Finland's Universal Basic Income Called 'Useless' By Trade Union Economist (bloomberg.com) 723
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Finland's basic income experiment is unworkable, uneconomical and ultimately useless. Plus, it will only encourage some people to work less. That's not the view of a hard core Thatcherite, but of the country's biggest trade union. The labor group says the results of the two-year pilot program will fail to sway its opposition to a welfare-policy idea that's gaining traction among those looking for an alternative in the post-industrial age. "We think it takes social policy in the wrong direction," said Ilkka Kaukoranta, chief economist of the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions, which has nearly one million members.
Since January, a group of unemployed Finns aged between 25 and 58 have been receiving a stipend of 560 euros ($600) per month. The amount isn't means-tested and is paid regardless of whether the recipient finds a job, starts a business or returns to school... Advocates say it eliminates poverty traps and redistributes income while empowering the individual and reducing paperwork... While limited in scope (it's conditional on the beneficiary having received some form of unemployment support in November 2016) and size (it's based on a randomly-selected sample of 2,000 jobless people), the Finnish trial may help answer questions like: "Does it work"? "Is it worth it"? And the most fundamental of all: "Does it incite laboriousness or laziness...?"
The trade union argues this UBI program would cost 5% of Finland's entire gross domestic product, making it "impossibly expensive."
Since January, a group of unemployed Finns aged between 25 and 58 have been receiving a stipend of 560 euros ($600) per month. The amount isn't means-tested and is paid regardless of whether the recipient finds a job, starts a business or returns to school... Advocates say it eliminates poverty traps and redistributes income while empowering the individual and reducing paperwork... While limited in scope (it's conditional on the beneficiary having received some form of unemployment support in November 2016) and size (it's based on a randomly-selected sample of 2,000 jobless people), the Finnish trial may help answer questions like: "Does it work"? "Is it worth it"? And the most fundamental of all: "Does it incite laboriousness or laziness...?"
The trade union argues this UBI program would cost 5% of Finland's entire gross domestic product, making it "impossibly expensive."
A more basic question (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the original has been improperly translated.
I think a more accurate translation may be:
'How dare someone try a system that treats everyone equally, and isnt controlled by US!
Our research shows that the best trade union members are poor and unhappy, we need more people like that!
The LAST thing we want is a feeling of happiness and satisfaction for our members, they they may not need us,
and if they dont need us, then how will we be able to take their money so we can live the high life?
No, UBI is a terrible, horrible idea, bad for everyone who matters, which are the leaders of our trade union movement!'
Re:Translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah I'm sure the same tired old "work or die" rhetoric will really win people over. That's what the traditional system is: force people to work for the money to live, or go homeless and basically die. People call it "earning a living". It's a hamster wheel meant to get every last ounce of labor from you, so you won't have the energy or the health to enjoy retirement. That way, you can die early and they keep all the money you paid into things.
When automation renders 50% or more of the workforce redundant, governments will have quite a situation on their hands: either give these people something to live with and stimulate the economy, or deal with the rioting of hungry, disenfranchised families.
But Europe's supposed to be more civilized than us Americans, so hopefully they make better decisions than we did with this turd of a country.
Re: (Score:3)
either on a narrow scale or on a wide scale. if you subsidize shiftlessness eventually nobody works and everybody dies.
Re: (Score:3)
It IS "work or die"
either on a narrow scale or on a wide scale. if you subsidize shiftlessness eventually nobody works and everybody dies.
This bears repeating. At some point I'm wondering if the goal of all of this is just to make it so that nobody has to do anything to sustain themselves, as if they have the right to make somebody else do it for them. We did do this in the past, and it was called slavery.
Besides, this whole UBI concept won't even work anyways. You're just going to move the store of value from one place (sitting in somebody's bank account or investment portfolio) and to the pockets of everybody else. That doesn't do anything
Re: (Score:3)
Translation is: for every person on UBI there will be at least one robot doing the work for him, kinda. So no person will work instead of a jobless person. It will be a robot. Are we already contemplating robot's rights and call them people?
No, you're missing the point. Unless you can just go down the street and ask for a free burger and everybody from the farm to the restaurant is completely automatic, (which it isn't) then you're essentially asking that somebody, somewhere along the supply chain to do their job for free. That is the slavery part.
As for the bigger picture; does automation cost a job somewhere? In the long term it's not likely, and so far, there hasn't ever been a long-term loss in jobs as a result of it. The scale that we aut
Re: (Score:3)
You're setting up a strawman: specifically, conflating UBI with an economy in which no human ever does labor, and then you are arguing against such a system. The thing is, though, there is still plenty of incentive to work under UBI - the idea of the policy is that it will provide just enough money to prevent dire poverty, but not enough to have much disposable income. So, while some people will be content to live only on the basic income, many people will continue to work, either for status, disposable inc
Re: Translation: (Score:4, Informative)
Because its simple maths.
There are not enough troops and police etc for them to defend everything that they would like to protect.
While one force is out putting down one group of civilians,another group of civilians is burning their fuel supplies,garages,bases etc etc.
Troops and police have families,they will also come under attack,so who is going to protect all the vips and infrastructure that these forces need to put down an uprising if more than 30/40% of the population decide to fight back ?
No country in the northern hemisphere has enough troops and police to take on a large percentage of its own population..
Re: Translation: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
and let me translate yours:
'I am a kneejerk right winger without much clue, I dont actually realize that UBI systems are actually a right wing concept, and instead
think they are just more socialism. What I have missed is that they remove a whole pile of corrupt and broken welfare systems, and
instead replace them with a single, simple, and balanced system that benefits people who actually work more than people who dont,
and therefore is generally attacked by socialists, who hate such systems and want the status quo, I damage the very cause I claim
to represent'
So no sir, it is you who is the uninformed moron. You should go and learn a little more instead of believing rhetoric from public figures.
Re: (Score:3)
Wasn't it actually Adam Smith who came up with the idea in the first place?
Re:Translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Just for future reference: France, Germany and Japan all require you to buy health insurance. I'm sure there are more. But one example is sufficient to show you are full of shit.
Re: (Score:3)
Only on Slahsdot (and DU) does such claptrap, with endless examples of how it fails miserably throughout the world, be marked insightful. See also: NHS
The NHS is a failure? The outcomes are similar to the US (worse in some cases, especially cancer, better in other cases, especially neonatal) but we spend less than half the GDP per capita on healthcare as you do.
Same quality for half the price is the oddest definition of failure I think I've eve heard.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the sort of one sided rhetoric that demeans us as a nation. I'm a "lefty" that worked hard and made something of himself. I believe in doing my fair share and at the same time I understand that it's harder for some folks to make their way. We are ALL standing on the shoulders of those that came before us. There is a penultimate point at which we all worked hard before we managed to get ahead. What I reject is the notion that it somehow makes us better than others. We all should be working to help every one of us do better. The divisiveness of politics today is our greatest weakness as a nation. We work as a team, we succeed as a team. That is the lesson lost in the current wave of righteous indignation and self-reinforced politics. We are all Americans and we should spend more time working to help our fellows than casting stones over the differences which from the outside are minuscule. We spend our time attacking our neighbor for their beliefs than in trying to find common ground. Politics is the new racism.We would rather find fault in our neighbor than actually think about what all of these actions mean to us as a people. It is easier to attack than to think.
The great American Experiment in a way of life is losing it's momentum as more become focused on their personal issues than the society as a whole and I find myself greatly saddened by the direction we are choosing.
I beg of you all, please stop being angry and start thinking about us as a people.
Re:Translation: (Score:5, Insightful)
Hatred cannot cure hatred. Words like "we", "us" and "together" are the only way to break down hatred.
Participating in the hatred against those you blame for being hateful isn't a solution, it's growing the problem.
A very good more basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we measure the economics of the situation?
That's a very good basic question to ask.
Too many times people get up on the soapbox of the world and give their opinion about this or that policy, and one can never figure out whether they are experts speaking from experience or just political hacks.
People giving an opinion in public is just noise, and people bolstering their opinion with rationalization and/or analogy is noise masquerading as signal.
We shouldn't give any credence to anyone who tries to sway our opinions about, well... anything, unless they can back it up with facts that are suggestive or studies that can be examined in detail.
I'm especially suspect of the "it will only encourage some people to work less" comment, as if that is a bad thing. It might be perfectly acceptable for some part of society to have to work less, or perhaps not to have to work at all. There's a parallel and opposite rationalization that holds that people will accomplish great things [wikipedia.org] when given enough leisure.
Making that statement ("some people" is an obvious attempt at being divisive, as in "you know the type of people I mean") in the way that he made it is simple emotional manipulation. Also from the article are such gems as "We think it takes social policy in the wrong direction", meaning basically "I don't like it, in an unspecified and indeterminate way".
He's not claiming that it doesn't work, he's claiming that he doesn't like it (and neither should you).
Re:A very good more basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not claiming that it doesn't work, he's claiming that he doesn't like it (and neither should you).
The money quote from the article is this one
In other words you are 100% right. He doesn't care if it works or not; he's set to oppose it no matter what.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:A very good more basic question (Score:4, Interesting)
One important factor you've neglected to factor in is the cost of administering the current means-tested systems. You have to: ...all of which cost money as well. Give everyone a flat amount that's enough to live on and you don't need the legions of mandarins and all the associated resources (buildings, pensions, consumables, etc) administering the system.
a) have rules
b) enforce those rules
c) maintain those rules as loopholes and variables change
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have yet to see any proponent of UBI come up with a figure for their supposed overhead, but that doesn't matter anyway: the cost of a UBI program is greater than the entire current government budget (including social programs, defense, healthcare, etc.).
The US federal budget is 3.8 trillion. There are 320 million people in the US. That works out to about $12000/person/year, which I suspect most people in the US would consider to be far too low to actually live on. And again, this is with zero spending on
Re:A very good more basic question (Score:5, Informative)
Check your math. In 2013 there whre 242 million adults in the USA.
You don't pay UBI to children.
Re:A very good more basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
but that assumes (as does UBI itself) that money grows on trees.
You are apparently not aware of this but money (almost) does grow on trees. Ever wondered where the money that is around came from? It was printed by a central bank. And it still is. Just google Mario Draghi and what he's doing with the Euro lately.
citing from The Article:
Not only does SAK say that the system may reduce the labor force -- for instance by tempting mothers of small children or those close to retirement to take more time off -- but the union also suggests that making it easier to refuse unpleasant jobs may create inflationary bottlenecks.
Having people work less - but voluntarily - is one of the benefits of UBI. Many people suffer involuntary unemployment due to automation. So we end up with a part of the workforce without ANY job and the other part with full jobs. It would be smarter to distribute jobs more evenly. But the present system drives everybody to try and get a fully paid job, as a matter of risk management: it could be anytime you lose that job and without a (substantial) financial buffer you'd be in deep trouble. UBI takes away that fear of existential threat - it gives you peace of mind and makes you less clingy to the job you have. It significantly improves your negotiating position towards (potential) employers.
UBI can also significanlty reduced the size of financial buffer necessary to quit working entirely (freeing your position for someone who actually needs the salary). It's a feature, not a bug!
One might also wonder if money were created for free, whether cost (of everything) would remain the same, or rise to meet the levels of available money. In other words, the program might be undone by rampant inflation.
Yes, there will be inflation. FYI the European Central Bank is desperately trying to increase inflation (my above comment regarding Mario Draghi)
The reason why the union SKA is against UBI is pretty obvious once you think about it: Their main reason for existence is to give workers a more negotiating power against employers. UBI would provide that power naturally, making unions obsolete to some extent. The UBI is an existential threat for trade unions, THAT's why they are against it. Instead of going on strike to fight for better compensation people could just quit and look for a better job on the market.
Re: (Score:3)
You are apparently not aware of this but money (almost) does grow on trees. Ever wondered where the money that is around came from? It was printed by a central bank. And it still is. Just google Mario Draghi and what he's doing with the Euro lately.
citing from The Article:
No, it doesn't. Money is not by itself a resource. Instead it is a means of measuring value. If you create money without also creating value, all you do is dilute the supply of money. This works out great if you are the one making the money since you end up with a bigger share of the pie, but for everybody else it means their fixed amount has just become less valuable. Inflation is in a very real sense a wealth transfer from the poor (who don't own much, and have much of their capital in cash) to the rich (
Re:A very good more basic question (Score:4, Informative)
I even work 32 hours, which the boss needs to approve, but according to the law 32 hours is still full-time employment which means a bank for example can no deny me a loan because I don't work a full 40 hour week.
Things would have to fundamentally change here in Canada for instance, especially in big cities and surrounding areas. There are places like Toronto, Vancouver, etc where working 50-60hrs/week at two jobs@$14-19/hr($10-14eur/$8-12GBP) is just barely scraping by. I'm sure someone will say well why don't they just move to a smaller town, or commute or something. It's because in many cases those smaller towns and cities have no jobs. The commuting system either doesn't exist, or is so cost-prohibitive that you'd actually be making less money. For some people to make it they'd have to commute over 150km every day, and pay $100/day or more in just transit/parking/etc. Round that out with the costs of energy going through the roof, more companies packing up and leaving? Now you've got problems. And now dealing with governments like those in Ontario and BC which are fundamentally broken, but supported by the big cities because of what those governments hand them.
To explain to people in Europe: All of Europe votes for MEP's, all areas have their own interests. But Berlin has a higher concentration of people so the EU simply caters completely to Berlin. Now they ignore the rest of the EU but raises taxes, add more fees, energy prices go through the roof directly due to government polices(60% increase in less then a decade), cut transfer payments, and people in Berlin don't get why "you simply don't move" or "suck it up." For Americans: The house, and the senate are voted on by every state. But only except NY and CA get hand outs, the rest are ignored or get token handouts just before an election. Or to put it simply, that's why you have an electoral college to break electoral power. No such system exists here.
Re: A very good more basic question (Score:3, Informative)
You transparently understand neither the American nor the EU system, which leaves the rest of your argument in question.
For the record, California is a net *contributor* to the US federal pot, so no, they don't get handouts.
Re: (Score:2)
Luckally money is a unit of measurement.
1. How much money did you use to tax the population vs how much you will need to tax the population now.
2. Find out if the average percentage of a persons tax per wage has gone up?
3. Factor in any government dept needed to be payed for the service.
Now if we find the side effect of a basic income is laziness then you will find that incomes will stagnant so your tax revenue will too if using a progressive income tax. If you find that people invest into this safety net t
Re:A more basic question (Score:4, Insightful)
It obviously doesn't likely work very well with no one working, but that won't be a realistic society anyway. There will always be those who want to work.
as others have noted, the coming automation wave is going to wreak havoc on over a century of employment concepts. Something needs to change as the vast majority of low income/skill jobs are going to just disappear being replaced by a fractional number of higher skill tech/maintenance workers
Re:A more basic question (Score:4, Insightful)
the one thing is though that you get guaranteed tax revenue as well.
And that's another important issue of basic income: not the cost per se, but the fact that in many countries the bulk of tax revenue comes from income taxes. That will have to change if people are going to be working less, regardless of whether they do so by choice or they are replaced by robots. Taxing consumption more heavily will reduce consumption and at some point necessitate an increase of the basic income. Taxing production is an obvious solution; during the replacement of human labour with robots we could levy an "income tax" on robots, but that would only work on a level playing field or in an autarky; in our own globalized world, production would simply flee to the country with the lowest tax on production as it does now.
An experiment, can we agree on criteria? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people think it will work very well, some people think it'll be a total failure, and of course some people are in-between.
For anyone here in EITHER of the first two groups, you both think the results would be pretty clear cut - the result won't be ambiguous. Here we have an actual experiment to test it, and there are other similar experiments being done or planned. Here's a chance to prove that you're right, and possibly in a measureable way such that those who disagreed have to admit their prediction was wrong.
Are you smart enough, and do you understand the issues well enough, to come up with some fair criteria by which to judge the outcome of these experiments? Can you mark a goal line and say "the experiment will show that UBI does A by x%, without doing B by y%"?
Since you understand the issues, that means of course that you understand the opposing viewpoint, you understand what their concerns are. Since you're pretty sure you are very much right, you should be able to be a bit generous in marking the goal lines. If anyone can come up with some fair measures we can later use to see who is right and wrong, I'll post my prediction and if I turn out to be wrong I'll freely admit it.
That would be really cool if we could do that. I don't have too much hope - I think a lot of people shooting their mouth off don't understand at all what people who disagree are saying, and have no interest in understanding anything other than their own guess. The ad hominem attacks which are already so prevalent on very page strongly suggest that some commenters haven't a clue what the other group is trying to warn them about, and don't care to know.
Anyway, there are experiments in progress. Anyone have an idea of some fair to generous criteria by which to judge the results when it's done, can you set a goal line which those who disagree might think is a fair goal line that captures their concerns?
An example from Obama (Score:3)
As example of the general kind of thing I'm asking for, early in his first term Obama said something like "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for ... well you should think real hard about who to vote for."
It was fairly obvious he has started to say "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for me for re-election", then decided halfway through the sentence to change his words slightly. Anyway, he gave a clear, objective number by which to judge his performance. M
Re:A more basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
The real challenge is admitting there's an over-population problem and that our current way of living isn't sustainable and dealing with this without getting peoples backs up.
Re:A more basic question (Score:5, Informative)
there is no overpopulation problem.
there is a logistics problem, the moving of basic needs, goods, and services from person to person.
there is a difference between the two.
there is plenty of food even at current production levels. the problem is getting what we have where its needed; since we rely primarily on a free market system, and the world poverty stricken arent much of a viable market...they get to suffer the consequences of a market failure. meanwhile much of our own excess goes to waste.
there is plenty of space for people to live with room left over.
https://persquaremile.com/wp-c... [persquaremile.com]
the rest is quality of life: electricity, medicine, education. each of which is solvable.
Re: (Score:3)
You can only say this if you are ignorant of the way we are decimating the ocean floor, polluting everything, ignorance of global warming and the domino effects waiting in store.
This isn't about simply being able to grow enough food, I never said it was.
" rest is quality of life: electricity, medicine, education. each of which is solvable."
These things are not the issue, looking after the planet we live on so that it can continue to support us, that is the issue.
Sustainable, look it up, research it.
Re:A more basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
"The true challenge is to bring prosperity to the poor countries which currently have locally unsustainable population growth."
'prosperity' You the whole western world has been brain-washed, this prosperity thing, it has another name - mindless consumerism and it's this mindless consumerism, the idea that we must have ever more junk, ever bigger houses, cars etc, it's this falsehood that's getting us to where we are now which is at the edge of a precipice and that precipice is our impending extinction. It's good and well to say we can deal with these things, I know we have most of the solutions to do so, but we have to implement those solutions. And we need to stop investing into getting every last drop of oil and gas out of the ground, and we need to stop subsidising these same things.
If mankind doesn't face up to the fact that the very survival instincts that got us to where we are now will kill us all if we don't rise above them and use our brains instead of our balls.
Prosperity is the wrong goal, the correct goal is making sure everybody has clean air to breath, healthy food to eat, clean water to drink, but 1st and foremost we need to look after the planet we are on. And we should be trying a lot harder to preserve other species because our own survival may very well depend on it.
Trade union fighting for survival (Score:5, Insightful)
If people become indifferent to unemployment, trade unions have no reason to exist anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
At this time yes. In the not so distant future, no. Most jobs will go away and will not be replaced.
Re: Trade union fighting for survival (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. People think a lot of people will suddenly become lazy. In fact, they won't - a lot of people LIKE their current lifestyle.
Basic income provides a roof, three square meals and some safe environment. It doesn't mean you'll get a single family home, a private apartment, or even a room by yourself! The most basic of housing can be barracks style living where everything is shared except maybe a private locker for your personal stuff. The vast majority will want to pursue work, if nothing more than to have a private room or apartment with their own (non-shared) bathroom.
The problem might be a trade union that provides for people at the very bottom - if they didn't have to work for housing, then it's possible the union might lose a good chunk of its membership. Perhaps they've been fighting for people to stay in their jobs who really don't want to be in those jobs (and are thus terrible), but in it just to live, in which cease the union is more about welfare and the poor industry than really helping people out.
Re: (Score:3)
Rights in the workplace will still matter, but won't need trade unions to protect them anymore. Treat me like a slave? Meh, I quit the job, live on universal income for a while, see if something better pops out. Once your entire workforce adopts this mentality, guess who will become the nicest employer to ever exist?
Re: Trade union fighting for survival (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic income is automation itself. It cuts lots of jobs. With current welfare you'll need a lot of clerks to evaluate conditions of those who apply for welfare and make a decisions. And even if those who apply are too poor to bribe officials, these officials can exersize power over them and feel theirselves significant.
With basic income you' ll need only one computer which would send checks around based on census data.
Re: Trade union fighting for survival (Score:5, Interesting)
With basic income you' ll need only one computer which would send checks around based on census data.
Well, collecting extra child support (particularly migrants that "loan" children) and pensions of dead people depend on messing with census data in the first place. Unemployment benefit fraud generally depends on income tax fraud, which will probably be more popular with the much higher gross tax rate of UBI. So the biggest area you could eliminate is disability fraud, but I honestly don't think we'll force someone who was in a major traffic accident at 20 to live 50+ years on UBI with no hope of improvement.
I'll tell you the future because I think I'm living it here in Norway. First of all 90% of the population now use online banking. Between 98 and 99% of the population have payment cards, 91% prefer paying with card and 81% say they prefer it even for amounts less than 50 NOK ($6). In volume 97.3% is now paid electronically. Part of this is because we have a national standard for a no-frills debit card (BankAxept) that costs merchants a few cents per transaction, it's used in 90%+ of all card transactions which translates to 2 billion times at 100k+ sites in a population of 5 million.
Of course average people don't have card terminals, so it's been either online banking or cash. But now consumer to consumer mobile paying has taking off like crazy through a service called "Vipps", essentially for registered users it takes a cell phone number (which is tied to a unique person, no anonymous phones) and turns it into a bank account. It has gone to zero from 2.2 million users in no time and is now the de facto standard for settling debts between friends and colleagues. I suspect that the 81% who always prefers cards will now live totally cashless, short of malfunctions.
Where am I going with this? Well I'm already liable if I pay above 10000 NOK ($1200) to someone in cash and they cheat on their taxes. There is talk of doing away with the requirement that shops take cash, there's talk of requiring businesses to take electronic payment and there's talk of banning cash altogether and to be honest I don't think the 19%/9%/1-2% who remain will have the market power to resist. Even if they can't kill it completely I suspect all that take out or deposit cash will come under scrutiny. Once they're done I don't think it'll be the census computer, it'll be the all-seeing IRS computer.
Major differences (Score:3, Insightful)
Norway has a population of 5.2 million people, or .1% of the population of the US. The Government is much smaller than larger countries which reduces the amount of bureaucratic layers that can be corrupted. While I would agree that the US Government is much larger than it should be, it's also larger by necessity due to population and landmass differences. In other words, what you can do in Norway does not translate to what you can do in any other Government larger or smaller.
The majority of the corruptio
Re:Trade union fighting for survival (Score:4, Insightful)
FTFY
Useless? That article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing - basic income CAN theoretically not work out... but some an economist with a stake or two against it working is NOT evidence that this version of it hasn't panned out. Especially when it's posted on fricken Bloomburg news!
That's what the experiment is for. Instead, it's to see if the money spend on THIS style of program is as effective as the several other programs it can replace, and whether that replacement will be practical. It's money that will be spent in any case! You need experimental comparison to judge the merit of the approach.
Again though - until RESULTS are in, hearing some talking head berate the idea of it as not to his liking isn't helpful.
It's like folks who dismiss needle exchange programs to reduce communicable disease, without actually bothering to look at the numbers, and what the studies actually account for.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Useless? That article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing - basic income CAN theoretically not work out... but some an economist with a stake or two against it working is NOT evidence that this version of it hasn't panned out.
Business folk (the type that like exploiting cheap labor) are terrified they are going to lose their leverage on people so they are summarily declaring it a failure. It could have been the single most successful thing on day one and they still would have declared it a failure because it's a threat to their way of life. That is to say that their way of life is exploiting people's food/housing insecurity, the modern form of slavery.
Re:Useless? That article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Most business folk are not the ones most keen to take improper advantage of people. Sure they make a business decision to move where the labor is cheaper
And you have contradicted yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
Must be a trade union for psychics:
The labor group says the results of the two-year pilot program will fail to sway its opposition to [Universal Basic Income]
Good thing they warned the Finnish government before they wasted time and money on that pilot program.
Needle exchange makes sense (Score:2)
work less (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can tell you (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Guaranteed subsistence level income.
Then there is the thorny issue of if you're willing to sit on your ass for a small income, and do nothing productive, what are the chances that you were less than productive at work, and a drag on your coworkers.
Imagine some employers without those who are simply pretending to work.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:work less (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, however, define "work". Would you labor for someone else? Probably not. But you likely wouldn't sit on your butt all day doing nothing either. Maybe you join a club, start a band, discover an aptitude for art, start your own business.. who knows?
The inescapable fact, however, is that what you conceive of as "work", going to a building someone else owns and laboring for them, is going to decline as automation, AI and robots improve, so something has to be put in it's place that's better than "labor a robot won't do".
Re: (Score:3)
Only if you leave out all the people who have given up searching for work. The actual labor participation rate is still much lower than it was at the end of the Clinton administration. It fell a bit under Bush, and even more under Obama.
Re: (Score:2)
Only if you leave out all the people who have given up searching for work.
No, even U6 is really low right now.
Sigh...that's due to baby boomers retiring. (Score:2)
It's not Barack Obama's fault that a lot of people were born about 65 years ago. That's why retirees (and children, btw) are excluded from the labor statistics that functional adults use (U4, U5, U6--all of which look pretty good by historical standards)--and why the Breitbart set has to manufacture some misleading metric to placate their mouthbreathing outrage junkies.
Re:work less (Score:5, Insightful)
The inescapable fact, however, is that what you conceive of as "work", going to a building someone else owns and laboring for them, is going to decline as automation, AI and robots improve,,
When? When is the magic decline in jobs going to start happening? Because unemployment rates are really low right now.
For me, it's not necessarily a matter of declining jobs, but declining wages. Unemployment can be really low, but if most of the employment is in low-paying service jobs, we have trouble. Robots have ALREADY taken over most manufacturing jobs, Amazon's warehouses are now almost entirely automated, and soon Uber will be driving our trucks. You can bet that as service workers demand livable wages, the calculation for when to introduce robots tips toward "soon". When that happens, with other sectors automated, where will they go?
I don't think it's ethical to let people starve, and honestly, letting them waste their lives as fry cook or paper pusher in an office isn't much healthier or better. If we can all have robots to meet our basic needs, why not? Let the robots do the work, and let humans compete over creative works, creating their own businesses and styles to compete with each other for fame or other society acknowledgements of worth. I think the age of arbitrary numbers written on scraps of crushed dead wood pulp is coming to an end, we need to adjust for a new concept of "money" based on cultural contributions to society rather than simply your required 40 hours a day wasting your life away because "that's how we always did it".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What figures are you using?
U6 [stlouisfed.org].
My mom is a 64 year old Uber driver.
If your mom is underemployed (not working full time, for example), then she counts as unemployed in the U6 statistics.
Here's a good reason for you (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen anyone come up with a good reason people wouldn't use basic income to work less and be lazy. I can tell you, if I had guaranteed income for life, I would probably not ever work again.
Here you go [wikipedia.org].
You have to realize that "work" may not be going out and doing a 9-to-5 job in the traditional sense. Newton made a bunch of his discoveries while on forced leave from Cambridge due to the plague, and there are many historical examples of well-to-do scientists and explorers and artists who made great discoveries because they had the leisure and means to do so.
Stephen King was dirt poor for much of his early life, but he still wrote because he loved writing. Imaging how much more he could have contributed to popular literature if he didn't have to take back-breaking jobs as a young man to make ends meet.
Not everyone will be Newton or King, but anyone who takes up a hobby or minor occupation and becomes really good at it might extend the frontiers of that area. All of this has the potential to enrich our society and further our scientific knowledge.
Re: (Score:2)
He said not everyone would be. Are you claiming that the entire thing is an utter failure if "that guy" actually veges out on the couch until his circulatory system collapses?
Consider that Rowling has brought enough money into the UK's economy to cover a few hundred thousand person years of the dole.
Others might make somewhat lesser contributions, but probably not zero.
Re:Here's a good reason for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people may be like that, but I see two problems with that observation.
Short term: current welfare strongly encourages people to not get a job, because when you get a job you automatically lose the welfare. Let's say you get offered $1100/mo to work a 30h/week job, but your welfare gives you $1000/mo. Essentially you're being offered $100/mo for 30 hours of work per week. Would you take that offer? With a UBI, suddenly the same job would be paying 11x as much for your time, and I suspect that would make you more likely to say "yes". In other words, a UBI would remove the boredom for many people, and thus improve the situation.
Long term: between automation and AIs, jobs are going away. There's just not going to be enough work out there for humans to do (and this probably isn't a very far future either, because AI research is moving really damn fast). Having lots of people with no work to do is something we're going to have to deal with whether or not we do a UBI, so it doesn't constitute a reason not to do a UBI. Also, without a UBI, those people are either going to be on welfare (with its associated high per-person administration overhead), or they aren't -- in which case they won't be bored, they'll be bored and desparate. I'd say that wouldn't be an improvement.
Re: (Score:3)
Or not. Would you take the offer I described?
You're right that they wouldn't offer the same amount, but surely you see the advantage of not having a big trap around welfare that encourages people to not take a job once they're on it.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, it the employer didn't want the job done.
Re: (Score:2)
If you have enough money to live on, but not enough to pay for entertainment, what will you do with your time?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have you considered that that says more about you than it does about the basic income?
As for evidence against your couch potato theory, I present to you Linux, volunteers in all sorts of charitable organizations, various community projects, and retired people I have known who took part time jobs to relieve boredom and be with people.
The latter showed me some of the reasons the capital class fears the basic income. Though the retirees didn't really bargain that hard for maximum pay, they absolutely had to be
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
and retired people I have known who took part time jobs to relieve boredom and be with people.
This is evidence against basic income: the vast majority of retired people don't work.
Re:work less (Score:4, Insightful)
And then they take part time jobs or volunteer in church, babysit the grandkids, provide peace of mind to parents in the neighborhood, etc etc.
The ones who actually do nothing are the ones who die within a couple of years of retirement.
Re:work less (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk to long-time unemployed people and ask them if they would work given the chance. Most of them will answer in the positive. Sitting around being lazy is wonderful if you are a working person, because it is a change from your usual routine. Once it becomes your routine you absolutely want to work again.
Of course there are exceptions. Many of them have other problems (alcohol, drugs, etc.) that are unrelated to UBI.
Re:work less (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy shit you are thick. I mean in every single reply on this topic you have missed the point, taken something out of context, or just plain not understood what was said.
I would say english is your second language but that would imply you learnt it at some point.
Re:work less (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd be happy with a subsistence level income? You sound like a fucking loser.
Yeap. Fortunately, I'm also immune to peer pressure, so I can live with myself.
Re: (Score:2)
The point is that in the coming era of automation, that's exactly what needs to happen. There will NOT be enough jobs for everyone
Yeah, people have been beating that drum for over a century. When is the drop in employment coming? When do you predict it will happen? Make a testable prediction, and we'll see if you're right.
Re: (Score:3)
Too low (Score:5, Insightful)
UBI is very different when the sum is enough to live or not.
If it is too low (and at 560 euro/month it is certainly too low to pay housing and food), then people still have to accept any job to live, and employer can pay less because decent living costs are already partially covered by UBI. In such a situation, UBI acts as a social support to employer without taking any power from them.
OTOH, with a UBI high enough to cover basic needs, things change a lot. Employers need to convince people to enroll them instead of the other way around, while people can also choose to start businesses that have social benefit without being profitable.
Of course that consideration do not cover the huge question: how to find the money for high UBI? Some specialists consider a high UBI possible if all national labor costs are socialized: Instead of paying employees, employers contribute to a labor fund which in turn pays UBI to people. I have no idea if this is workable or not
Re: (Score:2)
You do it by trialling it in selected groups.
One obvious way is to take ten thousand people, who are possible candidates, and flip a coin ten thousand times to see if they're enrolled or not.
This lets you fairly robustly measure how much more or less the people work, and other costs.
For example, if you have a 'normal' benefits system, you have costs in the system about investigating if people are working while claiming benefit, prosecuting them, making sure they're looking for work, penalising them if they'
Re: (Score:3)
Unless all participants are grouped together geographically, your experiment will be invalid. For example, one criticism is that UBI will lead to price inflation. You can't measure that when the number of participants in the experiment is dwarfed by the rest of the population several (dozens or hundred) times over.
Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you think sickness benefits, unemployment benefits, state pensions, etc are somehow not 'giving money out'? They are somehow 'measured'?
The whole point of a (properly designed) UBI is to replace ALL of that, with a single right of income.
The advantages include removal of the huge amount of bureaucracy, management costs, corruption, and fraud.
Basically it means everyone gets treated EQUALLY, and you would be amazed how many people hate that idea.
Usually because THEY want to be the ones deciding who is 'worthy' of support.
The cost is self-adjusting, because basically all countries have graduated income taxes, and UBI is also taxed, so people with large incomes
just end up repaying most of it in tax anyway. A country should use a combination of personal tax, and savings from the scrapping of all the broken
other forms of social benefits to fund it.
Of course that is putting it simplistically, however that is the formula of a true UBI, which many haters (usually those who currently profit from control
of existing welfare schemes) work very hard to ignore.
UBI is not 'free money for all', it is an acceptance that welfare is a sensible right in society, so we should remove the broken and inequitable systems
that current exist, covered in bandaids, and replace them with a simple single system that treats everyone equally, is low cost to manage, and almost
by definition free of corruption and fraud, because it is so simple..
Re: (Score:2)
Most of those you listed are things an employee pays for from their gross income. At least in the places in the US with which I am familiar.
Re: (Score:3)
The rest of the world bears no resemblance to the US - particularly not Europe, where the French Revolution has left clear evidence of what happens if you leave most of the population in abject poverty, and then publicly say "I'm all right, Jack".
Trump and his mates may tell you you can avoid problems by telling the general public they are worthless scum, but the evidence is against this being the case.
Re: (Score:3)
A UBI is very simple to administrate and requires very little bureaucracy. Our current collection of welfare systems are not. The reduction in bureaucracy won't come from increasing the number of people on welfare, but by reducing the per-person administration overhead.
I have absolutely no idea how you managed to misunderstand that from the GP's post.
Re:The problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not as if that 'extra' money suddenly leaves the economy. Given the subsistence levels of cash we're talking about, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of it will be spent quickly.
This is a point that is often lost on a lot of people. People who have little money are fantastic at spending it. From an economics point of view they are the ideal consumers: if they happen to save money it is almost guaranteed to be for a specific larger purchase in the near future. Otherwise they are going to spend all their money locally (no fancy imported Russian caviar or trips to remote countries) and soon.
There have been and are projects in Africa that specifically just give money to poor families and it seems to be working very well. See for instance:
https://www.givedirectly.org/r... [givedirectly.org]
Barring emotional arguments such as 'but Western poor people are different' the fear for giving poor people (marginally) too much money is simply unfounded.
I should add (Score:3)
Welfare should be something to keep people alive if they don't have enough income not some "every child gets a prize" bullshit.
Re: (Score:3)
I wasn't aware that robots were invented by bank CEOs. Or computers. They certainly did invent cutting away the social security systems that held society stable.
If you think that only the owner of a company deserves the profits that the company makes, you just busted the top end of the idiot scale. Trade unions should go on strike more often to remind those owners who is actually generating the profits of the company.
You are right, the people who earn the profits should get them. That means the sales clerks
Finland needs to quaduple it (Score:2)
The most logical argument yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you do not have basic security you cannot be rational,"
Exactly.
Not only does SAK say that the system may reduce the labor force -- for instance by tempting mothers of small children or those close to retirement to take more time off -- but the union also suggests that making it easier to refuse unpleasant jobs may create inflationary bottlenecks.
We have automation so that we didn't have to perform unpleasant of dangerous jobs! Not enough workers? AUTOMATE IT! Can't automate it? Pay people what the job is actually worth!
This is how the future should work.
Re: (Score:3)
Pay people what the job is actually worth!
In a world of globalization, that figure drops rapidly to whatever a migrant is willing to do to stay in our beautiful country.
Shortened that for you:
STFY:
Pay the most desperate worker available what the job is worth to them.
You don't say! (Score:2)
An organization whose only reason to exist hinges on people being unable to tell their boss "Stuff it, slaver, I quit!" when he makes unreasonable demands is against something that enables people to just get up and leave jobs with insane employers?
That's unpossible!
Of course unions oppose it. (Score:2)
The unions will argue that the appropriate response to this is to outlaw automation, to hamstring its progress by demanding that it adhere to ludicrous regulations where it is used, and to otherwise do everything in their power to keep their power, just like any other political entity. Most unions
5% is really not that bad (Score:2)
The U.S. spends 1.27 Trillion on Social Security Unemployment and Labor
https://www.google.com/imgres?... [google.com]
That's just at the federal level and at a guesstimate is close to 8% of the economy. It would be great to eliminate that and get the number down to 5%
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You pay people to do fuck-all... (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to somehow have missed that most jobs will go away and not be replaced with others. Hence your statements make no sense. Nobody is really advocating for an UBI if enough jobs stay available and need to be done.
Re: (Score:3)
You're being short-sighted. A robot that can serve you pizza won't change much, no. But what about a robot that can do all of the things we're currently doing, and all of those "things to do that other people will want done"?
Our automation for physical tasks is improving, but we're also rapidly approaching the point of having AIs that can do cognitive or creative tasks as well as we can. It's easy to say "we'll come up with something", but there's not going to be a whole lot of things left that humans can d
SAK is a worker union stuck in 1970's (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Finland, so few comments about the SAK.
SAK is worker union that has jammed to 1970's.
There are only 2 things SAK is capable of doing:
1) Shouting "bigger pays of we will go to strike"
2) Shouting "you may not do any improvements for more flexible work contracts, or we will go to strike".
Absolutely no understanding that the world economy has changed since 1970's, and absolutely no understanding od thet fact that finland has been belonginf to EU for over 20 years should make things very different than things were in 1970s.
Also absolutely no understanding of the fact that Nokia was holding Finnish economy high and now when Nokia is no longer making mobile phones, Finnish economy is doing much worse and they cannot require so high wages anymore.
In Finland the worker unions are way too strong, they have some rights (or actually wrongs) worker unions in other countries do not have:
1) The worker unions also decide how much is paid to employers that are not members of the union.
2) You get tax rebates for belonging to worker union.
3) In order to get better unemployment benefits you HAVE to belong to some unemployment fund, even though only about 1% of the unemployment compensation money comes from the unemployment fund, 99% comes directly from the goverment. Most of these unemployment funds are ran by the worker unions. (fortunately there is also one private on, "YTK", "common unemployment fund", but many people do not know it exists)
Ask the Longshoremen about basic income! (Score:5, Interesting)
A perfect example of basic income working is the longshoremen's unions in the US. Before containerized freight and automated cargo terminals, thousands of men would stand on the stones every morning and work a back-breaking job hauling loose cargo off ships with hooks. After containerization, instantly, there was no more work for the vast majority of these people. Since most of them were completely unskilled, and not capable of retraining into any other job that paid the same or better, they could have been in danger of seing the same fate we assign to the unemployed today -- eventual destitution. However, the longshoremen's unions implemented what amounts to a tax on cargo handled through these automated terminals that goes towards paying "retired" longshoremen a basic income. This is one example, and let's just say the union has a lot of muscle behind it that helped this get passed, but it does show a way to help the unemployable -- and make no mistake, that's going to be 90+% of us sometime before I'm dead (in the next 50 years or so.)
I guess my problem with people who argue against a basic income is that they don't have a better alternative in mind. Sometime in the near future, the vast majority of low level service jobs will be automated. At the same time, the use of intelligent systems will come and cannibalize the top end of the spectrum too. Think about doctors for a second -- they're smart enough to have a regulated profession and should be fine because of that. But what if they didn't? Medical education is basically academic hazing, from the MCAT to the preclinical firehose to 100 hour weeks as an intern. Med schools select for people with photographic memories and perfect grades because that's basically the only way to survive the training as it is today. Well, thanks to Google we don't need photographic memories anymore, so the only skill left will be synthesis of all the stored knowledge. This is why IBM basically sold off their entire business and are building Watson and other AI-type systems. Soon as these algorithms get good enough, most work that requires intuition is toast. Hospitals won't have to pay doctors when they can feed test results and live observations of patients into a machine and get a diagnosis.
I think basic income is the only reasonable transition vehicle to move the world away from traditional employment. Imagine telling everyone who's about to retire that people entering the workforce now won't have to save. Or, tell people who define themselves by their work that they've all been made redundant at the same time. Or, try to divide up the accumulated property among people when money stops being critical -- who determines where the renters go, or who gets to keep the houses they own? All of these are too much stress for the economy to bear all at once and will lead to a mess. Phase in a low-employment world over time with controls, and it makes the shift easier.
They seem to misunderstand the idea... (Score:5, Informative)
How other could they see "it may encourage some people to work less" as a problem, when that is precisely the intent? The problem tackled by an UBI is primarily the scarcity of work, nothing else.
The problem with your argument... (Score:3)
is that it conflicts with all of human history.
There is ample evidence of social & economic collapse under communal economic systems (and you're kidding yourself if you don't think that's what UBI is, because the only way to pay for it is to tax wealth so much that it becomes de-facto communism)--and there is basically no evidence to support the theory that society cannot replace the jobs lost to technological automation. People have been predicting the latter ever since the loom and they've been wrong
Misunderstood: socialism IS everywhere (Score:3)
Capitalism claims to benefit the most people overall than other systems which is a socialist argument!
Socialism is actually used to justify capitalism. The problem is that so much propagandizing has been done that people see it only in extreme examples; and unfortunately people don't explore things in depth regardless of it's importance.
Making people suffer, starve, and die because they refuse to work is foolish as well as inhumane. Those people will cause hardships and increase costs to society. While so