Is Universal Basic Income The Key To The Future? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org on this channel I've covered rather apocalyptically how the rise of AI and automation is gonna affect our workforce in the coming years technology has always been a bit of a double-edged sword on this front you know with generally improving the quality of life over the long term but causing short-term disruptions and pain that some people never quite recover from and that's mostly why I talk about these issues on this channel it's not meant to scare people and it's certainly not meant to be anti technology or anything but you know if you know about this kind of stuff then you can prepare for what's coming because the pace of technology is faster now than we have ever seen in human history so the potential for disruption is deeper and broader than we've ever seen before and obviously nobody can predict the future but we can read trends and the trends say that these double edges of this sword are getting sharper every day on the upside we're talking higher productivity cheaper Goods better access to legal and medical resources safer streets and factories and on and on and on but also potential mass unemployment homelessness and economic insecurity how do we create a system that emphasizes the good and minimizes the bad a one idea that's being floated out there and getting a lot of attention lately is the idea of a universal basic income but is it the cure-all that some people think it is universal basic income is a pretty simple idea in theory the government gives everybody an unconditional monthly stipend that will cover their basic needs and it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor employed unemployed no matter what your situation you get the same monthly stipend as everybody else and the idea is that it provides everybody a subsistence minimal income in the United States that magic number tends to be around a thousand dollars a month now Before we jump in let's just address the elephant in the room here and acknowledge that this is a political issue so depending on what side of the aisle you sit on you've probably already made up your mind on this that's fine I really should have covered this topic a while back because even just six months ago it wouldn't have been a political topic at all it just would have been an idea that people were talking about but right now there are presidential candidates they're discussing this as a real option so now it has officially enter the political realm but it's still worth talking about because even if you don't think this is the real solution it does address a real problem that people need to be talking about estimates for how many jobs can be lost to AI and Meishan are frankly just all over the map from some people saying they'll actually create jobs to some people saying we could lose up to 40 percent of jobs in the next 10 years and there's a few key technologies like driverless cars that once perfected are gonna be an accelerator of this process there's 5 million people that work in the transportation sector in the United States that's three point five percent of the entire workforce that's not even to mention the millions of people who work in the infrastructure that supports the transportation sector now that's a pretty obvious one but there are a lot of jobs out there that traditionally have been considered safe that are now kind of on the chopping block like human resources which companies are now using AI to do more efficiently there's almost a million people in the United States that work in human resources the legal profession is also under fire just last year an AI platform called la geeks pitted their AI up against law professors from Duke USC and Stanford to see who could best interpret and analyze five non-disclosure agreements when they were done the law professors had an 85 percent accuracy rate which is not too bad but the AI got 92 percent accuracy and better yet it did it in 30 seconds it took the people an hour and a half there are 1.3 five million lawyers in the United States and a huge part of their job revolves around legal documents like that obviously lower skilled entry-level jobs are most at risk which means that this is going to affect younger people disproportionately ironically those are the most technical sadly people out there but those are also just the jobs that we all get started in when we're young and these kinds of job losses have profound ripple effects throughout our society in our economy according to susan winterberg a Harvard Fellow and Technology and public purpose laid off workers typically see a permanent 17 to 30 percent reduction in wages when they return to the workforce after two months out of the job market resume callbacks drop dramatically this means people are left with no choice but to join the gig economy as contractors without benefits and underemployment brings out a litany of psychological problems from depression to marital issues and their children or even 15 percent more likely to repeat a grade in school not to mention people tend to go toward the political extremes during times of economic distress liberals tend to go more anti corporate and anti-capitalist conservatives tend to go more isolationist and nationalistic it's not like we've been seeing any of that lately of course it's not just that these technologies exist it's really about the adoption of these technologies and one thing that can spur adoption of these kinds of technologies are economic recessions as the economy starts slowdown in revenues flatline or go south companies look for ways to save money in reducing labor costs by replacing workers with AI and automation is kind of a no-brainer and a lot of economists are saying that recession is gonna be on the way soon but there are just natural cycles of boom and bust and that we're just way long overdue for one all of this could add up to an unemployment bomb in the coming years one that we kind of need to be ready for now it needs to be said this is not guaranteed to happen but this is totally how it's gonna happen no one can predict the future but we can totally predict the future and there's a lot of different ways this could go but this is the way it's gonna go so there's not really any reason to panic just yet it's time to panic the idea of the universal basic income or ubi is actually nothing new early inspirations for the idea go all the way back to Thomas Paine in the late seventeen hundreds but the modern version is usually credited to the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman who called it a negative income tax it's gone by many names over the years including state bonus national dividends social dividend citizens dividends citizens wage Universal benefit and most recently freedom dividend and it's not entirely untested different versions of this been done in Namibia India Macau Brazil Canada Finland and Poland in the United States there are privately funded experiments in various cities like Oakland New York Chicago Omaha New Orleans and Jackson Mississippi one of the largest and longest-running basic income programs belongs to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina who share with all their members from their casino revenue fund in Alaska since 1982 is shared a piece of their petroleum profits with all their residents through a yearly stipend and all these tests and experiments are very wildly and their implementation there's some things that we've learned there's still some things we have to speculate about but here we're considered the biggest pros to a ubi on the pro side the idea is supported by some of the biggest names in the tech world including Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes at Facebook Elon Musk Ray Kurzweil Richard Branson and Sam Altman of Y Combinator not saying that because these guys like the idea is the reason that we should be doing it but they are definitely people who understand automation and AI and what's coming so I feel like their opinion should hold a little bit more weight the main thing about ubi is it would reduce insecurity which sounds like a little thing but it's not reducing insecurity has ripple facts that go from intangible things like improving problem solving and creativity to very tangible things like a reduction in crime because desperate people do desperate things it could actually reduce bureaucracy a current welfare system in the United States anyway put so many conditions on who can get benefits and what kind of benefits and how much they get that it takes a whole army of people to analyze and process and keep track of them and deliver the benefits and the food stamps and the checks it goes on and on in a UVI system everybody gets the same thing which reduces complexity it'll allow people the time they need to find better jobs that are more at their experience level as I mentioned before when people get laid off they usually have a reduction in wages just because they've got to keep food in their mouth so they take the first thing that comes along under a UVI system they would be able to kind of put that off a little bit and make sure they get a job that they're qualified for similarly it would give people in bad jobs more cushion to leave those jobs you know a bad job is like an abusive relationship or it can be pretty close to that a ubi would get somebody enough cushion to be able to leave it they needed to and it might incentivize businesses to improve working conditions it would create more opportunities for people to start their own businesses a lot of people have jobs but they want to start their own businesses which is really hard when you don't have the time or the resources to do it as I know full well with an extra thousand a month people have put that thousand dollars into building their business or step away from work a little bit and have more time to put into that business proponents of ubi say this could lead to an explosion of new businesses and new ideas and new innovation it could be a boost to the economy when you're poor you spend all your money the whole idea of putting savings away is just a pipe dream because you have to you're in survival mode you have to put food in your mouth and so with a UVI people would have that money and they would spend it back into the economy and support local businesses and while it seems paradoxical it might actually incentivize people to work I know bear with me here in the current welfare model in the United States you have to make below a certain amount of money in order to qualify to receive those benefits which leads to a lot of people cheating the system and finding ways to gain the the system to get more money which you wouldn't have that incentive to do that in a ubi but that's a whole different thing the point is if you get a job even a low paying job you lose those benefits and depending on the job and what kind of benefits you may or may not get you might have to spend extra money just to get to and from the job you might have to spend money on benefits that you used to get for free and it might completely even out or you might even make less money than you made before our current welfare system can actually de incentivize you to get a job conservatives have been saying this for years with the ubi you would still get that full amount of money even after you get a job so there's no incentive to not get a job it would just be more money and who doesn't want more money now there are some people that make the exact opposite argument on that point which might be a good time for me to jump over into the cons of ubi the first con well people might be less incentivized to work I mean it's a fair point let's be honest here there's a certain segment of the population that is just absolutely not going to work if they don't have to period that does exist in fact in some of the experiments that I previously mentioned there were small dips in the workforce after the ubi was implemented although a lot of those cases it was people going home to take care of their kids people leaving the workforce could cause a reduction in productivity even though the AI and automation that we're trying to protect ourselves against our increasing productivity a reduced workforce could even that out or maybe even decrease productivity and probably the biggest con for a lot of people is the cost this thing is gonna be extremely expensive I mean a thousand bucks for every man woman and child in the United States is gonna come out to around 350 billion dollars every month that's not chump change paying for it could lead to higher taxation for higher income earners while I'm not one to cry for the billionaire class necessarily it could decrease investments out there which might slow down the economy according to the argument anyway and it could lead to increase migration as people flocked to countries with the highest basic income of course migration on its own is not necessarily a bad thing but it could put a strain on existing resources and once it's implemented it'll be very difficult to get rid of this kind of sweeping shift in the role of government in people's lives is not just some kind of incremental thing that can be undone with the stroke of a pen this is a very entrenched thing and if it turns out that it causes more problems and it solves and it doesn't work the way we thought it would it could put us in a hole that's really difficult to get out of and lastly it's worth mentioning the argument that the entire premise underlying the need for ubi might just be wrong yes we are seeing technological disruption yes jobs are being innovated away and yes this could be a short-term problem but there is the argument to be made that this has happened in the past and those crappy jobs got replaced by much better jobs now I know immediately the counter-argument to that is that what we're seeing right now is on a much bigger scale than what we see in the past but it is possible that newer and better jobs are on the way we will see now there are many other pros and many other cons and there are many other counter arguments to each and every one of them but I'm just going to let you guys have it out in the comments to talk about that I'm gonna move on from here earlier in this video I mentioned that this has now become a political topic because there is a presidential candidate that's running on this platform of ubi and that person is Andrew gating Andrew yang is a graduate of Columbia Law School who went on to run a couple of successful education based ventures the first being Manhattan prep which prepares students to take the GMAT tests later program called venture for America which trained recent graduates to be entrepreneurs and run businesses and startups yang's programs launched hundreds of startups in 20 cities around the country and it's with this experience in the business and tech world that informed his policies of which there are more than 100 listed on his website in excruciating detail seriously if you like to policy wonk you will never want Carter you want to go check it out I'll put the link in the description but his main policy his signature policy is that he's running on a platform of universal basic income which he has coined the freedom dividend [Music] it is simply a thousand dollars a month to every single American who wants to take it and of course the first question everybody asks is how do you pay for such a thing well he has a four point plan on his website that goes like this number one is reducing current spending as I said before a ubi would be far simpler to manage than our current welfare programs which currently costs between 500 and 600 billion a year he also argues that we could save 100 to 200 billion dollars a year on jails health care and homeless services as people's conditions improve number two is introduced of value-added tax or DAT the vit has attacks on the production of goods and services of business produces which is actually pretty common 160 countries around the world have a v80 or something similar in fact all of Europe has a v80 of 20% yang is proposing half of that at 10% believes that this could raise 800 billion dollars in new revenue number three is increased tax revenue from economic expansion he cites a Roosevelt Institute study that predicted a ubi would create 4.6 million new jobs as people use their stipend to start businesses this could create 800 and 900 billion dollars in new tax revenue and number four lastly an increase in taxes on top earners as well as a carbon tax how you feel about all that again depends on your political beliefs that you brought into watching this video which I'm sure you're all sharing in the comments right now but it does make a lot of assumptions with this policy assumptions that things are gonna work a certain way and the big question of course is is he right you know we do have tests that we can look at that have been done as I mentioned before but the problem with these tests in these experiments is that people act differently when it's a limited term experiment then when it's a long term thing that they know is going to keep going it's like if you're working at a temp job and you know it's only gonna last a few months you don't just go spin that money because you know at some point that money is gonna end so you need to kind of hang on to it whereas if you get a job that you think is probably gonna go on for years well then you might look into you know redoing your wardrobe plus a lot of these programs really didn't pay that much I mean don't get me wrong $100 $500 a month is nice but it's not the kind of money that's gonna tell your boss to go eat a bag of butts and then storm out the front door the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend for example which I mentioned before it only pays like a thousand of $2,000 a year but perhaps the closest example to what yang is proposing is actually being done by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina not only do they pay out between thirty five hundred to six thousand dollars every six months which means that sometimes they do actually make a thousand dollars a month they've been doing this since 1996 so we have 23 years of data to look at here one person that's been studying this data is Jane Costello a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke Institute for brain science in 1993 she and a team of researchers wanted to research the need for mental health services for kids in rural America and they chose the Smoky Mountains as a base for their research it just so happened that of the 1420 children in their study 350 of them were members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians they provided the parents of these thick very detailed surveys of behavioral issues that they were gonna fill out and they had them do it every single year up to the year of the age of 16 and then every few years after that up to the age of 30 obviously they also monitored household data like household income and that kind of thing and this put her in her team in a unique position because two years later in 1995 they opened their first casino the Cherokee Nation did and they decided that they would start in 1996 the next year distributing that money throughout the tribe so Costello and her team had a couple of years to establish a baseline not just for the kids in the tribe but also the kids outside the tribe so as the money came in she could see how they kind of differentiated and by the way at the beginning 67% of the Cherokee kids lived below the poverty line and as this money started to come in 14 percent of those families were actually raised above the poverty line within four years the non-indian families grew over that same time as well but at a much lower rate so a pair of studies were released by our team in 2003 and in 2010 that we're studying the long-term effects of this dividend I'll put the links down the description below but a few of the takeaways are this after the casino opened the kids showed a 40% decrease in behavioral problems and in just four years they were behaviorally no different from the kids in their study who had never been poor they found similar decreases in drug and alcohol addiction and found that the chances of the poorest kids committing a minor crime dropped by 22% the ripple effects of lower crime led to an improvement in the overall community less money was spent on jail and inpatient care for these kids and many of them are now going off to college and starting businesses now it should be said this is not a magic pill this area has been hit with the same opioid crisis that everybody else in that area has been hit with not everybody spins the money wisely there is a matter of personal responsibility that comes into play here but overall the signs are encouraging and one interesting thing is that the younger the kids were when they first started taking the dividend the better they showed and behavioral tests over time but what's really interesting about that is that the tribe actually holds on to their money until they turn 18 which means a couple of things first of all they're going off to college with a nice little nest egg instead of going to college and then you know being burdened with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt they have a nice little boost instead of an anchor and the second thing is that these kids are exhibiting better behavioral outcomes before they ever even get the money meaning that just knowing that it's gonna be there for I'm just having that hope leads to better behavioral outcomes better grades and higher graduation rates this actually kind of makes me think of the video that I did on cryonics where people who signed up to have their bodies chronically frozen at the end of their lives actually said that they took better care of themselves and they were more careful throughout their lives because you know the end wasn't necessarily the end they had a little bit of hope there they were less fatalistic about the end of their lives that a weird comparison makes sense to me now our other people are gonna take advantage and abuse a system of course there are there's always gonna be that segment of the population out there but in general having this sort of safety net might improve behavior and outcomes enough that the society as a whole will rise at least that's the idea similarly there's a portion of people out there that are just never gonna be okay with this idea they see even the conditional government programs that we have right now is beyond the pale for some people the idea that they're working their butts off while somebody else is getting something for free is just never gonna be okay with them that is just a defining value that you know is deeply ingrained in their psyche you want something you've got to work for it and I get that mindset I do I understand why people think that way and I think there's even an argument to make that this mindset is one of the reasons why civilization has progressed the way it has that it's a growth motivator which is why capitalism won out over other economic systems but we may be entering an age where that mindset becomes toxic and anachronistic I said before that we may have to reach a point eventually where we just have to divorce the idea of income and work going together you know we've had ideas for a long time now utopian ideas of a future where resources are you know plentiful and robots do all the work for us but rally to these visions in encapsulate also the economic system that makes that possible we may find that our current system may need to be replaced by something different based on a different kind of currency something more human-centered mini cryptocurrency and blockchain super fancy that as a newer and better way to go and China just recently started experimenting with what they call sesame credit which is like a credit that you get for being a good citizen that you can spin like money so things like volunteer work and community involvement could give you more credits sounds great of course but in true China fashion you can also lose credits by speaking up against the government so yeah in that same kind of vein not to turn this into an Andrew yang commercial but he also has a policy that he calls human capitalism he defined it as a type of capitalism that's geared toward maximizing human well-being and fulfillment one that's made to serve human ends and goals rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace he argues that instead of measuring for things like GDP we should focus on measuring things like household income and standard of living infant mortality quality of infrastructure environmental quality and so on the point is when all is said and done the world is evolving technology is evolving society is evolving and eventually our economics are gonna need to evolve what that looks like and how painful that's gonna be remains to be seen now having said all this as you can imagine I've had a million people asking me if I'm on the yang gang and I'm not I can also say I'm not on any particular gang just yet but I do like that he's out there talking about this you know as I said at the beginning I don't know necessarily if you bi is the answer but there is a problem that's coming and we're not talking about it enough so I'm glad he's out there doing it and I'm glad that he's bringing this problem to the forefront you know the cool thing about single issue candidates is they're a really cool way to test the public interest in different policies and positions as opposed to personalities in theater but I think I said enough about this let me throw this to you hoodlums down in the comments section below do you agree with a universal basic income why or why not do you think it's a terrible idea why or why not and do you think that there's even a problem that needs to be solved why or why not and be nice to each other advocates of universal basic income like to say that it's not really about left or right or any particular agenda or political position it's just about math and scientific reasoning which is why Andrew yang actually has on his website a cap that just says math on it and of course if you want to enlarge a file you're thinking fication machine one great place to do that is brilliant org brilliant org is so much fun it's a learning platform that teaches you how to reason like a scientist instead of just throwing facts at your face that's what this YouTube channel is for they do this by walking you through problems and complex challenges that hope you to figure out the core principles yourself so that you can learn it in a way that makes sense to you and you can apply those learnings to other areas of your life a great place to start is a scientific thinking course which gives you the fundamental understanding of what it means to science the issue out of things through fun puzzles and interactive games if you want to improve your brain just a little bit every day there's this daily challenges feature that they have you can pull it up on your computer on your app on your phone and give your brain a little workout wherever you are because every little bit helps you can sign up for free at brilliant org slash answers with Joe and get free access to their weekly brain teasers and puzzles and if you want to go deeper and sign up for the premium subscription gives you access to all their courses like the ones I just mentioned you get 20% off your subscription for life I love brilliant they've been great sponsors of this show and I'm happy to shout out their praises because a little bit of understanding it goes a long way brent dork slice answers with Joe link down the description thanks again to brilliant and a huge shout out to my answer files on patreon they're forming an awesome community and talking with each other giving me great ideas we have a live stream every once in awhile if you sign up for that here's some new people that have joined with me I murder the names roll quake we got Robert Charles gay mario guru ganas Jonathan Edward Robert Sebastian Duvall one named Tony miqo'te Logan Keith reeling mind Russell melon Michael lesser David Andrews Kevin Gauri Ali Kassim and Colin Mikulski thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to cool perks and early videos and all kinds of cool stuff you can go to patreon.com/scishow please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here you know I checked this video well because Google thinks you'll like that one or any of the others and my little face on it and if you do like what I do here please do subscribe I invite you to join us cuz I come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday t-shirts available the store answers with Joe dot-com 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 443,074

Rating: 4.8482523 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, universal basic income, andrew yang, yang gang, freedom dividend, automation, artificial intelligence, eastern band of cherokee indians, economic recession, unemployment, economics, elon musk, ray kurzweil, welfare, UBI

Id: c4W8p3b2p58

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019

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"[...] but it's still worth talking about because even if you don't think this is the real solution, it does address a real problem that people need to be talking about." (at around 2:04)

Thanks for sharing this! Joe brings up a good point which I think could be brought up as more and more voters find out about Andrew Yang - particularly for voters who are on the fence or who may be dismissive at first of the idea of a Freedom Dividend.

I'm sure many of you feel this too--my gut feeling tells me at some point many voters will eventually know of Andrew Yang and of his flagship proposal but may write him off entirely at first because they don't believe his flagship policy can be implemented in any meaningful way. We see this attitude - the fact that UBI exists as some unobtainable far-flung policy - in many comments from Facebook article posts and on Yahoo.

The way Joe Scott frames this question at 2:04 is attractive and is an important point to hammer on, in that it opens up conversation and keeps the discussion focused upon the issues we need to address and fix in this country. My hope is that down the line we'll see more and more skeptics embrace Yang's campaign though this kind of continued dialogue on what an implemented UBI would truly mean in ways both big and small for people across this country and what it would mean for this nation as a whole.