you
throw them a bone. Welfare is MUCH better at identifying peoples needs and
filling the gaps rather than expecting that "they ll just figure it out
themselves". UBI is more inhumane than welfare.

> At no point does automation mean that jobs go away,”

I mean, yes it does. by definition, and saying it doesnt doesnt magically fix
it

> So, whatever cool comes from that culture, they owe me and people like me

hmm. i stop here. cant read further

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RickJWagner
Just imagine if Hacker News gave a monthly 'points' stipend to every user. You
wouldn't have to earn up-votes or make popular submissions-- the upvote
'points' would be equitably distributed among all readers.

What would that do to the discussions? Would it encourage more free dialogue?
Would it help promote more civil discourse?

Serious question. It seems like a close model to UBI. Is there a point-
counting-forum that has tried this?

~~~
akvadrako
That's almost how slashdot works - a fixed number of upvotes per article. I
also can't see the relevance to UBI.

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Reedx
> _Value, like energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can change
> form._

This is both false and unproductive. Value is unlocked and created all the
time. People are much wealthier and better off than their ancestors, despite
our far larger population. Hello technology! They didn't have refrigerators,
microwaves, the internet, smart phones, modern medicine and so on. Today we're
increasingly concerned with overeating vs starvation.

As for UBI, I'm not sure if it's the best answer or not, but Andrew Yang makes
the strongest case for it that I've seen:

[https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/](https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/)

Also branding it as a Freedom Dividend is smart.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yeah. Chips made out of silicon are more valuable than silicon is. I mean, how
disconnected from reality does your view have to be to not see that?

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umadon
There are some really interesting comments in this thread, but I wonder what
people think: Where does value come from?

~~~
sesteel
I might not understand what you are getting at, but all value originates from
desire (demand) and scarcity (supply).

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umadon
UBI smells like a trojan horse for privatization of what remains of social
security, disability, unemployment, etc. I would much rather have a robust
national pension system than "Uber, but for retirement."

~~~
mac01021
How would it lead to privatization of those things?

~~~
wmf
Many UBI advocates explicitly say that UBI should replace all existing welfare
programs and people should use their UBI to purchase any services (e.g.
insurance) they need from private companies.

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40acres
UBI is not politically feasible in America, realistically I can only see it
working in a very homogeneous country (religious, ethnic, language, etc.).

Those who want UBI in America should redirect their focus on an expansion of
the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits. I think eliminating the phase in
period of EITC and increasing the benefits (by absorbing other forms of
welfare) is the way to go.

~~~
Nasrudith
I hear this suggested often - why would homogeneity make a difference? Being
too stupid bigotted to benefit yourself if it might help "the other"?

~~~
luckylion
> why would homogeneity make a difference?

Two things I can think of off the top of my head.

People more easily help people that are similar to themselves, simply because
they can easily see themselves in their shoes.

You'd have similar productivity throughout the population, i.e. you won't have
some distinct part of the population do most of the work while other distinct
parts of the population are primarily taking but not contributing. Having
cemented net transfers where, say, protestants to all of the work and
catholics sit around collecting welfare will make for unhappy protestants (and
you need those to be happy, because they do the work).

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ap3
I don’t get what UBI solves vs the existing social safety net programs

>James Felton Keith, tells The Sociable that a Universal Basic Income is the
best way to distribute an equity stake in productivity — thus creating an
“asset holder class.”

US already provides a tremendous amount of value to its residents vs the rest
of the world - doesn’t that count as a stake in productivity ?

~~~
undersuit
The cost of administration of the social safety net programs disappears when
you stop caring if the benefits are used to buy cigarettes instead of milk,
validating that a Section 8 domicile is worth the payments to the owner, or
verifying an individual on unemployment is actively trying to return to work.
Everyone gets $X.

~~~
ap3
I guess, but don’t you lose the safety net too?

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zackmorris
I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound.

Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital
to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where
wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If
half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life
that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited
trait just like cultural identity.

I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI.
Their failures in big picture thinking and long term planning, whether in
basic economic principles like opportunity cost or tragedy of the commons, or
in more existential philosophical matters like whether it's ok to subsist on
the toil of others, shouldn't take precedence over our self-
governance/determination.

What I'm saying is that we're approaching a day when one person owns the
entire discretionary spending of each country, and has effectively corrupted
government to the point where propaganda informs our beliefs more than ethics.
Are we there yet? Maybe not quite. 10 or 20 years away? Perhaps - look who's
president.

UBI threatens the status quo (specifically crony and vulture capitalism) more
than almost any concept I can think of. So for that reason alone, I'm strongly
for it.

~~~
ap3
>If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of
life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an
inherited trait just like cultural identity.

I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished
way of life.

Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it.

Still don’t get how UBI creates wealth

~~~
zackmorris
It's not a question. We passed the point where children have less than a 50%
chance of being wealthier than their parents sometime around 1980:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-
u-s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-
poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility)

Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs
anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet
search will show them so I won't bother listing them here.

The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the
Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should
eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income
brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin
until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should
pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about
$125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is
my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is
that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by
lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires.

UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross
national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human
resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip
burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food
industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending
on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat
that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is
one of the great problems of our time.

Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full
time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US:

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-
underemploymen...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-
underemployment-rate/)

But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more
than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at
more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career
jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money
for their employers, then I think it's around 50%.

UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their
own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is
$20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40
trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if
underemployment is 50%.

I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My
personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of
the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years
of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and
moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward
mobility.

------
maxxxxx
I like the idea but I doubt this will be sustainable long-term. There is
already a lot of pressure to reduce the social safety net and to have more tax
cuts for the "job creators". Why would this be any different with UBI? The
people who work full-time jobs will complain about the slackers who do
nothing. Maybe once almost everything is automated there is a better chance to
do this.

Personally I think it would be better to reduce working hours.

~~~
sesteel
I think many people view UBI as transformative (as you suggest), though they
don't always talk about it in those terms. Increasingly, production and
services will be automated leaving fewer and fewer jobs for people. In a far
off dystopian future, there will be some Ubercorp that does everything,
controls all production and services leaving no paid work for people. UBI is
simply a means for smoothing out the transition for people to new careers or a
world where fewer jobs exist. Obviously, as things become more automated,
taxes on these corps will have to increase. There has to be a cash flow cycle,
otherwise money will pool at the top among the shareholders of the companies
that won the automation race. Thus, as long as there is cash flowing from the
bottom to the top (thanks to UBI) it is sustainable. Otherwise, the economy
will be broken; it already is for some now.

~~~
maxxxxx
" Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now."

If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history
that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other
upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will
lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major
conflict.

We see that already with climate change. There clearly is no will to really
address the issues. We'll have sea levels rising, millions of refugees and
somehow deal with that. We will not prevent that.

~~~
sesteel
I think you are correct. Typically, there needs to be pain before there is
action that is human nature. That pain traditionally has come in the form of
epidemics, famine, and war.

A large part of climate change denial is driven by economic forces. The oil
and transportation industries have built an economy that relies on fossil
fuels. As soon as alternatives are cheaper, there will be a transition. We are
seeing that in the energy sector now where solar has gotten cheaper than coal.
Power companies are starting to make the transition to wind and solar. IMO,
the best thing we can do to solve the climate crisis is to make the economics
of non-fossil fuel energy sources impossible to compete with OR close the loop
on CO and CO2 emissions (converting atmospheric carbon back into fuel).

------
tomschlick
Nobody can ever answer the question of "What happens when someone blows their
UBI and cant afford to eat?" Will we let them starve? You'd almost have to
from the government side of things.

How about 5 years after when someone introduces another entitlement program to
help single mothers/seniors/etc and then criticizes everyone else as heartless
for not supporting it? Will we just end up where we are now with even more
entitlements?

>“I know Jeff Bezos is probably worth $50 million. I know for a fact that he’s
not worth $150 billion. The rest of that money is mine.

Yeah that says it all right there. This guy feels entitled to someone else's
money.

~~~
basch
I've asked this elsewhere recently but here it goes again.

Im sure Im wrong, but wouldnt it make sense to start with like "all rice,
bean, potatoes, and broccoli consumption at the personal level is free" and
start with a food stamp / ebt that buys unlimited of something very specific?
It wouldnt be a currency thats worth trading to other people, landlords
couldnt collect ebt credits in lieu of rent, because everyone would already
have unlimited.

I guess I dont understand why UBI proponents think CASH is the best idea,
compared to more specific tiers like "600 for healthy food, 100 to treat
yourself, 300 for xxxxx." I guess I also find it confusing why it has to be
nothing or 100% without any sort of gradual experimentation. Why does the
program have to immediately ramp up to the full plan?

~~~
slowmovintarget
Destroying the value of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli would signal to
producers that they should grow something more valuable.

The next inclination would naturally be to say "Well, you just force the
growing of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli." You have now landed on a
planned economy, which doesn't work very well.

So healthy staples can't actually be "free for all". I do think that providing
the food directly for people who need it would be a better idea, but you get
associated issues of government price-fixing and dumping of lower quality
food-stuffs.

Federalism is all about experimentation. One of the features is to permit the
autonomy for local governments to attempt local solutions to the specifics of
the problem as it is faced locally. There may be something to be said for a
central (federal) facilitation of local programs, but this almost always takes
the form of funding.

~~~
basch
Why would the value of those plummet? Wouldnt the opposite happen? Did
insurance prices fall, did insurance stock prices fall, when the government
mandated insurance purchases? Do college prices fall when easy access to loans
become more available? I dont follow how a free subsidy would lead to less of
a crop? Do corn subsidies lead to less corn? The government would be paying
rice producers for all the rice people choose to consume. The loser in that
scenario is the tax payer who pays a lot and doesnt eat rice.

If anything, the argument against it would be picking and choosing industry
winners: pistachio, avocado, cheese, meat markets would find it unfair.

------
insickness
UBI will never replace welfare. People are not going to agree to cut off
current welfare programs.

And it will not stay at a $1000. It will go up. Not long after implementation,
a politician will soon say that $1000 is not a livable wage and that it needs
to be $2000. The next politician will say that it needs to be $5000. Basically
this opens the door to socialism where we will just be haggling on the amount
of wealth redistribution. Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.

~~~
maxxxxx
All Western countries (including the US) do some kind of wealth distribution
and it clearly works. Societies without any form of wealth distribution don't
work. Or do you have an example? I can't think of any.

~~~
folkhack
It's a pretty horrible argument unless they come back through to actually
explain what they mean.

> Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.

Is a HUGE sweeping generalization that has literally zero substance in a
discussion - and technically it's false off-the-bat because I'm certain almost
anyone can think of at least ONE example where the "redistribution of wealth"
has worked to lessen human suffering. Also, don't let someone come through
here and try to redefine what they meant by those words - they mean that they
don't believe in wealth re-distribution plain and simple.

When you see binary arguments like that it's a flag to run for the hills.

~~~
insickness
Try responding to the logic of my argument rather than phrase 'wealth
redistribution.' What's to stop this universal income from being pushed higher
and higher to the point where it is a large fraction of income for most people
rather than a small fraction of income? Do you really think that UBI will
replace welfare?

~~~
folkhack
> Try responding to the logic of my argument rather than phrase 'wealth
> redistribution.'

When y'all land it with "Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has" as
the last sentence, I'm left to think that may have been your overall point!

Respectfully, I'm not going to respond to the rest of it because I do not
think we would be able to effectively communicate on the topic.

~~~
insickness
Exactly. You have no response to my arguments.

~~~
maxxxxx
You have stated no arguments.

~~~
folkhack
That's the point - they won't respond to the "Western society" common sense
because they'll just ignore facts and move the goalpost. Which is pretty
convenient when you want to win an argument!

In their eyes, they've won because I won't engage them further when in all
reality no one wins because no one is willing to give up their stance.

You can't nail these folks down on anything - they argue in almost pure
logical fallacy, and the last thing they want is to concede to how the world
_actually_ works... That's why the "fake news" thing was so incredibly
damaging - if anything it signal virtues to everyone to just make up their own
narrative =(

