As the author of linked article, I'll add 3 things to this mix:
1) For those criticizing the article for claiming capitalism is the result of intentional design, that it was "devised" rather than emerged organically from historically contingent forces, they're absolutely right.
It was just sloppy writing on my part to suggest capitalism is anything other than an emergent phenomenon from a complex stew of factors. That's not my claim, just my sloppy representation of Albert Hirschman's thesis (who doesn't claim that either).
2) But that capitalism was seen as a system that would nullify our passions by diverting attention to our interests, is not my claim, but Hirschman's. If you want to critique that, I highly recommend Hirschman's "The Passions and the Interests."
3) Why was this submission flagged? Is there such thing as the Hacker News Capitalism Defense Force, and might they actually have flagged this for its critical undertones, or did I violate some other rule?
I guess I'm having trouble separating "passions" from "interests" but it seems that there are earlier definitions of these words with somewhat different meanings than they way they're commonly used in the modern context.
Interesting article. We do need to explore what comes after neo-liberalism as we're going to need something to replace it soon. You refer to an article on mutualism - it sounds like it has some similarity to distributism.
Yeah I agree with this - under most proposals, this is actually how UBI works.
You can't fund a full (poverty level) UBI without progressive taxation (as you mention, most people don't recommend paying for UBI via deficit spending), and UBI advocates acknowledge that there will be a breakeven point beyond which people's taxes increase more than the UBI affords. This achieves the same "curving towards zero" of the benefits as if you had means tested people and only given people below a certain income some payment.
UBI advocates tend to prefer doing it this way - giving everyone the same amount, and taxing it back from high-earners to achieve the same "phase out" effect" - so as to avoid the bureaucracy of means-testing.
What you're saying here is pretty close to the "modernized negative income tax" I suggest towards the end of the essay. Whether UBI, or stimulus-style phaseout, there will always be net recipients, and net funders. I'm not sure whether means testing is better than going universal and taxing on the back end to achieve particular distributions, but it's important to note that UBI's funded by progressive taxation, when all is said and done, are still redistributing money from above to below.
It's definitely better to do means-tested distribution because of the Friction of Money.
A hyperbolic example: One might be able to send fuel to Mars and reconsume some on a return voyage (taxes) but it costs fuel to get there and fuel to get back. There is no such thing as 100% efficient salvation of discretized token, so we have to distribute it intelligently to begin with.
I agree it's certainly an inefficient process (universal payouts and taxing some back), but so is means-testing, especially if it's to be on a monthly basis. A monthly payout requires monthly means-testing, and we struggle enough to do so on an annual basis. Not to mention the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus required to handle the monthly testing and payouts, which would itself be a source of inefficiency, and introduce numerous opportunities for exploitation and cheating.
The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts that are partially taxed back?
In theory, I don't see any obvious reason means-testing is less inefficient that universalizing.
(My personal hang-up is on the gross cost required for UBI relative to an NIT. Even with the same net effects, UBI's political feasibility is far less than NIT's given the disparity in tax revenues required)
>The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts that are partially taxed back?
Well said! It'd be great to get something like this on the books. In general, however, taxation is politically unsavory and, primarily, taxes have varying surface areas based on states' laws, so any attempt at trying to coordinate the appropriate amount of taxation would be indirect at best.
In my view, the universal-payout-and-taxback is a tarpit with no harmonious resolve, and giving money to everyone devalues currency faster than need be. It duplicates effort, and that's something to be avoided, especially at a national level where one bit of duplication is multiplied three hundred million times. Any inefficiency introduced in universal-payout-and-taxback will be egregious in the aggregate.
To me it's equivalent to saying "yeah we could experiment with a little salt in the soup, but why not just pour in the whole box of salt and see if it dilutes well." It's not our luxury to play games with our one economy, or our one currency, because irrevocable changes are irrevocable.
I wonder if the Hoover Institution would be interested in doing a cost-assesment of this make-it-rain-and-tax-it-back versus tactical-delivery. Maybe I will try and make a model just on the scale of a city or state and extrapolate from there. In general, I see devaluation of the currency because the wealthy are getting more than they need, so buying power for the bottom 50% goes down, meaning they must spend more on commodities, so there is more concentration of wealth at the top, simply exacerbating things. In other words, even if the costs are technically recoverable on the national ledger, the sociological costs of a "Universal" payout are devastating.
I don't think anybody's arguing that we can just redistribute wealth to the degree that there's enough for everyone to do absolutely nothing and still enjoy high living standards (though folks like Buckminster Fuller make a case that this will grow increasingly possible, and the proverbial 15-hour, or less, workweek should be feasible while maintaining the same, even higher, output). But Andrew MCafee's (research scientist at MIT) recent book "More From Less" is a contemporary take on this idea.
The traditional GDP would shrink in the long-term, but the idea (drawing from Charles Eisenstein, Paul Mason, etc) is that gift economies and communities would grow to replace the goods & services we currently rely upon traditionally economic transactions for.
And you're right that policies trying to democratize abundance (unconditional affordances like UBI, healthcare, etc) would restructure the labor force. But David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' is a strong case that the labor force needs restructuring anyway.
And it grows increasingly difficult to earnestly frame these abundance arguments as fanciful, wishful thinking, when some of the most reputable economists who've ever lived argued the same. Thinking of John Maynard Keynes, JK Galbraith, and so on. There's a serious economic discourse, and potentiality, around the idea of lessening the amount of necessary labor to negligible amounts in order to secure access to all one needs, leaving production and 'participation in the workforce' to be an increasingly voluntary decision, taken on because one wants to make something, rather than one needing the paycheck to continue living their lives.
What do you think? The idea of abundance doesn't seem like a hippie discourse anymore, especially in light of folks like Mcafee's work. Why do these ideas continue striking folks as wishful thinking?
The author of the article is advocating exactly that, though. I quoted him saying just that.
The move toward a shorter work week seems like a good idea, but this would reduce GDP and the tax base, and would necessarily be counterproductive to the author's goal of redistributing more wealth to the poorest.
Why would we expect gift economies to increase as total output decreases and gift dollars are more dear?
I haven't read 'Bullshit Jobs', but based on a quick Google, he uses the meaninglessness of some jobs as an argument for UBI. His first premise may have merit (it has probably applied since the industrial revolution) but his prescription of UBI as a cure is odd. I would be interested to see a comparison of the mental states of people with "bullshit jobs" vs people who live off the file. And anyway, a Libertarian may make a decent case that taxation is theft, but that doesn't magically make the Libertarian ideal of a voluntary society a realistic proposition.
Your reference to Keynes and Galbraith seemed to argue for a general endorsement of a vague notion of progressive tinkering-- what exactly did they endorse in this regard?
In any event, there is nothing wrong with tweaking the economy in considered and careful ways. UBI is neither considered nor careful, which is why it does not deserve serious consideration. Big ideas (like actual socialism, communism, and UBI) that require a massive top-down rework of the global economic system are doomed to fail. And that makes them dangerous. Careful, considered action over long periods of time aren't sexy, but they're safe(r), responsible and more easily refersable.
