Remember, we know how to address many of the world’s problems, including poverty, homelessness, and climate change.
But those with capital in society choose not to.
Those with capital choose not to
Those with capital profit off of not doing so.
Like the one recent CEO saying the quiet part aloud by saying government should promote higher unemployment, since in the high employment environment employees aren’t desperate and have more demands costing him money. That employees arent feeling enough pain and despair in economy.
To be fair, this isn’t that far away from the economic theory underlying using interest rates to manage inflation - it’s just phrased in a different way.
I recently heard it phrased like this:
Capitalism is built on hierarchy, which means someone fundamentally NEEDS to be at the bottom. There is no way around it, someone needs to suffer.
But if we raised the bottom up enough, it wouldn’t really matter if they were on the bottom. Many people would be happy if they had a stable place to live, food, healthcare, and freedom, and many don’t really need or even want “more” all the time. The problem is the vast differences in wealth and ownership.
I don’t think that this is really true.
If someone has “more” then yes of course someone needs to have “less”, merely by definition.
The question is really whether those with less are living below the poverty line or living comfortably. I guess it’s a question of semantics whether “capitalism” requires people to be living below the poverty line but I don’t think it does. It’s just shitty regulations which allow wealth to become as concentrated as it has.
Socialism in principle sounds great, but most times it’s been implemented it’s suffered from the same problem as capitalism - the people with power are greedy and use their power to manipulate and oppress the populace.
Conservatism is built on hierarchy. Capitalism just says markets work and investment is gambling. You can do that and still keep everyone fed / clothed / sheltered, specifically because markets work, and can make food / clothes / shelter more plentiful. Some people having more doesn’t require private space station versus duplex cardboard box.
Conservatives only say market failure demands misery and successful gambling means unchecked power because that’s what they always say. That’s their only conclusion, applied to literally everything. That’s how conservatives think things work. The entire tribal worldview boils down to “well somebody’s gotta be king.” Just a fractal pyramid of militaries over empire, rulers over courts, owners over workers, and patriarchs over families. If you’re at the bottom you’re lucky to be alive, and how dare you question your betters.
The unspoken assumption is that change is impossible. This is genuinely how they think everything works. Like the universe itself dictates a steep gradient, and the only way things could be different is by shuffling around who goes where. So if someone is suffering, they must have fucked up to deserve it, and if you want to help them, you’re putting someone else in their place.
Remember that politics can be changed with votes. Tax them to finance change.
It’s difficult, but blaming billionaires takes away our agency.
If we could change politics by voting, we wouldn’t be allowed to vote.
We’re not stretched thin to finance these changes. Taxes aren’t holding us back. This is what those with true power in society and their cronies say to not do anything. This is the whole point.
No one is only blaming “billionaires.” This is you patronizing them, portraying yourself as a genius and the person you’re responding to as too naive and stupid to understand how life really works.
And no, we don’t have agency. We have a deluded sense of agency where we think we can vote and change the system from within.
There are levels. Voters don’t have agency. But if voters would coordinate they would have agency.
The difference is believing in agency.
I am aware how stupid I sound. But how else can I phrase it that there needs to be a believe in change to create change? Right now I just hope that readers ignore the stupid part.
I don’t like this logic because it’s predicated on an nondescript “they” with unlimited shadowy power. It leads to unhelpful conspiratorial thinking bordering on the magical. It obfuscates the real problems we face, and if we don’t understand them, even a violent revolution to defeat it would eventually replicate the system we destroyed because we didn’t understand how it came to be in the first place.
The reason it’s hard to change the system is because the system is self-reinforcing through individuals acting in their own immediate best interests and not acting as a class, not because “they wouldn’t let you change it, they’d just [rig the elections/not let you vote/kill you with a space laser]”. But that’s a complex answer, and it’s much easier to believe in the latter and call it a day.
Remember that politics can be changed with votes. Tax them to finance change.
I agree the wealthy need to pay a lot more in tax than they currently do.
They also have disproportionate control over the electoral process in many countries, and most political parties are not even considering taxing them to the extent that they need to be taxed. Nor are most political parties challenging our capitalist society in any significant sense.
Voting is important, but don’t expect voting alone to solve our problems.
It’s difficult, but blaming billionaires takes away our agency.
No it does not. Sod off with that. Correctly identifying a major contributor to an issue does not take away agency.
Because most of us have our own problems and don’t feel responsible for the lives of others.
Now imagine if you lived in a society where someone gave a shit about your problems. And maybe they even have the skills and resources to fix them more efficiently than you would. Or not, does it matter, theyre willing to help.
Who is “us”? Unless you’re politically well connected or have nine figures in the bank, you aren’t wielding significant power to make systemic changes.
“Us” the people who pay taxes and are hypothetically responsible for paying for UBI.
But those with capital in society choose not to.
That’s a good 80% of the population
Ah yes. 80. Wealth to scale
So because somebody has a lot, you have nothing? Because somebody has a house worth 5M and don’t have a house, means you have no dwelling? Because somebody earns 10x what you have, you have no income?
“They have more capital than I do, therefore I have none”.
“A person with more capital than I chose to vote and lobby, that means my vote is null and void and so are my efforts”.
“There’s no point in doing anything ever if somebody else is better at it”.
Except that’s just false. I actually cannot fathom where you pulled that estimate from.
You can argue that national poverty lines are made to be kept under a certain percentage, sure, then we can ignore that. Globally, yes, the majority doesn’t have capital (as in financial capital), but per country, there are stark differences. More things to consider
- internet access
- smartphone penetration
- poverty percentage
- Gross National Income Per capita at Purchasing Parity
- Global total of low, middle, high income
Especially GNI PPP: if you live in Europe, North America, Australia, China, Japan, and a few other countries, there’s a good chance you belong to the global 20% of high income earners. The minimum wage in your country will probably be higher than what a low income family earns in a year
For the current 2024 fiscal year, low-income economies are defined as those with a GNI per capita, calculated using the World Bank Atlas method, of $1,135 or less in 2022; lower middle-income economies are those with a GNI per capita between $1,136 and $4,465; upper middle-income economies are those with a GNI per capita between $4,466 and $13,845; high-income economies are those with a GNI per capita of $13,846 or more.
Can you fathom?
Every single study on UBI finds that it is a good idea that benefits both the recipients and society as a whole, but because it contradicts the dominant ideology it can’t be allowed to happen.
If people aren’t forced to work to live then how can I get cheap labor for my shitty business that my dad gave me?
If people have UBI, you can get away with paying less though. That’s how walmart does it; just encourage your workers to get welfare so they stay alive enough to work more
And that’s honestly my proposal for it. Basically, create something like UBI (my preference is NIT) that ensures everyone is over the poverty level, eliminate minimum wage, and have benefits phase out for some reasonable definition of “living wage” (say, 2x the poverty level, maybe 3x).
Working would never make you worse off, and people wouldn’t feel obligated to take crappy jobs if the pay isn’t there.
We could also eliminate many other forms of welfare at the same time and just increase benefits accordingly.
Which we all know would happen IMMEDIATELY in lockstep with any widespread rollout of UBI, and any complaint would be met with half the country screeching “FREE MARKET REEEEEE”
How can a society built on capital work towards the betterment of society rather than the accretion of capital?
Exactly. If organisations (private, public and other) had to maximise for social betterment, they would release annual reports measuring it. There might even be entire industries dedicated to auditing measurements of social betterment.
But no, we’re stuck using a system of ‘value’ based on the prestige of owning shiny rocks and control of the areas where those shiny rocks are found. And finding new uses for things and people that aren’t the desired shiny rocks so that you may demand and acquire more shiny rocks as others in the same time duration.
If a majority of countries can successfully ditch the gold standard and allow fiat currency - as they did a century ago, that means the world is also able to redefine what fiat currencies measure. There’s nothing actually stopping us from requiring social and environmental impact to be included in the calculation of financial valuations, except the people who have a vested interest in keeping the current equations.
I’ve yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that’s about it?
Kind of a weird argument, isn’t it? If we did the opposite instead, it’s not as if you’d expect rents to fall – on the contrary, rent would go up in response to the added financial burden on landlords. Setting that hypothetical aside, wouldn’t a generalized inflation of rents be an acceptable tradeoff for reducing homelessness and untethering the 50+% of young adults who still live with their parents to move and work in more economically efficient environments?
While I actually consider multi-generational housing a good thing, let’s ignore that since the reason people aren’t moving out is financial and not social.
The question is whether UBI is the best way to solve that problem (and others) and I have yet to see data that can be reasonably said to actually be universal for a region. The closest thing I know of is Alaska, and their oil payments are too small and their economy too remote to say much about larger payments in a larger economy.
To me, because money has a social and psychological value to it, what works on an individual level has no guarantee to transfer to a societal level. I would be very interested to see UBI practiced on an entire economic zone, but good luck getting anyone to volunteer.
So what if there were 100 or more small scale experiments in 50 different countries, in similar conditions. I won’t be playing with the money of the entire nation|state|county|city to possibly lose it and not get elected again!
I want vaccines to be tested on 30% of the population to see if it works.
We should be putting this prototype hardware in the hands of 40% of the population to see if there are any side effects before deciding whether to legalise it.
We will do a double blind test on 50% of the population with these new safety regulations to see if there’s an impact on incidences. The study would be invalid otherwise.
Models and small scale experiments are for wimps. I, the ruler of the democratic country, declare an experiment shall be run at national scale! The economy of region X with will not be comparable to that of the rest of 90% of country!
Uh, the key issue is that it’s very unclear whether the results will hold at scale, since you’re suggesting a modification to society. There’s no (or very little) social component to the effectiveness of a vaccine or a new tool. Money is fundamentally a social construct and so what works in isolation or very small groups might not work the same way at large scale.
If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change. So far I’ve only seen studies where a few people embedded in a larger society are given money, and that’s not the same thing.
You have to remember that industrialized countries already have a systems where people get money for “nothing,” but those quotes do a lot of psychological heavy lifting. Disability, unemployment, retirement, food stamps, etc. The difference being that it’s not universal and each payout is either “earned,” temporary, or a pity case. As such, the psychology behind that money just isn’t the same.
I’m interested in UBI, I just want to see results that can actually be reasonably transferred to a population the size of my country (350 million) before I make hard statements about its effects.
That’s about it. Why would anyone work for $20k/yr when they could get $12k for free? They wouldn’t. So those jobs would bump to $30k+, and a domino affect would occur. Nothing would be achieved other than the devaluing of the American dollar, which would lead to a loss of jobs, increased poverty, and guess what else - increased homelessness.
Tbf, it’s difficult to break programming. If your whole life you’re raised in a society that measures your worth by your “hard work”, then accepting that you don’t need work to be happy is difficult for most. Most will continue voting against their own interests until there’s a watershed moment. My bet is on unemployment hitting >30% due to AI.
If 30% of the population has to be on social security and can’t be hired anymore, it would surprise me if nothing changed. Unless of course they blamed immigrants and minorities. They always serve as good scape goats.
The problem is the definition of “work”. There’s lots of things a person can do that both require a lot of effort and produce real benefit to society that are difficult or impossible to make money from, and therefore they aren’t “work”. Raising children being the most obvious example.
You mentioned unemployment due to AI. There’s a short story from a while ago that outlined this step by step. It’s a good read if you have the time.
They tried it on Manitoba Canada. Not just a study. It rather fell flat with the most positive statement being, productivity fell less than expected.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgotten-universal-basic-income-experiment
This is the only experiment that comes up from Googling Manitoba UBI, and it doesn’t seem to match what you say. A study of about 2k people, definitely not the whole population, and this article lists quite a number of positive statements about it.
It was 2500 families and encompassed about 10000 pretty much the whole town in some way and was over 4 years. The place was picked because at that time it was bit remote and somewhat isolated on that external forces would have minimal effect. It was determined the cost economically was far higher than the returns. Productivity did fall which was huge in that if this was instituted over a whole country and the result is less productivity, there is absolutely zero way to pay for it. The main take from the initial 4 year study was productively fell less than predicted but it certainly made live easier for the people getting it.
This was likely the biggest study ever done and the most controlled IMO. It did improve people’s health who recieved this money but that was at the expense of the rest of the country paying for it basically all thing being equal, they would get less health care.
Ubi also is payment to everyone. In these examples it is just payment to low or no income people. That is not ubi but simply welfare. Something that is not a bad thing to provide if there is excessive resources to do so.
Similar experiments in Vancouver: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/30/canada-study-homeless-money-spending
Ontario: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/basic-income-mcmaster-report-1.5485729
Turns out, socialism ain’t that bad eh?
UBI is socialism? Without any price caps on goods and services it just gives capitalists another excuse to raise prices.
That’s not true. You’re thinking of social programs. Socialism is when workers own the means of production.
If this was socialism, America would have already done a military coup in Denver.
Socialism, in an extreme simplification, is a mode of political and economic organisation in which the workers own the means of production, and receive the full value of their labour. While social welfare programs are often attached to that, they are not socialism in and of themselves, nor are they a prerequisite to socialism (but it is nice to have).
That isnt socialism, the proletariat doesn’t control the means of production.
You read the first study? The money was not given to those that has substance abuse, mental health symptoms or alcohol abuse because they felt they represented a small portion of the homeless. Was given to people that were sleeping in friends house and some in cars and didn’t abuse alcohol or drugs. That is a joke of an experiment and in no ready ubi. Not does it indicate on any meaningful way how it is paid for as it doesn’t include everyone.
The second study found only 3/4 of the people continued to work and ultimately the 150 million dollar program was cancelled because it did not appear to increase contribution to society in any economic way.
It’s not like it’s that expensive to determine who’s homeless because they don’t have money. Solving homelessness isn’t a single golden bullet.
99.999999999% of the homeless are homeless because they don’t have enough money.
That is pretty much bullshit. From a brother in law that died of substance abuse and another I house for same reason, nearly every homeless person I have met has had some type of substance abuse. Being you are making that claim, do you have a source to back it up?
Rent is only high because of artificial scarcity of real estate. The scarcity only exists because building new housing is decided neither by supply and demand nor central government planning, but by the people who accumulate more capital if housing isn’t built.
We really need to push for the feds to step in and start constructing government housing against the will of the NIMBYs and local and state governments then.
1K a month is pretty trivial compared to the cost of all the public money used to punish them (e.g cops). Even if you don’t care about the humanity aspect at all UBI makes sense just from a pure numbers perspective.
I know it’s a popular sentiment, because private prisons are so in-your-face evil, but they’re not as ubiquitous as the population seems to believe.
Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 96,370 people in private prisons in 2021, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.
Yes, that’s too many. Yes, we need to ban these things at the federal level. But let’s not forget the grift from state and local prisons, in many cases worse because they can’t be as readily audited.
