(Crossposted from Twitter)

I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.

Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand years ago; they often own more than one pair of shoes; why, they even have cellphones, as not even an emperor of the olden days could have had at any price. They're relatively poor, sure, and they have a lot of things to be legitimately sad about. But in what sense is almost-anyone in a high-tech country 'poor' by the standards of a thousand years earlier? Maybe UBI works the same way; maybe some people are still comparing themselves to the Joneses, and consider themselves relatively poverty-stricken, and in fact have many things to be sad about; but their actual lives are much wealthier and better, such that poor people today would hardly recognize them. UBI is still worth doing, if that's the result; even if, afterwards, many people still self-identify as 'poor'."

Or to sum up their answer: "What do you mean, humanity's 100-fold productivity increase, since the days of agriculture, has managed not to eliminate poverty? What people a thousand years ago used to call 'poverty' has essentially disappeared in the high-tech countries. 'Poor' people no longer starve in winter when their farm's food storage runs out. There's still something we call 'poverty' but that's just because 'poverty' is a moving target, not because there's some real and puzzlingly persistent form of misery that resisted all economic growth, and would also resist redistribution via UBI."

And this is a sensible question; but let me try out a new answer to it.

Consider the imaginary society of Anoxistan, in which every citizen who can't afford better lives in a government-provided 1,000 square-meter apartment; which the government can afford to provide as a fallback, because building skyscrapers is legal in Anoxistan. Anoxistan has free high-quality food (not fast food made of mostly seed oils) available to every citizen, if anyone ever runs out of money to pay for better. Cities offer free public transit including self-driving cars; Anoxistan has averted that part of the specter of modern poverty in our own world, which is somebody's car constantly breaking down (that they need to get to work and their children's school).

As measured on our own scale, everyone in Anoxistan has enough healthy food, enough living space, heat in winter and cold in summer, huge closets full of clothing, and potable water from faucets at a price that most people don't bother tracking.

Is it possible that most people in Anoxistan are poor?

My (quite sensible and reasonable) friends, I think, on encountering this initial segment of this parable, mentally autocomplete it with the possibility that maybe there's some billionaires in Anoxistan whose frequently televised mansions make everyone else feel poor, because most people only have 1,000-meter houses.

But actually this story has a completely different twist! You see, I only spoke of food, clothing, housing, water, transit, heat and A/C. I didn't say whether everyone in Anoxistan had enough air to breathe.

In Anoxistan, you see, the planetary atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and breathable oxygen (O2) is a precious commodity. Almost everyone has to wear respirators at all times; only the 1% can afford to have a whole house full of breathable air, with some oxygen leaking away despite the best seals.

And while Anoxistan does have a prosperous middle class -- which only needs to work 40-hour weeks in order to get enough oxygen to live -- there's also a sizable underclass which has to work 60-hour weeks to get that much oxygen.

These relatively oxygen-poorer Anoxians submit to horrible bosses at horrible jobs and endure all manner of abuse, to earn enough oxygen to live. They never go on hikes in Nature or otherwise 'exercise', because they can't afford that amount of physical exertion; they can't afford to convert that much O2 to CO2.

They try to take shallow breaths, the Anoxians who have a kid; to make sure their own kid has enough to breathe, and grows up without too much anoxia-induced brain damage.

And if you showed one of the Anoxians a hunter-gatherer from our world, living in what my sensible friends really would consider poverty -- somebody who has 0 or 1 foot-wrappings, no car, no cellphone, no Internet access -- the Anoxian would be breathless at the unimaginable wealth of oxygen this hunter-gather commands. They can walk around in a planet of oxygen free for the breathing! They can just go running anytime they like, without having to save up for it! They can have kids without asking themselves what their kids are going to breathe!

As for the hunter-gatherer's paucity of fabric, the absence of closets full of clothes or indeed housing at all, the Anoxians hardly notice that part -- everyone on their planet has enough clothes in their closet, so few people there much remark on it or notice; any more than we on Earth ask whether people have enough to breathe.

What's my point here?

That it only takes a life lacking in one resource needed to survive, to produce some quality that I think ancient poor people would also recognize as 'poverty'.

It's the quality of working yourself until you can't work any longer; of taking on jobs that are painful to do, and require groveling submission to bosses, because that's what it takes to get the few scraps to hang on.

Does owning more than one pair of shoes, as would once have been a sign of great wealth, alter that or change that? Well, it can be convenient to own different pairs of shoes for different pedalic situations. But the amount that shoes contribute to welfare, soon saturates –

– just like your whole planet full of oxygen doesn't mean you live in an unimaginably wealthy society. Once you have enough oxygen to get by, the value of more oxygen than that, quickly saturates and asymptotes. Having 10 times as much oxygen than that, won't make up for not having enough food to eat in wintertime, or not being able to afford healthy-enough food not to wreck your body.

The marginal value of more oxygen saturates, and can't cover all aspects of life in any case; which is to say:

Even enough oxygen to make you an Anoxan decamillionaire, won't stop you from being poor.

I think this is the problem with saying that modern society can't have real poor people, because they own an amount of clothing and fabric that would've once put somebody well into the realm of nobility, back when women spent most of their days stretching wool with a distaff in order to let anyone have clothes at all. That amount of fabric doesn't mean you can't be poor, just like having vast amounts of oxygen in your apartment doesn't rule out poverty. It means that a resource which was once very expensive, like fabric in medieval Europe or oxygen in Anoxistan, has become cheap enough not to mention.

And that is an improvement, compared to the counterfactual! I'm glad I don't have to constantly worry about running out of clothing or oxygen! It is legitimately a better planet, compared to the counterfactual planet where life has all of our current problems plus not enough oxygen!

But if you agree that medieval peasants or hunter-gatherers can be poor, you are acknowledging that no amount of oxygen can stop somebody from being poor.

Then fabric can be the same way: there can be no possible sufficiency of clothing in your closet that rules out poverty, even though somebody with plenty of clothing is counterfactually better off compared to somebody who owns only one shirt.

The sum of every resource like that could rule out poverty, if you had enough of all of it. What would be the sign of this state of affairs having come to hold? What would it be like for people to not be poor?

I reply: You wouldn't see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.

When a poor Anoxan looks at a hunter-gatherer of Earth -- especially if they're looking at someone from a time before hunter-gatherers got pushed off all the good land, and looking at an adult male -- I think the poor Anoxan legitimately recognizes this hunter-gatherer as being an important sense less like a 'poor person' like themselves. Hunter-gatherers die during famine years, which enforces the local Malthusian equilibrium; but at other times can get by on hunting for 4 hours per day, and at no point have to bow and scrape to live.

Or if the bowing and scraping doesn't strike you as particularly horrible, and you want to know what it is that modern 'poor people' really need to work 60 hours to accomplish, if not having unnecessary amounts of fabric -- well, what about working that hard to expose your children to less permanent damage, like an Anoxan taking shallow breaths themselves, to try to have their children end up with less hypoxic brain damage during formative years? Like working 60-hour weeks to afford rent somewhere the school districts will damage your child less -- where the violence is at a low-enough level that your child keeps most of their teeth. That's also what I'd call poverty, a recognizable state of desperate scrabbling for scraps.

I think this is what people are hoping Universal Basic Income will finally eliminate.

So -- having hopefully now established that there is any general bad quality of life apart from owning a too-small number of shirts, which somehow persisted through a 100-fold increase in productivity since the days of medieval cities -- we can ask:

Will a Universal Basic Income finally be enough to eliminate the state of life I'd call 'poverty'?

And my current reply is that I'm skeptical that UBI will finally be the thing that does it.

If you went back in time to the age of peasant farmers and told them that farming and most manufacture had become 100 times more productive, they might fondly imagine that you wouldn't have poor people any more -- that there would be no more people in the recognizable state of "desperately scrabbling for scraps".

And yet somehow there is a Poverty Equilibrium which beat a 100-fold increase in productivity plus everything else that went right over the last thousand years.

We can point at lots of particular historical developments that play a role in the current situation.
Eg, high-tech societies imposing artificial obstacles to housing or babysitting. Eg, credentialist colleges that raise their prices to capture more and more of the returns to the credential, until huge portions of the former middle class's early-life earnings (as once might have been used to raise children) are going to pay off student loans instead.

But to regard these as a series of isolated accidents is, I think, not warranted by the number of events which they all seem to point in mysteriously a similar direction. My own sense is more that there are strange and immense and terrible forces behind the Poverty Equilibrium.

(No, it's not a conspiracy of rich people, such as some people fondly imagine are solely and purposefully responsible for all the world's awfulness. I have known some rich people. They don't act as a coordinated group almost ever; and the group they don't form, is flatly not capable of accurately predicting and deliberately directing world-historical equilibria over centuries.)

I do not understand the Poverty Equilibrium. So I expect that a Universal Basic Income would fail to eliminate poverty, for reasons I don't fully understand.

I can guess some parts of the story, parts that are relatively easier for me to guess. Eg, rents in San Francisco would almost instantly rise by the amount of the UBI; no janitors in the Bay Area would be better off as a result. Eg, in 2014 the city of Ferguson, Missouri, which you may remember from the news, issued 2.2 arrest warrants per adult; maybe the Ferguson police departments of the world, just raise their annual quota for fines per capita by the per capita UBI. Eg, governments have always taken the existence of wealth as a license to pass regulations that destroy wealth; many different parts of government would take "poor people have more money" as a license to impose more costs on them.

But none of that quite sums up to a vast pressure that somehow works to the end of making sure that people go on being poor. That's what I think held historically; so in the future I'd expect a strange vast pressure to somehow not have Universal Basic Income play out as its advocates hope.

And also to be clear: it's quite possible that tomorrow's poor people do finally end up somewhat better off, because of Universal Basic Income, than they would have been counterfactually otherwise. The forces that maintain the Poverty Equilibrium don't actually prevent the people working to exhaustion under horrible bosses, from also having multiple sets of clothing and clean water. People who have that genuinely are better off, even if they're still working to exhaustion; just like medieval peasants are counterfactually better off for having plenty of oxygen.

(I do worry a bit that Universal Basic Income is the sort of essentially financial engineering which will prove unable to help at all in the face of the mysterious porverty-restoring forces, since it's not itself a water faucet or a loom. But financial engineering could help temporarily, until the Ferguson police department catches up and issues more fines; and, I sadly suppose, long-run restoring forces don't actually matter if superintelligence is going to omnicide everyone etcetera. But I don' t know how else to participate in conversations like this one, except under the supposition that there's an international treaty banning advanced AI, such that long-run outcomes go on actually existing.)

To sum up: I don't quite know what would actually happen, with UBI practiced on a scale where large-scale Poverty-Restoring forces would have a chance to catch up; because I do not have an account of history that explains why the Poverty-Restoring forces already had the power they did.

On the whole, however, a UBI strikes me as a much less powerful change than a 100-fold productivity increase. If that didn't prevent a huge underclass that has to desperately scrabble for scraps, I expect UBI can't prevent it either.

It's the sort of thing where, in a better world, one would call for more economics research and more economist attention to questions like "Where does the Poverty Equilibrium come from? How do its restoring forces act?"

But before any project like that could get started, you'd first have to answer the immediate reply that every economist and my sensible friends always give me, whenever I try to pose the question: "What do you mean, there's a 'Poverty Equilibrium' that resisted all our past productivity improvements? The people we call 'poor' today own more than one shirt; we only consider them poor by comparison to people even richer than that."

And to this my attempt at a snappy answer – to summarize the discussion above – is here:

The people we call 'poor' also have plenty of oxygen, which would make them very wealthy in Anoxistan; but so what? You can have tons of fabric in Anoxistan, and still need to work a horrible 60-hour job there; or have limitless oxygen on Earth, and still need to work a 60-hour job for a horrible boss, in a medieval city or a modern one. That's the miserable condition of desperately scrabbling for at least one lacking resource, whose strange persistence in high-tech countries despite vast productivity gains, needs to be better-explained; that's the strange miserable condition, whose mysterious persistence we're trying to ask if a Universal Basic Income could finally fix.