http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/19/about-half-of-americans-support-giving-residents-up-to-2000-a-month-when-robots-take-our-jobs.html
Quote
"The general concept of a floor on income is generally acceptable to and popular with voters. This is a solid first step," writes Misha Chellam, the founder of startup-training company Tradecraft and a signatory of the Economic Security Project, a newly founded research organization dedicated to learning more about the implications of universal basic income (UBI). Chellam wrote a summary of the survey results for Medium.
While 500 people is not a perfect representation, there is a reasonable diversification in the ages of those surveyed: 24 percent were over 65, 31 percent were under 40, 16 percent were in their forties and 25 percent were between the ages of 50 and 64.
....
The research joins a flurry of conversations about UBI. The Economic Security Project, co-chaired by Hughes, was announced earlier this month and has so far raised $10 million in private funding to research the practical implications of the idea.
Also, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, said recently that he considers UBI to be a nearly foregone conclusion. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," Musk told CNBC. "Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen."
It is a small survey, yes, but the idea of UBI seems to be catching on. There are so many variables in the coming years that it is really hard to see the time line for how this will shake out at the moment. I think there is a good chance that trend towards automation gets accelerated -- it will be a way for companies to hedge their bets wit political uncertainty.
Finland to test UBI:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/business/economy/universal-basic-income-finland.html
I plan to let 2017 happen before I comment on this idea.
From Reddit:
"UBI might pay your rent but your going to have to buy your own beer."
That is probably how it should be I think. People will need motivation and some reason for ambition. Side note: I've seen some examples of people born into wealth that spend their lives floundering.
Is it possible to have a successful UBI program without some form of population controls ???
Historically human population planning has been implemented with the goal of increasing the rate of human population growth by reducing death rates. In the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about global population growth and its effects on poverty, environmental degradation and political stability led to efforts to reduce human population growth rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning
Quote from: nffc on December 22, 2016, 12:14:23 AM
From Reddit:
"UBI might pay your rent but your going to have to buy your own beer."
Or the other way around, depending on your priorities. I have a certain number of voluntary friends and acquaintances. If they had money for gas, food, beer (in some cases not even), car insurance and the occasional clothing/gear purchase, they would be pretty much fine.
Quote from: Mackin USA on December 24, 2016, 02:26:25 PM
Is it possible to have a successful UBI program without some form of population controls ???
Historically, as income and in particular as infant mortality falls and income security rises, population falls.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility/#when-more-children-survive-fertility-decreases
And this is a new one with some interesting additions (see world population by education level)
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts/
And this
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/#demographic-transition
Finland launches experiment in Basic Income (not universal because it's an experiment with 2000 people who will receive 560 euros per month.
http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2017/01/01/la-finlande-commence-a-experimenter-le-revenu-universel_5056148_3214.html (in French)
To put that in perspective, that is about one fourth of a bus driver's salary
http://www.worldsalaries.org/finland.shtml
And about one fourth of the average household income (USD 22,238 = about 2248 euros per month)
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/finland/
It's been a long time since my economics courses, but the basic goods & services these people need will quickly go up accordingly. < BRB, searching G. Bingo! >
https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income-just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7
>> USD 22,238 = about 2248 euros per month
I don't understand that math.
>inflation
It really depends on how they get the money to pay out.
No. It's almost hard-wired.
<added>
That's why people hate economics.
Quote from: buckworks on January 02, 2017, 07:15:36 PM
>> USD 22,238 = about 2248 euros per month
I don't understand that math.
Annual household income in dollars divided by 12 and converted to euros
Quote from: rcjordan on January 02, 2017, 10:43:20 PM
No. It's almost hard-wired.
I would agree with that, except for the "almost" part.
I was trying to ponder this question the other day. I'm no economist, but I think of my time in Switzerland. A friend came to visit and we went to get a key copied. It cost about $15 in 1993 to copy a key. He said that was too expensive because he could get it done at Home Depot for $0.89
We ended up discussing that problem for the better part of two days. I threw out the idea that the key is too cheap in the US. In the US, the person who makes that key for $0.89 can buy a lot of keys per hour, but can't pay rent and certainly not a mortgage in a decent school district. In Switzerland, though, the person who makes that key can't buy many keys per hour, but affords rent in a neighborhood with substantially similar schools to what all but the wealthiest, with kids in private school can afford.
A real-life example: I had a friend who was an Algerian refugee in Geneva and he was able to pay for university (at the excellent University of Geneva), rent and food on part-time job at McDonald's. Yes, he was on an ultra-tight budget, but 20 hours at McDonalds won't pay tuition at a decent school *or* rent in the US.
What's the point of all this? The point is that when you push income up at the bottom end, you are pushing up prices but you are disproportionately improving the standard of living of people at the bottom.
Consider this.
- Everyone gets a $2000/month raise (forget the mechanism for now).
- Prices get pushed up by 50% because of that extra income (that's probably extreme).
- The $2000/mo means Bill Gates gets a 0.00000000000000001% raise. He has effectively fallen behind. His raise does not track with the rise in prices. But you know what, I think he's going to be okay.
- The guy earning $8/hour at McDonald's who can't manage to get full-time and struggles to work 25 hours per week goes from 860/month (based on avg 4.3 weeks per month) to 2860/month. He has gotten a 233% raise. He is WAY ahead of where he was.
I understand it's way more complicated than that. There's no doubt a follow-on wage cascade because that guy may decide it isn't worth it to work at McDonald's and so there's a cyclical inflation. But if jobs are drying up and if, in fact, most of those McDonald's jobs will be gone in 15 years (and I think they will), this is a good thing.
Another effect of the inflation is that people in debt benefit and people with savings are hurt, which is probably the effect I would worry about more than upward pressure on prices hurting people at the low end. Debt is not distributed equally and some very rich people (our president-elect for example) carry massive debt.
To me all of these questions circling around automation, UBI, minimum wage and so forth basically come down to whether we want to see the income inequality trend of the last 40 years go exponential, or whether there is a benefit to maintaining some level of social cohesion and avoiding a complete breakdown into some dystopian society of the science fiction future.
RC - as we discussed before... I don't want to be Louis XVI, but I'm not especially interested in being Robespierre either.
I'll throw out one other thing - the proximate cause of the French Revolution and the English Civil War was that the deficit spending of the central government put it in a position where it could no longer raise enough money to pay the debt service.
That's the tough part of the UBI quandry - in my opinion we need both lower deficits and better support for people at the bottom. That is going to be really hard to achieve given the political realities of the US system (and probably most systems in the world).
There aren't any economist's opinions I respect more than Tyler Cowen's. Oddly, I've haven't had a whiff about any articles on universal income by him, so I wondered if he'd written on it. Quick serp:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-27/my-second-thoughts-about-universal-basic-income
>except for the "almost" part.
I was being charitable.
What I mean is that there needs to be money taken out of the system to pay the basic income. If they just print extra money, yes we're likely to have inflation, but if the basic income is payed by taxation then it is a closed loop and there will be no overall inflationary pressure.
From the article you linked to:
>The money for a basic income guarantee would be already existing money circulated through the economic system. It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.
That article actually goes through a lot of pains to say that inflation would not be a major concern. I don't know if I agree with that, I think inflation needs to be in check, that's why it couldn't be a *universal* basic income, but just a supplement for those at the bottom. That said, if we really are heading to a point where we have 20%+ unemployment I think a little inflation is much better than the alternative of rioting in the streets.
I still think it is too early for BI, it shouldn't be implemented until mass unemployment is a real issue.
Sorry... I missed that link.
In any case, this is basically similar to the extreme argument I was trying to make with respect to Bill Gates and the McDonald's worker
QuoteThis would mean that if you are currently earning $20,000 per year, you'd not only get an extra $12,000 per year in basic income, but also $10,000 in higher wages. Your new yearly income would be $42,000 and groceries might end up costing you an extra 1.4 percent per month.
Like he says, very few people buy more milk because they have more money. But you are shifting money around a fair bit, so won't items that are discretionary and just beyond the limit of affordability for low-wage workers have to have an upward pressure? You've dramatically increased the number of people who can afford certain things.
"just money shifted from one location to another."
That makes my HEAD HURT :'(
BUT I would not quite this far in the other direction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest#Social_Darwinists
Yeah, I'm familiar with social Darwinism. I just do not know if the old paradimes will apply when labor's value approaches zero.