Are you in favour of UBI (Universal Basic Income) due to automation? (6 days old reddit repost)
Are you in favour of UBI (Universal Basic Income) due to automation? (6 days old reddit repost)
What's your stance on this?
Let's have a respectful and informed discussion about this topic and the different perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
I support it. Literally the entire purpose of living in a society vs. as hermits, is so that we can help one another out. Lets do more of that.
In theory, yes. But I think for UBI to be successful we need to deal with the housing issue first. Otherwise landlords being able to gouge due to the housing shortage will do to UBI what student loans did to higher education.
I would defer to someone with far more knowledge about social work and conditions as to whether a single UBI-like payment can take over for the various agencies that currently pay for food stamps, welfare, etc. I suspect there is a lot more to them than just the cost and the payment.Yeah, just UBI is not enough and we need to change a lot of things in how our society functions but UBI is a great start in such a societal shift.
The end goal for automation is to take care of all the tasks we need to do but don't want to do. If/when that happens, requiring human labor in exchange for resources doesn't make sense anymore because those resources aren't coming from human labor.
UBI isn't one policy. The hard right want to use it to voucherise public services and punish single parents. Tech wants to use it to giggify work. Social democrats want to use it to make benefits cheaper and easier to distribute. Socialists are still mostly suspicious but it could be used to force employers to behave themselves. Any version of UBI will struggle to ensure that it doesn't make immigrants even easier to exploit (and some of those with the power to implement will seek to make sure this happens).
I am in favour of a socialist UBI which works well for immigrants too but it is extremely unlikely that any such thing will be implemented in this current reality. So, I am not against UBI but I am very wary of how it might be designed to work in practice.
I think it would take a major restructuring to society to work, one that... Can't pass anytime soon. Think Star Trek's "post scarcity" environment. Everything we'd ever need is so easily and cheaply available from the result of automated manufacturing, mining, farming. In my mind, we'd have to hit this critical mass where such a small portion of the population is necessary to run the maintenance and development of these automated systems that it's impossible for most people to have a job that "contributes" to society. There's no way, in that situation, we could just... Let the population starve because they have no money, even though the infrastructure exists to support all their needs and more for free.
UBI, in that case, would just be "spending money" to supplant the free food, power, housing, and clothing everybody already receives. Society would be more focused on socializing, exploring hobbies, art, etc. Only the people who really want more money or something else to fill their time with would get jobs, be STEM or government or something. I don't see capitalism happily coexisting with UBI. Capitalism inherently depends on people needing to pay their bills to stay alive.
I can see capitalism finally getting abolished in the next 2 decades because of automation, either that or we will end up in a dystopian future where corporations are allowed to own all profits from autonomous production/services.
I wish I could share your optimism, I just see it getting worse before it gets better. Like, bloody revolution worse.
As of now, the majority of people still see billionaires as hard working geniuses who deserve the immeasurable wealth they have. There's strong movements online that challenge these ways of thinking, but from all the people I know IRL, my wife is the only one who doesn't call me crazy for thinking that level of wealth is only accessible through exploitation of "normal" people's productivity.
Relevant tweet
I always thought UBI was not as good as just decommodifying food, housing, and whatever else.
Unless there is a near infinite supply of something, it is a commodity and there is a market for it, even in a perfectly anarchistic utopia. Things take land, labor, and capital to produce. That makes them a commodity no matter what, even if the state and everyone else all insist my labor belongs to them.
Many people talk of UBI as transitional thing but I have no idea how would post scarcity society would look like to talk about it.
I have always been against UBI because it is funded by the taxpayers - so people that work are forced to support people that wont ("my job was automated" is not a valid excuse to laziness). our mommy state policy is bad enough as it is, we dont need to add more of a load on the taxpayers.
just federally mandate how/when automation is allowed to be used. it'll have a negative impact on some aspects of creativity but at the cost of providing income to a great many people.