Unconditional Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century

in basicincome •  7 years ago 

Can the savings of unconditional basic income (UBI) exceed its cost?

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” — Benjamin Franklin

For those not familiar with this old idiom, it means it’s less costly to avoid problems from ever happening in the first place, than it is to fix problems once they do. It also happens to be the entire logic behind the invention of the vaccine, and it is my belief that unconditional basic income has the same potential.

The Most Cost-Effective Public Health Tool Ever Devised

The savings provided by vaccines are staggering to the point of almost being beyond comprehension. The human suffering avoided through vaccinations are immeasurable, but the economic benefits are not, and in fact have been measured. Let’s start with polio.

We estimate that the United States invested approximately US dollars 35 billion in polio vaccines between 1955 and 2005… The historical and future investments translate into over 1.7 billion vaccinations that prevent approximately 1.1 million cases of paralytic polio and over 160,000 deaths. Due to treatment cost savings, the investment implies net benefits of approximately US dollars 180 billion, even without incorporating the intangible costs of suffering and death and of averted fear. Retrospectively, the U.S. investment in polio vaccination represents a highly valuable, cost-saving public health program.

For every $1 billion we’ve spent on polio vaccines, we’ve avoided spending about $6 billion down the road. And that’s purely the economic costs, not the personal costs. You might think our investment in fighting polio is perhaps as good as it gets, but it’s not.

Most vaccines recommended are cost-saving even if only direct medical costs—and not lost lives and suffering—are considered. Our country, for example, saves $8.50 in direct medical costs for every dollar invested in diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine. When the savings associated with work loss, death, and disability are factored in, the total savings increase to about $27 per dollar invested in DTaP vaccination. Every dollar our Nation spends on measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination generates about $13 in total savings — adding up to about $4 billion each year.

Just $1 spent on a single MMR shot can save $13 and a DTaP shot can save $27 that would otherwise have been spent on the costs of the full-blown diseases they protect against.

These vaccinations save us incredible amounts of money and suffering as a society, as long as we continue vaccinating ourselves. But what kind of savings are there to be found, when we go all-in and invest in a massive vaccine program so large, its aim is to entirely eradicate something?

The Eradication of Smallpox

Reported as eradicated from the face of the Earth in 1977, and in possibly one of the greatest understatements of all time, the eradication of smallpox by the U.S. proved to be a “remarkably good economic investment.”

A total of $32 million was spent by the United States over a 10-year period in the global campaign to eradicate smallpox. The entire $32 million has been recouped every 2 months since 1971 by saving the costs of the smallpox vaccine, administration, medical care, quarantine and other costs. According to General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates from a draft report, “Infectious Diseases: Soundness of World Health Organization Estimates to Eradicate or Eliminate Seven Diseases,” the cumulative savings from smallpox eradication for the United States is $17 billion. The draft report also estimates the real rate of return for the United States to be 46 percent per year since smallpox was eradicated.

We also didn’t stop at eradicating it from within our own borders. We invested our money in the entire world.

It has since been calculated that the largest donor, the United States, saves the total of all its contributions every 26 days, making smallpox prevention through vaccination one of the most cost-beneficial health interventions of the time.

Even if we let these numbers sink in for a bit, it’s a huge challenge to fully appreciate because these savings are what we don’t experience. We aren’t spending tens of billions of dollars that we otherwise would have. Had we not spent millions then, we’d be spending billions on all of the effects of smallpox to this day and long into the future.

Try to imagine a world where we didn’t eradicate smallpox. Aside from the obvious increases in our already sky-high health care costs and the deaths of over 100 million people that were prevented, millions every year would be calling in sick to work to care for themselves or a loved one with smallpox. Businesses would be paying more for sick leave and losing millions of hours of productivity (estimated at $1 billion lost every year). Medical bankruptcies would likely be higher. Crime would likely be higher. The entire economy would suffer along with all of society.

But we didn’t take that path. We chose instead to pay for an ounce of prevention in order to avoid paying for a pound of cure.

Unfortunately we can’t see the effects of what we did, because we made them never happen with the ounce of prevention. We’re saving what will eventually be trillions of dollars, and don’t even give this incredible fact a second thought.

Not only is it hard to see the pounds we’ve avoided, but we also have a really hard time recognizing the pounds we’re paying for, because we consider them normal, just as smallpox would today still be normal if we’d never chosen to eradicate it through mass vaccinations. It would just be an ugly fact of life… like poverty.

What if poverty is like smallpox?

What if the realities of hunger and homelessness aren’t just facts of life, but examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? How much would it cost to eradicate? How much could we save?

The Eradication of Poverty

As I’ve written about before, a report by the Chief Public Health Officer in Canada looked at this question of potential savings, and estimated that $1 invested in the early years saves between $3 and $9 in future spending on the health and criminal justice systems, as well as on social assistance.

It’s rare to see this kind of return on investment. That is, outside of vaccinations. That’s the power of immunizations. Spending $1 on a vaccine for a kid can save $10, but also just giving the same kid $1 can save $9 some decades down the road too. How can this be?

Because childhood poverty is hugely expensive.

Our results suggest that the costs to the United States associated with childhood poverty total about $500 billion per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of GDP. More specifically, we estimate that childhood poverty each year:

Reduces productivity and economic output by about 1.3 percent of GDP;

Raises the costs of crime by 1.3 percent of GDP; and

Raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2 percent of GDP.

The above numbers are from 2007, and since then the child poverty rate has increased from 17% to 25%, so we can safely assume the hit to GDP has increased as well. Assuming a proportional increase, the 2018 loss to economic growth of child poverty could now be 5.6% of GDP, or $1.1 trillion. And that’s only child poverty, not adult poverty.

For the same reason it’s cheaper to just spend $10,000 on the homeless providing a home than it is to instead spend $30,000 in medical and criminal justice system costs, it is cheaper to prevent people from ever living in poverty than it is to pay the full costs of poverty. In addition to the costs of child poverty above, these full costs include a significant portion of the estimated $1.4 trillion spent on crime, the $2.7 trillion spent on health care, and the trillions of dollars spent on its many other effects every single year in the U.S.

These numbers are just economic costs. There are biological costs as well. Poverty even rewires our brains. The new field of epigenetics show us such biological costs can be paid spanning entire lives.

Coming of age in poverty may lead to permanent dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala — which, according to the researchers, “has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse.”

Fortunately, the even newer study of neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons long thought to be impossible) shows us these effects also need not be permanent.

Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.” On the other hand, enriched animal environments — enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat — lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.

Essentially, we’re recently learning that we can potentially reverse the long-term effects of poverty, if we eliminate it.

Poverty currently affects almost 50 million Americans, 18 million of whom are kids coming of age impoverished. To allow poverty to continue in the 21st century or to eradicate it is the same choice between an ounce or a pound as smallpox was in the 20th century, and outside of an experiment in Manitoba, we’ve been choosing a pound of poverty for pretty much all of recorded history. Or as another saying goes, so far we’ve been penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Decades ago, we developed a vaccine for smallpox and we used it to eradicate smallpox.

Today, we may already have a vaccine for poverty. It’s been tested, and the results are remarkable.

It’s called unconditional basic income.

An Ounce of Prevention

The idea is to give every citizen enough money to cover their basic needs like food and shelter, no strings attached. For the U.S. to guarantee these basic needs to assure no one would live in poverty would cost about $1,000 per adult and $350 per child every month.

For a significant portion of the population, this is where the conversation can stop. Once the napkins are whipped out and a $3 trillion price tag is estimated, the idea can be hand-waved away as too expensive.

But is that really the cost? No. The actual cost of UBI is not simply the annual amount multiplied by the number of recipients, just like the actual cost of buying a $20 bill for $20 is not $20, but $0. The actual cost requires calculating the net amount transferred from top earners to middle and low income earners, and that calculation also requires taking into account the welfare reform and tax reform that UBI allows through by the replacement of various programs and tax credits with UBI. In the end, the real cost of UBI is somewhere around $300-$600 billion.

Half a trillion dollars in new taxes may still sound high, but remember how every $1 spent keeping a child out of poverty can save $3 to $9 as an adult? Well, that means if we started vaccinating kids with a basic income of $350 a month, we would not have to spend $1,000 to $3,000 a month on them as adults. This also means that when kids became adults, a basic income of $1,000 per month is a savings of up to $1,700 we’d have otherwise spent. So why not start vaccinating our kids against poverty, and consider their basic incomes as adults a huge net savings?

Upfront Costs vs. Long-term Savings

What if we had hand-waved away the costs of eradicating smallpox as too expensive with napkin math? What if we today faced that same choice we did then? What if the price of smallpox eradication now was calculated on a napkin as being $3 trillion? What would we do? What should we do?

What if the discussion about smallpox eradication never included the reality the investment would be recouped every two months? What if no one talked about the 40% annual return on investment? What if we all kept pretending eradicating smallpox would just be too darn expensive and that it’s just one of those ugly facts of life we just have to deal with until we die?

This is where the conversation about basic income needs to change.

Poverty is a disease. It’s an illness that even doctors are beginning to recognize as something that requires the prescription of cash in order to successfully treat its many associated diseases.

“I was treating their bodies, but not their social situations. And especially not their income, which seemed to be the biggest barrier to their health improving. The research evidence was pretty clear on this. Income, poverty, is intimately connected to my patients’ health. In fact, poverty is more important to my low-income patients than smoking, high cholesterol, high-blood pressure, obesity, salt, or soda pop. Poverty wreaks havoc on my patients’ bodies. A 17% increased risk of heart disease; more than 100% increased risk of diabetes; 60% higher rates of depression; higher rates of lung, oral, cervical cancer; higher rates of lung disease like asthma and emphysema… It became pretty clear to me I was treating all of my patients’ health issues except for the most important one — their poverty.” — Dr. Gary Bloch

We can do more than continually treat poverty’s many economically and physically expensive symptoms. We can eradicate it entirely with a social vaccine designed to immunize against it.

A social vaccine can be defined as, ‘actions that address social determinants and social inequities in society, which act as a precursor to the public health problem being addressed’. While the social vaccine cannot be specific to any disease or problem, it can be adapted as an intervention for any public health response. The aim of the social vaccine is to promote equity and social justice that will inoculate the society through action on social determinants of health.

Basic income is a tested social vaccine. It’s been found to increase equity and general welfare. It has been found to reduce hospitalizations by 8.5% in just a few years through reduced stress and work injuries. It’s been found to increase birth weights through increased maternal nutrition. It’s been found to decrease crime rates by 40% and reduce malnourishment by 30%. Intrinsic motivation is cultivated. Students do better in school. Bargaining positions increase. Economic activity increases. Entrepreneurs are born.

Experiment after experiment, from smaller unconditional cash transfers to full-on basic incomes, the results all point in positive directions across multiple measures whenever incomes are unconditionally increased.

Unconditional basic income is therefore a social vaccine for the disease of poverty.

We can keep spending trillions every year to treat this disease and its many symptoms, or we can choose to eradicate poverty as we did smallpox through UBI as a mass social vaccination program.

It costs real money for us to look the other way on poverty. Unlike smallpox and other diseases we can vaccinate ourselves against, the costs of poverty can be more invisible. We don’t get bills in the mail from Poverty, Inc. telling us each month how much we owe, but we still pay these bills because they are included in our many other bills.

When we pay $10,000 in taxes instead of $7,000 because of welfare and health care, that’s in large part a $3,000 poverty bill. When we pay $500 a month instead $400 on our private health insurance premiums, that’s a $100 poverty bill. When we pay $50 on a shirt instead of $45 because of theft, that’s a $5 poverty bill. When we’re taxed a percentage of our homes to pay for prisons, that’s a poverty bill. What other examples can you think of personally? What might we all be spending on poverty every day?

These poverty bills are all around us, but we’re just not seeing them as they are. And let’s not ignore the lack of opportunity bills either.

If just one Einstein right now is working 60 hours a week in two jobs just to survive, instead of propelling the entire world forward with another General Theory of Relativity… that loss is truly incalculable. How can we measure the costs of lost innovation? Of businesses never started? Of visions never realized?

These are the full costs of not implementing unconditional basic income, and they will only increase as technology reduces our need for work as long as we continue requiring the little work that’s left in exchange for income.

These are the full costs of being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not socially vaccinating ourselves against poverty.

These are the full costs of continuing to opt for a pound of cure instead of an ounce of prevention.

So now, let us consider a new question.

Is the question for us to answer in the 21st century, “Can we afford basic income?”

Or is the question, “Can we really afford a world without basic income?”


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This is incorrect.

The actual cost of UBI is not simply the annual amount multiplied by the number of recipients, just like the actual cost of buying a $20 bill for $20 is not $20, but $0. The actual cost requires calculating the net amount transferred from top earners to middle and low income earners, and that calculation also requires taking into account the welfare reform and tax reform that UBI allows through by the replacement of various programs and tax credits with UBI. In the end, the real cost of UBI is somewhere around $300-$600 billion. 

The net cost is lower BUT  the government has to raise and redistribute 3.2 trillion, either by

  • Taxation — Raising taxes steeply across the board. Disincentivizing productivity and penalizing the productive.
  • Printing money— A lot of it! That causes inflammation raising the cost of living and you get into this perpetual game of having to raise the universal basic income to catch up with cost of living.

Another factor that these optimistic analysis ignore. The same political faction that wants UBI also wants limitless, unfiltered immigration.

  • Whenever the democrats or leftists get in power our borders become none-existent.
  • Illegal immigration is encourage instead of penalized.
  • Chain migration, birthright citizenship or the idiotic lottery migration flood our country with low quality migrants.
  • Liberals refuse to filter for migration based upon clear heuristics that indicate that certain migrants would integrate better and contribute more to our country; like education, IQ, professional skills, income, net worth, cultural compatibility, or language skills — No ingles, no problemo! UBI para todos!

We won’t just be paying $12k to every American adult, we’ll be paying $12k to every single adult human who likes free money capable of reaching to our borders, which is potentially billions of people. And we’ll be offering them a tremendous bribe of $12k/year to pack up their lives and come take advantage of our idiotically generous system. 

Exactly. Incentives matter. UBI would absolutely crush any nation that implemented it if it had open borders.

Over the last 10 years of teaching university students about Rawls' vs Nozick's views on how to structure society, I've been thinking a similar thing. Even if you come down on the libertarian-minimal government-Nozick side (and a lot of people here do), this is an idea that makes sense.

Basic income might not be cheaper than doing nothing in the short term. But it will be cheaper than inaction if problems are allowed to get out of hand. I bet King Louis XVI wished he'd instituted a UBI!

Seriously, basic income also ensures that choices are truly voluntary as it reduces economic duress.

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

And ensuring that consumers have the ability to truly make those choices is obviously the best way to promote a competitive market. Competition is reliant on the consumers having options.

That should be a natural progression of the right-wing free-market thoughts. It's unfortunate that too many people are stuck in the 'how I wish to live my life' rather than realizing the contradiction in their personal ideology and following where that train of thought would lead towards. :/

Preach it brother, varoufakis is on board with this as well.

Great to see you again my friend, and with another amazing article

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

It also happens to be the entire logic behind the invention of the vaccine, and it is my belief that unconditional basic income has the same potential.

Despite it's intentions vaccination hasn't been the triumphant achievement you make it out to be, and far from that. The damages it has caused cannot be estimated.

Your first study about polio is only an abstract and the paywall which hides the substance of the abstract allows me to preview the very first page where the case for this study is made through this very first figure they use:

Which paints the picture that polio is basically only vaccine induced and wild polio is all but eliminated, which is hardly true considering that polio was never Isolated or Demonstrate to be viral, the Salk vaccine and subsequent vaccines have done untold damage to the population, the cancer causing SV 40 virus invalidating ANY and all benefit that it might have had. Polio has been a failure from the point of vaccination for prevention, polio continues to this day, Acute Flaccid Paralysis Syndrome, and I beg you go and research exactly how Polio symptoms were reclassified throughout the world to hide the fact that the vaccine wasn't doing anything. The book Dr. Mary's Monkey goes deep into the SV 40 debacle as well as exposing that polio vaccination wasn't working.

The myth of vaccinations is persistent because of unbelievable propaganda spanning centuries. The news articles do not lie, the many smallpox vaccinations, mandatory vaccinations left hospitals full of people with smallpox. In the very fist vaccinations waves in England in 1860's it was found that nurses were instructed to mark cases of smallpox after vaccination not as vaccine induced but as regular
infection, the under reporting of smallpox has been a hallmark of the vaccination industry throughout it's use while the epidemics that it has unleashed have only seen the headlines of local newspapers, even the congressional hearings that were on vaccines have all but evaporated from the professional conscious.

Even today, with the latest and greatest research no evidence exists for the action of vaccination like it's proposed and there is no explanation for the multitudes of viral dna found in a healthy human body. The lock and key mechanism suggested had been a complete fabrication that from the beginning was demonstrated again and again to be false.

The cost of vaccinations is without estimate as we are talking directly about the highest level of fraud and scientific malice there is, again research SV 40, and even better would be to go to the library or and gather the data because there's only pamphlets and statistics pulled out of thin air in the Pro Vaccine side, and there are voluminous works, cited correctly and full of references and sources that without a doubt paint a horrid picture of the vaccination programs. There are plenty of virologists that have turned their back on the industry but you won't find one skeptic of the germ theory that turned and embraced vaccination.

UBI is what vaccination wishes it could be, unfortunately I wouldn't go that far even, because vaccination is purely profit driven or at the worst driven by Eugenics Embracing Globalists such as Bill Gates.

just droppin by to say I love your work - one of these days I will break out of this shit poverty (and it wont be because I waited for this f***ed up govt to fix it) Crypto will save us - and this is an awesome platform to do it

You make some very compelling points here. I examined the topic of cryptocurrency as a sort of vaccine against the cancer of debt in this article:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@xsid/if-debt-is-a-cancer-is-cryptocurrency-the-cure

I do believe a number of broken and corrupt social paradigms can be fixed through the innovation of blockchain technology. I just wonder, how quickly will this take place? Will it be years or generations before we cure these societal ailments?

See: ”examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? ” it looks like you got that one backwards. Should be "an ounce of prevention".

As always great post with useful information. Thanks.

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Can we really afford a world without basic income?
nope.
Steemit is an embryonic experiment which might give some insight in how to provide UBI without resorting to taxes.

Let that sink in for a moment.

What if a country were to implement a fork of the Steemit BlockChain providing all of their citizens the opportunity to earn rewards?

Maybe with each person having only one account, some form of universal basic income automatically distributed, each person having equal or close to equal voting power/weight, etc, that could work much better.

Right now, we have a system where whales cannot be voted out of office and they control the supply. Bots also pool money to exploit the system and benefit from it, without really adding much value to the system.

guess you didn't hear about steem-chat where the whale running it got booted out?

Nope, but that's interesting! I'll check. :)

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What is the UBI response to loafers? Spendthrifts? While I worked in the military I saw a lot of people who spent more than their means, and ended up with huge debt. It wasn't that their pay was too low; it is that their desire is always too high. Some people are going to live in the now no matter how much money they get.

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

The response with UBI is that a much broader base of people can create social capital to help out this rather small fraction of the population, a fraction of the population that gets even less support today, by the way.

A basic income is something for the 99.9% of people who'd put it to better use than targeted benefits, I think that's a good objective to act upon in its own right.

edit: Also, a basic income wouldn't have to be a replacement for when there's clearly a greater requirement for more financial or service support like with the severly sick or elderly.

With respect (and I'm passionate about this topic), history shows that giving people free stuff does not create an even improvement across the population. Some people will use their UBI well; they will grow in wealth and contribute in the way UBI advocates expect.

But far more than .1% will waste their money. Where does the 99.9% assumption of frugality come from? The US is incredibly wealthy; I live in a country where people have every opportunity to get off the streets if they want to, and yet there are still people who are consistently broke and poor. And some, not all of those people, (and not .1%) are poor because of their own actions.

Look at ancient Rome's bread and circuses. What did the young roving mobs of men do who had free food? They brutalized others out of boredom.

Survival is a good tool for personal transformation. I'm supportive of helping those who cannot help themselves, but giving free stuff to the able bodied (especially youth) is a level of foolish that only Silicon Valley could think is a good idea.

Focus the money on widows and orphans, and maybe the mentally ill. Everyone else works.

This post has received a 10.45 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @scottsantens.

Looks like I'm not the only one who's been reading the book "Utopia for realists". My view of just how viable a UBI is has been rapidly changing, in fact I can think of few opinions I've had that have flipped this quickly. I can't wait for wide-scale trials.

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