Obsidian Wings

Query regarding the Universal Basic Income

--by Sebastian

I'm attracted to the idea of the Universal Basic Income for all sorts of reasons that have been well hashed out elsewhere. 

However I have a problem that I haven't seen dealt with very seriously anywhere.  It seems so obvious that I feel it should be dealt with somewhere, but I haven't seen it.  Please bear with me as I talk through it.

The general formulation of the problem is: won't a universal basic income just be hugely inflationary and therefore not that helpful?  The general response is something like: it isn't inflationary because it really just a redistributive tax, and because as more people buy things, more supply comes online to keep the prices down rather than spark an inflationary spiral.  But that is being too hyper-focused on narrow definitions of 'inflation'.

The problem is really something like:

A) There are areas in the economy where price increases often don't spark adequate supply responses.  We can fight about WHY they don't (i.e. local housing restrictions, supply constraints on medical doctors, signaling restraints on colleges) but I think we can agree that for whatever reason, they often don't.

B) For those areas of the economy where adequate supply responses aren't available for various reasons, the price can go up (without collusion) to consume a large portion of the subsidy.

B1) So for housing in many job rich areas, the fact that UBI is available to all residents could translate to rent going up a very large portion of the UBI, turning the UBI into a subsidy for landlords, rather than an actually effective anti-poverty measure.

C) So while for most goods, the supply will rise to meet the demand and keep prices down, for a subset of important items (perhaps housing, education, medical care) the price will rise to consume all or nearly all of the UBI, leaving most people no better off, and the landlords and other holders of the choke points much better off. 

Now for housing for example, the obvious answer is to remove many of the choke points and make building easier.  But that has always been the obvious answer to the housing crisis brewing in the coastal cities and it rather noticeably has not been taken up. 

I guess the question is of magnitude.  If things like increased rent only end up sucking up a small portion of the UBI it won't matter overall.  If they can suck up 60%-70% it might matter a lot.  I've never seen good estimates on the issue. 

Bonus points for thought both ways:

Can we investigate somewhere like the Alaska income and figure it out?  Which way does that evidence point?  My initial feeling would be that Alaska doesn't have many goods that are pertinent (property isn't very scarce, people go to college in other states, maybe medical care?). 

Is the college loan/price spiral thing an illustration of a similar principle or not? 

 

 

Who Knew? -- Memorial Day Open Thread

by wj

I have stumbled across a document, Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households, which was put out by the US Federal Reserve earlier this month. A couple of things seem worth noting.

First, it reports that 60% of adults report that they are either “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” compared to 65 percent in 2014 and 62 percent in 2013. As most of us are probably aware, there is a lot of evidence for the fact that election results (especially at the Presidential level) correlate strongly with how the economy is doing. Or, more accurately, which how voters feel that the economy, specifically their personal economic circumstances, is going.

When the economy is bad, there is a lot of "turn the rascals out" voting. When the economy is good, there is a strong tendency to not rock the boat. Only when the economy is just so-so do other factors appear to become significant. The implications for this year's elections, if the state of affairs reported by the Fed continues into November, are obvious.

Second, and something which really startled me, was that 10% of those making over $100,000 per year said that they were either “struggling to get by” or are “just getting by." Read that again. These aren't people down around the poverty line (however you choose to define that). These are people in the top 20% of incomes in this country. But they think that they are struggling?!?!? Sometimes I am just amazed at the world-views, the insularity of the world views, of some of those around me. (And I wonder how they think the rest of the country is doing -- assuming that they consider that at all.)

Wednesday Books: Good Stuff

by Doctor Science

This week: novels by Ada Palmer, Adam Rakunas, and Frances Hardinge; novella by Seanan McGuire.

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Dinner was delayed slightly because I was reading the last few pages of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning while snapping beans.

I love the style, how much everyone talks and thinks, the layers of world-building and characters. The fact that the Enlightenment includes both Voltaire and De Sade.

One part of the world-building that frankly baffles me: how monolingual most people seem to be. The fact that people talk in *Latin* to conceal the topic of their conversation from speakers of other Indo-European, and even Romance!, languages, wtf. Particularly surprising because their Enlightenment heroes were all polyglots.

There's one thing that bugs me, but I don't know if it's going to be dealt with later or not. This is yet another futuristic novel (of a string I've read recently) with hereditary aristocracy and even rulership, where the aristocrats/princes include people of exceptional charisma, intelligence, and beauty. That trick never works! -- at least, not when the general population is healthy and well-fed. Regression to the mean is one driver toward democracy, especially since charisma seems to be poorly heritable (or not at all). Contemplate Prince Charles if you find yourself thinking that a long line of royal ancestors will tend to produce exceptional leaders.

Similarly, I can't figure out why control of the transport network is so hyper-centralized: not just in one group, but one family. Why would people do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to have more people doing it, in more places (not an earthquake zone, for instance), and have the workers chosen on the basis of skills/talent/experience, not family membership? Am I missing something?

Basically, I can't figure out if Palmer has almost forgotten about democracy and how it works, or if there are guillotines in these aristocrats' future.

Wow, what a complicated book. This is SF you have to keep your brain on for. Written in a 18th-century style including digressions, talking to the reader, and Homeric similes, it is actively in dialogue with the Enlightment: Voltaire and Diderot, Madame de Pompadour and De Sade. It's a novel of ideas, plot, and world-building, past and future. I wonder if I should lend it to my mother, who loves Ideas and litfic but usually finds SFF unappealing.

My response can only be love when the author calls the book part of "the path which flows from Gilgamesh and Homer to the stars." That's it, that's why I love SFF.

I've left more detailed comments on the spoiler thread at Making Light.

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Windswept by Adam Rakunas. It's such a goddamn relief to read a science fiction or fantasy novel that doesn't focus on aristocrats of some sort. "Windswept" is tropical-colored noir, with the focus on people who do dirty, hard work and don't get paid enough to do it. Our protagonist, Padma Mehta, is a union rep with a (highly-specific) alcohol problem, trying to take care of her people while keeping more than half an eye on her plan to retire and run a distillery. The planet she's on, Santee, is part of the underbelly of interstellar civilization, growing sugarcane for the molasses that's a basic chemical feedstock. It really makes you think about the kind of work that has to go on behind the scenes of your favorite space adventure, and how unsung the people doing it tend to be.

I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel, coming out next month. My only uncertainty is whether I'll get a hardcopy (paperback) or an e-book. The paperback of "Windswept" is set in a font just a bit smaller than my old eyes are comfortable reading -- I can do it, but it makes my vision blurry if I read for more than a couple hours. I'll probably get the e-book if the rest of Casa Science doesn't care for "Windswept", but a paperback if the others want to read it, too.

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The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge continues to cement her rep, for me, as a writer of exceptionally sophisticated YAs. I'm not even sure what makes "The Lie Tree" YA except the age of the protagonist, and the fact that there's no sex and little violence. No-one's motives are simple or unlayered, there's a good deal of description of setting and character ... aha, that's what it reminds me of! Joan Aiken! But with extra layers of complexity in the characters. I think I need to re-read "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase" for comparison purposes.

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Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. A great premise, beautifully creepy prose, and not the expected ending. My only problem: it's a murder mystery, and it fails the John Donne Test. That's a matter of personal preference, of course.

The John Donne Test

by Doctor Science

I mentioned my John Donne Test on File770 yesterday, and want to put it down coherently in one place for reference and discussion.

I used to read a lot of mystery stories. A *lot*. One of my favorite Christmas presents while I was growing up was The Annotated Sherlock Holmes; I read Agatha Christie, Earl Stanley Gardner, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout when I was a teen and college student. Then I added many more in my 20s and 30s: Tony Hillerman, Dick Francis, Anne Perry, Martha Grimes, Charlotte MacLeod, Carl Hiassen, and on and on.

At some point in there I came up with what I'll call the John Donne Test, because he said "Any man's death diminishes me." The Test is very simple:

Is there a second murder? (a second incident; two people murdered at once doesn't count)

If the answer is "Yes": you fail.

If it's a mystery story without *any* murder, you get an A.

That's it. I was willing to read stories that failed the John Donne Test, but I always *preferred* to read ones that passed.

But eventually, about 15-20 years ago, I just quit reading mysteries, cold turkey. Hardly anything was passing the Test, and the number of bodies per book was weighing on me.

For me, it feels debasing, as though only one human life isn't interesting or important enough to be worth a book. And it also becomes a kind of un-gendered fridging, where people keep dying for the sake of the protagonist's storyline. Murder mysteries on TV would be even worse (if I watched them), because each story takes less time, so the bodies per minute rate gets hideously high -- and also because I find violent images hard to forget.

I'm not saying every mystery story "should" pass the John Donne Test -- I like plenty of ones that don't. But I think it's worth thinking about what "a mystery" might be if it's not a serial killer, and how we could maybe stand to think of every murder as a tragedy.

Illustration by Roman Muradov for Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter -- a work that helped define the mystery genre, but which includes no murder.

Wednesday Book Round-up

by Doctor Science

This week's reading:

In The Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan: another satisfying installment in the saga of Lady Trent and dragons. In this volume Isabella & Co. are in meta-Egypt, and the similarities to the Amelia Peabody series are obvious and amusing.

The one thing that isn't at all amusing is the book designer's choice to have each volume printed with a different color font, on paper that isn't really white. This particular combo, dark red on cream, pushed the edge of readability to me, and Mr Dr Science couldn't read it comfortably at all in less-than-perfect light. Cute, but not practical nor reader-friendly.

Todd Lockwood's cover and illustrations continue to be lovely. Their only flaw is that his pictures of ancient ruins don't look ruined enough: sculptures break and wear away over centuries more than that.

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I also finished Linesman by S.K. Dunstall, the pseud of a pair of Australian sisters. It's such a relief to be back in SPAAACE for my SFF! Verdict: pretty good, though there's a lot of stuff you have to just roll with, hoping to pick up later. It's one of those "we have cool interstellar travel using lost-alien-civilization tech we don't understand, what could go wrong?" stories, which I always love. *Lots* of semi-comprehensible politics. First of a trilogy, of course.

I don't think it's quite "Hugo-Worthy", because too much of the world-building doesn't feel like it hangs together. How can a space-faring civilization keep going jura gurer'f bayl bar uvtu-yriry zrpunavp sbe fvk zbaguf? [rot-13 spoilers] for instance. Also, heart attacks don't work like that. But I'll be picking up the second volume.

Though that will be after Too Like the Lightning, which I'm reading now. Heads up: this is one of the SFF books of the year, it's going to make a *lot* of shortlists.

Fair Play Fair Pay Act

by liberal japonicus

I put this Jeffrey Toobin piece about the new Fair Play Fair Pay Act because this is something Russell has often written about

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/congresss-chance-to-be-fair-to-musicians

There have been several good articles about streaming etc at the newyorker, including

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/who-is-really-paying-for-adele

and

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/will-streaming-music-kill-songwriting

have at it.

DC Dictator Dictates Dicks in the Damesroom

by Ugh

Or "how the federal government came to 'meddle' in who can pee where in our public schools."

So it seems people might have heard about the Obama Administrations saying schools receiving federal funds that wish to continue to receive them* must treat transgender students in accordance with their gender identity.  Thus, a child born with male genitalia but who identifies as a girl must be allowed to participate on girls sports teams and, pertinent for purposes of this post, use the girl's restroom.  This has caused a little bit of consternation in some quarters, including such statements as Obama is "allowing men to have open access to girls in bathrooms" and that "the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school."  Golly, what a meanie that Obama is.

Setting aside what appears to be certain high-level GOPers not having that high of an opinion of half the population (and in a twist, not the usual half; it also smacks of campus feminists publishing in the campus newspaper all the names of male undergraduates under the heading "Potential Rapists" - strange bedfellows**), you might ask yourself why the federal government is in the business of saying who can use what bathroom in, say, a Des Moines Elementary School.  The simple answer is, of course, Title IX (20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688).  Signed into law by raging leftist Dick Nixon (he says, just for fun).  More below.

Garden planning

by Doctor Science

The garden at our new house needs a lot of work. I'm planning on doing it in stages. First, I went to the Native Plant sale yesterday, and got:

Clockwise from pink flowers:

• pink Creeping Phlox (Phlox stolonifera)
• Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) -- they've already bloomed, I'm hoping for seeds
• Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)
• two Green-and-Gold (Chrysogonum virginianum)
• Golden Ragwort (Packera aurea) -- this is a new one for me
• two 'Larinem Park' Wild Stonecrop (Sedum ternatum)
• Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
• two Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia)

.

As you may know, there's a cultural divide (heh) among gardeners, between "gardeners who use Latin names" and "gardeners who use English names". I'm mostly a Latin-namer while my mother is an English-namer, which can be confusing for everybody.

Cutting here for multiple images.

Wednesday Books: A symphony of the unfinished

by Doctor Science

I started a lot of books this week, but finished only a couple. Coincidentally, both are fantasies set in the 1920's.

Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge succeeds admirably as creepy-fantasy, less as historical fiction. The past tense of "weave" was "wove", dammit, not "weaved". By which I mean that, in general, it was hard to hear the 3rd-person-limited narrative voice as that of a 13-y.o. English girl in the 20s -- or even that of an older person of the period.

Nonetheless, it's an novel (and creepy!) take on the changeling story, and on Faerie-Fields We Know relations.

Barbara Hambly's Castle of Horror is a novelette, a sequel to "Bride of the Rat God". I have to find and re-read Bride to see how smoothly this follows it. It's in here somewhere ...

"Castle of Horror" involves two silent movie crews filming at the same site: one with many of the characters from "Bride", and one a race film by and for African-Americans. My problem was that I couldn't always remember which character names were which (I read it late at night), and the voices of the white & black characters weren't distinctive. I'm not saying Hambly should have tried writing in "dialect" (that never ends well), but that there should have been more of a distinction in rhythm and word choice. Or even failure of comprehension: Norah (the POV character) is English, and in the late 70s I was a TA for a professor from England, who explained that one of our TA duties was to translate between her and the African-American students in the lecture, because their language was often not mutually comprehensible. To be fair, she had one of the most rapid and stereotypical Oxbridge accents I've ever heard.

Commenters at File770 said that her Benjamin January novels, about a free man of color before the Civil War, have a very carefully developed voice, so perhaps she just didn't want to put the time in for this novelette.

Mr Dr Science finished The Cold Between by Elizabeth Bonesteel, but only because he's stubborn that way. "I never imagined that a book with a smokin'-hot sex scene in the first chapter could be so boring," he reports. Earlier, he finished Medusa's Web by Tim Powers, which he thinks is OK for him but more to my taste (see below). After he was done with the Bonesteel, he felt like a binge re-read of aaalllll the Dresden Files books, so he'll do that until he gets bloated (like when you eat a whole box of donuts by yourself).

And our In-House Offspring read "Borderline" (my review was last week) & loved it.

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Books I read some of, and quit (that's what libraries are for!):

Patricia McKillip's Kingfisher, because I've never met an incarnation of Parsifal I didn't want to kick in the pants.

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders: I saw too much bullying and possibly animal harm coming, I don't have the starch for that right now.

Medusa's Web, Tim Powers: Mr Dr Science was right, the density of description is really thick, you know what *everything* looks like, whether it's important or not. The characters and the situation didn't grab me hard enough to make me want to do the work of the prose.

Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau. Magic realism, i.e. sff with no world-building. I bailed when the past had cell-phone reception. This is Daviau's first novel, and I might be interested in giving her a try when she stops writing for men -- I could get interested in her heroine's POV.

Arcadia by Iain Pears: very Oxford, very lyrical, very fantasy. I might give it a try some other time, when I'm not jonesing as hard for SPACE.

But lo! Windswept by Adam Rakunas and Linesman by S.K. Dunstall have just been delivered, so I'll tell you about them next week.

Facebook and conservative news

by Doctor Science

Gizmodo reports:

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential "trending" news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site's users.

...

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. "It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is," said the former curator. "Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn't as biased."

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook's algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

What the widespread outrage about this (up to and including demands for a Senate investigation) overlooks is whether Facebook's young Trending curators were trying to weed out stories that are deceptive, false or even dangerous.

Below the cut: includes an image of artistic nudity in the Western tradition, which may be NSFW.