The case for a universal basic income | Free Lunch on Film

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[syrupgoblin]

We're going to need UBI out of pure necessity in the next 2 decades because of automation

[Robert_Douglass]

I remember those "economic stimulus" checks. I received two of them while I was woefully behind on my child support. You know what I did with it? I made several child support payments. If I was already current on my child support I would be able to stay current. If I had that and a simple minimum wage job, I'd continue to work while looking for the job I want. I'd also be able to give my kids the future they deserve instead of just hoping to save up enough for their future while giving up on myself -- a parent should be able to make better choices for themselves as well as their children. I've had some low-income parents tell me that if you haven't driven yourself to mental illness in the first few years, then you haven't done your job as a parent.

[genxlife]

Basic income would not weaken the incentive to work. Bad working conditions weaken the incentive to work.

[WhichDoctor]

A big part of it for me as someone who has been on and off disability benefits all my life as a result of a incurable chronic illness is the sheer amount of stress caused by having to prove my health status every couple of years. The more unwell I am the more gargantuan the task of filling out the horrible means testing form that requires you to analyse every part of your life and document everything you can’t do, every way you’re life sucks compared to most people, and the more overwhelming the prospects of having to sit through a medical assessment with someone who you know will lie about what you say and do at any opportunity to make you look less ill than you are. Then when your almost inevitable rejected by the medical report, gathering evidence and sit before a tribunal panel for multiple hours trying to defend yourself like a defendant in a court case, when the very reason you are doing any of this is because you have medical issues that make doing that very thing incredibly hard. That process usually takes all my availability energy for 6 to 12 months depending on how slow the system is running, and all the time you are in limbo as to whether you’re going to keep receiving the money you need to survive. The stress of it usually causes my health to significantly worsen. When I’ve been on regular unemployment the situation is even more degrading and humiliating, although on a more day to day level. Always knowing that you have to please your work coach at every turn to avoid being sanctioned. Having to apply for dozens of jobs you know you’ll get rejected for, or even worse knowing you wouldn’t be able to actually do if by some mistake they did offer you the job, just to keep up with the quota. And then occasionally getting sanctioned anyway for things out of your control like because they told you the wrong date for a meeting so you turn up a day late, and that’s your fault. Unless you’ve been inside the means testing system you can’t know quite how personally invasive and soul crushingly demoralising it is. A UBI would eliminate all that stress and pain on the most vulnerable people in society and give them time, space and security to actually improve their health a little, and maybe even do a little bit of work with the energy they are no longer having to spend fighting their way through the system

[honazhu]

I once looked into the poverty trap. Based on loss aversion and prospect theory, it seems that not the unemployment benefit which leads to poverty trap but the fear to lose the unemployment benefit. This is because they might encounter the loss in expect value first before recieving the joy of gain from working. Therefore, the UBI could result less poverty trap than traditional unemployment benefit.

[GeoffV-kh]

The Finnish study is slightly misrepresented here. It didn't give people lots of extra money it replaced unemployment benefit for those already in work - the difference was small. What it did promise was that the money would not be taken away if they found a job.

[TrixiHill]

I don't have any strong opinion about UBI.
I came here to see how it could work.
I do wish this topic would be on people's minds much more than I feel like it is.
I have only heard about it mentioned like 8 times in my 40yr life.
This should be talked about so much that people who don't think about this stuff, learn about this stuff!

[luxushauseragency]

It's amazing how problems are devoid of solutions in the real world. In a classroom, the teacher would raise an issue like this and ask everyone to submit their answer and then mark the papers and explain later what the correct solution is and why. Yet, in the real world, no one seems certain of the correct solution.

[kschuman]

I agree completely. I am still watching the video so I don't know if you get to it, but the most compelling reason to move towards something like this is that within 10-20 years the vast majority of jobs will be automated out of existence. It's not really necessary to have a lawyer to file a divorce, bankruptcy or deal with an estate, nor is it necessary to have an accountant to file taxes, investment advisors are almost completely useless and always have been, an automated investment program would do just as well; most physicians are not particularly good at it, and an expert system can probably do a better job of checking a CT scan for cancer, and likewise run a diagnostic tree more intelligently that a human physician. We don't need doctors, and even more obviously don't need health care insurance companies. The list of replaceable professions goes on and on, and essentially replaces the vast majority of them, except perhaps IT and software engineering. It's not that I advocate any of this, but I regard it as inevitable.

In the near term future it's not just blue collar workers who will be replace by expert systems or automatronic systems -- almost every job is coming within range of advancing tech.

I recall back in the 60s the marvels of modern science and technology were supposed the herald 'the end of work', and indeed, that is what is happening, whether we want it or not. A life of leisure could be lived in poverty, or we could try to be creative about things and arrange to provide the benefits of an increasingly efficient economy to the general public so we don't have to put on a uniform and toil to produce vast wealth for a couple hundred billionaires.

The whole value of work thing is largely an invention of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, the mark of a gentleman (or woman) was that one did not have to lower oneself to the necessity of 'work'. Work was the province of the poor. The protestant work ethic gained so much momentum because industrialists needed cheap labor. It did arise originally from the notion that idle hands are the devil's playthings, but from that point of origin the silly superstitious beliefs of ignorant people it has been very effectively utilized by monied interests make sure need will reliably produce people to flip burgers at McDonald's for minimum wage. This becomes more obvious in today US economy where business perceives it as a crisis that there is a labor shortage. Nothing could be more beneficial to the average person, but it is a crisis to the corporation that might actually be forced to pay ordinary workers a decent wage and to create conditions of employment that are far more attractive. It is just as hard flipping burgers or being a janitor as it is to be a top investment banker -- quite a bit harder in IMHO.

It is perhaps time to replace a form of slavery dressed up as something noble by what is ultimately corporate gaslighting, so that we may pursue a life of leisure doing the things we really like to do. If such pursuits involve professional life, fine, then get a job, but otherwise let people reap the benefit of technology instead of being shamed by it, and let everyone lead a life of nobility, a life not driven by fear of want. This is surely is the real promise of human existence... not the sham illusion of a life spent purposefully which in truth is more often just wasting time...working for 'the man'.

[TPA]

Disappointed that inflation wasn't mentioned.

[basicprogrammer]

All other support programs pay huge salaries to administrators.

A UBI is a monthly check. The paper and the stamp are the only costs.

[AvinashNicholas]

Your documentary is fantastic! Thank you. 🙂

[h.f.]

If the pandemic taught me one thing is that UBI will be another level of control. They will be able to take it away when you don't obey.(i.e. mandates)

[mikesmith]

Many years ago I was a seafarer and I remember a chap in Kuwait telling me the government gave every citizen a payment as a dividend on the oil extracted, not sure if that is still in place or what it cost. In Norway they took the dividend from the oil and invested it, the pension fund already existed so they put it there, today Norway is the worlds largest single foreign investment fund, giving them a lot of 'soft power' and they don't have to worry about their pension fund (I spent time there and it was rather like 'going to where the grown ups live'). The UK is however hamstrung by ideological concerns inherited from the Normans that favour large corporations at the expense of local concerns (it's difficult to run a shop when it requires a room full of people to handle the paperwork and try being a builder when the large companies buy up all the land and 'bank' it).
Politics at its best is expediency and at its worst it is thinly veiled criminality but it is what we have to resort to when we don't know. Ideology is what we fall back on when we don't want to know and dogma is what people cling to when some bugger finds out anyway and insists on telling us, so ideology is a major problem. Even if you can clearly demonstrate the advantages of UBI those may not be the advantages the politicals wish for. The UK, at least since 1066, has had a problem with investment, they just don't 'get' capitalism (investing in order to make a profit), Dale Carnegie was telling us this before world war one, the UK steel industry was much larger than the German steel industry, but the profits the Germans were making on their high quality output was much larger than the UK was getting.
There has been a shift in emphasis toward 'inward investment', basically selling everything to foreigners in the hope they will make a better job of running it while avoiding spending anything on investment ourselves. ICI, British Oxygen, just about all the car makers (with the possible exception of Reliant), fertiliser production, engine manufacture, the railways and bus services, water supplies and electricity generation are all now in the hands of foreign companies and nationalised industries (one nice example is the DB rail freight concern, yes it's a publicly listed company, it's just that all the shares are owned by the German Government who get to choose where they will spend the subsidies). All the British aircraft industry ended up in BaE Systems who have, for good reasons, focussed on the US military (that being where all the loose cash is sloshing around). The banking sector has shifted toward catering to dubious 'rich foreigners' and money laundering but Brexit seems to have put something of a spoke in those works as we can no longer argue against tighter regulation of the international financial markets. Automation is and will continue to eat away at jobs most people are equipped for. The world is changing and the medievalists need to wake up to that.

[basicprogrammer]

Happiness. THAT is what matters most. My biggest takeaway from reading how people felt who were part of a UBI study is that they were overwhelmingly more happy.

If it works (which it does) on other levels like economics, education, etc, that's great.

But a monthly check makes people happy.

[glowwurm]

UBI simply makes sense, it cuts welfare administration, doesn’t punish ppl for working (our existing systems actively discourage workforce fear of loss of benefits) and provides ppl the flexibility of refusing under paid work. Right now employers have the vast majority of the power in any work dynamic.

We also have a clear an obvious flaw in our existing economic model, wealth doesn’t trickle down, it positively flows upwards. It would require a change to taxation.

[TimBryan]

This was a great video, but unfortunately it didn't address the problem with UBI that I hear the most and that is the inflationary effect it could have on the economy. Things might just get more expensive relative to the UBI.

[YoYo-gtiq]

To call Basic income handout is fairly ridiculous. It is basically just a means of giving people back their own tax money so they could use it how they want

[noidph]

Excellent feature! Working towards making basic income a reality here in the Philippines!

[earthsteward]

The overall goal is to eliminate poverty so whatever works for that. I would also add: universal child care, universal pharmacare, deregulating zoning to increase housing supply, year-round schools, etc