Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

[lightreads]

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, And Remake the World

3/5. As usual, the subtitle of a nonfiction book does it absolutely no favors. This is an interesting, brisk overview of UBI, an old idea finding its way to trendy. Lowrey discusses the impacts on poverty (not necessarily as dramatic as many people think, though definitely worthwhile), gender equality, and social justice. I'm not an UBI skeptic, but I am kind of skeptical of a lot of the first order arguments trotted out. For one thing, this supposed technological future that wipes out most jobs has been 30 years away for about a century, if you trace the ideas back. I'm also deeply skeptical of the notion that the cost of a UBI could be underwritten by eliminating pretty much all existing social safety net programs except Medicaid/Medicare. That only makes sense if you think lifting millions of people up to teeter juuuuuust on the poverty line somehow eliminates the mass impacts of inequality. UBI folks in general seem really interested in not talking about inequality, actually, it's really remarkable once you notice it.

TBF part of my crankiness is that I was the recipient of an UBI (well, BI, there's no universal in SSI) and it was absolute hell and left me worse off than I was when it started. Granted that was because of horrific and dehumanizing administrative practices, but I am also skeptical of the idea that an UBI would be virtuous because it would eliminate all those administrative nightmares. Yeah, sure, you betcha. So just like the universally available unemployment insurance, huh? You know, where the governor of a state got on live television and shamed someone he said filed a fake claim because surely his name couldn't be real, and he definitely wasn't getting any money, so there. Spoiler: that was a real person entitled to benefits, oh and you'll never guess the racial valence of the name, so mysterious.

Comments

[readerjane]

One thing I've wondered about UBI is, when everyone can afford basic housing and subsistence calories, don't the affordability goalposts then move? I mean, if everyone can buy peanut butter, won't the producers then raise their prices?

It's not a reason not to try, but it seems like any UBI plan will need to take that into account. Unless having everyone fed and vaccinated really does lift all boats to the point where the economy experiences a change in kind, not just in degree.

[lightreads]

That doesn't necessarily follow, I don't think, at least for non-bid priced goods like food where production can theoretically ramp up subject to environmental limitations. If anything, an uptick in demand driven by increased spending should keep prices of a lot of things pretty stable. I'm not sure that would be true of, say, real estate though, since that market is weird in a lot of ways.

Alaska sort of has an UBI in the permanent fund, but the AK economy is pretty hothouse and weird anyway given everything they have to import, and how expensive that is. So maybe looking at that would provide evidence one way or another in a way that looking at all these isolated experiments where only some members in a community get an UBI can't. Or maybe the PF payments just aren't big enough. Or or or.

[jadelennox]

I took so many notes when reading this book, because I was disappointed as hell. It was so introductory, so much about justifying it ethically, and I suppose I wanted a layperson's introduction to the economics instead. Would anyone even read the book who needed the moral justifications to be made? Meanwhile I desperately wanted to know the thing you're skeptical of. I know that no large scale experiments have been done that would answer the larger questions empirically, but surely economists have at least run models.

And I wanted to know questions she never explored. Like, obviously some ways a non-means-tested UBI would pay for itself would be by depleting administrative burdens, if it were well-implemented, but what entitlements could scale down in a UBI state because they're sufficiently stable costs (eg. housing, food, education, in lieu of pell and stafford and snap and section 8 et al.), and what entitlements could never be replaced with UBI because they're too unpredictable (eg. medical, disability, disaster relief). Another question: what effect would UBI have on the housing market? Another: who is eligible to get UBI: Citizens? Kids? All legal residents? All humans?

I wanted to know the answers to the questions because I'm emphatically not a UBI skeptic. I want a non means tested answer to poverty like whoa. I want a system that even the US can't manage to racialize. So I don't need to be convinced it's ethical, I need to know whether it can possibly work. And Lowry's book did not have me as the intended audience, clearly.

[lokifan]

Yeah, I'd have the exact same experience - thanks for the warning!

Would anyone even read the book who needed the moral justifications to be made?

That'd be my question!