An update on Universal Basic Income (UBI)

One way, perhaps, to apply Ethics in practice is to initiate in a nation, state, or municipality, a form of Universal Basic Income - akin to what citizens of Alaska have with their trust fund.

Critics argue that after UBI is granted people would laze about, would give up exerting themselves on any worthwhile project, or exercising any skill; they all would stagnate. They would not be productive, would not contriute to the progress of the economy.

The factual evidence shows that this has not turned out to be the case. What has happened in on-the-ground actual UBI experiments is that people continue to work, but less at jobs they hate, and more in jobs and projects that they consider to be interesting. :sunglasses:

:slight_smile: :slight_smile:

The beauty of it is that over all productivity increases in the regions where the experiments have been tried. Do the research yourself and you will discover how it works out and why [b a Universal Basic Income is necessary[/b] - since automation and robotics are displacing many, many traditional jobs and vocations.
Check out these links, and learn:

basicincome.org/news/2017/11/rep … onference/

basicincome.org/news/category/features/blogs/

youtube.com/watch?v=bdHOZCy … e=youtu.be

Your views on these matters are most welcome!

I am absolutely in favour of the UBI, not just “because it sounds like a nice idea” but because it’s increasingly becoming an economic necessity as thinkdr said.

One has to ask themselves the question: what is the purpose and motivation of creating better and better technologies?

Given the “mixed economy” model of the West and not some radical transformation that half the population consistently votes against, we are in an economic environment of being monetarily motivated to supply evermore innovative ways of meeting demands. But simply eating into the market share of already-established businesses, that might only provide a relatively basic version of what people want in some way or other, is not as lucrative as enhancing technologies to make the provision of goods and services even more efficient.

Enhancing technologies to improve the provision of goods and services is what the West does. The point it seems is to shirk the classical liberal self-regulating ideal of “perfect competition” and manufacture one’s very own monopoly or at least oligopoly through product differentiation: “my product isn’t just the same as all the others in the same market” - even if it takes psychological tricks to force this, through advertising a unique association with your product. You’re rewarded for abusing the system in your favour, and better technology can give actual substance to claims of “a better product”.

That’s the motivation - it’s built into our economic model. But what is the purpose? Where is it headed?

Obviously technology enhances what mere people can do on their own, it removes the necessity for people to perform a certain aspect of a required role. Continually. Obviously again, the tendency is towards the removal of the whole role altogether.
So far, the human element in jobs has been sustained by there still being room for them to augment the role in most cases. The human requirement, when not improving technology, is ever shrunk to more and more menial tasks of smaller and smaller consequence. Some roles are even on the verge of being taken over completely, such as with drivers. This one will cause a sudden huge squeeze of people into an already squeezed job market of increasingly pointless roles, and might be the turning point.

We create technologies in order to remove the need for humans to work.

And yet the economic necessity is still stuck in “you have to have a job”. A job for a job’s sake, to uphold the individualist ideal of self-sustenance. It’s basically a modern-day sin to be unemployed, because it is perceived that government “steals” from the employed through taxation in order to provide for the unemployed. This is actually a form of the “fundamental attribution error” where one tends to attribute one’s (e.g. financial) success far more in favour of their own actions than to those of others and to one’s environment. It’s actually the economy as a whole that provides the platform for you to become rich, taxation is more like a fee for being privileged enough to take part. The more you benefit from it, the more you are in debt to it. I find the lack of gratitude of the Libertarian sort to be particularly disgraceful in this regard. There isn’t even any appreciation for the fact that provision for the unemployed goes straight back into businesses when it is spent, paying for the rich once more. It’s just channeled temporarily through other human beings first before it goes back to them. And what are we supposed to do? Let the incapable die off by denying them any income? We are more than easily able to maintain a certain level of civilisation.

And that point is an important one. Simply gaining a better understanding of economics will enable nay-sayers to see how not only is UBI necessary but there is in fact no moral or economic problem in bringing it about.

The final point may be a way off: when all work is replaced by technology. Then everyone will be unemployed. There won’t even be income to tax at this point, you may simply use the technologies at your disposal to get what you want. You’re not going to be paying machines to do what they are programmed to do, so you need no income to pay anybody with.

But how are we going to evolve to this point economically?

  1. The ratio of unemployed to employed is going to steadily increase simply as a matter of course. We just let our current economy do what it does.
  2. These increasing numbers of unemployed are going to need income for as long as there are people who want to be paid to provide a product or service.
  3. The money can only come from where it currently is: the employed. Therefore it must be diverted by government force unless the employed can learn to give in accordance with what our civilisation can reasonably afford.
  4. The money supply is going to steadily decrease, along with prices (both tending to zero) so comparative richness is going to decrease.

The only quarrel left will be how much government is allowed to take from the employed to give to the redundant - how much is “reasonable” to maintain what level of civilisation for the unemployed class (how much of a human being are they)?

On a light note, I don’t even want everyone to work - dealing with stupid employed people is annoying. Let just the best and most motivated work. There is no need for the incapable and unwilling to work, even now in my opinion.

Do we need technology to replace our efficiency when we are on a planet with finite resources? Do we need technology to excavate the resources to its end more quickly? To end the ability for human survival in essence more quickly?

Technology is not our road to salvation, it’s more our road to annihilation at break neck speeds. I don’t even understand the concept of UBI that doesn’t point to some super evil culling of the population due to technology heading us towards oblivion on a planet that can no longer sustain unproductive life forms such as humans who only use and waste unsustainably. UBI may be what the communist global government gives folks as they cull the populations quietly using advanced medical technology.

…or live.

Eugenics, which has taken to the underground, will resurface and be interwoven with how civilization judges human life forms as worthy of their existence, worthy of what’s left of the resources, which each life will have to prove, have to contribute to what society (or a few old men) deem vital.

If UBI happens, it will be short lived, and those who accept it may be targeted as unfit, a waste of resources.

There is no UBI utopia on a planet of finite resources.

Could this continued striving be due to strong ingrained work ethics (be productive or look bad) pervasive still the rest of the world over? Once ambition fizzles without any status rewards, why would folks continue to work? Even if their work becomes more play inspired these projects that interest them, why would they bother rather than vacationing with their families and building memories at home?

So… finite resources.

The answer is quite obviously sustainable energy resources and other practices?

The only reasons we still use non-renewable energy are that they are embedded so strongly in our infrastructures, they have been around for longer so are efficient and prolific, they are still making the people in power rich so they won’t want to change - e.g. the supply of limited resources is much easier to regulate in your favour, and our economy rewards short-sighted and desperate approaches to competition such that reckless measures are resorted to.

This all unravels once you consider those inevitable consequences that I numbered. With technology replacing the human element in the workplace, any human irresponsibility will be phased out, renewable energy technology will catch up with non-renewable, and changes to infrastructure will follow to accommodate this. Unsustainability will be replaced by sustainability whether or not the former has a chance to run out.

It anything UBI will enable us to find a balance without our finite resources.

There is no need for the incapable and unwilling to live?! Some super evil culling of the population by some communist global government?!

Forgive me for saying this sounds absolutely hysterical and unfounded. I don’t even know where to start with this one it’s so removed from reality - maybe it’s the exciting sensationalism of conspiracy-type media, but in reality the vast majority aren’t comfortable with the actual killing of real people and won’t let it happen, as history has proven - and with communication and availability of news and information like we have today, it’s going to be even harder to get genocide on familiar territory off the ground.

For one, as soon as religion has finally died out enough we’re much more likely to transition into genetic modification to prevent more unwilling and incapables from entering the world, and more prominently, as technology replaces all need for humans to work the unemployed will be everyone. What do you think we’ll all be killed off as each and everyone person becomes redundant until none of us are left?!

Some level-headed factual and logical explanation is going to be needed on your part for any your fears to be remotely feasible.

Everyone begins life motivated, all kids have energy, creativity and engage in activity. That’s where ambition comes from - it only fizzles out when restrictions like lack of money and opportunity wear you down. You’re pressured to leave behind work that you enjoy and are passionate about, to pursue “a proper job”. People just return to what they thought they weren’t supposed to do, but actually care about. The more necessary but undesirable stuff will be done by technology before anything else.

Again, your fears are unfounded.

Sorrily, the vast majority don’t make the behind the scenes decisions made by governments that favor the more productive or wealthy over the less productive and poor. No one asks for permission to genocide segments of populations or even entire populations, the few in charge sign classified orders and its done with very few even knowing that its happening. Vaccines are an easy in to end people. People are dumb enough to let doctors inject them with whatever they are told is in the vaccines.

Is that statement a question of disbelief? How can sustainable energy resources recreate the entire food chain or the plants and minerals that sustain it?

Are adults supposed to behave as children…playing all the live long day?

I’m unaware of any domestic genocides (not including the odd attack from one of our “enemies”) in the developed world since the end of the second world war - I know they certainly still happen behind closed doors in foreign countries, but nowadays the west is in horror whenever just a few of its own people die, often when just one person is killed. Genocide doesn’t happen to us lot anymore. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, or be arranged to happen, but there’s just no way it would get far off the ground with all the communication and information open to us about our own countries. As for vaccines, nobody is getting killed by them, be real. They might not all be free of side-effects, but the good they do far outweighs any bad. Trusting doctors is smart, but mania and paranoia about them is able to completely undo all the good they could do in cases like vaccinations - please don’t buy into that. Doctors are normal people but with an unbelievable dedication to helping people and with fine scientific mindsets - they have to keep up to date with what they’re administering and all the tests that go into its legitimacy, pros and cons - only on TV and maybe in the odd isolated case are they corrupt and susceptible. That’s public healthcare at least, in private healthcare they’re often supposed to push whatever the private companies who own them tell them to recommend - private companies are rewarded for the absolute opposite to doctors…

My apologies it was a rather rude sigh that I didn’t have to put into words before tackling your response.

Farming is already incentivised to be sustainable, they have a finite amount of land on which to produce as much as possible - except of course in the case that aggressive expansion is permitted into other habitats like rainforests - but that is that same greedy human input that will inevitably be replaced by technology. It’s entirely possible to avoid that, so much is wasted afterall, it’s all in the name of making far more than we actually need to make more money at the expense of peoples’ health and waistlines. Food chains and plants are easy to sustain. Minerals just need recycling - they don’t die, they just get chucked in landfills. All the minerals that ever were in the ground are still on the earth - except for the odd thing we send into space that didn’t come back. They just need to get reused - technology could no doubt help recycling become competitive with simply throwing stuff away.

But ummm… UBI?

Let’s not get off topic now.

Have we produced enough for 7+ billion people a day? I really don’t know.

Your answers are easy coming, but written while the oceans, the reefs are suffocating in an ocean that is polluted with human use bi-products in a warming cycle that is destined to flood the Earth with rising tides.

Doctors trust that what is in vaccines is what’s in vaccines, but some scientists have started testing vaccines to see what else might be in there and they found unnecessary additives in a vast majority of vaccines that cause a host of problems, but namely and more pervasively neurological damages, diseases, and disorders to progress unnaturally, ending people’s lives much earlier with for instance Alzheimers, then others die still in their mother’s wombs. I can’t remember what thread I spoke of vaccine research and its revelations.

UBI will be irrelevant if products to buy simply run out on a permanent basis.

If we’re going to live in lala land, sure UBI all the way…I vote for 7+ billion people to net one million a year each.

Is everyone forgetting that above all others, money is relative.

Give everyone a $million a year and a loaf of bread would probably cost $200,000.

It is the same as the raising of minimum wage, it merely causes the prices of everything to increase. And during the shuffle, the rich get even richer.

I think we should approach the problem from the perspective of need. We have universal basic needs, and money is not one of them

When technology has eliminated many jobs, the basic needs will not have changed much - food, water, shelter.

I think it would be better to universally supply food, water, and shelter before giving people free money from which poorer decisions can be made

Money would serve in the realm of desire. Television, internet, luxury items

I think humanity would be well served with sustainable solutions (in terms of population growth and limited resources) to the needs of food, water, and shelter.

Maybe start with expanding things like food stamps

Why does everything have to be hyperbole with you? All your points of view are so extreme…

I did request level-headed factual and logical explanation but I think you’re more concerned with doom-saying. Yes, there do appear to be environmental issues that might disrupt the whole thing, but my point isn’t just to say that UBI would be easy to pull off worldwide and we’ll definitely last long as a species to see it, just that increased unemployment tending towards total unemployment IS happening, and UBI is a neat and simple solution to this inevitability, even if we’re a way away from getting enough people such as yourself to appreciate this fact.

Whether or not you think UBI is a ridiculous prospect is irrelevant if something to its effect is going to be necessary whether you like it or not. Glib statements like “oh yes let’s just give 7+ billion people a million each” can’t detract from this.

As long as money is the media of control, you are going to be impoverished. That cannot and will not ever be avoided.

Money DOES NOT solve social problems. It CREATES them.

And the ONLY good use for technology is Per Individual, not to maintain national or global power structures, but to maintain each individual independently (much like an Iron Man suit). And if you want to help “everyone” then give everyone an Iron man suit.

LOL…an iron man suit? I’ll take an iron maiden suit with all the sound tracks preprogrammed in.

Your use of the word “everything” is hyperbole. Actually, my statements are far from exaggeration.

There are plenty of articles about the nature of our world that cover, just as I have, a myriad of issues that are actual events, not doom-saying paranoia. Wake up buster!

This is not the capitalist way. We create technologies in order to remove the need to pay humans to work. Technological growth is the only significant factor in economic output growth, besides population growth.

The money is not with the employed, but with the technology owners. As the return on capital more and more outstrips the return on labour, the money will drain towards the owners, who will have to provide enough to the labourers that they can buy things and make them money - otherwise there’s no return on capital.

It’s not that binary, of course: most “labourers” have pensions and savings that profit from the capital returns. But money will stagnate, and certainly if there’s limited or no inheritance tax, society will to and we’ll be back to a feudal hierarchy.

Money is relative to economic capacity. If you just print an extra million dollars per person, that will happen. If you use a more redistributive/less regressive financial system, it won’t on any significant scale.

“More redistributive”??
Are you talking about forming a flat wealth distribution??? :open_mouth:

Anything even close to that is de-globalization. You could get burned at the stake for that.

“Decelerating? You mean bringing your car to a dead stop on the motorway?”

The current system is regressive, and growing more so all the time. Wealth inequalities and capital mobility are at pre-WWI levels.

The increased prices of everything can be caused by giving everyone more and more money or by the raising of wgaes, thus also by minimum wages. Then ( a new) immigration of poor people has to start in order to curb this process a bit, only a bit, and for a short time, only for a short time. So, indeed, in the long run, more and more humans become poorer and poorer, whereas less and less humans become richer and richer.

This development is unfair, destructive, dangerous, stupid, and it is going to be stopped (the question is only: when?). Even the question of how is not relevant, because at last nature is going to stop it.

:laughing:

Or what about an “iron horse” suit?

Again: If not the human beings, then nature itself is going to stop that unfair, destructive, dangerous and - last but not least - stupid development.

Infinite growth is not possible on our planet. So, globalism also means the last step of ecnomic growth on our globe.

What you have is this:Natural Power Distribution Curve.png
That is the natural stable power distribution of a free flowing aggregating substance (money through absolute Free-Trade). The inanimate universe itself conforms to this law (A true Philosopher’s Stone).
$$ e = \frac{1}{(1 + r^2)}$$

What you want is this, except times a million wide:SAM Power Distribution.png
That is an organic distribution of power or information and wealth (similar to the cell structure in a living body). Note that it no longer has free flow of the wealth throughout the system. The wealth distribution is compartmentalized (“cells”). With such a structure (SAM Coops), a supremely stable, intelligent, and capable Man can form, but not be predesigned, rather allowed to grow by discovered need.

Both are stable distributions of wealth, but the first, inanimate distribution, has an upper limit, after which it can no longer contain or control any more mass (people and androids), thus chooses to eliminate the excess to avoid potential instability (Globalism). The organic structure allows for much, much greater stable growth with almost unlimited mass potential. If formed of living creatures, it is like the first is an amoeba and the second is a homosapien, billions of times more massive (more populated) and capable.

What is now being called “Universal Basic Income” cannot be profitable to the masses unless distributed as the second structure, simply because there are too many people for the first structure to remain stable. People in excess of the needs of the structure must be eliminated … and will be (are being).

The challenge is one of how to prevent those still using their extreme power from continuing to lust for the first, inanimate (inevitably lifeless, Clock-Work Orange style) technological structure. In theory, the answer is simple - just compartmentalize opportunity for wealth. Businesses, companies and corporations already do that in their limited way and thus become powerful and organized. But businesses are not the entirety of life and hopefully never become such without first learning of MIJOT and stable distributions.

If it isn’t being done the right way, it necessarily is being done a wrong way.

Compartmentalize wealth via “cell structures”, SAM Coops, don’t just flood humanity with more syrup.

Absolute Free Trade doesn’t and can’t exist, because money is a human convention governed by other human conventions. Nature has no laws to aggregate matter more due to derivatives of matter, for example, no government bond particles, no energy generation in the firm expectation of future energetic transfer, and no consideration of minimal requirements that a society certainly has. In addition, a power law scales according to constants; the height of the peak and the width of the spread depend on arbitrary choices, and there is no closed system to validate it. So people can pick and argue post hoc for a profile that supports their politics, but it has little predictive power or relevance.

In short: that’s nice, as far as Just-So Stories go.

A distribution that perfectly fits that curve doesn’t exist either. And I hate to break it to you at your age in life, but humans and their wild imaginings are still all a part of nature and governed by natural law. But the reason that I specified “absolute free trade” was that humans can naturally interfere with the natural free-flow distribution and aggregation of power, most specifically the religions have that capacity. That is what national boundaries are about (despite the pretense that they don’t exist). But without mindful intention, power, even among humans, will follow natural laws of fluid mechanics and aggregation, especially money. Why do you think they call it “liquidating” and “amassing”. Free flow is a free flow and amassing is aggregation. They occur at predictable speeds and due to specific principles. Nothing is actually random except to the naive.

That is your theory is it? Human affairs are totally independent of nature and the result of only free-will? Is that a theory that you have put a great deal of thought into or is it more like, “Of course no one can sail around the world. They would fall off!

Again, a well studied conclusion, or … just another off the top opinion? You seriously believe that there is no such thing as economic theory and economic science??

Get you tickets soon.

So you’re an avid supporter of the theory, “no one can know”, much like Feynmann and the Quantum Magi. Is that a derivative of the theory, “Ignorance is bliss”? Or perhaps that “ignorance in others is power”?

Let me guess…
You believe that the current power distribution among people today is very close to that first graph merely by accidental coincidence? Or is it due merely to evil Republicans?