A “watershed” moment for the arts?
April 5, 2022 8:51 AM   Subscribe

In Ireland, a new Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme will see 2,000 artists and creative arts workers receive €325 a week for three years starting in 2022, no strings attached. The only obligation on the artist is to keep a weekly journal for research purposes. Read the government press release here, news coverage here and here, and information for applicants (including eligibility criteria) here.

1800 places are earmarked for "practicing artists" as defined in the guidelines, and 200 places for the "recently trained", who have yet to begin their artistic career.

Selection will be made at random among all qualified applicants. Applications open on 12th April 2022 and close one month later.
posted by rollick (28 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
They're test-piloting a much smaller-scale version of this in my (U.S.) hometown. It's very exciting.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:27 AM on April 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


The thing that frosts my goat is that we know Basic Income works. Every "pilot project" that just hands people money has come back with a positive benefit to society, creating more wealth and opportunity than any kind of means-based support.

It never transitions to universal because OH NO who will do the shit work if people aren't desperate enough to eat to clean toilets for pennies; how will the employers get away with rampant wage theft (the biggest crime of them all, in dollars) if their employees don't feel obliged to stick around for the bullshit.

I'm glad that 2000 people will get some money for three years, though. Good for them. I'm just like... what is there to TEST? Just fucking go for it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:31 AM on April 5, 2022 [24 favorites]


From the FAQ Please note a number of eligible applicants who are not selected to receive the payment (i.e. recipients) will be asked to participate in a control group to facilitate the evaluation of the pilot (“control group”). Control Group participants will respond to the same survey and data requests as those in receipt of the payment. . Control group members will be paid two weeks basic income for each of the three years of the pilot scheme (i.e. equivalent to six weeks of the BIA payment to compensate them for the time required to engage in the data collection process.

It's government money, so there must be an accounting for the effectiveness of this pilot scheme. Much as MeTheScientist approves the idea of a control group, The Man must also wrestle with the units of measurement. 3 haiku = 1 sonnet; 5 sonnets = 1 sonata; 4 sonatas = 1 three-act play. I can't readily find eligibility criteria for my neighbours Barry the Cartographer, Felix the Stonemason, Mike the Folklorist and Seamus the Historian. And what seanmpuckett says.
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:46 AM on April 5, 2022 [5 favorites]


It never transitions to universal because OH NO who will do the shit work if people aren't desperate enough to eat to clean toilets for pennies; how will the employers get away with rampant wage theft (the biggest crime of them all, in dollars) if their employees don't feel obliged to stick around for the bullshit.

This is the core, fundamental rot that lives at the heart of modern economics.

As the line goes, if you can't walk away from the table you're not negotiating; you're begging. Today, we don't actually know what anything really costs at all, and we can't know because labour is fundamentally obtained by coercion, and will be until it's no longer possible to threaten people with abject poverty or destitution, until people can always walk away. Until the last bullets are taken out of the poverty gun and those chambers aren't spinning next to the temples of every member of the working class every day.

If that happens? Then we'll actually find out what it costs to pay someone to clean a toilet.
posted by mhoye at 11:01 AM on April 5, 2022 [20 favorites]


Stay tuned for some reactionary cherry picking the journals and showcasing some of the more challenging artwork so they can crow about the government doing communism to spread degeneracy or whatever, and pragmatic centrists bowing their heads solemnly and declaring the continuation or expansion of the project to be politically impossible.
posted by Reyturner at 11:31 AM on April 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


Then we'll actually find out what it costs to pay someone to clean a toilet.

Right on the money. I think most people are aware that the very most important jobs (teaching, garbage collection, plumbing, etc.) are often the lowest-paid. Basically anything that is supposed to be a vocation, something you do because you love it, not for the money it pays. Which is just the biggest crock of horseshit. If we could get UBS, I suspect that a whole lot of work would be considered worthless very, very quickly, and other jobs, like the ones above, would rightfully command exorbitant salaries.
posted by nushustu at 11:45 AM on April 5, 2022 [3 favorites]


Plumbers are badly paid where you are?
posted by Grangousier at 12:35 PM on April 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


It's a step, but it's also a little maddening that it's less than minimum wage (€1650/mo.) though it is above the poverty line.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:35 PM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


"teaching, garbage collection, plumbing" - I don't think any of those are among the "lowest-paid" in our society.
posted by davidmsc at 12:51 PM on April 5, 2022 [5 favorites]




Sorry if this is continuing too far along the tangent, but I'm curious:

Who does do the "less desirable" work in places with strong social safety nets and labor protections, and why? I guess I'm thinking of Scandinavian countries (or let's say Nordic and include Finland, with their collective bargaining). Do janitors, for example, simply make a better wage, relative to cost of living? Fast food workers?

Logically "OH NO who will do the shit work" is a valid concern if you're (ideologically, or financially) invested in an economy that uses scarcity, precarity and terror to force people into work that is unpleasant and low wage at the same time. So just curious if there are examples where those tools don't work so well. Does the unpleasant work pay better?
posted by abrightersummerday at 2:10 PM on April 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm just like... what is there to TEST? Just fucking go for it.

There's still a significant unsolved question regarding UBI, which is how you keep it from being immediately absorbed by the housing market.

Like, let's say that the US decided to implement a very modest UBI tomorrow: say, $500/mo stipend to everyone with an SSN, no means testing, here's a check. (Which we could totally do, incidentally; it'd cost about $2T/year, plus or minus administration costs and savings from other programs realized by pulling people out of abject poverty.)

But if I'm Alfred T. Pennysnatch, Slumlord Extraordinaire, I just spat out my teeth into this month's copy of Monocle Polish Magazine. And boy am I excited, because now I get to say the only words that get my dick hard anymore: the rent's going up! By approximately... $500 per month. Which I know you all have, courtesy of Uncle Sam. So pay up, ingrates, or start looking for refrigerator boxes to shiver in—if you can afford one. I'll have Kick'em Out Quick® Eviction Services (incidentally: an actual company that actually exists) here on Monday for anyone who needs some assistance moving their possessions to the dumpster.

It turns out that stopping that behavior is a fairly complex problem. Sure, there's always rent control: but there are lots of ways of getting around that, or for driving people out of rent-controlled spaces and into market-rate ones, and most rent control schemes really don't control rents over the long term, as much as they control the rate of increase of rents. Lots of cities even call their rent control programs "Rent Stabilization", and don't even try to hold average rents below market over the long haul.

So, okay, then you get to the "build more housing" argument. Which makes more sense in terms of economics: if you have insufficient housing supply, and you can't decrease the demand (turns out people need places to live), then it follows you need to increase the supply. We can stipulate all those things, but it doesn't make the challenge much easier. Depending on who owns the majority of the housing stock, it can be a hard sell, politically: people who have a significant portion of their life's total income tied up in housing, aren't likely to look very fondly on a program that has as its explicit goal a reduction in real housing prices. On top of that, if you just implemented a UBI, labor costs for stuff like construction are almost certainly going to increase. So building more housing just became that much more expensive, and now needs to be financed on top of whatever tax hikes you just got through to pay for the UBI. (Maybe it would have made more sense to build the housing first? I honestly don't know.)

The question isn't really "how do we implement a UBI"—that question has been answered. You send out checks. Turns out it's not hard, and government is already pretty good about sending out checks. Kind of a core competency. But moderating the second- and third-order effects of those payments on an already-fucked-up and regulatorily-captured market economy, such as exists in most Western countries right now with regard to housing (particularly in urban areas), is fairly complex, and it's not clear that a lot of governments know how to do it well, if at all.

That's where I hope they are aiming their research. Because IMO, that's the meat of the problem.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:40 PM on April 5, 2022 [16 favorites]


Metafilter: I'm Alfred T. Pennysnatch, Slumlord Extraordinaire, I just spat out my teeth into this month's copy of Monocle Polish Magazine.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:23 PM on April 5, 2022 [7 favorites]


Plumbers are badly paid where you are?

You know a lot of plumbers with health/dental/vision/pet insurance, paid maternity leave, paid vacations, stock options, quarterly bonuses, 401K plans, etc.? I don't. Those aren't just CEO-type perqs: pretty much any tech job will get you those. And that shit adds up.

"teaching, garbage collection, plumbing" - I don't think any of those are among the "lowest-paid" in our society.

I was going to say nobody said they are, just that they're low-paying jobs, but when you factor in that most teaching jobs require a college degree and a master's, and zero funds for supplies, then I dunno, maybe they are one of the lowest-paid. Either way, I would put all of the above in the category of "essential," and also "unable to be automated." And they're sure as shit not high-paying jobs.
posted by nushustu at 4:54 PM on April 5, 2022 [2 favorites]


Today, we don't actually know what anything really costs at all, and we can't know because labour is fundamentally obtained by coercion...

It smells like a transitional phase from feudalism to capitalism to the next thing, which was supposed to be robotic automation, which hasn't quite fully arrived in all labour yet, so our oligarchs would really like to push for a return to feudalism in the meantime. Then we see what happens next.
posted by ovvl at 5:22 PM on April 5, 2022


Sorry if this is continuing too far along the tangent, but I'm curious:

Who does do the "less desirable" work in places with strong social safety nets and labor protections, and why? I guess I'm thinking of Scandinavian countries (or let's say Nordic and include Finland, with their collective bargaining). Do janitors, for example, simply make a better wage, relative to cost of living? Fast food workers?


There's multiple ways you could measure this, but I think Australia is way up there - highest median wealth (over $190,000 per adult) trading places with Switzerland most years, contrasting to US which has higher average wealth due to billionaires but much lower median wealth (around $79,000). But even that reflects historical trends over the past 20-30 years, not what's current, which have significantly worsened everywhere.

Practically, the "low" paying jobs aren't that low in Australia. It was awhile back but even working casually in a supermarket as a cashier or shelf stacker (level 1, literally new start) the award rate for all roles of that type was $20 per hour on weekdays, $30 per hour on weekends for casual work, back in 2007. I'd typically do two 6 hour shifts on the weekends, and maybe four 3 hour shifts on the weekdays, so that's $2,400 a month I was clearing for 24 hours a week, $2,160 after tax, and my rent (tiny single room in a sharehouse) was $400 a month, so 19% of my after tax income eaten by rent, which isn't bad for just 24 hours a week.

Wages haven't kept pace with inflation, what's new. I just had a look and it's $28 per hour weekday and $36 per hour weekends (blended) for newly started level 1 casual staff, so if I were to work that schedule today it would be $3,100 per month, or $2,800 after tax, and rent would be about $650 for a single room per month in a sharehouse, so that's now 23% of your after tax income eaten by rent. Still not too bad for a 24 hours a week. Of course if I wanted an entire 1 bedroom / studio place to myself in the city, it would be closer to $1,200 per month, but then I'd be looking to work something full time for that. Also, your wages would go up with experience, as you go from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 etc.

Less desirable workers aren't so much an issue, I find. A lot of the industrial work focuses around work processes, not individual talent. Think about the airline industry: it's not safe because individual pilots go above and beyond the call of duty and perform at their peak every single day, while they review and fire the worst 10% undesirable pilots every month. It's safe because the processes are designed to be as robust and foolproof as possible, so even the worst 5% of all pilots you have will still get your plane safely from point A to point B. Same thing for most work - worker "desirability" is secondary to designing robust processes to get the work done at acceptable quality regardless of worker talent.

Higher marginal tax also compresses compensation ranges: hitting 45% marginal tax at just $180,000 per annum means employers must get more creative than just throwing more money at people to retain talent, because of every additional $10,000 you give them almost half is taken by the government. Working conditions tend to be a lot better as a result with the de-emphasis on wages and increased emphasis on engagement and satisfaction. This means that say, typically, in a white collar multinational, a fresh graduate would get $75,000 per year, someone with 3-4 years experience would be on $110,000, and their line manager would be on $150,000, which is very close to the top marginal tax rate already. Then you get up to middle management (closer to $200,000) and then director levels (closer to $250,000) but those numbers vary wildly by industry / type of responsibility they have.

Of course, there's also automation coming into the mix: instead of paying waitstaff $28 per hour, for 12 hours of operation that could be $336, they could hire a robot for $45 per day that will bring food to the tables. Several restaurants in my area are already doing this. You could argue whether this is a labor productivity multiplier or labor replacement, both are essentially the same: to some degree high wages can only exist if productivity is high enough to begin with. Of course this doesn't preclude situations where productivity is high but wages are low (employer keeps profits) but it definitely is the case where if productivity is low, wages cannot be high (because the employer would be bankrupt). Automation like this where a single worker loads up 3-4 robots with food which then delivers it to tables is a natural extension of our labor productivity increases.
posted by xdvesper at 7:07 PM on April 5, 2022 [8 favorites]


The worst thing about this plan is that some poor sucker is going to be hired to eventually go through all those journals and try to make some sense of them.


You know a lot of plumbers with health/dental/vision/pet insurance, paid maternity leave, paid vacations, stock options, quarterly bonuses, 401K plans,

I don't know about quarterly bonuses and stock options, but everything else is not uncommon for employees of any decent sized company, including plumbers. In addition, plumbers are pretty well paid. Also, teachers and garbage collectors are similarly well paid and tend to enjoy decent benefits. I'm willing to wager there are plenty of Mefites reading this now who would love to have the wages of these professions. I think it's pointless arguing over some sliding scale of "well paid", but your examples were simply not well chosen.

As the line goes, if you can't walk away from the table you're not negotiating; you're begging. Today, we don't actually know what anything really costs at all, and we can't know because labour is fundamentally obtained by coercion, and will be until it's no longer possible to threaten people with abject poverty or destitution, until people can always walk away. Until the last bullets are taken out of the poverty gun and those chambers aren't spinning next to the temples of every member of the working class every day.

This is reductive to the point of being meaningless. I suppose people are coerced by a sense of self preservation, to put food in their bellies and seek shelter. There's no real walking away from that "coercive" drive without being considered dysfunctional.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:13 PM on April 5, 2022


There's still a significant unsolved question regarding UBI, which is how you keep it from being immediately absorbed by the housing market.

It is very true that absent an equal commitment to rent control and universal housing, UBI is just a subsidy for landlords.
posted by mhoye at 7:23 PM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


they could hire a robot for $45 per day that will bring food to the tables.

Like 'Waiting for Godot' with breadsticks.
posted by clavdivs at 8:35 PM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


There's still a significant unsolved question regarding UBI, which is how you keep it from being immediately absorbed by the housing market.

It is very true that absent an equal commitment to rent control and universal housing, UBI is just a subsidy for landlords.


This is accepted wisdom, but it seems to be not entirely true to me. I don't hear it much around discussions of minimum wages, or unionization -- even though these also have the same impact of increasing the wages of lower-income workers. I've never heard anyone argue that existing social welfare programs should be cut because they are just subsidizing landlords; if adding a dollar per month per person will result in that dollar going directly to landlords, surely reducing supports a dollar per month per person would transfer a buck directly away from landlords. If not, why not?

So all real estate is local, which makes it hard to make general statements (or implement good general policies.) With that caveat, in my city, $800 a month in rent will barely get you into a basement suite, and not a nice one. If a couple in a basement suite suddenly got $1000 a month more, and Alfred T. Pennysnatch jacks up their rent to $1800, he's now charging the same amount as a pretty nice apartment -- two of the three of: brand new, great location, two bedrooms. The basement suite couple would be happy to get a nicer place for the same money.

Of course, you're ahead of me already - the rental agent of the $1800 place will jack up their rents a thousand bucks as well. My wife and I live in an $1800 place, and if our rents went up to $2800, we'd buy a place for less than that and leave the rental market and our landlord would be stuck with an empty place. Renters aren't a different species of creature that are nailed to the floor where they live. I suspect some of what afflicts the poorest renters is that they are trapped in the worst sliver of the rental market because they are likely to default; a guaranteed stable income makes this segment more appealing to standard non-slumlords, in the same way as a UBI would (hopefully) help cripple the payday loan segment.

As I said, all real estate is local; in cities like Vancouver and Toronto and New York and San Francisco, there are a lot fewer rent-by-choice people at the higher end of the rental market to provide that response valve. But there's a lot of cities that aren't housing-constrained coastal cities; why rule out a policy because it merely improves the lives of the two thirds or three quarters of poor people living in non-coastal areas?

We don't know the impact of basic incomes on housing costs because there's never been a housing market wide basic income -- actually, this is a lie. Alaska has a statewide basic income; a small one, called the Permanent Resource Dividend. Anchorage and Fairbanks more affordable rents than other high income western metro areas -- the median renter income in the Alaska cities is about the same as San Diego, which has 27% higher rents; Seattle has 6% higher income and 15% higher rents. Austin and Portland have about the same median rent as the Alaskan cities, but have median renter incomes 6% and 12% lower. Alaska's somewhat a unique place that is hard to confidently compare to anywhere else, but a UBI here hasn't blown out the rental market.

The studies I have seen in a quick lit review on low income supports and rental cover rental responses to changes in minimum wages; Yamagishi (2020) looked at aggregate US and Japanese housing markets; Agarwal et all (2021) looked at a decade of lease data in the US. Their conclusions are broadly similar; around half of the benefits went to households and around half to increased rent expenditure. (Yamagishi notes that rent controlled and non-urban markets didn't see this effect; all the money there went to the households.) That's still a lot, but it's a lot less than 100%.

None of this is to say that increased housing construction, rent controls, changed tax structures, taxation and reduction of non-occupied housing (either investor held or AirBnB style short term rental), better public transport and urban planning, and more public housing won't help as well -- perhaps as much as a UBI, especially in crunched housing markets. But saying that we can't implement one policy to help people until we implement two more helpful policies isn't historically a recipe for getting three helpful policies implemented; it's a recipe for getting nothing.
posted by Superilla at 12:21 AM on April 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Who does do the "less desirable" work in places with strong social safety nets and labor protections, and why?

I think the social safety net and labor protections are quite a bit stronger where I live (Austria) than in the US, and the answer, at least in Austria, is immigrants, who don't have as much access to more desirable jobs due to administrative barriers (lack of recognitiong of qualifications, etc) and racism and migrant workers (great hand-wringing about the invasion of Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are now fighting for their existence instead of coming to us to harvest the asparagus).

Could imagine it might be similiar in the Nordic countries. Social safety nets and labor protections rarely really apply to everyone; you can always find reasons to exclude someone.

Also, women.

"teaching, garbage collection, plumbing" - I don't think any of those are among the "lowest-paid" in our society.


My impression is, those are actually comparatively reasonably paid in Austria. I teach high school; I think the income is okay. Do friends from college with the same degree who went corporate earn more? Sure, but I think some of them are a bit overpaid, actually. Or maybe they need to be, to keep up appearances, because representing a certain status is actually part of their job, part of the sort of personal branding you have to do in certain lines of work. I don't need to do any of that as a modest high school teacher, which saves quite a bit of expenses and probably makes me feel just as financially secure on my lower income. Also, I'm absolutely willing to trade in a higher income for the job security.

What _is_ grossly underpaid in Austria for instance however is something like teaching Kindergarten. And sure, cleaning toilets. Nursing, taking care of others. Stuff that's mostly done by women.

Why do so many women go for these less desirable jobs? Because their options for better paid work might be limited due to having to do so much unpaid work in addition. Because they're still raised to be more selfless and caring too much about money is not a good look.
posted by sohalt at 2:33 AM on April 6, 2022


I want to salute Grangousier for the remarkably successful thread-judo of "Plumbers are badly paid where you are?", that somehow replaced typically poorly-paid janitorial roles with a well-rewarded skilled trade in the collective mindset of this thread. It's subtle but you can really see the tonal shift in the discussion from then on.
posted by mhoye at 6:38 AM on April 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


2N222, how much do you think teachers make?
posted by ®@ at 6:58 AM on April 6, 2022


Why do so many women go for these less desirable jobs?

Probably less easy to be hired in a male-dominated/more profitable field, and they're more likely to get sexually harassed out of said field. My job is about 80% ladies and while obviously there's a lot of problems here, harassment by your coworkers isn't one of 'em.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:15 AM on April 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


why rule out a policy because it merely improves the lives of the two thirds or three quarters of poor people living in non-coastal areas?

Well, to start: because it's the liberal-leaning coastal areas with high costs of living and supply-constrained housing markets that are likely to support a true UBI, and without which you'll never get anything passed at the Federal level in the US.

And it seems like it'd be heavy sledding to convince coastal voters to support a policy that they'd largely be bankrolling (since those are the most economically productive regions) and that might increase their housing costs, if the benefits would mostly accrue to people in red states—particularly when those red state/local governments are likely to try and immediately use the new cashflow to justify slashing existing services and give it back as tax breaks.

If you can't make a UBI work in big coastal cities, I think it's politically dead on arrival. Conversely though, if you could make UBI work in big cities, it would probably only work better in more rural areas where the housing supply is more elastic.

if adding a dollar per month per person will result in that dollar going directly to landlords, surely reducing supports a dollar per month per person would transfer a buck directly away from landlords. If not, why not?

Good point. FWIW, I have heard a lot of arguments about housing vs. minimum wage increases, particularly in relation to a $15 Federal minimum. There has been research done. Here's a summary (from a fairly left-leaning source, not, like, some Austrian-school economist or the Heritage Foundation, who I'm sure thinks a UBI is ACTUAL STALINISM):
Looking at regional variations in wage and rent increases, and differences in rent increases between older and newer apartments, Yamagishi estimated that a 10% increase in minimum wages induced a 2.5% to 4.5% increase in housing rents in urban areas. [...]
Another paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia [...] found that renters in areas with increased wages defaulted on rent substantially less than renters in other areas during the three months after the increase occurred. But the effect was reduced over time as landlords raise rents
So, minimum wage increases seem to be a mixed bag. Landlords do tend to raise rents, but not enough to eat 100% of the new increase in pay. It is a significant fraction, though.

That's actually a pretty good argument in favor of raising minimum wages, because it makes the concept politically salable across the board: poorer people get a near-instant shot in the arm of new income, landlords get fewer defaults, evictions, and eventually get higher rents, and homeowners see an increase in housing values which are often crucial to retirement planning. Everyone wins, more or less. IMO, the argument in favor of raising the minimum wage is very clear.

The difference between a minimum wage increase and a UBI is where I start to have questions. With a minimum wage increase, you generally don't get a wholesale upward shift in incomes across the entire economy. The effect is, as you'd kinda expect, concentrated at the low end of the wage spectrum. (People making more than the minimum do benefit, but somewhat less, and the real effect diminishes as you go up in income.) Landlords can't just raise rent across the board, because eventually they're going to run into people who didn't get as much of a pay bump, and the rent increase won't be supportable.

In other words, if Pennysnatch has three properties—a low-rent one that goes mostly to people making minimum wage, a mid-market one to salaried or hourly professionals / skilled laborers, and a high-end one for rich folks—a minimum-wage increase lets him potentially increase rates in the low-rent building (or at least have fewer late/defaulting tenants), but doesn't give him much leverage to raise rents on the other two properties without pricing out those tenants (since they didn't get a raise). It probably also creates more demand and competition at the low- and mid market, so maybe he has to build some amenities. (For Pennysnatch, that'd be, like, heat.) In aggregate, maybe it results in new low to mid-income housing construction. The net result should be fewer people at the very bottom end of the housing market (illegal rooms, etc.), and increased demand for the places that suddenly became affordable to minimum-wage workers.

A UBI, though, could conceivably let him raise rents across his whole portfolio. Maybe there's some countervailing pressure somewhere that would prevent him from doing it, but I'm not sure where it would come from. Everyone now has $500/mo more to spend but still needs a place to live, Pennysnatch knows there's more demand than supply and it's still a seller's market, so he raises rents on everyone and captures the new income.

The only thing that comes to mind, is that if you finance the UBI with a very progressive/redistributionist tax structure, such that the rich people are actually paying $1000 in taxes to get $500 back, the mid-tier people are getting a wash, and the poor people are actually netting $500... then you more or less have the minimum-wage-increase case... I think.

Anyway, I'm not trained as an economist, but that's why I think some research isn't totally stupid; I'm not convinced we know how things would play out. I have nothing against the concept of a UBI, but it sure looks to me like what you basically end up with is a minimum wage increase with extra steps. In some cases maybe it's more politically palatable to implement a UBI plus progressive taxation than to just increase the minimum wage, but my experience says the opposite is true in the US. I think you'd benefit more people faster by putting the energy behind minimum wage increases (with no increase in taxation), getting the redistributive effect through price adjustments of stuff that depends on minimum-wage labor, rather than trying to push through something that on its face is going to have a significant tax increase associated with it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:48 PM on April 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


Stay tuned for some reactionary cherry picking the journals and showcasing some of the more challenging artwork so they can crow about the government doing communism to spread degeneracy or whatever

This is an interesting question across the political spectrum. Are folks envisioning an ideology test for this UBI-funded art?

If no test, will people be comfortable if one of the artists is found to be producing works that could be interpreted as transphobic, or as racist, on the public dime?

How about if the random selection ends up funding an artist who produces mediocre decorative junk, but passing over a better artist who produces important works of great political value?

I feel like this works only as long as people can imagine UBI funding exclusively the kinds of art they themselves approve. That's possible while the project is strictly hypothetical, but falls apart quickly once actual pieces start being produced.
posted by yersinia at 2:38 PM on April 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


yersinia How about if the random selection ends up funding an artist who produces mediocre decorative junk, but passing over a better artist who produces important works of great political value?

For me the random allocation of prizes from a cohort of qualified applicants is one of the most exciting aspects of the scheme. In 1981, a previous Irish government created Aosdána; inducting creatives into a club of 200 [now 250], the poor of whom can claim a stipend equivalent to the the current scheme. Problem is that vacancies are filled by a system of peer nomination and election by the membership - inevitably to some extent in their own image. Random is more likely to get things which challenge our cosy complacency - which is what great art is for.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:02 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


I have nothing against the concept of a UBI, but it sure looks to me like what you basically end up with is a minimum wage increase with extra steps.

UBI is meant to cover people who are unable to work, for whatever reason.

Due to being non-neurotypical, being impacted by trauma, physical disability, some people struggle to hold on to a job. There exists a very expensive arm of government designed to interrogate and monitor these people to find out if they're "truly" worthy of receiving welfare, and then further restricting the kind of welfare they receive - not always in cash, but sometimes in the form of debit cards that can only be used for approved purposes. All of which are opportunities for private firms to get rich contracting their services to the government. All with the intent of denying as many people welfare as they possibly can (I guess that is their goal - as a gatekeeper).

In theory you could just save all that administration and institute a UBI - and it also frees up labor on the recipients side too, instead of running around to "prove" they are worthy of receiving welfare - applying to X jobs per week, getting their physical and mental health periodically audited, living under the threat of losing their income if they earned TOO much and suddenly failed a means test - they could just, go and live their life the best they could?

It's like one of the massive efficiency savings you get by going to a public health system - instead of the entire byzantine system of insurance companies designed to deny claims, essentially being a middleman leeching off the system, with CEOs and shareholders which need to be paid... you could just, you know, give healthcare to everyone. It is probably even be cheaper in the end once you count ALL the costs - delayed primary care leading to expensive ICU / surgery in the future etc.
posted by xdvesper at 2:22 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


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