Comment by mike_hearn

Comment by mike_hearn a day ago

"Trials" by true believers who don't understand their own proposal?

We don't need trials to know if UBI can work or not. Basic economic literacy is all you need. It's like saying there's a bunch of trials that show 2+2=5. No review of the trials is required, all the statement means is the trials were incorrectly designed/run.

The concept of UBI boils down to "something for nothing", which is incoherent, practically a violation of the laws of physics. Money is not wealth. You cannot simply pass a law that magics wealth into existence. The only way to give everyone a minimum standard of wealth is via the already heavily used strategy of taking wealth away from other people who are creating it, and then hoping it doesn't bum them out so much they stop working.

dns_snek a day ago

We're not creating something out of nothing unless you ignore improvements in productivity and automation over the past few centuries, as well as the ones that are coming.

As time goes on, we need fewer and fewer people to do the work required for a population of given size to survive. That is an indisputable fact - how does that factor into your mental model?

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mike_hearn 13 hours ago

Productivity levels don't matter! UBI isn't just a more generous welfare scheme, with conditions on who gets it and where the rich lose wealth because it's being transferred to the poor. UBI says everyone can receive wealth unconditionally. In other words, that it would be possible for 100% of the population to stop working and still receive a spendable income that buys some meaningful standard of living.
UBI taken literally is a demand for an economic perpetual motion machine: it's not merely hard, it's an impossibility.
That's why if you apply even a little bit of pressure to UBI arguments they collapse and a mass retreat to the bailey begins, e.g.
• In reality most people would work even if they didn't have to. Doesn't matter: the claim is still wrong, and hoping people don't call your bluff is no strategy.
• People in high tax brackets will pay more into the scheme than they take out. Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income (wealth has to come in to be an income).
• The near future will be a hard sci-fi scenario in which self-repairing robots and AI do every imaginable job both now and into the future. In other words: UBI is a utopian fantasy from a children's book, not something governments should be wasting time and money trying to implement. Arguably, people who propose UBI should be seen as very dangerous, given the long history of utopians who became tyrants when their dreams hit the rocks of reality.
There are no real-world scenarios in which UBI makes sense as a concept, sorry. It's just /r/antiwork rebranded.

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- dns_snek 3 hours ago
  
  Is this the first time you realized that human ideas tend to fall apart if you conveniently ignore how people collectively behave like it doesn't matter, make up a scenario in the logical extreme and pretend it's the obvious outcome? In the same reductionist spirit I'm sure you would agree that:
  Fractional reserve banking can't possibly work because what happens when everyone withdraws at the same time?
  Capitalism can't possibly work because what happens when a single corporation owns everything in the world?
  Insurance can't possibly work because what happens when a natural disaster affects the entire world?
  Maternity and paternity leave can't possibly work because what if 3/4 of the working age population just keep having children every year and never go to work?
  Disability benefits can't possibly work because what if everyone just harms themselves so they don't have to work?
  Bridges can't possibly work because what happens when every lane is filled bumper to bumper with fully loaded semis?
  Power grids can't possibly work because what happens when everyone uses 100% of their capacity at once?
  > Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income
  That's an argument over what we're calling the system, not an argument addressing its viability.
  
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  mike_hearn an hour ago
  
  > That's an argument over what we're calling the system, not an argument addressing its viability.
  What you call it is everything in these debates. You accuse me of taking something to a logical extreme, but UBI is a logical extreme by definition. It takes welfare and then extrapolates it to an extreme in which nobody has to work at all.
  If you're imagining a system in which most people do work, and are forced via taxes to pay more taxes to people who don't, that's fine and viable even though it's a bad idea. But that's just welfare. No new names or trials needed, we know how that works out already.
  If you're imagining UBI as the system actually presented in these trials, and aren't merely playing word games, then everything I laid out isn't some reductio ad absurdum but rather a direct consequence of the actual definition you're using. That's why UBI proponents have to make arguments of the form "we offer that nobody has to work, but it doesn't matter we're lying because in reality nobody will take us up on it".
  
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int_19h a day ago

We are already doing it with various forms of welfare, except that it comes with a very large bureaucratic overhead because of the myriad of rules as to who can claim what. UBI with properly calibrated tax brackets is no different.

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mike_hearn 13 hours ago

That's the core misunderstanding found in every discussion of UBI. Welfare doesn't create something out of nothing, it redistributes wealth by taking it from those who created it.
UBI is fundamentally different to welfare at a conceptual level. It posits that everyone receives money unconditionally. This is technically possible if you don't care what that money buys - just inflate the currency - but that's merely an accounting trick and doesn't achieve anything by itself (it makes things worse). If you replace the word money with wealth, which is what people mean, it isn't possible at all. It's the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
The lower overhead argument also doesn't work. You can't eliminate most of the overhead of welfare distribution by using UBI. Any UBI scheme would still need at minimum:
1. A strong ID verification scheme to verify that each person only receives UBI once.
2. Bureaucratic systems for ensuring people's births and deaths are always found and tracked correctly, and cannot be forged.
3. Management of name/address changes, immigration, emigration etc to ensure the above.
And so on. Look at the stuff DOGE has been doing to the existing US social security system and notice that none of the problems identified are at the level of means testing going wrong. They're all the absolute basics, like "do dead people keep receiving money". UBI doesn't fix that. You would still have a massive bureaucracy.

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