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I dont expect people to do anything they don't want to do. In contrast, it is the people complaining about work (e.g. BI proponents) who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so.

Also, cook, maid, trainer and paan wale - examples given in my blog post - are not bullshit jobs in any sense. They all directly contribute to the happiness of other human beings with no levels of indirection (unlike "good" jobs such as mine).




That's the fallacy though. You aren't expected to do anything to work in support of BI. The whole point is, with increasing automation that all of us don't have to work much anymore to make basic necessities.

Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. The new world we're building is called 'post-scarcity' for a reason.


People want BI/welfare state/etc now, and we are in a world with a huge labor scarcity.

Let's drop it now and take up the issue after we reach post scarcity, when it's so cheap to provide that no one cares about it.


I don't know where that idea is coming from. There are a hundred million Americans under-employed and soon to be replaced with automation. This is an urgent issue.

Already clothes and basic food is so cheap as to be almost free here (the store cost is a fad/fashion tax; clothing is made in factories at pennies a garment).


Those people refuse to work as maids, caring for the elderly, picking crops (remember how we need immigrants to do jobs that Americans just won't do?) and similar.

They are not underemployed, they prefer not to work. Go read the article I linked.


> They are not underemployed, they prefer not to work. Go read the article I linked.

"Prefer not to work" is not a reasonable summary of the article. "Receive no benefit from working" is the real problem.

Not only do low income people in the US lose almost all of their earnings to government benefits phase outs, taking a job incurs expenses. You need transportation to the job, potentially to move to an area with an overall higher cost of living, pay someone to do things you can no longer do yourself because you're busy working, etc.

The result is that for low income people in the US, taking a job can easily cause you to lose money.

Which is the thing a UBI fixes, because there is no phase out other than normal taxes, so you keep >=70% of your earnings and taking a job will actually put more money in your pocket.


A basic job also fixes the disincentives - you work regardless, only question is if it's a bad govt job or a better private one.

A basic job also costs a lot less since it only goes to people who need it.


The problem is it doesn't actually cost less. The taxes you pay for your own UBI cost you nothing.

Meanwhile a basic job has the potential to be very expensive, because unlike a UBI you can't supplement it by working since you're spending your time doing the basic job, so it has to pay a living wage, which is more than the amount you would have to pay as a UBI. And then you will have people who choose the basic job when they would otherwise have chosen an economically productive real job since it's one or the other, which you then have to pay for while at the same time losing the tax revenue you would have had from them doing the real job.

And what happens if too many people choose the basic job so that there are too many unfilled real jobs? With a UBI you can reduce the amount to push more people into the labor force. With a basic job which workers can't supplement with a real job, reducing the amount causes them to starve.


Wait, a UBI won't pay enough to live off of? UBI beneficiaries will all die? That could be pretty cheap.

Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure? In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.

If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?


>In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.

In the US most prisoners are not allowed to work (even for no pay) for this reason.


> Wait, a UBI won't pay enough to live off of? UBI beneficiaries will all die?

They will all find work, which they will be able to without a minimum wage.

Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here and we have a $12,000/year UBI. Finding a job that pays $18,000/year is not possible for everyone but finding a job that pays $6,000/year is, so they don't die.

> Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure?

It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job.

And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.

> In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.

If we could actually do that, i.e. find workers to do the same work for less money, then we could/should do it regardless.

> If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?

A UBI is purely redistributive. You aren't actually buying something, you're only moving money around. It only makes sense to talk about "cost" in the sense of net transfers with government for a given person. For the average person it costs nothing -- they pay $X in taxes and receive $X in UBI, net is zero. People at below average income are net receivers, so if you want to talk about what it "costs" it has to be what it costs to people with above average income.

Moreover, a UBI replaces both welfare/basic job and the progressive tax structure, because the effective tax rate as (taxes - UBI)/income is inherently progressive even with a uniform marginal tax rate. With a basic job you still need a progressive tax structure, which from the perspective of our above average income taxpayer means they then have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than lower income people.

And under both the current welfare system and a UBI, the effective rate paid by lower income people is negative. So unless you're willing to put in place a system that is less progressive than the existing one, a basic job would also have to be coupled with transfer payments to lower income working people. To be equally progressive the transfer payments would have to be the same as the UBI net of taxes.

So they end up costing "the same" until you get to the question of what happens to people who can't find a job that pays a living wage.

Then under a UBI, you let people find whatever job they can even if it doesn't pay a living wage, and let the UBI supplement it so they don't starve.

With a basic job, the government invents work for people.

In some kind of hypothetical sense these could cost the same amount as well. You have a job whose actual economic value is $6000, under a UBI you take the job for $6000 and get a $12,000 UBI, under a basic job the government pays you $18,000 to do the job and then has $6000 worth of productive work done which it can sell on the market or whatever.

But the underlying assumption is that the government is as good at finding productive work for you to do as you are. The bureaucracy itself will waste money, it won't optimize for job satisfaction or consider economically productive activity like providing child care for your own children, and it will have the incentive to invent less productive unskilled jobs for everyone rather than matching each person's abilities to the job. Fundamentally it assumes that the government is as efficient at the market at allocating work, which is hopelessly wrong.

On top of that, it makes the relative value of the basic job too high, so that people have no reason to choose a real job that pays $17K/year and produces >=$17K/year in real value over a basic job that pays $18K/year but only produces $4K/year in real value.

So how does a basic job cost more? Because with a UBI there is someone receiving $12K/year from the government while getting paid another $12K/year to do a job that creates $14K/year in economic value, and then pays $4K/year in taxes, so the government is net -$8K/year to this person. Whereas with a basic job the government is paying the same person $18K/year to produce $4K/year in economic value (which they prefer over the $12K/year real job), so the government is net -$14K/year to the same person, the person has $2K/year less in their pocket and there is $10K/year less economic value produced.


Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here...

It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living.

It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job. And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.

It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.

I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.

https://thecorrespondent.com/541/why-we-should-give-free-mon...


> It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living.

That wouldn't feed an adult for half that long in the US, to say nothing of lawful living quarters or healthcare or transportation.

And even if true, how does it help you? It would allow both the amount of the UBI and the wage of the basic job to be proportionally less, but the necessary amount of the UBI would still be smaller -- at that cost it could be negligible, given that the number of people who can't find a job in the US that would pay $0.18/hour would be nearly if not literally zero.

> It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.

You can't use "building infrastructure" as a basic job because it's already a real job. The benefit of doing the work exceeds the cost of doing the work so it would/should be done regardless of a basic job program and can't be used to create jobs on top of that, unless the additional jobs couldn't otherwise be justified because they provide less public benefit than they cost.

And how is "child care for working women" or "pre-K" better for those people than the equivalent amount of cash which they can use to buy those things or not as they choose? If anything it will make those things worse because a subsidized government option would bankrupt private alternatives that would otherwise provide better service or lower true cost.

> I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.

Was the last paragraph of the previous post not satisfactory?

"Labor disincentive effects" is just a pejorative way of saying that some people may choose to consume their own labor/time rather than selling it to a third party, which is not actually a problem. Your link points out that the "decline" was primarily young mothers and college students. People choosing to spend more time with their children and their studies. How is that bad?

By comparison a basic job directly displaces private labor with less efficient government labor. That's why it costs more -- people will choose a basic job that pays $8 but only produces $2 in value over a private job that pays $6 and produces $7 in value, and now you have higher expenses, less productive value and lower tax revenue.

Choosing to care for your own children over working for someone else doesn't do that because people only make that choice when they get more value from it than the wages they would receive from the other work. They're literally paying themselves (in opportunity cost) to do child care. The ability to do that isn't a cost, it's an efficiency gain.

The only sense in which it's a cost at all is that self-labor is typically untaxed, which is a policy decision that we could make the other way in theory, but we're probably better off not because it implicitly subsidizes self-labor which is generally meritorious (e.g. no transportation costs, no principal-agent problems, no paperwork).


Ah, but people still want to be in fashion, don't they?

If you take people's wants into account, as opposed to their needs according to abstract principles, we're not yet in a post-scarcity society.


Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do.

I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?


You have it backwards. Advertising works because advertisers know what people want. And people WANT social status.

"We even find that relative income is more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1]

"To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2]

1. http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption


These conspicuous consumers are only fooling themselves. If my neighbor spends 4x on his car compared to me, it certainly doesn't make me feel inferior in any way. If anything it makes me feel sorry for him -- must be overcompensating for some other shortcoming.

Yes I've read Veblen so I understand the theory and psychology behind these tactics that advertising exploits (especially luxury advertising), but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom such shallow status markers have no effect.


These conspicuous consumers... are a very important part of the economy :) Think about how many engineering and design jobs there are just creating fancier/faster/prettier/etc versions of basic goods. And if the consumer if happy, whats wrong? A lot of that money would just be sitting in a bank somewhere otherwise. Yes, I know some people would donate it to charity.

"but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom "

Sorry, I didn't mean to generalize all people. I should have said "a large portion of people".


If you take wants into account, we will never be in a post-scarcity society.


> Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it.

Okay, if you don't take it from the taxes of those who work/invest, where do you take the money to provide for the people who don't?


And now is the time for actually doing research into the BI. Instead of speculating and manufacturing fear, uncertainty and doubt.


who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so.

Not all people who make money work for it. What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own? By paying economic rents to these people, the rest of us are supporting their lavish lifestyles while many other people struggle to keep a roof over their heads.


> What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own?

I love how all these revolutionary fantasies always start with the same concept "these greedy capitalist pigs do nothing and get all the money!", as if everything was given to them to just profit from; and even if you want to play the inheritance card, as if their ancestors got the same benefit.


I didn't say they do nothing, I said they don't work for it. Travis Kalanick is a billionaire but he didn't get that money by driving millions of people around in his own car; he paid people (with investor money, no less) to do it for him. You can talk all you want about the huge risk involved in growing a startup but guys like Kalanick will never end up on a street corner holding a filthy cardboard sign.


I favor eliminating the regulations that allow rent seekers to profit - NIMBY rules in coastal cities, taxi and other labor protectionism, etc. I even favor taxes on signalling activities, such as getting a degree.

I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).


The rents mostly go to the banks, who create the loans out of nothing and win either way. Your rent might go to a landlord but to compete in the bidding on the building he must lend as much as anyone else from a bank.

That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.


I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).

Eh, tons of the money made on Wall Street is not really investment income but stuff like management fees, so-called 20 and 2 fees, interest on loans, arbitrage from high-frequency trading, etc.

How are you going to eliminate all of that?


Management fees are labor income. Interest is investment income. I have no desire to eliminate any of this, except for the portions that are economic rents.

As an example of the portion that is a real rent, consider the management fees you pay on 401k investments over and above the management fees paid on equivalent public symbols. (E.g., my last 401k's S&P index fund cost 30 or 40 bps more than SPY.) I favor eliminating this rent by banning 401k's.

Is that what you had in mind?


"rent seeking" and capitalism only differ in that a rent seeker strives to rig the system to maintain for themselves a profit whereas in capitalism it is assume that all profits will drop to zero with competition, and one must chart new territory to regain profitability. Hence if you can maintain your profit (like Apple) then you are probably a rent seeker and not a capitalist.




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