I was once talking with one of my classmates and he said that in the future, there will be universal basic income implemented by entire world. I was not convinced at that time and thought he is just being stupid but given the layoffs happening and massive amount of unemployment, I am thinking about this possibility. What do you say?
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If we replaced all of our current welfare systems with a simple UBI, it would save us money. In terms of running the system, and simplifying taxes. Don’t need to take 5 different taxes out of your paycheck, just one. Earn over a certain amount? You don’t get it. The majority of people won’t, because they’ll be earning enough to pay in but not collect. This would have to be done alongside universal healthcare, as tying healthcare to employment wouldn’t work much anymore, which would also save us a massive amount of money.
The result of which, is an absolute explosion of creative genius and new businesses. People no longer hindered by the threat of starving in the street, or losing their healthcare, would finally be able to start that business they always wanted to. They’d be able to create their long-overdue masterpiece. Literature, art, new inventions. There’s a guy out there right now that, if given the space and a bit of assistance, could create the first prototype of a warp drive. There’s someone else who has a pretty good idea about how to cure dementia, and halt the aging process.
Just imagine the possibilities of actually investing in our people, and in our society, instead of handing all of our money to billionaires, and letting those evil mentally handicapped fuckwits steer the course of humanity straight into a climate change-driven mass-extinction event.
Just Imagine.
UBI to me is a leftist pipe dream of how a post-scarcity society could work. When you actually look at the financials and how greedy humanity is, it all falls apart and will either bankrupt entire nations or pay an absolute pittance.
The UK’s voluntary living wage is £13.45 an hour, which translates to £26,227.50 for someone working full time 37.5 hours a week. If we replaced our entire welfare system (state pensions, Universal Credit, child benefit, Personal Independence Payments, Disability Living Allowance, etc) and paid our approx 58.1 million population of working age people and retirees the living wage, it would cost us over £1.5 trillion, or roughly half our annual GDP. Our current welfare expenditure by comparison is at an estimated £333.7 billion.
I am using the Living Wage as a comparison since it’s an agreed metric calculated by a non-profit organisation for how much a worker would need to earn to live on their wage in the UK. To pay a living wage to every adult in the country we would need to spend nearly three times as much as what the USA spends on its military.
The question then becomes “How the fuck will we pay for it?” We can’t even get the rich to pay their fair share of tax as things stand. They are going to flat-out refuse to foot the bill once AI leads to mass unemployment.
What I think is a more likely scenario is societal collapse. People starve, leading to widespread civil unrest and then a brutal and violent crackdown, made easier than ever by armed drones and humanoid robots that have no sense of morals. This is exactly the kind of doomsday scenario that a lot of billionaires are prepping for.
The only way I can see humanity not ripping itself apart is if automation somehow makes the cost of living so cheap that UBI could viably exist.
Interesting. UK and other EU countries are already doing enough welfare though (in my opinion), that I don’t think they need to replace all of that with UBI.
You’re forgetting to factor in all the people that won’t receive it because they already earn enough. A majority of people won’t get anything at all. Replacing all of our current welfare systems with a simple UBI would save us money. It’s just that the billionaires are under the impression that it would stop people from working harder for a better life, which is also something they think about our current welfare system, and has never been true.
I’m talking about a scenario where entire industries of workers end up getting displaced by AI and robotics, and I don’t think we’re far off from this becoming a reality. If Tesla’s Optimus 3 robots are anywhere near as advanced as they are rumoured to be, they could easily replace warehouse and logistics workers.
We already have Waymo disrupting the taxi industry further by removing the driver from the equation, and Miso Robotics automating kitchens in restaurant chains like Jersey Mike’s Subs and White Castle.
Also, doesn’t means-testing UBI kinda defeat its intended purpose?
New tools used to replace workers happens throughout the course of human history, I don’t think we will ever see robots replace humans successfully enough to really dent the workforce, they’ll just go to other industries.
Though the one industry whose collapse could spur the entire UBI system, is long-haul truckers. That may happen, but again, I think they’ll just go into other off-shoot industries, and the change in workforce won’t be so dramatic that it’s one day they’re all on the road with jobs, and the next day they’re all out of work. You’ll need truckers with experience to actually park the things for loading/un-loading, and nobody is going to trust an AI or robot with piloting that much freight all by itself. they’ll want a human behind the wheel, ready to take over.
The industry we should be driving people towards is computer chip manufacturing.
Each technological advancement has created new jobs in some capacity. What new jobs has AI created? And don’t tell me “prompt engineer” like every AI bro likes to hype up. That is not an actual position and the fact that I cannot find any jobs advertised where typing out very specific and accurate prompts are one of the skills required is proof of this.
AI isn’t perfect. It hallucinates and sometimes gives bad answers. But I think that we are one incredibly good model away from being able to reliably automate white collar work.
Ah, I think AI is shite, and most people reliably hate it. It’s just a new fad that will be sectioned off for tiny use-cases in the future, I don’t think it will reliably be able to do anyones job at scale
No because corps and oligarchs will campaign against it, inexplicably win, and destroy one of the country’s greatest achievements with cheers and applause
Its cynical, but its happened to many social programs thay way.
Would be nice but the wealthy won’t allow it. You can trace back to when the wealth/power inequality ramped up and those with the power will never let it go, and worse with their propaganda on all the socials most scroll mindlessly. The same methods to keep people going along with the flow was used way back then and still today. Keep people in low-level thinking, don’t question, just obey supernatural explanations, Perry’s scheme 1-3 of 9, they use all the neurological tricks like fear, reward, belonging, etc so people comply and conform, just what the owners and those who also benefit from the high-control systems want.
what is perry’s scheme?
Here’s some more info and ask more questions to better understand it all, check sources of course to ensure accuracy. share.google/aimode/m9pcjKzfhtWExb89T
Perry’s Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development is a framework mapping how human thinking evolves from rigid, absolute black-and-white beliefs to nuanced, context-dependent personal commitments. Developed by William G. Perry Jr., it outlines nine sequential positions grouped into four core stages
interesting. gonna look into that
Yes, but not in the way we envision it.
Wealth inequality will increase. Drastically. There will be a small group of people owning basically everything. But they still need cheap labor and subjects, plus someone needs to consume their products. Because jobs will be limited UBI will be implemented: as a baseline to keep us alive, not as a tool for general prosperity.
Watch “Elysium” how this bleak world may look. It’s not a great movie, but has that “everyone but a few people is super fucked”-theme locked down.
Is that movie in English?
Yes. Look for Elysium (2016). It’s by Neill Blomkamp, starring Matt Damon.
UBI is 100% populist idea. It replaces targeted welfare directed at people who need it with universal one - which is a massive waste of money, and extremly unfair to the working class as it has to be financed with massive taxation.
Funny how Marxists love talking about working class being exploited just to nonchalantly drop UBI around.
IMO Universal Basic Income the second worst idea after so called “Modern Monetary Theory”
What Marxists are talking about UBI as proposed by yang and others?
If by UBI you mean everyone has access to housing, food, water, electricity, internet, education, and healthcare, you’re talking about two different things.
UBI proposed assumes corporations replace workers with automations and aims to provide a crutch for those capitalism eats alive, except it doesn’t guarantee any of the things I listed that people need. It just gives them money to spend on corporations.
If by UBI you mean everyone has access to housing, food, water, electricity, internet,
I’m talking in literal meaning as in “universal basic income” where some taxes collected from working class are redistributed to everyone.
I in my heart of hearts see UBI as unworkable and inflationary, as universal basic income doesn’t set universal basic buying power which is very hard to do without a socialist system guaranteeing housing, food, etc. I also don’t believe people are ok with a disconnection between work and financial value. Money is one of the few ways to quantify the value of work and humans in general have a need to feel what they do is valued, particularly if it takes up so much of human identity and what they do on a day to day.
as universal basic income doesn’t set universal basic buying power
i disagree. food prices would not go up. prices are set by supply and demand. demand would not change. imagine a society with 1 million people. all of them need to eat, whether they earn their money through wages or get it through UBI. the demand for food does not change. i don’t see a reason why supply would change either. so prices stay the same.
do you have any rational argument against this?
Sure - I have 10 customers, their income is fixed. They all need food, and at current prices, all of them can afford rice and beans, but 5 of them can afford rice and beans and meat. UBI increases everyone’s income by $100/mo. They still all need food, but now all of them can afford meat, but the quantity of meat hasn’t changed and they can’t all get meat. Therefore, I as a producer, may increase the price of meat as demand has increased - there’s more money available to buy my goods, therefore there’s more profit extraction available to me. Now, it gets more complicated and with a free market, you’d expect more players to enter the market, but we don’t have a free market, we have limited suppliers. Take housing as an example. There is a shortage of housing causing prices to way outpace inflation. What happens when you give more money to everyone? They now add more players into an already supply constrained market, causing prices to go up even higher. You’d assume with the massive demand there’d be incentives to build, but in practice, we don’t see this. That’s my issue with things like UBI - it tackles a symptom of wealth inequality and while it works somewhat, its still inflationary. you’d have a better shot at taxation for the very wealthy to redistribute wealth in public goods and focusing spending on the poorest of society(i.e. welfare), not an equal distribution across the entirety of the population.
yeah ok that would make meat more expensive (which some people would argue is actually a good thing) but not plant-based food. (since plant-based food is less limited). which is an interesting observation …
yeah the housing crisis is something else. however i suspect that there are bigger factors at play here than just a limited supply … theoretically, the housing supply could be arbitrarily big. the land area is not the bottleneck here (around 1% of the settleable land area of the world are used for housing, 97% is used for farming) and neither are the materials available … it’s more about market expectation (declining birthrate) making new housing construction seem short-sighted and not worth it in the long run. but this is a bit of a different issue and does not directly have to do with the buying power of the people, i think.
UBI is a bandaid to keep capitalism propped up by neo-liberals. It’s contingent on the idea that society is dependent on people spending money, rather than getting essential services and enough free time to maintain mental stability.
I don’t think so.
No UBI proponent has given me a convincing argument that
inflationgreedy bastards won’t eventually increase prices to the extent that the extra money would be effectively wiped out. Which would be especially bad because people often propose UBI as a replacement for welfare - so those on a benefit get what little spending power they have eliminated, and only those with jobs can absorb the increased costs.Also, governments don’t tend to go around handing out money (well, to those who actually need it) willy-nilly. Most social welfare/workers’ rights gains in the 20th century were because western governments were afraid that the October Revolution might give their citizens ideas. As of now, there’s no longer threat of an alternative to Capitalism.
We’re 30% there already, between long term unemployed and people on social security. I support more. Human rights include food, shelter, healthcare, but not everyone has figured that out yet.
do you think internet can come to rights?
I would argue it already has. We already agreed to fund public libraries through tax dollars. Libraries are inherently information services and include Internet access today.
It might follow that municipal Internet services be made available via taxes so that everyone has equal access to the Internet.
In Kirkland, WA there exists a kind of municipal Wi-Fi offered in its business district. Similarly, most businesses provide free Wi-Fi to anyone within range. These aren’t perfect systems, but provide examples and a path to expand services to a whole community.
I don’t honestly think it will happen in a way that is genuinely good for people. It will happen in a way where the rich and powerful are in control and can use it as a method for maintaining control.
Came here to say this. Nobody in power gives up their power to the masses willingly, it must be taken. And the price is almost always paid in blood and suffering. And every victory is only temporary as they try to regain the power that was taken from them.
I mean you could just make Luigi a national holiday or event. Kill the rich once in a while to keep them in line.
