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Hey Y'all Let's Talk about Basic Income
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It depends on how you implement a UBI. For the initial rollout, I would want to balance the payout level at a point that survival is possible, but a life of luxury is not. I would go so far as to say that it should be implemented in such a way that a life of reasonable comfort is not available from the UBI alone, as we want to spur continued productivity from the population. Ideally, I would couple the UBI with things like free training for careers and new technologies, so that those that lose their current lifestyle due to obsolescence/automation could rebuild that lifestyle in a new field.
In the long run, I would want the UBI threshold to continue to grow, advancing ahead of inflation. This is because continued efforts in automation should increase the level of lifestyle available to all humanity as the levels of productivity increase.
Also, I don't know if many reading this have thought about it, but we do have a form of UBI already implemented in the US. Social Security is a UBI.
I would put the starting value much lower, maybe about $2k a year. The labor market may have some slack, but not that much.
Which, short to middle term (~200 years) doesn't really seem likely to me given how most local governments can barely keep their streets clean and pipes flowing.
This is my main thought. The US has major, falling infrastructure, for example roads, and it seems to my that inefficiently spent social labor programs to improve that would still be better than just UBI.
But not everyone can dig ditches or lay bricks or reinforce concrete.
And eventually there won't be infrastructure to upgrade. Or the manpower needed to upgrade or maintain it will be minuscule.
I think it's time to admit that not everyone needs to be working to deserve the right to live.
Would solve public service issues, the student tuition crisis, the less-populous states personnel attrition issues, the education without work experience crisis, and generally make most communities a better place. It would also delay college graduation long enough that most students would actually have an idea of what they wanted to do after graduation and thus would make smarter choices on where, what and how they pursue college education.
See: quality departments.
We're good at it because there's this notion that if people aren't working they're leeches.
I'm okay admitting someone with back problems can't dig a ditch, or that we need to have office jobs for people to make it seem like they're productive.
Think of it, if you just want to cut a check for $2500 a month to someone, why would you add expenses like tools or office upkeep on top of that? That $2500 turns into $5000 and you've wasted an extra $2500 just for "show".
I think part of the faulty link of thinking here is the assumption that these are, in fact, useless jobs rather than necessary complications due to the exponentially growing complexities of modern economies. I'm generally for Basic Income because it's a solid idea, but lets not confuse the fact that there needs to be protections for our poorest folk with all, most, or even a decent amount of "some" jobs not being necessary.
In the private sector those seemingly nonsensical positions like QA and internal auditing exist due to insurance, liability, and financial security reasons. You don't pay people in the private sector unless they have some sort of added-value for the organization's bottom line.
In the public sector, with some exceptions at the appointee and Federal levels, no public employee serves a bullshit or useless role that isn't mandated by legal or functional need within the city, state or government as if they did their position would have long since been slashed after decades of nation-wide budget cuts.
If it's "Get GBI but you need to do xyz at the office unless you can prove you're working in the private sector" that's just a terrible idea.
If I can apply for a state job, get it, and get pay and slowly phase out GBI, then sure, that's a great solution.
I'm also generally in favor of the state-worker draft, assuming there's demand for the X-millions of teenagers we have.
Specific to this comment, why wouldn't we pay them to go to training to do these jobs, too? We'd be improving their skill sets, giving them a living wage, and then they could transition to community projects and continue to get that wage OR do something in the private sector.
Obviously we'd have dispensations for people who couldn't do the work for health reasons.
And if we ever one day ran out of public works projects that needed to be done, THEN we'd transition to UBI. But we'd also have fantastic public infrastructure, something we're lacking now.
Not to mention the non-tangible infrastructure, such as web and computer logistics and data management that requires billions of man hours in the local community to get it right. Having a good hundred people per small city constantly doing nothing but logging digital coordinates for state GIS coodinate planning and inventory would be a massively needed element by literally every community. Cities like New York would likely need two or three thousand just to make headway over a year on simple surveys.
There is always local municipal work to be done to make towns more effective, better, and livable by the folks living within them. The best way to solve blight is to employ those living within blighted conditions to improve their communities so that you don't have to destroy a community with the only other alternative: gentrification.
The person with the bad back can't dig ditches for fiber opitcs or lay concrete. What are you going to do, invent a job for them to do? Why?
Alright you train the guy with the bad back to configure the fiber optics instead of doing the manual labor of it all. What about the guy with the bum leg? 56 million people have a disability that's enough to get some sort of disability payout. Are we forsaking them or are we just putting them on the dole and requiring them to sit down in an office and draw pictures for 8 hours a day so we feel better about them doing something?
I agree that the infrastructure needs improvement and there's always things to improve. I disagree that there's enough work for 56 million people to do this work forever. Let alone the 10-20 million of unemployed people, and the countless others that are underemployed.
What's the solution for them?
Well sure. So is farmer. But the argument here is that we could productively employ a much larger percentage of the population going forward doing construction. That's unlikely for any manual labor type job.
What would those other 77 million people do?
You can only fix a bridge so frequently. I just don't think there's enough things to do for that many people.
The whole point of GBI is that, eventually, there just isn't going to be work left to do anymore. Sure maybe you've got 5 million bridge fixers, but bridges don't need to be fixed every decade, either.
GBI is slated to cost in the ballpark of what, $5-10 trillion?
We should probably just write some checks and then start a government job program on top of it to fix our infrastructure. Those doing jobs can get weeded off the dole and get some skills so there's a net positive for doing both.
Management.
I'm not following your math, it should be around 10 million based on 3.3/130 = x / 320.
You're ignoring all of the advances in technology since 1938. We would need nowhere near the amount of labor now to duplicate the New Deal. And we already have all of the infrastructure from the New Deal, much of the infrastructure work we need now is in maintenance and not in new construction.
Look at things from a mathematical perspective. Today, on average a person produces X amount of labor, and we need Y amount of productivity to satisfy the needs (food, clothing, shelter) of a person. If we have a total population, P, and a percentage of population laboring, N, then N*P*X >= P*Y. That is, our total productivity must be exceeding the amount needed to satisfy our needs. We can divide P out as it appears on both sides of the equation, so N*X >= Y. You can then see that if X increases, N can decrease to maintain the balance with Y.
As productivity has increased since 1938, we know that less employment is required now. If we look at the limit as time goes on, and assuming that productivity continues to increase, we find that eventually little or no humanity will be required to work. A UBI is part of the transition to this utopian society.
The math mostly still stands, what would you have the other 66% of people doing that they're not already doing?
Which of the 50 million people get those jobs? But yeah that's my point, there's not enough work to be done in the public sector, and what's the goal, to make word to be done for no reason at additional cost to ourselves?
Basic Income is a good start. I'm not saying it isn't (again, I have and still do agree with the concept).
But before we get to the point of awarding Basic Income due to having nothing left to do we actually have to have nothing left to do. If we are issuing Basic Income we might as well also tap every possible local development, infrastructure and technology project we can.
These are necessarily physically taxing jobs. GIS infrastructure tasks can be taught in a three day training seminar and updating and expanding GIS records for local and state governments increase the ability to successfully govern, tax, address emergencies, and ensure compliance with all sorts of code exponentially. They also need people constantly updating and additing to those records which really only requires the ability to drive around and punch a button on your GPS for the physical side, or to sort through and edit databases on the mental side.
Right now the city inventory, after six years of doing this, barely accounts for less than 5% of the total city population or materials inventory at any given time within a year. Because of this everything from powercompany overcharges for fixtures that have been dead or disabled for years to not knowing who actually lived in the house that burned down with three bodies inside are common problems. These are problems everywhere.
The only real solution to this is manpower. You need physical bodies and able minds with only a little training and a GPS recorder or tablet to get this sort of thing done. The last city inventory review said they needed a population of approximately 60 people (for a town of about 30k people) on canvas to keep it up annually and actually get a real recording data and twice that for a bi-annual review.
This is just the canvases, not counting the folk doing the data managment tasks at the GIS office.
Add in general state and federal census needs, and just data management could employ a large number of unemployed folk as part of public service in a New Deal style programming with no hard labor tasks or extensive training beyond telling folk how to record their data and giving them a route to travel.
And this is needed by every city, county, state, and the federal government desperately. GIS auditing is one of the top issues right now in actual governance of territory and the biggest issue it faces is real manpower.
Abstract:
Among European countries, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands are the most committed to work, while also having the most generous social systems. Meanwhile, Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovenia show the lowest agreement with the statement 'I would enjoy having a paid job even if I did not need the money.' while also having some of the smallest welfare systems.
It absolutely doesn't, because you're assuming that productivity hasn't changed in the past 75 years, and you're attempting to ratio out the New Deal by population, rather than by productivity required. The New Deal took X amount of labor to complete, which required 3.3 million people over a several year time frame. With productivity increases, we could achieve the same level of infrastructure rebuilding now with much fewer people, not with much more.
I certainly agree that we need more focus on infrastructure, but I have to ask what all this labor would be used to create?
Why is it needed desperately?
Why would you need to know the rate the power company is charging for light fixtures for insurance purposes or casualty reporting?
It sounds like a plan to micromanage everything, when there are much more efficient management systems available. On top of that, implementing a good record system now would let almost all of this data be built up as repairs, filed reporting (surveys, deeds, blueprints, etc) and other actions occur.
That's what I was arguing before, I was having a hard time placing even 77 million people. You're still going to have a hard time placing 6 million extra people in government positions.
The number went from "WOW how are we going to employee that many people?" to "wow that's still a lot of jobs that we don't have work for".
But why are you trying to place 6 million people in unneeded jobs at all?
I said we should just cut a check and not even bother because of all the waste associated with trying to put people in the field or in an office building.
From what I can see, Bowen is arguing in strict favor of a UBI, arguing that just doing another "New Deal" and trying to avoid a basic income by instead taking the 100% employment route, that this is even more impossible now than it was in the 30s/40s. There are just too many people, not enough productive jobs, and too much automation that we shouldn't be preventing just because we hate the idea of people living and not working SO MUCH.
On a very real level, the issues with isolating waste and spending are an afterthought. The real reason everyone wants this is this:
This is a shot of the city of Gulfport after Katrina.
After things like Hurricane Charline, or Katrina, or the floods in New York, or any number of other major catastrophes you have to figure out what what where usually before you can figure out how best to rescue people or what you can do to save them. Notice that line of debries about mid-shot through that image? Everything in front of that was a wasteland of broken timber and housing materials and broken sewer pipes and powered and unpowered electrical lines. Knowing where and what was in there was a huge problem.
But it's a problem most cities had on the books right? We know where our pipes and electrical stations are. True.
Except with only a ~very~ few exceptions across the country all of these records are paper and are stored in a central planning office at city hall. And City hall was in the disaster zone. As was the city backup, and all but one firestation, along with the entire police department and emergency fleet of vehicles.
Add to it that hazardous waste chemicles stored at the walmart that got completely destroyed (from liquid petroleum canisters to the entire contents of three gas stations) are now scattered in that giant ramp of waste, bulldozing of which before you could figue out what might be in there was impossible.
All of this is before the human casualty piece.
GIS software and logistics is now playing a huge (HUGE) role in almost every state, county, and municipal government. Gulfport itself literally flew in hundreds of GIS planners and city workers from Florida and Georgia during the disaster to rebuild their infrastructure (using a tent and flown in generator) to try and figure out where everything was just to get the national guard into the wreckage. This is just one town, and a small one at that. For a city like New Orleans, or even one as staggering as New York, infrastructure records are scattered, ineffienct, and usually just plain wrong. Decades of lost paper records and lack of foresight by city planners have led most places in the US to have absolutely no idea functionally what resources they actually have, and as construction is almost always ongoing, logging and tracking this is extremely difficult.
There is a reason why, right now, GIS statistical programs are the largest growing degree programs (and some of the highest paid and best employed) in the country right now. Natural disasters are only growing in frequency, and everyone has to figure out what they have to figure out how to deal with it.
So you've got 6 million people extra in federal jobs that didn't exist before... now what?
Now you're supporting the infrastructure to keep them in those jobs. Tools, offices, support staff, electricity, computers, internet, heating, cooling, etc.
All that because you wanted them to be doing something for their $1500 a month? You just bumped the cost of that $1500 a month to $3000+ a month instead.
So they can push a pencil back and forth, or dig a ditch and then refill it. Nah I don't really like jobs for the sake of a job. I hate employers who do it now because "unless you're in that chair from 9-5 you're not really working."
It also ignores efficiency and economies of scale too. Maybe you need 6 million bridge builders today, but in 5 years from now, you've got 6 million bridge builders doing nothing. That skill doesn't really translate well to building houses or anything. This is sort of what China is doing, just building stuff because they've got people that need jobs.
I wouldn't expect that to be conditional on GBI. "Oh here's $1500 a month... but you also have to go work in the field and travel a lot"
That's not very appealing. Everyone should get the $1500 a month anyways. Then they can offer to pay $15 an hour on top of the GBI for people to do that work.
Or they should be hiring people to do that work now, because we obviously need it, and that should be part of FEMA's operating budget.
Before Basic Income becomes a thing (and it should be), I would much prefer to see New Deal style of programs actually get people trained and employed than assume they don't need to work/want to work/have work they can do. At present we are at a place where there is plenty of work to go around, just not enough money to pay to get it done. If 2 trillion is gong to be reinvested into something infrastructure and training work seems like a better goal than flat income until we get to a point where work is actually superfluous. We aren't anywhere near there yet, though.
If both can be done side by side, even better. But as an assumption that "work as value" is a past idea, I'm not at all confidant we're going to reach that anytime soon.
x-country fiber optics, GPS cataloging like that, these are things we should be doing.
Think of how much our country changed with x-country rail. Then telegraph, then the interstate highway system.
Where is this coming from? Unemployment is 5.3%, and most of our existing infrastructure gets failing grades, never mind new projects. Remember that interstate bridge that fell into the gap a few years ago? The idea that we couldn't get sufficient employment right now from useful infrastructure is crazy. Infrastructure spending is especially good because it targets one of the least employed demographics: non college-educated young men. Yes, in the future that might not be enough, but that future is a long ways off.
Additionally, however well UBI may work economically, from a civic and political point of view having large portions of the population living on the work of others is a disaster. Not only will it cause a resentment that dwarfs the issues with welfare now, but many people simply do not do well without the structure, focus, and social contacts that work brings. Sure, some will volunteer in three different places, write that novel they always meant to, and love it. A lot of others will become hikikomori. The reason welfare reform focused on delivering benefits to people working or looking for work wasn't just mean-spiritedness, though that played into it for sure; it's also because research shows that chronically unemployed people suffer tremendous physical and mental health effects. Sitting at home watching television and waiting for your check just sucks.