Sam Altman's universal basic income experiment reveals benefits and limitations in addressing AI job losses

[gamerk2]

I have a strong feeling that if prediction were calculated right, there are 2 outcomes:
1. ubi is pretty good, people quit their shitty jobs, nation runs out of money
2. is a follow up of the first one. ubi becomes so small that it is literally poverty. People go back to work, at least those who still can find a job

When people speak of ubi, I do not think they are using the right term.
Good ubi equals not bad ubi, a ubi that is derived of the nation's ability to gather enough money for it.

A few things to point out:

1. 1. 
      
   2. 1: The most successful forms of UBI tend to use them as a replacement for other services. Essentially, rather then trying to micromanage across multiple different departments, just gives those in need a singular check and get out of their way. As an example: If you give a UBI to those out of work, you immediately make both Unemployment payments and Social Security redundant. Those who get the UBI get the benefit of said UBI, those that don't get more money in their paychecks.
2. 
   
3. 2: Remember that beyond the dollar cost of a government program, there's the much harder to define economic benefit to consider. As an example: Unemployment is a relatively expensive government program. But pretty much every study done on it has concluded it pays for itself by preventing recessions from being much worse. EG: The economic activity maintained through payments to those who go unemployed prevents enough cascading job losses where it pays for itself more or less in full. So looking at just "the program costs X" is a very gross oversimplification.

3: Technically speaking, you can spend more or less infinite money so long as national GDP grows as well. That's why Debt as a percentage of GDP is a much better indicator of a nations debt load then just the dollar amount of debt. And before you bring up "Democrats spent how much", I remind you they keep inheriting economies in recession, and the most effective way to end recessions (which are really just a decline in economic activity): Spend money.

4: I highly recommend reading up on the numerous UBI experiments that have been done the past decade or so; pretty much all of them have shown to be much more effective (and generally, cheaper) then maintaining a couple dozen/hundred government agencies that do effectively the same thing, but worse.

5: Finally, and this will blow your mind: Giving people $1 directly accomplishes the same exact thing as reducing their taxes by $1. The difference is that taxes have to hit entire income brackets, which makes the tax code a relatively inefficient way of distributing money, as you either hit too many people or too few. I argue direct payments allow a much more targeted way to get people who need the aid the aid they need.

 

[yannus]

What a surprise ! Conspiracy theorist were right once again.

universal basic income < digital ID < social credit system < easy technological global slavery

 

[Aranarth]

I'll say it again...
Being poor is EXPENSIVE.

Lets say you're me, you blow a tire that's $200 to get a new one. Me TODAY I just shrug, grab $200 from my savings no big deal. Move on with my life.

Me 20 years ago? Crap that $200 was going to put a groceries on the table for my wife and two kids. Now I have to put another thing on the credit card that I can't get paid off.

When you're doing well a minor inconvenience is a minor inconvenience.
When you're poor its a huge deal.

People discount that doing well is LUCK not just hard work this is why you have the "working poor" at Walmart who works 60 hours a week and still need food stamps to get by. They are working hard they just had bad luck!

There are people who are in jail because they were right at the breaking point, then got a speeding ticket they couldn't pay.

The results of the UBI experiment is a damning portrayal of just how messed up the type of capitalist society we have now. Crony capitalism where you work and they get paid is where we are now.

 

[AdamNovagen]

Fatuous, wrong-headed wealth redistribution schemes have been responsible for more human death and misery in the last century than WWI and WWII both combined.

Nothing better expresses the Left's childlike ignorance on this than a nation-ranking metric they created: the so-called Gini Index, which considers a nation in which everyone is dirt-poor to be superior to one in which few are poor, but most are wealthy. By their absurd Gini ranking, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan are among the best places to live on Earth, while the US is sheer hell.

Oops! The Gini coefficient was created by Corrado Gini in 1912. Being a lifelong eugenicist and an advocate for fascism in Italy, he is in no way part of today's "Left." You also failed to mention that countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark are also among the top-ranked on said index.

At any rate, income equality is a serious concern of any sane, developed nation, but it certainly won't matter much if the country is poor and underdeveloped on a national scale. Hence why you can have countries like you mentioned, with low levels of income equality combined with low quality of living.

 

[zulu53]

The issue is that years of privatized health care and rampant real estate speculation is skewing the effectiveness of patchwork solutions like UBI: you'd need to establish universal health care and nation wide rent control first to lower the floor and yes, this will cause deceleration of the economy because that's what it takes to truly redistribute wealth: there is no point in trying to level the playing field if the wealthy have over 100 years of a head start there's never going to be any way for regular people to afford housing until public housing and rent control are enforced at the expense of current speculators. Similar story with health care just less years but perhaps even more severe speculation.

The worst part is that the wealthy like Altman (Not him personally but similarly wealthy people) will use this study to say we should to *nothing* at all to address income disparity and then just demand even more policing to avoid the Luigis that are definitively coming.

Of course you are completely ignoring that fact that no economy yet invented by man can keep up with the population growth rate of the industrial era. Control population growth to production capacity and "universal" service equality will follow.

 

[Endymio]

Oops! The Gini coefficient was created by Corrado Gini in 1912. Being a lifelong eugenicist and an advocate for fascism in Italy, he is in no way part of today's "Left."

Oops! Your history is seriously lacking. Gini proposed 13 variants of his coefficient to measure everything from industrial development to population levels to racial and ethnic segregation. Its use to refer solely to income levels -- and to rank the desirability of nations by low levels of income disparity -- is an appropriation by today's Left.

Worse is that fascism didn't even exist when Gini proposed his index. Furthermore, Italian fascism -- particularly in its early days -- was a phenomenon of the political Left. Mussolini was a far-Left socialist writer before proposing his "corrected" version of socialism, and the very name of the movement came from the "fasci" -- Italian Leftist unionists.

The Italian fascists first proposals were: shortening the work week, confiscating "unfair" profits by corporations, expanding women's rights, and suppressing the historical authority of the Church. When they encountered political resistance, they sent -- just like the black-masked 'Antifa' of today -- a black-shirted anonymous mob to wreak violence upon their opponents.

You also failed to mention that countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark are also among the top-ranked on said index.

Oops again! I mentioned the Nordic nations in post #25 -- they score high, but they are NOT the top of the list. The World Bank Gini Index has Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Belarus as the top four. When you planning to move to one of those?

 

[user478318]

Never understood this UBI stuff, how can paying someone not to work, motivate them to work!? Also I see from comments, people think 1000$ is small money wow. Do you guys know in how many countries people work for less, even doctors!?