European Citizen's Initiative for UBI(eci-ubi.eu) |
European Citizen's Initiative for UBI(eci-ubi.eu) |
From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win for a sufficiently narrow group of people. You're basically taking wealth from the top X of society and transferring it to the bottom 1-X, where X is probably somewhere in the range of 30-70%. This is too wide for the strategy to work effectively. Either no one really feels like they're winning that much, or the cost to the losers is so high that they're going to fight tooth and nail to stop it.
That's just the implementation challenge I see from the political angle. I also think there are a ton of problems with UBI and it would probably be very economically and socially destructive, but that's a separate argument from the fact that it's going to be very difficult to implement in a democracy.
Reforming the Civil Service would remove his life-support system.
It would kick away the ladder that's put him where he is.
While he's still standing on it.
The only way to reform the Civil Service system is to reform the political system.
No government's going to reform the system that put it into power.
- Sir Arnold Robinson
Do you have any source on that? One of the original welfare systems, in Imperial Germany, was introduced by conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to preempt the popularity of the Social Democratic party which was gaining popularity with its proposals.
Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states. There were wealth transfers, of course, but they were to the state, not citizens, and welfare wasn't linked to it.
Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal. If you read the thread under my comment, you’ll find plenty of people pointing out researchers and historians who came to the same conclusion, e.g. (apparently) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose book I have ordered.
> Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states
This is entirely compatible with my observation. They aren’t democracies.
The agendas that are most successful are those which are laser focused to benefit particular groups, or even worse, to ensure that certain vilified groups have it worse. In the US, higher taxes are a very controversial topic, even if they would benefit the majority of the people. Even worse, some of the most ardent opposition is from the social class would most stands to benefit from liberal policies.
The whole game theoretic aspect of rational actors is out the window. Instead we have ever more isolated groups of people who don't care that they have it bad as long as their presumed opposition has it worse.
In light of all that, I'm actually inclined to agree with OP that a campaign that would benefit north of 50% of the population could easily be unpopular as a punchy opposition riles up the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to vote against their own interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interest...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
That doesn't make it correct, but it's not 'wild' at all.
Think subsidies. Industry specific subsidies (e.g. farmer subsidies) are popular, while industry wide subsidies (e.g. tax cuts for business) aren’t.
Attempts to shape markets tend to do this.
I don't understand how this follows. I was with you until then, but IMHO UBI might negatively affect middle/upper class who relies most on lower class paid labor (things like cleaning, delivery, cooking, repairs). But people who provide these services already can and have to do them themselves, I don't see how UBI causing rising labor costs hurts them.
I think this isn't true. The UK got single-payer healthcare (with the creation of the NHS under the postwar Labour government) because it was felt that a national regime could deliver better health outcomes, following the experience of WW2. The NHS was enormously popular, thus it was embraced by the Conservatives, who beat Labour in the next election.
This is normal: successful welfare policies do not grant the party that introduced them lasting popularity and competent politicians understand this. A better model is that they are introduced because the party base wants the party to do it.
Also, I want fun, cool, tech and if the masses are being put out of work by fun, cool, tech we will have problems, and thereby see far less fun, cool, tech.
You do away with those people and that power leaving gl everything else the same, what you are doing is giving more power to the other existing social structures and ensuring no single person outside them can check their power.
So? More outsized government official power and more power to faceless corporations no longer under individual control but an entity up for its own best interests at the whim of a complex social structure bound by law to do the best for that entity which often ends up very bad for the interests of individual freedom.
You want to take away multibillionaires you have to start with structural changes to prevent mergers and pseudomonopolies, you need ten companies fighting for what two or three have now.
If you don’t you end up further encouraging next quarter profitability targets and megacorp best interests.
in other words there is probably something to fix, but you can’t just target a few of the symptoms or trying to make things better you drive us further into dystopia
Yes, exactly 2755. I’m having two and a half men flashbacks.
https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/
Can't find a decent, detailed description of the proposal. They have an intro video, a translation of the same one in the main page:
https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
which is mostly gross oversimplifications, I suspect, to trigger emotional responses. Around 2:00 they mention funding. Basically, more and higher taxes, and the critical point, IMHO: replacing current subsidies and other public services with UBI. The devil is in the details, though, and wording is critical: they seem to say, but don't clearly state, that they're getting rid of everything else, and thus saving all that money to spend on UBI.
E.g. for countries with a public healthcare system: does UBI mean all public healthcare becomes private, and you spend UBI on your provider of choice? Does this mean people/enterprises no longer need to pay healthcare taxes?
E.g. for countries with unemployment insurance: does this mean it fully goes away, so people/enterprises no longer need to pay the unemployment tax?
E.g. what about pensions? Does UBI become your pension, thus no more taxes paid for your retirement? We all know what you need to live when you're 20 is a fraction of what you need at 70.
I'm extremely skeptical of any of these initiatives because they tend to be scarce in basic details. Which is likely done on purpose.
The obvious problem here is that UBI only makes sense if you take those other programs out (no public healthcare, no public pensions), but it will be unthinkable for most europeans to loose those. There’s no way to sell a change that requires people to take that amount of personal responsibility, especially when they’ve enjoyed life without them.
I also hate that what was a good economics idea has become into a meme, and has been modified in a way that defeats the purpose.
All the current talk about UBI started with people discussing back the concept of NIT (negative income tax), and the on-paper benefits of removing poverty traps from the system.
I suspect there are all kinds of interesting pros and cons worth study, but without trials everything is just a wild guess.
The study to do is why existing programs don’t work better.
Since I am from the EU this initiative concerns me, but I would fully support an US or Chinese experiment.
This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual.
This is complete insanity.
Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a very significant proportion would do: nothing.
So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.
You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There's no downside.
Or if you're one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever?
Do you know how many people would be "artists" or "authors" if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it's all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted.
I'm for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance.
UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else.
Neil Breen is funny because there's only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny.
And NONE of them would be forced to "get their life together". Their life IS together, they're "film makers".
So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing.
And we can't keep the world running on the backs of the 25%.
Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects.
UBI is absolutely bananas.
In theory, if a member state implements a directive in a way that is not faithful, it might risk a fine from the EU, but member states generally do not care much about it, I am not even sure if all of the fines that have been issued in the past have been paid...
The amount of UBI will most likely depend on how much money an individual needs to buy food, pay rent and pay basic utilities, in a given country.
Some people… have a best possible outcome of at best not contributing anything to society for big chunks of their lives. This is just a feature of humanity. You get the most people out of this situation by taking away the fear of not having enough to exist. A big chunk of people don’t need to be in prison or institutionalized or in elaborate programs to “help”, they just need time and shelter and good food, with enough freedom to pursue happiness in their own way. Drugs, crime, and mental breakdowns always have a component of desperation as cause. You can take that away and help all of those problems without needing to do anything else.
I have known people in social programs to “help” and my god were they terrible under constant threat of losing support and filled with perverse incentives to not try to be better.
This is a huge issue and one that UBI might make easier to address. The person suffering from addiction or mental health issues would not be dependent on the job which could help prevent homelessness and further degradation of their state. Friends and family being able to temporarily leave the workforce to care for each other could help get that person the help they need.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-dru...
To qualify, they must establish that they're unable to do any job which could earn them about $1200 a month, they can never have more than $2000 in assets, and they basically can't work.
With UBI, they just... get the $700 a month (for the sake of argument). If they can work a little, well, then they do. If they get a gift, inheritance, any sort of windfall, good for them.
There isn't ever a choice between continuing to get the lifeline check or trying to reenter the workforce, also known as the poverty trap.
This is one of the basic arguments for UBI over means-tested benefits, in fact.
Lots of people do lots of things for reasons other than money and we’re heading towards an economy where living a middle class life doesn’t require everyone to work.
People will run factories and do science and make art without just needing to do it to eat.
Humans before civilization didn’t work anywhere near so hard to survive as people today.
Go look at github and tell me about how money is necessary to get everything done.
We’re not in a post scarcity economy but it’s nearby.
Currently people decide how much work they are willing to do - want more stuff, earn more money to buy more stuff
We are already seeing the disaster of Social Security benefits not being enough to fund retirement - how will this work when people don’t even work to save for retirement
Yes, but most do earn some money. Or in other words they provide some service to other people in exchange for others doing things for them. Literally doing their part to be in a society.
But with UBI there is no longer any obligation for even a base level of doing service to anyone else.
> and we’re heading towards an economy where living a middle class life doesn’t require everyone to work.
No, but we are hundreds of years from Star Trek utopia where basically nobody has to work.
I don't think you get my point about just how unproductive society would be if everyone had FU money. Literally anybody could say "Oh, I can't take a month off, starting tomorrow? Ok, then I quit. Bye".
> We’re not in a post scarcity economy but it’s nearby.
Not even remotely close. Nothing in the world is not scarce. Hell, they say water is going to be the next big expensive thing.
With the growth we have, in people and resource consumption, if anything we are further away from post scarcity now than ever.
I love how you framed this as a bad thing. As if FIRE was something one has to earn after years and years of wage slavery.
> Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful.
> So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free.
That assumption has been disproved time and again.
> I love how you framed this as a bad thing.
No, not at all. I'm a Star Trek fan.
But for the 21st century it's a complete fantasy to think it's realistic.
You need money to do this. To just skip that step is disconnected from reality.
Or to put another way: You can't just take. In Star Trek you can, because food replicators, and extreme abundance.
In Star Trek people would give away a house because they can just get a new one.
We're hundreds of years away from that.
FIRE is about really intensifying your production (your "giving"), in order to then get back your fair share as others give back to you.
If you create a world where nobody has to "give", but everyone is allowed to "take", what exactly do you think will happen?
> That assumption has been disproved time and again.
Oh? How, where? I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
Yes, some wealthy people in history have used their time to make great things. But the vast VAST majority, like 99.9999%, have not.
Just look at royalty. The only productive thing they do is through their wealth and power. Who actually contributed, as opposed to have their wealth contribute?
But I also like your cynical take on petitions. :-)
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Look at Switzerland (it is not UBI, but they have some of the highest labor costs): https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Zurich . A meal at an inexpensive restaurant which relies on low skilled labor (not just cooks and waiters, but the entire food supply chain) costs $27 USD. I am all for improving labor conditions though.
As you might have noticed from the rest of my answer, i disagree with your observation, hence the question about sources or any extra information to help me understand how you got there.
So, some of the original and most popular welfare states - Imperial Germany, post-wars UK disagree with your observation.
The only way it would work was if UBI was calculated as the maximum payment needed by the most needy person. But then there would be no incentives to work for the vast majority of the population. No one producing is no one paying taxes, so no UBI.
You’ll find the odd case of someone who instead of paying their health insurance decided to gamble their income or spent it on drugs. If UBI truly replaces public health, these people won’t have health services. There’s a snowballs chance in hell that you’ll be able to sell this politically in the EU.
If it's enough to enable you to do what you want without working, then it's enough. If it's not you find a way to get more.
There are a lot of problems with people in tough situations where their outcomes are made worse by having to make bad choices. People accept abusive living or working situations, suffer through anxieties and trauma because it's a choice between an awful situation and going hungry and homeless. A whole lot of people are wage slaves. The "option" of working, where to work, and to accept situations is only an illusion because the alternative is much worse.
Give people UBI instead of difficult to navigate social programs which don't guarantee support and you have to be an expert to navigate well and you solve a lot of problems.
People living on the street are expensive to society and not in some abstract way. People have less lifetime value to society because they are forced to accept their current situation and don't have the resources to have job mobility or can't afford to put themselves in a better living situation. People also treat jobs like they are forced to do them. A workforce that is there by choice performs a lot better, gets treated a lot better, and has better outcomes for customers, employees, and in general everyone.
Social security wasn't meant to fund retirement, it's a safety net to prevent the elderly who can no longer reasonably work from pushing way past their limits or starving. It wasn't meant to fund your expensive suburb lifestyle. It isn't luxury, but indeed you can live off of social security but it requires choices that lots of people don't want to make.
This petition is explicitly about giving everyone a middle class lifestyle for no contributions.
People are quite content at middle class lifestyle.
We're not talking "struggling artist" here, we're talking "yeah, I'm doing quite well. Haven't quite decided what my book will be about yet, though".
Like the parent comment said, we're already failing at funding social security even with the classical age pyramid (which is disappearing, by the way), and now we want to expand that to not just seniors but EVERYONE?
It's just completely unworkable.
For the other things you mention, yes we do have a bunch of social problems. UBI is not the answer, or at least isn't the answer in the form this petition asks for. Two things are ridiculous: the "U" in UBI stands for zero means-testing, and in this petition made explicit again. The second is that middle-class is just way too high to aim for.
I'm in favour of more spending on the poor and homeless, even when it's not "fair". I'm even for less "punishment" and more "rehabilitation" for crimes, even when it's not "fair". Society is better off if (hyperbole alert here) criminals are rewarded for their crimes by getting education and support, than if they're stomped on.
But the idea of UBI (as proposed here) is broken on every level, with society-ending first and second order effects.
People add value to society because they get "social credits" (aka money), that they can then use to better their own lives or their causes.
If you remove that aspect then people will do what they want, not what needs to be done or is valued.
I don't think it's certain that it would benefit the majority of people. In fact, I think it's unlikely.
One of the tremendous advantages of the US (and why we're so rich compared to almost all EU countries) is that our cultural programming includes the implicit understanding that higher taxes introduce deadweight loss and other higher-order losses of efficiency. Taxes aren't as simple as "taking from A and giving to B" except in the very short term. Over time, it results in less efficient resource allocation, capital resources leaving to less distorted markets, etc.
This happens on both a personal and institutional level. The gamble you're taking when you raise taxes is that "stickiness" (social ties, pre-existing legal and technical infrastructure, procedural momentum, etc.) won't just cause your tax base to leave. However, stickiness only slows the process down, rather than stopping it entirely.
This is encoded in American culture's sense of economic fairness, which precludes aggressively shafting people with more stuff just because you want their stuff.
Why do you believe in one and not the other? I don't see any compelling categorical difference between either of these. The latter just "feels better" because "life and decency" are positively connoted. In both cases, the "right" is that person A has to pay the cost for person B to live a certain way. If you restricted your argument, to, say, a "right" to the bare minimum nutritional supply to survive, that would be categorically different. However, that's not an issue in the EU anyway.
Not advocating for this. But the assumption would be if you can’t afford Munich, move.
Median household income in the US is significantly higher than any EU country except Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I think most Americans who complain incessantly about how "third world" America is view Europe through rose-colored glasses. Any third-world aspects of the US (which do exist) are not caused by our economic policies.
If we encounter any entitlements susceptible to inflation or supply constraints, we use automation and technology to solve for that (medicine, energy come to mind).
Sam Altman proposed something similar to a UBI with American Equity [1], so I don’t think it’s too crazy of an idea to move towards implementation and experimentation. If you’re a central bank, buying up securities and distribute the dividends into citizen deposit accounts also held at the central bank is another path.
There are people in the US on Social Security who are homeless. UBI doesn't solve one of the key issues in the US: The high cost of housing rooted in broken housing policies and broken city planning.
All of our wars since WW2 have been wars of choice. The survival of our nation hasn't been at stake.
As if any of the world wars had the US' survival at stake. Being separated by other powers by oceans on both sides, and having enormous amounts of resources and manpower meant that the last time the US was at any legitimate threat was 1812.
I would love your take, as someone who has a lot of experience with homelessness and life challenges, what you envision as impactful public policy to help set a firm quality of life floor for everyone.
>The flip side is it's much easier to make up the difference due to the increased economic opportunity in <high cost of living area>. If you can't it's a good incentive to move somewhere cheaper in turn reducing the pressure on housing in <high cost of living area>.
Say I'd like to live in Monaco or Luxembourg. No one owes me that privilege. I can't just demand to get that. Even if I get a job in a grocery store or whatever to legitimise my residency.
I’m not an expert, by any means, but to say it’s impossible seems flippant and intellectually dishonest. A better way to approach it would be with caution and the understanding that a lot of research and effort is going to be required if it’s to be implemented soundly (or determined to be untenable).
For the EU, this is in the ballpark € 1000 - € 1500 - € 2000 ( we already have people on 'benefits' in NL, so there is consensus about this 'living minimum' ).
If you would really care so much as you claim you do, you could have easily provided a basic budget for this grand plan.
But you can't.