Is it just me or do conservatives even exist anymore? This isn't conservatism, this isn't fiscal responsibility.

I gotta tell you, it's just too ironic that about 3 weeks after my personal favorite candidate, Andrew Yang, got laughed out of the room for having the idea of a universal basic income. It's ironic that those same people who scoffed and treated it like an impossibility, "That will never work!!! It's socialism!!! It'll cost too much!!! Obviously he's a joke and not a good or real candidate. How insane he must be, handing out money to everyone, tisk tisk. IT'S SOCIALISM LIKE NAZIS FROTHfrothFROTHfrothFROTH THEY WANT TO MAKE US NAZIS BY GIVING US MONEY!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"

===3 weeks later===

" We're sending everyone in America a check or direct deposit for $1,200 for individuals or $4,000 for a family of four. We think this plan is really a fantastic plan a great plan. This is the best thing we could do."

Your video, Universal Basic Income Explained - Free Money for Everybody?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Pretty much everything @ChaosEngine said, and as pointed out in the Humans Need Not Apply video. There are far more factors going into this than the economists are willing to look at.

Shelf checkouts might result in slightly higher theft rates, and each person might be at the register than they would be with a properly trained cashier, but you now have one minimum wage employee watching 6 or 12 registers, rather than 6 or 12 people... that is a huge savings. That's 5 to 11 jobs lost, and at the low end, where people can least afford to lose job opportunities. It's just a matter of time until McDonald's, Wendy's and the like all add app-based ordering, or ordering at a kiosk, and that saves a couple employees there (Chick-fil-a already has that in their app, order, notify when you are there, they process the order)... and it wouldn't be too difficult to automate the McDonald's cooking line either... the burgers aren't flipped, the grill cooks both sides at the same time, drop them in place, grill down, cook, up, then put them in the stream tray, easy for a cheap bot to do. Portion control would be far easier with a bot too... there are huge incentives for them to move to automate...

The only real incentive not to automate as fully as everyone can is the fact it would cause a huge disruption to the economy if a Universal Basic Income isn't in place. I'd expect the biggest push for a UBI to eventually come from the various industries that want to automate, who'd gladly pay an automation tax to help pay the UBI in order to greatly increase their bottom lines, because we are very close to where a UBI, even based on an automation tax, is still cheaper than employing people.

Not sure how this didn't get far more votes. It's *quality talk about an important, and under-discussed issue. I look forward to the second installment, as they discuss solutions like Universal Basic Income. It's beyond time that it should be a regular discussion in politics, as the UBI will be needed far sooner than our politicians and public will be ready for.

Driverless cars and AI in general. AI is capable in the very near future of kicking off a revolution to rival the industrial one we all learned about. Huge increase in productivity and a reduction in expenditure for large corporations that currently rely on human labour. And AI that can fix and monitor the robot workers.

Which also means unemployment without a new job to go for. But if 50% of people don't have an income, who is going to buy the stuff the robots produce? That's where universal basic income comes in. Tax AI to fund UBI which would allow people to pursue their own goals in life. Fully automated luxury communism ala star trek! Credit to Aaron Bastani for that idea.

I await someone mocking the idea of UBI, calling me a lazy idiot, saying people will turn to drugs and crime, without providing a single alternative solution to the certainty of automation and what it will do to the economy. If boardroom jockeys find out that they can get robots to do the work of 1/2 of their staff for 1/100th of the cost, 1/100th of the errors, none of the stress, illness, holiday or sleep time, do you honestly think they won't? This IS going to happen.

Meanwhile RE: housing prices - if roast chickens had increased in price at the same rate houses have, each would be £50 - it would be unacceptable. Having a place to live is equally necessary for life, so why is it acceptable and even encouraged, celebrated by some?

Seems U-4 is the number one should normally look at, since discouraged workers wanting work, but not looking is a valid number. U-5 I don't get, if you are taking care of family or are in school so not actively looking, but would take a job if a good one came... just seems to be a meh number.

I don't get how U-6, which seems to be the underemployed number, is a indicator of potential job growth. If the jobs aren't here, or they don't have the skills, etc... then that number doesn't represent potential growth. It would be one thing if you have somebody who could be in a great job, that job is around, but they haven't found it, but I'd guess that most of those are unskilled, or underskilled, or those jobs just no longer exist or at the very least are being phased out. Automation is going to become a bigger and bigger issue, and seems to be the thing people, especially those on the far right, seem to ignore... and neither side is really looking at guaranteed basic income yet as a serious issue, which really needs to be discussed in detail. Too many people are becoming unemployable and that is a problem we don't seem ready to seriously discuss in political circles.

@Payback
>>>If they're saying she couldn't get sponsorship AFTER winning major competitions?
She was 8 times best surfer in Brazil and 2nd in the world twice. Isn't that proving yourself?

@Babymech
>>> I just don't think we owe it to the people who are the best at a form of exercise to provide them with a living.

Well, there's a whole other discussion we could have about how the world would be a better place if a) people who were really good at anything were paid to do it and b) people in general were owed a universal basic income, but that's probably too broad for this topic.

So let's take it as read that, in the world today, NO-ONE is owed a living based on what they do. I write software, I am not inherently entitled to be paid just because I'm good at it. I'm paid because I provide value for my employer.

My issue is not whether or not anyone should be paid for surfing. If no-one was paid for surfing, I can live with that. But people ARE paid for surfing and my issue is that she's not being paid for two reasons: she's a woman and she's not a model.

Even if you wanted to say that all surfers have to be attractive, well, I'd think that was stupid, but I could deal with it. But no one tells Mick Fanning he's not hot enough.

Because he'd shark punch the shit out of them. Because Mick Fanning is awesome.

@RedSky

First, if it were up to me, you could take over as Minister of Finance in this country tomorrow. Our differences seem miniscule compared to what horrendous policies our last three MoF have pushed. The one prior, ironically, was dubbed the most dangerous man in Europe by The Sun.

We're in agreement on almost everything you mentioned in your last comment, so I'll focus on what I perceive differently.

First, I'd differentiate between fiscal stimulus and fiscal spending, the former being a situational application of the latter. As you said, fiscal stimulus during an economic crisis tends to be inadequate with regards to our macroeconomic objectives. You can neither whip out plans for major investments at a whim nor can you mobilize the neccessary resources quickly enough to make a difference and still be reasonable efficient. Not to mention that it only affects certain parts of the economy (construction, mostly), leaving others completely in the wind. So I'm with you on that one, it's a terribly inefficient and ineffective approach.

Automatic stabilizers work magnificently in this regard, but they barely take any pressure from the lower wage groups, especially if unemployment benefits come with a metric ton of strings attached, as is the case in Germany. A basic income guarantee might work, but that's an entirely different discussion.

The problem I see with merely relying on reasonable automatic stabilizers in the form of payments is that they do put a floor into demand, but do very little to tackle the problem of persistent unemployment due to a lack of jobs. As useful as training and education are, the mere number of highly educated people forced to work mundane jobs tells me that, at best, it doesn't work, and at worst pushes a systemic problem onto the individual, leading to immense pressure. Not to mention the psychological effects of being unemployed when employment is tauted as a defining attribute of a proper person -- aka the demonization of the unemployed.

It's still somewhat decent in Australia, but in Europe... it's quite a horrible experience.

Anyway, my point is that I'd rather see a lot more fiscal spending (permanent!) in the shape of public sector jobs. A lot of work cannot be valued properly by the market; should be done without the expectation of a return of investment (hospitals, anyone?); occurs in sectors of natural monopolies -- all of that should be publicly run. A job guarantee, like your fellow countryman Bill Mitchell advocates quite clearly, might be an approach worth trying out. Economy in the shit? More people on the public payroll, at rather low (but living wage!) wages. Do it at the county/city level and you can create almost any kind of job. If the private sector wants those people instead, they'd have to offer better working conditions. No more blackmail through the fear of unemployment -- you can always take a public job, even if it is at a meagre pay.

I should probably have mentioned that I don't buy into the notion of a stable market. From where I am standing, it's inherently unstable, be it through monopolies/oligopolies, dodging of laws and regulations (Uber), impossibility to price-in externalities (environmental damage most of all) or plain, old cost-cutting leading to a system-wide depression of demand. I'm fine with interfering in the market wherever it fails to deliver on our macroeconomic objectives -- which at this point in time is almost everywhere, basically.

Healthcare is all the rage these days, thanks to the primaries. I'd take the publicly-run NHS over the privately-run abomination in the US any day of the week. And that's after all the cuts and privatizations of the last two decades that did a horrible number on the NHS. Fuck ATOS, while we're at it.

Same for the railroad: the pre-privatization Bundesbahn in Germany was something to be proud of and an immeasurable boost of both the economy and the general standard of living.

In the mid/long run, the effects of automation and climate change-induced migration will put an end to the idea of full employment, but for the time being, there's still plenty of work to be done, plenty of idle resources to be employed, and just nobody to finance it. So why not finance it through the printing press until capacity is reached?

As for the Venezuela comparison: I don't think it fits in this case. Neither does Weimar Germany, which is paraded around quite regularly. Both Venezuela and Weimar Germany had massive supply-side problems. They didn't have the production capacity nor the resources to meet the demand they created by spending money into circulation. If an economy runs at or above its capacity, any additional spending, wherever it comes from, will cause inflation. But both Europe and the US are operating faaar below capacity in any measurable metric. You mentioned LRAS yourself. I think most estimates of it, as well as most estimates of NAIRU, are off quite significantly so as to not take the pressure off the wage slaves in the lowest income sector. You need mass unemployment to keep them in line.

As you said, the participation rate is woefully low, so there's ample space. And I'd rather overshoot and cause a short spike in inflation than remain below potential and leave millions to unneccessary misery.

Given the high level of private debt, there will be no increase in spending on that front. Corporations don't feel the need to invest, since demand is down and their own vaults are filled to the brim with cash. So if the private sector intends to net save, you either have to run a current account surplus (aka leech demand from other countries) or a fiscal deficit. Doesn't work any other way, sectoral balances always sum up to zero, by definition. If we want to reduce the dangerous levels of private debt, the government needs to run a deficit. If we don't want to further increase the federal debt, the central bank has to hand the cash over directly, without the issuance of debt through the treasury.

As for the independant central bank: you can only be independant from either the government or the private sector, not both. Actually, you can't even be truly independant from either, given that people are still involved, and people have ideologies and financial ties.

Still, if an "independant" central bank is what you prefer, Adair Turner's new book "Between Debt and the Devil" might be worth a read. He's a proponent of 100% reserve banking, and argues for the occasional use of the printing press -- though controlled by an inflation-targeting central bank. According to him, QE is pointless and in order to bring nominal demand up to the level we want, we should have a fiscal stimulus financed by central bank money. The central bank controls the amount, the government decides on what to spend it on.

Not how I would do it, but given his expertise as head of the Financial Services Authority, it's quite refreshing to hear these things from someone like him.

I would argue that automation still isn't the job killer #1. Plain old political decisions, such as sound finance, deficit hawkery, and austerity lead by a mile in this category. Neither is being addressed properly, but I find it hard to focus on the employment effects of automation when the Eurozone, for instance, runs at >10% unemployment strictly due to policies enacted by (non-)elected officials. We don't need technology to cause mass unemployment, humans can do that all on their own.

Additionally, even the amount of work available is a matter of perspective. Within the current system, the number of jobs with a decent salary is already dwarfed by the number of people looking for one. The amount of work to be done, on the other hand, is not.

Case in point: our (read: German) national railroad company is short-staffed by about 80.000-100.000 people, last I checked; our healthcare system is short-staffed by at least 200.000 people, probably a lot more; law enforcement is short by about 50.000; education is short by at least 20.000. Let's not even talk about infrastructure or ecological maintenance/regeneration. These are not open positions though, because nobody is willing/able to pay the bill.

So while I agree that we should be discussing how to deal with technological change, a more pressing matter is either to alter the system or to at least take back control over the vast sums of dead currency floating around in the financial nirvana or on Stephen Schwarzman's bank accounts. First stop: full employment. Then, gradually, guaranteed basic income when automation does, in fact, cause mass unemployment.

Finally, I don't think automation will do as quick as sweep as some presume. The quality of software in commercial machines is quite absymal in many cases, since it was written in the normal fashion: do it now, do it quickly, here's five bucks. Efficiency improvements generally come at the price of QA, and it shows. Europe's most modern railway control center is nearby, and it never went online -- Bombardier cut corners and never had the proper railway expertise to begin with. Meanwhile, the center build in '53 is working just fine, and so are the switches put in place when Wilhelm II was running the show.

Edit: That said, I'm thrilled to see mind-numbing labour being replaced by machines. Can't happen quickly enough.

This isnt just the US economy. The Digital World will make many jobs obsolete everywhere. In a few decades there will be not enough manual work left to make a living for everyone.

Which means ... there will not be enough spending capacity left to generate enough revenue for a lot of industries. When no one has work, no one has the money to buy stupid crap they really dont need, so entire industries will go bancrupt which means more jobless people which means even less disposable income.

In Davos, on the World Economic Forum, for the first time there was a decent and serious discussion about possible solutions for this developement. From heavily investing in education for future generations to different models of basic income.

"They" know that something has to be done. There has to be some form of wealth distribution or everything will go up in flames.

@Bernie:
As a European Bernie isnt THAT much a leftie. He wont win the nomination, but the more he gives Hillary a hard time, the more influence he will have on her future social and economic policies. May be he'll even end up in her government.

What would it take for a Basic Income to finally take hold?

At some point, yes. But for the time being, increases in productivity (automation) are less of a job killer than your everyday policies and ideologies.

Speaking of my own country, the amount of work not being done is enormous, and the aggregate of work not having been done over the last decades is absolutely staggering. The current economic system not only unloaded a great number of burdens onto society, it also never found a way to come up with a way to integrate the aforementioned work. No one is willing to pay for it, so it doesn't get done, period. The most prominent examples would be infrastructure works of all kinds (energy, most of all), ecological restauration and care for the elderly. Our national railroad alone could hire 100,000 people and still be understaffed.

You can have full employment next year, but not if you expect the private sector to provide the jobs within the current system. The public sector could create them, if you use a sovereign, free-floating currency, but ideology doesn't allow for it.

As long as we focus on finding people for a given job, there'll be mass unemployment, no matter what. Reverse the process, create/find jobs for a given people and we might make some headway.

Again, ideology doesn't allow for it. And that's also what made me stop advocating for an unconditional basic income (UBI). The financial details of it can be a nightmare, yes, and it would be a break with a social welfare system that survived two world wars. But the deal breaker for me was politics.

A UBI would mean taking the boot of the peasants' necks. Liberty and (some) equality made real. Love it.
But look at how vicious the Greeks are attacked these days, not just by the elite, but by our fellow worker bees. They're not just burying the last bit of European solidarity in Greece, they're unloading all their frustrations onto the schmucks who had very little to begin with. It's despicable. And it indicates to me that any attempt to introduce a system that would take from people the need to work would unleash unimaginable hatred from the usual suspects. And significant portions of the public would go along with it, given how easy it already is to channel their frustrations towards "welfare queens" and "moochers".

So yeah, a UBI would be lovely. Finally some liberty, finally more negotiating power for the worker (can decline any job offer without repression). But the shit would need to hit the fan hard before there can be any room within the political sphere for it.

Given the increasing capabilities of automation, it seems quite obvious that full employment will never again be seen. Given that, a guaranteed basic income is the only way to stave off a violent revolution by those who have been abandoned by the system. Because they're not likely to just lay down and die simply because they can't do a job as economically as a machine can.

So I'm not sure that calling a guaranteed basic income "unrealistic" is accurate.

The devil is in the details, isn't it?

For instance, what kind of guaranteed minimum income are we talking about?

The context they used (automatisation, labour supply) suggests to me something along the lines of an unconditional basic income. If that's the case, it cannot be compared to a minimum wage at all, since it has effects that go far beyond the labour market and the income situation. It's a massive reshaping of how we organise society. And it becomes a pain in the ass to even conceptualise properly once you talk about how to finance it...

A minimum wage, no matter how decent it is, doesn't even put a dent into the disparity between income from labour and income from capital. It makes life less horrible for those it applies to and it somewhat curtails the welfare queens among corporations who like their wage slaves being paid for by society. Yes, I'm looking at you, Walmart! Still, on its own, it does very little about income inequality, and nothing at all about wealth inequality.

How would I address income inequality?

In German, the words for taxes and steering are the same: "Steuern". If you want to steer the income towards a more equal distribution, taxation might be the easiest way to go about it. Treat all forms of income equally in terms of taxation. Or go one step further and treat wages preferentially to support employment.

However, redistribution will only get you so far. So why not address it at an earlier stage: distribution. Mondragon serves as a successful example of how a cooperative structure puts democratic checks and balances on the wage structure within a corporation. One person, one vote puts the lid on any attempts by higher-ups to rake in 300 times as much as the peasants on the factory floor.

Yet it doesn't do anything about the inequality between wages and capital income. Even a combination of progressive taxation and fixed income-ratios doesn't do much about it. Especially since non-wage income can evade taxation in a million different ways and most politicians in every country in the world seem more than eager to protect what loopholes they created over the decades.

So what's my suggestion? Well, progressive taxation of both income and wealth, living wage plus job guarantee, support of democratic structures at the workplace, international pressure on tax havens (which includes my own fecking country). Realistic? No. But neither was our welfare system until it was implemented.

Technology isn't to blame for the damaging and exploitative nature of capitalism. As our production capability increases our society must necessarily get richer. Only the distribution of that wealth is in question. Basic income is long overdue as an obvious good.

If we have fewer menial jobs to do, that's great; the elimination of drudgery can't have a net negative effect except through gross social mismanagement. Destroy capitalism and democracy, put rational people in charge and everything gets better fast.