Europeans considering universal basic income and job guarantees

[lpetrich]

The authors write

As reported in Table III, the fine arts, originality, negotiation, persuasion, social perceptiveness, and assisting and caring for others, variables, all exhibit relatively high values in the low risk category. By contrast, we note that the manual dexterity, finger dexterity and cramped work space variables take relatively low values. Hence, in short, generalist occupations requiring knowledge of human heuristics, and specialist occupations involving the development of novel ideas and artifacts, are the least susceptible to computerisation.

So social intelligence and creative intelligence will be difficult to automate, while perception and manipulation will be easier to automate.

• Social intelligence: management, business, finance, education, healthcare, arts, media
• Creative intelligence: engineering, science. Heavily computerized, and a very early adopter, but computers serve as automated assistants.

Much like trends in the legal profession.

For example, we find that paralegals and legal assistants, for which computers already substitute, in the high risk category. At the same time, lawyers, which rely on labour input from legal assistants, are in the low risk category. Thus, for the work of lawyers to be fully automated, engineering bottlenecks to creative and social intelligence will need to be overcome, implying that the computerisation of legal research will complement the work of lawyers in the medium term.

The authors find that the more education necessary for a job, the harder it is to automate. Likewise, the harder a job is to automate, the more it earns.

The authors thus predict that many low-wage jobs will get automated. "We note that this prediction implies a truncation in the current trend towards labour market polarization, with growing employment in high and low-wage occupations, accompanied by a hollowing-out of middle-income jobs."

 

[Wiploc]

1) I don't think we can afford UBI yet.

(1) I have no strong opinions about.

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

 

[Angry Floof]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

I don't know, man. We might have to cut back on corporate welfare to pay for it and that's just too much to ask.

 

[Wiploc]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

I don't know, man. We might have to cut back on corporate welfare to pay for it and that's just too much to ask.

And it won't be too much to ask later?

 

[Angry Floof]

I don't know, man. We might have to cut back on corporate welfare to pay for it and that's just too much to ask.

And it won't be too much to ask later?

According to right wing ideology, it's always too much to ask to take taxpayer money away from corporations who desperately need it.

 

[DBT]

The Corporate Mind can't even bear the thought of paying minimum wage workers a few cents an hour increase....

 

[Canard DuJour]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

There just aren't enough dollars in the dollar mines. So, even though we can produce surpluses of nearly everything, we'll have to wait until the big piggy bank at the Federal Reserve gets filled up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

 

[ZiprHead]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

Most of the UBI to upper income brackets should be recouped through higher taxation on the upper income brackets.

 

[Wiploc]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

You said yet. We can't afford it yet. Are you anticipating that the federal budget will increase relative to what UBI would cost?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

Most of the UBI to upper income brackets should be recouped through higher taxation on the upper income brackets.

Most of the people aren't in the upper income brackets.

Do the math.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

You said yet. We can't afford it yet. Are you anticipating that the federal budget will increase relative to what UBI would cost?

I'm anticipating that as technology advances the amount needed to provide basic living is a smaller portion of the pie and thus more affordable.

 

[ZiprHead]

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

Most of the UBI to upper income brackets should be recouped through higher taxation on the upper income brackets.

Most of the people aren't in the upper income brackets.

Do the math.

You're the one that keeps saying it doesn't and up and do the math. YOU do the math.

 

[bilby]

I don't understand #1 at all.

Can anybody articulate ideas about how we would be unable to afford UBI yet?

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

UBI can be completely budget neutral. You can fund it with progressive taxation.

The comparison that tells you whether you can afford it isn't with the budget; It's with the highest level of tax revenue that can reasonably be implemented (assuming that you don't want it to be even slightly inflationary - if you can tolerate a small amount of additional inflation, then you could go bigger still, and right now inflation certainly isn't at risk of running away; But that's a different discussion).

It's obviously not known what the maximum tax revenue is before economic activity suffers serious damage; But a good indication of a taxation regime that collects vastly more revenue than current US taxes, while American society shows no sign of economic problems caused by that level of tax, is the tax structures of the 1950s and '60s.

Apply those percentages to the current US economy, and you will find that the USA can afford quite a lot.

The size of the current budget tells you nothing about what you can afford; It's like saying that Bill Gates can't afford a pair of $1,500 shoes, because last year he only spent $1,000 on shoes.

 

[Wiploc]

Look at what even a low UBI payment would cost, compare it to the federal budget.

UBI can be completely budget neutral. You can fund it with progressive taxation.

Also, you can "fund" it by cutting other forms of welfare, social security, etcetera.

The comparison that tells you whether you can afford it isn't with the budget; It's with the highest level of tax revenue that can reasonably be implemented (assuming that you don't want it to be even slightly inflationary - if you can tolerate a small amount of additional inflation, then you could go bigger still, and right now inflation certainly isn't at risk of running away; But that's a different discussion).

This ignorant layman assumes that four percent inflation would be good, independent of whether we get a UBI.

It's obviously not known what the maximum tax revenue is before economic activity suffers serious damage; But a good indication of a taxation regime that collects vastly more revenue than current US taxes, while American society shows no sign of economic problems caused by that level of tax, is the tax structures of the 1950s and '60s.

Those taxes might be better for us than current taxes, again, independent of whether we get a UBI. When we had those taxes, the money wasn't being gathered into fewer and fewer hands.

A "UBI" might be misnamed if it started out at a tentative $6,000 a year, but I wouldn't object to that as an experiment. It would be easier to "afford," and I'd love to see a demonstration of whether trickle-up economics is less voodoo than trickle-down.

 

[Angry Floof]

You could also fund it with a small portion of the obscenely bloated defense budget.

 

[bilby]

You could also fund it with a small portion of the obscenely bloated defense budget.

It's clear from history (not only US history, but worldwide) that redistribution of wealth is essential to avoid economic stagnation.

Indeed, the redistribution of wealth has become the most important function of government.

The reason that this isn't widely recognised is that it's often hidden in military spending. Wars cause economic booms, largely because they force the aristocracy to spend their money - and that means distributing it to non-aristocratic people.

When you have to pay soldiers, sailors, airmen, munitions workers, uniform makers, etc. etc., you cause an economic boom by redistribution of wealth. That the goods made by this process are simply destroyed, rather than becoming useful infrastructure, is almost irrelevant; The massive waste of war is more than offset economically by the wealth redistribution it demands.

The USA has largely concealed its failure, post WWII, to provide a social safety net (as the European nations did), by instead having ongoing massive military spending, despite the absence of a correspondingly massive war. It's a very inefficient way to redistribute wealth, and it has allowed Americans to pretend that wealth redistribution isn't a major function of their government. But it is redistribution nonetheless, and it's essential to keep the economy from stalling.

Moving from this informal, poorly designed, patchy, and inefficient model, to a fit for purpose, specifically designed, and universal system would be hugely beneficial on a number of levels.

But it would require an understanding of economics that is WAY beyond the grasp of most Americans, or indeed of anyone on the right wing of politics anywhere in the world.

The US military is socialism by stealth. It's the only thing keeping your economy from collapsing into feudalism. And it's long since time to stop pretending otherwise.

 

[J842P]

You could also fund it with a small portion of the obscenely bloated defense budget.

Doubt it. The defense budget is very bloated, about 700 billion. But using all of it would cover only a fraction of, say, Andrew Yang's proposal, which would cost about $2.8 trillion a year.

 

[Jayjay]

While technically USA could afford UBI, it would mean a huge tax increase. I think it's politically not feasible, especially on a federal level. The reason why these experiments are happening in Europe is because we europeans already have a bunch of smaller countries with higher tax rates, which means it's more about restructuring existing bloated welfare systems than creating one from scratch.

 

[bilby]

While technically USA could afford UBI, it would mean a huge tax increase. I think it's politically not feasible, especially on a federal level. The reason why these experiments are happening in Europe is because we europeans already have a bunch of smaller countries with higher tax rates, which means it's more about restructuring existing bloated welfare systems than creating one from scratch.

Sure, Americans have a bizarre attitude towards taxation. But it's really not so long ago that US federal income taxes were FAR higher than they are today, and under that tax regime, their economy was far stronger. So I would hesitate to say it's politically impossible - everything is politically impossible until it happens.

After all, five years ago it would have been "politically impossible" for them to elect as president somebody who had even the most tenuous hints of a link to Russia.