You also have to balance out all the people will stop doing work that benefits society with the group of people that create something of huge value in the they used to spend doing wage labor. Traditionally it was rich people who therefore have a lot of free time that made all sorts of advances in science and mathematics (see all the lords hanging around 18-19th century science). The same logic goes for forming businesses unless a massive percentage of people don’t work—it takes a ton of money to start a business because you still need to eat before you’re profitable, and UBI takes some of the strain off that because, at worst, you still have your basic income to fall back on. It doesn’t take many people doing extremely high value work of this sort because they aren’t doing wage labor to make up for any number of people who sit on the couch and watch television all day.
There’s also the second-order benefits on the next generation. How much healthier and higher-IQ would the population be if poor children had access to better food, better housing, and parent’s with more free time and energy? Probably a lot more than the average upper-middle-class kid would lose from their parents paying slightly higher taxes. And that translates to more people with the theoretical potential to do high value creative and cognitive work—and hence being able to compete for jobs that today get paid a lot more than any plausible near-term UBI.
Also, less resistance by the population to increased automation seems like a huge long-term benefit that would increase the pace of economic growth, even if it causes an initial slump as people leave the workforce.
if poor children had access to better food, better housing, and parent’s with more free time and energy?
It’s going to end up being an empirical question if any real UBI implementation does those things. Presuming it replaces, rather than supplements, current low-income government programs, it’s likely neutral or even negative to the disabled and non-working poor. It could be a noticeable boost to the working poor, and it remains to be seen whether it leads to healthier food and lifestyle choices, or “just” more pleasant lives. Or as payments to warlords (in a capitalist system, that’s mostly drugs and black-market purchases, not direct violence).
I support large-scale trials (major metro areas or smaller US States), and I have hopes that it could make things somewhat better. But it’s not guarantees, and it’s not a panacea.
I agree, of course there are no guarantees. Well, I expect it’s essentially a guarantee that there will be some of all of the above, and only the balance is in question.
I guess my response to that is… so what? Once we ensure people get enough support, for long enough, that their decisions are actually free choices unforced by desperate circumstances, I’m much more willing to let them bear the consequences of their own decisions. It removes a lot of the moral grey area. Granted I could be convinced the relevant time frame for that kind of shift might be anywhere from “a couple of years” to “multiple generations.”
How much healthier and higher-IQ would the population be if poor children had access to better food, better housing, and parent’s with more free time and energy?
Children’s access to food and housing quality don’t depend on whether the help that their parents get from the government comes with the government pressuring the parents to get work or not.
Not directly, no. But I’m fairly sure “Children have those things, but their parent(s) have to accept a job even if it has odd and inconsistent hours and is in an inaccessible-by-public-transit location so they’re never home to cook, or help them with homework, or read to them at bed time” is a very different scenario than “Children have those things, and parent(s) who are around in the mornings and evenings.”
I know I’m cherry picking a specific subset of scenarios here, but I do think I illustrate real and important ways in which a UBI would be better than the EITC, just by creating those possibilities.
I don’t think there a good reason to abbreviate EITC here given that it’s not a common abbreviation and not spelled out.
In any caseearned income tax credit is not the only way to provide government welfare. There’s welfare for the unemployed. The key difference of UBI is that the welfare that unemployed get doesn’t come with a requirement of them searching work and accepting job offers.
Arguing that time for children is important is a different argument then that having enough food is important.
There is clear evidence that malnutrition keeps cognitive ability down but I’m not aware of clear evidence that parents having time for children is predictive of adult cognitive capacity.
That’s very fair (on all counts). I have no studies to show, but would be surprised if it turned out that parental time and stress weren’t correlated with childhood nutrition quality, though that’s a very weak claim on my part.
You also have to balance out all the people will stop doing work that benefits society with the group of people that create something of huge value in the they used to spend doing wage labor. Traditionally it was rich people who therefore have a lot of free time that made all sorts of advances in science and mathematics (see all the lords hanging around 18-19th century science). The same logic goes for forming businesses unless a massive percentage of people don’t work—it takes a ton of money to start a business because you still need to eat before you’re profitable, and UBI takes some of the strain off that because, at worst, you still have your basic income to fall back on. It doesn’t take many people doing extremely high value work of this sort because they aren’t doing wage labor to make up for any number of people who sit on the couch and watch television all day.
There’s also the second-order benefits on the next generation. How much healthier and higher-IQ would the population be if poor children had access to better food, better housing, and parent’s with more free time and energy? Probably a lot more than the average upper-middle-class kid would lose from their parents paying slightly higher taxes. And that translates to more people with the theoretical potential to do high value creative and cognitive work—and hence being able to compete for jobs that today get paid a lot more than any plausible near-term UBI.
Also, less resistance by the population to increased automation seems like a huge long-term benefit that would increase the pace of economic growth, even if it causes an initial slump as people leave the workforce.
It’s going to end up being an empirical question if any real UBI implementation does those things. Presuming it replaces, rather than supplements, current low-income government programs, it’s likely neutral or even negative to the disabled and non-working poor. It could be a noticeable boost to the working poor, and it remains to be seen whether it leads to healthier food and lifestyle choices, or “just” more pleasant lives. Or as payments to warlords (in a capitalist system, that’s mostly drugs and black-market purchases, not direct violence).
I support large-scale trials (major metro areas or smaller US States), and I have hopes that it could make things somewhat better. But it’s not guarantees, and it’s not a panacea.
I agree, of course there are no guarantees. Well, I expect it’s essentially a guarantee that there will be some of all of the above, and only the balance is in question.
I guess my response to that is… so what? Once we ensure people get enough support, for long enough, that their decisions are actually free choices unforced by desperate circumstances, I’m much more willing to let them bear the consequences of their own decisions. It removes a lot of the moral grey area. Granted I could be convinced the relevant time frame for that kind of shift might be anywhere from “a couple of years” to “multiple generations.”
Children’s access to food and housing quality don’t depend on whether the help that their parents get from the government comes with the government pressuring the parents to get work or not.
Not directly, no. But I’m fairly sure “Children have those things, but their parent(s) have to accept a job even if it has odd and inconsistent hours and is in an inaccessible-by-public-transit location so they’re never home to cook, or help them with homework, or read to them at bed time” is a very different scenario than “Children have those things, and parent(s) who are around in the mornings and evenings.”
I know I’m cherry picking a specific subset of scenarios here, but I do think I illustrate real and important ways in which a UBI would be better than the EITC, just by creating those possibilities.
I don’t think there a good reason to abbreviate EITC here given that it’s not a common abbreviation and not spelled out.
In any case earned income tax credit is not the only way to provide government welfare. There’s welfare for the unemployed. The key difference of UBI is that the welfare that unemployed get doesn’t come with a requirement of them searching work and accepting job offers.
Arguing that time for children is important is a different argument then that having enough food is important.
There is clear evidence that malnutrition keeps cognitive ability down but I’m not aware of clear evidence that parents having time for children is predictive of adult cognitive capacity.
That’s very fair (on all counts). I have no studies to show, but would be surprised if it turned out that parental time and stress weren’t correlated with childhood nutrition quality, though that’s a very weak claim on my part.