There won't be the big UBI day, where we make the big switch globally. It's a creeping expansion of social benefits and transfer payments and an easing of work conditions. Some people will somehow stay in the unpleasant jobs, by inertia or the unfairness of a class system or, increasingly, by wages that compensate for the trouble. People will drop out of individual job categories and certain businesses become unsustainable; society will adapt around it, with automation or higher prices.
The conclusion for the individual is to not tough it out in a shitty job, instead look for opportunities where companies will pay a contractor or company to do work that used to be done conventionally in-house for a wage. Also, and I hesitate going that route, don't see the redistribution opportunities as shameful handouts, but rather as an income stream that will make up a larger and larger pie of the economy.
while technically true the author neglects to put this into perspective - it resulted in a 2% drop in labor participation and less than 2 hours lost working per week.
People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.
At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end.
And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job.
But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset.
This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief.
But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work.
So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless.
Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.
Borders only become a problem when there are incentives to simply being in a country, welfare programs. I'm not saying we should abandon all entitlement programs and open the borders, but it does seem shortsighted to create an even larger entitlement while our borders are such a mess.
Does the author (or anyone) have a source that establishes and quantifies this assumption that "we're paying people to waste their time unproductively"?
Or is this just that old "Bullshit Jobs" argument of "I don't understand why that job exists nor what they do on a daily basis, therefore that job has no value."
> There is no such thing as a UBI trial. There is no such thing as a UBI pilot program. Instead, there are cash transfer experiments being branded as UBI.
More strange to me, the author includes a quote arguing that UBI can't be tested at all, it must be fully implemented to test it. That really starts to sound like snake oil to me, and a huge risk as the argument is then that we should upend the economy based on an untestable hypothesis.
What I never see mentioned in arguments for UBI is also telling though. Namely that the whole idea for UBI is based squarely in Marxism. I'd rather not try out untestable ideas based in the fundamentals of Karl Marx. Read about the man's life at all and you'll really begin to question why anyone listened to such a person.
> the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed.
To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc.
Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society.
It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way.
We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies.
The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
That already happened: In communist Russia if you were not a good communist (you believed communism was a crap system) it meant no salary for you, a shitty status or being sent to prison or forced labor. If your children, or any family member or your friends were not good communists, you were punished as well.
UBI means taxes need to be confiscatory for those that work. Studies are done giving people free money but not about removing the fruit of their labor.
And of course the people who controls people's salaries are going to redirect most of it to themselves, like communists or socialists always do in socialists places. Lenin redirected billions of dollars to private accounts in Switzerland, Stalin forced its repatriation and later hundreds of billions disappeared. It has been the playbook of any communist leader, from Castro to Chavez or any socialist leader, Lula, Kirchner.
Based on the employers explaining this problem, they are asshole bosses. And in our 'normal' system of jobs and no UBI or other payouts, they can get away with treating people poorly. However, low skilled jobs don't have to be bad jobs, people enjoy all sorts of work and even find meaning in them. In this UBI / cash transfer role: employers can't get away with being an asshole(without spending big $$$) and have to connect meaning for the employee to the work they need done.
it’s not possible to pilot a UBI. Giving cash to a small subset of the population is not UBI. UBI goes to everyone. It changes the economy as a whole
I am in particular very skeptical of anything that cannot be piloted or otherwise effectively tested on a smaller scale. These things usually don't work, not simply because the idea is generally unsound (though they often are) but because there are no effective means to tune/calibrate even a promising idea.
* Work is one of the least frustrating parts of this complexity since at least people see the paycheck at the end. Many consumers have trouble interacting with e-stores, self-service kiosks, credit card issuers, etc. where they pay for the privilege. This is why service jobs are so terrible: employees are soaking up the aggression born out of this frustration.