>When you get that first paycheck, it’s not paying for what you already did, because you already did it. It’s paying for you to continue doing what you’re now doing. It’s fueling your work. It’s providing you the freedom to continue that work. It’s an unleashing of potential.<p>What? This makes zero sense to me. I work for money. I do not work because I like working, and the money is just "unleashing potential". Similarly, Colgate makes toothpaste because they know the supermarket will buy it. There is risk they won't, which they accept in return for a profit margin.<p>>the money doesn't matter. Money you can print. We have experienced that in this financial crisis. You can arbitrarily increase it. The question is, whether the corresponding goods are present. The poverty in our society isn't a precariat problem. It is an elite problem.<p>This is insane.
> But when you recognize that income is the fuel that makes work possible, it’s easier to see that basic income will enable far more work for multiple reasons. For one, having basic income means that people can choose unpaid or paid work. It also means that people are more able to choose self-employment.<p>I think there is a cognitive bias in play here that the author has not realized: a bias towards believing people will think and act like they will.<p>I like to use the analogy of a moving walkway or escalator. Some people get on it and use it as an opportunity to go faster- I walk <i>and it moves</i>, so together I move really fast and get where I'm going sooner. Other people step onto it and stop. Usually it's moving even slower than they would be walking otherwise, but their goal isn't to get places faster, it's to do the least amount of work possible.<p>Those two extreme attitudes can apply to how people react to something like UBI. Some people will use it to accomplish more. Others will use it to put in less effort. And most people will be somewhere in the spectrum between those two.<p>I still think UBI is a good idea. I just also accept that it probably won't increase overall productivity in our society.
It's true that if sales are good, then production can continue. But it's not clear to me how this is a good argument for basic income. (And I say that as a supporter of UBI.)<p>Anyone thinking about the timing of production should also be thinking about credit and finance. Investment and borrowing are how businesses fix the timing problem. Someone with money needs to believe that the sales will happen, and then the business can buy stuff on credit and pay after the sales happen.<p>To say that "because we have income, we can work" seems like a garbled version of more conventional economics, which is that savings allows for investment?<p>But it doesn't seem like a shortage of credit is any real bottleneck for profitable ventures. Interest rates have gone up a bit, but that's because central banks think that there is too much credit in the system. That's the opposite problem.<p>The bottlenecks seem to be in the physical supply chain nowadays. In a chip shortage, for example, businesses can pay for what they need; the problem is that they can't find a seller.<p>So how do you connect that back to UBI? Sure, if more people have a reliable income then they will spend more, but this isn't the Depression and lack of demand doesn't seem to be the issue.<p>(Here's a sketch of a better argument: UBI gives poor people spending power, which will cause businesses to anticipate more sales to them and cater more to their needs.)
>"They are already produced. There isn’t a shortage of food. There’s just a shortage of ability to buy food. So just create the money people need to buy food, and provide it to them so they can tell businesses to keep making the food they prefer to eat."<p>This whole article feels like it is written by someone who is elated to think they've figured out that we've been doing economics wrong <i>this whole time</i>, and the solution to scarcity is actually <i>super simple</i>!
I won’t argue for or against UBI. But it is not necessarily true that products on the shelf have already been paid for. The company that produced the toothpaste may have borrowed money to finance the production of toothpaste. The retailer might have net-30 payment terms, which is effectively a loan from the producer to the retailer. So when you are buying the toothpaste, you are helping pay off the debt of the retailer and producer. The lenders see the profitability of the toothpaste and extend credit to make the next tube.
The toothpaste analogy really points out quite insidious thought schemes.<p>I catch myself thinking about this when I see a pineapple or some meat at the supermarket about to expire.<p>Surely it would be a good deed to buy that item - otherwise it would go to waste entirely, even if it is plain overconsumption on my part.<p>But then the supermarket's metrics will show they sold all their stock and will order the same amount again next time - so in the end the overconsumption feeds itself.<p>I'm really glad that a lot of supermarkets around here (in Switzerland) put products on the edge of (legally speaking) hitting their expiry date on sale and then on apps like Too Good To Go (where you can pick up an assortment of food that would otherwise get thrown out for a low price).<p>I do hope that internally, the analytics are accurate enough to capture the actual margin on each product to reduce the amount of stock ordered ahead of time.
To me the best argument for UBI is that it would obliterate a bunch of economic disincentives that are dragging down on societal progress.<p>To be clear I’m working from two assumptions:
1) I have no issue with people being completely dependent on government support.
2) I have no issue nor do I partake in our glorification of work for work’s sake.<p>Having said that, the most important economic aberration UBI would do away with is the need for government and most public policy in general being run as de-facto job programs for the otherwise unemployable. If UBI were a reality there would be no rationale for bloated agencies, over-staffed infrastructure projects, tax schemes for factories, you name it. In that world, we could potentially turbocharge governance, as well as governmental and policy efficiency and efficacy.<p>A secondary, yet also important benefit of UBI is that it would unleash a ton of capable people who are otherwise bound to jobs or arrangements far below their capacity, for the simple fact that the fear of starvation or homelessness is too great. Think of all the human potential we could release if capable people felt safe enough to get an education or start a business.<p>Ultimately a bunch of people would just rely on UBI from birth to death. I don’t think that is a bad outcome. We live in a society advanced enough to be horrified by just letting people die/starve. However we struggle with the idea of some people just doing nothing when in fact the best possible outcome is for them to do just that. Some people are just not capable enough to do stuff at the level required in an advanced society, and saddling some institutions with employing them for charity does more harm than good.
> Payment doesn't balance out, but when you are buying something, you are ordering its continued production and sale<p>Here's a counter-example - the last legal sale of a product about to be banned.<p>In July 1989, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule (overturned in 1991 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans).<p>The rule banned the manufacture, import, and processing of asbestos product in three stages. The stage one ban included asbestos/cement flat sheet, like asbestos shingles, starting on August 27, 1990.<p>However, sales of existing stock were allowed to continue until August 25, 1992. (See <a href="https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nps57f.pdf</a> for full details.)<p>People bought existing stock because, for example, replacing a few broken shingles is a lot cheaper than replacing all of the siding.<p>Yet clearly the purchase was <i>not</i> an order for continued production.<p>And the last legal sale (assuming the ban had stayed in place) would <i>not</i> have been an order for continued sales.<p>Since that last payment isn't ordering the continued production and sale of asbestos shingles, according to the Toothpaste Argument, what is it doing?<p>There are other banned products, like the prohibition of "Methylene Chloride in Paint and Coating Removal for Consumer Use" <a href="https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/final-rule-regulation-methylene-chloride-paint-and" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...</a> where the ban went into effect after November 22, 2019.<p>Someone was the last consumer to buy paint with methylene chloride.
Based on the title I thought this article was going to be a much more straightforward argument for "basic" income:<p>That toothpaste (or broadly preventative dental care) is a collective benefit (combining thr basic principles of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and Bastiat's broken window parable) and that because we should optimize opportunity costs around creation not repairing destruction we should all happily provide "universal basic toothpaste" to whoever wants it.<p>And if you extend this accordingly up the first 2 or 3 steps of Maslow's hierarchy of needs you can find some equilibrium of "universal" "basic" income to satisfy those needs.<p>The article I imagined would certainly make a lot more sense than this one, which is just dorm room economic philosophy.
Milton Friedman, the noted libertarian and rather conservative economist, wrote about this topic in the 1960’s. It actually had a lot of support from the left and the right. Here is a link to what he called “negative income tax” as a solution:<p><a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-income-tax-explained" rel="nofollow">https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...</a>
The US government has absolutely 0 reputation for delivery _anything_ on time, under budget, without pork, and at a great value to the taxpayer. Why do relatively smart people on HN believe strange fantasies like UBI? Why do they ignore mountains of evidence and past performance of the government?