Universal Basic Income (UBI)

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I just found this article in the news today:

Free money? South Africa floats universal basic income for all

South Africa is highly likely to implement a form of universal basic income in the next few years, with the ruling ANC party committing to finalize a policy within two years of taking power. While details are still being debated, the goal is to provide a monthly grant sufficient for all citizens to live above the poverty line and meet basic needs.

A universal basic income providing a sufficient standard of living for all of South Africa’s nearly 60 million citizens could reduce rampant crime levels - which reached over 1.6 million reported cases in 2022 - to just a fraction of current numbers, as people’s basic needs are met and they are empowered to adapt their ways towards securing higher cultural interests defined by a society free from deprivation.

A prospect of an actual obliteration of crime, in :south_africa: Africa.

L.A. County’s Breathe universal basic income program gives participants $1,000 monthly for three years

Guaranteed income programs’ popularity remains strong at the local and state level. In the last two years, there have been 200 guaranteed income pilot programs launched in the U.S. In California, more than 12,000 people received money through several dozen similar pilots in recent years.

A European YouGov poll shows majority support for UBI in Germany, Spain, and Italy. The Covid-19 pandemic has reignited the UBI debate, leading Spain to lay the foundation for a universal income program, while Germany has implemented its own UBI scheme.

Additionally, there are calls for EU-wide minimum living income and the promotion of UBI through initiatives such as the European Citizens’ Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income.

Switzerland has proposed a UBI of 2,500 CHF ($3,000 USD) per month, unconditionally, plus $800 USD per child. According to a 2018 poll from Splendid Research, Germans found 1,137 euros ($1,300 USD) a month to be an appropriate amount on average.

grundeinkommen_finanzierung-1

Belgium has a history of active groups promoting basic income, such as the movement Vivant and the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, who is founder of the Basic Income European Network (BIEN).

More than 2.1 million people in Germany recently applied to be part of Germany’s first long-term universal basic income project, sparking discussions about its potential as a future model for the country.

  • A Finnish basic income experiment found that UBI had a positive impact on well-being and attitudes, such as increased trust in institutions. A society with higher levels of well-being and trust in the system could potentially foster a cultural shift towards more positive and law-abiding behaviors.
  • The idea that providing a universal basic income (UBI) could lead to an “obliteration of crime through culturally enforced behavioral and mental evolution” is an ambitious claim, but one that can be substantiated to some degree by examining the potential power of culture and societal expectations to shape human behavior.
  • When deprivation and financial insecurity are addressed through a guaranteed income floor, individuals may no longer have the same economic motivations or excuses for engaging in criminal activities. This removal of a significant barrier could create an opportunity for cultural forces to exert a stronger influence on shaping individual behavior and societal norms.

In summary: UBI sets people on a path of philosophy.

What do you think of Universal Basic Income (UBI), and for example the idea that it might enable to obliterate crime and promote a society that through culture aligns people with higher (philosophical) interests?

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Daniel Hart, an independent scholar and historian based in Australia who studies and publishes online collections of key texts from the “Great Books” of Western philosophy and political thought through his project Online Library of Liberty (OLL), is walking across Australia to promote Universal Basic Income (UBI).

http://davidmhart.com/

He recently was swept away in a river and needed to be rescued.

“The goal of Mr Hart’s walk is to encourage people to consider a basic income for all Australians.

He described it as regular, unconditional weekly payments to cover an individual’s basic needs.

It is something he believes could be possible by “taxing corporations correctly”.

“Right now, they’re taxed legally, but not ethically, in my opinion,” he said.

He says he hopes by hearing his story, people will seek out more information, find out what it is, and make up their own minds about it.”

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This is going to be as effective as raising the minimum wage. They will in response hike prices and taxes until it’s almost like you have nothing, as at the beginning.

As long as they are unwilling to hold greedy rich as accountable as surviving poor (for violating self=other in the taking of what another either THINKS they own, or is ACTUALLY owed to them), no solution coming from the state is going to solve anything.

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Don’t you think that Big Governments will be going after AI and robotics where the majority surplus of the future is to be found? Or do you think that Governments will give up on people when jobs are obsolete and when people are fundamentally not needed anymore for the advancement of industry?

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I like UBI, but two points I don’t see enough of:

  1. Basic income doesn’t need to be a living wage to have an effect. $3000/year UBI would effectively be a 10% raise for the median family in the US, which is life changing. But unlike a raise, it isn’t tied to work. People can reduce their hours and make the same pay, or get started in a new career at a lower rate, or quit and let the UBI tide them over while they look for better work. All of that gives workers significant bargaining power, forcing employers to pay reasonable rates, to treat them well, to entice them to say. Those effects make real a difference, even when the total payout is much lower than I usually see proposed.

  2. UBI is a small-government policy. When the government spends money, it takes money as taxes (or borrows against future tax revenue), and decides how the money should be spent. With a UBI, the taxes are taken, but the spending decisions are made by everyone individually. The choice of what makes a person’s life better is left to the individual, and not to their representatives (and the lobbyists who tell them what to think).

This analogy doesn’t quite work. If taxes are progressive and UBI is truly universal, the net effect is a redistribution of wealth. Even if prices increase in response, the effect on distribution matters.

Another big difference from minimum wage is that UBI is unconditional. When the minimum wage is increased, a certain amount of human labor becomes uneconomical – if a business can only get $10 of value out of every hour of my labor, they aren’t going to pay me $15 for it. Businesses just won’t hire those people, and everyone that isn’t hired earns less as a result.

UBI pays, no matter what.

I’d rather see an LVT, but your proposal is probably more politically viable.

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The US appears to be planning a major ‘control’ initiative in a few years, in light of AI’s potential to grow out of control. The EU is lacking behind in control initiatives, according to some articles, but I noticed that people in Europe may be warry about a robot and AI revolution.

Philosophy professor Seth Lazar wrote the following article about it:

The US is racing ahead in its bid to control artificial intelligence – why is the EU so far behind?

AI ‘godfather’ says universal basic income will be needed

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The idea of a reduction of hours isn’t feasible when considering that the prospect of jobs is to falter completely by AI and robotics.

What is at stake is securing peoples livelyhood, to live healthy and to raise children. It wouldn’t be an option to leave that responsibility to the very few that may still have a job for some time.

What do you think of the proposal in Switzerland for an UBI of $3,000 USD per month + $800 USD per month per child? In Germany, a neighbour, people are to receive about $1,500 USD per month.

What would happen when countries globally are to introduce such significant different incomes for people?

Can you please explain your vision?

When jobs and human labor are completely obsolete in the next decade, it implies that the need for healthy humans and a stable society from the perspective of the interests of industry, could fall away.

I am not intending to argue that human values are stand to lose, but from a financial system perspective, it appears that Governments have been setup as a sort of ‘service agent’ for the source of the surplus of value in industry, the foundation of growth.

When AI / robotics would replace the source of the surplus value in industry, would Governments transition into a service agent for AI? Or will Governments continue to serve the people and ‘enslave’ the AI for their benefits?

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Some philosophers who argue(d) for UBI:

  • Philippe Van Parijs, a Belgian philosopher, has been a leading advocate for unconditional basic income (UBI) and has worked to promote it through philosophical arguments and activism. Van Parijs founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986.
  • Hillel Steiner, political philosopher who has argued that a global UBI funded by a land value tax would be distributively just. He sees UBI as a way to compensate people for the loss of their equal liberty to use unowned land sites.
  • Thomas Paine, an eighteenth century philosopher and Founding Father of the United States, Paine advocated for a stakeholder grant at maturity plus a citizens pension, which is nearly a UBI.
  • Thomas Spence, an eighteenth century English philosopher, Spence was apparently the first to fully lay out what is now called a universal basic income.
  • Joseph Charlier, a nineteenth century Belgian utopian philosopher, Charlier reinvented the idea of UBI in 1848, suggesting the socialization of rent with the proceeds redistributed as a UBI.

Some projects:

Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE)

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…because the AI-hype ain’t real for All… no-one even speaks about it or discusses it here.

I guess -like covid- the AI industry is being used as a[nother] ‘transfer of wealth’, from All, to the American top few percent… and yet with all those funds being generated/stolen, still no UBI for the American population.
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I see no philanthropy over there, but just vested-interests of hobbies and foreign aid.

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That is indeed interesting. I’ve noticed this myself on another forum.

Why do you think that the hype isn’t real? Evidently, the job cuts are real, and the prospect of further enhancing AI and robotics replacing almost any human job in the very near future appears to be real?

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Perhaps you are right, but this time the situation might change profoundly. Humans are becoming obsolete from the perspective of the exploiters of labour. Through AI and robotics, humans might become fundamentally unneeded for industry.

Education: for what purpose? No industrial exploiters who care for human development. AI can do it better anyway. This might be something that is already relevant today.

Why do you think that AI receives almost no attention on this forum?

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The US is usually slower at adopting new policies like, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the EU ends up getting there first. GDPR is a prime example, the US was talking about privacy regulation from the early 70s, and we still don’t have federal data privacy laws.

The US is also much more vulnerable to AI, because worker protections/bargaining power are weaker here, and the safety net is less generous. AI will lead to much more unemployment in the US, and that unemployment will cause much greater hardship here.

(This goes to @MagsJ’s points as well: People are more worried here, and for good reason.)

LVT is “Land Value Tax”. The idea is to tax the value of land (not including improvements to the land like real estate.

This is the basic framework Georgism, a libertarian progressive economic framework: tax common goods like land and natural resources, and pay it out mostly as a universal, unconditional basic income. It removes so called ‘land rents’, the amount people earn from exercising a monopoly on a piece of land, and instead incentivizes using land and other natural resources to add value. The idea being that the value of common goods will fluctuate to find an equilibrium, but supply is fixed so taxes can’t distort production, they can only encourage the most valuable use. But since everyone needs land and other natural resources, taxes effectively ‘flow through’, so that people’s felt taxation is proportion to consumption and unproductive wealth. It also naturally checks inflation, since the UBI is tied to the value of the resources.

You’re not wrong, but that’s still a ways off. And a low UBI requires all the infrastructure of a high UBI, so a low UBI can be raised as AI replaces human labor. Getting the infrastructure in place (i.e. having a way to reliably give everyone their UBI) is a huge hurdle, but once its done it opens up a lot of possibilities.

I think that’s fine to start. It isn’t clear what the best level of UBI is, and each country that does it differently is effectively an experiment that will give us more information about how to reform going forward.

Long term, in an ideal world as I see it, the UBI would be global. Countries would compete for immigrants by offering a different mix of laws and services, because immigrants would bring their UBI and thus each additional citizen would be an increase in national wealth.

That’s all a pipe dream from here, so let nations experiment and see what happens. If Germany has a UBI, I don’t think an EU UBI is far behind.

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UBI is inevitable, unless the world-controllers do manage to remove 90%+ of the global population.

AI + robotics will make UBI reasonably possible. That and endless war to keep the ‘economy’ (military industrial complex debt-machine) going.

Notwithstanding how UBI is slavery. “Oh ah, yes’um Master, puh-lease gimme my monthly handout mister, yess oh yes please I’m a gooood boy look oh lookie at me, how good boy I am mast’a! PLZ gimme my table scraps oh yesumm oh yes my lord!”

…welcome to the future of (what was formerly known as) humanity.

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Recently published resultson a UBI project in Denver.

Some interesting results. The study targeted homeless individuals and families, and had three groups with different treatment:

  • Group A got $1000/month
  • Group B got a lump sum up front of $6500 and then $500/month
  • Group C got $50/month (this is their control group)

All three groups also got a smart phone with a plan, and were asked to fill out surveys throughout the study and were paid for completing them ($5 each for short biweekly surveys, and $30 each for long-form surveys at the beginning, middle, and end of the study)

The results are interesting. All three groups experienced significant gains in housing stability, which I’ve seen reported as showing that UBI doesn’t seem to matter. But If you look only at people who were unsheltered at the beginning of the study, Group A had significantly better outcomes, with 43% renting or owning their residence (compared to 25% for Group B and 28% for Group C).

Importantly, and contrary to a lot of misconceptions about UBI, full-time employment for Groups A and B increased during the study, but decreased for Group C.

This is a good study, but not perfect. It was short-term (10 months), and the control group still got a lot of interventions (it’s pretty interesting how much good just giving people a phone seems to do). There were also problems with how it interacted with other welfare systems, because getting the UBI made participants less eligible for SNAP and Social Security and similar income-based programs. It’s hard to get around some of these limits – other than by doing more and larger studies, so hopefully we’ll keep seeing more like this.

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Why, among previously unsheltered people, would full time employment increase if you give them each $1000 a month for free?

Because almost no one who is already unsheltered would also be able to be employed full time. Same applies for group B.

But for group C, $50 a month isn’t enough to unshelter anyone. So regardless if the person was already unsheltered or not before the UBI began, no one in group C should see their sheltered status change with the addition of $50 a month.

Therefore these outcomes don’t say a whole lot, except “if you give a sufficiently large sum of money to people who are unsheltered, some of them will use the money to obtain shelter, and being sheltered is a requirement of being able to maintain full time employment.” That’s a great outcome for those people, but it only provides a superficial argument of “let’s give relatively large sums of free money to unsheltered people to help them get back on their feet.” And if you look at the actual numbers here, the differences aren’t all that much:

From time point 1 to 3:

Group A increased housing by 38% (which means 62% of people in this group didn’t even use the $1000 monthly UBI to obtain housing).

Group B increased housing by 42% (again, means that 58% – more than half-- of the people in this group didn’t use the lump sum and $500 a month toward obtaining housing).

Group C increased housing by 31% (69% of people in this group didn’t use the $50 a month to obtain stable housing, but the more surprising result is that about 1/3 of these people were somehow able to get housing for just $50 a month? Odd.)

Then you notice Group C had the largest positive change in perception of stable housing, so you figure it’s likely that some of these people (in all three groups, but especially in group C) didn’t actually obtain what we might consider to be stable housing but may have marginally or incrementally improved their housing situation to somewhere between unsheltered and stable housing. For example, maybe some of the people used the money to pay to stay in a crack house with other addicts, rather than being on the street.

In any case, it already stands to reason that if you give unsheltered or under-sheltered people sums of free money in any amount, some of them will use it to improve their situation of shelter, others won’t. Not sure what this study is really supposed to mean other than stating the obvious. And other than confirming that anti-UBI advocates might claim that even if you give UBI to literally unsheltered people most of them won’t even use the money to obtain shelter. So what are they using it on? Drugs probably. What else?

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And none of that even touches on my point about how UBI makes people slaves to the government.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Germany Sending Troops to Russia?

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I think you are mis-describing the outcomes here. I assume from your numbers you are looking at the chart captioned “Percentage of Total Participants in a House or Apartment They Rent or Own at Timepoint 1 and Timepoint 3”, but that isn’t “increased housing”, that’s the increase in a particular kind of housing. You can’t assume that the rest of the people in the study didn’t use the UBI to improve their housing situation.

And I’m not sure where you’re seeing Group C with the “largest positive change in perception of stable housing”, the chart on the project home page shows Group A go from 19% to 48%, Group B from 17% to 48%, and Group C from 25% to 46%. That seems to say the opposite.

I’m also not sure how much we can read into “perception of stable housing.” As the authors note in their quantitative report (page 24):

Housing stability is a difficult construct to measure because individuals may have different definitions of what stable housing means to them. Stable housing may mean a house or apartment of their own, it could mean living with a family member, or transitional housing where they know they can be there for a set amount of time.

I think it’s also worth looking at the charts on page 26 of that report, which shows that even before the study, most of the subjects felt safe and welcome where they were sleeping: all groups average over 7/10 for each, where 10 is “completely safe”/“completely welcome”.

The financial results seem important. Increases in stable employment are important both because they make a lasting difference in the lives of the people involved, and because they reintegrate them back into society and make them productive. And importantly, UBI does not make people lazy, if anything it enables them to overcome obstacles that prevented them from working.

And just as a study of homelessness, the results are interesting. One interpretation is that giving people a cell phone is enough to make a significant difference in curbing homelessness, but another is that homelessness is just a transitory state, and a substantial minority of homeless people will be stably housed within a year.

You haven’t presented much of an argument here. Your claim is that giving people money, with which they can do whatever they want, makes them less free? Are people slaves to every source of income they have?

What do you mean by “slaves”? Giving people UBI doesn’t make it so they are bought and sold in slave markets; it’s not literal slavery, it’s some kind of rhetorical slavery. You really mean something like “dependents” rather than “slaves”.

Not to get too Georgist (I don’t know if @X10 endorses that view and it’s not he only way to do a UBI), but if UBI is funded by a tax on the value of land, that would effectively make every recipient a landlord: the people who use the land would pay for it, and all UBI recipients share the rents. That’s about as far from slavery as one can get.

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What other kind of housing are they talking about then, other than “apartment or house that you rent or own”? That pretty much covers it.

“And importantly, UBI does not make people lazy, if anything it enables them to overcome obstacles that prevented them from working.” Yes that seemed to be the case for a minority of those in the study who received the significant UBI each month. Again this is pretty obvious. If you give homeless people lots of free money each month, some of them will use it to obtain stable housing, and some of them who were homeless not because it’s their lifestyle choice but because of bad luck or unfortunate circumstances of poverty will be able to use this as a spring board to get a job and hopefully work their way out of poverty. I agree that’s a nice thing for them. My point isn’t that it’s not a socially good outcome for those people, more my points would be along the lines of 1) UBI is impractically expensive, especially considering how much massive debt we already have, 2) creating dependency on the government is bad, even if some of those people are able to eventually work their way out of that dependency many are not able to or will not want to, and 3) the majority of people already homeless will use the money for alcohol drugs and lottery tickets.

Basically… we can’t afford it, we are already only maintaining social government spending because of continuing to run up a new trilliion-dollar credit card every year. And even if we could afford it, it’s only going to help a relatively small number of people compared to the number of people it ends up hurting. Either directly by feeding their addictions or by habituating them to enslavement to the government for their continued material existence. Much better to do things that reduce government dependency and otherwise just let people live their lives.

“Are people slaves to every source of income they have”? A job doesn’t have the ability to legally use force against you, arrest you, jail you, execute you. A job doesn’t have the ability to force you to take experimental gene therapy as a condition of your employment, well some jobs pretended to have that ability and guess what, you are free to go elsewhere and find another job. You’re not free to go elsewhere and find another government.

Pretending like dependency on the state as such for your welfare handouts is no different from depending on having a job to work and earn your own living, is pretty disingenuous.

“but if UBI is funded by a tax on the value of land, that would effectively make every recipient a landlord: the people who use the land would pay for it, and all UBI recipients share the rents. That’s about as far from slavery as one can get.”

Huh. A tax on the value of land. So a new property tax? How does taxing land with new property taxes make recipients of UBI “landlords”? That makes zero sense.

Or are you talking some kind of communitarianism where the state buys up land, builds apartments on it, then gives equal partial ownership of those apartments and land back to the people in proportion to the number of people living there, and also at the same time pays their rent for them? Again, that’s just stupid. Imagine thinking we have the money to blow giving away free land and housing to millions of people while at the same time giving them free ownership of that same land and housing. Insanity.

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This statement alone shows that you come from an ideological position. Not a realistic one.

You cannot even admit that UBI would logically make some people lazy? Really? Giving people enough free money each month to live on? And you aren’t able to see how that would lead SOME (not all, but definitely a decent amount of people) to become lazy.

Bro

UBI is the silliest idea that will become sadly necessary in the future once a few key corporations own all material production through their AI and robotic systems. Human workers mostly replaced. At that point UBI will be necessary, but that doesnt make it good. It just means that, at the future time, life will be so stupid and irrational that we have no choice but to give free handouts to everyone since most people will have no chance of actually being productive in any meaningful way. Especially since by that time reproduction will probably be largely taken over by massive corporations too.

Several trillion-dollar global corporations owning most of all economic production and most of sanctioned human reproduction. I bet you get excited just thinking about it.