I would argue that wealth redistribution (which UBI absolutely is) is not a zero sum game.
First, let's talk about utility. Utility of capital is non-linear. So, if we take $100 out of a millionaire's pocket, and distribute it evenly to 10 people who each have $100. The millionaire's ability to contribute to society has decreased by 10 units. The ten other members of society each had their ability to contribute to society increase by 2 units. We've generated a net-gain for society by redistributing wealth.
Second, we can look at the dollar value of the system. Yes, I would argue that even the dollar value of this redistribution is not a zero sum game. Obviously the basic transfer of wealth was zero sum. But it made our enonomy slightly more efficient by improving the capacity of the 10 citizens. Let's say the economy grows $10 more than it would have without the redistribution. Suddenly, even in just dollar-value the redistribution was not zero-sum.
It's important to realize that UBI is a response to extreme income inequality, which can cause large ineffeciencies in a market. Automation obsoleting jobs only needs to lead to UBI if that automation leads to rising income inequality. If we find a way to work with technology that keeps income disparities at a reasonable and efficient value, then there's no need for UBI. However, income inequality has reached to pretty significant heights and continues to grow.
If the whole game is zero sum, then thats great! The solution to a zero sum game is easy. Redistribute wealth from everyone so that everyone is equally happy.
There is no need to worry about innovation or discouraging people from working. Its zero sum, so we may as well go with the fair solution of 100% income redistribution and 100% basic income.
It is zero-sum if you are talking about the proportions of overall wealth that go to different demographics at any given time.
People like to trot this 'not a zero-sum game' line out all the time as if it is somehow meant to make us feel better about the grave imbalance of wealth we have currently on this planet.
We already have the resources to feed and cloth everybody to a good standard, but it would require some sacrifices on the part of many wasteful developed nations, which they simply will never do.
Plus, if you want everybody to have a modern quality of life even within the confines of a developed nation, some greedy people are going to have to start paying more in wages and taxes and accept that the social contract and safety nets are the only thing between themselves and an angry mob.
If wealth redistribution is wrong, why are you encouraging us to give our money to the richest person in the world?
Wealth is redistributed all the time, and because of an economic system that rewards already being wealthy, most of the redistribution is from the non-rich to the rich. UBI is an attempt to mitigate that imbalance by providing for people's basic needs when the market has failed to. It doesn't solve all problems but it's a start.
I agree with you that GDP isn't a good metric of success to optimize for, though.
Of course, with redistribution, that actually becomes the case...
Redistribution is a necessary evil, though. It's zero-sum* in the immediate term, but it's a necessary upkeep measure for the long-term health of society.
Money is essentially a device for allocating resources to those who have put them to good/profitable use in the past. The problem with it is that there are so many degeneracies, such as crime and dumb luck, that also influence the flow of money. Foremost among these degeneracies is the way money is filtered through large corporations. Large companies profit or fail on account of reasonable market forces, but then go ahead and distribute the money in a manner that has 100 times more to do with office politics than actual productivity. Inheritances are also an enormous corrupting influence, in that they bequeath large amounts of capital to individuals who are entirely unworthy of the influence that it provides.
I tend to think of money and capitalism as shoddy (but the best we have) AI algorithms that need to be continuously tweaked in order to avoid divergence. If you start from an initial state where everyone is roughly equal, and allow capital to flow via a money economy, you'll have a system where more productive people have more control of the resources, and progressive improvements will result. Eventually, though, the degeneracies take over, and it starts to erode society; an elite selected not on merit emerges, and uses its influence to restructure society in its favor further, much in the way a cancer starves a body.
(* edit: I'd actually even argue against redistribution being "zero-sum" in any meaningful sense. From a utilitarian perspective, it's arguably positive-sum so long as we accept that the utility curve of material wealth is concave.)
Claiming that anyone discussing inequality is implying economics is a zero-sum game is making a strawman argument.
There is a continuum between two extremes - at one extreme, you have a zero sum relationship, where the total output (as measured by some sensible metric) is capped and it gets divided up, through to a view where there are unlimited resources and no constraints on growth, and the activities of people are synergistic but not competitive.
Both ends of the continuum are easily shown to be fallacious, but your argument only holds if you assume the unlimited resource end of the continuum is true.
The reality is that there are finite resources, and physical, biological and sociological limits how fast and efficiently they can be sustainably exploited. That said, there is clearly a lot of room for improvement in how efficiently we use resources - as many Internet startups are doing - as well as how sustainably we use them.
"Imagine four people got all the food, and the rest got another 20%" is still imbalanced, even with 120% of the food. And there still would be violence. The problem is that the benefits of anything not zero-sum disproportionately accrue to the people who already have more than enough. And that simultaneously zero-sum resources also disproportionately accrue to the ones who already have so much.
It's not "playing a zero sum game" when you question why e.g. Bezos should accrue another $40 billion in net value, while hospitals struggle to provide PPE to their health care workers.
It's not "a zero sum game" if you ask why we have a world where somebody can hoard $150 billion while 800 million people need to go hungry every day.
Hugely disproportional resource allocation will break civilizations, zero-sum or not. (I'm fairly convinced that some inequality might contribute to a better society, but we've exceeded reasonable limits long ago)
The fundamental premise is flawed: inequality is not created by helping some people aggregate more wealth, since wealth is not a zero-sum game. New wealth is continually being created through economic activity.
Is resource redistribution the only way to solve income inequality? I always believed we weren't playing a zero sum game. It's likely that when we are all working for a living and prospering then we all prosper a little more. I don't believe that means someone rich has to lose a little more so someone poor can win.
Communism / socialism / classless society doesn't escape the zero-sum game you mentioned. Relative wealth is zero-sum by very definition. If everyone has exactly the same wealth, no one is richer than others.
The non-zero-sum aspect you describe is commonly described as return-on-investment in a capitalist society. The redistribution is taxes and government spending. The power law is created by the preferential attachment of capital to existing capital. Even a weak preference creates an extreme inequality.
I'm not sure if it'll help you to think about it this way, but you can always model the system as zero-sum if you normalize the total amount of wealth in the system to 1 after every transaction. Or track participants' share of total wealth instead of absolute wealth.
It also doesn't imho make for a more equal society. The worse an economy is the more the rich seem to profit from it compared to the rest of society. Zero sum games I feel favor those with established power bases much more so than those without them.
If the goal of wealth accumulation is not actually to be better off but to be better than your neighbour (as it is), then positive sum games become zero sum games functionally.
So no, that's not really a solution either.
But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
What do you see is the fundamental problem with concentration of wealth (by which I assume you mean concentration of relative wealth, which seems to be what most people who discuss this topic are looking at)?
I'd agree that if absolute wealth is being concentrated, that could pose a serious problem, because it would ultimately make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth.
But I'm not sure how UBI -- a program that would make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth -- is a solution to this problem rather than a de jure entrenchment of it.
If you're going to define the wealth of a society to be the sum (or the average) of the wealths of its members, then you're probably correct that, in general, UBI or other redistribution of wealth does not lead to a wealthier society.
But total global wealth is probably not what the aid-givers are trying to maximize here. In fact, I think pretty much nobody is ever trying to maximize that.
One argument could be that on some zero sum games, wealth inequalities create material inequalities.
An exemple is real estate. Major measures can be confort vs. business advantage: a large house in the middle of nowhere v. a small apartment in a 1-tier city. The wealthier you are, the more of a somewhat fixed quantity of space in a 1-st tier city you can have. It reduces the space available to less wealthier people, may decrease their confort and therefore their productivity.
I'm not sure working on wealth inequalities is the best way to work on that, but wanted to make the point that it can be seen as the root cause of certain problems, given the rules we have chosen to attribute certain ressources.
There is a lot of talk here about income inequality being a fairness problem, but not as much about it being an economic problem. But if people don't have money they can't buy anything. If those poor people had more money they would just go back to Walmart and give it back to the Waltons, which is a good thing to have that economic activity.
Wealth gains are not a zero sum game. It is about how much we produce. If the economy is not operating at peak productivity (for example with a lot of people out of work), then not as much wealth is created. And this will happen when there a lot of people who can't buy much, making demand low. It is a vicious cycle.
In the US the wealthy have lobbied to push down their taxes, and this is an example of what people mean when they say the system is rigged. This can help those rich people on an individual level and in the short term. But it also effectively takes that money out of the economy, since the rich typically don't go and spend that money but save it instead. If that money went to taxes it would have stayed circulating in the economy, whether it is used to pay for college tuition or used on some pork barrel project.
This is the argument made by some for economic inequality hurting the economy.
Resource redistribution is pretty zero sum in reality. Investments are kinda gray, they (usually) have long term positive gains, but come with short-term costs and opportunity costs.
I don't know what "the wealthy have [...] advantages that make the system far from zero-sum" is supposed to mean or how purchasing power is supposed to factor into this.
You can say that redistributing resources is just despite that, but the author framing it as a 'win-win' situation that advantaged groups are just too ableist/racist/sexist to accept is absurd.
No — that relies on the assumption that we're playing a zero sum game, which we're not.
There's nothing stopping wealth inequality from raising at the same time as living standards for the world's poorest do. In fact, it's exactly what's happening right now.
'at best' is an incomplete picture. Redistributing wealth is zero or negative-sum, yes, but utility is not linear in wealth. It's logarithmic or less (wealth diminishing marginal utility).
To be opposed to redistribution despite the obvious fact that it would create utility, one has to bring in additional concepts. For example, one might take some sort of ethical stand on redistribution being Pareto-inefficient. Or one might argue that the additional growth from inequality will eventually outweigh the disutility of respecting wealth inequality. (Either of these might not apply during depressed economic periods.)
First, let's talk about utility. Utility of capital is non-linear. So, if we take $100 out of a millionaire's pocket, and distribute it evenly to 10 people who each have $100. The millionaire's ability to contribute to society has decreased by 10 units. The ten other members of society each had their ability to contribute to society increase by 2 units. We've generated a net-gain for society by redistributing wealth.
Second, we can look at the dollar value of the system. Yes, I would argue that even the dollar value of this redistribution is not a zero sum game. Obviously the basic transfer of wealth was zero sum. But it made our enonomy slightly more efficient by improving the capacity of the 10 citizens. Let's say the economy grows $10 more than it would have without the redistribution. Suddenly, even in just dollar-value the redistribution was not zero-sum.
It's important to realize that UBI is a response to extreme income inequality, which can cause large ineffeciencies in a market. Automation obsoleting jobs only needs to lead to UBI if that automation leads to rising income inequality. If we find a way to work with technology that keeps income disparities at a reasonable and efficient value, then there's no need for UBI. However, income inequality has reached to pretty significant heights and continues to grow.
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