A guaranteed income for every American

[Deletedaccount1]

I have been re-reading Charles Murray's plan for a UBI. I used to find his proposal pedantic but after reading his book, Coming Apart, I am beginning to see the merits of it.

In Coming Apart, Murray argues that upper middle class and working class white Americans have been divided both economically and culturally to a point where the U.S. lacks the moral unification it once had that made it a unique country where people of different classes did not hold contempt for one another. While he doesn't offer many policy solutions, he thinks a UBI might help remedy this.

To quote Murray:

My version of a UBI would do nothing to stage-manage their lives. In place of little bundles of benefits to be used as a bureaucracy specifies, they would get $10,000 a year to use as they wish. It wouldn’t be charity—every citizen who has turned 21 gets the same thing, deposited monthly into that most respectable of possessions, a bank account.

A UBI would present the most disadvantaged among us with an open road to the middle class if they put their minds to it. It would say to people who have never had reason to believe it before: “Your future is in your hands.” And that would be the truth.

Edit: I am aware this proposal is politically unrealistic. This is hypothetical.

More info:

(This link has 60 second videos about Murray's UBI) http://www.aei.org/publication/in-60...harles-murray/



Would you support this proposal over the status-quo?

[Blur4stuff]

I'd rather that same money be used to ensure people have the basics. For example, placing reasonable limitations on what SNAP can be used for then expanding the program to include everyone under a certain income level. So by default if you don't make too much you have food money no matter what. Every single middle class and poor family/individual are automatically enrolled.

If that proves to be successful, and of course it would be, then similar programs could be created for other basics aspects of life. For example, if you earn under a certain amount per year then you don't pay a water bill up to a certain amount based on location.

What I don't like is the idea of just dumping a chunk of money onto someone.

[Deletedaccount1]

I'd rather that same money be used to ensure people have the basics. For example, placing reasonable limitations on what SNAP can be used for then expanding the program to include everyone under a certain income level. So by default if you don't make too much you have food money no matter what. Every single middle class and poor family/individual are automatically enrolled.

If that proves to be successful, and of course it would be, then similar programs could be created for other basics aspects of life. For example, if you earn under a certain amount per year then you don't pay a water bill up to a certain amount based on location.

What I don't like is the idea of just dumping a chunk of money onto someone.

Why? You don't think they will use it responsibly? Murray argues that civic pressure will keep people in line to use that money at least somewhat responsibly.

He gives another example of how it might help people in poverty:

Imagine a man and a woman have a child and the man skips town afterwards. Instead of relying on this guy who has an inconsistent income on making his child support payments, the judge can just order that the payments come out of his UBI allowance. This is an improvement on the status quo for all parties involved.

[PACOX]

How the hell are going to get UBI when we can't get healthcare and our president keeps perpetuating the myth that coal is suddenly going to fall out of his ass?

[Deletedaccount1]

How the hell are going to get UBI when we can't get healthcare and our president keeps perpetuating the myth that coal is suddenly going to fall out of his ass?

It's theoretical. Murray's program is almost politically impossible no matter who is president.

[haxartus]

In Coming Apart, Murray argues that upper middle class and working class white Americans have been divided both economically and culturally

The working class doesn't have the skills that the market requires - too many people work unskilled jobs and too few people can work skilled jobs. So, you end up moving unskilled jobs overseas and importing people with skilled jobs form other countries, and you end up with a population that can't do anything useful.

What needs to happen is that all effort should be put in improving education so the skills of the working population are adequate for the market. This means a few things:

1. High school education should be relevant. Maybe reduce hours for things like philosophy and put an emphasis on math and technology.

2. College should be accessible. Maybe not the Ivy League private colleges, but public colleges should be good enough and affordable.

3. There should be programs to retrain people for jobs that are relevant for the market, with adaptable hours (for example, a college that you can visit in the evening, after you finish working your main job).

What is NOT going to work:

Dumping money on people. This doesn't provide an incentive to improve or acquire new skills. Over time more and more people will rely on this basic income and they will represent the needs of the market less and less, and this will cause and economic collapse.

What is also NOT going to work:

Forcing companies with legislation to pay more for unskilled work.

Everything is so globalized by now that most major companies have offices in all kinds of countries. Which means that they can fire all of their unskilled US employees and hire them in a different country with different laws. Google, for example, has an office in 20 European countries, 16 Asian countries, 6 countries in Latin America and 5 African countries. If you make laws harsh enough, they will mostly leave the US and you will lose billions of tax revenue.

[Deletedaccount1]

The working class doesn't have the skills that the market requires - too many people work unskilled jobs and too few people can work skilled jobs. So, you end up moving unskilled jobs overseas and importing people with skilled jobs form other countries, and you end up with a population that can't do anything useful.

What needs to happen is that all effort should be put in improving education so the skills of the working population are adequate for the market. This means a few things:

1. High school education should be relevant. Maybe reduce hours for things like philosophy and put an emphasis on math and technology.

2. College should be accessible. Maybe not the Ivy League private colleges, but public colleges should be good enough and affordable.

3. There should be programs to retrain people for jobs that are relevant for the market, with adaptable hours (for example, a college that you can visit in the evening, after you finish working your main job).

What is NOT going to work:

Dumping money on people. This doesn't provide an incentive to improve or acquire new skills. Over time more and more people will rely on this basic income and they will represent the needs of the market less and less, and this will cause and economic collapse.

1. I've never heard of a high school that teaches philosophy. If you mean humanities more generally, it is important that people know English and History at least. I also subscribe to another belief of Murray's (among others...) which is that a large chunk of the American population is just genuinely not intelligent enough to get a degree in a STEM field and hold a job utilizing it.

2. How would $10,000 a year to everyone over 21 not make colleges more accessible? Even families in lower income brackets could reasonably pay for college.

Murray's argument is that $10,000 isn't enough money to make people not want to work and that the difference in lifestyle between $10,000 per year and $40,000 is enough to incentivize work.

[Masark]

I'd rather that same money be used to ensure people have the basics. For example, placing reasonable limitations on what SNAP can be used for then expanding the program to include everyone under a certain income level. So by default if you don't make too much you have food money no matter what. Every single middle class and poor family/individual are automatically enrolled.

If that proves to be successful, and of course it would be, then similar programs could be created for other basics aspects of life. For example, if you earn under a certain amount per year then you don't pay a water bill up to a certain amount based on location.

What I don't like is the idea of just dumping a chunk of money onto someone.

You're basically arguing for in-kind assistance rather than cash transfers.

Evidence suggests that cash transfers are more effective than in-kind assistance for combating poverty, contrary to the widely paraded fears that the recipients will not make proper use of the money.

A UBI is unconditional cash transfers taken to their logical extreme.

[haxartus]

I also subscribe to another belief of Murray's (among others...) which is that a large chunk of the American population is just genuinely not intelligent enough to get a degree in a STEM field and hold a job utilizing it.

This is where the disconnect comes from. Murray has a Bachelor of Arts, he has no idea about innovations in neuroscience or anything like that, nor does he have any understanding of the STEM field.

Here is a hint: intelligence is created by the environment due to the brain adapting to it. It is not inherited and nobody is born with it. Nobody is permanently stupid and intelligence can be changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

[Deletedaccount1]

This is where the disconnect comes from. Murray has a Bachelor of Arts, he has no idea about innovations in neuroscience or anything like that, nor does he have any understanding of the STEM field.

Here is a hint: intelligence is created by the environment due to the brain adapting to it. It is not inherited and nobody is born with it. Nobody is permanently stupid and intelligence can be changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

Murray has a PhD from MIT, not just a BA. He is not a neuroscientist but he is an authority on the role of IQ in society.

If you want to take a hard pro-nurture stance on intelligence, I just have to come out saying I think it is pseudoscientific and ridiculous to think that intelligence is not at least partially inherited and is entirely environmental when there is so much evidence to the contrary. The scientific consensus is that it is a combination of both.

Do you seriously believe "Nobody is permanently stupid"? What about someone who is born with an IQ of 70?

If educational outcomes were really the sole determinant of life outcomes, then the US should be in the stone age compared to some other countries (Nordic ones in particular) which basically give each student a near perfect learning environment. The reality is that it isn't that simple.

[haxartus]

If educational outcomes were really the sole determinant of life outcomes, then the US should be in the stone age compared to some other countries

No, not only education. The entire environment. Everything.
Here is the thing: maybe there is an upper limit for intelligence, and maybe it is different for some people. However, the upper limit is vastly higher than anything that the majority of professions require. The perceived difficulty of STEM comes from bad teaching and the lack of well structured and well explained information about some of the topics, not form the topics themselves. Most jobs in STEM don't require you to discover new things or be innovative in anything.

[kail]

I'm electing not to watch a 1 hour video (it's late now), but here is my opinion on UBI.

There may come a time where our advances in technology will require less and less human beings to output the same or even more than what we do today. As that happens, unemployment may easily rise. Construction workers, cashiers, chefs, hell even people who do your taxes, those job positions may be a thing of the past. When wealth inequality hits such an extreme, then I will trust that the government (and with the people's approval) will motion a UBI plan to balance out the wealth plateau that is caused by automation.

In a nutshell: Not now, but most likely later.

[Deletedaccount1]

No, not only education. The entire environment. Everything.
Here is the thing: maybe there is an upper limit for intelligence, and maybe it is different for some people. However, the upper limit is vastly higher than anything that the majority of professions require. The perceived difficulty of STEM comes from bad teaching and the lack of well structured information about some of the topics, not form the topics themselves.

Again, if this was true then other countries should surpass the US in STEM more than they do. The correlation between IQ and STEM performance by country is also quite interesting.

Calculus is calculus at the end of the day. There are good and bad ways to teach it but the core concepts remain difficult for most people.

[Blur4stuff]

I don't think we can just flip a switch. Especially with the way politics are in the country. I think the best path forward would be to expand a currently (mostly) successful program like SNAP and branch out from there.

Maybe further into the future some of the other ideas would be more achievable.

[haxartus]

Calculus is calculus at the end of the day. There are good and bad ways to teach it but the core concepts remain difficult for most people.

Because they don't understand algebra and trig correctly, which is related to bad teaching. Or you're arguing now that people are too stupid to understand algebra ?

[Deletedaccount1]

Because they don't understand algebra and trig correctly, which is related to bad teaching. Or you're arguing now that people are too stupid to understand algebra ?

Some people might be, most probably not. Calculus is different from Algebra and Trig, knowing those prerequisites doesn't guarantee success in understanding it.

[haxartus]

Some people might be, most probably not. Calculus is different from Algebra and Trig, knowing those prerequisites doesn't guarantee success in understanding it.

What is so difficult about it ? I've never met anyone who understands algebra and trig and then struggles with calculus.

Most people who find it difficult have previous holes in their knowledge.

[Deletedaccount1]

What is so difficult about it ? I've never met anyone who understands algebra and trig and then struggles with calculus.

Most people who find it difficult have previous holes in their knowledge.

You might know better than me. I took a survey of calculus in college and that is the extent of my knowledge in that subject.

[haxartus]

You might know better than me. I took a survey of calculus in college and that is the extent of my knowledge in that subject.

Well, I got an "A" on differential calculus by watching Youtube videos of people solving differential equations. How difficult do you think it is ?

[Deletedaccount1]

Well, I got an "A" on differential calculus by watching Youtube videos of people solving differential equations. How difficult do you think it is ?

Maybe you are smart then. If your whole argument is that people can't pass Calc in the US because the US is bad at teaching people STEM, saying you can ace Calc by watching Youtube videos isn't helping your case.