I'm trying to find the pattern in your bad examples. It's not morality, they're all luxuries? Would a gaming computer be bad?
UBI should incentivise other income and would still be available even to the wealthy. Some of the extra will go to industriousness, some will go to frivolousness, but would we expect anything different from general economic prosperity? I guess we need to find a control group that gets more money on their own?
One counter argument to that are the organisational costs, which run against one of the central arguments for UBI - more efficient distribution of the welfare pot, due to the simplified, no questions asked system.
As with current voucher systems, there would definitely arise a black market as people trade them for other goods. This leaves people vulnerable to being exploited.
Finally I would personally argue that people should try and think less rigidly about what is considered a good use of money and time.
Recreation as an end isn't an inherently bad thing - it would lead to a larger market for content creators if you want to think purely pragmatically.
There are also many cases where buying a new computer or a bike, instead of more food, would be of greater benefit to a person and society as a whole. Partly with this in mind, you could argue vouchers restrict any unintended beneficial effects of financial freedom.
How does a UBI prevent this? The people described in the article don't seem to want more money. They want to play video games. Giving them enough money to live off of would allow them to do exactly that while producing nothing of benefit to society. Right now, at least, some of them seem marginally productive (contractors, the cashier, etc).
Utility, as a function of money, generally has a negative second derivative - think Utility(income)=log(income) rather than Utility(income) = income. Utility'(0) > Utility'(UBI), so the UBI is still a massive work disincentive regardless of marginal tax rates.
A better solution is work incentives - EITC, Basic Job (UBI but only if you do government work), that kind of thing.
People are downvoting this, but I think you point to a real problem.
Yes, people are generally good and want to do meaningful things and contribute to society. But we're also lazy, selfish, and good at convincing ourselves to make short-term choices with poor long-term consequences.
I think with UBI, there would be a whole lot of couch potatoes. I don't think that's necessarily morally a bad thing, but if the ratio of couch potatoes to people producing economic activity that pays into the UBI fund is bad enough, it can make UBI simply economically unsustainable whether you think it's a moral good or not.
So there is a balance between:
A. Keeping UBI low enough to incentivize people to produce labor such that UBI is financial self-sustaining.
B. Keeping UBI high enough that people who do not work are not destitute.
I think fans of UBI have a tacit assumption that A is well above B, but I am not so certain.
I think that for most people most of the time, economics falls in the category of things that they evaluate using their moral sense, rather than their practical sense. The important question for them is not whether the UBI works to achieve a specific goal, but whether it is moral or immoral.
"Life requires work. You can't just expect to live without work, and it's wrong for someone to live off the work of others. So UBI has no moral justification."
How about:
"You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want, and instead will engage in hobbies that provide little value to the world?
Your phrasing suggests you favor a UBI, yet your actual claims echo mine (and I'm a UBI opponent). I'm intrigued.
Hmm at a glance your comment seems to have a lot of normative assumptions baked in so it's hard to argue with anyone who doesn't share your beliefs. The comment seems to boil down to:
1. These list of behaviors are good
2. This thing (UBI) does not serve those behaviors
3. Therefore UBI is not good
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First of all anyone who disagrees with one or more of the list of behaviors will probably not be convinced by the remainder of the argument. Those are normative beliefs, anyone from another culture or background/faith won't share all of them with you.
But assuming we accept all of #1, I do not see enough evidence for point #2, why does UBI violate the norms? After all plenty of Christians have been in support of UBI, like MLK and the Pope. I saw the phrase "charity by force" several times but no clear definition of what that is or isn't, for instance the "Basic incentive of working" seems sort of like forceful coercion at some level: you either work or you starve and die. What exactly do these terms mean?
With all that, I'm not convinced that point 3 is supported by what I read.
I don't equate accepting UBI to being a freeloader. If you read the results of various UBI trials, the participants generally used the funds wisely to meet their most immediate and pressing needs, and were then able to take steps to improve their condition, via education or training of some sort. These people didn't need a handout, just a helping hand.
And my main concern isn't about the morality of others, but about my own. What I am concerned about, however, is the state of our society and whether our environment, including our social environment, is improving or deteriorating. That has a direct effect on me. So from my point of view, if my taxes increase to match, say, some Scandinavian country, but my life and my surroundings noticeably improve, that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
All of those seem like valid criticisms against UBI, but is it an argument not to do it? Are those issues non-existant without UBI? Take your third point - what do we do with people who spend all their UBI on drugs and gambling? Even though the “you’ve had your UBI the rest is on you” approach seems morally wrong the current situation is that they get even less or zero help anyway so UBI would only be an improvement for those people.
More importantly, UBI creates incentives for soul-sucking jobs to become better or even desirable.
Society should not rely on it's ability to coherce the less fortunate to sacrifice their lives performing horrible jobs just because it suits the fancy of a minority.
Fair point, but if I had to counter I’d point to egregious wealth accumulation in our society, which is in it’s distilled form is just greed.
The greedy could siphon away most of the UBI, bringing us back to square one. UBI suffers from the assumption that we have a system with the right incentive structures. We kind of don’t from what I’m seeing.
You currently already have the option not to work. The problem is that since we are not post-scarcity by any definition, there is a negative impact of your choice on other people. That is the case even with UBI. The question for me is if that negative impact is outweighed by the positive impact of UBI, most of which I think has nothing to do with choosing not to work but instead is about propping up an economy based on labor when we're shifting away from the labor coming from people.
I wasn't ascribing morality to your freedom to choose to be entirely dependent on society, I was saying that the moral argument that people are important and that socially we should care about, feed and clothe the needy is mostly grounded in religion. Your use case, where a person intellectually chooses to be dependent on UBI because they don't really like working very much, is very different from the one I envision: robots take your job and you have nothing and so are forced into dependency.
The problems this will cause a consumer driven economy are fantastic, and the easy way to prop up said economy is to simply give people money to spend - not too much, or they’d save it. Just enough so that they spend everything you give them, sustaining the cycle. That's the convincing Keynesian argument.
The requirements of “nobody lives in poverty” or the requirement of “no one feels that stealing is the best way to get what they want”
Because ubi would 100% eradicate poverty as we currently define it: making under a certain income
level. Would it improve living situations or get rid of stealing as a “best way to get what you want”? Idk - but it seems clear it’d work better than what we’re
currently doing (systematically impoverishing millions because otherwise nobody would get to own a superyacht)
I was trying to think of parallels with the programming world, and perhaps this analogy might make sense to some people.
Sometimes, the software we maintain accumulates so much tech debt that it becomes very difficult to make any headway. By setting aside some development time to address these issues, we enable developers to gain velocity again.
In a similar way, sometimes we see poor people make illogical economic choices, simply because of a cash crunch. When people are poor, they have too many competing priorities that require urgent attention, and they find themselves caught in a series of wicked choices. A Harvard study suggests that poverty causes 13 point drop in IQ.
The right level of UBI may actually improve the way energy and capital is deployed. It also protects a lot of small employers from economic shocks by smoothing out the velocity of money.
Many readers are rightly concerned about the moral hazard introduced through redistribution of wealth. However, seen through the lens of tech debt and investment, UBI is relatively straight forward way of investing in the future.
A sufficiently low UBI (survival, not comfortable survival with all kinds of nice-to-haves) would be wage subsidy (or microentrepreneurship subsidy, or subsistence farming subsidy) in all but the most extreme cases of zealous frugality combined with a heavy disinclination to work. Excess money beyond survival is a very strong incentive, much stronger at least than replacing survival level welfare with survival level earning, which is what existing systems routinely expect to happen.
I wish you'd explain why this is a bad thing, and that you'd elaborate on it. Do you think half of the people in a UBI world stop working entirely and subsist entirely on their pittance? A third of the people?
How few people would be allowed to go screw around instead of working, for this outcome to be okay?
UBI should incentivise other income and would still be available even to the wealthy. Some of the extra will go to industriousness, some will go to frivolousness, but would we expect anything different from general economic prosperity? I guess we need to find a control group that gets more money on their own?
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