[HN Gopher] People kept working, became healthier while on basic...
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People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
Author : fraqed
Score : 676 points
Date : 2020-03-05 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| swebs wrote:
| >The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were
| working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving
| basic income.
|
| In other words, over 25% of them stopped working. This is a
| pretty big contradiction to the title.
| jariel wrote:
| So most people 'kept working' but 25% quit, I think that kind of
| validates that a lot of people will quit, which is the concern.
| 25% is a lot. It'd be interesting to see numbers from those who
| were not employed, i.e. how many gained employment.
|
| The bits about 'having to drop future plans' isn't fair. Of
| course, people will have to adjust after losing a major source of
| income.
| winstonewert wrote:
| wow, that's just dishonest reporting.
| SirLotsaLocks wrote:
| to be fair, a lot of people are stuck in jobs that don't give
| them the benefits they want, don't pay them enough, or just
| don't suit them very well but they can't quit and get a new job
| because they aren't paid enough for that. UBI gives people a
| chance to quit and not immediately be on the streets. This also
| creates more competition for employers to win over employees
| instead of creating wage-slaves. I doubt that's what everybody
| who quit here did, but it is part of the idea of UBI.
| jariel wrote:
| "don't give them the benefits they want, don't pay them
| enough, or just don't suit them very well "
|
| 80-90% of the population would fit into this category.
|
| You are not entitled to social services because 'you don't
| like your job'.
| chillacy wrote:
| Yea the basic income in the study seems to be means tested
| so it might incentivize people to quit.
|
| Just want to point out that a universal income would be
| constant regardless of job held, so there's no incentive to
| quit. If the UBI amount is tuned correctly, then those who
| don't have a job can subsist long enough to find a better
| job, which I'd posit is a net boon for our economy.
| winstonewert wrote:
| That may all be true.
|
| But its extremely dishonest to make the headline "people kept
| working" when 25% of them quit.
| keymone wrote:
| Quitting is not the metric that is interesting, quitting and
| staying unemployed long-term is.
| giarc wrote:
| That popped out at me as well. I'd like to see the actual
| report because 25% of people stopping work is a big deal.
| However, it appears the response rate of the survey was only
| 217 of 4000 (5%) which isn't good. Typically when you have
| large population level studies like this, you have staff
| embedded in the town and would conduct telephone interviews
| with all participants. I wonder if the cancellation of the
| project meant they could only afford an online survey.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| The program was fully designed and budgeted. The new
| government scrapped it unilaterally after campaigning on
| keeping it saying "it's not showing good results"--but the
| study had barely begun!
|
| Any issues with reporting are unfounded since the program
| wasn't able to run as designed.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| It might very well be that they quit low pay jobs they took
| only because they had no alternative. It's obvious that the job
| market would need to adjust with an UBI in place. Most wage-
| slavery level jobs would have no justification to exist
| anymore.
| gridspy wrote:
| People actually enjoy being useful. We actually enjoy work which
| preserves dignity and has visible benefit.
|
| This idea that people only do work because they must is flawed.
| Most citizens are happy when they are doing a reasonable amount
| of work.
|
| Basic Income is crucial because not all useful work is fairly
| paid. From parenting to housekeeping, (early) innovating to art -
| so many beneficial activities suffer because the stress of
| financial security grinds them out of existence.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Totally off-topic so totally relevant: this is the kind of topic
| for which I wish each comment had its author's age, location and
| income displayed.
| RegBarclay wrote:
| I'm not sure anything was proven about people continuing to work
| during a temporary basic income study. If the basic income
| provided is temporary as part of a study, why would I leave my
| job when I know I'm going to need the income from my job after
| the study is over?
| simonsarris wrote:
| This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show
| a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the
| detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how
| about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion:
|
| > Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but
| unemployed during the pilot (17%)
|
| So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of
| the labor market when its a short-term study is huge.
|
| For the ~10% figure, Chris Stucchio has a fairly succinct roundup
| of the work disincentive of other studies so far:
| https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces...
|
| ~~~
|
| Personal opinion: If you consider multi-generational
| entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit,
| then the work disincentive could be a disaster. In UBI long run,
| the children of parents who have _never_ worked are probably
| going to be at a large disadvantage. I think its already a
| problem _today_ for children of SSI recipient parents (even
| compared to children of SSDI parents), but its not easy to prove.
| [deleted]
| shkkmo wrote:
| That is a pretty misleading assessment of the study:
|
| > Overall, there was a slight reduction in the number employed
| during the pilot compared to the number employed prior to the
| pilot. Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment
| while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the
| participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13
| (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with
| the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more
| qualified workers.
|
| The work disincentive seems well below 10%.
|
| > If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty
| as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work
| disincentive could be a disaster.
|
| The meta study you linked to shows a marked difference in the
| effect across genders. It seems pretty likely that a reduction
| in the labor force would caused by a significant factor by
| families where both parents work, and one has the ability to
| stay home with the kids. I don't see any data here talking
| about an increase in household where neither parent works. I
| suspect that any decrease that does exist, applies to single-
| parent households.
|
| When you take this into account alongside the number of these
| the "work disincentived" that are people moving into full-time
| education programs, it doesn't seem obvious at all that here
| will be a negative effect on multi-generational poverty.
|
| Finally, that article seems to lack a basic understanding of
| economics. A reduction in employment due to reductions in the
| job supply (such as during a recession) is in no way equivalent
| to a reduction in employment due to reductions in the labor
| supply. When you reduce the job supply, you reduce consumer
| income due to job loss / wage reductions, this compounds to
| further lower economic activity and thus leads to more
| reduction in the job supply. When you reduce labor supply
| through UBI, you don't see the same drop in consumer income,
| and wages should actually go up.
| nicholassmith wrote:
| As someone that grew up in an area where there are many
| families that have at least two generations of non-working
| family units I'm actually thrilled by UBI. It won't encourage
| that any more than the current social welfare system does, even
| if those numbers increase slightly the rest of the benefits to
| the rest of the population are still worth it.
|
| Not doing things because _some_ of the population take the piss
| is not sensible.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > It won't encourage that any more than the current social
| welfare system does
|
| Citation needed
| nicholassmith wrote:
| Smack a large "in my opinion" on there. I don't think
| anyone has done the statistical modelling for it yet.
| sailfast wrote:
| Why is a reduction in labor supply bad at present for low /
| unskilled labor? We're moving in that direction anyway using
| automation and software anyway, correct?
|
| Also I see no mention at all of frictional unemployment as part
| of Mr. Stucchio's conclusions and if I suddenly had the ability
| to look for new jobs I would certainly take advantage.
|
| The 10% number is created because people would now have actual
| OPTIONS, which is exactly what you want to create with this
| program. It's one of the goals. I don't see the disincentive
| being an issue except that it might increase wages in a tight
| economy which, is an actual thing people also want to do with
| these kinds of programs.
|
| As for the personal opinion: obviously you're entitled to it,
| however I'd recommend a deeper look. Are you drawing this
| conclusion from personal experience? Do you know people whose
| parents never worked and are you really saying they're at a
| disadvantage because their family never worked, or is the real
| cause of the disadvantage of the "entrenchments of poverty" the
| lack of money?
|
| The issue seems to be less "look at this poor role model - they
| never worked, so neither will their kids" but rather "we didn't
| have any money to actually consider a life that would allow me
| to focus on the things that make one successful, but rather
| food was difficult, and we were one broken arm away from
| bankruptcy". There seems to be a bias in your opinion. Please
| go speak with or listen to some actual human stories. I don't
| know anyone who would be less likely to be successful as a
| result of UBI. (Nor am I sold that it's a magic bullet either -
| it would be very costly)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who would be less likely to be
| successful as a result of UBI.
|
| I have an acquaintance who works at min wage jobs just long
| enough to qualify for unemployment, then he manages to get
| laid off. He lives off the unemployment until it runs out,
| then gets another min wage job, and the cycle repeats as long
| as I've known him. He's quite content with this arrangement.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Wouldn't he be more successful with UBI, then? He would
| likely overall save the corporations he's being employed on
| and off by money by reducing their turnover. Also, it's
| likely most low wage jobs would have their wages increase
| because there would be less fear of unionizing if striking
| meant that nobody would be going hungry.
|
| Thus, UBI can reduce the degree of low wage exploitation at
| both the worker's side (getting laid off asap for
| unemployment) and the business's side (exploitative
| policies countered by stronger unions and more incentive to
| unionize) while at the same time providing a fixed rate
| cost and less bureaucracy needed compared to the current
| welfare systems
|
| Just saying, seems like a win-win to me.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Wouldn't he be more successful with UBI, then?
|
| How would he be more successful by not working at all?
|
| > He would likely overall save the corporations he's
| being employed on and off by money by reducing their
| turnover.
|
| Businesses are used to high turnover with lower paid
| employees. It's ok, though, because their jobs tend to be
| interchangeable and easy for someone new to get up to
| speed on.
|
| > win-win
|
| The lose part is supporting people who would otherwise
| work and contribute to the economy. I don't know many
| people, but the fact that I personally know several that
| would not work if they didn't have to means that there
| are likely plenty of them. (I'm talking about able-bodied
| adults without dependents.)
| mordymoop wrote:
| Would be good if they could somehow disentangle work from
| valuable work. Many (maybe most) hold down "bullshit jobs" that
| create no value and serve mainly as a kind of de facto socially
| subsidized welfare. The aim of UBI ought to be the elimination
| of worthless jobs.
| daemonk wrote:
| What are the demographics of those that dropped out of the work
| force? Didn't some UBI studies observe that while there are
| people that dropped out of the workforce, these people
| consisted of mothers that can now go back to child rearing or
| younger people that can now pursue an education?
| jbeales wrote:
| Not really demographics, but from the article:
|
| > while some people did stop working, about half of them
| headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better
| job.
| simonsarris wrote:
| It is extremely unfortunate but studies like this are almost
| always done by people with somewhat close-ended goals. This
| research in this one is mostly self reports, and then, mostly
| "did free money make you feel better?"
|
| They are not recording, or interested in recording, the
| nature of who dropped out of the workforce and why, even
| though that seems like far more important, and somewhat more
| empirical, information.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| In your criticism you are missing some crucial details
| surrounding this report.
|
| This is essentially scrounging to make the most out of what
| was a single, but fully budgeted, study on BI with the
| intention of running more studies.
|
| The study was cancelled by the incoming government out of
| spite. All people who set up plans, knowing the full length
| of the study beforehand were suddenly tossed out of the
| program and it was just down, including any study
| occurring.
|
| They're trying to gather what and any information they can
| from the program that wasn't even given the chance to run
| to completion.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/basic-income-pilot-project-
| fo...
| 76543210 wrote:
| Child rearing seems like a waste of talent.
|
| Our high cost of education should be teaching people to
| create more value than the 15k/yr of value it is raising a
| child before the age of 5.(daycare costs, 4 children per 1
| adult)
|
| As an ancedote, it seems part time mothers are significantly
| happier than stay at home moms.
| take_a_breath wrote:
| ==Child rearing seems like a waste of talent.==
|
| Based on what metric?
| 76543210 wrote:
| Using identical twins, they find outcomes are basically
| identical.
|
| And really this only applies to 0-5. After that, kids go
| to school.
| take_a_breath wrote:
| What outcomes are basically identical? Could you share
| the study you seem to be citing?
|
| Kids go to school around age 5, but I'm not sure that is
| the end of child rearing.
| 76543210 wrote:
| There are lots of studies/stories. Google "identical
| twins separated at birth"
|
| Once a kid is in school, a parent can work. Removing the
| need for UBI.
| take_a_breath wrote:
| I'm not going to do the leg work to validate unsourced
| claims that you made, but I will assume you don't have
| kids based on your comments.
|
| It's possible that things are more complex than you
| suggest (or realize). One simple example is the typical
| start/end time for school. In Houston (a random example,
| but a very large school district), this is the school
| schedule [1]:
|
| * 7:30 a.m. - 2:50 p.m. for elementary schools and K-8
| campuses
|
| How well does that schedule fit with a typical job?
|
| [1] https://blogs.houstonisd.org/news/2018/01/10/hisd-to-
| standar...
| rocmcd wrote:
| Trying to distill 'child rearing' to $15k/year and calling
| it a 'waste of talent' is absurd. Not everything can (and
| should) be broken down into a monetary amount and optimized
| for.
|
| You can classify anything as a 'waste of talent' when
| looking through this lens. Are you a software engineer? If
| so, then doing literally anything apart from developing
| software is a 'waste of talent'. Cleaning dishes?
| Gardening? Exercising?
| 76543210 wrote:
| Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a
| restaurant is a waste of talent.
|
| Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring
| unskilled workers to do those tasks at home.
|
| I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting
| edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And
| there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend
| together where he learns how his dad behaves.
| refurb wrote:
| A huge part of growing up is developing bonds,
| understanding relationships and getting your kid on a
| firm footing so they can deal with what the world throws
| at them.
|
| A lot of that develop happens when they are not learning,
| or at least you don't think they are.
| 76543210 wrote:
| I've been working full time and my kid gets excited to
| see me every day.
|
| The bond is there.
|
| If you really want to turn this around, imagine how
| dependent a child would be on a parent if they never used
| a babysitter.
| lulula wrote:
| hah.
|
| Go create this lean startup factory that raises children
| from infants to 18 year olds. After all interested parents
| are superfluous to the well being of a child.
|
| Child raising is invisible and yet so crucial to our
| economy. What happens to our economy when parents refuse to
| raise the needed labor inputs for free anymore?
| [deleted]
| virmundi wrote:
| Why not require those who go on UBI and not work to give up the
| ability to reproduce while doing so? It's not a perfect system
| but it would reduce the amount of population stuck in the
| entrenchment.
| richardlblair wrote:
| Your right in that the reporting needs a lot of help in this
| article. It does a terrible job of painting a picture of how
| the province's welfare works today.
|
| Welfare in Ontario strongly disincentives work. Basic income
| may not be enough, but the current system is fundamentally
| broken. It punishes people who do what they can, by cutting
| them off from the system. So, by working, in many cases people
| will earn less.
|
| I also would like a break down of the savings the province had
| on healthcare.
|
| There is a lot of potential in Ontario and we need to help
| people get there. Health, wellness, education, and supporting
| those in a bad spot financially are all ways to do that.
|
| Anecdotally, I live just outside of Hamilton, one of the places
| the trial was run. That city needs help desperately. For
| Canada's standard, it's in a very very rough place. It needs
| every bit of help it can get.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Why would you ever want someone to work? Isn't the ideal that
| we automate everything, work never, and everyone can get
| enough?
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| As long as our government doesn't have a public service with an
| unlimited supply of entry-level jobs, it is disingenuous to
| talk about poverty as only endable by work. Poverty can be
| ended by money as well, and given that poverty is _defined_ by
| (lack of) money, it doesn 't seem right to focus on work.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| The end of slavery was also a huge disincentive to work
| hirundo wrote:
| Is starvation really less of an incentive to work than being
| beaten?
| koonsolo wrote:
| One other thing to add to it: The community in the experiment
| were not self sustained. What I mean is that extra money was
| pumped into this experiment.
|
| In real life the money needs to come from that same community,
| which boils down to increased taxes on labor. I would love to
| see the statistics on work incentive when your taxes double on
| that same work.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work
| disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say
| it disincentivizes work.
|
| Most of these studies aren't done independent of existing
| means-tested government benefits. Then the UBI amount in itself
| is typically not enough to disqualify from eligibility for
| means-tested benefits, but a UBI plus a job would phase out
| nearly everything.
|
| So you have on the one hand more subsidy living on the UBI plus
| existing government benefits than you would if the UBI would
| _replace_ existing government benefits, and on the other hand
| still all the same disincentive to work of the existing system
| because taking a job results in the loss of government
| benefits, which results in a very high de facto tax rate and
| corresponding disincentive to work.
| jbeales wrote:
| > This is very misleading reporting. ... Slightly less than
| one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot
| (17%)
|
| From the article:
|
| > The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who
| were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite
| receiving basic income.
|
| While they didn't say "83% of people kept working" saying
| "nearly three quarters" is much easier to read. The article
| under-reports the number of people who kept working, if
| anything.
|
| Edit: formatting.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| I doubt that the 17% who quit were working in jobs that they
| liked.
|
| If a employer's job requires a "work or die" sword of Damocles
| dangling over laborers' heads to be filled, perhaps it
| shouldn't exist.
|
| The New Testament Bible aphorism from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "He
| who does not work, neither shall he eat," has been used by many
| to incentivize work, including John Smith of Jamestown colony
| and V.I. Lenin of the Soviet Union. It is an aphorism borne by
| a world of scarcity, where all available labor is not only
| required, but must also be allocated wisely. It isn't just
| "work or die", but "if you won't help, we all might die."
|
| In a world of excess, wherein machines supply most of the labor
| required to produce the necessities, that becomes
| counterproductive. If everyone must work to eat, but no person
| can work as efficiently as a machine, and there isn't enough
| discretionary work to go around, then that game of economic
| musical chairs ends when someone starves because someone didn't
| want their hedges trimmed into topiary, or they didn't want to
| upgrade to the fused basalt railings on their luxury yacht. If
| the machine-owners can't spend the profits from their machines
| fast enough, people cannot afford to buy what the machines
| produce.
| zelon88 wrote:
| No,
|
| It dis-incentivizes killing your emotional and physical well-
| being for a dead-end position at a slave-driven agency that's
| forcing all their workers into race to the bottom.
|
| Which in turn incentivizes trickle down to attract those
| workers back into jobs again with worthwhile pay and adequate
| benefits to survive or _gasp_ maybe even raise a family!
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Sounds like UBI gave them the negotiating power to decline jobs
| that did not meet their needs, were too exploitive, were not in
| alignment with their goals, and so on. That's part of the
| point: to increase labor power.
| ConfusionMatrix wrote:
| When my kids were younger my wife and I had to work to pay the
| bills, but the majority of her income went to child care. After
| a year or so I got a raise and she could be a stay at home mom
| and our kids just jumped ahead mentally with mom their to
| interact with them all day.
|
| If UBI could enable a parent to stay home full time that would
| be a very good use of funds.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| This "necessity of work" is an evil that we must get rid of. So
| many jobs are absolutely useless and degrading from a societal
| and human perspective. If basic income enables one to stop
| doing these jobs, humanity as a whole is better for it.
| danenania wrote:
| "If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as
| its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work
| disincentive could be a disaster."
|
| Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a
| disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a
| work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic
| material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their
| potential.
|
| A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage
| slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do
| anything other than the same thing with their lives.
| YinglingLight wrote:
| You neglect any psychological effects of Scarcity Mentality,
| entitlement, and avoidance of responsibility for one's life
| situation. It is far less a resource problem than you would
| suggest.
| luckylion wrote:
| Multi-generational poverty is a thing in Western + Northern
| Europe as well, so it may be something other than the US
| model.
| Aunche wrote:
| > millions of people lack the basic material resources needed
| to fulfill anything close to their potential
|
| There is a limited amount of capital in the world.
| Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not
| help the billion people who still lack electricity. There
| simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions
| of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a
| much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also
| creates wealth.
| Joeri wrote:
| UBI doesn't get stuffed under the mattress, it gets spent,
| buying electricity, funding investment into electricity
| networks.
|
| Give money to the poor and most of it will end up back at
| the rich. It doesn't work as well trickling down.
| Aunche wrote:
| Money will eventually circulate everywhere, but it's a
| matter of efficiency. This is an immense simplification,
| but to illustrate the intuition, consider 2 options:
|
| 1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in
| a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a
| couple years. These people can finally afford to see a
| doctor and heat up their homes during the winter.
|
| 2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's
| UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a
| higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more
| money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an
| additional factory. However, within that decade, 100
| people in that developing country died of a disease that
| would be easily cured with medicine had they had they
| been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| Trickle up economics?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The money to pay for UBI doesn't come from a mattress,
| either. It comes out of money that was invested.
| zepto wrote:
| Since trickling down doesn't work, if UBI doesn't work
| either, we need a new proposal.
| danenania wrote:
| "There is a limited amount of capital in the world."
|
| You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any
| programmer should know: if you sit down and code something
| useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital
| in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch
| of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of
| furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add
| value to the world, and the more value they can add, the
| bigger the total pie of wealth can grow.
|
| Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to
| the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of
| poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions
| and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks
| from doing anything with their lives other than scraping
| by.
| Aunche wrote:
| I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to
| everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You
| can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase
| capital than redistribute it.
|
| > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite
| to the slightly-less elite.
|
| If you've seen how China changed in the last couple
| decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true.
| Basically all electronics are manufactured in a
| developing Asian country by the children of subsidence
| farmers.
| ilammy wrote:
| > It's better to increase capital than redistribute it.
|
| Consider the notion of _leverage_ where both A and B can
| increase their capital more in absolute value if some
| part of A 's significant capital is redistributed to
| poorer B. UBI just takes risk out of this equation so A
| does not have to _lend_ to B in order for this to happen.
| Though yeah, this makes A poorer in absolute value than
| they would have been without this sneaky taxation (=
| involuntary expropriation of money).
| Aunche wrote:
| > UBI just takes risk out of this equation so A does not
| have to lend to B in order for this to happen.
|
| For society, the risk is that A is more efficient at
| investing money than a blind redistribution scheme.
| That's a multi-trillion dollar gamble.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Isn't it a case of investment efficiency versus efficacy?
| If all you care about is capital increasing capital, then
| efficiency is a good measure. If you care about how the
| increase in capital impacts peoples lives, then giving $1
| to a billionaire is less effective than someone on
| minimum wage.
| danenania wrote:
| Yeah, so now instead of barely getting by on subsistence
| farming, they barely get by working 16 hour shifts in
| dangerous conditions with no rights. While the workers
| may be mostly better off than they were before, they
| still have to spend almost all their time and energy on
| meeting the basic needs of survival. The people who
| benefitted by _far_ the most from all that investment
| were the owners, executives, and shareholders of the
| companies that run the factories. So I would say that
| distribution of capital was still quite lacking in terms
| of where it could have the most leverage to increase
| opportunity.
| bob33212 wrote:
| The book Sapiens has a similar message. The children of
| farmers who move to textile manufacturing were worse off
| than their parents in the 1800s. But the great great
| grandchildren of those people have material wealth
| greater than upperclass people in the 1800s when
| comparing clothes, entertainment, transportation, health
| care. And none of them would prefer to live as an 1800s
| farmer today.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Keep in mind what the factories were producing - it was
| not luxury goods for the wealthy. It was textiles,
| clothing, pots, pans, all sorts of things that made life
| better for ordinary people.
|
| This, in turn, is what made it possible for us today to
| enjoy a high standard of living unimaginable back then.
| Aunche wrote:
| People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that
| completely against their best interests. If you're a
| subsidence farmer and get sick, you have no means of
| making enough money to see a doctor. Historically, people
| didn't care about leisure until they accomplished
| stability.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that
| completely against their best interests.
|
| The world is actually full of such examples. There's
| quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as
| to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example
| substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer -
| and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and
| 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural
| cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
| Aunche wrote:
| > in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the
| move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory
| production.
|
| The industrial revolution started in the late 18th
| century. Keep in mind that the population was booming
| then, so there wasn't enough space on the cottage to
| support the same standard of living.
|
| I feel like the concept of a idyllic peasant is the
| modern iteration of the "noble savage." For complex
| decisions, you indeed run into the paradox of choice and
| other strange psychological phenomena. However, choice
| between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital
| is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times.
| You need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| While the move to factories was only being completed by
| the end of the 18th century, the process had started much
| earlier, in laying the groundwork for the creation of
| industry, from the enclosures to the transformation of
| the peasantry to farmers who rent their land (rather than
| tithes to their lord). The market for land leases,
| necessary for the creation of the English capitalist
| class, flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries.
|
| >However, choice between sacrificing time in order to
| accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done
| billions of times.
|
| It's curious why so much land had to be expropriated
| forcefully if it were such an obvious choice to the
| modern-day noble savages - and even moreso when one
| considers modern union activity and intense revolts
| against the increasing duration and intensity of the
| working day in America, and to no lesser extent other
| countries which did not have the privilege of being so
| readily acquainted with capital. These are no edge cases
| either. The largest debate in the literature being the
| question of why the majority does not rise up against the
| unfair conditions implemented by a minority. Whether you
| subscribe to the false consciousness solution or the
| capability solution, both allow you to say that the
| "rational choice" of not rising up (or accumulating
| capital) is simply an element of playing the game. The
| only difference between the theories turns on the point
| of whether the players know it's a game or not.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > doesn't prepare them to do anything
|
| Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents
| work doesn't "prepare" you for work any more than watching TV
| does, but that's because it's completely unrelated. Watching
| your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn't
| "prepare" you for work in the 21st century either, education
| does. My father was a police officer (they don't make much
| money) and my mother stayed home with us - they both
| encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did.
| Watching my father go off to a dangerous job every day didn't
| "prepare" me for work, but it did help me grow up with a
| sense of "work is part of adult life" that I wouldn't have
| gotten if he'd spent every day watching TV and drinking beer.
| danenania wrote:
| "they both encouraged us to study so we could do better
| than they did"
|
| And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit
| home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a
| $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school,
| or start a business, or travel outside the country once in
| awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important
| skill like music or math or programming because the
| intense, ceaseless, soul-destroying pressure of just
| getting by has been lifted a bit.
|
| Also, while I understand that police officers don't make a
| lot and it's very tough job, it's also a very stable job
| with benefits, a pension, etc. so I imagine that despite
| not being anywhere close to wealthy, your parents also
| didn't need to spend their days focused solely on survival
| like someone who works minimum wage with no job security,
| who has possibly no health insurance, who likely has to
| frequently get high interest payday loans to make rent or
| buy food... that kind of lifestyle is extremely difficult
| to dig out of, and it leads inevitably towards family
| breakdown, crime, health-destroying habits, mental illness,
| and general despair. That's who basic income is really for.
| I mean these people are literally _killing_ themselves just
| to get by, and the response of many folks with far more
| privilege is "eh, you'd just be sitting around drinking
| beer otherwise".
| bluGill wrote:
| The only folks I saw working minimum wage to support the
| family didn't have those worries. Now I'll grant that
| health insurance was a lot cheaper 20 years ago, but
| still they didn't worry about payday loans - they weren't
| dumb enough to take them out. (I don't know who does - my
| personal experience doesn't show anyone doing it, but
| again that was 20 years ago when they weren't a thing)
|
| The ones I knew working minimum wage lived cheaply. They
| didn't worry about losing their jobs because they were
| hard workers who could be counted on - the type of person
| who gets the maximum raise until they top out the pay
| scale. They were also the type of person to be offered
| job in management and have the potential to make as much
| as anyone with an engineering degree (we haven't kept in
| touch - typically the requirement to move for the job
| every few years catches up and they decide the next
| promotion isn't worth it and so stagnate at nice wage
| that is better than average)
|
| I knew people who sit around drinking bear and working
| part time. Everybody knew they were losers. It wasn't
| lack of opportunity that is keeping them down it is lack
| of following up on it. They would abandon their kids even
| if you paid the a million dollars a year (even assuming
| they don't overdose on some drug)
|
| I also know mentally ill people. Their abilities vary,
| but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on
| some other scam. (I know someone who lost money to the
| Nigerian prince scam, and a dozen others - the family is
| careful to lock down his money now so he can't do that)
| zazaalaza wrote:
| "Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they
| will just waste it on some other scam."
|
| This is correct. For scammers this will be a new gold
| mine. But I guess it will be a gold mine for everyone.
| It's 2.8 trillion every year injected into the economy.
| If you look at it like that than the question is, how can
| I divert some of that money into my own pockets?
| zentiggr wrote:
| Sounds like a good incentive to start services to
| actually help protect those most vulnerable to scams - my
| own mother could have benefited from something similar as
| one of her caretakers bilked her out of a few thousand
| dollars toward the end of her life.
|
| A 'fool them once, shame on you... but it won't happen
| again!' policy would be a welcome thing.
| peterashford wrote:
| That's not true. You're saying the example your parents set
| has no effect on children and we know that's not the case
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I said exactly the opposite. If I had watched my father
| sitting around doing nothing, I probably would have grown
| up to sit around doing nothing. I saw him working
| instead, and he set a positive example, even though his
| job wasn't a high-paying "powerful" one.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Watching your parents handle a high-powered executive job
| very much _does_ prepare you for work in the 21st century -
| a certain kind of work, anyway.
| pault wrote:
| I grew up poor in a very wealthy suburb and went to high
| school with a lot of children of high powered executives
| and attorneys. In my experience they were in no way
| prepared for the real world, unless by prepared you mean
| living with zero parental guidance and no sense of the
| value of money.
| easytiger wrote:
| > A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-
| wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them
| to do anything other than the same thing with their lives.
|
| I'm sorry but you don't have the first clue.
|
| Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation
| states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst
| taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational
| jobs and careers.
| danenania wrote:
| Some do, but it's a small percentage. Many more struggle
| their whole lives to survive without being able to make any
| significant improvement to their family's economic status.
| brightball wrote:
| That's what I always come back to with UBI. It needs to be
| survival level but not desirable long term, so that the goal is
| for it to supplement a job and not to replace it.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Your link leaves out the study of the Alaska Permanent Fund
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 I believe it's left out
| because it contradicts the premise - it found more people
| actually looked for work because prior to the Alaska payment
| they were too poor to venture far from home.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Similar findings are repeated all across the social safety
| net. For example, the Scandinavian countries with their
| robust social programs routinely top lists for ease of
| entrepreneurship. [0] (e.g. Losing health insurance is big
| disincentive to starting a new company.)
|
| There are also have been repeated studies that found that
| financial stress causes people to perform worse on cognitive
| tasks, and removing that stressor increases
| performance.[1][2]
|
| [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2016/07/24/why-
| the-...
|
| [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-
| brain...
|
| [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/
| yaY...
| refurb wrote:
| Ease of entrepreneurship might be high, but actual
| entrepreneurship lags the US where a much weaker social
| safety net exists.
|
| Ow do you explain that?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| You're connecting two irrelevant things.
|
| Look at Sweden.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/swed
| en-...
| crooked-v wrote:
| Sweden has 10 million people. The U.S. has 300 million.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| Your opinion is spot on. Also the studies are short term
| whereas real UBI would be permanent.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The fallacy in that argument is that you're equating "dropping
| out of the labour market" with doing absolutely nothing of any
| value.
|
| For life.
|
| The other side of the fallacy is that any occupation based on
| investment or speculation is essentially parasitic, unless it
| includes a rare commitment to stick with an enterprise until
| it's a net benefit to all stakeholders. (Not just shareholders
| and the board.)
|
| The latter occupations are "in the labour market" but still
| making a net negative contribution.
|
| Essentially you're attempting to frame this as if UBI
| encourages freeloading. In fact the most influential
| freeloading is mostly at the other end - and the fact that it's
| considered a heroic and noble kind of sanctioned freeloading
| doesn't change its basic nature.
|
| So unless you're sure that everyone who is temporarily out of
| the labour market does nothing of value to anyone, _ever_ , and
| also that their negative influence is worse than that of
| speculators and rent-seekers, it's hard to be convinced that
| this is a serious problem.
|
| The other issue - social capital - is a complete different
| problem. People who are in work don't necessarily have access
| to social capital either. But as a rule it's easier to start a
| business with a safety net than without one.
|
| UBI could always be associated with opportunities for extended
| education. Money alone is rarely the issue, and there aren't
| many downsides to extended adult ed.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Also can you understand why I'm not shocked that an American-
| born statistician choosing to live in a third world country has
| evidence to support UBI being a bad idea?
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| And this is a very misleading summary of the results.
|
| Here are some actual quote from the study:
|
| > Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while
| 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants
| who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled
| in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of
| re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers.
|
| Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to
| train for a better job. That's great!
|
| > most of the respondents who were unemployed during the pilot
| reported experiencing health issues that made it difficult or
| impossible for them to work.
|
| Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to
| pay for a basic existence? That's great!
|
| Take into account those two factors and almost no able bodied,
| employable person opted to not work.
|
| Sounds like a success to me.
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| Education does not equate to a successful job. I know a few
| career students that acquire one useless degree after another
| because every time they try to get a job they find no one is
| hiring.
| godelski wrote:
| Education does correlate with a more successful job and it
| also correlates with a better functioning society. I
| believe that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that
| there is some causal relationship (note: this does not say
| that higher education leads to a successful job, but rather
| says that higher education increases the chances of you
| getting a more successful job).
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| No, because you can be educated in any topic up to and
| including the history of the Kardashians. This in no way
| contributes to a better functioning society. Your entire
| premise that education = more intelligence is completely
| wrong. Would you argue a person educated by extremists
| correlates with a better functioning society?
|
| The only thing that betters society is the positive
| application of knowledge to creating something of value
| for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must
| actually apply it make a difference.
| godelski wrote:
| It is unclear to me if you are being obtuse on purpose or
| on accident. But I want to reiterate that trolling is not
| allowed on HN and it is presumed that you are going to
| take arguments on good faith. So I will answer as if you
| aren't being needlessly obtuse.
|
| We're talking about institutional education, not gaining
| more information. So in this discussion we're not talking
| about people spending their money to become more informed
| on Kardashians. We're talking about them going to school.
| As far as I'm aware, there's no school that teaches the
| history of the Kardashians.
| jpttsn wrote:
| Sounds like the participants knew the study was temporary and
| invested the money in a job they knew they'd need after the
| study.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| How do you sign up for such a study?
| zazaalaza wrote:
| Exactly. With a permanent UBI in place you can throw all
| these studies out the window.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| While this is technically true, it's also true for every
| other political changes.
|
| All human behaviors are affected by knowing that
| something is going to end soon or not.
|
| Yet, UBI is often held under strict scrutiny. While the
| status quo is not challenged in the same way.
| battery_cowboy wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| Is that anything but conjecture? I see a study showing
| that UBI is a "good thing", and you didn't provide a
| source for your reasoning.
|
| Edit: to all those saying that the parent comment is
| straightforward, or common sense, or whatever, it's not
| straightforward or common sense because I disagree that
| UBI would be a failure. No one knows what would happen
| under UBI, but these types of studies give some evidence
| as to what is going to happen.
|
| Everyone saying the parent is correct is basically
| similar to saying we should stop studying fusion because
| it's common sense we'll never achieve it (there are
| people who say that, too).
|
| It's a good first step to study this, at least, and goes
| to show we need to test UBI on a greater scale.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| What I am saying is that a temporary UBI experiment
| cannot simulate the changes that a permanent UBI would
| bring. Especially when everyone is aware that this is
| temporary.
| [deleted]
| rtkwe wrote:
| The main thing being said is there's a drastic difference
| between knowing the BI you're getting is temporary and it
| being a 'permanent' government program. There's no way to
| provide a citation for that because the only way to run
| that is to have a full UBI and study the results to see
| if these short term BI studies still hold water.
|
| However it's not a stretch at all to say people will act
| different when they're temporarily receiving money than
| when they'll receive it 'forever'.
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| In fact it's well known that disposable vs fixed income
| directly impacts the financial decisions people make
| Revery wrote:
| I think his statement that these UBI experiments yield
| little insight into how actual UBI could play out full-
| scale holds water without a source.
| zepto wrote:
| It's a logical challenge to the ecological validity of
| the study.
|
| No citation is needed for straightforward observations.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| Exactly people would behave differently if they knew it
| was permanent vs temporary.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| So, look at the people that win $1k a week for life and
| see how that turns out.
|
| https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/two-dollar/win-life
| [deleted]
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| You can argue that the only way to perform a completely
| accurate UBI experiment would be to run it for at least
| 60-80 years for everyone. Social experiments are very
| hard to do and have many flaws, but it seems unreasonable
| to say that the information gained by doing such studies
| should be "thrown out the window".
| datashow wrote:
| This issue is not a "flaw". It's a root problem. We want
| to know the effect of permanent UBI, not of a temporary
| one, and we know (strongly suspect) the effect will be
| different.
|
| Maybe the simple solution is that the researchers
| establish a dedicated million dollar bank account for a
| participant and automatically withdraw $1000 for the
| participant every month.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Still completely irrelevant as the U in UBI comes with a
| lot of externalities
| learnstats2 wrote:
| But there is no such thing as "permanent UBI", though.
|
| UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every
| government.
|
| The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether
| they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it
| makes sense to up-skill.
|
| Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born
| with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively
| very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to
| live.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| "UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every
| government"
|
| If this is true than implementing UBI will be more
| problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call
| for all other financial safety nets to be removed in
| order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare
| if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up
| everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something
| similar to how the pension system is, once in place it
| stays there forever-ish (meaning that it can potentially
| collapse).
|
| "we do know how people behave when they are born with a
| million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very
| rare that they are criticised for how they choose to
| live" - that's an excellent point.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| That would more accurately gauge the effect on how much
| it disincentivizes, and how it changes the lifestyle of
| the recipient.
|
| It does very little to test economics. Perhaps UBI leads
| to a lot of people deciding to tend bar at the local
| tennis club, volunteering for the job. Maybe introducing
| UBI across a large area has marked effects on gym
| memberships.
|
| Those seem easier to test if you put a large area on UBI
| for a short-ish term (though I admit I haven't seen any
| UBI research that analyses such social effects - perhaps
| somebody knows of some?)
| tic_tac wrote:
| The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in
| education. It's to support people who would otherwise be
| starving or homeless without a job.
|
| Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If
| UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give
| up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive
| by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity.
|
| And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes
| with society wide UBI.
|
| The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing
| money at people to spend on broken institutions like
| Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in
| the first place to make them more affordable and effective.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity
| adventures in education.
|
| That is YOUR OPINION of what UBI should be. It happens to
| be wrong.
|
| What people do with the money isn't the point of UBI at
| all. The point is to improve their lives, and boost the
| economy. Who cares what specific the money is spent on if
| it is making people healthier, less stressed, and happier?
| Loughla wrote:
| >Who cares what specific the money is spent on if it is
| making people healthier, less stressed, and happier?
|
| And here, in one sentence, is why we will NEVER see UBI
| in the United States of America. There is no ability to
| be the moral whip and maintain control over someone
| else's choices to make sure they don't 'waste my money'.
| Therefore, it will never happen.
|
| In the US, at least, it's not about doing what's right.
| It's not about making sure people are healthier, less
| stressed, and happier. It's about making sure they live
| the 'best' life they can, as defined by groups like the
| "moral majority".
| trianglem wrote:
| Of course the UBI is for personal growth and development
| even if it isn't a guaranteed success. People have a
| fallback and would be more likely to take risks.
| godelski wrote:
| > The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity
| adventures in education. It's to support people who would
| otherwise be starving or homeless without a job.
|
| Who gave this strict definition. In my opinion, the point
| of UBI is to benefit society. I do think people being more
| educated benefits society as a whole, and thus I think
| people using their UBI on this is beneficial.
| einpoklum wrote:
| So, education is a "vanity adventure"?
|
| Perhaps if you're a person who looks at your cleaners or
| servers or cashiers as people with no potential for self-
| betterment; as people who are unable to expand their
| horizons.
|
| Ugh.
| tic_tac wrote:
| As it is structured today, yes it is. The majority of
| people study Psychology, Sociology, Economics or
| something of that nature then go on to make power point
| slides or enter numbers in Excel all day for the rest of
| their lives.
|
| Enabling this sort of broken system is exactly what UBI
| as currently imagined will do.
|
| The problem with progressive crusades like UBI is that
| they completely ignore reality... UBI will only increase
| the cost of education while simultaneously decreasing its
| value as a signaling mechanism, which is where the
| majority of modern education's value lies in the first
| place.
|
| Let me repeat from my original comment: UBI on a societal
| scale will only cause inflation without an increase in
| real income. It's a true waste of money and nonsensical
| in practice.
|
| That's why it's so horrifying to see people who should
| know better continue to try to meme it into existence and
| simply reminds all sober observers how divorced modern
| "progressivism" is from reality.
| purerandomness wrote:
| > The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity
| adventures in education
|
| What a twisted way to phrase "train for their next career
| step, which will make them earn more money, so the state
| gets more tax money than before"
|
| But for you, it's always "vanity adventures" when it's
| _other people 's_ education, right?
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Sounds like a success to me.
|
| I like the concept too, but we have to be careful what we
| wish for.
|
| If, somehow, UBI becomes real there will be a huge push from
| the libertarians and far-right to dismantle whatever is left
| of the social safety net. They actually would love the idea
| of replacing medicare, social security and other programs
| with a quick 1000/month that would enable even more shrinking
| of government.
| bavell wrote:
| I mean, part of the allure of UBI to me is that it _is_ a
| social safety net except it benefits everyone. Because it
| 's universal and not means-tested, it removes the stigma of
| being 'on welfare' which IMO is incredibly discouraging and
| makes it harder to rise out of your unfortunate situation.
| So yes, I would love if UBI replaced some programs while
| augments others.
|
| At the end of the day it's the most direct and effective
| way of combating poverty and goes a long way towards
| closing the wealth gap. Especially when we can divert those
| funds from corporations into the hands of the people.
|
| I do generally favor shrinking the government but not at
| the expense of the people's safety, liberty or well-being.
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| > At the end of the day it's the most direct and
| effective way of combating poverty and goes a long way
| towards closing the wealth gap.
|
| Where do you think all this Income is going to come from?
| The middle class will shoulder the bulk of it which will
| widen the wealth gap. You will end up with 1k in UBI and
| 1500 in taxes to pay for it.
| godelski wrote:
| Under Yang's plan even if you made $100k/yr (single
| person household) you'd get an increase[0]. You'd be
| having to make roughly $140k+/yr to see a decrease in
| total income (140k results in -$66/yr). (If you were the
| norm of 2 adults and 2 children your household income
| would need to be north of $315k/yr to "shoulder" his UBI)
|
| So I'm not sure why you think the middle class will
| shoulder the bulk of the cost. Do you think $150k/yr
| earners ($300k/yr families) are middle class? The median
| household income int he US (2018) was $62k/yr[1]
|
| [0] https://ubicalculator.com/
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/pub
| licatio...
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > enable even more shrinking of government.
|
| Nothing wrong with that. The government is severely
| bloated. Also nothing wrong with reducing or replacing
| horrid, administratively wasteful, degrading, stigmatized,
| means-tested social safety nets with UBI.
| godelski wrote:
| This is why Yang wanted to make it a choice. The average
| welfare recipient is getting less than $1k/mo in help and
| are limited in how they can use it (food stamps can't buy
| the car repair you need to keep your job).
|
| But I do think that is is an overstated concern __because__
| most welfare recipients are already receiving less
| assistance. Btw, there's capitalist oriented arguments for
| single payer options that libertarians are in favor of
| (tldr: health care operates under a network effect and
| single payer can minimize individual and public costs).
| sjwright wrote:
| Medicare isn't going anywhere. Once people get the taste
| for single payer healthcare, they don't give it up.
|
| Social security _should_ be replaced with privately held
| accounts, just like superannuation in Australia. But in the
| transition people would need to be paid out their
| entitlement. So no problem there.
|
| But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding
| disability etc) is that such a bad thing? As long as the
| UBI is high enough and indexed to cost of living, welfare
| that's broadly targeted at the poor should be unnecessary.
| Not just unnecessary, it tends to have the effect of making
| poverty stickier. Any time benefits are inversely tied to
| how well you're doing, you reduce the incentive to do
| better.
| djrhbedjkdi wrote:
| >Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to
| train for a better job. That's great!
|
| Ahahaha, 50% of people not faffing around would count as
| success to you? You pay the taxes for that then.
|
| >Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work
| to pay for a basic existence? That's great!
|
| Such an improvement! The old method of just buying some
| aspirin really got put in it's place here!
|
| Please, this sort of optimism is indicative of why this won't
| fly in America. I don't know if you're European or just
| really like rose colored glasses but these are the kinds of
| outcomes that doom policy proposals in America. If you're
| going to live on someone else's dime you're /expected/ to be
| wretched beyond reproach or guranteed to do something
| worthwhile. No one is going to be clapping for the tax that
| 50% of the time breeds couch potatoes.
| larrywright wrote:
| Do these studies account for people who drop out of the
| workforce to pursue education or training? It seems like that
| would be one of the benefits: allowing someone who is under
| skilled and working a low skill job to quit and focus on
| acquiring the skills they need to get a higher paying job.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| AFAIU That's what a number of the people were doing on the
| Ontario program. That and looking to start a business.
|
| They were promised 3 years and planned around that before the
| program was suddenly pulled out from under their feet after
| they'd already made major life changes.
| aylmao wrote:
| There could be other factors involved too, like the short-
| termness of the study. One year isn't a lot of time, and it's
| definitely enough to coast on savings and take a break from a
| job you hated until you get bored and/or need to take on
| another one.
|
| Also, more so than UBI (or perhaps as a compliment to one
| another), IMO reforms to labour policy are due. The 40 hour
| work-week has been standard for a long time, but if we have the
| productivity surplus to even consider UBI, why not consider a
| 4-day workweek, for example?
| danans wrote:
| UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality and economic
| insecurity, not a solution on its own.
|
| People will be incentivized to work despite UBI because they
| still want better things, and will work to pay for things that
| provide social signalling value.
|
| A UBI shouldn't be designed to try to cover all desires and
| eliminate all reason to work, but rather should be tailored to
| give people more flexibility in choosing jobs and locations.
|
| Even Andrew Yang's $1k/mo/adult proposal will not allow anyone
| to live very well in even the low COL areas of the US. But it
| might help them not to lose their roof or car while unemployed.
|
| This is analogous to how universal healthcare will never cover
| cosmetic procedures, but that's ok because it will cover your
| healthcare even if you end up unemployed.
| airstrike wrote:
| > UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality
|
| Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't
| necessarily rising.
|
| See e.g. the evolution of the distribution in wealth per
| wealth group per region based on data from table 3.2 of
| Credit Suisse's 2014 and 2019 Global Wealth Databooks.
|
| Compare "Percentage of region (in %)" from
|
| 2014 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png
|
| 2019 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png
|
| --------
|
| Link to full PDFs are here:
|
| https://www.credit-
| suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
|
| https://www.credit-
| suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
|
| (I picked 2014 and 2019 because those were the oldest /
| newest PDFs I could find by changing the year in the URL...)
| danans wrote:
| > Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't
| necessarily rising.
|
| My comment specifically referred to UBI in the context of
| the US, so I'm not sure what the relevance of global
| inequality is to whether or not an individual country does
| UBI.
|
| If anything, the globalization that is driving global
| inequality down (a good thing), when coupled with domestic
| policies in the developed world that massively favor owners
| of financial capital, are driving domestic inequality up,
| which further bolsters the argument for UBI-like measures.
| patentatt wrote:
| I think it would be hugely advantageous to my children if they
| had two parents who could dedicate themselves full time to
| raising them. In what world is having a parent stressed out and
| absent most of the time good for kids?
| neves wrote:
| You must also consider the amount of shitty jobs going away.
| I'd refuse a work that had terrible conditions, since I
| wouldn't die of hunger anymore. The other working people would
| also have better job condition, so they would be freer to quit
| their job. Everybody improves, but the business that exists
| just based in brutal exploitation of their workers.
| 1kGarand wrote:
| As long as you and others _choose_ to define value of a person
| only for their economic value (work output), we will always
| have poverty, no matter how enormous our total economic output
| (humans+machines) will become.
| mfer wrote:
| I know and know of many people who don't want to work or
| contribute to society. Sitting at home and not contributing to
| society is kind of a goal. Some groups are negative to those
| who try to work or contribute. I know families who have passed
| that on from parents to children.
|
| This isn't everyone but it is a segment. I don't see much talk
| about this.
|
| The folks in this segment aren't bound to be on HN.
|
| I point this out just as a piece of information. There are
| opportunities in that. Maybe not to make a bunch of money but
| to understand people and maybe help some.
| vharuck wrote:
| I don't think an economic system should be used as a blunt
| weapon to punish perceived immorality.
| mfer wrote:
| I added my comment as a data point. One that I find is
| often overlooked or not talked about. How that data point
| is considered is something else.
|
| As for how an economic system considers perceives
| immorality is a long winded conversation. Which economic
| system? What are rewards vs weapons in that economic
| system? For example, an economic system could reward work
| with money and not make money a given. Part of the idea is
| to look at rewards and how they work in a culture as well.
| pault wrote:
| Would the world be worse off if people who have no interest
| in working and will siphon off as much money as they can from
| their employer until they get fired left the workforce? Those
| jobs would be freed up for people that actually want them.
| crystaln wrote:
| Part of the reason for ubi is that a lot of work is
| exploitative or underpaid. Ubi puts people in a negotiating
| position to not work and demand higher payment, or to not work
| and contribute to society in other ways.
| asjw wrote:
| Or could put them out of business forever because they are
| less keen to work hard than those not living on UBI (for
| different reasons, it doesn't really make a difference)
|
| I think UBI is a good redistribution strategy if it's truly
| universal and with not requirements, but work wise I doubt it
| will change much...
| Kalium wrote:
| Might it be worth considering that choosing to not work and
| choosing to contribute to society in other ways could, for
| some people and in some circumstances, be slightly different
| decisions?
| a0zU wrote:
| There are absolutely people who would contribute to society
| in other ways but there are also people who would not work,
| not contribute and, sit in their rooms all day not having
| the will to do anything but debate with strangers on
| internet forums(lol). In my opinion the problem with UBI is
| that it would take away the necessity for people to do
| something to survive and it would make a significant
| minority of the population miserable because they wouldn't
| have to do anything but consume.
| aylmao wrote:
| I see where the sentiment is coming from, but I don't
| agree with the premise of "doing something to survive"
| being what people need. I think it's the relationship of
| the person to its community through labour that could be
| missing (Karl Marks writes about how capitalism
| fetishizes commodities and removes this relationship in
| Das Kapital. If you're into this subject it's an
| interesting read).
|
| I know a senior lady, for example, that works fixing
| clothes. She doesn't need it to "survive", and sometimes
| work piles on and becomes another worry on top of other
| things she needs to think about. But she does it, in part
| as alternative income but also to keep herself
| entertained and as a way to relate to her community. She
| is the person you go to if you need mending, and that's a
| social relationship. People from the neighborhood will
| look need her and seek her for this. Receiving or
| delivering work is also an excuse to interact with
| people.
|
| Would she go to a factory and fix stranger's clothes even
| if it were for the same amount of time and money?
| Probably not. She doesn't need it to survive, she needs
| it to relate.
|
| So in that sense I do worry that UBI could disincentivize
| forming these work and exchange relationships or finding
| your place in a community/society. Just like kids given
| the choice might pick not to go to school, but eventually
| this would probably lead them to isolation and not
| growing in other ways, I wonder if a percentage of adults
| that haven't realized work can be better than no work
| could isolate themselves from social and mental growth in
| the same way.
|
| In general thus I think UBI might work better as a
| compliment to reformed labour laws. Say, a 4 hour week.
| Or unionization, to push back on crappy management and
| predatory workplace policies. A goal should be to have as
| much people working as possible, but not because they are
| forced to in order to survive, but because they want to.
| ilammy wrote:
| > debate with strangers on internet forums
|
| Why do you think this is not a meaningful contribution to
| society? In order for sitting-in-the-room people to
| debate on the forums, someone else - a part of society! -
| has to spend _their_ time on said forums, creating demand
| for discussion. Otherwise the forums would have no posts
| at all. One person sitting in the room could effectively
| "free up" time of dozens others that they could spend
| otherwise.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| There is a lot of things to do other than consume. Even
| if it's learning to write poetry
| a0zU wrote:
| Absolutely, there are plenty of things to do other than
| consume and there are definetly people who would discover
| that they had a talent at writing poetry, but doing those
| things require effort that a significant minority would
| not be ready or willing to make, and consummation is
| incredibly appealing to those who aren't strong enough to
| put effort into anything else.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would
| take away the necessity for people to do something to
| survive and it would make a significant minority of the
| population miserable
|
| With all due respect, but this opinion reeks of someone
| who actually has the ability to choose his own job, say
| no to exploitative employment-practices, all while
| actually getting payed decently.
|
| Someone who has to work a shit job they hate for a salary
| that barely pays the bills because they simply have no
| other option might as well be miserable because of this
| situation. This endless slog they cannot escape, a
| treadmill they despise but have no other choice than to
| keep going.
|
| And let's not kid ourselves - there are _a lot_ of people
| out there who are doing jobs they don't want to do, or at
| least wouldn't want to do for the kind of salary they
| receive.
| dqpb wrote:
| Or to not work and not contribute to society.
|
| I'm not opposed to ubi per se, but your enumeration was
| incomplete.
| gwd wrote:
| So is yours actually: You have people who work but whose
| work doesn't contribute to society (or at least, makes the
| world a worse place).
|
| But most of those wouldn't be affected that much by UBI, I
| don't think.
| ngokevin wrote:
| What is work? With a large portion of labor subject to
| automation in and economy that doesn't need much of work
| anymore, people can rediscover their own form of work that
| brings value to the us as humans: caregiving, volunteering,
| arts, creativity, music, journalism, teaching, and revitalize
| local communities where all our main street stores are
| shuttering and local newspapers die in the thousands.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Well I for one voted for Andrew Yang. #CouldhavehadYang. Still,
| we need more of these pilots, but unfortunately pilots limited in
| geography, time, and universality cannot capture the knock on
| effects of a universal UBI.
| jeffy wrote:
| One argument I never see in UBI discussions is that some people
| are just bad with money. If you give more money to someone who
| doesn't budget, save, live within their means, etc, it won't
| help. There are people who spend beyond their means and then get
| payday loans. So while it would help some people who would spend
| wisely, many would not.
|
| You would have payday loans 2.0 where people would borrow against
| future UBI payments, spend on non necessities, and then be in an
| probably worse situation compared to the people still receiving
| UBI.
| omot wrote:
| I think a good iterative solution is to keep pay the same but
| change all laws to pivot around a 32-hour work week instead of
| 40. This will force employers to hire more people or pay more
| over time for any work past 32 hours. I think UBI is an extreme
| solution to the problems that globalization and automation
| presents. It's better to spread the existing labor. After a
| certain point we could move down to 24 hour work week finally
| down to a UBI model when no labor is required.
| winstonewert wrote:
| I don't think this fits the definition of basic income.
|
| > Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their
| basic income at 50 per cent
|
| That is equivalent to a massive 50% tax rate on every dollar
| earned. It seems to me the whole point of UBI is that its
| universal and not conditional on how much you earn otherwise.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I don't believe the pilot program was ever deigned to be a
| _universal_ basic income.
| syrrim wrote:
| How do you expect UBI to be funded? Either taxes or wars, and
| we haven't invested very much in our army.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| This would further disincentivize work.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| UBI proponents would say that having welfare taper is bad for
| work incentive, since you get less welfare money if you work.
| vzidex wrote:
| Yup, this combined with the difference in income for couples
| vs. individuals mentioned by another commented smells to me
| like the program had a lot of means testing built in. I
| wouldn't be surprised if this skewed the results of the
| experiment in ways that reflect badly on it.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| There is a lot of misunderstanding in this thread, and a lot of
| strong opinions.
|
| "UBI" is mentioned repeatedly, but this wasn't a UBI program.
|
| The intention of the program was looking to replace our existing
| welfare and many Ontario works programs.
|
| Instead, the incoming government (after campaigning on completing
| the pilot) canceled the program unilaterally, and is looking to
| outsource our welfare payment programs to foreign companies.
|
| Please read a summary on the program:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Pro...
| thedogeye wrote:
| Alternative headline:
|
| 25% of people receiving free government money quit their jobs
| joshlemer wrote:
| The problem I have with all of these studies is that they only
| look at the receiving side of the equation. In other words, their
| experiment is not a closed system where their subjects have to
| also provide the free money to each other, which is what UBI
| proposes.
|
| The results therefor are completely uninteresting -- do people's
| quality of life go up when you just give them free money, no
| strings attached? I would certainly expect so! I don't think this
| is news to anybody. But what about the people paying for the UBI?
| If their taxes have to go up 3%.. 5%.. 10%.. whatever it is, then
| any respectable study of the affects of UBI has to at the very
| least take into account the negative affects on the paying
| population, if there are any. Otherwise, the conclusions we draw
| are probably going to be disastrously wrong.
|
| An other way of thinking about it is with a thought experiment.
| If scientists didn't consider the full affects of their
| experiments on the entire system as a whole, then they could
| easily show that entropy decreases over time, or that momentum or
| energy or mass are not conserved.
|
| So, I'd like to see a study where participants are divided into
| payers and recipients. Perhaps, 90% are payers and 10% are
| recipients, and we track not only the benefits in lifestyle that
| the receiving 10% enjoy, but also look for any drops in quality
| of life suffered by the 90%.
| pingyong wrote:
| I really, really like the idea of UBI. However, some napkin math:
|
| In the US, with ~250 million people being eligible, a $1000 UBI
| would cost ~$3 trillion. That's almost the entire budget of the
| US. How is this even remotely realistic right now? Even if you
| can cut other spending in half due to it, you'd need an
| additional $1.5 trillion in "income" essentially. Is that
| something that would even be possible? How many rich people are
| there to tax?
| bontaq wrote:
| We could let the government build factories, mines, and
| services. Then profits could be directed towards the program.
| The government services could also have a mandate for
| automation and job-destruction, in order to maximize the
| effectiveness of the people's capital.
| adrr wrote:
| Doesn't Alaska have basic income? How do they afford it?
| variaga wrote:
| Briefly, the state of Alaska owns the oilfields in Alaska and
| makes money from selling the oil. That money is then
| partially disbursed to people living in the state.
|
| The actual payment has varied over time (with oil prices,
| mostly), peaking at $3269/person/year in 2008 but was only
| $878/person/year in 2012.
|
| https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/alaska-
| mode...
|
| [former Alaska resident]
| lonelappde wrote:
| Small population and they sell oil.
| mcv wrote:
| Oil revenue. It's not enough to live on, though.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Possibly a simplified answer, but the way I understand it is
| that the citizens own the oil rights, and get a cut.
| adrr wrote:
| That's way it's funded just Norway funds their social
| programs from oil revenues and tosses the extra in their
| sovereign wealth fund like Saudi Arabia. Alaska is listed
| on the wiki page for basic income.
| billmalarky wrote:
| You're forgetting about growth. Is UBI possible today? Probably
| not.
|
| Quick googling (so take my numbers with a grain of salt but my
| point is to illustrate not be exact) says US economic growth
| the last 10 years has been ~45%. If that trend continues
| today's $3 trillion budget could be $4.5 trillion in 2030 - UBI
| starting to look much more possible. Another decade of 50%
| growth and the budget is $6.75 trillion in 2040 -- UBI seems
| absolutely possible. Sure there's population growth to consider
| as well, but you get my point where at some point the math
| works pretty well.
| Erwin wrote:
| The inflation has also increased the prices, at 3.22% average
| over the last 100 years each 10 years increases prices with
| 37%.
| chillacy wrote:
| You threw out $1000 a month, any reason?
|
| Different proposals use different amounts, $1k a month happens
| to be in the Yang proposal (Freedom Dividend) which was funded
| largely from a consumption tax: https://freedom-dividend.com/
|
| A conservative proposal ($6.5k-$10k a year, Charles Murray)
| might be largely funded on cuts to existing programs:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-a...
| lonelappde wrote:
| Under 200million working age people Seniors already get BI via
| SS.
|
| People with good paying jobs would pay additional tax that
| cancels out UBI.
|
| So only the half earning below median would actually take cash
| out. That's 100M, or $0.5T net expense, a substantial but not
| order of magnitude tax increase.
|
| Even median is above living wage, so you could reasonably cut
| even further.
| thedogeye wrote:
| alternative headline: 25% of workers quit their job after
| receiving free government handouts
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| How long did this run?
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Not even a year! It was scheduled, funded, planned and then
| cancelled by the newly elected provincial government after they
| campaigned on keeping the program to its completion.
|
| It was designed to run 3 years, and people had barely begun
| implementing the plans they wanted over that time.
|
| IIRC some had taken the money and used it to improve their
| current lives, others left jobs to pursue schooling or start
| businesses. Those plans didn't get to come to fruition because
| of the drastic about-face by the gov.
|
| A summary on Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Pro...
| russellendicott wrote:
| Couldn't you consider older people living on Social Security to
| be somewhat of a UBI microclimate? I'd imagine you could learn a
| lot by sending the same questionnaire to them. A lot of the
| mental factors are the same: desire vs. ability to work, the
| changes in routine pre and post income, etc.
|
| Also, I wonder if we had UBI there would be facilities that would
| take care of you if you turned over your income check to them in
| the same way that some nursing homes do. One wonders how
| different this would be than a minimum security prison....
| chillacy wrote:
| We already know that social security greatly reduces poverty
| https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit...
|
| It's just hard to maintain from a balanced budget perspective.
|
| > One wonders how different this would be than a minimum
| security prison....
|
| The difference is that hopefully you could leave anytime and go
| to the facility across the street if it has better perks.
| williesleg wrote:
| Bring it on, I can't wait for my first check! Who's gonna pay for
| it? You are, not me!
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| The issue I see with basic income is that most money is spent on
| housing and health care. These two things are supply constrained
| so it's more of an auction for who can afford them.
|
| With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those things.
|
| This problem wouldn't appear in a study that distributed to only
| some individuals.
|
| We need to solve the regulatory or otherwise organizational
| problems of these things to provide real relief. Throwing money
| at the problem will just move money to a few hands.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Here in Finland the UBI discussion is completely different from
| what is in the US. Here UBI hast to come in addition to housing
| allowance, free healthcare and education.
|
| Realistic UBI would be roughly the size of minimum guaranteed
| pension.
|
| The cost: Microsimulation models have shown that it can be cost
| neutral.
|
| In current systems effective marginal tax rates are higher for
| poor people than they are for the middle class or the rich in
| both US, Finland and probably most other developed countries.
| UBI or negative income tax or something similar is needed to
| solve this problem.
| immawizard wrote:
| I disagree on the housing point. With basic income, people who
| can't afford housing in expensive areas would move to towns
| with cheap housing/land but less lucrative/efficient work.
| There's no housing shortage in rural areas.
| new_realist wrote:
| Why doesn't that happen today?
| ctdonath wrote:
| Because relocating requires a tremendous effort: new
| housing, job, occupation, acquaintances, etc.
|
| Because a lot of that cheap land is cheap for a reason:
| low/no data service, harsh weather, insufficient community.
|
| Because "basic income" is free: the whole point of UBI is a
| basic income which one can get by on - non-zero effort to
| work _at all_ withers against the prospect of being
| comfortable doing nothing; there is no imperative incentive
| to work.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Moving is expensive and disruptive.
| burkaman wrote:
| Because moving itself is expensive, and you can't just move
| and automatically have a new job. With basic income, you
| can afford to move, and don't have to worry too much about
| the time you'll spend looking for a new job.
| dx87 wrote:
| Because there isn't much work if you live there. If you had
| UBI though, that wouldn't matter, so you could just live in
| a rural area for cheap.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This of course directly contradicts the claim that people
| will keep working with UBI.
| [deleted]
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| If they like their current house they'll work hard to pay
| for it. If they can't find a job or don't like their
| current home that much they can use their UBI to move and
| make room for a more productive citizen to move into the
| city. This makes the allocation of housing more
| efficient.
| eru wrote:
| It does. But perhaps at a lower rate?
|
| Years ago, the Great Recession slowed that migration a lot.
| sp332 wrote:
| Because moving to places with lower cost of living, to
| speak extremely broadly of course, means less income
| compared to cost of living, meaning a lower standard of
| living. But with a guaranteed income, a lower cost of
| living would always mean a benefit to standard of living.
| jsonne wrote:
| This is true in theory but not in practice in my
| experience. I presently live in one of the bottom 5
| states in terms of population density and there are
| multiple manufacturing plants that require no experience,
| are paying 60k+ for new hires, and are in extremely low
| COL areas. By the way, they can't find enough people to
| apply and are having to aggressively advertise to fill
| entry-level spots. I think the issue is more information
| asymmetry. If people knew the jobs existed and knew what
| they paid I'm sure at least some % would be willing to
| move, but no one discloses that out of that gate,
| unfortunately.
| danans wrote:
| People are not exclusively driven by economics, nor are
| they immune to economics. For a lot of people, moving to
| a place with lower COL would mean giving up community and
| family in their high COL areas. Those networks provide a
| lot of security that doesn't appear on the books.
|
| These are quality of life trade-offs that are different
| for everyone.
|
| Of course, the younger or more flexible you are, areas
| like yours might be a good opportunity, but it's not a
| obvious win for every entry level job aspirant.
| wolco wrote:
| I think the other problem is what happens next. Without
| the nexus of a city you are stuck at that place or the 4
| or 5 similiar places. Good or bad variety can offer more.
| jsjddbbwj wrote:
| Because jobs and services are in big cities.
| lonelappde wrote:
| Rural areas are expensive, but heavily subsidized, from roads
| to Telecom and other utilities. This is only reasonable now
| because we need people out there growing food. It's crazy to
| spend money on moving people to the prairie instead of just
| building more housing in cities where people want to be.
| csunbird wrote:
| But there are infrastructure and opportunity shortage in
| those areas.
| jshevek wrote:
| I have lived in areas that were gentrifying. Everyone knew
| that rents were going up and would continue to go up, but few
| were willing to leave. People with small nest eggs preferred
| to blow it on higher rents than invest it in relocation. The
| general attitude I saw was 'I have a right to live here so I
| will, even if I can no longer afford it.'
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Not only that but people have an emotional investment;
| "This is my home", "All my family lives here", "It's all
| I've ever known", etc. Moving to someplace cheaper may not
| be an improvement overall. Financially maybe, but what's
| that worth if all your friends live across the state, or
| you can't just hop into a nearby pub (if that's your thing)
| like you used to, or you have to drive for an hour to get
| to work instead of a 15 minute bike ride?
| snarf21 wrote:
| You are right, this is under-discussed. Look at what happened
| to higher education with all the "free" money. We don't want
| slumlords just raising prices to capture this money. It could
| be that if you if you are in a program like this that the rent
| have to be regulated based on size and location. In my opinion,
| UBI can never really work, but there is no reason we can't
| reduce/eliminate taxes on the poor to increase their standard
| of living.
| eru wrote:
| Land value tax would be the way to go. Regulating the rent
| would be about as useful and effective as existing rent
| control schemes..
|
| With a land value tax, the rent would still go up, but the
| increase would mostly be recycled back into tax take. (And
| you can use that tax take to eg finance (part of) the UBI.)
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you intend to tax away all the advantages of providing
| additional housing supply, I'd expect smart landlords to
| not increase housing supply.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Wouldn't reducing/eliminating taxes have the same exact
| effect as an UBI? More money in people's pockets. By
| following your logic no form of welfare can work.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Tax settlement is done once per year. Monthly UBI both
| feels different and is practically different in terms of
| helping people have money throughout the year.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. And that's why any basic income would need to come with a
| land value tax.
| camelNotation wrote:
| If you are guaranteed income, you aren't bound to specific
| regions or locations. You can move to places with cheaper land
| and healthcare systems with less overcrowding. You can work
| less lucrative jobs in those locations and find customers for
| your work because everyone including the local residents of
| those rural areas, will have new money to spend. Local regions
| would see an influx in cash, allowing for small businesses to
| be reborn in rural areas and spreading the economy out and away
| from coastal metro areas.
| naravara wrote:
| >If you are guaranteed income, you aren't bound to specific
| regions or locations.
|
| Not disputing this, but there are some caveats that would
| need to be true for this hypothesis to hold. The main one
| being that people's reluctance to move comes down largely to
| career opportunities and moving expenses rather than access
| to amenities or proximity to family/community.
| camelNotation wrote:
| The primary reason people leave rural areas and move to
| large metropolitan areas is work. Most people in rural
| areas are already near their families, that's why they are
| there to begin with.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This might be a bug rather than a feature for a lot of
| people. Many people want humanity to concentrate in urban
| areas because it is better for the environment. Others
| complain about urbanites' tax dollars paying for rural roads
| (which is effectively the scenario you're describing, even if
| those tax dollars are labeled "UBI" and routed through rural
| citizens' bank accounts first). Still others see rural
| Americans as their political adversaries.
|
| (Note that this is just an observation; not a value judgment)
| dtech wrote:
| More "tax dollars" going to rural roads because more people
| live there is incomparable with a policy maker deciding
| that more budget should go there.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In the current case, politicians are deciding to route
| dollars to rural roads _because_ people live there. In
| the UBI case, tax dollars are given to people who live in
| rural areas who then pay tax to fix their own roads (or
| maybe we don 't change how rural roads are funded and we
| just add on UBI?). Seems like you're making a distinction
| without a (meaningful) difference.
| volkk wrote:
| > Many people want humanity to concentrate in urban areas
| because it is better for the environment.
|
| I'm interested in learning more about this. I've never
| heard of it, are there any sources proving that this is the
| case? If people spread out more, is that actually more
| harmful? I can imagine this is an extremely complicated
| topic
| adwn wrote:
| I can't provide numbers for this, but many things are
| more efficient for dense settlements: transportation, any
| last-mile distribution (food, water, electricity) and
| collection (sewage, garbage).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is the line of reasoning I was referring to. Also
| urban areas emit (cause?) less carbon per capita than
| rural areas and both do better than suburban areas.
| teraflop wrote:
| So provide a basic income, but also shift some (or all) of
| the costs of those externalities onto the individual. Your
| basic income stretches farther if you choose a lifestyle
| that makes more efficient use of it.
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| This is _already_ true. You make less money but it
| stretches farther in many areas outside of major cities.
| Most people live in these cities because they want to,
| even with all of the drawbacks. Not because they have to.
| Timpy wrote:
| A lot of people rely on friends as non-monetary resources. If
| I get locked out of my car right now I'll call a family
| member to bring me a spare key. If my car is acting up I have
| a friend that will look at it for me. I do a lot of tech
| support in return, not necessarily in exchange for other
| services in a direct way. It's just being part of a
| community. At least in my world (midwest US) I cannot imagine
| moving to an unfamiliar area as a form of resource
| management. I think this probably gets more extreme the more
| your financial resources are strained.
| organsnyder wrote:
| That's definitely true for those that have networks with
| some amount of wealth. For instance, if your family member
| doesn't have a vehicle, or works a job with inflexible
| hours, they might not be available to bring you a spare
| key.
|
| My wife and I are friends with a young single mother who,
| until recently, didn't have such a network (my wife met her
| through a mentoring program). She grew up in the foster
| system, suffered abuse, and went to an alternative high
| school. Her network consisted of family members who were
| themselves barely scraping by, as well as school friends
| who were in similar straits. If your network doesn't have
| the resources to support you, it's not nearly as valuable.
|
| All that being said, I have a similar feeling on moving
| away from our community; but our network has a lot of
| people (family, friends, and acquaintances) with money and
| connections.
| triceratops wrote:
| But with UBI, maybe larger networks of people could move
| together. For example, a single mom can't move to a new
| city to take a job because she relies on her parents for
| childcare, and her father can't leave his job. But with UBI
| they could all move together if it made sense for them. Her
| extended family could move with her and pay for expenses
| with UBI until they all found new jobs.
| Timpy wrote:
| I agree, I'm sure there are cases where UBI would enable
| people to move, I just don't think it's going to be a big
| paradigm shift/massive migration/stir the melting pot
| kind of thing.
| karatestomp wrote:
| Having close family nearby is worth a hell of a lot of
| money by non-FAANG-wage standards. Hundreds to thousands of
| dollars a year in saved vehicle and equipment rentals or
| purchases, Ubers (car breaks down, need a ride to work),
| and so on. If you've got kids and have some nearby family
| happy to provide child care, we're talking hundreds a year
| in babysitters on the low end to many thousands if they can
| replace daycare, before/afterschool care, that kind of
| thing. That's a _lot_ of money to most people.
| d0100 wrote:
| I disliked small towns. But I know several people who love
| them and would move back in a heartbeat if money and
| quality of life wasn't the issue.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those
| things.
|
| The problem with this argument is that it proves too much. It's
| true of _anything that causes the poor to have more money_.
| Lower unemployment, higher wages, anything. Heck, it 's true of
| lower healthcare costs, because people would have more money
| for housing, or vice versa.
|
| Housing costs and healthcare costs are problems, but they're
| _independent_ problems.
|
| On top of that, you're assuming the UBI actually results in the
| poor getting more assistance rather than merely different
| assistance. Right now there are explicit subsidies for housing
| and healthcare. If they get replaced with a UBI in the same
| amount, maybe people just use it to buy housing and healthcare
| anyway -- but maybe some of them don't, and that causes those
| prices to go _down_.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _The problem with this argument is that it proves too much.
| It 's true of anything that causes the poor to have more
| money._
|
| Lower unemployment would be associated with a greater
| availability of goods and services, so that would get it out
| of the trap. Higher wages would also be associated with a
| supply increase if they came with increased productivity, but
| if you raised the minimum wage then prices of low-end
| products might actually go up. Of course, the typical supply
| and demand picture predicts _both_ an increase in price and
| an increase in volume if the demand curve gets "richer," so
| you are not entirely off the mark, although your argument is
| not valid.
| SolaceQuantum wrote:
| Employment cannot solve poverty problems for the disabled,
| the sick, the people taking care of their
| children/parents/siblings/etc, or the people who are better
| served spending the time in getting a degree.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| _Employment cannot solve poverty problems for the
| disabled_
|
| Of course it can. Why, in the US, almost a million of
| disabled people stopped being disabled and entered
| employment in recent few years, because of good economy:
|
| https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1230489362883678
| 210
|
| The truth is that millions of people on disability in the
| US aren't actually so disabled that they cannot work: as
| the above shows, they will work if they consider the
| employment conditions good enough. Yes, there are plenty
| of disabled people who really cannot work, but majority
| of disability in the US is _created_ , not _alleviated_
| by Social Security. One needs to remember that by
| creating programs to help poor and disabled, along with
| helping poor and disabled, one also creates _more_ poor
| and disabled.
| spsful wrote:
| The only thing I would want to add is a minimum wage
| increase would cause employment to decrease holding all
| else equal, so an increase in supply would not be observed
| unless something else were at play.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Oh, of course, I was talking about the two separate cases
| of wage increases due to productivity increases (the guy
| maintaining the widget machine makes more than the guy
| who used to hand-stamp widgets) and wage increases due to
| minimum wage increases (all factories must now pay
| workers $15/hour for making one $8 widget every two
| hours).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Lower unemployment would be associated with a greater
| availability of goods and services, so that would get it
| out of the trap.
|
| That's assuming the goods and services are locally
| consumed, which in a global economy they're commonly not.
|
| A jet engine factory that moves in and hires a bunch of
| people reduces local unemployment, but that doesn't mean
| any of the local workers are in the market for jet engines.
|
| > Higher wages would also be associated with a supply
| increase if they came with increased productivity, but if
| you raised the minimum wage then prices of low-end products
| might actually go up.
|
| Same problem again. If a jet engine factory opens up in a
| place with already-low unemployment and pays better wages,
| people quit their lower paying jobs to take the higher
| paying ones, but that doesn't mean any of the productivity
| increase is relevant to local housing markets. The workers
| still aren't in the market for jet engines, but they'll bid
| up the local housing stock if zoning constrains any more
| from being built.
|
| The premise that a UBI would increase housing costs is also
| basically assuming that the money comes from nowhere. If
| the money was printed that would be the case -- but that's
| an instance of "printing money causes inflation" rather
| than "UBI causes inflation." If it comes from collecting
| taxes then the people who receive it have more money, but
| the people who pay the tax have less, which more or less
| cancels out. (Especially when, as with the people in the
| middle, they're actually the same people and the UBI and
| the tax _directly_ cancel out.)
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _That 's assuming the goods and services are locally
| consumed, which in a global economy they're commonly
| not._
|
| But in a global economy that's irrelevant: the greater
| availability of jet engines _where they are used_ will
| cascade eventually into a greater availability of bowling
| balls in the town where they make jet engines.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| But in this case "bowling balls" is really "whatever the
| workers buy with their money" -- if local housing is
| supply constrained so they have to spend it bidding up
| housing prices, they don't get so many bowling balls.
|
| This is still a "constraining the housing supply is bad"
| problem, not a "higher wages are bad" problem.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Right now there are explicit subsidies for housing and
| healthcare. If they get replaced with a UBI in the same
| amount
|
| Good luck with that. UBI is barely tolerated by the left and
| progressives but only under the constraint that it doesn't
| replace any existing social welfare programs. The minute UBI
| advocates start pushing it as a replacement is the minute
| that progressives will squash it.
| Cobord wrote:
| That is because it was proposed with cuts to everything
| else. That leaves people to fall through the cracks in the
| meantime. If you transition to UBI without those issues,
| progressives like the idea.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Right. But this is the unbridgeable gap between
| Libertarian-types, who see UBI as a way to cut
| entitlements and progressives who (at best) see it as a
| supplement to ALL existing programs. What's the
| compromise here?
| dvtrn wrote:
| _UBI is barely tolerated by the left and progressives but
| only under the constraint that it doesn 't replace any
| existing social welfare programs._
|
| Where can I read some of these articulated positions for
| myself? Any particular articles or writers that made a
| substantial impression on you with these positions that
| you'd recommend I read?
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Where can I read some of these articulated positions for
| myself?
|
| Imagine if you were to come up with a policy where you
| increase senior pension rates by $3000/mo but you get rid
| of Medicare - do you think Bernie Sanders would go for
| that deal? I'll tell you right now: ZERO chance he would
| support it. And that doesn't even take into account that
| there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of jobs that
| support the current entitlement programs. Do you think
| those employees will just let you lay them off without a
| fight?
|
| I don't have any links, but I have gone out of my way to
| find out what different groups think of UBI when I was
| excited about UBI a few years ago. My excitement has
| since deflated and I now think UBI isn't a solution to
| any actual issues with automation. Specially it doesn't
| solve the following:
|
| - It doesn't get rid of existing entitlement programs.
|
| - It doesn't solve automation issues for the developing
| world which can't afford to pay its citizens and will be
| hit especially hit hard by automation.
|
| - It doesn't solve automation issues for the developed
| world since people derive meaning and self-worth from
| work (there's a difference between working and supporting
| yourself and being supported by government handouts). To
| reinforce this point: communities that are supported by
| government welfare programs tend to have issues with drug
| and alcohol abuse and crime. Furthermore, the social
| welfare programs in the developed world are already
| extensive enough that healthcare, food, and shelter will
| always be available regardless of the state of
| automation.
| thedance wrote:
| I imagine he's talking about the response to the Yang
| campaign, where liberals quite rightly derided his plan
| to replace all "entitlement" programs with the
| dramatically smaller $1000/mo UBI. If someone who has
| been a life-long libertarian looks like he's trying to
| drive a wedge into social welfare programs, that's
| probably what is happening.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I imagine he's talking about the response to the Yang
| campaign,
|
| This predates Yang. Yang like all libertarian-UBI
| advocates, typically side-steps this issue.
| shadofx wrote:
| Yang specifically addressed it in allowing people to
| choose one or the other.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Was this just general derision in the form of "people on
| twitter" or had an economist somewhere made a cogent
| economic rebuttal? It's the latter I was interested and
| hoping someone could point me in the direction of. Not
| particularly interested in hearing what twitter person
| thinks about UBI-I'm rather ignorant to certain economic
| arguments about UBI myself, and am trying to address
| this, if that makes sense.
| thedance wrote:
| I doubt any serious economist could corral up enough
| spare tike to waste on a rebuttal of this idea. Not every
| idea rises to the level of serious discourse. The Yang
| UBI amount was much smaller than the amount paid by
| social welfare programs to the people who receive them.
| That's just arithmetic.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Agreed. The momentum of welfare service providers alone
| would see to that, with somewhere around a million US
| workers having a vested interest in keeping their jobs as
| gatekeepers/facilitators, vs "everyone gets a check"
| covering what they control access to. Should UBI be
| enacted, the very same system would agitate to provide
| specialty services on top of UBI for special cases,
| building pretty much the same bureaucratic structure as
| exists now.
|
| UBI simply redefines $0 income to a higher number
| functionally equal to $0.
| thomasfedb wrote:
| There are plenty of progressives who see UBI as a method of
| vastly simplifying social security by doing exactly this.
| One payment for all.
| macspoofing wrote:
| As an exercise, try and advocate for getting rid of
| Medicare for Seniors in return for increasing the pension
| payout rate (to whatever reasonable number of you
| choose). How do you think that will go ... and that's
| just one program. If you think you can get rid of food
| stamps and 10,000 other programs, you're dreaming.
| ethanbond wrote:
| > The problem with this argument is that it proves too much.
| It's true of anything that causes the poor to have more
| money.
|
| "The conclusion of this argument is deeply inconvenient,
| therefore the argument is wrong."
|
| It's actually true that rising wages result in higher rents.
| It's plainly obvious that this is the case - otherwise why
| would anyone care about rent explosion wherever Amazon
| decides to put HQ2?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It's actually true that rising wages result in higher
| rents.
|
| It's true in places with a constrained housing supply, i.e.
| restrictive zoning. Which is common in urban areas. But
| what you have there is a zoning problem, not a UBI problem
| -- evidence being that it's also true of higher wages and
| lower unemployment etc.
|
| In unconstrained areas higher demand for housing causes
| more housing to be built, which prevents housing costs from
| absorbing anywhere near 100% of the new money.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Agreed that there's additional margin we can get with
| less restrictive zoning, but land is _ultimately_ supply
| constrained. More importantly, high-quality (previously
| defined as arable, now defined as "close to good
| jobs/services") is certainly constrained as a matter of
| physical distance.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| _Land_ is supply constrained, which causes _housing_ to
| cost more in urban areas because constructing taller
| buildings costs more. But the limit on housing supply
| even in urban areas, absent restrictive zoning, would be
| that construction cost at any plausible level of demand.
|
| We know how to build 100 story buildings but there is no
| place on earth where you can find a hundred square miles
| of nothing but 100 story buildings.
| moduspol wrote:
| Those less restrictive areas are not always where people
| want to live. The people advocating for UBI are often not
| the same people that are OK with poor people being priced
| out of an area and moving into lower-cost areas.
|
| I think it's more likely we'll see UBI proponents want to
| factor in a cost of living adjustment based on the place
| one lives, which will be a nightmare of political
| administration and unintended consequences.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Those less restrictive areas are not always where
| people want to live.
|
| Then remove the restrictions in the places people do want
| to live.
|
| > I think it's more likely we'll see UBI proponents want
| to factor in a cost of living adjustment based on the
| place one lives, which will be a nightmare of political
| administration and unintended consequences.
|
| Terrible idea, do not want.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I don't follow that. HQ2 was about creation of new jobs and
| immigration of more people into the area.
|
| For a fixed supply, higher rents are caused by a larger
| number of people demanding housing at the current prices.
| Higher wages only affect that by (a) causing immigration
| into the area, or (b) raising people out of poverty so that
| they can afford housing when they couldn't before.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Hypothetical landlord: "All my tenants are now earning an
| additional $1k per month and nothing prevents me from
| raising prices. But I won't raise rents because...
| reasons."
| bo1024 wrote:
| Because the apartment next door would be $1000 cheaper
| and tenants would leave and go there.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Even where there are housing supply constraints, they
| still can't raise rents by the full $1000/month because
| that would give tenants $1000/month more incentive to
| move to a different city without housing supply
| constraints.
| SolaceQuantum wrote:
| > It's actually true that rising wages result in higher
| rents.
|
| Do you have a study you can point to, since this is
| trivial?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Aside from self-evident truth, here's a study on just the
| impact of rising wages for the absolute lowest wage
| earners: https://mpra.ub.uni-
| muenchen.de/94238/1/MPRA_paper_94238.pdf
|
| > I empirically analyze the causal impact of the minimum
| wage increase on housing rents in the United States and
| Japan. In both countries, minimum wages hikes increase
| housing rents in urban areas: 10% minimum wage increase
| induces 1%-2% increase in the United States and 2.5%-5%
| increase in Japan.
|
| Now imagine a 10% raise for _every_ earner.
| klyrs wrote:
| > 10% minimum wage increase induces 1%-2% increase in the
| United States
|
| This shows that absolute rent is going up. Relative rent,
| the proportion of income going to rent, is going down.
| This frees up folks' money for other things and improves
| living conditions.
|
| > Now imagine a 10% raise for _every_ earner.
|
| If everybody made the same exact amount, that would be
| relevant. With a $25k UBI, you'd see folks who previously
| earned $50k getting a 50% raise and those making $500k
| getting a 5% raise. Right now, people in poverty are
| often spending 40-60% of their income on rent. Not so of
| people making $500k.
| Cobord wrote:
| By how much absolutely does rent go up vs how much the wage
| has risen? Are the people better off or not? Don't just say
| rising rents as a catch all. This is all the more case for
| UBI vs rising minimum wage because in UBI there aren't the
| unemployed falling through the cracks.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Problem is the lack of colloquial objective definition of
| "poor".
|
| The US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes.
| The US's vast welfare/entitlement system ensures few indeed
| net less than that line, shoring up their shortfall with
| trillions of $.
|
| What constitutes "poor" keeps shifting. There will always be
| a bottom 10%. There is ongoing increase to the standard of
| living, instilling a sense of "nobody should go without X"
| (when X didn't exist not long before, broadband internet
| being the latest). Affordable housing gets overrun by
| population growth & attracting mobile opportunity-seekers,
| living space naturally going to the highest bidder; property
| taxes being a thing, there is no recognized natural right to
| real estate. Health care relentlessly advances, new
| lifesaving care objectively costing a great deal ... vs a
| public sentiment of a right thereto.
|
| We need an objective redefinition of "poor", predicated on a
| baseline of nutrition, housing floorspace, basic tools
| (stove, disposal, etc), care (minimum optimistic odds of
| longevity), information access, etc and an understanding that
| the baseline cannot be shifted - that those doing better are
| _not poor_ , that accessibility thereto is largely attainable
| (whatever the sociopolitical system), and acknowledgement
| that when/if all are above that line, poverty services are
| officially out of a job.
|
| As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great
| number of people have a vested interest in covering a
| consistent, if not growing, population.
| baddox wrote:
| Why would we not want the baseline to improve over time? I
| genuinely do not understand the attitude that we should
| establish some extremely low bar like "is not currently at
| risk of starvation" and then never move the bar, but merely
| congratulating ourselves when more people pass that bar.
| SuperFerret wrote:
| And of course, no one talks about establishing an upper
| bar for those who have way more than they need.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Because humans need an objective minimum to survive.
| Below that they face slow death. There's a difference
| between social norm vs existential need, and many people
| have a vested interest in conflating the two.
|
| There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage,
| above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path
| to thrive on - up to you to do you now."
|
| Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard
| of living, whereby people don't existentially _need_ X
| but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or
| opportunity thereto).
| baddox wrote:
| > Because humans need an objective minimum to survive.
|
| I don't even agree with this. Even for starvation there's
| no clean dividing line. Malnutrition leads to reduced
| lifespans and health problems. I think that quality of
| life both can and should increase as society improves its
| technology and wealth.
| ctdonath wrote:
| You're bolstering my case. "Malnutrition" is, obviously,
| below the line I'm trying to draw. Meet the line, and you
| fundamentally want for nothing, no "reduced lifespan and
| health problems". Humans have a natural lifespan; what is
| the minimum necessary to support that (aside from
| externalities brought on by personal choice or random
| $#!^)?
| baddox wrote:
| I'm not being clear. I mean that as your nutrition gets
| worse, your expected lifespan decreases and you are at
| greater risk of health problems. Again there is no clean
| dividing line between malnutrition and good nutrition. In
| fact, in the future we might know so much more about
| nutrition that many common human diets in 2020 will seem
| like malnutrition.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| The definition of "not poor" is not supposed to amount to
| "barely surviving" but to "living and being productive
| members of society".
|
| > many people have a vested interest in conflating the
| two.
|
| Just like you are conflating being poor and being a bad
| person:
|
| > your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive
| on - up to you to do you now.
|
| This implicitly suggests that you are only poor because
| you were too lazy/stupid/<insult> to follow that path.
| Maybe there are people like that, but many people are
| poor because being poor is expensive.
| ctdonath wrote:
| I implicitly suggest no such thing.
|
| At some point it's up to a competent adult to do with
| their lives what they see fit under the circumstances
| dealt them by life. They are not automatically the charge
| of others just because they don't achieve some nebulous
| whim of strangers. Each has their own dependents to
| prioritize.
| Balgair wrote:
| > As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great
| number of people have a vested interest in covering a
| consistent, if not growing, population.
|
| Nearly all Kings and Emperors were 'poorer' than most
| Westerners under the poverty line of today. They had no
| refrigeration, antibiotics, electricity, etc. But we still
| agree that there are 'poor' people today, and I think we're
| correct to say so. Yes, it is a moving target, and thank
| God that it is such. If 'progress' means that we have to
| drag the least lucky of us up to levels of decadence that
| Cesar could never have though of, I'm more than on board
| for that. Quibbling about the exact definition of poor for
| all of time is useless. Charge ahead, have the 'poor' of
| our grandchildren's time be the wealthy of today.
| BlackCherry wrote:
| I find this trope of Kings/Emperors being "poorer" than
| most people today, to be an extremely annoying trope.
| This trope is purely a rhetorical device used to justify
| inequalities, because "look you have a cell phone and
| infinite McDonald's deliveries on Seamless, you're richer
| than a King of old!" Meanwhile you're shackled to your
| job, shackled to your location, shackled to your
| apartment/mortgage, shackled to your debt, etc.
| idreyn wrote:
| IMO, the big factor that explains why a minimum-wage
| worker with a smartphone is impoverished but a 16th
| century king is not, comes down the psychological burden
| of poverty.
|
| If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of
| minor financial catastrophes because they will further
| constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards
| spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety
| drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and
| also leads to physical health issues down the road.
|
| By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European
| kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with
| the knowledge that everything possible is being done to
| save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the
| execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed.
|
| It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to
| dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in
| thinking about this question.
| frandroid wrote:
| People have studied the problem you talk about. Their
| statistical tool to address it is the GINI coefficient:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
| ctdonath wrote:
| Interesting (I'll study further), but still fixated on
| "inequality". I don't care that Elon Musk has billion$
| and I don't, I care that I have a "tiny house" bare
| minimum of nutrition, environment (heat/cool/humidity),
| waste disposal, energy, mundane medical care, and living
| space - with which I can be reasonably expected to live
| an optimal lifespan (within a standard deviation),
| processing raw resources at minimal cost.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The simpler solution is to just impose a tax of a given
| rate and pay out all the money it generates as a UBI. As
| economic productivity increases over time, more revenue is
| generated and we can pay out a bigger UBI, which satisfies
| the intuition that minimum standard of living should
| increase as overall productivity improves.
|
| If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't
| wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e.
| raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but
| nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the
| economy is doing better in ten years and that allows
| someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when
| they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a _problem_?
| ctdonath wrote:
| The problem is UBI simply becomes the new $0 per supply-
| and-demand. If you didn't have to work for $UBI, and
| everybody has $UBI it has no value. Yes, the math is more
| complicated than that; upshot is a limited supply of
| essentials will be priced to take into account that
| EVERYBODY has $UBI. If I'm poor, limited housing means
| rent goes to $rent+UBI. If I'm sufficiently above poor,
| $UBI goes to $0 because I paid for $UBI (xN) in the first
| place, getting back some of what I paid in taxes.
|
| Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't
| be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip
| where the market sorts pricing out) because rent &
| broadband just increased price according to everyone now
| having UBI. If anything, more _won 't_ afford essentials
| and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will
| rise.
|
| It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't
| work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low
| productivity, coupled with an increased population unable
| to earn _at all_ because they simply don 't produce
| $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to
| get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That would only be true in a world where supply of
| necessities is immutable. In practice when there is more
| demand for stuff we can generally make more stuff. It is
| possible to build additional housing rather than forcing
| everyone into a zero-sum auction over the existing
| supply.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Hence "Yes, the math is more complicated than that". The
| practical tweet-sized outcome is about the same though.
|
| The other thing missed by UBI advocates: money is merely
| a representation of value, it is not value itself.
| Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many would)
| has all their basic needs met without their effort ...
| except that those basic needs are not provided without
| effort. This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing
| a UBI recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that
| the $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy
| go".
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Hence "Yes, the math is more complicated than that".
| The practical tweet-sized outcome is about the same
| though.
|
| Only if we do nothing about housing supply constraints
| _and_ nobody decides they 'd rather move to areas without
| those constraints given a UBI. But we should do something
| about housing supply constraints, and people would move
| away from high housing cost areas either way, but moreso
| if we do nothing about housing costs. Either one
| invalidates your premise.
|
| > Someone living on $UBI (and I expect a great many
| would) has all their basic needs met without their effort
| ... except that those basic needs are not provided
| without effort.
|
| We already do this for people with disabilities etc. It's
| not a problem unless the number of such people is large.
|
| Meanwhile most people are not satisfied to live in a
| studio apartment and eat nothing but rice and beans
| forever. Anyone with more ambition than not starving to
| death would still have plenty of incentive to go out and
| do productive work, so the majority of people would
| continue to do so.
|
| This is also _another_ reason to fix the amount of the
| tax. If hypothetically too many people started to live
| off the UBI and not work, the tax would generate less
| revenue, the UBI amount would decrease and fewer people
| would be inclined to live off it.
|
| > This badly distorts supply-and-demand. $1 costing a UBI
| recipient nothing, prices rise by $1 - knowing that the
| $1 cost nothing to obtain; to wit "easy come, easy go".
|
| Giving everyone $1 doesn't cause prices to rise by $1.
| Some people would buy things with elastic supply whose
| quantity rather than price increases with increasing
| demand, some people simply wouldn't spend all of the
| money. (The second is more commonly done by corporations,
| but it's still very common, and the economic effect of
| the money being removed from circulation after being
| spent one time isn't that much different than zero.)
|
| Also, that still only happens if you print the money. If
| it comes from someone then it doesn't cause price changes
| unless the two people would have bought different stuff
| -- which is not the case if they were both buying
| housing.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _"A linen shirt is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of
| life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very
| comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present
| times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable
| day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a
| linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote
| that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed,
| nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."_
|
| - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
| thedance wrote:
| You're right about the housing. If we have government policy
| that restrains supply (as we clearly do) and at the same time
| a government policy that stimulates demand (UBI) rents are
| guaranteed to increase. That doesn't mean UBI is bad, it
| means the government needs to adopt a radical supply program
| for housing. Every landlord in America should be put out of
| business.
| laughingman2 wrote:
| Wouldn't Land Value Tax solve the housing problem?
| mc32 wrote:
| Would need-based public housing + reduced UBI work better then?
| loa_in_ wrote:
| People providing those things wouldn't need as much as they do
| now.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > These two things are supply constrained
|
| Health care yes, housing, no. It's possible to build more
| housing to meet demand, or for people to move to balance
| supply/demand vs. prevailing wages. Or to have a smaller home
| or more room mates.
|
| Housing is often constrained because of real estate owners
| controlling the political process and eliminating new
| construction to keep the value of their property high. Not due
| to economics.
| rayvd wrote:
| Hence GP's comment about solving at the regulatory level.
| Housing is artificially supply constrained.
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| Especially in places where cost of living is high.
| naravara wrote:
| >Health care yes, housing, no. It's possible to build more
| housing to meet demand, or for people to move to balance
| supply/demand vs. prevailing wages. Or to have a smaller home
| or more room mates.
|
| Why do you think healthcare is constrained? The same way
| housing supply is constrained by zoning regulations and
| stuff, healthcare supply is constrained by slow diffusion of
| IP, restrictive immigration policies, inadequate numbers of
| medical school and residency slots, and restrictive
| occupational licensing for day-to-day medical care.
|
| It is possible to expand access to care to meet demand, but
| in the USA we have a system that prioritizes high fees for
| doctors and hospitals, high returns to student loan providers
| (medical school debt), and high returns to health insurance
| providers above access and supply.
| shkkmo wrote:
| If people have the money to get care when they need it, it may
| actually reduce demand for care since we can catch problems and
| solve them before they end up so critical that people go to the
| ER.
| virgilp wrote:
| But this is from Canada, don't they have universal healthcare?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > universal healthcare
|
| That doesn't mean what you think it means. There are many
| things not covered or not covered practically that you would
| want to pay for private healthcare. e.g. You can wait years
| for services, or you can pay a few thousand a month and get
| it sooner. This is critical for things that necessitate early
| intervention. Wait too long, and when the government does
| finally come around to being able to provide services, it's
| already too late, and because the patient is too old, they
| are no longer eligible for the services they should have
| received in the first place. I speak from personal
| experience.
| allannienhuis wrote:
| I doubt your experience is the norm. The system isn't
| perfect - there's definitely gaps or things I think should
| be covered (eg dental), and I know everyone's experience is
| different, but as a counter example I've never felt the
| need or desire to pay for private healthcare either (aside
| from not-covered dental) on demand or with private
| insurance, and I don't know any of my family that do
| either. (BC resident) The system has been there when we've
| needed it, including access to preventative care like
| cancer screening programs.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > I doubt your experience is the norm
|
| For children with autism it is the norm.
|
| Sorry, but what they did to my children was shameful.
| frandroid wrote:
| > You can wait years for services
|
| *in some rare cases
| jasonlotito wrote:
| No, these aren't rare cases. If you have certain not-
| uncommon conditions, you can wait years for services.
|
| Please don't presume to put words in my mouth again.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Nowhere has universal healthcare. The basic healthcare is
| bad, so you can pay more to get better access, or go to the
| US for actual good care.
| save_ferris wrote:
| This isn't true. Numerous countries have public healthcare
| systems that service the public successfully, like
| Singapore.
|
| Sure, you can pay to access the private system, which is a
| nominal amount compared to what we pay in the US.
|
| The US ranks among the worst of the first world nations in
| terms of access to and quality of healthcare[0]. Just look
| at our hospital borne MRSA infection rates.
|
| The idea that the US delivers consistent, quality care
| across the nation is laughably false.
|
| 0: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/among-11-c
| ount...
| seszett wrote:
| It seems Americans often believe that, but virtually nobody
| in Western Europe would even think of going to the US for
| healthcare. I would assume the same for Canadians.
|
| I have no idea if that's actually true, but the widespread
| opinion is that the ~free (it depends a lot between
| countries, it's usually simply affordable, rather than
| free) healthcare here is much better than what a normal
| person can afford in the US.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > It seems Americans often believe that, but virtually
| nobody in Western Europe would even think of going to the
| US for healthcare. I would assume the same for Canadians.
|
| This is not true. It's just ignored because people would
| rather believe that universal healthcare is infallible.
| We moved from Canada to the US precisely because of
| healthcare for our children. In Canada, care was non-
| existant and the private services were expensive. In the
| US, it was the complete opposite.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Do your children have special needs? It never even
| crossed my mind to move to the United States. I imagine
| given my profession I could get a job with decent
| benefits, but I can't imagine wanting to move to the
| states for the health care, unless I had a special
| requirement.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Do your children have special needs?
|
| Autism. The "care" provided in Canada is horrid.
|
| > I imagine given my profession I could get a job with
| decent benefits,
|
| This is not needed. The services we benefit from our
| state run, not based on my job.
| allannienhuis wrote:
| universal health care has never meant that every possible
| heath care need is met without cost. It means that access
| to the covered services is universally available. Which
| of course isn't true in an absolute sense (residency
| requirements etc), but is true in most practical senses.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > It means that access to the covered services is
| universally available.
|
| I know. These are services that the state was legally
| supposed to provide but could not. Canada failed my
| children. It was disgusting.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| I'm Canadian, it's not nearly as good as paid healthcare
| in the US (especially high end paid healthcare). Giant
| wait times for things you can pay to do in the US.
| 33degrees wrote:
| Yes, and many municipalities have rent regulations
| ToFundorNot wrote:
| Some do, most are very basic outside of Quebec, and even
| then, I can't remember the last time a tenant sued an
| operator because they illegally increased the rent in
| Quebec (the new tenant would need the old tenants lease,
| plus proof that the increase wasn't justified).
| thisisnico wrote:
| Gov' of ontario has rent control.
| allannienhuis wrote:
| universal more-or-less free _access_ to basic (generally good
| in my opinion) care. But that doesn't include dental or
| prescriptions (with some exceptions/subsidies), for most
| people. It's surprising to see them list it as a significant
| part of someone's budget though. Perhaps I'm not old and sick
| enough (yet!) to relate :).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is a concern I have as well; if everyone has the same
| income, nobody has? I'm afraid it would just bump inflation by
| an X amount. If everyone's base income goes up by 10% due to
| basic income, wouldn't that just be offset by prices going up
| 10% because everyone can afford that 10% anyway?
|
| Plus, housing prices are already ridiculous and still climbing;
| it's at a point now where people need an income in addition to
| their normal wages to be able to get a house.
| chillacy wrote:
| It depends if the market is demand-side or supply-side
| constrained. If everyone had more money and wanted a new TV,
| TV manufacturers would just spin up production to meet demand
| over time. If everyone needs a house and housing is
| restricted by zoning then the price will go up.
|
| One reason basic income might sidestep the housing issue is
| that unlike city jobs, if a basic income is portable then it
| makes it easier to avoid living in the city, reducing
| competition for housing. That's also a good reason against
| making the basic income dependent on location (e.g. you get
| paid more in NYC than Reno), since that would just
| incentivize people to flock to cities.
|
| Also if that seems hand wave-y to you, consider that in
| Alaska when the oil money goes out, stores usually have
| _sales_ , lowering their prices to compete for customers.
| [deleted]
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| I haven't heard a compelling reason as to why the basic reality
| you point out wouldn't be true with UBI. It applies more to
| housing than to healthcare (we'd be delighted to build more
| hospitals and hire more nurses, but we can't make Manhattan
| bigger).
|
| Georgism at work.
|
| Places with lower building regulations and higher property
| taxes would likely fare better with UBI than places with locked
| housing supply and extreme building regulation, such as San
| Francisco.
|
| If it was possible to build more housing, then I'd expect more
| housing to get built with UBI and rents to not go crazy.
| Otherwise, we're just pumping more steam into a turbine...
| pkilgore wrote:
| > most money is spent on housing and health care
|
| In Canada?
|
| Would not an increase in demand for such things lead to a
| corresponding increase in supply? Or is there something I don't
| know about supply restrictions in Canada?
| vzidex wrote:
| Canadian here, the supply of housing depends on which part of
| the country you're talking about. As far as I've heard/seen
| the supply of housing is generally increasing with demand in
| most parts of the country - some of my relatives who live in
| a small town a couple of hours from Toronto were saying the
| town is getting its first block of apartments.
|
| However, the moment you start looking at Toronto, Vancouver,
| and to some extent Montreal and Ottawa, the trend no longer
| holds. The populations of Torcouver are going up far faster
| than supply is able to increase, for a variety of reasons
| including the cost of building, regulations, NIMBYism, etc.
| The problem is further exacerbated by demand-side issues
| driving it up, such as speculation leading to housing sitting
| empty and illegal AirBNBs keeping units from being rented.
| angstrom wrote:
| Yes. Everytime someone says the price will just go up to
| match it's like some imaginary world where the one thing you
| can't apply supply/demand is the welfare of people. Housing
| is not fixed and healthcare is a function of prevention which
| is best served by proactive measures instead of reactive
| which are generally more expensive. We can actually save
| money by not being so inefficient with the capital in the
| first place.
| pingyong wrote:
| Coming from Germany (not Canada, but maybe closer to Canada
| than the US in terms of spending): Housing _absolutely_ ,
| health care probably not for most people.
|
| But yeah, if you live on full time minimum wage here that's
| ~1200EUR per month, of which probably 500-800 depending on
| where you live will go to rent. And if it's 800, it would
| probably be 1800 if everyone got 1000EUR per month. So in
| that sense, he might be right.
|
| On the other hand some people just might actually quit their
| job with 1000EUR per month and live somewhere further away
| from cities, since they don't _have_ to live there to work.
| And maybe that would incentivize employers to try to create
| more work outside cities. Seems almost impossible to really
| predict the large scale effects here.
| shkkmo wrote:
| At the bare minimum, if the monthly income from rental
| properties doubled, I suspect that would have a major
| impact on housing development.
|
| It all depends on why development isn't happening, but I
| have a really hard time imagining that supply would not
| increase even if the major restrictions are due to other
| factors than development costs.
| pingyong wrote:
| Well, the thing in Germany is that (1) there is actually
| a decent amount of new housing being built in cities but
| (2) there are often strict limits around where you're
| allowed to build, what you're allowed to demolish, and
| how high you're allowed to build. And during the past 5
| years, demand has vastly outpaced supply. Property prices
| and rents in cities are absolutely insane, and there is
| no indication that that is going to stop.
|
| And the reaction to it from people is quite...
| shortsighted? From my perspective. Often the exact people
| who would benefit from a better housing market vote for
| parties who are more restrictive in terms of new
| buildings. There's this perception that new buildings are
| only being built for "rich" people, which is true, but it
| also means the rich people aren't competing for your
| shitty apartment anymore. But somehow, people don't
| really think about that.
| samstave wrote:
| The issue i see with basic taxes is that most of that money is
| spent on the military.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those
| things.
|
| Why? Basic income does not just magically generate money out of
| thin air.
|
| Right now you earn $4000(salary) per month. With UBI you earn
| $3000(salary) + $1000 (UBI) per month. Why should any cost
| increase?
|
| "But then I would work less, since I can comfortably live on
| $1000 per month". Yeah, and why are you not doing that right
| now?
| chillacy wrote:
| With basic income you make $4000 + $1000, which removes the
| discontinuities associated with means testing.
|
| Whether increased taxes used to pay for the UBI end up eating
| up your UBI depends on the plan and how much you make/spend.
| Some UBI proposals are paid for with a wealth tax, others
| with a consumption tax, others by cutting most of the
| existing programs). They usually end up being redistributive
| in the grand scheme.
| theuri wrote:
| Very promising to read this. Feels like many more studies needed
| and more data to be collected in order to figure out what is
| indeed effective and what's not.
|
| Just like the early hype with microfinance decades ago - there
| was an initial hype cycle, then broader cynicism in the academic
| community, and ultimately, a data-driven informed understanding
| of what in fact works (on a more nuanced level - by country,
| income levels, program design, etc.)
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| My issue, and I only have one, with these pilot projects for
| basic income is that its not realistic. The people in the project
| know that it will end at a fixed time, so their actions are
| different compared to what would happen in a BI/UBI system.
| smileysteve wrote:
| A fixed time before renewal is fairly common for legislation
| though; For instance, many of the tax cuts expire in 2025; Or
| the Bush capital gains cuts had to be renewed for 10 years.
|
| One question about expiration dates; are study participants
| more likely to take caution them than general populace.
| kaffeemitsahne wrote:
| Yes, this is the glaring flaw in all of them as far as I've
| seen.
|
| On the other hand, who knows how long UBI would stay in place
| in a democratic country? It might get voted out in the next
| election, too.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| People are already complaining about taxes too high and lazy
| welfare recipients. With UBI this would get even worse and I
| agree that most likely it would get voted out very quickly.
| If we can't even get universal health care, robust social
| safety net or secure retirement going without political
| fights, forget UBI.
| brundolf wrote:
| The argument for UBI in place of those other things is that
| it's extremely simple. Legislatively, bureaucratically,
| etc. Just give people more money to offset all of these
| systems that are too expensive. Simpler also means cheaper
| to implement.
|
| It does avoid dealing with the root problems in some sense,
| but it's certainly elegant.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| "It does avoid dealing with the root problems in some
| sense, but it's certainly elegant."
|
| Yes it's an avoidance of the real problems. Basically a
| nice looking pipe dream.
| beatgammit wrote:
| A lot of the poor that qualify for benefits can already
| get equivalents through family or friends if the program
| were not offered. If we just give cash, they're likely to
| spend it on other things and combine expenses where
| possible.
| karatestomp wrote:
| I'm tentatively a UBI fan, but just switching to single-
| payer healthcare would do a lot of that. So much damn
| bureaucracy, public and private, for that. I think the
| public side's under-accounted-for, actually--so many
| government agencies end up having to deal with health
| insurance crap for one reason or another.
|
| Some would remain for private supplemental plans or
| whatever, but 90+% of that work would just go away. Plus
| all those uncompensated hours individuals spend fucking
| with insurance and medical provider billing departments.
| brundolf wrote:
| Yep. People who oppose universal healthcare because "have
| you been to the DMV?" don't consider the fact that in
| this case private industry already has dramatically
| _more_ bureaucracy than the government equivalent would.
| My health insurer is _already_ the DMV, just without any
| legal obligation to help me.
|
| Of course, it would still take tons of legwork to make
| the actual transition. But the end result would be a net
| win for simplicity.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| Universal healthcare is a prerequisite for UBI. How could
| you ever rely on it if you have the threat of a six
| figure hospital bill whenever you get sick or have an
| accident? Affordable housing is also a prerequisite or
| the UBI money will go straight into the pockets of
| landlords (I often suspect this is the secret plan of
| billionaires who propose UBI).
| stevenwoo wrote:
| It's been about 40 years for the Alaska permanent fund
| dividends and it's popular AFAIK.
| jariel wrote:
| The Alaska thing is different. It's a) not enough money to
| be considered b) a reasonable response to the direct
| revenues from an Oil windfall.
|
| Now, it might be a good example of how a nation should
| distribute revenues from natural resources, i.e. right into
| the hands of the people. But it's not a UBI substitute.
| japhyr wrote:
| It's popular because everybody gets a check each fall
| that's been around $1500. One year the dividend was higher,
| just over $2k. There was also an "energy rebate" of $1200
| that year, so every qualifying person in the state got
| $3200 that year. In a family of four, that's over $12k.
| Large families, for example 8 people, got $24k that year!
|
| Some people use it well, putting some in the bank for their
| kids, paying off loans, etc. But many people just splurge
| every fall. There's an increase in alcohol and substance
| abuse-related incidents.
|
| It has impacted politics significantly. We are no longer
| getting large influxes of cash every year, so there's an
| open question about how to fund our state's services. We
| could implement an income tax, but that's a hard sell. We
| could start tapping into the permanent fund principal, but
| anyone who proposes that gets trounced by politicians
| willing to "protect" people's pfd by slashing services. We
| could offer so much as a state, but people won't have it
| because they want their $1500 each fall.
| ssully wrote:
| I appreciate your posts on the Permanent Fund here.
|
| I have a friend who moved to Alaska last year for work
| last year and will probably be there for a few more
| years. We had discussions about the fund recently because
| this is the first year he qualifies for it. He will very
| much be in that camp of using the check in the fall to
| splurge and will do so until he is able to move in a few
| years.
|
| As an outsider, it seems frustrating to me that the funds
| aren't used to improve the state (schools, utilities,
| infrastructure). I've expressed this to my friend and
| kind of derided him a bit for being what I see as part of
| the problem. In reality I guess I can't really blame him
| for taking the money and (eventually) running, but it
| just feels wrong to me.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I feel vaguely similar, having moved to Texas a year ago.
| No income tax, also money needed for services, when I
| point this out people just kinda go "oh you crazy new
| york folks."
| Aunche wrote:
| It was prematurely cancelled too. If the program risks being
| shut down at any time, of course people won't want to quit
| their jobs.
| charlesu wrote:
| I've noticed that a lot of people who are born rich still
| choose to work.
| pingyong wrote:
| Absolutely true, but they also tend to work in jobs where
| they have essentially full control over how much they work,
| when they work, etc.
|
| And in some cases, that might still end up being much more
| lucrative than a "normal job". But I'm sure that in many
| cases, it doesn't - we just don't hear about it, because
| they're still rich, and nobody really knows what they're
| really doing anyway.
| charlesu wrote:
| Do they tend to work in those jobs? There are people with
| trust funds working at McKinsey, Google, Harper Collins,
| Cravath, and Goldman Sachs right now. They all pay well but
| they aren't places where one has "essentially full control
| over how much they work, when they work, etc."
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yes, usually to stay rich.
| falcolas wrote:
| As self reported by many truly rich folks, money is not a
| motivating factor in their daily lives. If they want a good
| burger, they'll get one and not care if it's $1 or $1,000.
|
| Such an attitude would certainly apply to their reasons for
| working.
| eru wrote:
| If you factor in the opportunity cost of a rich persons
| time, the cost of the burger itself matter proportionally
| less.
| falcolas wrote:
| Well, the rich almost always make most of their day-to-
| day income from investments. The opportunity cost
| calculations change pretty dramatically when a person's
| labor provides little to no monetary value (especially
| given the context of going out for a burger).
|
| After all, there's a practical limit on the value of a
| person's labor - let's postulate that it's around $7,000
| a day - there's no such limit on what investments can
| return in a day.
|
| * $7,000 is Elon Musks's $2.2M salary from 2019 divided
| into 340 working days.
| charlesu wrote:
| You don't need to work to stay rich when you have a $25M
| trust fund.
|
| There are plenty of people who were born rich who
| nonetheless go to work everyday. They are engineers,
| doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, inventors,
| teachers, professors, and business owners.
|
| Having money doesn't discourage people from working. We
| won't run into a shortage of astronauts, teachers, or even
| police officers. But we may find it difficult to find
| people willing to work as a janitor for $8.00 an hour.
| save_ferris wrote:
| Since governments set budgets on an annual basis, there's no
| way any UBI program passed in the US would be funded and set in
| stone eternally.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| We already have a pilot project - the Alaska Permanent Fund,
| it's been running since 1976.
| snarf21 wrote:
| This is very true. Honestly asking: Is it working? I haven't
| seen lots of data on the topic. I also know the climate and
| endless day/night issues weigh into this too. I'm curious if
| academia sees this as a success or not.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's a pretty dismal failure if you compare it to the
| alternative approach, which is saving the oil revenue for a
| rainy day.
|
| Norway has saved up $195,000 per citizen. https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
|
| (Alaska's dividend is also a pittance that likely doesn't
| even start to offset the higher cost of living there.
| "Basic income", it's not.)
| japhyr wrote:
| The dividend is not particularly large as far as basic
| income goes, but it's an inflation-proof setup. The
| principal is currently somewhere around $67b. With about
| 700k residents in AK, that's about $90k per citizen.
|
| Now that the annual oil revenue has declined, there's
| debate every year about what to do with that principal.
| AK has been cutting services the last few years, even
| though we have almost $70b in the bank.
| eru wrote:
| If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so
| privately? (And if they don't want to save, why should
| the government force them? Isn't a democracy supposed to
| reflect what the people want?)
|
| Btw, the Norwegian model is partial about avoiding 'Dutch
| disease'. That's why they invest the money abroad. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so
| privately?
|
| The "why" is complicated, but the "they generally don't"
| is not.
|
| > Isn't a democracy supposed to reflect what the people
| want?
|
| People wanted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. There
| aren't many pure democracies out there as pure mob rule
| isn't super awesome in the long run.
|
| Alaska's dividend is particularly odd given they were
| proposing 40% budget cuts to the state university system
| recently.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alaska-politics/deep-
| budg...
|
| > Dunleavy, who took office in December and is an
| outspoken supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, has
| called for major cuts in higher education, health care
| and other social programs as he pushes to sharply raise
| the annual oil revenue dividend that Alaska pays to
| nearly every state resident.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| This study was in 2018 updated in 2020 - does not cause
| decline in work by recipients.
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's not basic income, though. It's far too low.
| Diederich wrote:
| > Alaska Permanent Fund
|
| About $133/month in 2019, which _might_ offset the
| fundamental additional expenses associated with living in
| Alaska.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You get a bit less than $600/month in France if you're over
| 25, unemployed and don't leave the country more than 3
| months per year.
|
| edit: but I suppose you get the $133 even if employed, nvm
| dahart wrote:
| "Almost all survey respondents indicated that the pilot's
| cancellation forced them to place on hold or abandon certain
| life plans," reads the report."
| beatgammit wrote:
| Well yeah, if someone says, "would ending this program cause
| you to change or cancel current plans?", I would say yes in
| the hopes that it would encourage the program to continue.
| Free money is nice.
| bparsons wrote:
| People interested in this UBI should look at the Canada Child
| Benefit (CCB).
|
| It has been described in many ways, but it is essentially a basic
| income for children (or the parents of children).
|
| It is means tested, which allows for the program to be really
| generous to low income single parents with young children.
|
| The effect has been a dramatic reduction in poverty -- especially
| child poverty-- in a couple of years. This is an example of a
| modest government intervention that will have massive positive
| impacts in the lives of these families.
|
| More info: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/trudeau-s-child-benefit-
| is-helpi...
|
| CCB Calculator: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-
| agency/services/child-famil...
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The project worked by recruiting low-income people and couples,
| offering them a fixed payment with no strings attached that
| worked out to approximately $17,000 for individuals and $24,000
| for couples.
|
| Why discriminate so heavily against couples?
|
| It creates every incentive to lie about your relationship status.
| Or to avoid sharing a household altogether, creating greater
| economic inefficiencies and less built in social support of
| having a partner.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Maybe those setting the rates believe most of the money will be
| spent on housing. Two people each living in their own one
| bedroom apartment will pay more in total than two people living
| in a two bedroom apartment. The gap is even larger if the
| couple lives together in a one bedroom apartment. Healthcare,
| food, and many other expenses will tend to double but not all
| will. If UBI is meant to cover the basics rather than
| everything, and housing is most people's largest expense, the
| amount can be lower for couples and achieve the same result.
| The problem, as you noted, is many will choose to game the
| system.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Two people each living in their own one bedroom apartment
| will pay more in total than two people living in a two
| bedroom apartment. The gap is even larger if the couple lives
| together in a one bedroom apartment. Healthcare, food, and
| many other expenses will tend to double but not all will.
|
| Exactly, so you are incentivizing people to be less frugal in
| order to get a bigger check.
| hadiz wrote:
| It's because if you're in a relationship, you're considered a
| more valuable member of the society. Because it signals that
| someone has selected you to be around for a prolonged amount of
| time. Being single is more expensive in a big city.
| swebs wrote:
| It is punishing couples, not rewarding them. The amount given
| to two single people is $34,000. The amount given to two
| people in a relationship is $24,000.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Probably under the assumption that pooling resources and
| sharing a house means their expenses are NOT the same as
| two single people.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Right, so punish people for making better economic
| choices.
| hadiz wrote:
| Being a couple is 1.5x more expensive than being single.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah, that's a means test and breahes the "universal"
| principle.
| vzidex wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head - means testing is the killer
| of any social program. Means testing makes social programs
| challenging to access and frustrating to use, leading to them
| being unpopular and unsuccessful.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| The program was never a universal basic income, just a basic
| income pilot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Pro.
| ..
| luckylion wrote:
| These studies feel like "free energy machines" that totally work
| as long as they are plugged into a wall socket, that is: as long
| as the budget doesn't come from the system itself, you're not
| testing under anything close to real world conditions.
|
| Otherwise, the results aren't surprising to me. I know very few
| people that wouldn't keep/be working if they had a UBI (and the
| ones that wouldn't aren't really working now), but I also know
| very few people that would keep their current job. UBI, if
| sustained and sustainable, should work similar to a roaring
| economy with full employment in that regard: if you want somebody
| to work in the sewers or garbage collection, you'll have to pay
| them well.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| Everyone is talking about "receiving money with no-strings
| attached" however there is a huge string attached, and everyone
| knows it very well, especially the researchers, and that is the
| experiment will end.
|
| This means that the experiment is temporary whereas real UBI
| would be permanent. A temporary experiment where everyone is
| aware that it will end cannot simulate the same changes that a
| permanent experiment would do. But I guess that wouldn't be an
| experiement anymore.
| timwaagh wrote:
| "nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the
| pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income."
| So can we infer that 25% of those working chose to actually quit
| full time? I think it's safe to say this much reduction in labor
| availability is not the result the government was hoping for. The
| state is right, maybe not to call it off prematurely but if these
| figures would have been the same after the trial the conclusion
| would have been: they need to look for another policy. A good
| 'normal' social security policy would result in 0 people quitting
| and a lot of people getting employed. That's the kind of result
| the government should want to see before even considering a
| change.
| Matumio wrote:
| I really don't like using employment as the only valid measure
| of success. See also David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" essay.
|
| Government could always create jobs, directly or indirectly,
| and force the unemployed into them, producing something for
| which there isn't really a demand.
|
| Why were those people quitting their jobs? What were they doing
| instead? Were they better off? How much did it cost to get
| those improvements, compared to other ways to get them?
| Causality1 wrote:
| Shouldn't it be obvious that the people receiving money would
| become healthier and happier? The question is whether they become
| healthier and happier enough to offset the cost of making them
| that way. Are they the best use of that tax money? What's the
| lifetime return on investment?
| burlesona wrote:
| Basic income makes sense to me as a more effective implementation
| of welfare, but I personally strongly prefer the negative income
| tax implementation: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-
| matter/negative-incom...
|
| That seems to address many of the concerns that people are
| raising in this thread. Namely, it doesn't require you to work,
| but ensures that you never have a disincentive to work either.
| contravariant wrote:
| Mathematically they're entirely equivalent.
|
| Although I'd be inclined to agree that negative income tax
| might be the better model, as it gives the most direct control
| over the net-income vs gross-income curve, and it's the
| properties of _that_ curve that drives people 's behaviour.
|
| For instance the steepness of the curve indicates how much
| someone is incentivized to earn more (ideally you'd want this
| to decrease strictly monotonically as people earn more, but
| somehow this is rather controversial). And its curvature
| dictates whether a stable or unstable income incurs more tax
| (this property doesn't seem to be used much but it's still
| interesting).
|
| One of the problems with income dependent welfare is that it
| messes up the lower end of the curve, making its slope smaller
| or even negative. In the worst case it provides a financial
| barrier to people on welfare to re-enter the work force.
| lonelappde wrote:
| Money is fungible. UBI + progressive income tax is the same as
| negative income tax plus UBI to cover people with 0 income. The
| parameters matter not the name of the model.
|
| Also we already have EITC negative income tax in US. So
| negative income tax is either irrelevant rewording or cruel to
| people who can't work.
| chillacy wrote:
| They can be made the same: https://taxfoundation.org/universal-
| basic-income-ubi-means-t...
|
| I think UBI has advantages in its universality, where it's not
| perceived as a rich to poor transfer (even though it really is)
| and everyone feels they benefit from the program (even though
| some people don't).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD
| disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-
| being, children, etc.
|
| Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work
| unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a
| family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and
| well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more
| children, getting married and buying a house, etc.
|
| Right now I'm stressed because I'm earning less than I spend, my
| girlfriend is stressed because she doesn't have a job yet and due
| to personal reasons may find it hard to get, keep, and work
| enough hours at a job, etc. If she earned a basic income we'd be
| out of the woods already. If I then also earned one on top of my
| job we'd be VERY comfortable.
|
| (And keep in mind I would already pay for both of our basic
| incomes through the income taxes I'm paying at the moment. I'm
| happily paying taxes because other people paying taxes put me
| through college and into my current job)
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I agree. Letting workers leave abusive employment situations is
| a benefit of UBI. UBI might even totally reorient the idea of
| work in that now an employer has the incentive to keep workers
| happy that must be balanced with the profit incentive.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| UBI would reorient the idea of work in the sense that new
| generations won't think about work the way we do, for them it
| will be something that you can do, not something you have to
| do. Similarly how sport is today, you can do sports but you
| don't have to.
|
| Also with UBI you are guaranteed a certain amount of income
| for the duration of your life. You can go to a bank and take
| a loan against your UBI. A big portion of the UBI will end up
| at the banks because basically the loans are guaranteed by
| the government.
| danans wrote:
| > You can go to a bank and take a loan against your UBI.
| Basically a government subsidy for loans.
|
| Trying to figure out how this would work. Presumably a bank
| would only lend a portion of the UBI to you
| simoninnes wrote:
| Quite simple, you'd borrow a lump sum and the bank would
| accept on the basis you have a guaranteed income and
| therefore able to make the repayments.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| The average life expectancy of the population would
| determine together with inflation and interest the
| maximum amount you'd be able to borrow. A rough
| calculation at $1,000 UBI a month would give you around
| $500K available to borrow at 18 and you'd pay back around
| 750k till you die at 82.
| danans wrote:
| If you default on the payments after spending the loan,
| how will they collect? There's no collateral to sell to
| recoup the principal, and the government isn't obligated
| to back up the loan you took, only to keep paying you UBI
| going forward.
|
| Therefore, the loan would have to be dismissable in
| bankruptcy. So a UBI loan basically reduces down to
| nothing more than an unsecured "personal loan", which is
| something you can get today, albeit at very high interest
| rates:
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/personal-
| loans?annualIncomeFilter...
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| That's not necessarily true. Work ethic is not derived only
| from the notion that people need to work. It is derived
| from an ethical imperative and from a sense of achievement
| people get from work. Also, any UBI would likely be well
| under the amount of money necessary to live a middle class
| life. I myself was on SSI and could have found a way to
| subsist on it but really did not want to live that way. I
| got to know a lot of other people on SSI as well and they
| mostly felt the same. Most were looking for a way to make
| enough money to get off government assistance. This was
| substantially affected by the fact that the government
| takes 50 cents for every dollar you make. For me, living in
| Montana, this meant I could go to work for $5.15/hour
| minimum wage. I could earn $40 a day and lose $20 from my
| benefit. If you want to talk about a benefit system
| designed to disincentive work you'd have a hard time
| inventimg a better one than we have now.
| zazaalaza wrote:
| The proposed monthly amount was EUR2,300 in Switzerland
| when they had a referendum on the issue in 2016. That is
| enough to have a more than decent living.
|
| Work ethic might be engrained into our culture, but
| someone who is brought up in a society where UBI is
| normal and they are just a few years away from becoming
| "rich", I think not-working-ever is a very enticing idea
| and many teens will fall into that trap.
| spullara wrote:
| I think they would have to make it illegal to borrow
| against your UBI to create a true safety net.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Hmm, like dual of bank minimum reserve.
| asdkhadsj wrote:
| Yea, I think many in the tech circles forget how predatory a
| lot of industries are. My first "real" job was a state job
| (good benefits, good hours, etc), and eventually I migrated
| to tech. After years of that I met my wife, who worked
| retail.
|
| At basically every aspect of her job it felt like her
| employer did not respect her as a person. Her work hours
| weren't steady, her pay wasn't good, she was constantly at
| risk of losing her "full time" status and if she did lose
| that she could drop down to random ~5h/week slots. Her
| employer wouldn't even fire you, they would just drop you
| down to basically no hours until you had to quit and miss out
| on unemployment.
|
| Most of the staff she worked with in fact, most of which I'd
| argue were full time employees were withheld hours just so
| they wouldn't get full time benefits. Looking around for jobs
| was also difficult as most other employers did not want full
| time employees either.
|
| Employers in lesser skilled fields get away with murder
| because employees have very little ground to stand on. They
| don't have the income to build financial independence, nor
| does the government help them out in many cases. Even
| unemployment is gamed and withheld.
|
| I don't know if UBI is the answer, but something needs to be
| done.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| > basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for
| society, health, well-being, children, etc
|
| Less work means less is produced, so society as a whole becomes
| poorer. There's simply less goods.
|
| Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be
| raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes
| would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them
| also to work less. Now there's more people wanting basic
| income, so more needs raised......
|
| Sure free money gives some people nicer lives, but in this case
| it is not free - it is taken from other people. Maybe instead
| of calling it basic income, call it "larger tax transfers for
| those not needing it as much as current tax transfer systems."
| santiagogo wrote:
| Number of hours worked is not equal to production or richness
| of a society.
|
| Productivity equals production.
|
| A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to
| build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity
| as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a
| day.
|
| A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New
| York, which are small social groups that have more economic
| and social output than most countries with a much larger
| population.
|
| To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of
| life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's
| generally more efficient and sustainable to have better
| education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit
| them.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| > Productivity equals production.
|
| Yep, and when significant numbers of people simply stop
| working, as has been demonstrated in every experiment on
| basic income, production drops similarly. 0 work * any
| finite rate of production = 0 output.
|
| Recessions/depressions are caused by smaller drops in
| production than those seen in basic income. Production
| includes food, medicine, services, and things that make
| life better for all.
|
| >A small team of engineers who design and create a machine
| to build brick walls en masse, could have the same
| productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers
| working 16 hours a day.
|
| Then let them do it. That they have not done so thus far is
| not because we didn't have basic income. Postulating this
| mythical event as a counter to the empirical evidence that
| production did drop significantly during actual basic
| income is not compelling.
|
| >generally more efficient and sustainable to have better
| education and social conditions for workers, than to
| exploit them
|
| Then start such a company, and your better, happier, more
| efficient workers should beat out those other inefficient
| companies.
|
| Again, this hasn't happened, despite many people trying to
| make such companies, only to realize that things don't work
| this way for valid reasons.
| mola wrote:
| What makes the people in Singapore New York and silicone
| valley more productive? The fact that they work in
| successful businesses and earn lots of money? So what?
| Tobacco is a successful business. How can you even define
| more economic output? You can't, you just use a very flawed
| proxy for economic value, money exchange.
|
| I believe a good teacher is 100 times more productive than
| a software engineer. But that guy that wrote some tracking
| code earns a boat load more money. So you consider him more
| productive. That's just a huge fallacy. Value cannot be
| fully quantified, we use proxies for that reason, but we
| should always remember that.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It's funny because the post you responded to would be
| better as a refutation of this post rather than the other
| way around
|
| OP just explained why people (or rather, the upper middle
| class tech workers) of these two cities for out produce
| potentially thousands of people. A team of software
| engineers who can nail software for flipped classrooms
| will replace thousands of teachers AND improve
| educational outcomes
| refurb wrote:
| The people in Singapore, NY and SF usually represent a very
| small slice of a given industry.
|
| NY for example has lots of high paying finance jobs, but
| without all the industries those bankers serve, those
| finance jobs wouldn't exist.
| munk-a wrote:
| And this is exactly why we have a 7 day work week with 20
| hour work days and never retire, because the only measure of
| us as a people is how much money we produce. /s
|
| Society doesn't become poorer, in fact UBI will _probably_
| lower stress and allow more creative thinking and longer life
| spans with lower medical costs. Even if it doesn 't I'd just
| be happy to know that the people struggling at the bottom
| have to struggle a little less because, as a person in the
| middle, I'm happy to give a little bit of my income to
| someone who needs it more.
| stuartaxelowen wrote:
| Is care of a sick family member "produced" in the same sense?
| neves wrote:
| A stay at home parent education children "produces"
| anything?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must
| be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher
| taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or
| leading them also to work less. Now there's more people
| wanting basic income, so more needs raised......
|
| This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the
| basic income, so there is no "more people wanting", but if
| the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less revenue
| would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI amount,
| more people would work. It's self-balancing.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the
| basic income, so there is no "more people wanting"
|
| ?????
|
| Less time worked correlates with less things made. Less
| things made means less sales. Less sales means less sales
| tax. Less people working means less income. Less income
| means less income tax....
|
| Sure this doesn't shrink the tax base? After all, when a
| _few_ percent of people are put out of work during a
| recession, there are severe tax revenue issues. Basic
| income experiments so far show that 10% of people simply
| drop out of the workforce.....
|
| >if the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less
| revenue would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI
| amount, more people would work. It's self-balancing.
|
| So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base,
| not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI
| people will get really screwed....
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > ?????
|
| Everyone gets the UBI, not just people who don't work. If
| hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people
| wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it
| either way.
|
| > Less time worked correlates with less things made.
|
| In general this goes the other way. The history of
| progress is to make more stuff in less time. If people
| had more "disincentive to work" then companies would have
| to pay them more -- which increases the incentive for
| automation, which creates more stuff with less people
| working, which solves the problem.
|
| This is also why your "disincentive to work" calculations
| are off. If you pay <1% of people a UBI, it's not going
| to affect wages. If you pay it to everyone and there is a
| "disincentive to work" then to get people to work,
| companies will have to pay more. Which creates a
| countervailing _incentive_ to work that keeps people
| working. It also increases wages (and correspondingly
| spending), which increases the tax base, so there goes
| that too.
|
| > So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax
| base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those
| UBI people will get really screwed....
|
| Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP, not a percent
| of the stock market. Have a look at the GDP graph:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
|
| Difference from the height of the housing boom to the
| bottom of the crash was ~3%. Not a huge difference. And
| it was back to where it was at the height after one year.
| (Compare to ~50% drop for the Dow. The stock market is
| not the economy.)
| clavalle wrote:
| >Less work means less is produced
|
| If we were all just moving rocks around, that statement might
| be true. But human productivity is a much richer equation
| than time work in == value produced.
|
| Where would we be if we took that to its logical conclusion
| and put kids to work rather than send them to school? If we
| all worked 16 hour days?
|
| Your model doesn't consider productivity/unit time, nor the
| case of win-lose bargaining in the case where the 'lose'
| party is at a disadvantage and bargaining to lose less rather
| than for gain.
|
| Disincentivizing work (in the near term) can be a net
| positive over time if the person that turns away from that
| trade uses their unsold time to increase their overall
| productivity/unit time or if they use their enhanced
| alternative to a negotiated agreement to turn a negotiation
| that would have otherwise been a 'lose but lose a bit less'
| or 'tread water' situation into a gain for themselves.
|
| My only question is whether the productivity and value gains
| from enhanced productivity/unit time and employee/employer
| negotiations where the employee always has a workable
| alternative to employment will be more than what is lost in
| the reallocation through taxes?
|
| Considering how much the top has and how little it would take
| to move those still in desperate poverty to merely being
| poor, I'd be willing to bet the overall value creation would
| far outstrip the losses in taxes. But it's a fair question.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yes! If you all aren't destitute and your parents never worked,
| your family has time to accrue lots of social capital, which
| incidentally is extremely economically valuable in this weird
| age.
| richardlblair wrote:
| This is especially true where the trial was run. Those places
| are in a bad spot and three isn't much to lift them up.
|
| > I'm happily paying taxes because other people paying taxes
| put me through college and into my current job
|
| Me too. I came up very poor, but access to a good education
| allowed me to learn how to code at 16... We need to raise these
| people up. We are paying the taxes to support it, we just need
| a government who doesn't misappropriate funds.
| sabarn01 wrote:
| People should fear being destitute its the natural human
| condition. Learning skills is the only way to make wealth.
| munk-a wrote:
| Sorry, can you clarify what lesson people who never were
| given a chance at an education should be learning?
|
| Maybe, instead of getting all social darwinist, we could
| actually take stock in the fact that we have enough that we
| can afford to share with those less well off than ourselves.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Dying young from curable diseases is also the natural human
| condition... should we not use antibiotics?
| nennes wrote:
| That's a common argument to justify inequality. If learning
| is the key, then why is there such a huge income disparity
| between men and women? Are women lazy and don't learn?
| toolz wrote:
| What you're arguing for is equity, not equality. We already
| have equal opportunity. As for the gender wage gap, if
| women are so disadvantaged - exactly how do they make up
| 85% of consumer spending?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Dude, we are faaaaaaaaar from equal opportunity. One of
| the largest predictors of one's ability to accumulate
| wealth is still the wealth of their own parents. The U.S.
| is one of the countries with the highest link between
| parents' and a child's wealth.
| bluGill wrote:
| Citation needed. I hear this often, but no hard evidence
| that isn't easy to show is false.
| denisw wrote:
| I recommend ,,Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas
| Pikkety, an economist who has deeply studied wealth and
| income equality using historical data spanning three
| centuries. This book has all the evidence you need.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0674979850
|
| Spoiler alert: income from wealth is on its way of
| becoming close to being as concentrated as it was in the
| 19th century (especially in the US), and the share of
| income from work in total national income is decreasing
| almost anywhere. So yes, increasingly you can only accrue
| significant wealth by already having significant wealth.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > Citation needed.
|
| Here you go: "The fading American dream: Trends in
| absolute income mobility since 1940", Raj Chetty et al.
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398
| nennes wrote:
| How do we have equal opportunity? Can you point me
| towards evidence of this? I guess you're not arguing
| about the gender wage gap, as it's a well documented
| fact. What is the point you're trying to make?
| rstupek wrote:
| And yet not everyone can agree on what the cause of said
| gender wage gap truly is. Is it because women take time
| off to raise children, thus setting back their wage
| advancement? Is it because women are less likely to be
| more vigorous in asking for wage increases than men? Or
| is just because men are keeping women down?
| munk-a wrote:
| As an example... for my wife, her salary was depressed
| because her boss thought that I make good enough money
| that she doesn't really need it. I think a lot of women
| still receive extremely slanted peer reviews due to
| gender biases (she's really catty, while he tends to
| raise good arguments), relationship drama (I mean, she's
| a good worker, but she turned down a drink with me... I
| don't know how good her judgement is), straight up
| appearance judgements (Oh, don't give the raise to nancy,
| she'll have a cushy life with looks like that, barbara
| could use it more), and harassment (I don't know about
| that raise - hey what are you doing friday?).
|
| I think that everyone feels like we've totally solved
| gender discrimination forever while it's still _really
| deeply seated in our culture_.
| isoskeles wrote:
| Because you're using data that doesn't control for
| occupation, hours worked, etc.
| nennes wrote:
| So as a gender, women choose lower paid jobs and work
| less? If this is true and it is a choice, that would mean
| that women as a gender are either lazy or less qualified.
| If this is not true then it is evidence of inequality in
| the selection of employees. I don't see either of the
| above making your point.
| isoskeles wrote:
| > lazy or less qualified
|
| No one is saying that, it's more of a strawman you want
| to use to, I'm not sure, maybe accuse people who disagree
| with you of sexism. Or could you explain why you use
| those words rather than assume we think it's, let's
| suppose, just a choice based on differences in average
| values men and women have?
| rstupek wrote:
| And as a society we need to understand that men are
| facing tons of difficulties women don't face too? Why are
| men killing themselves at a rate 4-5 times higher than
| women in the western world? Why is the life expectancy of
| a male always less than a female?
| nennes wrote:
| My argument is that -as a society- we don't really accept
| that women are facing tons of difficulties that men don't
| experience, because of their sex. For example, sometimes
| it's because they might choose to have a baby in the
| future and a lot of employers don't want to have that
| risk, so they avoid hiring women after say 25. I'm not
| saying that you're sexist, I'm saying that as a society
| we're comfortable saying that people who have less
| deserve it for some reason and we have more for just
| reasons. If we accept that the society is unfair, and
| part of why we're better off than others is either luck
| of because the game is rigged (ie rich parents), we'll be
| more generous and fair. Apologies if I insulted people, I
| was trying to make a point for generosity and I got
| carried away.
| tomp wrote:
| So you're writing on HN instead of working more because
| you're lazy and less qualified? Or do you voluntarily
| choose to spend part of your life not working and doing
| other things that you find enjoyable?
|
| TL;DR: go away troll.
| nennes wrote:
| Yes, you got it, women have more enjoyable things to do
| than working. How convenient.
| [deleted]
| mhalle wrote:
| There are countless socially beneficial personal activities
| that aren't centric around wealth. Start with a list of
| things people volunteer to do.
|
| Then add jobs like teaching, nursing, health care aides, and
| social work that positively impact the lives of many but in
| many places pay extremely little. People are called to these
| jobs for reasons outside of wealth. UBI allows these people
| to continue to serve the rest of society in a sustainable
| way.
| dleslie wrote:
| We've built civilization around the notion that escaping the
| natural order of things is desirable.
|
| I, for one, am happy to not be sleeping in shifts in order to
| stand guard against predation.
| mgolawala wrote:
| Up until recently the natural human condition also involved
| going through the grief of losing at least one of your kids.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/parents-losing-their-child
|
| The human condition evolves.
|
| Having said that, while I am supportive of UBI, I share your
| concerns over its impact on society. We do not understand the
| all what the knock on effects of such a program are. How it
| would be used/misused and how it would reshape incentives. We
| definitely need to dip our toe in the water before
| considering jumping in.
| sfkdjf9j3j wrote:
| Does that mean you would support a 100% inheritance tax and
| say, confiscating all of someone's wealth every few years?
| sabarn01 wrote:
| I think a true meritocracy is only possible using some type
| of agoge system, but that also violates human rights. When
| I say destitution I guess I mean to the acceptable minimum
| which that most people would find unacceptable.
| hooande wrote:
| No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid
| destitution. And poverty isn't the natural condition for
| humans any more than it is for cats, or any other animal.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Rich people have other reasons to learn skills.
|
| And I think the hope with UBI is that people in general
| will find enough reasons that they continue to learn
| skills, and not just live off society as purposeful
| freeloaders.
|
| I used to think that there are some types of people that
| would freeload whenever they possibly could.
|
| Then a young family member proved that they will basically
| do whatever they can to avoid even finishing school, let
| alone getting a job and keeping it.
|
| I would like to think that people would learn hobbies and
| create art and science for the sheer joy of it if they
| didn't have to put food on the table... But the truth seems
| to be that there are many people who would just consume the
| massive amount of entertainment that we now produce and no
| contribute anything of their own, ever.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| Not true.
| tenpies wrote:
| > No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid
| destitution.
|
| I can only speak for the Western tradition, but for most of
| history, the wealthy took great pride in making sure their
| male children were at least trained in soldiering, knew the
| family business, and were well-educated. It was the bare
| minimum to be considered a gentleman.
| munk-a wrote:
| And, if that child flubbed all those skills, then they'd
| skill live a comfortable and rich life, there just might
| not be much left for the next generation.
|
| Also, how is learning how to fence a good skill to avoid
| destitution? The rich had leisure time and invested that
| time in cultural skills, this isn't actually a bad thing
| either - it's my hope that everyone can afford to develop
| a hobby and be creative in their life... but that has
| nothing to do with avoiding destitution.
| easytiger wrote:
| Yea sure. No one ever blew a fortune
| mola wrote:
| It's rare. How you are born pretty much sets your future
| in stone. Those rags to riches stories and vice versa are
| the outliers
| easytiger wrote:
| And?
| bluGill wrote:
| Books are filled with once great families with a name, and
| nothing else, struggling to survive. It is common for
| someone to be born rich, gamble it all away and leave
| nothing (other than maybe an education) to the kids.
|
| There are rich who live their children much, but most
| children of the rich who remain rich have to work to stay
| rich. Yes there is a big advantage that being born to
| wealth gives to keeping it - but that advantage isn't any
| guarantee.
|
| I have in my lifetime seen plenty of starving cats - we
| took pity on them and took them in. I've seen evidence of
| mass freezing to death in wild animals after the herd eats
| all the food.
| defaultprimate wrote:
| That's why 10% of people born in the top quintile fall into
| the bottom one in adulthood, right?
| csa wrote:
| I'm guessing you don't know many people who were born into
| wealth.
|
| The skill that they must learn is how not to lose the
| money.
|
| This skill is difficult to sustain over more than a
| generation or two -- grandparent earns it, parent might
| keep it, child usually ends up destitute both in terms of
| financial capital and social capital.
|
| If the "child" in this scenario is lucky, they have some
| social capital that will save them, and their branch of the
| family tree is at an inflection point.
|
| Seeing a family self-destruct like this is tough to watch
| and surprisingly common within that class of people.
| sabarn01 wrote:
| I grew up working class and have seen lots of people
| fail. Those without the wherewithal to get on social
| benefits generally moved on with their lives toward
| success. I also have know several to get on social
| benefits find that acceptable and live what seemed to me
| unfulfilling lives on a type of pseudo adult hood. It
| could be they were happy and who am I to judge. I have
| always known if I fail I will be destitute and I think it
| has helped me build a decent life. But what works for me
| may not work for others.
| munk-a wrote:
| That skill is so trivial to learn compared with the skill
| of surviving and building up income from nothing.
|
| Rich people literally just need to not be complete idiots
| - if you've got 300 million in the bank put it in some
| low interest stable investment and you'd be able to live
| off the investment earnings alone. There, I just
| explained all the life skills you need as a rich person -
| there is no equivalence between the road the rich and the
| poor need to walk to survive.
| csa wrote:
| I am guessing that you do not know many people who were
| born into wealth.
|
| There are existential questions that gnaw at some of
| these people that hinder them from taking the seemingly
| simple path that you have presented.
|
| I would also argue that it is not as easy as you would
| think to park millions in some "low interest stable
| investment" that also does not have substantial (for
| generational wealth) counter-party risk.
|
| > there is no equivalence between the road the rich and
| the poor need to walk to survive
|
| I agree with this, but I think you are being overly
| dismissive of the skills that someone born into a wealthy
| family needs to keep that wealth.
|
| It requires a healthy amount of self-awareness among
| other things.
| peterashford wrote:
| I literally cannot believe you are seriously making this
| argument.
| munk-a wrote:
| Being a human being isn't easy, many people rich and poor
| struggle with deep philosophical questions, some people
| get devoured by questions of relative wealth even when
| they have very little just because they're among so many
| people poorer off than them.
|
| That doesn't change the fact that being rich is easy mode
| for life. Yes, it isn't just a stroll in the continuous
| orgy park of happiness and funtimes, but there are a lot
| of difficulties in life that arise out of not having
| enough money, rich people essentially get a pass on all
| of these problems.
|
| So, while I'm not saying that rich people never struggle
| with being a human being and all the existential doubt
| that can accompany that. I am saying that they never
| struggle to eat. I think everyone has their own struggles
| through life and really don't want to minimize problems
| that can arise in dealing with human issues like poor
| mental health - but seriously, everything is on easy mode
| for the rich, and if you don't think that's the case then
| you should really reach out to other communities and see
| what low income people have to deal with on a daily
| basis.
| MadWombat wrote:
| > People should fear being destitute its the natural human
| condition.
|
| People should die of diseases, its the natural human
| condition. Women should die in childbirth, its the natural
| human condition. Men should die in wars, its the natural
| human condition. People should be hunted by sabre-tooth
| tigers, its the natural human condition.
| sabarn01 wrote:
| Fear of failure is a useful social motivator. In rich
| societies that does't have to mean biological poverty.
|
| When I lived in a urban poor neighborhood I had one
| neighbor who drove a asphalt truck while the other was on
| benefits and drank on the porch all day. As an external
| observer there was little material difference in their
| standard of living.
| refurb wrote:
| Ok, but work (productivity) is how you actually pay for UBI.
|
| So by giving UBI, you are decreasing the resources that pay for
| it.
| coffeecat wrote:
| Give people money, and most of it will get spent. That
| spending is income for someone, and that income is taxed. I
| don't understand this argument.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Give people money, and most of it will get spent. That
| spending is income for someone, and that income is taxed. I
| don 't understand this argument._
|
| You can't eat money, nor can money cut your hair. refurb's
| point is that a UBI leads to a decrease in wealth, not in
| the amount of money in existence.
| coffeecat wrote:
| It will lead to a new equilibrium for sure. Whether that
| equilibrium is more wealth than currently exists (due to
| the additional buying power in consumers' hands) or less
| wealth (due to increasing cost of labor), I don't claim
| to know. But in the latter case, this decrease in total
| wealth would be a result of a collective decision that we
| value our time more than unnecessary material shit. A
| leaner workforce would have the incentive of higher
| wages. So in either case (an increase or decrease in
| total wealth), I'd argue that we're better off for it.
| pixelbash wrote:
| With increasing automation less people can do more work and
| therefore earn more money, this is already causing some of
| the unemployment issues we see today.
| fma wrote:
| One of Andrew Yang's proposal was to pay for a UBI with a 10%
| VAT, especially on services gained from automation, AI etc.
| Things that give companies a productivity boost, while also
| avoid taxes. So this would be a way to get the money back.
|
| For example - currently a trucker driver will pay state tax,
| federal tax, pay taxes on the things they eat/buy. When a
| self driving truck comes...all of that above won't occur
| anymore. And the company saves money.
| Mirioron wrote:
| > _Things that give companies a productivity boost, while
| also avoid taxes._
|
| Shovels, cars, tractors, computers, pens, paper etc? A
| truck driver can do the job of many cart drivers! And a
| cart driver can do the job of people who carry things with
| their own body.
| lastres0rt wrote:
| UBI is like any other government service: if you're spending
| more on [Service aimed at me] than I actually need to become
| a productive member of society (or at least not a drain on
| it), you're not spending your money right.
|
| You can spend that government money on any number of
| services: Prisons, Childcare, Libraries, Transportation, etc.
| UBI is different in one major detail:
|
| UBI assumes that people are, at this stage of human
| technology and society, smarter about how to spend that money
| the government is ALREADY going to spend on them than the
| government itself is.
|
| Furthermore, to differentiate itself from mere "welfare", any
| attempt at means-testing to try and ensure that only "worthy"
| clients get UBI is just going to add further cost to the
| system. Specifically, it will cost more than simply
| distributing the money involved. After all, drug tests cost
| money. Paperwork costs money. Employing enforcers costs money
| AND office space AND equipment for them to do their job.
|
| It's a radical notion -- after all, doesn't figuring out if
| giving out "free money" actually saves money still itself
| cost money? Still, we're not comparing UBI to a mythical
| "perfect system"; we're trying to compare it to the imperfect
| system we have right now, where the cost of NOT doing it gets
| reflected in things like crime, mental illness, drug abuse,
| preventable deaths, etc.
|
| There is already a cost associated to continuing to do things
| "the way we've always done them". UBI is that same cost spent
| in a different way.
| munk-a wrote:
| We currently have intense income inequality in the world -
| pretty sure we can shave some off the top and the middle to
| help everyone live a healthier life.
| graeme wrote:
| Wealth isn't fungible like that. A lot of recent wealth
| inequality was stocks rising.
|
| That doesn't mean that food production went up, or that
| more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are
| cloned, or anything of the sort.
|
| It just means stocks went up.
|
| Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other
| people, or working to import stuff. If people don't work,
| you don't get the stuff they provide.
|
| To a certain extent you can sell off assets abroad and
| import stuff using a trade deficit. But that doesn't work
| forever, and you can't import haircuts or clean floors or
| construction labour or nurse shifts. At a certain point
| work is needed.
| simoninnes wrote:
| In other words, asset values are entirely conceptual and
| depend on a raft of parameters.
| munk-a wrote:
| Oh, so maybe we should fund UBI by just stripping out the
| capital gains exemptions that allow insanely rich people
| to get insanely richer.
|
| Some people have more money than they need, it can be
| removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that
| money should be very carefully considered when it comes
| to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly
| have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is
| transferable.
|
| Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything.
| No one starves in America because there isn't enough
| corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to
| afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be
| built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for
| the home to be built.
|
| These are all solvable problems.
| biggestdecision wrote:
| How do you transfer it though? If some businessman has
| all his wealth tied up in stock in his business, how do
| you convert that to money? Some other person has to buy
| the stock. All this does is move the wealth around.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It doesn't matter. You bleed them through inflation, VAT,
| whatever. The finance may be abstract, but at the end of
| the day money is claims for (future) economic output and
| you can dilute that as needed.
|
| Some ways are better than other, but this idea that the
| powerful can hide their power through accounting tricks
| alone is a failure to think at multiple layers of
| abstraction.
| munk-a wrote:
| Wealth taxes have been discussed in the modern political
| stage - but I'm a bit :shrug: about them - I think it'd
| be fine to continue to only tax capital gains when
| they're realized - so as long as that businessman can't
| effectively use any of his wealth he doesn't pay taxes on
| it - as soon as he benefits from his wealth he pays taxes
| on the accrued gains.
| joe_fishfish wrote:
| Unfortunately the people at the top will do everything they
| can to stop this.
| munk-a wrote:
| Getting this done may be quite a challenge, but it's a
| good thing to get done.
|
| It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada
| (while not perfect) is much better than the US in
| pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.
| free652 wrote:
| No, you wouldn't pay for basic income from your taxes. Where
| did you get that? It's an extra tax that you are currently not
| paying.
| undersuit wrote:
| Yeah, taxes.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I think what he meant was "we already have enough tax-funded
| government income for it, but it is squandered elsewhere".
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is simply not true. Giving every person the oft-quoted
| $1k/month would cost over $4T/year, which is more than the
| _entire_ current tax revenue of the United States. So we 'd
| need to more than double tax revenue to continue doing
| everything we are now plus pay the UBI.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| It removes a shit load of misc. other benefits and all
| the bureaucracy needed to maintain them. That might not
| cancel out but it's not purely extra costs.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Those other benefits combined don't come remotely close
| to $4T. I'd be curious to see which benefits you think
| could be eliminated or cut back and how much that would
| save.
| refurb wrote:
| The logic of it is that you could increase taxes to pay
| for it and above a certain income level, 100% (or more)
| of it would be clawed back in taxes.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The required tax rates would still be unbelievably high
| though. Way higher than any other developed nation (some
| of whom already have >50% tax rates).
| munk-a wrote:
| Canada has a tax rate that tops out at 50% (mostly), the
| US caps out at 37%[1]. I think we'd all be better off if
| the tax brackets went a lot higher. Rich folks tend to
| have a lot of inactive money that's just sitting around
| doing nothing - we can put it to more productive uses.
|
| 1. Please note, these numbers are off of raw income tax -
| both Canada and the US have other employment related
| taxes that I'm not counting here (like payroll) since
| their proportional contribution is pretty minimal.
| spullara wrote:
| You aren't including state taxes.
| munk-a wrote:
| I am for the Canadian ones - where I can easily count the
| provinces. I am indeed too lazy to do the math on how
| much each of the fifty states leverage in taxes but it
| looks like they tend to come out well below 50% (except
| for CA, which is fair). Specifically, CT caps out at 43%,
| NY is at 45%, CA is at 49% and TX is 37% - since there
| are 0% state income states I find it reasonable to assume
| that rich people concerned with income taxes will chose
| to live in one of those 0% income tax states.
| minitoar wrote:
| My understanding of UBI was it's a replacement for many
| existing social programs.
| free652 wrote:
| Where did you get that? UBI won't help people that get free
| housing in NYC UBI doesn't work with HCOL areas.
| kube-system wrote:
| Many UBI proposals have suggested eliminating or reducing
| other programs in conjunction with their implementation.
| minitoar wrote:
| Where did you get the idea that all current social
| programs would continue unchanged if something as radical
| as UBI were introduced?
| lumberjack wrote:
| There are two versions of the proposal. UBI as a
| replacement for social programs is fantasy. The UBI
| cheque would have to be insanely fat to replace the
| welfare/medicare/housing/food all the other forms of
| assistance that disadvantaged people need. I know a lot
| of libertarians support it because it is essentially a
| round about way of cutting social benefits.
|
| And hypothetically speaking, say the government is
| spending $10k/year on assistance to a disabled
| individual. If you instead give $10k/year to that
| individual in cash he would not be able to buy the same
| level of care for the same price on the private market.
| He'd get massively short changed. Welfare is far more
| efficient, financially speaking, than handing out cash to
| people and letting them fend for themselves.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > If you instead give $10k/year to that individual in
| cash he would not be able to buy the same level of care
| for the same price on the private market
|
| How do you know that? Countries with much worse welfare
| than the US often have much better prices than the US
| when it comes to healthcare.
|
| Maybe healthcare prices were allowed to grow so much only
| because insurance pays for most of it anyway. If that
| changes, healthcare providers would have to charge more
| realistic amounts, especially for common procedures like
| dental checkups and medications like insulin.
| free652 wrote:
| Because you would cut programs all social programs like
| medicaid, ssi, section 8 and etc. How would these people
| live going forward?
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Why would anyone sane want to live in NYC anyway, if UBI
| was a thing? People move to big cities with expensive
| housing because that's where the well paying jobs are.
| free652 wrote:
| Sane? Like a great-grandmother? Would be she insane to
| live in NYC where is her whole family?
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| The combined disposable income of an entire family should
| be enough to afford housing for one great grandmother.
| UBI probably won't help or hurt her at all.
| z9e wrote:
| It would be insane for her family to not take her into
| their home and take care of her, which unfortunately the
| US doesn't do as much as other cultures.
| free652 wrote:
| So right now she is independent, but under UBI she has to
| beg her family? Is that what you call a success of UBI?
|
| That's just income redistribution from the most
| vulnerable, right wing would love this.
| munk-a wrote:
| I don't think we've seen a serious UBI proposal that can
| actually replace social benefits - but it'd be nice to see
| it replace the more targeted benefits (like food stamps and
| housing benefits) there are some social services (like
| health insurance) that really are more efficient to just
| have the government directly funding - as evidenced by the
| crazy rates Americans tend to pay for what is, elsewhere, a
| rather modest societal expense.
| biql wrote:
| Not necessarily if you account for the fact that people's
| expenses increase as soon as their income increase. Before UBI,
| they might want certain type of hobbies, a certain type of
| house, etc, and after UBI the same people might want more
| expensive hobbies, a bigger house, and so on. Even without UBI,
| many could choose less demanding jobs with more free time,
| lower salaries, and in less expensive cities, but they don't.
| luckylion wrote:
| > From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD
| disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-
| being, children, etc.
|
| Somebody _has to_ do the work though, until robots do
| everything (and then declare war on us), you need somebody to
| take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets.
| Disincentivizing work doesn 't make that go away, it just means
| you'll put that load on fewer shoulders.
| bena wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| That's the part of automation that no one wants to discuss.
| What happens when we're like 90% automated and there simply
| isn't enough jobs for everyone.
|
| Who do we force to work and is that ethical?
| c22 wrote:
| I don't know who we can force to do the work for us, but if
| my toilet's backing up, the garbage is overflowing, and my
| back yard is filled with rotting fruit I guess I'd do those
| jobs.
| I-M-S wrote:
| loa_in_ just answered that question for you
| loa_in_ wrote:
| But lack of personnel to do jobs would bump the wages due to
| demand and that would quickly find people ready to fill them
| in
| megous wrote:
| Or it would kill the businesses operating at the margin of
| profitability.
| BlackCherry wrote:
| Which leaves room for a more cost effective business to
| come in and fill the gap in the market left by the
| inefficient business' death.
| munk-a wrote:
| Why do business deserve a level of welfare we're not
| affording to human beings. Let's feed, house, cloth,
| educate and provide health care for everyone - then we
| can start looking at saving unprofitable business.
|
| The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't
| profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a
| business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by
| flying couriers there with the food - but it could be
| profitable if enough market changes occurred.
|
| As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in
| the market - either there will be a surplus of employees
| (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable
| more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other
| businesses to work at that can survive in the margins
| that exist.
| wtdo wrote:
| And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to
| customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and
| the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so
| effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as
| high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Maybe. These kinds of system-level effects are extremely
| hard to forecast with any kind of certainty. At best, the
| evidence we have is from studying the effects of things
| like raising minimum wage or giving away money to more
| niche groups such as families with children (eg Canada's
| CCTB), or people living in specific areas (Alaska
| Permanent Fund).
|
| As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has
| had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of
| living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington
| State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum
| wage increase back in 2016?
|
| Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully
| expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments
| that have been undertaken by other political ideologies
| with little to no opposition--where is the economic
| growth that was supposed to have happened as a
| consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?
| BlackCherry wrote:
| You're assuming the bump in costs due to higher wages
| would by default outpace that of UBI's tax revenue. This
| is a ridiculous assumption.
|
| The wage earners would be paying more taxes due to their
| higher wages.
|
| The wage earners would have more spending power in our
| real economy, which both means more businesses earning
| money, and more tax revenue collected.
|
| Is there a threshold we could hit where wage increases,
| increase cost to the point of outpacing tax revenues,
| sure. Is this even close to a default outcome. Absolutely
| not, and it's absurd to suggest it.
| munk-a wrote:
| The first half of your statement is perfectly true,
| through implementing UBI we're raising the floor on
| income inequality so that the relative gap between the
| richest and poorest shrinks. But, we don't end up back at
| square one, we just haven't given as effective a UBI as
| we originally intended.
| xzel wrote:
| A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I
| mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing
| professions are useless and only exist because there is
| manufactured bureaucracy. Bullshit Jobs is a great book
| looking into to this. Also UBI shouldn't be disincentivizing
| work, it should be allowing people to explore more fulfilling
| pursuits.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I hear people say this, but I'm never clear on the
| mechanism by which we A) have bullshit jobs now and B) we
| will stop having them once UBI is implemented. It seems to
| me like capitalists pocketing more money is already a
| compelling reason to labor used efficiently.
| rgblambda wrote:
| Graeber himself acknowledged that most of those job roles
| were actually well paying and high status. UBI ain't going
| to disrupt that too much. Also, having read his book, I am
| highly sceptical of the claims made in it. I believe that
| there is a certain portion of many jobs that are bullshit
| but the proportion of fully bullshit jobs is much less than
| as claimed in the book.
| Aunche wrote:
| I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll
| find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of
| them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it
| was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.
| BigBubbleButt wrote:
| Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those
| jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit
| jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes
| bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for
| government contracts - just look at almost any military
| contract where literally billions of dollars go
| unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the
| US that are regularly overbudget, late, and oftentimes
| not even up to the original requirements. And yet - those
| people still get paid and the people who created those
| contracts make _lots_ of money. In fact, they usually
| make _more_ money by being more incompetent, because they
| have to ask for more money to finish the job.
|
| The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
| Aunche wrote:
| I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is
| going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.
| xzel wrote:
| Yes it wouldn't eliminate them. The processes that create
| them would have to be changed or reformed in some way.
| The bullshit jobs/UBI argument is more about filling in
| if/when these jobs are eliminated, that be via automation
| or process reformation.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| One of the major sources of bullshit jobs are self-
| annihilating professions, like lawyers or advertising.
| Monsanto sues Exxon for a billion dollars, Exxon
| countersues, they spend ten years in court and then
| settle for 10% of what they each spent on lawyers. Coke
| and Pepsi each spend a billion dollars on advertising to
| cancel each other out.
|
| If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting
| people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs
| that self-cancel their own profession could then hire
| fewer people industry-wide and result in a net
| productivity boost, since whatever they do in the
| alternative can't be more useless than what they were
| doing.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't understand many jobs, but many I thought were
| bullshit, I changed my mind after learning more about them.
|
| I do know that asking people if their job is bullshit is
| not a good way to truly understand. It's natural to hate
| many jobs, that's why I'm paid to do them.
|
| I once shoveled horse stalls. I hated it. It was. Horseshit
| job. But if the job stopped existing, it would have
| negative impact.
|
| I think it will be cool when we have the luxury of working
| only fun, happiness creating jobs. But someone has to
| shovel out the stalls.
| xzel wrote:
| I don't think I've said all jobs will be rockstar you're
| the boss type of jobs, but there are certainly a huge
| amount of inefficiencies in lots of business. I think
| asking people if they feel like their work is needed or
| could be automated away is probably the only gauge one
| might have until actually removing them or trying to
| automate it. I agree it's not a perfect metric but it's
| got to be correct within some boundary, right? I think
| that's the bigger question here, as well if people are
| qualified to judge (which I would hope since it's their
| job). I actually think we need more "horseshit jobs"
| (great phrase and pun btw I'm going to steal this) in
| America where in the last 20 years we've pushed a lot of
| them to China and others, such as recycling.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| You mean there are tasks that need to be done, not jobs.
|
| In the case of horse shit, for sure it is better if
| someone cleans it, but that someone can also be the
| person that trains or rides the horse.
|
| There isn't an intrinsic need for a job that performs
| only that task.
| throw_away wrote:
| David Graeber talks about this in his book Bullshit Jobs,
| which has been discussed here previously. He makes the
| distinction that a bullshit job is one where both the
| employer and the employed must both pretend that the job
| is useful even though both of them know that it is not.
|
| Under this definition, a lot of dirty or otherwise
| maligned jobs are still essential to society (including
| stall cleaning, depending on your perspective of how
| essential having horses is) and are thus not bullshit
| jobs, but a lot of others (rubber stampers, make workers,
| flunkies) are bullshit jobs.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| I think a better framework to think about this is
| 'Bullshit Businesses', not bullshit jobs. A lot of
| companies only exist to make the owners/investors rich,
| provide little to no value to the world, and/or rely on
| dirt cheap labor for the economics to work. Think spammy
| call centers, Walmart, amazon warehouses, etc...
|
| If people were not in desperate need of a paycheck and
| were able to negotiate/hold out for better jobs, or spend
| more time on career training, then a lot of the business
| would not exist, or would be forced to treat their
| employees better.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Sounds good for workers.
| munk-a wrote:
| And maybe if those jobs are as unattractive as you imply they
| should come with higher pay checks. I work in software and
| love the work that I'm doing - if I was a janitor I'd be
| miserable and be paid less, so where is the incentive for
| anyone who can do something else to be a janitor... and the
| answer is, it isn't there.
| luckylion wrote:
| Sure, so ... who do we force to do the janitorial work once
| nobody has to work anymore? Or does the need for it
| magically vanish? If the answer is "we pay them more",
| great. We're paying more to janitors, janitorial work gets
| more expensive, we need to make more to afford it, we need
| more UBI, janitorial work becomes unattractive.
|
| You'll have to give up a significant part of your (real,
| not nominal) income to make a difference there. You might
| be happy to do that, my guess is that most of your peers
| are not.
| munk-a wrote:
| If I give you 1k, you get some amount of spending power
| x, if I give everyone 1k and you're on the lower end of
| the income scale then you've got an additional spending
| power y. 0 < y < x - getting UBI offers an absolute and
| definite increase in spending power to those in need, it
| doesn't give them that spending power at 100% efficiency
| though, it just shifts some spending power from the
| richest to the poorest.
|
| The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI,
| that's fine, if it's going up then it means that
| something in the current market situation was
| artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market
| can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the
| jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they
| aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a
| profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and
| we discover that people working in an office should, once
| a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very
| plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen
| naturally if it'll happen at all.
| luckylion wrote:
| If you let the market respond, it will just price in the
| UBI, and you'll end up with pretty much the situation we
| have today, only with prices increased by some amount and
| some added bureaucracy.
|
| > maybe [...] we discover that people working in an
| office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans
|
| They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay
| somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid
| software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have
| you do complicated software things than mopping floors
| and emptying the trash can.
|
| I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's
| wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-
| proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor
| is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to
| survive.
|
| I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep
| everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't
| see any compelling argument that some (new or old)
| alternative system that you or I or some people that are
| way smarter than us could come up with would work more
| efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market
| system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets
| if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of
| it failing catastrophically are just too high to go
| "well, maybe it'll work this time".
|
| I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any
| of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI
| suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim
| that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be
| enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they
| haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers
| to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude.
|
| Controlling inflation will be a _massive_ issue, and I
| don 't haven't heard any convincing answers.
|
| If you find a way to convince the super majority that
| "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them
| happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will
| benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are
| certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them
| first and then change the system and not change the
| system and pray to any and all gods that they will become
| convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The litterally shitty job of manually cleaning toilets would
| be higher paid, as it should be.
| theklub wrote:
| Seems like that job will be taken over by robots sooner or
| later.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Just means someone has to clean the toilet-cleaning
| robots.
| simiones wrote:
| > you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits
| and unclog the toilets
|
| So your plan is to make sure some people will die of
| starvation unless they accept to do these jobs?
|
| If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily,
| perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to
| convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more
| people - perhaps on a rotational basis.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| No one (in US or CA) is dying of starvation.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Having worked with them in the past, there are plenty
| that are one Meals on Wheels delivery away from being
| hungry and unable to buy food. Hunger rate in the US is
| 12%.
| munk-a wrote:
| If jobs are critical and unappealing, then we should pay
| large amounts of money for them to be done... Right now
| those critical and unappealing jobs are quite undervalued.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| The examples specifically used above (garbage removal,
| plumbing) pay very well. I'd say they're valued
| appropriately for how little training they require.
| kube-system wrote:
| Exactly. Too many people think about the relationship between
| employment, productivity, and prosperity way too linearly.
|
| The biggest problem is that we don't really have a good way to
| measure the value of free time or well-being. While someone
| could spend every penny of a minimum wage job on daycare
| services and it would boost productivity figures, it would be a
| pretty silly decision for someone to make in terms of actual
| prosperity.
|
| Society has decided for a long time to continue working the
| same or more hours as productivity rises, but at what point
| does it make more sense in terms of prosperity to cash out some
| of that productivity in the form of free-time rather than
| dollars?
| charlus wrote:
| As a side point - whatever happened to the YC research basic
| income study? After great fanfare 4 years ago, it's been very
| quiet the past year.
| EGreg wrote:
| If you want to make UBI a reality, instead of just talking about
| it for 50 years, we have to do it from the bottom up.
|
| I supported Yang, my company Qbix even built https://yang2020.app
| for him. But he didn't get anywhere.
|
| We have a project to build UBI from the bottom up, using
| cryptocurrencies for communities - including local townships and
| cities like Stockton. Local currencies already exist, including
| casino chips, disney dollars, berkshares, bristol pounds etc.
| This just puts them on a blockchain (actually, a new architecture
| we designed that's far faster than blockchain).
|
| If you are really interested, or want to get involved in some way
| to make it a reality, I suggest to do the following:
|
| 1. Visit https://intercoin.org/feature/ubi and fill out the form
|
| 2. Visit https://community.intercoin.org and participate
|
| Or if you are a Javascript developer, contact me. My email is
| "greg" at that domain, intercoin.org
| WilliamEdward wrote:
| What's to stop UBI from eating into other welfare checks? Or
| what's stopping renters from simply raising rent 1000 dollars?
| chillacy wrote:
| > from eating into other welfare checks
|
| I think that's the point for most UBI proposals. The most
| cash-like welfare programs are TANF and SNAP, they pay out on
| the order of $250 (depending on state), are temporary, hard
| to obtain, always under danger of being cut, etc.
|
| UBI is an appealing replacement that's universal (more
| resistant to cuts because it's more popular), pays out more,
| has no discontinuities which result in welfare traps, etc.
|
| The goal should not be to increase welfare recipients but to
| increase quality of life and social outcomes. For instance a
| jobs program like the Green New Deal would probably "eat into
| welfare checks" as people become ineligible through earnings.
| glennvtx wrote:
| No one seems to address the idea that coercion is necessary to
| force people to pay for this, something i do not wish to do, and
| many people feel the same. It has already been shown this
| disincentives work, Those of us that do work and are taxed to pay
| for the already massively wasteful welfare state resent being
| enslaved even further to pay for the errors of socialist re-
| distributive schemes.
| chillacy wrote:
| You're already being coerced to pay for social services, I
| wouldn't compare UBI to an anarcho-capitalist paradise, but the
| current situation, and many UBI proposals are much better than
| the status quo.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| The basic income experiment improved motivation to find a higher
| paying job for both employed and unemployed members but
|
| > almost three-quarters of the respondents who were employed six
| months before receiving basic income were still working while
| receiving basic income. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents who
| were previously unemployed remained without work during the
| pilot. About 20 percent found employment.
|
| So the majority of unemployed people stayed unemployed. Of the
| people employed prior to the pilot, about 23% became unemployed
| although in some cases it may have been to pursue more education.
|
| > The unemployed group were three times more likely to report
| their general health had declined during the pilot as compared to
| the employed group.
|
| The majority of the unemployed group reported improved general
| health but a significant portion of the unemployed group became
| worse off during the pilot.
|
| The majority of participants did report improved well-being
| through a survey. The survey asked questions about general
| health, mental health, and financial well-being among others.
|
| If the cost was $150,000,000 for 4,000 people for 3 years, the
| cost per year should be approx $50,000,000.
|
| The articles states there are 2,000,000 people in poverty in the
| Ontario province so this program, if scaled up to all those in
| poverty, would be expected to cost $25,000,000,000 per year from
| simply scaling up the cost 500x.
| jl6 wrote:
| Are trust fund kids an example of what happens when people are
| given an unconditional income?
| lonelappde wrote:
| No because their income it not Basic.
| mzs wrote:
| I wish the report broke out the family health benefits based on
| if the participant gained/lost work did/didn't go to school.
| (edit: Also provide a category for those that were too ill to
| work to begin with.) From the conclusion:
|
| >As for the labour market participation of survey respondents,
| over half indicated working before and during the pilot (54%)
| while less than a quarter were unemployed before and during the
| pilot (24%). Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before
| but unemployed during the pilot (17%) and a smaller number
| reported not working before but finding work during the pilot
| (5%). Just under half of those who stopped working during the
| pilot returned to school to improve their future employability
| (40.6%).
|
| >Those who were working both before and during the pilot reported
| improvements in their rate of pay (37%), working conditions (31%)
| and job security (27%). The entire survey sample reported other
| work-related improvements such as searching more easily for a job
| (61%),staying motivated to find better employment (79%) and
| starting school or an educational training program (26%).
|
| https://labourstudies.mcmaster.ca/documents/southern-ontario...
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I think it's important to study the details of different
| implementations before making any conclusions, positive or
| negative, about basic income. Yeah, one of the challenges with a
| test like this is knowing there's a finite end date.
|
| Another aspect that is often ignored in these discussions is the
| question of whether recipients continue to be eligible for basic
| social safety net type of services. I've heard the libertarian
| approach to basic income is essentially a replacement for the
| services we consider "welfare", and that's what we're seeing out
| of the proposal in California where recipients receiving other
| assistance would be ineligible for this kind of income. Medicaid,
| for one, is a strike against eligibility.
|
| I haven't looked into Ontario's test in detail, but I doubt the
| recipients gave up their single-payer healthcare to receive basic
| income. Also makes me think that BI is only so popular because we
| rarely dive into the details of what happens to existing social
| programs, a question that will surely turn the UI/BI discussion
| more divisive.
| amoorthy wrote:
| As others have said this study doesn't have enough data to be
| conclusive. So most people, including me, comment based on which
| of the following we believe in:
|
| 1. People are inherently lazy. UBI will encourage them to do
| less. 2. People are inherently interested in maximizing their
| potential. UBI will enable them to do more.
|
| I couldn't find any social science research on which of the above
| is more true. But if we could tell maybe that can help us guess
| at how many UBI recipients will abuse the system as that seems to
| be the main concern around UBI.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| This misses the point entirely. UBI is the democratic socialist
| version of The Great Leap Forward. Its an attempt to better human
| existence via direct government intervention, something which
| rarely works as intended (assuming you're counting net gains).
| I'm pretty pragmatic, (and libertarian) so if we're going to
| start down this path let's skip the faux capitalism and get
| straight to the bread and games part. The government _already_
| has a near limitless amount of power to effect changes in the
| economic structure of the country, and this is where they 've
| gotten us. Going further down that path seems a bit daft.
|
| I realize part of this problem is that we've moved into being a
| post-frontier world, where there are few, if any, places left
| where people can go to govern themselves, but I don't see why the
| lack of empty unclaimed space should lead to the government
| taking money from some citizens to buy the loyalty of other
| citizens.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I'm not optimistic about basic income for the average person.
|
| That said, I know that if I had basic income, I would spend my
| time building things for the world. There are lots of side
| projects that I have worked on or want to work on, but simply
| haven't been able to get them off the ground because I don't have
| the time to dedicate enough mental energy. There's too much at
| stake for me to compromise my current job to work on something
| that may or may not succeed. I could work on projects after hours
| or during the weekend, but I've found this to be too spiritually
| exhausting and simply impractical; I have a hard time maintaining
| momentum if I can't dedicate more than half my time to something.
|
| If I could get by with the basics and not have to be employed, I
| could actually get something done that not only might help the
| world but employ others.
| chillacy wrote:
| I would think that thousands of people like you trying to build
| something innovative and new would be well worth the investment
| in those who try and fail or those who are content to "waste it
| away" (spending their UBI and doing nothing else is still
| creating economic activity).
| rapind wrote:
| If you raise the bar by $x across the board then doesn't $x
| gradually becomes the new bottom? If we give everyone $50k / year
| tax-free, would that just make $50k the new $0 relative to cost
| of living? The effect being the same as a progressive tax (those
| who make far more are far less impacted).
|
| If it is basically the same as a progressive tax, then it does
| strike me as a much simpler way to implement it (instead of
| complicated varying brackets). However adding it on top of an
| existing progressive tax scheme is adding another point of
| complexity right?
|
| Maybe replacing progressive taxes with a flat tax and then adding
| UBI would be a better / simpler approach.
| chillacy wrote:
| The Harvard economist Greg Mankiew has a talk where he shows
| how a UBI + flat tax could behave the same as a progressive tax
| + phased out UBI: https://taxfoundation.org/universal-basic-
| income-ubi-means-t...
| rapind wrote:
| Seems like it would be more clear and fair all around to have
| flat tax + UBI so we aren't mixing solutions to different
| problems.
|
| Rich and poor probably utilize public services around the
| same amount (roads, police, hospitals, fire departments,
| etc.). (I'm sure there are counter arguments to this, but if
| public services we're good enough, can we assume this?). So a
| flat tax would be fair. It potentially disincentives better
| public services in more wealthy regions if everyone pays the
| same (again, sure there are some counter arguments, but it
| would be better right?).
|
| Then adding UBI is clearly for the purpose of distributing
| some of the wealth that our society has allowed to be created
| is contributed back to those less fortunate. UBI would have
| to keep pace with inflation of course. A fixed "thank you for
| making our rich country work and for buying crap even if
| don't need it" that everyone gets doesn't seem too
| controversial.
|
| Other than accountants, tax lawyers, and offshore havens, who
| gets hurt?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > The three-year, $150-million program
|
| Three year. Would you quit your job, and move somewhere cheaper
| if you knew the money will run out after three years, and you'll
| have a three year gap in your CV?
|
| Are there really no lottery winners winning lifetime monthly
| payouts to study?
|
| Because, if you gave me 5x average earnings for three years, I
| wouldn't quit my job. But if you guaranteed the money for the
| rest of my life, i'd pursue different activities (fun, good for
| me, but non-productive for society).
| avanderveen wrote:
| > non-productive for society
|
| Why? I feel like a lot of people want to do things that are
| productive for society, that we have too little of right now.
| Things like producing art of all forms, building things,
| increasing their level of communication with those around them,
| participating in community events and activities, etc. Sure,
| these things aren't economically productive, but they're still
| productive for society, which is the gap that I'd like to see
| filled, whether by UBI or other forms of providing more
| security for the general population.
| allovernow wrote:
| >Why? I feel like a lot of people want to do things that are
| productive for society
|
| Most of the things that are productive for society require
| study and practice of skills that aren't particularly
| interesting to the vast majority of people.
|
| >Sure, these things aren't economically productive
|
| The vast majority of things that are productive for society
| are economically productive. That's why people pay for
| things.
|
| We don't need UBI to go toward funding artists and musicians.
| That's a waste of resources. Particularly considering that
| far too many people are likely to choose the easy way out,
| pursuing "what they love", i.e. soft skills like art and
| music. You also drastically underestimate the number people
| who are perfectly content with doing drugs and watching
| TV/playing video games all day.
|
| Unfortunately while resources are scarce, human nature is
| such that people require incentives to do the things that
| need to be done.
| strgcmc wrote:
| As a slightly different kind of counter-example, see this
| recent post about "hard problems":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425745
|
| IMO, UBI can actually encourage innovation and productive
| work, on "hard problems" that are not economically viable
| in a short-enough time-frame or lucrative enough for VCs,
| but for which society would certainly benefit from.
| 6DM wrote:
| Well Paid Salary: No, I probably wouldn't do much different and
| would still be concerned about my CV.
|
| At or near Poverty: Yes, I would use this opportunity to focus
| on education/training that I might not have had the
| chance/maturity to focus on earlier in life.
|
| Your income level will play a significant role. Being able to
| escape a violent neighborhood would be more than worth it for
| some people.
| harumph wrote:
| > Three year. Would you quit your job, and move somewhere
| cheaper if you knew the money will run out after three years,
| and you'll have a three year gap in your CV?
|
| This might be news to you, but there are huge swaths of people
| on this planet with no CV, no career, and are just scraping by,
| for whom 3 years of money would be a literal gift from the
| gods.
| dahart wrote:
| > Are there really no lottery winners winning lifetime monthly
| payouts to study?
|
| There are a bunch, but that's complicated and notoriously
| politicized because people with agendas spin the results. For
| example, there's a famous and widely cited study of 35,000
| lottery winners in Florida where the headlines say almost
| everyone spent all their winnings after 5 years, and that
| bankruptcy rates went up after 2 years. It's misleading because
| the winners were $150k or less, you'd expect that to be gone
| after 5 years, and because backruptcy rates went down for the
| first two years, and then returned to normal.
|
| Googling it right now, I'm actually seeing a lot of headlines
| like "85% of lottery winners kept their jobs" and "study finds
| lottery winners are happier".
|
| > if you gave me 5x average earnings for three years, I
| wouldn't quit my job. But if you guaranteed the money for the
| rest of my life, I'd pursue different activities
|
| I'm not sure why... 5x for me would be life-changing. That's 15
| years' salary, or 12 years' savings, without making lifestyle
| changes. I would _absolutely_ use that money to re-evaluate and
| try some new things.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Three year. Would you quit your job, and move somewhere
| cheaper if you knew the money will run out after three years,
| and you'll have a three year gap in your CV?
|
| Short-term thinkers vs. long-term thinkers
| ativzzz wrote:
| > non-productive for society
|
| Assuming if you made more money, you would then spend that
| money, there would be someone who would create opportunities
| for people like you to spend your money. And that just sounds
| like business to me.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| What about guaranteed 1/4 average earnings for life? Would you
| still quit your job then? It's a rhetorical question the answer
| is obviously no, most people would still keep working just now
| have better negotiating power and flexibility.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'd use 3 years to unapologetically recover from the daily
| grind that is working daily, and figure out what I really
| wanted to do. It would make for a great opportunity to figure
| out and build skills for what I want to do in the next phase of
| my life.
|
| A 3 year gap (call it a sabbatical and get all kinds of kudos
| for being so brave) isn't that hard to overcome, if you have
| the required skills.
| peterashford wrote:
| relevant:
| https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...
| elif wrote:
| The problem is not the productivity of those on UBI, the elephant
| in the room is the ideology of humans on this planet who are
| forced into labor for survival vs those who are percieved as
| having a free ride.
|
| That schism will exist for any set of parameters and methods of
| rolling it out. It will not solve class imbalances, it will make
| them painfully clear.
|
| E.G. for those of us who have wealth, own houses, etc, UBI will
| make having a job seem like an optional folly to a person with
| debt and rent to pay. We really don't want a society like that.
| hinkley wrote:
| I want UBI and a 30-32 hour work week, so I guess I'm proposing a
| 20% "disincentivization".
|
| Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? What's the
| carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don't
| need but we bust our humps for anyway? At this point, more robots
| don't mean more of the stuff we need. they mean more stuff we
| _don 't_ need.
| dang wrote:
| This subthread was originally a child of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22494497.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| You can already have a 30 hour work week if you want to do
| contract or part-time work, but for a full-time position you'd
| be competing with companies who still work 40-50 hour weeks so
| I don't think there's much practical opportunity here.
| regularfry wrote:
| You're assuming the additional 10-20 hours is a meaningful
| competitive advantage. That's not a given.
| Proziam wrote:
| Anecdote incoming. I work double full time and have done so
| for approaching a decade. It's _definitely_ proven to be a
| significant competitive advantage in my case. I don 't know
| too many folks who could have comfortably retired in their
| 20s (that didn't grow up with generational wealth).
|
| Still, I've seen many folks in esports do crazy workloads
| and get nowhere fast. So there's more to the formula than
| just pouring in more effort.
| munk-a wrote:
| I mean, congrats, but if you retired comfortably in your
| 20s you got crazy lucky - that kind of rapid wealth
| acquisition isn't skill based. I used to work in the game
| industry getting peanuts for the same hours, we made
| amazing things in crunch that I am proud of, but when we
| started to scale back hours our product got even better
| because we lowered the stress and increased the
| healthiness of our workplace.
| ta5840 wrote:
| > that kind of rapid wealth acquisition isn't skill
| based.
|
| This is just nonsense and reflects a desire to dismiss
| the capabilities and accomplishments of others because
| they don't reflect your self-pitying worldview.
|
| Chances are that the above poster did something you're
| unable or unwilling to do -- and the difference in
| outcomes is reflective of that.
| Proziam wrote:
| If you could have worked twice as many hours and made
| twice as much money - would you? That was the position I
| found myself in, and that's how I got where I am. I never
| claimed to have a secret skill.
| munk-a wrote:
| 1. It would have been physically impossible for me to do
| so since I was already working 10-12 hour days pretty
| often and without sleep I'd be worthless.
|
| 2. Double income isn't necessarily that much income, if
| you're making 35k giving up sleeping to get 70k seems
| like a pretty poor trade.
|
| Also, no, never. I would never work twice as many hours
| (assuming we're taking a base number of hours between 6
| and 8) for twice the pay. You effectively earn less money
| (due to graduated taxes) and you have to give up all the
| creature comforts of life. Going from working 8 hours a
| day to 16 hours a day would drastically lower the
| enjoyment I got from life and probably end up killing me
| from stress.
| Proziam wrote:
| I suppose everyone's situation is different. I was self-
| employed and had the opportunity to just work more and
| earn more at the time. The luck part of that equation is
| that I wasn't earning 35k, but I'm sure there are people
| on this forum earning more than I was at peak regardless.
|
| I personally really enjoy working, and never felt that
| working 80+ hours was a burden. To be honest I actually
| look forward to getting up and getting to it most days.
|
| With all that said, the growth I had just wouldn't have
| been possible on 40 hours a week of work. So I credit the
| long hours with the creation of a lot of the luck and
| opportunity I experienced in my life.
| hinkley wrote:
| "Man.
|
| Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
|
| Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
|
| And then he is so anxious about the future that he does
| not enjoy the present;
|
| the result being that he does not live in the present or
| the future;
|
| he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies
| having never really lived."
| Proziam wrote:
| You're describing my dad perfectly. He worked as much as
| I do (plus he was doing hard physical labor...) until he
| died of cancer in 2009. He's the reason I dedicated
| myself to work as much as I could as early as I could, so
| I could get myself to a point of financial independence.
| He never got to enjoy his retirement because he
| sacrificed his life to adopt me, so I feel a sense of
| urgency to enjoy life as much as I can in his honor.
| hinkley wrote:
| That is a Dalai Lama quote, and it's the only one that
| has really stuck with me.
|
| It's so true it hurts.
| hinkley wrote:
| Most of American management cannot tell the difference
| between motion and progress.
|
| While I don't want to dismiss your extra effort as
| improving your results, I suspect that the value placed
| on your behavior by management may have been out of
| proportion with objective truth.
|
| I'm also concerned with whether you were Defecting, in a
| Prisoner's Dilemma sense. Management always sets
| unreasonable deadlines as long as anybody agrees with
| them. Only when people are unanimous that this is crazy
| do they ever seem to back off.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad?
|
| Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and services
| they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people who opt
| out of working, the harder everyone else must work to
| compensate.
|
| > What's the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods
| we really don't need but we bust our humps for anyway?
|
| People dropping out of the workforce doesn't reduce the demand
| for those goods and services. In fact, giving people free
| income might increase the demands for goods and services as
| those people would have extra disposable income.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone
| else must work to compensate.
|
| For which the market should correct by increasing their
| compensation, thus incentivising people to return to working,
| no?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > For which the market should correct by increasing their
| compensation, thus incentivising people to return to
| working, no?
|
| Partially, but some of those increased compensation costs
| will translate to increased prices for everyone. That
| reduces the real value of a fixed UBI amount.
|
| It's a given that a significant amount of UBI will be
| absorbed by inflation, particularly in housing prices in
| competitive cities. If everyone in a city is already
| competing for a limited housing supply and suddenly
| everyone has an extra $1000 per month, I wouldn't be
| surprised if the cheapest housing costs suddenly increased
| by nearly $1000 per month.
| cambalache wrote:
| How so? The compensation is increased because less people
| are working, so the cost of labour is fixed (which is
| neglible in any case in a post-scarcity society as
| envisioned in the future)
| EpicEng wrote:
| If labor remains fixed then people as a whole have more
| money. Prices go up due to inflation and increased
| demand, no? I realize that's simplistic, but is it not
| generally true?
| take_a_breath wrote:
| ==If everyone in a city is already competing for a
| limited housing supply and suddenly everyone has an extra
| $1000 per month, I wouldn't be surprised if the cheapest
| housing costs suddenly increased by nearly $1000 per
| month.==
|
| If we accept this logic as true, wouldn't it incentivize
| builders to increase housing supply? They would want to
| capture those higher rents and prices, right?
| CivBase wrote:
| > For which the market should correct by increasing their
| compensation, thus incentivising people to return to
| working, no?
|
| Which drives up the cost of goods, resulting in an
| inflation that counteracts the UBI and gets us right back
| where we started.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Competition still exerts a downward force on prices, and
| as the cost of labor increases the cost of developing
| automation will become more and more attractive to
| replace it.
| tomp wrote:
| You don't need UBI then, prices will just go down towards
| 0 because of competition, resulting in free food /
| housing / clothing / mobile phones for everyone.
|
| Only being half-sarcastic here.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and
| services they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people
| who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to
| compensate.
|
| Workers are more productive now than they ever have been.[0]
| Productivity was up 253% since 1948 seven years ago. For
| decades they've been promising us the 20 hour work week, and
| it's here. In fact it's only 15 hours comparatively.
|
| The point is: you don't need everyone to work full time
| everyday for a society to maintain a healthy standard of
| living.
|
| [0] https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/07/news/economy/compensatio
| n-p...
| luckylion wrote:
| > The point is: you don't need everyone to work full time
| everyday for a society to maintain a healthy standard of
| living.
|
| _Maintaining_ isn 't what people are aiming for though,
| they want improvement. People are not satisfied by
| objectively living much better lives than some king or pope
| 500 years ago.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| First, peoples' satisfaction is primarily influenced by
| the visibility of the inequities immediately around them.
|
| Second, who said anything about the rate of change going
| to zero? Even if productivity suddenly dropped to 1948
| levels, it's not like we'd be living in 1948. It's not a
| time machine.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| So why don't managers and administrators work to produce
| things? They seem capable of labor, and they're paid extra,
| but they work less. Why?
|
| Edit: You downvoted me within a minute of my posting. I asked
| two questions. If you can't answer them, then it is because
| you fear their answers.
|
| So let's answer them! Managers and administrators don't
| produce things because they claim that their positions allow
| them to optimize labor. Specifically, their bonus pay is
| based upon the idea that management and administration
| increases output _proportional to their efficacy_. It follows
| that we should _measure_ the output of management practices,
| and compensate managers according to their actual impact.
| 0x4477 wrote:
| >So why don't managers and administrators work to produce
| things? They seem capable of labor, and they're paid extra,
| but they work less. Why?
|
| Management and administration is a skill that not everyone
| possesses. There are such things as good and bad managers.
| Just because the work they do doesn't directly output a
| tangible product doesn't mean it's not valuable.
| Additionally, it's typically a position with more
| responsibility as well as accountability which tends to
| reflect in higher pay. That's not to say it's a perfect
| system but this is generally how it works.
|
| As for working less, unless you mean they do less physical
| labour than the people they manage, they often work more.
| It's unfair to say managers work less because they do
| management tasks rather than the work their subordinates
| do. In virtually every job I've had, the more senior the
| manager, the more hours they worked. Retail especially.
|
| >So let's answer them! Managers and administrators don't
| produce things because they claim that their positions
| allow them to optimize labor. Specifically, their bonus pay
| is based upon the idea that management and administration
| increases output proportional to their efficacy. It follows
| that we should measure the output of management practices,
| and compensate managers according to their actual impact.
|
| They don't just claim their positions optimize labour, it
| actually does optimize it. I don't understand where this
| idea that managers are merely irrelevant middlemen who have
| no impact on the people they manage comes from. Companies
| seek profit and have no desire to pay people simply for
| existing, especially if they do not meaningfully contribute
| to the bottom line. Managers are hired exactly because they
| do affect the bottom line in a sufficiently meaningful way
| to justify their presence. And, as with almost any other
| job, a manager that fails to contribute will be replaced
| much like any other underperforming employee.
|
| That isn't to say there isn't a thing as too many managers
| or levels of management or even bad managers that do not
| get fired, but to sweep them all aside as irrelevant is
| simply not a realistic interpretation.
| Cobord wrote:
| But we need the counterfactual. When the labor they
| "optimized" would have done the same or better without
| their interference, we cannot tell. We just take the
| estimates from the manager themselves as the baseline. And
| of course, they would lie about that.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > If you can't answer them, then it is because you fear
| their answers.
|
| Or they object to the obvious answers and rather strike out
| emotionally. How dare you sir!
| vslira wrote:
| > the harder everyone else must work to compensate
|
| I really don't want to get into this argument but supposedly
| productivity gains from automation/AI should make those who
| keep working work proportionally less to compensate non-
| workers.
|
| Why I don't want to get into this argument: there's no
| conclusive view about UBI + automation yet, so it's all
| speculation
| ativzzz wrote:
| "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy."
|
| Or adapting to productivity gains, the productivity
| required is increasing to meet the needs of increasingly
| productive people.
|
| So taking into account human nature might mean that
| productivity gains enable us to do more advanced work, not
| to work less. But like you said, we're all just
| speculating.
| bittercynic wrote:
| > People dropping out of the workforce doesn't reduce the
| demand for those goods and services.
|
| It might, if the price of labor goes up and makes those goods
| and services more expensive.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I would give up some of my income to finance UBI without
| thinking twice. I probably would work a bit less, but I am
| planning that nevertheless with or without UBI.
|
| What I am skeptical about is work that is real hard, not some
| silly office stuff. Care and nursing for example. There might
| be few people who would do that under current working
| conditions with UBI in sight. Not that I think the current
| situation is in any way sustainable. It is already completely
| broken before the large demographic bombs hit some countries.
|
| On the other hand, maybe family members had more time to
| offer care themselves.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Since we already have the productivity to grow and make all
| the necessities of life, why are we worried about maximizing
| degree to which we work for more luxury goods?
| thfuran wrote:
| Because I don't want to live in an un-air-conditioned shack
| subsisting only on wheat and soy.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone
| else must work to compensate.
|
| Historical counterpoint: Shorter hours like 40/week were
| introduced to _increase_ productivity.
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
|
| So it may very well be that the exact opposite of what you
| think is true and that you currently have to compensate for
| people working badly with long hours.
|
| > In fact, giving people free income might increase the
| demands for goods and services as those people would have
| extra disposable income.
|
| Thus far UBI tended to be about the same amount of income
| just from different sources.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think some people imagine that people like me calling for
| 32 hour work weeks are part of some slippery slope to
| everyone working an hour a day.
|
| I trust the research that suggests that humans may only be
| built for ~30 hours of detail oriented work per week.
| That's also a nice number where I have time to work on
| other things, rather than just loafing about. If my boss
| offered me 30hrs/w plus insurance, I'd spend an extra 5+
| hours a week working on my side projects and volunteer
| work.
| rmah wrote:
| To use different phrasing, what you're saying is that you want
| people to be poorer. Please understand that I don't mean this
| as a personal attack on you, your beliefs or philosophy. But
| from a different perspective, that really is what you're
| saying. Do you _really_ want to say that?
|
| Perhaps a better alternative is: a good goal would be to allow
| people to have more while using less natural resources and
| polluting the environment less. While certainly difficult, I'd
| hope that advances in efficiency (such as more automation)
| could theoretically allow this!
| hinkley wrote:
| I want people to figure out that materialism doesn't actually
| make them happy. And to stop cutting down forests while they
| haven't figured it out.
|
| I don't want poor people to have nothing. I want the middle
| class to look elsewhere for status besides carbon footprint.
| togs wrote:
| I think you're too hasty to assume OP thinks they should be
| unemployed AND have no income.
|
| Anyways I agree that we need to work less.
| bluntfang wrote:
| >To use different phrasing,
|
| I don't find this style of discourse productive. Why do you
| insist on putting words in their mouth in an attempt to lead
| them down the discussion you want to have instead of what's
| being presented? Asking for clarification on why you don't
| understand their statement could be more productive, but I
| don't think you're interested in that anyways.
| Cobord wrote:
| Yes. I do want the per capita and total GDP to be lower if
| that means raising the minimum of the distribution and
| reducing its variance.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You are using very charged and slanted language.
|
| Likely, their lives will be greatly _enriched_ by an extra
| day off of work per week.
|
| Bank accounts, the GDP, and other similar metrics fail to
| capture enormous amounts of value and meaning in our lives.
| Even the progress of scientific understanding is poorly
| measured in this way.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe. What will you do with that free time? Most people
| will give an answer that depends on having toys they can no
| longer afford.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I don't think that is true. Here a few things people
| might do:
|
| * Spend valuable time with a young child
|
| * Relax at the park
|
| * Spend time with family and friends
|
| * Take care of household chores or administrative life
| tasks that one has been procrastinating on
|
| * Go hiking
|
| * Read a book
|
| * Watch a show or movie
|
| * Learn a new skill or start a new hobby
|
| * Build a website or start a blog that isn't profitable
| but adds value to the world
| BlackCherry wrote:
| I think you're confusing consumerist propaganda we are
| bombarded with in media designed to literally get us to
| purchase stuff from the ads they are displaying with real
| life people.
|
| Real life people on average desire more quality time with
| their communities/families and to make themselves a
| "better person" through hobbies, learning, exercise,
| sports.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's worth noting that more automation should also lead to
| shorter work weeks (or alternatively more unemployment). So
| the effect stays pretty much the same, the question is only
| if people keep the same compensation for fewer hours or if
| compensation per hour stays about the same.
| auiya wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet in most workplaces, about 20% of the
| workforce is dead weight - especially those in the management
| chain.
| nradov wrote:
| Very few workplaces have 20% management. A few businesses
| have experimented with radically flattening the organization
| and cutting out management layers; this has generally not
| improved productivity or financial results.
| auiya wrote:
| So radically flattening the organization and cutting out
| management layers has generally not improved productivity,
| but are you then saying it had little impact, or negative
| impact?
| calgoo wrote:
| True, but I think the question should be if the company is
| worse off without the baggage management, not if they are
| more productive or have better financial results.
| nradov wrote:
| The problem is that there is no scalable, reliable way to
| distinguish between "baggage" management and productive
| management in any large organization. Many have tried to
| solve that problem and no one has really succeeded. So
| cutting out management layers tends to indiscriminately
| eliminate the good with the bad. If you can figure out a
| better solution then you'll make a fortune as a
| management consultant.
|
| Lower level employees often think they know which
| managers are baggage, and sometimes they're right, but
| often they're not seeing the whole picture. A manager who
| appears to be baggage from one perspective is sometimes
| performing crucial activities that are only visible from
| other perspectives. Management value added often can't be
| objectively measured but yet it exists all the same.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to learn that 20% of work time is
| spent on social media or other personal matters across all
| office workers.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I'd be very surprised if it was only 20%. By my estimation
| many office jobs are 50% or more just being paid to sit at
| a desk.
| Supermancho wrote:
| And the less well paid jobs (eg Veterinary Assistant -
| not technician or McDonald's employee) have individuals
| working near constantly. There is a class divide under
| the 1% which is also quite stark, with regard to work
| demands.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think I've witnessed that fraction go up when raises and
| promotions fail to meet expectations.
| a0zU wrote:
| I agree that we all have so much stuff that we don't need, but
| in such an incredibly consumerist society we can't really
| seperate what we want from what we need without a massive
| cultural revolution. On top of that our current capitalist
| society only works because people buy lots of things that they
| don't need.
| ip26 wrote:
| Everyone working 20% less will have very different effects
| compared to 20% fewer people working (while the rest continue
| to work as before).
|
| The former, which is what you are describing, seems positive.
| However it sounds like this study observed the latter
| happening.
| anoncake wrote:
| That depends on what the 20% do instead.
| Proven wrote:
| Complete nonsense.
| exabrial wrote:
| The end does not justify the means. Forcibly removing someone's
| money and transferring it to another person can never be
| justified. Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion.
|
| However, if a billionaire wishes to privately sponsor UBI, this
| is a completely different story in charity and example that
| should be regarded. It's important to differentiate between the
| two, but unfortunately most UBI schemes refer to extortion, not
| charity.
| Seenso wrote:
| > Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion.
|
| Our law creates both property rights _and_ taxes. Taxes aren 't
| theft because, by law, that money is actually the government's
| property. If you want individualistically overrule our law to
| make taxes theft, I might as well do the same to make your
| property mine.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| The notion of property rights is not created by the law, but
| a law of nature, a concept intuitively understood by human
| beings. The same goes for theft. The law only _adopted_ these
| concepts, but it _created_ taxes. It is not intuitively
| obvious that some entity is entitled to a percentage of the
| money you 're earning.
|
| You can change the law any way you want, but you're not
| changing the underlying laws of nature, and they allow you to
| make a case that taxes are theft. Whether that's actually
| true is then of course debatable and depends on a lot of
| variables, but saying that someone else's property should
| arbitrarily be yours immediately contradicts those
| fundamental laws.
| Seenso wrote:
| > The notion of property rights is not created by the law,
| but a law of nature, a concept intuitively understood by
| human beings. The same goes for theft. The law only adopted
| these concepts, but it created taxes. It is not intuitively
| obvious that some entity is entitled to a percentage of the
| money you're earning.
|
| Nope, sorry. You might be on to something if you limited
| yourself to the "foreign relations" of a community, but
| we're talking about _intra_ community relations here. If
| you're looking for laws of nature, _socially obligatory
| sharing_ is far more fundamental and important than any
| primal notions of exclusivist private property and theft.
|
| Concepts like private property, theft, _and taxation_ do
| have primitive antecedents, but you 're guilty of
| anachronism if you think those antecedents make some modern
| ideological notion a kind of fundamental law.
| vzidex wrote:
| > Forcibly removing someone's money and transferring it to
| another person can never be justified
|
| Except that almost everything government does involves removing
| someone's money - through taxes - and transferring it to
| another person - through social programs (including public
| school, building infrastructure), social programs, paying
| government employees, etc.
|
| > If a billionaire wishes to privately sponsor UBI...
|
| Extending this to include the social programs listed above: gee
| I can't wait to lick a billionaire's boots and do the hokey-
| pokey to be allowed to drive on their roads, have my burning
| house saved by their private firefighters, and send my kids to
| the schools they own.
| karatestomp wrote:
| > The end does not justify the means. Forcibly removing
| someone's money and transferring it to another person can never
| be justified. Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion.
|
| Unrelatedly, I have also proven beyond a doubt that Ray Charles
| is God.
| cvlasdkv wrote:
| > The end does not justify the means. Forcibly removing
| someone's money and transferring it to another person can never
| be justified.
|
| I agree. For that reason we should redistribute wealth from
| lazy rent-seeking shareholders and landlords. Billionaires and
| shareholders are legalized slave owners and should be treated
| as such.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The ... program was scrapped by Ontario's ... government in
| July. ... minister Lisa MacLeod, said the decision was made
| because the program was failing to help people become
| "independent contributors to the economy."
|
| Basic income is supposed to help people cover their basic needs,
| not to make them "independent contributors to the economy".
|
| This is doubly the case when we remember that doing volunteer
| work, social/community organizing, (non-commercialized) art - is
| not even counted as part of "the economy".
|
| Also, if you're an employee - becoming an employee or continuing
| to be one - you're not an "independent contributor to the
| economy". But the vast majority of"contributors to the economy"
| are wage workers, not independent tradespeople.
| zeta0x10 wrote:
| Things like Kubernetes probably exist to employ engineers to have
| to do something and to contra basic income.
| drummer wrote:
| Like the brilliant social engineer Jacque Fresco said, we should
| just give everyone what they need to live for free in what he
| called a Resource Based Economy. That is even better than giving
| them money. I highly recommend his book "The best that money
| can't buy".
| [deleted]
| dahart wrote:
| I'm glad there are experiments like this actually happening for
| any amount of time. It would be great to see the experiment run
| it's full course, but it's maybe more surprising to me that it
| got funded, rather than that it got cancelled. Thinking about how
| contentious and political funding can be for things we know we
| need, like schools, it's not very surprising that something
| expensive and not 100% required ends up on the chopping block.
|
| What do you think it would realistically take to be able to fund
| UBI (or other experiments) without running the risk of being
| cancelled? How could it be set up so that next year's political
| opponent doesn't have the ability to axe a project to make
| themselves look good?
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