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When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of "innovation." Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the "futuristic" building and its many "groundbreaking" features. But few are aware that Apple's monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.
In the 1940s and '50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the 'burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.
Rockstar coders don't do suburbs?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @04:41PM
"It would be interesting to see how much basic Income would reduce crime."
Current best guess is: not much, if at all.
The logic works like this:
First, it's no disincentive. You don't lose it if you get convicted. It's a basic income. You still have it. Even if it's suspended while you're imprisoned, it's there for you when you get out. So the existence of a basic income does nothing to tell people: "You probably should consider not being a crook."
Second, at least in the USA, criminality may correspond with relative poverty, but desperation is very, very rare as a reason for criminality. So the problem that basic income might solve, in that sense, is not one that relates to a plausible cause for much criminal activity. To put it in more concrete terms: carjackers in the USA generally do not do so because the alternative is death by starvation. Are there people who turn to crime as their only option to fill their bellies, or fill their prescriptions, or (more often) to fill their need for opiates to stave off withdrawal symptoms? Surely, but they are, again, a minority, and basic income will do very little to alleviate most of these cases.
To get more sophisticated about the analysis, basic income will (unless it actively displaces current social support programmes such as SNAP and TANF, which it might have to just to be affordable) effectively increase the money supply quite a lot, thereby probably inducing a bump of inflation, up to the point where it is just barely enough to scrape by - if that. If it does displace SNAP, TANF and all the rest of them then there's no real reason to believe that the status of people near the bottom will materially increase, except inasmuch as the transition up income levels is eased, so that it becomes more sensible for them to embark on some kind of career - although then to really smooth that out, you'd have to ditch minimum wage as a concept, and that's a sacred cow for way too many people.
Petty crimes are not generally motivated by need. Much shoplifting, for example, is done by middle class women. Far from all, but more than you might think. Some technical shoplifting is purely accidental, in fact - a screwup in the checkout line, or whatever. It still shows up as shrinkage when the store does an inventory, but there was no criminal intent. But even so, that's a huge class of petty theft where an absence of cash is manifestly not the reason for the theft.
Many violent crimes are basically fights between idiots that got out of hand. An argument over cards, or girls, or cars, or football teams. Basic income will do nothing to solve that, or subsequent retaliations.
Crimes born out of envy (nice couch/TV/games console/car/sex doll, I want it, I'm taking it) will not be solved by basic income. Basic income is too basic to meet those status-marker needs, so those will keep happening.
So, yeah. Chances are not good. And in fact, chances are that the stigma surrounding living off basic income will do those people who do depend on it, no social favours at all, resulting in a sense of alienation and reducing their inhibitions with respect to social rules.
Sorry. I know it's a fun thing to think about, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:06PM
So the existence of a basic income does nothing to tell people: "You probably should consider not being a crook."
I guess it does nothing for first offenders, but I believe it would help to prevent "rehabilitated" convicts from turning back into a life of a criminal. Then the disincentive is the penal system, and basic income is just a mechanism to break vicious circle of crime, conviction, distrust, unemployment, crime, ...
Crimes born out of envy (nice couch/TV/games console/car/sex doll, I want it, I'm taking it) will not be solved by basic income. Basic income is too basic to meet those status-marker needs, so those will keep happening.
Maybe we should consider "basic dignity and respect" as well? It would probably cost society not a single cent ... Of course there will always be those who will need to overcompensate something, but then again, they will always have a number of other options beside crime.
Anyhow, basic income is solution for at least some problems. I can't see why the fact that no single thing can solve ALL of the problems should prevent us from trying some things that can solve at least a number of problems?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:39PM
People who came out of the penal system still have access to (a large variety of) support systems today. All basic income changes at that point is the simplicity of collecting.
Providing "basic dignity and respect" is not something governments can do, and certainly has no bearing on basic income.
Basic income can certainly solve some problems - although it's far from clear that the problems it will create, if implemented society-wide, won't be at least as bad as those it (supposedly) solves. But sure, what the hell, let's try it.
In the US of A, with (round numbers) 300 million inhabitants (we can exclude a lot of immigrants, for example) we can provide all of them with a basic income of $10K for the low price of $3 trillion annually (or billion, if you're european). You could polish some of the numbers around this by doing things like putting half a kid's basic income in trust to be disbursed when they turn 18, and give the other half to their guardians, or whatever, but this is the ballpark.
Three terabucks is more money than you would get by annihilating social security, medicare, medicaid and all other government transfers to the indigent up front. But hey, maybe we only do it for the roughly 20% lowest quintile of the population, and everyone else gets taxed so that while they theoretically get it, it goes away immediately? Right. Assuming you're not just shafting the kids of the wealthy because fuck them (after all, it's not like you're doing anything anti-corporate and doing away with inheritance tax here), you will still end up with (roughly) 1 trillion dollars in annual transfers, just for a basic income that may keep you housed and fed in Missouri or West Virginia, but is laughably, hopelessly inadequate in any big city. As a point of comparison, we're looking at around a full time $5/hour wage's money here.
So what happens next? That $10K had better replace everything from medicaid/pelosicare/whatever medical solutions apply to the benefits to retirees of social security/medicare/whatever .... hey, wait a moment. It's obviously, radically inadequate, unless you top it off with massive subsidies on a lot of stuff, like premium subsidies for insurance as per PPACA. OK, so it doesn't really act as a good substitute so we will probably lose a lot more money backfilling the holes in our social safety net ...
Wow, this thing is incredibly expensive. How about we not do it until we have a much better idea where the money's coming from? Pro tip: punitively taxing the taxpayer class (i.e. the middle class) is a political non-starter.
So let's hear your plans on how this will make all the things better without making a lot of things a lot worse?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @06:53PM
That $10K had better replace everything from medicaid/pelosicare/whatever medical solutions apply to the benefits to retirees of social security/medicare/whatever ....
You better ask how those programs will cost. Sure, it's a lot of spending now, but many of those programs are going to grow a lot bigger. What's 10K per person now, will grow quite a bit. For example, Medicare/Medicaid spending is projected to rise to 22% of GDP by 2080. That would be just by itself probably somewhere on the neighborhood of $30k per person in present dollars, assuming moderate growth in population and of course, the usual continued inaction on health care costs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @04:48AM
I don't think most universal basic income proposals cover children. Children are already effectively subsidized by the public school system. What's more, people who are old enough to receive Social Security already receive quite a bit more than this on average; they would not need UBI at all. Now you can also replace (most of) welfare and unemployment insurance with this.
Let's also assume that you replace quite a few prisoners, who cost several times this per year, and homeless, who cost at least this much, and end up providing them with a meager but respectable living. That's going to save a lot of money. Some of them may even be able to convert this into a real, if low-paying, job, actually reducing their dependence on public assistance.
And because this money goes to low-income people who will spend it, it's all going back into the economy, so it's effectively a permanent stimulus package. Which can be compensated for with a somewhat tighter monetary policy on the other end.
Now, for the middle class, it's true that you have a lot of people who are going to be receiving a lot of money in the aggregate. However, there's a high likelihood that UBI for the middle class would be implemented as a tax credit rather than a monthly check. You would necessarily have tax increases to pay for all this, but much of this would then be credited back. It allows you to, basically, make the UBI a no-op in practice for at least 50% of the population while still allowing them to "receive" it - and know it would be there for them if they have any sort of life event that puts them out of work.
So, yes, it would have some cost, but my guess is that you could do it for less than $1 trillion a year net. And at that price it might actually be worth it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday October 21 2016, @03:57PM
Really, you probably want even the middle class to get a monthly check - one of the benefits to a UBI is that there's no bureaucratic overhead to continue receiving it when you lose your job. Simultaneously less stressful for the already stressed individual, and cheaper to administer.
Fiscally, it works out pretty much the same - generally it's envisioned that you increase the tax burden on everyone, so that somewhere in the (usually lower-) middle class the increased tax burden neutralizes the UBI, and everyone above that point is paying into the system.
No extra paperwork that way - every citizen receives a monthly UBI, and the existing tax system handles the rest. Plus you get to eliminate all the bureaucracies around food stamps, unemployment insurance, social security, etc. Medicare/Medicaid is a separate question, there's a strong argument to be made for non-profit socialized medicine, or at least medical insurance. But if everyone has a UBI you could at least eliminate the need-based qualification and simply make Medicaid into a fixed-rate buy-in "public option" for insurance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:40AM
Taking the parent and grandparent together:
If you don't cover children in UBI, then your UBI needs to be a lot higher to cover costs of parenting. It actually makes more sense to give kids a UBI, a proportion of which goes to guardians to defray the costs of upbringing over and above things like the school system (such as, say, a roof over their heads). Similarly, putting the balance of the cash aside to help them get on their feet when they turn 18 seems reasonable. I mean, you could totally cut them out of UBI but then you suddenly need a lot more subsidies to provide for them, which then reintroduces a lot of the complexity UBI was supposed to avoid.
There's no real reason to believe that prisoners would be replaced, as covered elsewhere. Maybe a couple of percent ... maybe? Unlikely. But what the hell, let's put on our happy faces and pretend. Congratulations, you moved the needle a couple of percent on your massively unaffordable programme.
Trying to paint this as a stimulus programme does not work, because all you're doing is displacing current forms of spending. It's not as if those people aren't eating now, and will suddenly start eating when they get a UBI.
If your UBI doesn't replace a lot of the current social safety net, then it's a net cost of staggering magnitude. If it does replace the whole enchilada (or a substantial proportion thereof) then it's massively underfunded at a terabuck per year. Even a terabuck going to the lowest 60 million people in the country, in income terms (and being extracted from the highest 240 million) is around $16K/year, which in the absence of any other sort of income or social safety net will not cover all the subsidies and systemic benefits being currently delivered.
So the short answer is: a pure cash social safety net is not supportable with the current system, as an equivalent to current benefits.
If you then go ahead and juice everyone's income (which is the usual idea, and kudos to the parent for pointing out the major benefit, besides increased political palatability) you still need the mean member of the top 240 million to dish out an extra $4K in taxes over and above the face value of the UBI - a very, very tough sell. Unless you can find some way to guarantee that you're making up for it by increasing the efficiency of government by doing away with huge bureaucracies - in which case you have hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed.
Oh no, wait. Public servants don't get laid off, unless they get huge, fat, chunky packages. And their masters prefer to redeploy them because headcount is a status marker in those circles. So we probably would not see that efficiency from the government. So chances are the benefits would not materialise. Or am I being too cynical?
As for non-profit socialised medicine, we already kind of have that. Trouble is, it's slowly failing because of major systemic problems. For example, it's price controlled - to the point that it's actively uneconomical for health care professionals to tend to people on it. Unless you have a scheme to start paying a viable amount (hah!) you're going to see an extension and acceleration of things like the broken, incompletely funded not-a-fix to the doc fix, and more doctors continuing to leave the profession, increasing the already high pressure to get more nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants and other stopgaps because the AMA continues its rentseeking behaviour in terms of how it allows doctors to be trained, with the expected extra high costs of training doctors being borne by a much smaller student body than would be maintained if the AMA weren't putting its thumb on the scale.
What would make a lot more sense if you really wanted to tackle health care costs would be to require absolute equity in prices required, and those prices to be based on actual services and goods rendered. For example, if they want to charge you for a whole roll of surgical tape? They MUST provide you with the remainder of the tape. And so on. Essentially, prevent the back door subsidies that currently allow the broken system to persist, at the expense of people who are not in the system - basically, a shadow tax. Moreover, this would prevent sweetheart deals with big insurers that leave upstart health care cooperatives in the cold. More broken aspects such as forcing people to have more insurance than they want (Thanks, Nancy!) would also have to go, to let people on UBI stretch those thin dollars a little further.
The whole system is pretty comprehensively broken, but the fix relies upon so many moving parts, and so much selflessness on the part of bureaucrats, that I just don't see it happening without a substantial shift in how government is run in the USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @05:40PM
Second, at least in the USA, criminality may correspond with relative poverty, but desperation is very, very rare as a reason for criminality. So the problem that basic income might solve, in that sense, is not one that relates to a plausible cause for much criminal activity. To put it in more concrete terms: carjackers in the USA generally do not do so because the alternative is death by starvation. Are there people who turn to crime as their only option to fill their bellies, or fill their prescriptions, or (more often) to fill their need for opiates to stave off withdrawal symptoms? Surely, but they are, again, a minority, and basic income will do very little to alleviate most of these cases.
Complete lack of any numbers to back this up wildly pulled out of ass
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @07:22PM
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realise that your google was broken. Here, I'll use mine.
Poverty definitions, with some statistics:
https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/poverty-united-states/ [debt.org]
Oh, look, Wikipedia also has some data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Please note that extreme poverty in the USA, according to this page, is at around 1.5 million households - not great, but compared to the size of the nation, pretty decent percentage-wise, and as per the prior page probably significantly overestimated (since it counts cash rather than a broader range of transfers).
As to the reasons for crime, there's a whole slew of googlable pages you can hit when your google works again, but here's a quick overview to whet your appetite:
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-crime.html [phys.org]
There you go! Boy, this internetting is hard. I can see why you didn't want to do it. Time for my bourbon dinner.