A link to the actual research paper would be helpful.
In this experiment, what amount was given to the treatment group that received basic income? How often? How does that amount compare to the cost of living in their city?
> ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’
I’m not an academic, so take this with a grain of salt.
If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.
My spouse worked for the state government as part of a benefits/disbursement program. She took phone calls from benefits recipients. Some who are disabled, on unemployment, or generally within the states bar to qualify for tax payer aid.
The pay was slightly above minimum wage. My spouse quit after about a year, during which my souse constantly suffered from verbal abuse and even callers who didn’t qualify threatening to murder my spouse unless they received cash from the state.
My point is - there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit and not work if the basic income can provide a sufficient substitute.
I’m not making an argument against basic income. I suppose it’s sad that we as a society treat a significant number of people, even in developed countries, without a shred of dignity.
> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.
Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.
And the pay would obviously go up. People would be willing to do the job if it means life or death, but not for minimum wage - and that's a good thing.
I've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated.
For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming.
Then they cut their hours to part-time for all but two workers. At minimum wage it was barely livable on 40 hours per week.
They also ask the night worker to come in the next day with less than a seven hour gap from the previous shift.
Even at the punch clock they were scolded for punching in or out a mere 1 minute off from the time to work or end.
I could tell when talking to the staff many of them felt defeated and this was the only job they could do. They just had to sit there and take it.
Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.
> Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.
This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be able to live until they find another job. Being able to do that should prevent a fair amount of abuse in the first place.
I don't get it... why not raise minimum wages to reflect local cost of living? IE, why tax all of us instead of the businesses not paying enough for their employees?
Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone. I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.
The problem is that it takes a strict authoritarian governmental control because you need to regulate the prizes of everything that's deemed necessary to prevent subsidizing controlling third parties.
Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any possible benefit but for those already in a non-vulnerable position.
I don't think rent control is the policy of a "strict authoritarian government". Regardless, I don't agree with you that rent would rise considerably or that it would negate any benefit.
Why would rent not rise? Landlords know you have X more to spend now. Why would they not raise prices, altruism? You think that's their reason behind renting out property?
Same with the telecommunications pseudo-monopolies: you really think they won't try and tap into that resource even if a little? Communications has become almost as vital as housing the last decade.
Companies will do everything they can and the public is capable of paying to increase their revenue.
Because people can decide to go live in another place, quit their job and get another one in the new place.
One of the reason some people do not move is due to being comfortable and at travel distance to their job.
Under this light you can see what happened to several European cities with high rent due to University: as soon as Covid made students go home to their parents as classes were online, there was a huge drop in rent prices.
You could bundle welfare, food stamps, other social programs, medicare, etc. add a tax break/no tax for anyone making less than $20K. Put it all into one system and call it UBI. You the tax payer are still paying the same thing.
It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.
UBI incents more people to work compared to current policies, because it smooths out any disincentives that occur from clawing back existing subsidies. It's precisely because "someone needs to produce stuff" that we should be rewarding people for their increased productivity. The increased "bargaining power for workers" that results from UBI is entirely consistent with this goal.
> We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working.
We have inflation because of sustained fiscal and monetary stimulus through a period of sharp restrictions on economic activity being sustained after most of the restrictions ended; the fiscal stimulus has already been withdrawn, and monetary stimulus is slowly unwinding.
But that really doesn't have much bearing on a tax-funded UBI, which—unlike deficit-funded airdrops—is redistribution, not general stimulus.
Of course. Printing money inflates its supply. And increasing the demand for products (by providing easy money) without increasing the supply of products (and actually decreasing it by restricting work) will lead to higher prices. It is economics 101 and it was tested by many countries eg Germany before the WW or more recently Venezuela.
Sorry, yes, printing money leads to inflation. I was asking for evidence that "We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working." is the source of a large portion of inflation instead of the multitude of other reasons that money is printed. Of the recent $4 trillion coronavirus payout, only about a fifth of that went to workers or their families[1], and even that isn't all to people who aren't working.
I'm not an economist, but I do listen to a bunch of them. My understanding is that printing money doesn't necessarily create inflation, and the real story is far more complicated than that. That it also depends on things like: the overall economy, how that money is being spent, demand pull, cost push, public fear of inflation (which causes ->), how much money is circulating vs how much is being pooled (investments/into banks/under the mattress), and more.
ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.
The conclusion is derived from the basic principles. Of course if even more money was given directly to non productive people the prices would increase even faster!
We do ask the general question of "what costs are we willing to bear to reduce the amount and human toll of actual slavery". Actual slavery is illegal, certainly, but there are still instances of it happening, even today[1,2,3]. We could spend more resources to further reduce the number of cases where this happens, and there are plenty of people saying we should. In theory, a complete enough surveillance state, where the movements of all people and all monetary transactions are tracked and analyzed, might even be able to get the number of such instances all the way down to zero, but that seems a lot less likely to be a good tradeoff.
So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.
Not only bad things, but also everything can be traded off against some other thing. That doesn't mean we should. There's an economic value assigned to human life, but we don't let someone kill another one by paying a markup.
We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.
Even a small amount of income gives breathing room. That's the idea here. A full UBI would mean there's no chance of suffocating. I'm saying that we can dip our toes in first and we should still see effects. It isn't an all or nothing scenario as many put forward.
It isn't just organisations that put pressure on people, it is mostly customers.
One example is delivery workers. Everyone expects their packages to be tracked which resulted in total surveillance of delivery workers with extremely tight time slots. Competitors that didn't expand here were soon left behind because the profit margin of that industry is extremely low.
Janitors are similar. People will take the cheapest option and the companies that exploit the best with prevail.
This is a selfishness that cannot be denied and in my opinion would make a basic income impossible. Prices would just soar to a level where this income is of little consequence.
Sensible laws for worker protection to restrict selfishness can better the situation more efficiently.
Damn. In our office (well before Covid), we were explicitly given training on how to behave with janitorial workers - to be polite and clear the workspace if we are working late hours and not make a mess of things for them and increase their workload. Well, this was an EU company not an American one, so far more respect for blue-collar workers.
Agreed, isnt this exactly whats been observed from pandemic financial aid? Increased pressure on employers to pay more and give workers a better work environment? Maybe someone has a better link to back that up but heres one at least.
Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?
~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors.
While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions.
Having higher cost of labor will incentivize more capital solutions to menial jobs (automation, substitutions), which will change societal patterns a lot (maybe you should expect a machine to take orders at every restaurant) but could certainly lead to a happier 'steady state' long term.
Many years ago I worked as a solderer/assembler. One day I said to a supervisor "You mean there isn't a machine that can do this job? Seems easy to automate." Their response was "There is a machine...but it costs more than you do."
From that moment on it was very clear to me what my value to the company was. Combine that with the long hours, low pay and constant watching over my clock in times made it very easy to just "walk" from that job with no notice.
The worst part was knowing that there were people who had been there 20 years and had (seemingly) no upward mobility during the entire time. After 6mos I was moved up to QA (with an insignificant pay increase) and I realized that I was as high in the company as I was going to get without someone dying.
I have no issue working...but if I am going to be poor while working 56hr weeks...why do it?
Good correction. The Keynes essay I am thinking of is from the 1930s, which is almost 100 years ago now! It was probably inspired from Russell's thoughts.
i just read his essay "in praise of idleness"[1] (1932) and what sticks out is how nothing has changed wrt how capitalism works:
"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
>~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors.
Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.
The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.
Used to be that everyone worked brutal hours six days a week, even children. The working class wasn’t called that for nothing. All this work yielded a very meagre and fragile existence.
Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.
Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.
If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.
Note that pandemic financial aid has often been conditional on hardship and has been intermittent. This makes it not a great model for basic income.
I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.
A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?
We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.
Minor correction; pandemic financial aid for individuals has been conditional on hardship. The PPP on the other hand just required businesses to pinky swear that they'd retain or bring back employees. Then the "loans" were completely forgiven.
Fewer workers means fewer goods and services. If demand remains constant or increases, you get inflation. The pandemic caused supply chain issues, but this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had demand been artificially pumped with the stimulus. In many places, such as the ports, productivity is at an all-time high, but they're still bottlenecking consumers.
There were many anecdotes from employers complaining about unemployment benefits, but the systematic data collection gave mixed evidence. I concluded the impact varied across industries.
On the other side of the coin, in my career I've had colleagues so bad that I would gladly pay them NOT to work. They created a toxic workplace and made everything worse. Unfortunately the majority of them would likely not take UBI (in two cases they were the owner/boss). However, if UBI kept just a portion of troublesome workers out of the workforce, then that would be beneficial as well.
UBI would likely help most in this case by giving employees the power to comfortably seek new work. Bad bosses survive mostly on apathetic employees that empower them to get away with being awful while looking productive because of their team.
The more power you give to employees the faster people will jump ship from bad bosses to good ones - and the awful ones will have a harder time keeping their positions.
UBI would probably end up disproportionately filtering out non-troublesome workers. Non-troublesome workers are more rational than troublesome workers and would take a small reduction in pay in exchange for less headache. The troublesome workers that actually enjoy conflict would stay in the workforce because they can't find the same opportunities for conflict elsewhere.
Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.
"a capitalist society" is not a binary attribute. There can be elements of capitalism and elements of "socialism".
Private property can coexist with government supplied housing for instance.
In the "capitalist" USA a lot of the military industrial complex lives off government handouts. Why not the people too? The cakes and cookies we should earn ourselves, the meat and potatoes (and housing) should be a right for every citizen
Not necessarily. Society is made of people; some things can be automated in a non-capitalist way (e.g. free software) even by capitalists. Though, of course, we will have to struggle to avoid the dystopia.
Capitalistic societies still have taxes. Any realistic UBI proposal would have to funnel some of the efficiency gains from automation toward constructing a strong social safety net.
Revenue per employee, usually. (There are many measures of labor productivity, though.)
Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it. I only think they should be taxed if they try to distribute those gains exclusively to the executives and shareholders.
> makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it.
why would the remaining employees, who have no invested capital into the business (with which the automation is driven by), receive any of the gains from said automation?
The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit. In this case, it's often the shareholders in the end.
> The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit.
Yes, that's how it works today. That's not how I'd like it to work.
Many people here get a significant portion of their compensation via RSUs, ESPPs, and other profit-sharing initiatives, and any company that decides to extend these benefits to lower level workers should be treated favourably by the tax system.
i.e. > just with the quality of the result and with who reaped the rewards.
Maybe we should leave terms like capitalism and socialism out of the discussion because no one can agree on their meanings so they just become fighting words and their usefulness to the conversations are less than meaningless.
Then I'm confused what you are meaningfully adding to the conversation with your comment? The parent to your comment already suggested what you are stating.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it?
Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.
All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.
Here's a discussion from 2002 where someone says 'all the new McDonald's have serve-yourself-drinks' but older stores still had them behind the counter. At some point, most existing stores retrofitted self-serve, too. Other chains had it way earlier for sure.
The ones I've seen (yes, at McDonalds specifically) are terrible, take forever to use, are abusive in attempting to push crap on the user and make some (what I'm sure are higher-margin) items easier to buy than others, and are yet another case of pushing labor onto the "consumer" and calling it automation(?!), like "automated checkouts" at grocery stores—a fucking lie, the buyer is doing almost as much work as paid workers used to, "automated" would be if you could just let go of your cart and a machine took care of the rest while you waited.
Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)
I don't think the comparison to AI is apt since meal making robots do currently function and are in restaurants right now. It is literally just being rolled out slowly.
Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present...
So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
Pandemic driven wage increases haven’t been happening long enough to drive just too much automation yet - supply chains and all that would greatly limit how fast that will roll out. It will be interesting if in 5 years I’d wages stay at current levels how much automation displaces them.
This looks more like deskilling than automation. There's not someone constantly on the fryers in most fast food outlets, this just makes it a button press instead of having to learn by sight/smell/feel when something is done. That can make things a little faster, but at 30% faster you're paying now paying a whole person's salary to... save at most a person's worth of work, with a much bigger business risk if anything goes wrong.
That’s because we rely on China for parts to make the robots and there has been a huge shortage. At least in America, we need to back to being self reliant. Software is not going to eat anything without hardware.
It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.
Speaking as someone who has worked in a factory, you couldn't pay me a six figure salary to go back. And most of the things were automated already, at least as much as reasonably could be.
I think that is more a testament to the lives we now live as Software Developers more than anything else. It's not uncommon to find anecdotes of others on HN talking about how they maybe work 2-3 hours a day and take home 150k+ a year.
I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)
I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.
Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.
The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.
If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.
I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).
The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.
Oh, I definitely feel like I'm working in the top 1% of jobs now.
Full time WFH since significantly before covid, it's B2B so even though I'm nominally on call, that's just a nice chunk of extra pay for maybe 1-2 calls a year. I do work hard when required, but it's not as required any longer, so I end up with a lot of free time when there are no issues to solve and I use that to go the extra mile to keep my customers happy.
Depends on the factory and what you're doing there. Last time I worked in a factory I was debugging printer-eating robots, shooting high powered lasers at things, and blowing stuff around with blasts of compressed air. (And I got to program all those things).
You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)
Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).
I mean, this isn't completely unsolvable--better AC would've made things better. But it probably wouldn't be that economical, because industries like that are rather price sensitive.
I think this is an honest perspective, but it directly contradicts the article which is saying "basic income would not reduce people's willingness to work." Menial labor or being berated by customers rather clear-cut example, but most jobs have moderate amounts of unpleasantness, and given the choice many people would opt out of working altogether. There's a lot of unpleasant work that needs to be done to keep civilization going!
There's a big difference between "I am willing to work, even though I can get enough money to survive without doing so" and "Under those conditions, I am still willing to work at a job that dehumanizes and degrades me constantly, for very little extra money."
So labour costs would go up, things get more expensive, and there are still no incentives to be civil because that cost is spread amongst all customers.
If $X was enough to live (even if meagerly), then why would a worker put up with a new wage that is $X less than previously?
The worker would only continue a "shitty" job, if they get a better deal than before. So it makes sense to conclude that wages would cost more to entice a worker if said worker was able to obtain a UBI.
Jobs that would be popular and enjoyable, would be sought after - and those wages would drop.
Much as we might agree these workers overall have more money - from whatever source - it does not follow that the pay would go up for crap jobs. The pay need only be high enough above the post tax increase from the UBI baseline to fill the spots. Maybe it won't they populated by people who need to feed their family anymore, but perhaps by college grads who need to feed themselves because UBI is eaten up by their student loan repayment. All we can guarantee really is shifting the bracket of the likely talent pool's need for a few extra dollars. Humans aren't alike in the level of income above which they're no longer in desperation for a few extra bucks.
In addition it would incentivize companies to actually invest into research and development instead of wasting money into dead-end financial schemes and bullshit jobs. Everyone wins.
> Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.
I agree, but is this feasible or wishful thinking?
As a society, we’re decidedly split on whether we should wear masks or should or should not get vaccines, despite the science or despite whatever seems like a rational decision. (Admittedly I’m introducing my bias here).
Would raising pay for retail workers or people acknowledging that we need to treat them with respect - would either of these actually lead to the right outcome? Or would it fuel another voice that vehemently sees these jobs as a stepping stone and not entitled to respect and dignity?
I think what it would do is balance the power a little toward an employee’s favor instead of a customer. Right now there are people that have no choice but to work these jobs. So a company can institute a “customer is always right” policy because it keeps the customer around and they really don’t have to consider their employees feelings- they are easily replaced. Customers only act like assholes because they can get away with it- abuse the clerk, the manager comes out, customer gets free stuff. But if there was a basic income there might be fewer people willing to put up with abusive customers. If a company has a hard time replacing employees then it might have to reconsider their policy to be more like “accommodate reasonable customers but abusive customers can be kicked out.” This would probably happen over time, not immediately after implementing a basic income but I think it’s a good thing.
But I think the overall idea that companies would have to put a little more effort into their employee’s well being would be borne out if a country could commit to a basic income for long enough for the effects to shake out.
This is good behavior that companies would be forced into, not because of morals like respects and dignity, but because a mass exodus of employees would eventually hurt profits more than keeping unreasonable customers around.
Also, I think we've all seen the reddit threads about someone standing up to a rude customer and not getting fired. Those employers exist and seemingly are operating their businesses at a profit.
Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.
I don't think anyone in retail is asking for an undo burden by the rest of society when demanding humane treatment in their workplace.
> Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.
By law in most situations you must comply with the police officer. Not really the same.
The fact that "karens" have become a meme is largely due to this. Working retail has always been filled with absolutely terrible customers but in this day and age we're actually shaming them instead of feeding bad behavior with passive silence.
As you pointed out, it's not possible to achieve consensus on things like vaccines and masks, I don't think we should expect any differently in any sort of proposed change. There are always going to be opponents.
If we always chose not to do something because it would be met with resistance, then nothing would happen ever. The US passing the civil rights act was met with vicious resistance as it was happening, should it not have happened because there were critics of the law? Ultimately, I think we do need to raise pay and facilitate a higher level of discourse in those kinds of environments., regardless of what detractors will say.
Another take is that if workers are able to say no to a shit job, then the burden is placed on the employer to either eliminate the job or make it less shit.
In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, yet life goes on. Economically it doesn't make sense because of the high labor costs, and realistically it is a menial job that can be for the most part automated.
If you want to live in a world where you can have a cheap hand wash in your back yard, then you have to also admit to wanting structural inequalities to keep people trapped in those carwash jobs. It's delusional to believe that the people washing your car have a path out through hard work alone; my observation is that they already work pretty hard.
UBI is much more about giving workers power than giving them free money. And yes, there will be dole bludgers. Unfortunately any system is going to have inefficiencies, you just have to pick which ones and live with it. Alternatively, you can get tough on crime and house a prison population.
Which car washes are we talking about? Self service manual washes, or something more akin to a light detail that includes a hand wash?
In the US, you can drive up and pay $1~/min and spray your car yourself w/ soap and water. You can also do the drive-thru option for about $10. On the upper end, you can pay $50~ for what might start as a drive-thru, but then someone comes out and does a manual touch up where the machine might have missed a spot, and then they will vacuum and wipe down the interior.
At $100+, you're looking at a hand wash and detail, potentially going up to hundreds of dollars for different aftercare options. Detailing can be very lucrative if you get a good referral network established.
At $100+, you're looking at a hand wash and detail, potentially going up to hundreds of dollars for different aftercare options.
It's also worth mentioning that you've jumped from menial to skilled labor at this point. There's a big difference between hosing off a Prius for the owner's commute and detailing a McLaren for an auto show. The latter is far more satisfying work.
Why is it a McLaren? I have a BMW and it’s around $80 for a quick vacuum, hand wash and detail. It’s not at all skilled labor and if I had a hose (I live in an apartment) I’d do it myself.
Those polishing cars for auto shows are quite a bit in a different realm and not what’s being discussed here.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't consider someone who washes/details cars as having a "skilled" labor job. Every job requires training, but I can give someone a checklist and one day of training and set them free after that.
I agree that detailing supercars is a different league.
I don't really know exactly what a 'full service car wash' means but I do know that car washes with optional polishing and interior cleaning are available here in Norway because I see signs for them in the next town to where I live. I imagine that they are much less common than in the US simply because wages here are high. But they do exist.
And of course we have the kind where you wash the car yourself using a high pressure water jet in addition to the drive through kind (both those with and without brushes).
So, what you're basically saying is that your spouse had a job that was a net negative for her: compensation for the abuse was not sufficiently priced into her pay grade.
To me, your argument says that UBI will cause a re-evaluation of the income market, where undesirable jobs will have to be priced higher so that employers still can find the employees they need (and the services will have to be priced accordingly). I'm okay with that outcome.
(in this particular case: I suspect that private companies will very quickly add language to their contract that being abusive to their employees will void the contract -- I'm okay with that outcome as well. In the case of government services, that could mean that the person would be required to only interact through an intermediary, like a legal guardian or social worker)
Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.
I’m dealing with this infinite loop chatbot with Verizon right now haha. My number port to become a Verizon customer was supposed to take 4-24 hours. Ten days later still nothing. Chatbot asks me for topics to help with, put in my number but it’s not a Verizon number (it’s mid port) so they recommend I register, I try to register and I cannot because my number isn’t a Verizon number, so back to the chatbot about my problem, they need me to login for further help, but I can’t login without a Verizon number… ad infinitum. It’s maddening and have tried several times to get on the phone with a customer service human being, but after 90 minutes on hold several times nothing.
So I’m in this weird limbo that I think could be solved by a customer rep chat in minutes.
Just an example of automated chatbots being only programmed for a couple common situations and not things like, “I’m a pseudo Verizon customer who is receiving bills but has no phone number with Verizon.”
It's Verizon's choice not to compensate someone fairly to deal with all the abusive folks that call up customer support - and to have company policies that force people to turn to CS out of desperation. I think it's perfectly fair for people to refuse to work phones for minimum wage and I think it's also perfectly fair for you, who probably pays hundreds of dollars a month to this company for the services that might run them tens of dollars to offer on a technical level - to expect the company to divert more of their profits to actually providing a good customer experience.
In some businesses the margins are so tight that increased CS costs will put them under - the answer for those businesses is, unfortunately, to go under. However, everyone that's left should be held to a reasonable standard - maybe companies will start levying "Abusive customer" charges on especially painful support calls and piss off a small portion of their customer base while keeping the vast majority happy and well served - maybe they'll just up their charges across the board (or cut the costs into their profits) - that's up to them. What's up to you is the choice to cease being a customer[1] you can chose to discontinue your services with them - and if they have difficulties closing your account or continue to charge you erroneously for services... then you can reverse charges and report the behavior to whatever passes for a better business bureau in your neck of the woods.
Dealing with crap CS is a cost that companies are currently levying on customers because they can - but you can refuse to play their game.
1. Unless you're living in a service monopoly in which case - shake your fists at the heavens, bend over, and consider moving to some country with sane anti-monopoly laws.
We all decide that a planned economy is the only way to move forward? If market forces have any influence and companies are actually going out of business due to poor customer service than someone should switch strategies to actually offer non-terrible customer service.
So funny, off topic story with Verizon. I ported my number from them years ago. Which ended me up in the same exact situation. I couldn’t log in or anything. So I sent them $800 just to make sure I covered my early termination fees since I couldn’t log in to see a bill and I had paperless billing on. Fast forward 6 months later and I get a call from their debt collections for $600. I asked where the $800 went. They didn’t know but I owed them money. I disputed it on my credit report and it vanished. Another six months and I get a call again, almost same conversation but at the end of it, they sent me a check for almost $200. It was great. I’m never doing business with them again though.
I just went through an absolute debacle with my phone number being in limbo and no customer reps being able to access the account. Submit a complaint to the better business bureau within a day or two executive services will contact you via email. They resolved my issue, it still took a few more days but it worked without spending even more time chatting to bots and reps who simply do not have the power to resolve the issue.
this has already happened in the food service industry. McDonalds used to hire a lot of teenagers; for many it was their first job. When minimum wage went up sufficiently high enough they replaced human labour with self-serve kiosks and reduced staff to a single register and kitchen staff. Tim Hortons switched to centralized bakeries and terminated all store-level bakers.
I'm not arguing either side of this, just that there are very real impacts. It's not a situation where every entry-level job is going to be floated by a rising tide, some people will drown.
As a Canadian - I can comment that Tim Hortons has notoriously terrible baked goods. You might grab a breakfast sandwich there (and a lot of people are weirdly enamored with their coffee) but they can't even compete when it comes to baked goods in most metro areas - they're a coffee shop and we have much better alternatives for baked goods. The cost to them for cutting bakers was to gradually lose their position as a purveyor of donuts in Canada.
Can we blame that on minimum wages going up, or can we blame it on McDonald's find a cost-effective way to automate that? Do we find no kiosk in those states who haven't had a minimum wage hike?
Turning your example around: if those teens were to receive UBI and McDonalds could hire them for only $3/hour instead of having to pay them full wage, some of the self-service kiosks might not have appeared, and the customers might have encountered better motivated workers?
The U in UBI stands for universal: everyone gets the same amount, regardless of whether they have a job. Taking a job is additive with UBI, there is no "significantly less money".
Under UBI, a government could do away with minimum wage completely because there is no coercion by necessity. The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.
Some short-term unemployment insurance would likely still exist under UBI - the two programs have sharply different goals, and a viable UBI would generally be too low for a "full" income. But UBI would almost certainly allow for more flexibility in the labor market, that would make extended UI a lot less relevant.
That only follows with a theoretically perfect UBI which either matches everyone at the highest COL or matches everyone with their local COL and reacts instantaneously with increases due to changes in the market.
If there is a delay in UBI increases, or if the UBI is not properly matched to the COL, there will still be pockets of people who must work by necessity.
> The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.
That's exactly my point—why would you show up to a job that pays you less than you receive by default? It doesn't make sense to go from working 0 hours to working 40 for a less than 50% increase in income.
One could argue this has nothing to do with willingness to work. In many professions verbal abuse is simply that: verbal abuse. One could say abuse does not count as work (except in healthcare perhaps, e.g. psychiatry). Just like getting beaten up should normally not count as work (except in MMA or as a security guard).
Your point still stands for the professions for which abuse is part of the job by definition. However, I get the idea that too many industries are tolerating it while it could go away by having a culture change.
Another reason why one could argue it’s not the same as willingness to work is because if one is willing to work a job where abuse isn’t really common then you could say that person does have a willingness to work.
Which is exactly what will happen. The pay for those jobs will increase, until such a point where it becomes cheaper/easier to just not have the job in the first place.
I don't honestly know why whether or not people will work even factors into one's support for UBI. Some people will keep working, some people won't. Nobody will starve so that seems like something in the "pro" column at least.
It depends if you just end up paying people not to work. Money doesnt just have some "value" you can share like a pie. The value in money is just the productive capacity of an economy.
If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve.
Recall: 50% of the country make less than the median wage... UBI is going to have to be way below this to preserve the very wealth which UBI redistributes
One thing that's been made clear in the last two years is that even a very very measly increase to unemployment can have huge impact. And unemployment runs out after a while, and the increases have been tiny. And unemployment makes you jump through hoops, is very stressful, and wastes a lot of your time.
I expect that UBI could start off very small and still have huge impact. A quick search shows that median income can range from ~40k-80k state to state. I'd bet you could radically change this country for way less than that.
> If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve
Absolutely not. Having a large fraction of population being unemployed is not good but this is not the point of UBI. Also, this is completely disconnected from inflation/deflation.
Furthermore, deflation and "people will starve" are very much disconnected. Many countries devalued their money on purpose to be more competitive on international markets.
I don't think deflation is an actual risk in this scenario ("value of that money plummets" = high inflation).
There are many stages between "people will starve" and having access to high quality food (and high QOL in general). For example if UBI is sufficiently high to allow most people currently employed in the food and service industries to not work (or to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.) I think a massive increase in food prices is unavoidable, at least in the short term until automation catches up. While basic foodstuffs would still remain affordable to all/most (the government would be forced to subsidize them if not), eating out and high quality, labor intensive products would likely become unaffordable to most people.
Currency exchange rates are bidirectional. You are arguing for people to produce less, so export plummets, which will bring down the value of the $, which means it is harder to import stuff you need.
UBI has to be under the average, not the median. If wealth disparity increases too much, the average wealth will be much higher than the median wealth, but unfortunately that wouldn’t apply as much to income.
Yet that did not deter us from creating trillions of dollars and giving them to financial institutes.
What if we printed the same amount and gave it directly to people? the $6T/year could yield ~$40K to each of the ~150M working-age Americans.
The biggest impact is to give employees more power in the negotiation with employers: currently, employees are far more pressed to find work than the employer needs to fill in a position (if the employee fails to pay rent, they are evicted; if an employer fails to meet a deadline, nothing happens immediately), and have the inherent disadvantage of having orders of magnitude more employees than employers.
UBI will help the public by reducing the pressure on employees to find job, thus improving the negotiation power and conditions for all other employees. Even the slight help during COVID created the best conditions for working people in decades. Seems to be worth the inflation IMO.
> creating trillions of dollars and giving them to financial institutes.
those trillions were swapped, not given, to the financial institutes, in return for the bonds and treasuries they held.
It isn't the same sort of printing that you hear about in Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
If the gov't really printed trillions and gave them to people like you described, you'd get major inflation. Oh wait, that's already happening...and it's only a couple thousand for some people, and it's not printed, it's borrowed. Imagine the effects, if it was truly printed like you described!
From another comment:
> Seems to be worth the inflation IMO.
Some things will become expensive. Some might be balanced. Construction cost will increase, but land value may decrease (since there is no necessity to crowd in job hubs).
Taxis and Uber will probably increase as people are not forced to work at all costs, but people might find this trade-off favorable: unemployment is far more painful than having to take the bus.
And everyone could still work to afford expensive things, if they chose so. They will also have much better working conditions, since they will have much more negotiation power.
I’m glad we can predict that far in the future. IMO, it won’t be, as inflation will continue as we spiral downward. Venezuela will be super jealous of our inflation.
Ostensibly, we are paying them back the Social Security taxes + interest that were withheld from their pay when they were working, supplemented by any pensions or savings they may have.
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.
> It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.
What it too to get mine, required very hard work and literally signing my life away for 4 years. Then, when I started gaining, I got fined for not having health insurance. Now that I can comfortably afford my health insurance and am starting to look at buying a house, here’s the left again saying I should help others, when I received no such help, and taking away the money I worked hard to earn. Imagine not having a degree in the software engineering field. The struggle is real, and if I can do it then what are others excuses?
No, I’m sorry, I will fight to force others to follow my path (albeit in a different field should they choose). I will not willingly pay for others to have an easy life unless they are related to me.
I’ve never understood why people are so willing to give up what they’ve earned for people who are not trying that just have their hand out. Why do we do it this way, those that want to help can pay the UBI tax and receive the payments. The rest of us that don’t want it can never receive it but also don’t have to pay. Why don’t we do that instead?
Also I’m a Navy veteran. I can’t tell you how many times I can back from deployment to see actual hatred from these people I had never met, who I was defending their freedom for. The idea of helping others is gone after 1) I already did by defending their freedom and 2) most people here are assholes only thinking of themselves, so i joined them.
People with that mindset usually greatly overestimate the influence their work has on what they have and underestimate external factors, so pushing them to reevaluate may be a good thing.
Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fraction of that (and/or under much worse conditions) even assuming that I'd be putting the same amount of hard work. Alternatively, with more dumb luck I could be earning much more while putting less work into achieving that. Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface, as there are also other ways to get rich than working hard or being lucky; mere ability to invest your time and effort into "working hard" is often filled with external factors as well; and "being (un)lucky" itself contains so many factors to consider that I wouldn't even know where to start.
You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better while working side projects to improve my skill. I just recently caught up to what I should be making.
It’s common for those that took the standard path to think nobody works for what they got.
I'm not. You were able to read open source code and learn from it, taking advantage of a lot of effort its authors put into it (who knows, maybe you even stumbled on some of my work out there?). You had access to computers and to the Internet, and had time to use it, most likely thanks to your parents, which isn't a given. You admitted yourself that you turned into publicly funded military for it to invest into your education. You also had ability to do side projects while working a low paying job, instead of, say, taking care of an ill relative your whole spare time - not everyone is so lucky. And perhaps most importantly of it all, you turned your attention into software engineering during time when software engineering is extremely lucrative - it doesn't have to stay this way at all.
I don't even have a degree, by the way; I'm mostly self-taught too.
> You were able to read open source code and learn from it, taking advantage of a lot of effort its authors put into it (who knows, maybe you even stumbled on some of my work out there?).
I knew you were going to fixate on that, as you’re grasping at straws, which is why I put it in there. The amount of source code I read was one project, a php web framework. Yea I learned about 2 things from it back then, which I’ve long forgotten now.
Since I didn’t earn what I have, call your school, revoke your degree, quit your job and start over again with only unskilled jobs on your resume. Until you do that you won’t understand.
No, I haven’t. You are assuming people give out info for free. What you’re saying is essentially that your degree was free. Someone had to pay for it. For me it was buying books. Did those authors help me with free books? No they charged me just the same. How is this getting help from others? Unless you believe that if you gain knowledge at all even with compensation from someone else is help. But that’s just commerce.
Since you’re still not following, why do people post blog articles? Why do people write research papers? Just to get the info out there? No, they do it because it gives them some advantage over others. FAANGs won’t hire you without proof of knowledge. The other side of it is SEO. You want to exist on google you have to look like an expert, so you write a lot of articles to increase your score. Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.
> My degree that does not exist?
Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read. If your self taught, or went to school, you know this is just dumb.
So back to the point, did you or did you not work for the knowledge you have? Or did it just get matrixed into you?
> Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.
I've learned a lot from pseudonymous or even anonymous people with no money or fame involved. And helped others this way too.
> Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read.
That's not what I'm saying at all and you would have known that if you would read what I wrote with comprehension. It took a lot of effort, but I recognize that this effort alone is just a single factor that influenced what I earn, and not even the most important one. Other factors outside of my control could have easily ruined (or boosted) it all, and it's true for everyone.
Right, and that's what would be supporting UBI: taxes. So either you're arguing that taxes are unjust because they take what is rightfully yours, or you're just saying that UBI will cost too much. It very much seems like your argument is the former.
> It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.
I haven't "got mine" yet and tend to disagree when people propose to lock me out of upper-middle class lifestyle by taxing the hell out of my income. It is more like people like you who "got theirs" want to pull the ladder up.
> That's the whole point of voting on things, to resolve conflicts.
It doesn’t resolve the conflict, one side is just forced to accept something they don’t want. The hatred, and therefore the division, builds regardless.
As more jobs become automated, UBI will become a necessity to prevent the collapse of civilization.
Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.
> Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs. This time it seems that it's the other way around.
> The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs.
No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.
Yes you're right, now that I read it doesn't make sense.. I guess what I wanted to say is that is that at least initially it replaced a huge number of medium paying jobs with a large number of low paying and a small number of extremely well paying jobs.
Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875.
Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
You are correct about the dynamics of wage labor during the industrial revolution. However, I can't say I agree with this:
> Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.
If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.)
If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point you lose their tax money, unless you impose draconic measures on emigration.
I don't see why they shouldn't be free to. Yet, weirdly, we don't see a lot of people renouncing their rich-socialist-nation citizenship to run off to some other libertarian paradise.
You can get as pedantic as you want about the definition of socialism, but the point is, there's no evidence that a program like single-payer healthcare or UBI will drive off everyone who pays into the system.
What evidence we do have says that people are not going to mass-flee a country just because taxes go up to benefit the lower classes at the expense of the higher earning ones. I therefore assert that inglor_cz's assertion is baseless. Feel free to provide a counter-example.
I have a feeling you're pedantically latching on to the word 'socialist' as a, frankly quite silly, effort to try and link the concept of higher taxes with authoritarian-communist countries. I believe you to be arguing in bad faith.
Otherwise, I can simply point out that many almost all the countries with single-payer health care are still plenty enough peopled to be able to pay for it and don't have to have any draconian policies against leaving. As I understand it, even residing outside of them often exempts you completely from taxation, which even the 'can't afford single-payer!' US doesn't do.
What does single payer system have to do with UBI? Americans also have medical insurance and they also pay for it one way or the other. The UBI tax would come on top of that. The same thing as in single payer countries. Your are not disproving inglor_cz's assertion in any way.If anything you confirmed it with an example of socialist countries.
The assertion seemed to be that higher taxes which go to universal social programs cause people to flee, I provide examples of countries that have higher taxes going to social programs where people have largely not fled even though such activity is not prevented. I fail to see how this confirms the assertion.
The "so what" is that basic income doesn't change the ordinal ranking of how much people prefer to do different jobs. Neither does it change people's ability to get those jobs. Better qualified applicants will always have better options. So while basic income might increase the nominal pay of the least preferable jobs, it wouldn't mean you suddenly get to skip over the "shitty jobs" and suddenly get access to the better ones.
That doesn’t ring true. If you had the capital to make the decision not to work a crap-corp and instead pursue your dream “job” of being painter, musician, rock climbing explorer, artisanal fisherman, etc etc
What about everyone else who now also has the capital to pursue their dream job? Just as before basic income, there's many people competing for a finite number of dream jobs.
What about them? Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more.
Want to “work” as a golfer? Cool, enjoy living on UBI because no one will be topping up your salary for that. The person who cuts the greens earns wayyyy more than you though. Want to play lots of golf? You’re going to run out of UBI to pay for all those greens fees. Maybe you need to think about taking on a side gig in a comfortable back office worker role (salary $1k/year), or a refuse collector (salary $130k/year).
> Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more.
Why? Golfing is a poor example because you can already lose money trying to be a pro. Or, you could become world famous and make millions. What's more is that you don't need to be "hired" to become a golfer.
When we talk about jobs that firms pay salaries to fill, then I don't see why the supply of those jobs would change, whether they're enjoyable or horrible. Since the supply would still be in the same ratio as before basic income, I'd think that doctors would still make more than the hospital janitors, even though the janitors would make more than before on a nominal basis.
>> then I don't see why the supply of those jobs would change
Are you not underestimating just how radical a change UBI would be? You’re going to radically change which jobs are viable.
For example, if you pay every teacher UBI, is it a stretch to imagine more than half decide not to go into work tomorrow? It’s not just a case of paying teachers more when they can afford to say no to your job. You’re talking about completely changing the role.
There’s going to be zero room for unruly kids in that classroom. Suddenly the teacher flips from being one of the least powerful professions to being up there with doctors and lawyers (im aware in some societies this is already the case but not in the US).
> There’s going to be zero room for unruly kids in that classroom.
How come multiple times now people point out UBI as being a way to deal with the entitled people running around right now? And with more entitlements we’ll have more of an issue with entitled people.
With more money in some cases and less in others. Entitlements, that’s far too broad an umbrella.
What exactly would you be entitled to beyond sufficient money to make a basic living and pursue the free pleasures in life (which are generally among the best available in life).
What’s more fulfilling, spending $130k to ride the vomit comet for a couple of hours - i say this as someone who would LOVE to do that - or hiking to the top of a local mountain with a loved one to watch a sunrise? Vomit comet is COOL but it’s not fulfilling. Not in the meaningful way that time spent with a loved one enjoying the beauty of life is.
But back to the entitlements - why is a teacher going to agree to teach an unruly kid? They don’t need this job. They’re here because it’s a passion in life, they’ve chosen a career not of necessity but of interest.
> But back to the entitlements - why is a teacher going to agree to teach an unruly kid?
You missed my point, the kid is unruly because of the entitled attitudes running around this country. If you pay people UBI, it doesn’t fix this, it exacerbates it. Fix the entitled attitude by making people earn what they get instead of handing it to them and maybe we’ll fix that attitude and not have to destroy our economy?
If you're behaving in an entitled way, and you're told - i'm sorry you're not welcome here. Having sufficient dollars is not enough for entry to my classroom - then what's the problem with them continuing to be entitled off on their own elsewhere?
When society is no longer driven by profit, then other forms of exchange become relatively more important again. It'd be no bad thing if basic decency to other humans was a requirement to access services you'd like to consume.
>> Fix the entitled attitude by making people earn what they get instead of handing it to them and maybe we’ll fix that attitude
If this idea were true, it would have happened already.
> If you're behaving in an entitled way, and you're told - i'm sorry you're not welcome here. Having sufficient dollars is not enough for entry to my classroom - then what's the problem with them continuing to be entitled off on their own elsewhere?
And this requires giving everybody money instead of just fixing the entitled attitudes by kicking them out of your store? Why are we choosing the most expensive path?
> If this idea were true, it would have happened already.
Because we have actually addressed the entitlement and not fed it right?
Golfing is an expensive passtime for 99.9% of the people who play it. It's not something that should ever be viewed as a "dream job" and if you do have aspirations to be a pro and didn't start working on it before age 10, you never will be one.
So if there are no golfers, then why are the groundskeepers making so much? Golfing gets more expensive because you have to pay the lawn mowers literally sitting on a vehicle all day, so less people do it, then the groundskeeper is out of a job? Now what?
Why are there no golfers? If everyone has basic needs met, shelter, basic food, healthcare, you’re telling me no one is going to make use of some time to go play some golf? Why?
>> why are the groundskeepers making so much?
Golf courses dont magic out of thin air, ubi can do a lot but it’s not magic. You’re going to have to pay someone enough that they choose to specialise then take on that career. They’re going to need capital for equipment etc etc but there’s a lot of people would like to play golf. A golf club won’t look anything like those of today though. Ubi would have such a drastic change in society given sufficient time that perhaps even the game of golf itself would change.
I explained why, read it again. And golf is not a basic need, it’s entertainment. Which in hard times nobody pays for. You’re gonna choose golf over eating?
Why do we need GDP growth? Is there no other point on the spectrum which is sustainable?
E.g. instead of “grow” - which is inherently unsustainable, you run out of materials and labour to feed the economy - i mean we can continue to kick the can down the road for a few generations yet and pretend we don’t understand what “grow” means in the context of finite resources. Instead of “shrink” which is also unsustainable. Is there some other viable point?
No, money is worth something because another country wants to buy stuff you make and this must be done in your currency. Stop making what people want, or keep devaluing your money to the point where holding it means you lose value, and people stop using your currency. They become arcade tokens that only have value inside the borders. You cannot force value, economics 101.
The "So what" is that if pay for waiters and labourers has to compete with UBI, the cost of service, food, and housing increases significantly, putting it out of reach of more people, and contracting the entire economy as a result.
You can postulate about how much we should value these jobs, but the reality is that most people wouldn't be able to afford a meal at a restaurant where all the staff make 50k, or a packet of strawberries picked by pickers who make the same.
Who would pay the multi-million dollar salary of the top footballers if that came to pass? If people were suddenly paying a LOT more for strawberries and garbage collection, would they have disposable left over for footballers?
There’d still be footballers - the person who was picking fruit left that role to follow their UBI funded dream of being a footballer. They’re just not going to make the same amount of money.
Same goes for CEOs and other roles with comparatively enjoyable execution vs high pay. Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company when you take all the risk out of the system by giving everyone a safety net.
Enjoyable jobs will pay less, hard jobs will pay more.
Believe it or not, poor people generally don't buy football tickets. If their TVs were made by UBI workers, then they wouldn't be able to afford those either. Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour. You're basically rewinding all of the gains in productivity we've made by imposing a high floor.
CEOs aren't paid a lot because the assume risk, they're paid a lot because business leadership is hard, and good leaders are scarce. I also don't know of many CEOs at large companies whose job I would classify as "enjoyable".
> Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company
Then we'll need a new word for "company" as it's meant today. Also no one is stopping anyone from being an independent contractor, which is basically this. I'm not sure I'm following.
> Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour.
A UBI would be more efficient than the extensive patch-work of policies and regulations that we use today to artificially redistribute income. There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less - especially when adjusted for productivity. Minimum wage work today is some of the least productive.
> There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less
Who will do all the hard, unpleasant work then? Who will pick strawberries, work retail, or do hard labour, for anything less than a fortune? What substitute to the current "don't starve/end up homeless" incentive structure will motivate people to do these jobs?
Productivity improvements aren't universal, they're specific. We've not improved productivity for strawberry pickers because we've not come up with a way to automate the picking of strawberries. The least productive work tends to pay minimum wage.
Who picks strawberries today in high-income countries/locations, where strawberry pickers have all sorts of alternatives available? There's your answer. It tends to cost more, but not much more. And the increased cost is offset to a large extent by improved specialization in those lines of work, and the ensuing productivity.
Migrant labourers mostly, and in places where these are not available (like Japan), strawberries cost a lot more, making them a "special occasion" treat for middle classes, and putting them mostly out of reach of poorer people.
Not just less strawberries, but less everything that involves domestic/UBI-competing labour, which is a lot. If we did this worldwide, it would be everything.
Again, this is exactly what happens in high-productivity locations. Local, labor-intensive services like haircuts, waiting tables at restaurants etc. are paid more, because the workers have alternative opportunities in high-paying sectors. The flip side is that quality tends to improve as well due to efficiency-wage effects. It's hardly a disaster.
So this makes everybody poorer. Nobody is being lifted up here. If things cost more then your money doesn’t go as far. That’s called inflation. UBI seems like a great idea on paper but you’re pointing out its problem as a feature.
How are you quantifying this success? If people have "more money" but are suddenly unable to afford things they previously could (those same strawberries), wouldn't they be worse off?
> The richest today will be relatively less rich.
Isn't this just communism with extra steps? Why do you think these things have always worked out poorly, economically speaking, triggering runaway inflation and material scarcity?
My thesis is that the the threat of abject poverty is the only thing keeping much of our economy functioning. If we remove this threat, then the economy shrinks significantly and we all end up in poverty anyways.
Surely UBI results in something more like an-cap? You collect your ubi payment in exchange for agreeing to live in the area serviced by the United States corporation.
UBI wouldn’t be a small tweak around the edges of the current system. It’d be fairly radical.
By redistributing the amount of money in question, you are effectively planning the economy. You are writing into law the idea that everyone should be able to afford to eat, with no means to contend with the fact that there may not be enough food.
I don't think you're addressing my core thesis. When I worked in a restaurant, I did it to maintain myself - to pay primarily for rent and food. My coworkers were much the same. If I was provided these things, I wouldn't have applied at the restaurant. Multiply this by every tedious or difficult job and you'll find that many of them just wouldn't get done. People will avoid them, and pursue other fields. This sort of thing has actually happened in places like the USSR. Loads of highly educated, trained specialists, talented (or not) artists, shortages of farmers and labourers. Breadlines.
No, you’re either taking from the rich and killing innovation, and thereby jobs, or you make everything state owned and go full on socialism, or you cause inflation. All of these make everybody poorer.
Or they just cease to be done, and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.
> If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy?
If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be enough for subsistence, possibly not even that, so people would still choose to work if only to acquire some disposable income. For every single thing that 'ceased to be done' because of increased expenses, there would be growing employment in some other, higher-productivity sector.
Didn't Henry Ford actually do something like this for his own workers? He paid a much higher wage than his competitors, on the argument that his own workers should be able to afford the factory's products.
He paid high wages because he was in fact offering highly-skilled work for his time, a bit like Elon Musk is doing today. The "our workers should be able to afford the product" thing was a clever meme/bit of marketing.
(In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)
This is why I don't feel bad about replacing people doing boring work by robots. They now get the somewhat more interesting work of operating the robots.
Only if they have interest in operating the robots, and the intelligence. If they don’t have either one of those, nope, they just lost a job because of your decision.
Maybe I've gotten lucky with machine operators so far.
The ones I've met are intelligent, though their locus of intelligence is in their thumbs. Someone on a project needs to have it there, so that's just fine by me!
Depends on the company maybe? Were you in a project that went bad?
Last time I did a robot project, the people who would ultimately be the machine operators were involved every step of the way, learning and building together with the team.
I'm not sure how installing a handful of machines in one small corner of a huge factory that's already full of machines would somehow change someone's entire life. Hopefully it does make it a little easier though!
> Depends on the company maybe? Were you in a project that went bad?
I have never worked in robotics, save for hobby drones and hexapods. The question is not whether we would enjoy it, it’s whether someone else will. You seem very convinced that you should decide what people do for work. That’s the part I’m trying to get across to you, you should not have that power for anybody but yourself.
I don't think that I've ever decided what people do for work. I unsure if that that is a thing. As far as I (can/do) know, they decide internally and then hire me to help.
I'm not sure how to proceed. Could you unpack your assumptions for me?
Often cheap labor is the thing holding back the automation of particular tasks. The greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation, but they simply never had the incentives. Imagine what would have happened if they had voted to outlaw slavery?
If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate. Depending on the nature of the good or service, the price might go up a bit at first to recover development costs, and later it might go down drastically once those costs are recovered.
> greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation
This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity.
> quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate
I'm not sure that chemistry or metallurgy are strict requirements for industrialization. My impression is that any form of mechanization is very helpful.
For example, the Netherlands started out industrializing on wind power using wood and rope and cloth, ...actually they still use a lot of wind power today, though now with exotic composites. (At some point in between there were traditional windmills that were still being updated with odd things like aviation leading edge slats made of aluminium up to something like the 1950s! )
So -while speculative and certainly open to discussion- in some alternate history Romans could have had some sort of industrial system, though it might not look like something we would immediately recognize.
I'm trying to convey the intuition that if you have a perfectly workable society based on slavery (the cheapest form of labor), you don't have as strong an incentive to start using machines instead. Conversely, I have the impression that the abolition of slavery in the 19th century is one of the big contributors to our modern industrial society.
I'm just being cautious wrt saying that most low wage work wouldn't cost 10x to automate. One can never be sure one hasn't missed an example somewhere.
Of course, if we find some examples of low wage work that really do cost more than 10X the cost of the work needed to automate it, possibly we've been under-valuing those tasks all along.
I'm not sure I would count Dutch windmills, impressive as they are, as industrialization. People have been building windmills and watermills for a very long time. Industrialization started in Great Britain in the 1700s. Advancements in chemistry and metallurgical process had enabled the production of iron with coke, which can be mined much more cheaply than charcoal can be produced.
Emerging global trade networks incentivized producers to scale up indefinitely. The resulting innovations transformed the textile industry. Textiles are always in demand, and their non-mechanized production is extremely labour intensive. The lessons learned from mechanizing this industry were applied everywhere else. It's true that competition with cheap Indian labour was a major factor in textile automation in the UK, but these global trade networks could not have been sustained without massive advancements in stellar navigation provided by the invention of the telescope. This in turn was only made possible by advancements in chemistry that enabled the production of clear glass.
All of these processes were well underway before the abolition of slavery in the US. It should be noted that innovations such as the cotton gin were eagerly adopted by the slave-powered US cotton industry. There's nothing like efficiency for an industrialist.
With regards to automation, I think all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We're left with things that seem simple, but are in fact horribly difficult, and require near-human levels of dexterity and situational awareness, such as driving or construction work or food handling. That however doesn't mean that our society would be just fine if we provided workers in these industries an alternative to their jobs.
> Believe it or not, poor people generally don't buy football tickets. If their TVs were made by UBI workers, then they wouldn't be able to afford those either.
This is not my experience at all. I once had a job setting up home PCs and internet for low income people in my community. Almost every single home had a projection TV (the top of the line at the time) and a recent mercedes in the driveway. They’re able to afford these things because they are actually receiving income, it’s just not reported (and therefore also not taxed)
>> They’re able to afford these things because they are actually receiving income, it’s just not reported
Everyone’s a drug dealer? Doesnt sound plausible. Or at least They’re getting so much income they can afford to run a fancy car (debt free because who’s lending to a person with minimal documented income).
I mean is that a poor person when they have $50k laying around to go buy a fancy car outright?
Something about your proposition doesnt add up in a really basic obvious way.
> Everyone’s a drug dealer? Doesnt sound plausible.
Where did I say drug dealer? Or is this the first time you’ve heard of jobs getting paid under the table?
And yes some of them had much more than $50k judging by their things. But hey, make them more wealthy. Some people are really good at gaming the system.
There's no competing with UBI. People with jobs still get UBI. That's what the "U" part means: Universal.
Pay for waiters and labourers, like pay for everyone else, is on top of UBI. There's no particular reason it would have to rise by 2x or 3x—unless the industry is categorically unwilling or unable to ensure that their workers are treated well enough that they just don't see it as being worthwhile for less.
I'm arguing that there are many industries that would not survive workers having an alternative that provides for their basic needs, or would be transformed into niche, artisanal goods/services that would be out of reach of ordinary people.
The people who will suffer most from continuing the way we're going are also the poorest people.
If the industry is dying out because we introduce universal basic income, then the poorest people will still be at least as well off as they are now, and in many cases much better, because they are guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills, no matter what happens with their employment status.
If an industry dies out/becomes more expensive due to UBI, then the first people to lose access to the goods/services provided by that industry are the most economically constrained people.
> guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills
This all depends on how well your UBI keeps up with inflation. If you trigger runaway inflation, then you won't be able to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Fundamentally, it's not about how much money people have, but about how much work they do. If UBI reduces the amount of work done overall in the economy, it will contract said economy and make everyone poorer as a result.
So the conclusion of this study was that UBI would not reduce amount of work done overall in the economy.
Another study discussed here showed only a mild net reduction in amount of paid work being done on the short term; and arguably the unpaid work being done instead was also beneficial to society.
Interestingly, in general, UBI studies don't show really alarming reductions in amount of work done. Sadly they also don't show hoped for amazing increases in productivity either. It seems like the advantages and disadvantages of UBI for stimulating work seem to balance each other out. I think people's arguments don't need to be about the work aspect so much.
As it has been pointed out, the studies are fundamentally flawed in that the participants know they are of a limited duration. Getting a stipend for a few months isn't enough to quit your job. Being promised one for the rest of your life certainly can be.
UBI is basically communism lite - with all its flaws. People who are provided for tend to behave just like animals who are provided for - after all, people are animals - they mainly lounge around and try to amuse themselves. This isn't a moral judgement, just an observation. I've not seen any study that has conclusively refuted this.
It is the rare, exceptional, person that will spend their free time on something truly productive and constructive. We can see examples of this already - we've made it very easy to get a loan and go to college, partially socializing college education. As a result, we have a surplus of college graduates and a shortage of labourers and trades. Introducing UBI would simply magnify this effect. When people have alternatives, they don't tend to want to go work on farms, construction sites, or in restaurants or shops. People work these jobs primarily because they would otherwise be destitute. I know that's why I did.
So we could quibble over details such as that people in some of the studies did quit their jobs, or whether UBI is actually a very conservative and capitalist concept, and so forth... but ...
Since HN discussions tend to be short and fleeting; I think the point to focus down on would be "free time". Just because you take (some of the) money out of the picture, doesn't mean that there still isn't a lot of work to be done. And it doesn't mean that all the other motivators to do that work aren't still present.
Instead of or in addition to money: people work for power, prestige, recognition; but also for love, honor, duty, "FOR SCIENCE", beauty, tradition, for personal satisfaction&improvement, and many other reasons.
With all these different reasons to want to work, and all kinds of different people and professions, (eg. politicians, artists, homemakers, soldiers, police officers, doctors, nurses, scientists, students, artists ), you might imagine that taking money off the table might not actually have such an influence on these people's desire to work.
If you think back, surely you'll recognize these motivations showing up everywhere; including in stories, newspapers, citations, history books, holy books, and surely even scientific studies. They're all part of the human condition, after all.
The examples you give of farming, construction, hospitality and retail are often mixed motivation. Some people (like you?) only work in those jobs because they need the money. And without further motivation, then surely one won't like the work.
But many people who work in these sectors actually do so because they believe in their job, because they want to build something, and/or because they see it is valued and helps the community. When they are down and demotivated, this is where they draw their strength to carry on.
This is especially true in SME's, which is where I've had a lot of my experiences.
I agree with everything you wrote. I think the only question is how much work overall, as a percentage of the economy, is motivated by the avoidance of destitution, and how much is motivated by higher humanistic values. I think if you ask most people, you may be disappointed to find that they give pithy answers about not starving, or supporting their lifestyle, and vanishingly few will cite honor, duty, beauty or tradition. I think you would also find that the frequency of pithy answers forms an inverse relationship with wages. It would be interesting to try to construct a study to answer these questions.
Overall, I don't think the "human condition" is much of a thing. People are marginally more clever than apes on average, and that small margin pushed us past a tipping point into civilization. Give a chimp a smartphone and they start to behave remarkably like people (or is it vice versa).
However, even if you're right, and most people would find humanistic motivation to work, my point is that we just can't have all the people who do menial, necessary, jobs pursue careers motivated by higher values. If all baristas were suddenly free to pursue their dream art careers, who will pour the coffee?
By way of contrast to your question, ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up. Note the cool factor in the jobs that kids want to do ("astronaut" , "fighter pilot", "fireman", "vet", "nurse" ). I'll bet very few kids say they want to stay at home and sit on the couch all day!
More in general:
I think that Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] has a quite a lot of levels between "basic physiological needs" and "transcendence". I think that as long as people need to fulfill needs anywhere on that ladder, they'll be willing to do work. If people are lucky and/or smart, a lot of their needs will be immediately fulfilled by their work; other times things may still need to be covered by money and/or free time.
I think it'd be strange if people would only have boolean motivation (either 100% staying alive, or 100% enlightenment). I think in real world people, it's often going to be some mix of motivations, with all sorts of levels in between. Sometimes more towards one side, sometimes more towards the other.
So that's my theory anyway.
Here's some examples of anecdata I have:
* An electrical technician I met at $factory. Possibly they'd work somewhere else if not for money, but on the other hand they do get a kick anytime a machine they fixed starts working again.
* An industrial programmer who got to play with $MM worth of robots and computers and lasers. They outright forgot to bill me and needed to be reminded. (oops)
* An awesome Barista who made coffee into an art form indeed; A lot of deep knowledge and skill and creativity went into it. They charged me about 2-4x what it would cost out of a machine, but it was worth it!
But you've not answered my question. What portion of all work in the economy do you think is motivated by the lowest needs on the ladder, the ones that we are endeavouring to provide with a UBI? How do you think that work is distributed across industries?
> very few kids say they want to stay at home and sit on the couch all day
You will notice however that, in absence of intervention, most kids do sit on the couch all day, especially in the digital age. We also observe that this behavior continues as long as it is materially supported. Countless articles have been written about the increasing numbers of seemingly-functional adults who live under the care of their parents and don't do very much at all. UBI will enable more people to adopt this lifestyle, to become starving (read: non-productive) artists, man-children or hikikomori. Why don't you think they'll take the opportunity?
> people would only have boolean motivation
I agree that it's not a binary motivation. In aggregate however the point stands, removing x% of motivation for work will inevitably result in x% less work being done. Furthermore, any decrease in x represents wealth transfer from those who are motivated to work by higher values to those who are motivated to work by lower ones (in Maslow's hierarchy). All of this raises many moral questions, and I think these are fundamentally worth discussing.
The only way an industry "can't survive" is if there is no price for their product/service at which both of these are true:
1) People can afford to pay for it
2) The employees can afford a living wage
If an industry is vital to our modern way of life, but it fails to meet those criteria, there's a third option: government subsidies, ensuring that the price can stay affordable while not shortchanging the employees.
However, as critical as I generally am of market-based solutions, in this case I genuinely believe that at least in the vast majority of cases, the second-order effects of the safety net offered by UBI will not require additional government subsidies for any vital industries. Some things may get more expensive, but overall, life will get better.
You can also make higher-quality products that require less support, and then have a smaller number of high-quality well-paid support for the fewer customers who still need it.
And we may have a long discussion about "how to engineer software so that it doesn't need as much support". Theoretically, it can be done; practically, we have all been astonished by Ways of the Common User that no one anticipated, plus you always hit the problem with diversity of hardware.
Apple seems to be pretty user friendly, but Apple products are expensive to boot and Apple does not support their OS on non-Apple hardware.
Pretty much no one today builds software with the intention that it doesn't need support. In fact, the entire hybrid-FOSS ecosystem is perversely incentivised towards exactly the opposite. It won't be as hard as people think it will be when we stop cramming features and GUI changes in to appease some manufactured need to sell the new version.
As long as the general public contains a certain % of assholes, there will be someone who needs to deal with them and tired of their shit. Not necessarily an IT support person. Perhaps a nurse, a hotel receptionist, a security guard etc.
Maybe there is a financial limit of compensation after which dealing with them stops being a problem - I would certainly personally tolerate an onslaught of assholes for a million dollar salary, at least for a few years - but that limit of compensation may be unrealistic to reach.
I am not sure how an utopia where people stop being assholes to one another could be achieved.
Employees should not have to take verbal abuse, but must because they will get fired if they stand up to rude customers. I personally was "fired" for standing up to vicious customers more than once, and I only felt comfortable standing up for myself because I was young and single and could afford not to work for a month or two.
But I worked with plenty of people in retail and food service who were older and had families to support and mortgages to pay. They didn't have the luxury of putting their self-respect above their paycheck.
It's ironic to think that people put up with that level of abuse for 8 or 10 or $12 an hour. Now that I'm an engineer, he would be unthinkable for anybody to talk to me like that, but in food service I experienced it from both customers and managers on the daily.
If the only way anybody can stand working someplace is if they're so desperate that they can't afford to leave, that's a job that shouldn't exist.
That is the thing. My definition of UBI is suppose to keep people alive. You wont die in starvation and live on street. But it is not suppose to give you Netflix, movies and popcorn. If you want those you need to work. Which is why
>> ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’
this never make sense unless people have different definition of UBI. You will need to work to borderline enjoy life.
And it also shift the power to workers. No more shitty jobs like what you describe just to put food on table. The level of abuse people will tolerate before they quit will reduce. It will fundamentally shift ( or lift ) the power in bottom half of the society.
But no work on UBI have ever provided a solution how they deal with "living". If I have a small flat of 6m2 ( unless you want to live in a cage like Hong Kong, I think 6m2 per person is bad enough to be the absolute minimum ) , enough for a bed and bathroom, and zero rent. Getting yourself fed is easy enough.
Which shift the question from UBI to something else, our biggest problem isn't UBI, but property. How it is both an investment as an asset as well as a fundamental need by human. You could always pop up the property prices so UBI will never be enough. And every time we have a discussion about UBI, it is always about tax, equality, willingness to work and nothing on actual "living".
> But no work on UBI have ever provided a solution how they deal with "living".
UBI would be a major part of the solution, because it would enable people to move to lower cost-of-living areas where their UBI payment would go a lot further. Today this sort of mobility is heavily impeded by the need to be around meaningful job opportunities and all sorts of government services provided in-kind. With UBI, the job opportunities would spring up where people reside and not vice-versa.
The government could provide everyone with a small apartment, free food and free public transport. Then do away with UBI and other direct financial benefits. The government can better organise these things and not worry that some money will just go to drug dealers or other vices.
I also think in general all the research around basic income misses an incredibly important piece that is being proposed in policy changes.
Basic income experiments usually game it like this:
We will give you x years of payments monthly for just being alive.
Then they see what happens. The problem is, policy has one huge difference. It doesn't end.
The difference between, I'll give you 2 years of payments monthly and then you'll have to take care of yourself the rest of your life is extraordinarily different than, I'll give you monthly inflation adjusted payments for life, there will be no point in the future when you will need to take care of yourself again.
Think about the FIRE movement. People are working to create an early retirement for themselves with the government not offering it. There will certainly be a percent of the population who retires with basic income.
To be more precise, it has no specific end date, but in a democracy, it can be repealed again with every new parliament. Or possibly via a ballot initiative.
At which moment the net recipients are in for a major shock.
The bigger danger is its just a path to the end of democracy. If the 50.1% can just vote themselves a bigger piece of the pie, how long before the morlocks decide they don't like supporting a bunch of eloi. If the morlocks decide eloi votes don't count, what are they going to do? Go on strike?
Democracy is not the same as time-limited dictatorship. A well-working democracy has constitutional safeguards against policies that are hostile against parts of the population.
If you're living in a country where 50.1% of the population can impose their will on the other 49.9% unopposed, you're not living in a healthy democracy. Regardless of what the media says.
(And yes, the Brexit referendum is a good example of that. All the issues the British government now has in living up to the results of that binary decision are problems of their own making -- on the other hand, one might say that these current problems show that the British democracy is in a healthier state than that referendum made it out to be)
So, this is anecdotal of course, but my high school was a terrible experience and university was incredible. Why? I think it was because the people who didn't want to be there didn't have to be. That's one benefit of UBI.
As for the jobs people won't do, those jobs will be higher valued and eventually, when the price is right, people will do them.
The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).
Finally, people who don't have the means to take risks will suddenly be able to. We will unlock their potential and the future will benefit as a result.
Tens of millions of people aren’t at university because they lack the privilege to be able to realistically attend too.
> The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).
No need to bring up points like this when the effect on the overall system is small. It’s a great way to continue to demonize poorer people and let the 1% or .1% off the hook.
>My spouse worked for the state government as part of a benefits/disbursement program. She took phone calls from benefits recipients
Not to excuse bad behavior, but one of the arguments for UBI is that it could help streamline the convoluted systems of government benefits; under a simpler basic-income system perhaps those callers would be fewer and less angry.
That implies your job currently doesn’t require those things. Does it mean you would continue to do the work you currently do?
I think a better phrasing to the hypothetical might be: “if my current job requires…”. And sure, you would leave that job, but does that mean you wouldn’t work at all?
Or does it mean you might use that free space to learn the skills to do a different job that wouldn’t treat you like such garbage.
It almost sounds like your conclusion is: “such a program would allow workers to reject abusive workplaces, and require management to ensure people didn’t abuse their workers if they would want any workers”. To which I say, don’t threaten me with a good time.
> My spouse worked for the state government as part of a benefits/disbursement program. She took phone calls from benefits recipients. Some who are disabled, on unemployment, or generally within the states bar to qualify for tax payer aid.
> The pay was slightly above minimum wage. My spouse quit after about a year, during which my souse constantly suffered from verbal abuse and even callers who didn’t qualify threatening to murder my spouse unless they received cash from the state.
This feels like a particularly unfair anecdote in the context of what we're talking about. Imagine for a second that the tables were turned and your spouse was disabled and unable to work: Everything is harder – they can't leave the house without someone to give them a ride; maybe they have to use a wheelchair, which makes everything twice as difficult. They're in survival mode every day.
Not only do they rely on the state for money to eat, to pay rent, to keep the lights on, but doing anything enjoyable is challenging. They have to navigate a byzantine system that is DESIGNED to make qualifying for support extremely frustrating, and then have to stay on top of getting their benefits regularly. The system has literally trained them to react to any issue with anger because they know that whenever a problem occurs, it could be weeks or months until they get the money they need to survive.
I'm not saying that your spouse's experience was justified in any way – dealing with that requires a hell of a lot more than minimum wage! – but (theoretically) this particular problem would go away with something like basic income, where most of these people would have their basic costs covered. They might still have "disability" to help pay for all the other stuff disabled people have to deal with, but at least they aren't relying on a sclerotic bureaucracy to eat, yunno?
Great point. People often try to measure "willingness to work" by looking at "willingness to harm yourself", often in service of making somebody else wealthy. Well, they do that for poor people. People of the right caste are instead, "funemployed", "taking a sabbatical", "looking for the right thing", or "a socialite".
One of the silver linings for me of the pandemic is how much the Great Resignation is revealing to the general public how much "essential workers" were poorly paid and miserable. Not even in a way that was necessitated by the work itself, but just because their bosses could get away with being jerks.
My guess is that inflation would go through the roof resetting it back where the UBI wouldn't be enough to sustain basic life. Increasing UBI would further lead to runaway inflation.
We literally just did this with COVID checks.
I would vote for the complete opposite of basic income - invest heavily in education, trade schools, colleges and free access to tools for learning, apprenticeships, etc. Give tools to people to become productive and sustain a good life, by also providing value to the society.
Yeah, anyone trying to live on basic income would be resigned to rural squalor with no opportunity to speak of. Rent prices in those areas would be saran wrapped to basic income levels, making them impossible to get out of.
Inflation would rise if UBI is paid with newly printed money and deficit (e.g. covid checks). If it's paid with taxes, nothing should change in terms of inflation. Surely, prices close to the consumption should rise, and price of capital goods should fall, but overall it stay the same.
We don't have a balanced budget. Programs like UBI would most likely not be paid by taxes (which would be better used for education/trade programs that I mentioned) but by increasing the deficit. There is no undo button. Millions of people would be dependent on it. You will have no choice but to print money.
I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.
Weird that you got downvotes by saying what's widely know in the field of UBI. Almost any UBI proposal includes the slash of all other programs.
The main strenght of the UBI is that it simplifies the bureaucracy: in theory, you just give everyone an income that should cover health insurance, education when needed, food, housing... so if anyone prefers to spend the money on drugs and hookers is up to him: the society already provided with everything he needed. The key is that you can live with the UBI, and if you want recreational drugs you have to find a job for the extra money or sacrifice some of the basics.
UBI + lots of other welfare programs makes little sense.
That has nothing to do with desire to work. Shitty jobs are shitty jobs, and if employers don't pay enough to justify putting up with the negatives, people are naturally going to do something else. I presume your spouse didn't quit after a year to sit on a couch, she quit and found some other job which was (hopefully) better.
A lot of shitty jobs out there rely on the fact that people need to settle to pay the bills. There are people with little experience or going through rough times who simply can't afford to wait for a good opportunity to come along, they need something to hold them over for a few months or maybe years. The employers know that these people have few options and will leave as soon as they do, so they offer low wages and overwork their staff and replace them when they are used up. UBI means people don't have to settle for the first low paying, undesirable job that comes along, they can hold out indefinitely for something better. Yeah, people are still going to need to get their foot in the door somewhere, and some opportunities might be too rare to be considered realistic, so we're not all going to be working our dream jobs, but the worst abusive employment anti-patterns will go extinct.
The more money you have - the less value a marginal dollar has.
I think there would be a massive pressure to raise minimum wage.
Why would you work for $7.50 an hour and pay $1 in taxes - spending the majority of your day to make ~$50 - that doesn't buy much - and you don't have much time to spend it anyway?
When your options are either do that or be homeless and hungry - most people opt for work.
But when you have other options - spending your entire day to make $50 seems dramatically less appealing.
Yes, but not by raising minimum wage (in fact it would no longer be needed given a high enough UBI to make a living), but because employers would voluntarily raise wages, because they now need to compete against not working.
Also, I think many menial jobs could be made a lot more pleasant with only a slight cut in productivity.
UBI might cover your food and rent, but it won't cover much past that. So if you want some beer money or a new videogame or whatever, you'll need to work.
And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.
> landlord and food companies just raise the prices
Which is exactly what has happened (in the US at least) as people received mini-UBI called "stimulus checks" and their bosses got PPP "loans" (that didn't need to be paid back)
Exactly. You can't determine a baseline UBI amount without knowing the baseline cost of food and rent. And I'm perfectly ok with rent control. Housing is a basic necessity, after all -- at least in humane societies.
They can only do that if they collude, which is illegal. On the other hand, if food and rent are paid for mostly with UBI money, and supply was more elastic than demand, then prices would surely increase.
Ya, isn’t that what supply not keeping up with demand (in the form of money that can be applied to said demand). Everyone can’t afford to rent an apartment f there isn’t enough apartments to rent. People will use their buying power to prevent being the ones left without, while landlords will benefit from bidding wars by being able to raise prices. That works in Seattle or austin even if it doesn’t work in Detroit or Shreveport.
I'm saying that the work wouldn't be so mentally tedious. You're working because you want to be there because the reward is tangible. The difference between working because you have to and because you want to is massive, even if the work is the same.
If you're not stuck in a fight for survival, you have a lot more energy left over for other things, both less and more frivolous (like charity or games)
Avoiding a particular job is not the same as sitting around doing nothing. It's quite possible for you to get basic income, yet channel your energy to other productive things.
Or other improductive things. The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus. That's pretty much doing nothing at a productive level.
One of the problems of those studies are that they are temporal, and everyone involved know it. If I enrole you for two years in an UBI experiment, you'll probably not leave your job, even if you hate it. But if I guarantee you the same income for the rest of your life... well, lets take a look at how many people keep their jobs, and specially their boring/shitty jobs, when they win a huge lottery price. Usually they don't do other productive things, or even other improductive things: they tend to destroy their own lifes.
Another problem is that you have to take into account how slowly people internalize the new situations. E.g. when central banks started to use inflation as a source of government income, in the first decades it was "free". But people adapted and started to track inflation and price indexes to peg the salaries to them, "learning" how to live with the new situation.
> The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus
I've been following the UBI space for a long time and I've never seen anyone use this as an example - that's just a strawman. What people discuss is the work that is valuable to society but is unpaid such as raising children, caretaking for the elderly, community support, and so on.
A few hundred dollars a month isn't enough to live on, but it moves the needle for those most at-risk for going hungry or becoming homeless. And for everyone else, it gives extra breathing room and negotiating power in the workplace.
Well, the "Malibu surfer" is a recurrent theme. E.g. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-37908-... or https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265291. Van Parijs (author of the last text) is very well known in the field of UBI (some sources even list him as the founder of the idea). The haiku theme often arises in discussions, but I cannot find a source. Anyway, is the same idea: being paid for doing whatever you want or nothing at all.
What you talk about is not UBI, but other schema of basic income conditioned (thus not fulfilling the U).
If someone’s job involves receiving verbal abuse, perhaps they should be paid extra to compensate for the fact that it’s a very difficult job. If a job like that paid enough, people will still take it. Basic income would just mean that employees couldn’t pay poverty wages for shit jobs. In addition to being fairer, total utility could even rise because companies would be financially motivated to remove the need for the most unpleasant jobs.
I think basic income is a great incentive for workplaces to be better.
it does need balances tho, to prevent abuse, especially against undeclared workers double dipping the state (not paying labour taxes and getting the income)
basic incomes tho has a series of drawback that current experiment cannot easily handle.
the first one is of principle: it doesn't solve what caused poverty in the population, and unilaterally ties recipient survival to the benevolence of the ruling class - without a strong economy to zero involuntary unemployment, it begins to look a lot like vassalage.
the second one is of application: punctual welfare is inherently less efficient than aggregated action - living universal income + private school and private healthcare is just a way to bleed state resources into private coffers. public school and public healthcare are much more efficient, and then the supplementary income should just cover the remaining quota of needs (housing, food etc)
there's also second order effects tied to basic income inelasticity - if housing or schooling or whatever price raises, it can displace all the recipient from an area. it's not unrealistic to expect basic income city quarters, at which point state provided housing seem a better alternative to prevent basic-slums.
and there's a question about what the long term goal of the society are - given that there will always be premium goods/service out of reach of people living off basic income, I'd wager that while basic income is sure helpful to bring people out of poverty and placing them into the same bucket of the working class, it rarely help bringing such people into middle class, as that would require the saving necessary to bootstrap a private action, which I rarely hear to be the goal of basic income.
If the market is as intelligent as the gravitationally wealthy sitting at the top want to make it out to be, then we should be able to solve that no problem through hard work, bootstraps, ingenuity, and whatever marketing term Volkswagen has decided to pimp.
If you think that people who are sitting at the bottom wouldn't take a job to ensure that their basic needs are met and they can have something nice for themselves every once in a while, then I don't know what to tell you. People didn't just start working degrading jobs in the 2010s.
Agreed. So people will either drop out of the workforce for such jobs, or will require more money to do those jobs.
As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.
I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.
And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.
A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.
> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.
Having worked in a factory, there's no way I'd do that for free. Heck, even at my current salary, which is multiple times higher, I wouldn't want to do that again.
> My point is - there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit and not work if the basic income can provide a sufficient su
I'm neither arguing for nor against UBI here, but from my understanding, you description is not of UBI. Here you are saying income as a substitute for work. Where as UBI as I understand it is provided independent of work. Meaning that by your spouse quitting she would be losing half of her income.
Maybe she still makes that trade off and quits and the program needs to raise wages to keep people. Or maybe she stays in place for the pay (with abuse). Or maybe the programs doesn't raise wages and has worse/fewer employees as a result.
But it doesn't sounds like the situation you describe is UBI.
- if we had guaranteed roof, we'd do different jobs, fill desire, aim at useful. A lot of people go to work with zero benefits being ability to pay rent. They dread it but they have no choice. It's a weird balance
- any task can be done, even being berated or doing petty tasks, you just dont have to do it from 9 to 5, all year long. You can do 2h if that pleases you. And those jobs now being recognized as nasty would be distributed differently or at least valued as such and workers doing it would feel appreciated
ps: our current system makes us angry at each others. very ironic.
If there were basic income, the payments would be incremental to the salary. The worker, though unhappy, could upgrade other elements of their life.
Perhaps jobs are scarce and this worker really has no place to go and must endure the abuse. Once BI is introduced, what percent of workers would quit and stop working, vs. quit but find new employment using the BI to bridge expenses in the meantime and be able to make a full time effort of the search?
BI should make employees more mobile and employers with unpleasant work will need to pay more to get those positions filled.
One reason retail workers passively endure being berated by customers is that they are fearful of losing their job. UBI would reduce that fear and increase worker power.
I'm not sure how this is relevant. I'm sorry for your wife having to go through that. That's a shitty job. But I think the premise is about working in general, not a specific job. As a thought experiment, if you and your wife had a billion dollars, would you still work? Would you still do things that are work? Or would you fly around the world vacationing all day, watching TV, or things like that. If it's not the latter then that's the premise of the article: people find fulfillment in work.
Somehow, if those jobs are so bad no one wants to do it but the purpose of the job must still to be done/accomplished then maybe people will try other solutions, some that don't let those kind of behaviors emerge.
Also, if basic income is good enough then their wouldn't be a need for that kind of job :).
It quite well ignores that this only works with some subset of the population. If it’s truly universal, or even for the majority, then the net result will be nothing. We’re just moving decimals again to give people some idea they’re making more.
I would think basic income would only cover the basic necessities, plus some extra. Not enough for one person to live without a roomate, or have the latest and greatest technology.
So... to pay for a private apartment maybe that crap retail job would be ok.
> My point is - there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit and not work if the basic income can provide a sufficient substitute.
You have no personal experience with UBI schemes, yet you think you know what people would do based on what you think you would do. A long time ago people thought that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. Then Galileo came along, conducted an experiment, and proved them wrong. It seems something similar is going on here. Peoples intuitions about UBI and joblessness are faulty and researchers are disproving them.
Ah, so you are saying we shouldn’t offer UBI because then we would have no excuse to keep degrading conditions in the workplace. So people should have to go through with bad experiences (see retail, “menial” jobs) in order to be worthy of their lives. Ok, got it.
>They simulated the reward structure of different forms of social security in an experiment. ‘We got people to do a task on a computer,’ says De Kwaadsteniet. ‘In multiple rounds, which represented the months they had to work, they did a boring task in which they had to put points on a bar. The more of these they did, the more money they earned.’
"short term experiments done in a lab" seems to be psychology's equivalent of "in vitro" (aka. in a test tube). I'm not really sure how you can draw any conclusions about someone's lifetime behavior, using a experiment that looks at the behavior of people sitting at a few hours at a computer.
Yep. Meaningless. Yet the paper will be blasted from one end of the earth to the other by people who care more about their agenda than the universe's frequently unhappy truths.
Probably the same people who said that increasing the money supply wouldn't cause inflation because MMT or some other tendentious garbage.
It's not meaningless. It's not enough to prove that basic income will have a long term positive impact, but it is enough to show further experimentation on a larger, more long term scale is worthwhile. It's decidedly unreasonable, not to mention unscientific, to dismiss something because you don't like it.
We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident.
This isn't suggestive, valid science. It's the equivalent of setting up a "scientific" contraption that purports to be a perpetual motion machine. You can create a pretty convincing fake perpetual motion machine, but because we have a broader theory of mechanics, we know perpetual motion is impossible, that the purported machine must be cheating somehow (even if it's not immediately obvious), and that to give funding for further study based on that machine's existence would be absolutely stupid.
We've done a long-term wide-scale UBI experiment? Where?
I hope you don't mean any fickle systems tied to covid, and I especially hope you don't mean the unemployment boost the US did; unemployment pay is very different from basic income.
And even if something fails, that doesn't prove it's some kind of impossibility like perpetual motion machines.
The closest analogue to true UBI goes on in the oil-rich Gulf nations. Citizens are basically guarenteed a job where they don't even need to show up, which is basically an inefficient form of UBI. Some, like Saudi Arabia are transitioning to true UBI.
The result of this is that these nations are completely reliant on foreign labor. Both skilled on unskilled work is dominated by foreigners. The latter have enough leverage to live comfortably. Unfortunately for unskilled workers, they're kept in slavery-like conditions and even have their passports taken away because otherwise, the cost of living would be too high for citizens to live off state income.
And the closest Western equivalent is the pension system. Also not a perfect comparison since pensioners are obviously older and have more assets on average, and some have large private payouts at the time state pensions kick in. But few people carry on working full time, and the system relies almost entirely on the labour of people who are not entitled to pensions to sustain it, to the point pensionable ages are needing to increase because healthier, longer lived people don't retire any later.
I've seen enough of my elders get their pensions to know what happens. Suddenly their schedule gets MUCH busier. Just because they're not necessarily doing paid work, doesn't mean that they're not doing useful things in society.
Hard to find good sources but Kuwait had a median household income of $40k. Meanwhile, almost 1 million workers make less than $300 a month, so Kuwait citizen families likely make a lot more than $40k.
The purpose of money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Giving money for the sake of nothing defeats the entire purpose of money, because you're giving everyone money without creating new good and services. Note that this is different from conditional payments like food stamps or pensions, which serve the purpose of insurance. This is also different from welfare, which is targeted towards certain people in hopes of improving their well-being.
> Hard to find good sources but Kuwait had a median household income of $40k. Meanwhile, almost 1 million workers make less than $300 a month, so Kuwait citizen families likely make a lot more than $40k.
Yeah that sounds pretty unbalanced.
> The purpose of money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Giving money for the sake of nothing defeats the entire purpose of money, because you're giving everyone money without creating new good and services. Note that this is different from conditional payments like food stamps or pensions, which serve the purpose of insurance. This is also different from welfare, which is targeted towards certain people in hopes of improving their well-being.
People get lots of things for "free", like infrastructure, and that doesn't defeat the purpose of money. Basic income isn't "for the sake of nothing".
What conditions do you think are important for food stamps and welfare?
If a certain level of low income is good enough, that's basically equivalent to universal income plus progressive taxation.
So how would that be different from Americans getting ~$12000 and buying goods from developing countries where workers also make $300 a month.
>People get lots of things for "free", like infrastructure
Infrastructure serves a specific purpose. Why should we give money to people for free when we can instead use it to build infrastructure?
>What conditions do you think are important for food stamps and welfare?
Welfare targets people who cannot provide for themselves, such as children and the disabled. We don't lose much productivity by giving these people money. Every able bodied adult should be expected to give back to society.
> So how would that be different from Americans getting ~$12000 and buying goods from developing countries where workers also make $300 a month.
I don't really know how to respond to this because we buy those goods anyway.
> Infrastructure serves a specific purpose. Why should we give money to people for free when we can instead use it to build infrastructure?
Every category of spending has diminishing returns. You'd never want to spend everything on infrastructure, or zero in any effective category.
> Welfare targets people who cannot provide for themselves, such as children and the disabled. We don't lose much productivity by giving these people money. Every able bodied adult should be expected to give back to society.
We also want to have certain standards for non-dehumanizing employment, and not everyone has access to jobs that meet those standards. Basic income is a way to help that situation a lot, but do you have better ideas?
Also how much productivity do we need to demand from everyone? Somehow a century after establishing 40 hours, with productivity per hour skyrocketing over that time, we're demanding more than 40 hours from so many workers just to make ends meet.
This phrase is usually used to force through otherwise unpopular economic policies. But here’s the thing, this isn’t actually an argument. You’re unilaterally asserting that you’re right and that anyone who disagrees with you is a child that refuses to accept “hard truths”. But you have offered literally no evidence for your assertions, only bluster. This is mere abuse of rhetoric, not an argument.
Oh, and it’s funny how only other people have an “agenda”. As if you aren’t also expressing a policy preference too.
If I'm receiving $1000 a month for a six month program run by a university research group, which states very clearly that the program will end after six months, I'm not going to go quit my job.
That's the problem with these "studies". They are completely different from a permanent government program. They can't tell you the impact on inflation, the impact on the labor market, or if it is affordable over the long term.
I also wonder if we can't make some conclusions from real world data over the last two years. Yes, the pandemic is a bit of a confounding variable, but from what I've been reading we have at least strong reason to believe that the support payments from unemployment both substantially contributed to inflation, and also reduced marginal propensity to work.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I think there's not much of a chance of this getting implemented in my country during my lifetime. We can't even agree to give people universal healthcare. I think if anything the pendulum seems likely to swing in the opposite direction given the political landscape nowadays. But even if I could decide this unilaterally . . . I'd probably want some other country to try it first, and see how it goes. It doesn't obviously seem like a good idea based on what I know today.
> we have at least strong reason to believe that the support payments from unemployment … substantially reduced marginal propensity to work.
I always see people blaming benefits for people not working, but nobody ever seems to offer an explanation why these same people didn’t return to work once the benefits were cut down to their pre-pandemic levels.
Why wouldn’t it have a rapid and sudden effect? If you suddenly slash the UI benefits for an entire state at once and people only start trickling back to work slowly, then it implies that there are other unexplained factors at play. After all, the hypothesis is that UI is allowing people who otherwise would have to work to survive to not work. Shouldn’t the sudden cliff in payments make these people go find a job once their meager savings are exhausted?
It’s also incongruous with the other hair on fire arguments you see about UI causing labor shortages; it’s inconsistent to say that UI makes people not work, then hand wave away why months and years after cutting the benefits were still facing a “labor shortage” in a lot of job markets. If it’s really down to UI, then you’ve got to propose some mechanism for why canceling UI didn’t fix the supposed labor shortage.
If benefits were indeed providing more income than people previously got from their jobs, they have a good chance of building savings from that income. Those savings won't instantly evaporate when the support is cut off, they'll decrease over time. As the savings run out, people will return to work.
Personally I think this is a good thing, both the buffer and the staggered return to work.
The issue is that the median American doesn’t have enough savings to not work for a long time. The median American had $5,300 in 2019, and the median rent was a bit over $1,000. These numbers are just not consistent with huge swaths of the economy deciding to hold on for months and months of unemployment once benefits were cut. Since the numbers don’t add up, something else has to be going on.
But not everyone has the same amount of savings, or the same cost of rent, so there's a trickle as each individual runs out. And didn't unemployment bonuses only end 4 months ago?
Right, and a lot of people have a lot less savings than the median, and those who had to count on enhanced UI during the pandemic likely had less still, since more of those were in low to minimum wage service jobs. The second quintile had only $2,100 in savings, and the bottom a mere $800. I sincerely doubt many of them were able to save up enough to last more than a few months.
The issue is that the story of enhanced UI isn't internally consistent. Apparently UI made all the (implied) lazy people stop working because it was more profitable to not work than work[0], which made it critical to turn off the benefits as soon as possible in order to force people back into the office. Except once they turned off the benefits people decided not to work and spend down their savings because ... erm, why would people do that? And doesn't this undermine the premise that people stopped working because it was cheaper to not work, if they're deciding to go broke not working for funsies?
Personally I think that the story of the labor shortage is explained as such:
1. Loss of workers due to death, disability, retirement, changing careers, and general re-evaluation of life choices in the face a deadly pandemic
2. For those that remained in the service industry, a brief exposure to being treated with dignity and as an essential part of the economy was a real awakening moment for a lot of them, and many are no longer willing to put up with workers that pay poorly and treat them as sub human. In my parts the restaurants that offer good wages always seem to be fully staffed, while everywhere else has signs crapping on people's work ethic and apologizing for slow service. Coincidence? I think not.
I think UI was critical to get people through the early period of the pandemic due to the chaos and the uncertainty of the early pandemic, but I am extremely dubious about the effect that UI had as compared to the deadly pandemic.
> And didn't unemployment bonuses only end 4 months ago?
Oh lord no. A lot of states started disabling enhanced UI back in June and July. My state ended it July 19th, nigh upon 7 months ago. I am doubtful many working Americans
0 - I've seen this floated a lot by CNBC types, and they never seem to engage with the fact that the most lethal profession during the pandemic was line cook.
> once they turned off the benefits people decided not to work and spend down their savings because ... erm, why would people do that? And doesn't this undermine the premise that people stopped working because it was cheaper to not work, if they're deciding to go broke not working for funsies?
Once you get used to 100% of your time being leisure time for months to years, it's hard to overcome that inertia and start looking for work again, even when it's the rational thing to do.
> changing careers, and general re-evaluation of life choices
People changing careers wouldn't contribute to the total number of unfilled jobs being higher, though. And if "general re-evaluation of life choices" leads to quitting your job, aren't the only two possibilities that you either get a new job, or you don't work anymore?
> A lot of states started disabling enhanced UI back in June and July.
But what about the rest of the states? And the federal government left their money faucet on until September.
> People changing careers wouldn't contribute to the total number of unfilled jobs being higher, though
Are there actually any evidence that there are more unfilled jobs though? Unemployment is actually at 3.9%, which is down to pre-pandemic levels. That's better than 2017 and most of 2018, actually.
Heck, now that I'm pulling up real numbers (should've done this earlier), unemployment spiked up to 14.7% in April of 2020, and was on a continuous downward slide after that, including before any state cut its enhanced UI. Nationwide unemployment was at 5.9% when states began cutting UI. This is more consistent with "crisis over, we don't need to keep this" than "oh god we have to cut UI or they won't go back to work. My state had an unemployment rate of 3% when they turned off enhanced UI, no need for a stick there!
For comparison the official unemployment rate was above 5.9% between August 2008 and October of 2014.
I think that the best argument for here "UI lets people be lazy and not work" is not that people stopped working during the pandemic because of it. I think the best argument is that people knew that this system was temporary and that they had to get a new job and start working when they felt it was safe, because it was temporary. One might expect different results if the system was more generous permanently, I don't know.
> And if "general re-evaluation of life choices" leads to quitting your job, aren't the only two possibilities that you either get a new job, or you don't work anymore?
Either possibility is incompatible with the general thesis that UI was why people stopped working, and we had to cancel UI in order to get people back into work. Either they didn't need the job and no amount of UI tweaking will bring them back, or they decided to get a different job and no amount of UI tweaking will fill their old one.
> But what about the rest of the states? And the federal government left their money faucet on until September.
I could be wrong here, but UI is administered through the states. The federal government had the money tap on to the states who then gave it out through their system.
Obviously, receiving free money is better than not receiving free money. There's nothing surprising about that. The question is where this money will come from. You can't support universal basic income from casinos or oil wealth, both of which have major negative externalities to boot.
This is functionally no different than dividends paid by a company to its shareholders (although this Casino enjoys a local state-sanctioned monopoly, and the shareholder is the tribe council, so it is slightly different, but economically similar).
UBI on the other hand is done by taxing ourselves to pay ourselves, or worse, printing to pay ourselves.
>Even in Cherokee country, where the additional income is quite sizable, the payments are not enough to live on
>The Alaska Permanent Fund has been giving $1,000 to $2,000 a year to its citizens for decades
Neither of these are amounts to not work on. Many people quit working after reaching a specific "UBI". Either through social security or retirement/investment accounts. This is also the goal for many folks such as FIRE.
The fact that properly done experiments have the same outcome doesn't mean that these "let's go to the psych department from 1-4 this afternoon to get a $50 gift card" pseudo-experiments hold any real value.
If someone seriously wanted to run an experiment/trial it would need to be on the scale of a medium sized city and a decade before I’d be willing to draw any conclusions at all.
If you're referring to longer-term experiments, do they show actual statistical significance? One of the two I've read through, the UBC experiment, showed a similar outcome but was only significant at the p≈0.13 or p≈0.24 level, depending on the precise statement of the null hypothesis, which is not particularly enthralling. The Stockton one I recall showing something similar but don't have the precise numbers for.
Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work.
For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others.
I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need it, instead of ham handedly giving it regardless of need, thereby shorting those who need it at the benefit of many who do not.
And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money.
Product Z simply rises to cause person to put in the same pain to obtain it.
If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.
The two big ifs are: would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, and can we actually get rid of current welfare if we roll out UBI?
There is a tremendous amount of overhead involved in current welfare programs, so it's not unreasonable that the first question is could be resolved. Politically, the second issue seems unlikely to be implemented.
>If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation
It cannot, unless you're ok with screwing those already on such programs. Do the math, and you'll find it is not even close. Welfare programs (unless you include SS) are given to a tiny amount of people - spreading that across a large group of people simply screws those who need it most.
If you include SS, now again you're screwing old people who many times need the money to give it to people capable of work.
>The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.
This common claim is not true. There are ample people moving out of such program regularly, and many of them have limited lifetime benefits.
>would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs,
No. I've been down this set of math lots of times. Do it - all welfare budgets are public, population is public, it's easy to estimate.
You make accepting UBI optional, so if the $1,000 per month or existing services is better for your situation then you get to decide - not the government; e.g. maybe you have 6 kids and food stamps etc you get is way better than the $1,000/month. This way there is also a statistics dashboard that we can see who's choosing what and optimize more precisely.
You force corporations to pay, to not be able to avoid taxes - using a VAT that's customizable so things like diapers have say 0% tax vs. buying ads on Facebook has 80% tax. The nuanced ability to lever different goods and services allows tax to be fine-tuned to cover all costs until the floor quality of life is covered/existing for all.
We can supply everything 90%+ of what people need through automation, the remaining 10% or less will be the engineers and system and machine designers and maintainers - while the 90%+ can focus self-improvement/education, family/community and being creative/artistic etc.
>You force corporations to pay, to not be able to avoid taxes
Economic maxim: "Corporations don't pay taxes, people pay taxes". This means when you think corporation tax is somehow free, you ignore that comes directly from stock prices and wages, i.e., direct income and pensions.
>you get to decide
Historical evidence shows that directed tax cuts and targets are much better multipliers of using tax revenues. Your method has been demonstrated to costing more for the same public outcomes, which is why there are so many directed tax cuts and directed tax spends. They are simply more efficient.
Simply put forth an estimate of what you think various groups need to pay to get what you think people will get with UBI. Once you try to put actual numbers to things, you soon realize it's simply not possible without damaging a lot of vulnerable people.
>We can supply everything 90%+ of what people need through automation
No, we cannot. Unless people take a drastic quality of life cut, and even then, we cannot.
> There is a tremendous amount of overhead involved in current welfare programs
Take the salaries of the people involved, and divide that over the entire country. Will that suffice? I don't think so, because it isn't as if 25% of the population is involved in distributing welfare.
> If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation.
Not necessarily. If the government gave everybody a minimum wage extra, landlords could raise their prices further, shops, restaurants, construction firms, etc. would have to increase salaries to maintain lowly paid staff and raise prices, etc. There's a distinct risk of inflation involved in handing out money.
> If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation.
UBI is, by definition, Universal (e.g. given to everyone). Welfare programs are highly selective and only apply to a small number of people.
The only way to make them cost the same is to massively reduce the benefits given to the small number of welfare recipients, then give the balance to people who didn't previously qualify for welfare.
UBI is taxable income. You just adjust tax rates slightly to claw it back from those with higher incomes. No extra bureaucracy required, no means testing needed.
Yep, that's the myth of "universal" basic income: It would actually be taxed away for most of the population.
You may get $2,000/month for "free", but most people reading this would see their taxes go up by $30-40K/year to pay for the program. The money has to come from somewhere.
But that doesn't change the fact that if we pump money into a certain demographic, the assets they're buying will go up in price. In this case, it's the lowest cost housing that will go up in price.
You can refactor it to net 0. Take n tax brackets. For each tax bracket estimate how much x% income is raised by UBI, then raise the taxes in that bracket to that same x%.
In the $0 income bracket this would be tax_rate:=100% , in the >$100K bracket it might be tax_rate:=1%.
So now your UBI is paid for but it's not doing anything useful.
However, you can now tune your tax brackets "as per usual" to get a more desirable outcome; lowering taxes in the lowest bracket and raising them in the highest.
The new ability you get is that while previously your progressive tax brackets only allowed you to control the upper limit of the income band , you now also have the ability to control the lower limit of the income band.
I'm about as anti big government and anti welfare programs as you can get, but the overhead costs of most welfare programs isn't nearly as much as UBI proponents seem to think they are. Food stamps, one of the more inefficient ones, costs about 15 cents in overhead for every dollar in benefits. Most other programs like social security etc. range between half a cent to 5 cents for every dollar of benefits.
UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI."
I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.
In US, these taxes wouldn’t be particularly progressive. US taxes are already very progressive, much more so than in Europe. In US, the wealthy already pay overwhelming majority of the tax. If US was to embark on European level governmental spending, it would have to introduce more European-like taxation system, where bulk of the revenue is collected from middle and working class.
Exactly, I came to say the same thing. You could pay for UBI with some MMT trick, but you‘d just end up inflating/rescaling all the prices. It would only work as a massive wealth redistribution program where the rich and middle class get heavily taxed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to implement than the former, but technically both would be UBI.
> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected"
The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant.
> And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money.
Yes: If you give everyone extra money and theoretically nobody quits working, it's hard to argue that the extra money wouldn't just go to rising prices.
We're already seeing this with supply-constrained resources like housing: In hot cities, people will pay whatever they have to in order to outbid their competitors for houses or apartments. Pouring more money into the situation would only make the numbers go up, but the root problem still exists.
> The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant.
I agree that seems very significant. Unemployment is considered to be quite high when it's at 8% for instance.
During the pandemic, we've had to pay people monthly cheques because we forced businesses to shut down, and it's been difficult to get people to return to work. Granted, this isn't the same as UBI, and there are conflating factors, but currently, we're in a situation where we have high inflation and a labor shortage. That's not very encouraging.
In my mind, if we want to implement something like UBI, we need a way to control the inflation it might generate. It might also not be realistic to do this until we have something like general purpose robots to counter the labor shortage. Another problem is just how we finance something like this. Increasing taxes on the general population seems like a pretty bad idea. We'd have to fund it through money printing, but again, how do we control the resulting inflation? High sales taxes? Increasing income taxes in the higher brackets would create a situation where it's less worthwhile to work hard.
> Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began?
What do you mean? Labor force participation has been trending upward over the last 100 years, not downward.
For an extreme example, fewer than 10% of married women were in the workforce around 1900. Now it's closer to 3 out of 4 married women in the workforce.
"shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it"
A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5%
How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible?
B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing, and it caused massive inflation of asset prices
> "pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money."
Usually economic theories talk about productivity, resources and velocity of money. This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.
>How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible?
That is part of it. Fortunately there are plenty of other examples in US and other country history where money handouts are clearly a driver, so it's not a question of whether or not easy money adds to inflation.
As mot economists put it, all long term inflation is ultimately the result of more money in the system.
>This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.
Not a rebuttal. If Bob willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z, simply rescaling the value of money (inflation) will not change that Bob is willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z.
Do you think this is not true? That he gets 37 yotobucks or 19 fishcoins or 39801892 bubblenotes is irrelevant. He is willing to trade time and effort for goods. If the value of the currency moves he is still willing to do this.
Free money will not, and historically has not, come without costs.
Just like you don't need to rebutt a flat earther theory that ignores basic laws of gravity, no-one needs to rebut an argument that ignores basics of economics.
You are conflating consumer good and assets, you are conflating creation of money and redistribution, you are totally ignoring the three most important factors - velosity of money, productivity and interest rates.
Firstly prices of houses and other assets depend on interest rates, not wages.
Secondly UBI does not do 'rescaling', whatever that means, nor does it create new money, it does redistribution. Redistribution does not cause inflation.
You could have presented an argument that velosity of money would increase so much it could trigger inflation, or that productivity would collapse, but you have provided no such argument, let alone evidence
UBI however would mostly transfer this cost to high-income earners (if financed through taxation) or capital owners (if financed by debt/printing money). Basically it's just a form of progressive taxation with a large safety need (without a means test) at the bottom, which would function as a mechanism to decrease inequality (which some economists believe negatively affects economic growth). Also another factor (and I'm personally not fully convinced on this) is that it would would actually result in higher overall productivity longterm by giving more people the opportunity to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.
> UBI however would mostly transfer this cost to high-income earners
Show me your napkin math. I've been all through this so many times that hand-wavy claims are not enough - simple estimates will show you how these claims do not work.
And if it was a simple we getting some more taxes somewhere, do you not think we'd already gather that tax? It's not like there's money that is easily taxable either politically (or sometimes, even economicially).
Sure, if we could magically get more money, and get it from places that are not current places, and ignore all effects of giving such money yo people on inflation and the economy, and get it so that there are zero side effects, maybe you'd be on to something.
But even in that case, it's still wiser to spend this money on better targeted things than simply handing to everyone with no regard who needs it.
It doesn't seem to me that apartment rents going up by $n/month when UBI of $n/month rolls out is an impossible proposition, since everyone can afford extra $n. Can you elaborate as to why this wouldn't happen?
You are correct. But as the Mincome report itself noted, some of the people who were most likely to decrease hours were young parents, especially single mothers, and students who returned to school. At least some of that decrease was a positive social outcome, probably.
Gettting rid of serfdom, debt prisons and endentured servitude all reduced work and caused products of labour to be redistributed. Who said that current distribution of products of labour between Amazok and their workers is optimal?
We all fantasize Bezos and Musk should pay for it, but in reality it will be yet another tax on middle class (e.g. run-of-the-mill senior developer from high CoL area, so from Amazon engineer to (would be ex) Amazon warehouse worker).
If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too.
If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.
That’s the interesting thing. Some people want to be lifetime wage slaves: they will work till they die at a low earnings level. Others would like to make five times as much with five times as much work. Proportionality is what they value.
The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle. To that, I say no. In fact, you’re not going to get that world.
> The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle.
No I don't. If I was in charge then for step one I wouldn't change the amount of money those people make at all, I'd try to claw back any productivity gains from the last few decades that aren't going to workers and see how much UBI that can turn into. If I did want to tax someone with 5x income more, it wouldn't be that much more.
>I'd try to claw back any productivity gains from the last few decades
If productivity gains come from capital, not from labor, then trying to take that from rewarding capital will also hurt labor. Over the past few decades a significant amount of productivity gains are from capital investment. Your average worker isn't simply turning out 2x or 3x the goods with the same effort. They have been given a productivity multiplier tool paid for by investment before they set foot on the job.
When it often takes significant tooling and tech investment from an employer to increase productivity, if that stops, we're back to much earlier productivity and level of goods.
Next, over the past few decades, there has been (in the US, likely others) legislation benefiting workers that has a cost to employers, which has also taken up some wage growth, by giving workers other benefits. BLS tracks such things under terms like total cost of employment and total remuneration. If you look at these over historical periods, you can see more places that workers are better off today than in decades past, without it showing up in wages.
There are reasonable causes not all productivity gains are immediately given as wages - not all gains come from workers.
I don't think all that much capital is going to stop investing in companies even if taxes increase, especially if increases are over many areas.
Also, any business that already exists under this setup has the necessary equipment, and any new business should be budgeting for the necessary equipment. Not much should be stuck in a place where they have lots of inefficient employees and can't afford to upgrade and can't secure a loan.
And I'm not totally sure my visualization in my head is correct, but if everyone is getting $1,000 per month with a high quality of life provided with that, an additional $1,000 per month is weighted much more purchase power wise than in today's model.
How much is "plenty" and who gets to decide? What if they live in high CoL area? You propose they should sponsor someone else's leisure time instead of buying a house for their family, for example?
So go use those arguments you already mentioned, about redistribution and buying houses, against current taxes. You can even use the same complaints about freeloaders.
You made it sound like this caused new objections, rather than being one more bout of business as usual tax griping.
You seem to be upset with my arguments for some reason. However, if you read some other comments here and multitude of previous UBI-related discussions, you will see that there are a lot of people who (naively) assume that UBI will be somehow financed by taxes on corporations (from one of the comments: "Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay)."). However, if you want to get a good approximation how modern politicians structure similar programs, then just look at California health care tax proposal (aka "Let's make healthcare free for ourselves and get tech-bros pay for it!").
I'm not upset, I just think that particular argument doesn't support keeping the status quo. And because of that, I don't find it very convincing as an argument against making a change.
And I would prefer not to get into the details of who gets taxed or how to optimally structure a tax today.
You mean for the machine's labour - progressively more and more as more and more is automated, and where people with their UBI are paying into the system (consumers aren't a fuel leak, they're the largest cog in the wheel) and workers will be getting paid adequately on top of the UBI they'll be getting too?
A concept missed by most is that the buying power of "$1,000"/month grows exponentially as more and more gets automated.
> You mean for the machine's labour - progressively more and more as more and more is automated
How do you propose to finance UBI? All proposals that I've seen assume middle class to pay (for example, "everyone pays percentage of their income and then everyone gets fixed amount of money at the end of the period"), not nebulous machine-automation overlords.
> A concept missed by most is that the buying power of "$1,000"/month grows exponentially as more and more gets automated.
I don't observe housing getting exponentially cheaper "as more and more gets automated". In fact, I believe landlords would capture non-trivial amount of any potential UBI program.
Does your thinking here work if including automation into the equation?
Why didn't society then collapse when automation began - like textile/garment/fabric manufacturing, etc?
You also seem to be ignoring the other side of productivity - if it drops it's arguably, in part at least, that less people are buying - so there's no funds/fuel for the local system. If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods - within the ststem - then there's no leak, and instead of fueling China and letting the tank run dry locally - you force fuel to be spent locally. This is why major, credible think tanks estimate an immediate 13%+ increase in GDP with implementing a $1,000/month UBI.
>Does your thinking here work if including automation into the equation?
Yes, I am more of a technologist than anything. Automation is not free, and if a thing can be efficiently automated it is already or will be as soon as it's efficient.
Automation gains in the past have not freed large swaths of workers, simply because as more goods are available people want higher quality of life, absorbing any gains. If you want to live like someone in 1950 you could on a much lower salary than people get now, but people now want bigger houses, more cars, more goods, more entertainment, more of everything.
If you think automation will free us all, work on figuring out why all the massive automation gains did not already free large amounts of people from work.
>If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods - within the ststem - then there's no leak
This completely fails. Consider how good your life would be if you could only have goods you made. Not nice. Then make it people within a mile of you. Better, but still crap. Make it a US state. Better again, but not really anywhere near first world standards.
If you want a first world standard of living, you need goods from around the planet and skilled people from around the planet trading and making and innovating. Buy local simply lowers your quality of life (and everyone, since you'll soon lower the # of specialists that can exist by serving large populations).
>This is why major, credible think tanks estimate an immediate 13%+ increase in GDP with implementing a $1,000/month UBI.
And others have reached the opposite conclusion. Most importantly, the evidence from real world trials is consistent with a smaller, not larger, economy.
> I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need it
That might be true but it also might not be true. If you add a bunch of rules to the program it can increase the administrative cost a lot and leave you with less money to distribute. I'm not sure if it's true, but when I was a kid I heard that Canada's baby bonus (Canada Child Benefit) was made universal because of this.
Look up and demonstrate this "ton of bureaucratic overhead". All US programs have efficiency ratings you can find. There is not the overhead you (and UBI people in general) claim.
Pick the system you think is most inefficient, then look up to find admin budget versus money paid out. I've done all this, under the same initial belief you have, and it's simply not true.
And UBI will also require the same overhead to collect and dole out - it is simply a different tax redistribution method than current ones, and will not be zero overhad.
You've made claims up and down this thread that amount to "trust me" or "look it up". None of these are simple factual matters like "What is the capital of Egypt?". There are numerous studies about basic income, all driven by different assumptions and biases. No one knows exactly which one you're referring to when you say "look it up". It's impossible to have a detailed discussion when everyone isn't evaluating the same information.
If you can tell us the % of bureaucratic overhead that's consumed by the US welfare system, then please do so. Otherwise you can simply say nothing.
There's others that have posted the % overhead for various programs in this thread.
There is so much nonsense repeated here that for me to look up everything, which I have done in the past, would not be worth the time. Take a moment to pick one thing I claimed, check it carefully.
> None of these are simple factual matters
How much is spent by any welfare program is a simple fact. The budget spent to administer that is a simple fact. Thus the overhead is a simple fact.
And I have never looked into one and found this massive overhead UBI people claim.
And even with throwing all that small overhead into UBI for free, and assuming UBI has zero overhead.... The number are still not going to work, or, as I started with, will screw those already needing assistance.
You're confusing federal programs (like Medicare and Social Security) which tend to be transparent, efficient, and universal with state run programs (like Medicaid, SNAP) that make up the bulk of welfare spending.
You're not going to find a straightforward answer about to the administrative budgets of SNAP or Medicaid.
The person you replied to posted a link in a sibling comment that shows 90% of combined Federal and State SNAP money is spend on food.
From that link:
> Eight percent of total federal- and state-funded costs went for administration, less than 2 percent went for services for beneficiaries, and about 90 percent went for food that beneficiaries purchased.
"However, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling"
Note that 13% is likely the net value, so if this group slowed down, possibly other groups actually started working harder at the same time, compensating for some of the loss.
> We got people to do a task on a computer,’ says De Kwaadsteniet. ‘In multiple rounds, which represented the months they had to work, they did a boring task in which they had to put points on a bar. The more of these they did, the more money they earned.
I find it hilarious that they think they can reach the conclusion they did based on that description of the experiment.
It's advocacy, not experimentation. That applies to most of the more in depth studies too, which tend to spend a lot of time and money concluding if you give a cohort extra money for a year or two, they're a bit better off as a result but haven't been able to afford to retire, something the study designers knew from the outset. We have another much larger and long running experiment in guaranteeing people livable incomes for the rest of their life called the pension system, which designers of UBI studies would like you to ignore because it only works by restricting when you're allowed to claim it.
This is true, which is why UBI would have to be combined with housing reform. Both are doable and needed.
One of my favourites is to encourage cooperative housing and to have the government become a landlord itself, but with rents capped to a share of income. This way, the government would have an incentive to make the system more efficient and to make more and better public housing, as the money would go back to the government budget and they would be able to lower taxes as a result. At the same time, the private housing market will have to compete. The idea of allowing the government to make a reasonable profit as measured by outcomes to the consumer is very successful for many endeavors, and it makes it very unpopular to cut public services as it would necessitate a tax increase. We have done this in Quebec with Hydro-Quebec and, unlike many crown corporations, it has resisted privatization, while still providing the best prices to the consumer in the world for electricity, without any subsidies (as it generates net profit for the government), and many very good jobs.
Beyond this, it has caused cascading positive externalities not only in Quebec but throughout the world - as it has pioneered mass production techniques of LiFePO4 battery technology that is now becoming dominant for EVs, greatly improved brushless hub motor technology which is now used in many low-cost EVs, and facilitated the construction of renewable energy projects.
This however requires a large change in ideology, as current neoliberal and neoconservative dominant ideologies not only refuse to admit the fact that the government can provide a better overall service than the free market, but are deathly afraid of allowing state owned enterprises to compete with private businesses as a matter of principle. This limits the scope of solutions to many problems.
>but with rents capped to a share of income. This way, the government would have an incentive to make the system more efficient and to make more and better public housing, as the money would go back to the government budget and they would be able to lower taxes as a result.
Can you explain this a bit more? What would be their sources of income other than rents? I am not able to follow your efficiency argument.
The more efficient these rentals are run, the higher the profit the government makes. The more money the government makes, the less they need to tax and the more services they can provide, and the more votes you get. If they don't run these well, people will leave to the private sector, reducing government income, which would then have to cut services and raise taxes, losing them votes. So there is a strong incentive to run the service efficiently.
Hmm, it seems like you're suggesting setting up a system where the private and public sectors keep the other in-check, with incentives to make sure it happens. But I see some practical points of concern, e.g. in most rent-controlled housing, the rent (eventually) gets to be much lower than the private market - thus removing pressure that customers will leave. Also, historically most governments seem to have no trouble getting votes even as their services become more and more inefficient over time. I guess I just don't see it working as you described. But its quite possible that I'm just too cynical! :)
Good point. As production technology improves alongside automation, bringing us closer towards a post-scarcity civilization, society will be able to make more guarantees, as they are materially trivial to create.
I suspect the extra support may translate to decreased profits for landowners. Tenants would have more time and money to file maintenance issues and represent themselves in the legal system, which would cost landowners. In Ontario it costs $50 and takes a lot of time and energy to file a complaint to the LTB. Tenants would also have more ability to change their situation in response to abuse, shop around for a better deal on housing, etc.
In many U.S. states you need not even bother going to court, because of robust "implied warranty of habitability" statutes and precedents. A person who experiences real habitability issues such as no heat, no cooking fuel, doors or windows that don't close and lock, etc after notifying landlords and waiting a reasonable time (which is as short as 24 hours in the case of no heat) can simply hire someone to fix it and deduct the actual cost from rent. It would be on the landlord to initiate legal action, if they disagreed with the outcome. The tenant has no obligation to go through courts.
In Ontario,Canada you can pre pay for repairs, but you aren't allowed to deduct those amounts from rent. Here, you would need to front $500+ or whatever to have the work done, and then pay $50 for a Landlord and Tenant Board hearing booking (which have been delayed months). Then you need to show up, prove the work was needed, that the landlord had enough time to do it and didn't, and that you minimized the costs.
(A joint tenant advice, contracting and paralegal brokerage might be a good business in this area. But do I really want to make myself a major enemy of all the scummy landowners? Noooope.)
Municipal offices will intervene on their own to ensure things like heating are taken care of. In Waterloo the minimum allowed temp is 21C or 70F. In my experience with this city's offices, they will take care of this almost immediately (immediately respond to form on website via email asking for evidence of sub 21C settings, then call the landlord and request the temp be increased etc.)
This sounds like it would quickly devolve into a very socially unstable state.
For every legitimate complainant, there’d be a hundred entitled moochies with nothing better to do than work the bureaucracy to their own benefit, entirely at the cost of the few remaining people actually doing any work.
One, why waste $50 on a complaint which won't have any effect?
Two, the bureaucracy actually should help with the real moochies. In Ontario Canada tenant protections are crazy and it can take 6+ months for a landlord to evict a non-paying tenant. The official resolution for landlords is to ask the bureaucracy for help.
(The non-official resolution is promoting ignorance about tenant protection laws, legitimately or illegitimately making use of the "family moving in" loophole, and hopefully not any more.)
Maybe if everyone moved to the same low cost of living area and tried to achieve the same densities as the high cost of living areas for some inane reason. Realistically the increase in demand in any one area would be negligible - Tulsa isn't going to become a happening place.
Oh, it very much can "spawn new people" - all those couples that always wanted a second/third child but couldn't financially afford it will now be able to :)
Not to mention all those illegal immigrants storming the borders.
Not if it was paid for by a tax on rental income. 100% tax on everything over the equivalent mortgage payment on the property would be a lovely cap on rent values.
There's not an objective number for that. But if we assume there is, then you are simply guaranteeing that no rentals will exist, because landlords pay higher taxes than a resident mortgagor, and they have overhead.
Only if you ignore the appreciation on the investment asset (eg the house). That's most of the reason to rent out a house - for the future sale of the property. This would just mean landlords would need to buy the maintenance costs until they sell up.
You are earning $4000/month after taxes and begin to receive $1000/month. What do you do?
Some fraction of people will reduce their workload so their earnings are $3000/month, bringing their total income back to $4000.
Some fraction of people will not reduce their workload at all and inflate their lifestyle to depend on $5000/month.
The overwhelming majority of people will choose the latter; we already know this, it's one of the chief complaints about a materialist, consumerist oriented society. When people get a raise, they overwhelmingly spend it. It's why most people can't save a $1000 emergency fund.
If you are earning $2000 per month and suddenly your income increases by 50% you feel like a baller, you are going to start eating better, ordering take out a little bit, replace that cracked phone, add a little more data to your cell phone plan, turn that thermostat up a little, whatever.
That's a great example, but you need to use smaller numbers. If UBI is put into place, the only thing somebody making $4K/mo after taxes is going to do is complain about his increased taxes.
In a balanced UBI, the UBI is paid for with taxes. So if you make the average income, you get $X from UBI and your taxes go up by $X. If you make more than average, like your example, then you pay out more than you receive in UBI.
Because average income is considerably higher than median income, most people benefit from UBI.
There are other taxes than income taxes. My idealistic view of UBI is a way to share the increasing benefit of automation. So if a factory owner fires all his employees and replaces them with robots, his increased profits are rather heavily taxed and go to UBI. I am aware of how logistically difficult it would be to have a fair "automation tax" though. But the point is: income tax is not the only tax, and probably not even the best tax, to fund UBI.
There are no other taxes capable of pulling in trillions of dollars annually. So it'll have to be at least partially on income tax.
(I hate saying trillions of taxes when talking about UBI. Since most of the effect of the increased taxes is just a clawback, on net the tax is only in the hundreds of billions).
Morally, there's also a good case for taxing income for UBI -- it's a fair claw back for those that don't need UBI.
But there's a solid base to your argument -- we definitely should be increasing other taxes and decreasing income taxes in general.
In the U.S. that would be a very good outcome. 15% of American households experience food insecurity. We absolutely want these people to spend it, not save it.
Even stimulus checks that were small and arrived irregularly had a huge impact on hunger in America. $1000/mo on the regular would be revolutionary.
Maybe, but I think the fact that they could be planned for / assumed would mean the benefit would have a high risk of quickly disappearing into inflation and rent-seeking.
In the case of rent in particular, there would be no reason for any landlord to take less than $UBI if there was a guaranteed monthly payment from the government.
Unexpected or unpredictable cash influx almost always makes things better because people know they can’t “count on it” and they use it for savings or to fix problems they had been unable to fix, rather than “live off it.”
To put that differently: what most people really need is margin to handle the unexpected problems in life. But living below your means to create margin is hard, even for high-income people! Doubly hard when you are low income. So unexpected cash is more beneficial than expected cash, precisely because it is unexpected and therefore inherently “margin.”
Why not to increase federal minimum wage instead to, say, $30/h? If you were making $4000 - you are good already. If you were making $1000 - you get an increase.
I personally used to be a proponent of UBI, but after 2020 and watching some of the impact of Covid and what increasing government financial payouts has done to employment malaise and to the economy, my skepticism has increased. I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs like I once did.
This ignores data that shows how many older people retired, and how large that effect is.
Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.
I made no claim here other than my opinion changed beaded on my observations. And I am pretty sure that creating 20% more money out of thin air has a downstream economic effect far beyond the day the check was cashed
This is exactly where I am too. I thought replacing all of our existing safety net programs with UBI would be perfect until the COVID money happened. I knew some people would choose to just live off of it forever and never contribute to society again, but I didn't realize just how many people it would be.
I'd like to see some data to support that claim. Fed data shows the opposite--the employment ratio is down 1.5% from its 2020 peak. That's at least a million people who've stopped working.
This isn't jobs data... This is an estimate, by an unknown source, as to what the employment numbers might be be at the end of 2022. From your site:
> In 2019, around 157.54 million people were employed in the United States. For 2022, an increase by almost 2 million employed people is expected.
Also, do we think this estimate is recent? The US economy has not been adding jobs as expected, and has undershot recent projections by a lot. New hires were 300K short of projections in November[0] and 200K short in December!
I don't know, but I definitely still see more "closed today due to lack of staffing" signs today than I've ever seen in my life before the lockdowns. And even places that are open still have noticeably fewer workers.
Would it really be so bad if some people stopped working altogether?
One of the proposed justifications for UBI is that automation creates wealth that could (or in some arguments, should) go to everyone rather than the ultra wealthy. That automation is taking up a larger and larger slice of the workforce, reducing the need for people to work.
Many people will choose to do work that gives them meaning. Some people will do unpleasant jobs because since they can’t be automated, they pay well. And some won’t work at all. Is it so bad if there is an entire class of people who just don’t work?
Fewer people working reduces the size of the pie, making ourselves poorer. So yes. I would say it's a bad thing if we tax society in order to pay able bodied people not to be productive.
Because the benefits of automation are highly capital intensive, concentrating wealth in ways that are bad. Taxing this make the benefits for those with capital less, but it probably still means automation is a great investment.
This tax just prices in the negative externalities of job-loss into automation. Job-loss really is a drag on an economy (you need consumers to keep an economy going). Moreover job-loss causes poverty, and poverty is bad in and of itself. UBI should make poverty less bad. Funding that partially by automation makes sense if that automation is partially the cause of the poverty (through job loss).
On one hand, you say that fewer people working reduces the pie. On the other hand, you say we should encourage automation. What situation would enable full automation and enable 100% workforce participation?
I'm not a luddite. I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant. The human skill set is too diverse. Automation should be encouraged, not taxed, because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
"I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant."
Technology has already made people permanently redundant in many places and will continue to do so. There is a near zero percent chance that technology will stop advancing to replace people's jobs. As we march forward with new automation, there will be a net loss in jobs. UBI is an attempt to solve that problem.
Examples of permanent redundancy are tricky to see, because even when people don’t really do a job anymore at a large scale, there are still humans involved, just way, way fewer. Examples are:
Computers - not microprocessors but “computers” which were people who did the work of calculating stuff before calculators were invented.
Lumberjacks - we have logging equipment now.
Musicians - we have DJs and radio to provide us music.
Yes those are examples of technology, but there aren't vast swaths of homeless lumberjacks and mathematicians. Humans are remarkably adept at learning new skills when previous tasks have been automated.
Traffic lights eliminated the jobs of police officers standing in the middle of the road with a whistle. That policeman didn't become homeless. He got reassigned to a more productive role or found a new employer.
I actually agree with you on this if taxation is framed as a way to discourage something. But the goal is to encourage automation but ensure it benefits society, not just a wealthy few, so…
> because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
It does not. It makes some people ridiculously wealthy and makes everyone else poorer.
Would you say that the tractor for instance has only made John Deere wealthy, or has it made the world better off?
Has the motor vehicle only improved the life of the Ford family or would I be better off with a horse and carriage?
Have personal computers only made Bill Gates and Michael Dell richer or have they benefited the human race as a whole?
All of these are examples of automating laborious processes. All of them have made inventors wealthy and the world a nicer place to live. The economy isn't zero sum where to make one person richer another must necessarily become poorer.
You are correct that the economy is not zero sum. It is not black and white, but the primary beneficiaries of automation are those who have the investment capital to leverage automation at scale. The rest get a better world sometimes, but our benefits pale in comparison.
Humans and automation coexist. It's not as if all the engineers that used slide-rules and graphing paper went homeless when AutoCAD was invented. Same with farmers and the tractor. Society gets richer as automation makes our labor more efficient.
I'm an automation engineer. Automation and labor are at odds. Yeah, automation doesn't completely eliminate jobs, but it takes a lot fewer people to do those jobs. As per your example with farmers and the tractor, agriculture went from employing 90% of people to <2%, most of whom are doing tasks which are generally resistant to automation. You do not find humans guiding horse-drawn plows right alongside the tractors, both coexisting in harmony; the horse population plummeted as they were rendered obsolete and the humans have moved onto other things.
The main impediment to automation is the ready availability of cheap labor. Automation requires large upfront investments and lots of technical skill on the part of management. A highschool dropout has no upfront cost and responds to voice commands. I can say from personal experience, even when automation will easily pay for itself in a few months, there is generally still huge resistance to making that investment.
Throughout history you will find that many civilizations such as Rome or China had the opportunity to industrialize but didn't because labor was abundant. It is when there is a shortage of labor, such as after the black death, that moneyed interests are forced to invest in making their assets more productive. By paying people not to work (or more accurately not to work the undesirable jobs which ought to be automated) you get the same incentive to automate that a massive plague would induce, but without the tens of millions dead.
But you're proving my point here. 90% was pushed out of farming, but that population isn't unemployed right now. We're doing other things, like being automation engineers.
And as we automate other things, life will continue to improve, but humans won't ever run out of things to do.
People weren't pushed out of farming, people abandoned farming. The large investments in mechanization were made after migration to cities made it increasingly difficult to find low wage workers to tend farms. The automation wound up being much better than the humans it replaced, allowing agricultural productivity to skyrocket even as its labor force plummeted, but despite being the biggest beneficiaries, the farm owners had spent decades resisting these improvements. The average time from when a new farm mechanization was invented to when it started being commercially adopted was about 30 years. Progress begins with change.
No one is arguing that humans are at risk of running out of things to do, nor is that at all relevant to a discussion of UBI. No one is going to leave a fulfilling and rewarding job to live around the poverty level on UBI, UBI is about getting people out of the low paying, menial work that should have already been automated were it not for the glut of cheaply available labor, the jobs people only take because they will starve to death if they don't. The moment you take away the risk of starving to death, these people can do things besides burn away their hours - they can learn new skills, move to areas with more opportunities, or maybe just work on themselves, and then opportunities which were previously out of reach become available. Not everyone will necessarily find something better to do, but whereas under our current system these people would clog up the gears of progress by continuing to work automatable jobs, with UBI they are taken care of while society advances.
Note that UBI should not be 'paying people not to work'. It is paying people regardless of whether they work. The key to UBI being succesful (imho) is that everyone gets it and everyone gets the same amount (maybe excepting people under 18?). This makes the system so much simpler to administer.
It also prevents weird traps where doing something unintentionally costs you your UBI. (e.g. people who start working and earn too much to qualify for food-stamps / benefits / some other program, thus having them end up with less money each month).
Yes. Because the people most likely to quit are the people at the bottom. We need a lot of bottom tier workers to run society. See how much stuff falls apart right now with the labor shortage.
GP is framing his argument based on a world where the lower tier jobs do not exist through automation. So the assumption is that bottom tier work will be replaced by automation, and society will continue to run.
Not a particularly realistic view of automation. Real automation is productivity tooling that turns semi skilled labor into unskilled labor, at vastly fewer heads. Most tasks have some last mile task that still requires someone with a pulse to be there.
Like store clerks used to be fairly high skill jobs. If there’s truly no need for lower tier labor we will enter a never before seen economic inflection point, and a race to remove labor costs at every point in the system, because you’ve implicitly suggested we have achieved generally intelligent, physically present ai
Pay me enough to live without working and I will quit my job and work on a moonshot startup/interesting tech all day. Most likely nothing will come of it, but I won’t be working
I'd also stop working, though instead of working on a moonshot I'd go camping, work on my garden, and spend long days playing games with friends and family.
There is a qualitative difference between needing to spend 40+ hours a week to sustain yourself versus spending 0 hours. If one need to spend those hours anyways it makes sense to maximize the income from doing so.
It may take a generation, but I think most people would eventually come to the conclusion that the rat race isn't worth it when zero hours is an option.
I'm with you. If I got basic income I would absolutely quit work and not go back. The burden is now on these researchers to find at least two people who would go to work only if basic income were instituted, to balance us out.
Well, in Denmark we have the equivalent of Basic income and I'd say we have a major problem with peoples willingness to work. Some families are on welfare for generations now.
I do agree with this. Here in France I'm currently unemployed and I have a lot of compensation from government welfare.
I'm looking for a job and every time I apply to a job, I have a little voice in my head saying : are you sure you want to work there ? You currently have the opportunity to do what you want and learn whatever you want for free, but if you work there it will be boring af and you will not be able to do what you want.
So currently I'm reading a lot of books, doing coursera course I'm interested in and doing a lot of sport which is impossible when I have a job because reading takes hours just to read one book.
Doesn't it also make a difference that you lose welfare benefits when you start working? Maybe you could just work part time if all earned income was supplemental with no welfare gap.
Yes, 800 euro would be the max I could hope for I think.
But as an average of ~500 euros improvement of my current "salary" and loosing at the same time 40h/week + getting tired and not being able to do intense intellectual things after work I don't know if it's really worth it. And as I said, I "earn" enough money to not have to use my saving.
We don't have UBI in the US and many people here would say the same.
I think many are quick to conclude motivation is the cause without considering any less visible underlying reasons that cause people to be in those situations.
The US has many fragmented welfare systems, rather than a single universal system. Many people do live on a combination of these benefit programs. This does not mean they do not struggle.
People who are out of work for short periods of time may not be familiar with all of the various programs and how to sign up for them, and it may take some time to do so. They may also have budgeted their expenses with their employment income in mind. This is why things are particularly difficult for people who intermittently lose their jobs.
But in general, anyone who finds their income unexpectedly unstable or close to the minimum amount necessary to meet their expenses will have a tough time, no matter where that income is coming from, or what value it is.
In Denmark I don't think everyone gets payments from the government regardless of need do they? The welfare system is just for people who are unemployed/disabled right? This doesn't really tell us much about how UBI would work since losing welfare benefits is a disincentive to work that you don't have with UBI.
This article says UBI has been controversial for a long time in Denmark but is on the political agenda again recently:
I think a significant difference between the Danish system and UBI is that working people do _not_ get Danish welfare. In the Netherlands we have a very similar system, except with a legal obligation to apply for jobs or do volunteer work in order to keep the welfare.
If I guessed correct, then the Danish is significantly different from UBI, because that system discourages working. Starting work means losing your welfare. Or at best every euro you earn from working is subtracted from your welfare. Besides that, in such systems you need a complicated bureaucracy to figure out who should and should not get welfare. This bureaucracy needs to contend with fraud, and is probably rewarded for giving as few people welfare as possible. This leads to a bureaucracy that is somewhat hostile to those it is meant to serve.
With Universal basic income, you lose the discouragement to work. You lose the very complicated and hostile bureaucracy (with exceptions for emigrants and immigrants probably). And you lose some of the political pressure to cut welfare, because everyone gets UBI so there is less jealousy.
In the Netherlands there have been cases of people on welfare needing to pay back thousands of euros because sometimes their mother did groceries for them. That was officially 'income' they failed to declare, and therefore their welfare was retroactively cut. That is just inhumane, and stupid. It means anyone on welfare who cannot make ends meet cannot ask anyone for financial help, because that would cost them their welfare.
Doesn't Denmark have a normal European style "Conditional" welfare system? That has very different dynamics from an UnConditional basic income.
Often the way that welfare is implemented is that if you can't work, you get welfare. This seems like a really obvious, logical, good idea. But there's a trap (a welfare trap!). Because on the other side, when you start working again, you stop getting welfare. And your net income might actually go down.
A rational actor might therefore end up stuck in this local optimum where they stay on welfare and never start working.
One argument for UBI is that it eliminates the drop in income associated with the return to work (because you get it unconditionally: whether you are working or not) . A theoretical prediction might therefore be that more people would work if UBI is available.
In practical tests so far this doesn't seem to have quite panned out. This is due to UBI having multiple effects simultaneously. However, I would be most amused to see if in some situations this does became the dominant effect, and the number of working people went up.
UBI would lower the effective tax, because it wouldn't put off everyone who might be able to work.
Denmark having high tax in general is another story, but at least with UBI not everyone who is getting paid will be thinking "hmm I lose all that income if I take a job, plus I can't be at home so much".
Realistically speaking, it sounds like introducing UBI would require a plethora of fundamental reforms (political, taxes, housing, job market) to be successful. While I enjoy thinking about that as a mental exercise, I consider it a complete fantasy - seeing how American politics work.
On the other side of the pond in a lot of European countries you already have this concept of "levelling", where progressive taxes control the higher end of the salary band to reduce income inequality. It's not such a large stretch to introduce controls on the lower end as well.
I would want UBI combined with a marginal tax rate that is much more constant as a function of income.
Current welfare systems, if you plot the effective marginal tax rate as a function of gross income (i.e. if you earn one more dollar, what percentage of that dollar does your net income increase including all government systems), have by far the highest marginal rates for the lower incomes. With the marginal tax-rate actually generally decreasing as your income increases. Notably in some broken systems (like the Dutch one) there can be cases where your marginal tax rate is above 100%.
Note that the tax burden ratio [(gross income - net income) / gross income] as well as the actual tax burden [gross income - net income] still increases with as gross income increases. If you graph the tax burden as a function of gross income, then the marginal tax rate is essentially the slope of this plot.
Importantly, it is the marginal tax-rate that affects a rational actor looking to weigh whether it is worth it work harder to earn more money. Hence very high marginal tax rates are very discouraging to working more / harder / trying to become more productive.
How do you know that, and how do you explain that more people get on welfare as it gets available to them, even though they have good employment options?
Moreover, why does that matter at all - how is it fair to those still working, who are forced to pay for those who don't want to? I'm all for welfare - helping people in need. But I'm not going to fund someone's lifestyle.
To take a market perspective to this: I think there are some costs that people fail to accommodate for when comparing employment vs welfare. We used to consider homemaking an actual profession, because... it really is. Now that we are expecting households to have dual incomes, we are recognizing that income on paper, when in reality it always was there, it just was not formally recognized.
With the cost of childcare these days, staying home to earn $28,000 in welfare instead of working a job making $30,000 isn't laziness, it's a no-brainer. You have to consider the non-monetary "income".
$28K < $30K is the wrong math. It really is: $28K + 2000 hrs of opportunity cost > $30K
And to your second point: being fair is not the only reason to have assistance programs. Even if I don't think assistance programs are not fair I still support them so that there is less crime in my neighborhood, etc.
But I disagree with your comment on the second point. As I said, I'm all for welfare/assistance given generously to those in need, but that's different from funding non-working lifestyle of those who have good working options and simply don't want to work.
Some part of UBI might overlap with the welfare part, but it's going to significantly increase the number of people who don't work just because - and it's not fair to fund that from the money made by those who work, and especially not fair to take it from those who must work because UBI is not enough in their situation.
UBI could be funded from sources like sovereign funds - why not. But let's not take money from people who need it just so a group of people can quit their job. Classic welfare at least says that those who receive it need it more that the person that pays.
> As I said, I'm all for welfare/assistance given generously to those in need, but that's different from funding non-working lifestyle of those who have good working options and simply don't want to work.
I don't really know if that's worth worrying about. We're not living in a subsistence economy where if someone isn't carrying their weight the whole tribe dies. I think it's perfectly acceptable to have a certain amount of non-participatory portion of the population, we should make sure it doesn't get to the point of unsustainability but trying to police absolutely everyone in society is a recipe for disaster.
> But let's not take money from people who need it just so a group of people can quit their job.
The people who need that money aren't going to bear the majority of the burden - when you get down into the range of poverty wages people are already exempt for non-transactional taxation and end up receiving more money than they pay. I don't think it's fair to paint any new expenditure as "But how will the poor bear this cost" - when, in the end, the middle and upper classes are where we look to for funding.
The 1980s perpetuated the idea of a "welfare queen" that we should all be really mad at - there are folks that take advantage of the system but it's such a small cost that, honestly, whatever. Most people can't enjoy that kind of a lifestyle so if a few people get to live content lives that would otherwise be ground into the dust I'm perfectly happy for them.
> As I said, I'm all for welfare/assistance given generously to those in need, but that's different from funding non-working lifestyle of those who have good working options and simply don't want to work.
I guess what I’m getting at is that someone options for employment might not make sense given their life circumstances. A good job for someone is not a good job for everyone because of the opportunity cost.
On one hand, we can make our benefit systems so barebones that any minimum wage job is better, even including opportunity cost, but then the people who actually need those programs are starving.
If we make those benefit programs generous to properly support those who truly need it, then minimum wages are going to have to support more than bare survival to be a better option.
It’s really not an easy dilemma to solve because incentives are working against you.
Really, I think the best way to get people off welfare is not to decrease welfare benefits, but increase the incentives to get a minimum wage job.
I had a sibling (he's dead now) who, all his short adult life, would work a job, get a few paychecks in his pocket, then quit and couch surf until the money ran out. Often, he couldn't find a new job and so he would couch surf until his welcome ran out. I am confident, given UBI, he would never have worked.
Now, that being said, I don't believe he represent(ed|s) a majority and actually I am in favor of a UBI. I have friends who I believe it would help out tremendously.
However, I really wish we would get universal HC first. HC expenses, in the not too distant future, will create more hardships than a lack of UBI ever would. And ALL people deserve good healthcare.
Is it just me or is it impossible to mimic (and therefore test the psychology) of the real impact of UBI unless you implement it across a nation-state. For example, let's say you test in a small town in Minnesota. It's impossible to rule out variables such as federal taxes, healthcare costs, mobility, etc.
I therefore think its impossible to test UBI on the scale of the US for example.
I work in the field of economic development and this universal basic income debate has been fascinatingly ideological with little grounding in fieldwork reality.
There are stones in this debate that nobody wants to touch; the relationship to work of different cultures around the world for one, as well as the very real effect of reserve wages increasing above the economic opportunities available in remittance receiving communities.
I really wish it was as simple as give people money and we will get economic development across the board, if that was the case a lot of sub-Saharan africa wouldn’t be in the situation it is right now.
This article doesn't have details on the experiment and how much money "social security" was, also it's incredibly easy to generate an experiment which shows no effect if it's underpowered or the effect is minor.
I used to believe this, based on the last 2 years I no longer do. I hope we get to a basic income state so that we change what motivates people to work (from push to pull) but I still maintain a large number of people will choose not to work if they can achieve their personal level of comfort with a basic income.
The very first sentence says this work was fudned by "FNV union"but I don't know what that means; the closest I could get was a Dutch trade union?
The fact that they don't define this (apparently) biased conflict, nor link to the actual study makes me immediately question the impartiality of any research.
We also just ran a real world experiment where many of the jobs in question here where impacted by covid and individuals got a flat-rate government cheque, and they DID stay home rather than go back to work the same job once restrictions where removed, so I question any outcomes from a set of behavioural studies that discounts the suppression on low-paying positions.
Something not talked about often, but I wonder if basic income might lower the "applicability" of what people spend their time on. I know if money were not an issue I'd spend my time working on projects that sound fun, but might not have a path to profitability.
Money, besides being a motivator is also a signal to markets on what people want.
I've had a few landlords that just don't have any job at all and just ride off their cash flow. Boomer landlords of mine especially who got in on the property early before the market swelled in the last few decades just live like freespirited hippies. No other job, engaging in art or creative things, eating and drinking around town with their partner, and smoking a lot of weed. Even with this decadent living on their end and supposed enlightened disposition, getting simple repairs is still like pulling teeth.
This argument doesn’t get enough attention. There is a large population right now that has enough money not to work and - perhaps surprisingly to some - they do not engage in creative side projects for fun. They choose not to work.
The majority won't engage in productive tasks, but the output from the minority can be massive. Einstein wrote his papers as a side gig from his patent office job. It doesn't take many Einstein's to make up for a large number of slackers.
What I dislike about these studies is that what they are measuring maps badly to real-world experiences. There was another study before, not long ago, where participants were asked what they would do if they had this and this much UBI. And from that they drew their conclusion. I don't know how and whether they corrected for obvious biases (who would honestly say that they would sit on their ass? People deceive themselves all the time!), but doing a study on imaginary situations just looks pointless to me. You want to do a study, you randomly select people from different walks of life and give them their money for a long enough time for them to feel secure and plan long-term. That's how you know. Yeah, you'd need to get money from somewhere, but who says it's gonna be easy?
I would certainly spend at least a month goofing around. Maybe two. Maybe I'd become a freaking train driver, who knows. Take up a shitty job, blog about it without fear of being fired. Or maybe I'd decide that I should spend the rest of my life goofing around. How should I know? Give me my money and see what I do, not what I say I'd do.
Basic income provides people the basics needed to be able to look for and apply and interview for work without having to worry about how are they going to pay for food, transportation to/from interviews etc...
Its crippling knowing that you only have a little bit of money and you need to determine how much a sunk-cost-opportunity is worth -- meaning:
"I have $100, and I do have expenses - but in order to interview for [JOBS] - I need to be able to get to and from, put gas in car/pay for transport, and know that I can still feed myself/dependents && be able to absorb the cost of the interview if I dont get it -- AND have money to make it to the next interviews"
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Everyone focuses on the lowest bar "these ghetto people wont work if we give them money"
FUCK YOU i you think that the only people who NEED such assistance are ghetto poor people who want to milk the system.
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What about having employers cover the costs of actually interviewing with your company? If it costs one $50+ just to get-to-and-from an interview inclusive of time -- then some people will struggle to do so.
> We got people to do a task on a computer,’ says De Kwaadsteniet. ‘In multiple rounds, which represented the months they had to work, they did a boring task in which they had to put points on a bar. The more of these they did, the more money they earned.
That's not really for research. That's for something we can call data laundering. It's like money laundering but for data. Now politicians will use articles like this to sound scientific and data-driven when proposing their policies.
In reality they are quoting an article that quotes a paper that uses a horribly designed experiment with zero scientific rigor. But voters that don't pay attention will never get to know the flow of the data from the fake research to the politician taking their money away. Hence the data laundering.
Most people strife to life a life better then "just basic".
Many people are driven by more then just money. Tbh. I don't know if anyone would become a nurse in a hospital for monetary reasons (if they have another choice). Or a care taker of old people. At least where I'm from. (As it's severely under-payed for the work you do.)
Similar a lot of people love to compete with wearing brands, having fancy things or having the harder to get in job.
A lot of people are prevented from being able to do what they want because of money. Sometime because they can't afford to take some time off for education, sometimes because the job they want to do doesn't pay well.
So I'm sure you can have a well working society with basic income.
My anecdote: It would reduce my willingness to work for others but it certainly would not reduce my willingness to work for myself. And it would allow me to take on entrepreneurial risks that I other wise can’t afford at this place in my life.
We didn’t lose our entry level employees and warehouse workers because of the checks. But we did lose them to the increased unemployment benefits.
We had guys working for $18 quickly so the math and figure out they would make $24 an hour not working. And they did. Our CFO took covid very seriously and laid them off or did whatever we had to do do they could take advantage of this.
We’re still having trouble getting people to fill those positions now even that the rates are back to normal.
Three guys I know of all started working construction and were being paid cash under the table. So making the $24 plus the cash, and are still doing that. So… I’m not sure about this whole thing.
I imagine that the validity of this research is completely dependent on the particular monetary rewards and other incentives built into the experiment design.
Getting paid $5 to do a boring task for an hour is a totally different ballgame than getting paid $100 for the same. Even moreso after you've done it for 100 hours. And in the context of a a person who is visiting a research lab the incentives to keep participating in the potentially "interesting game" are different than real life.
Even if it wouldn’t reduce people's willingness to work (which the article doesn’t prove in any way), people would work on whatever they feel like, not on what our society needs.
Because in the job market, wage signals work like price signals in other markets: they incentivize people to move in the direction most valued by the economy. Like IT right now.
So we may be doomed to a society of grasshoppers with nobody willing to be the ant - like in the old fable.
The problem I have with the UBI is that you absolutely have to nail it on the first try in order for it to succeed. A great example is the housing market (in the US but also applies to a lot of European countries).
Regardless of UBI there will always be locations that will be more popular than others. I'm not saying everyone wants to live in San Francisco or Manhattan but I don't think supply will always exceed demand.
Assuming this there will be regions where demand for housing exceeds supply. So naturally the price of rent will go up. In some places that means you will have to find a job in order to be able to pay rent. At this point people are again subject to the current patterns of exploitation.
Sure if you can't make rent in one of the coastal cities you can always move inland and have a nicer life but even leaving money issues aside there are so many factors why people are not willing or even unable to move (proximity to family and friends is a big deal).
All that is to say, before you can even think of a UBI you will have to first solve the housing crisis because at best UBI will mitigate it. And this is just one example (cough health care).
As long as UBI is never "localized" to regional costs of living it can act to revitalize housing markets in inland America. Housing isn't a gobal supply problem, it's that there isn't enough supply near sources of income. Unlink needing access to work from where you can live and things will get a LOT better.
I think it depends on what level of devotion is expected from me, under the terms of "work". After spending 20+ years working like a trouper and genuinely enjoying the crazy pressure, I quit my job last year and took 6 months to do very little. I'm amazed at how much I've enjoyed not working. I'm about to return to work, but what I've taken away from my break is:
1. I want to work on interesting problems
2. I will not give my life to a company, ever again.
In other words, I'm waiting for companies to start offering 30-hour weeks, 4 day weeks, 60 days unpaid time off per year etc.
For now, I'm returning to "regular" work. However, whereas in the past I worked through months of stressful bullshit caused by bad management, toxic colleagues and unpaid technical debt, my future willingness to work will be based on job satisfaction. If my job isn't making me happy, I'll try to fix things for a while, but if things don't get better quickly, I'm gone.
It will not reduce the willingness to work but certainly will reduce the willingness of workers to suck it up for low pay, shoddy benefits, lack of holidays, no job security and importantly, the lack of dignity.
The most recent American cash handout is the closest we have come to a large scale UBI and it does exactly what we expect humans to do - follow Maslow's pyramid.
I totally agree with this "The psychologists also found an indication that people with a basic income look for work that suits them better.". If I would have enough money for all my needs I wouldn't stop working. I'm lucky that I'm already doing what I love. I'm not doing my job just to get payed.
I think it’s the same reason people rarely choose frugal FIRE approach, that is, live spending as little as possible to optimise for early retirement. People generally have way too many desires for it too be enough. The pecking order dynamic, social pressure, etc, are far stronger forces I think.
If I had a guaranteed income that allowed me to meaningfully exist and only occasionally work so as to earn enough whenever I wanted to make larger expenses, AND society could more or less ensure that, then yeah, I would probably consider working less if someone is going to pay me to live.
Also enhanced unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic basically proved nationwide that it would create pockets of the economy where people would literally just not work because you would earn more versus going back to work.
Wouldn't you do the same if your unemployment exceeded current market software engineer rates and any rate people offered you in the market? I would. I definitely would. I would work on my own projects while being funded by the state.
> "Immigration from low wage countries is important because there are millions of jobs that Americans simply won't do (at the same low wage)"
> "People will not work less if we give them free money"
For me these studies are utterly meaningless without real world long-term data.
> would not reduce people’s willingness to work
> The psychologists also found an indication that people with a basic income look for work that suits them better.
Note how the authors use the word *willingness" to work. 0 people want to clean toilets or public restrooms for a living. Or be waiting staff at a restaurant. Yet those "grunt work" jobs are often formative in developing grit, social skills & long term prioritisation skills (instant gratification vs. long term payoff). I shudder to think what the consequence would be of participating in a society where you are free to skip the "hard stuff" because it's inconvenient.
Is the only "hard stuff" in life found in employment?
What about losing a friend? Learning who you are in relation to your parents? Attempting to cooperate with a partner? Sacrificing your goals for your children?
Life is much richer than the lessons learned by doing menial labor.
if the 'hard stuff'means earning a pittance so the investor class can sent their children to a decent school and I can't even afford to get treatment for my shot back. or to understand how clueless and narcissistic low level managers can sometimes psychologically abuse their employees. or that no matter how much time and energy I put in I'm never going anywhere.
some of these are lesson we can maybe stop teaching.
Agreed. The way I see it is that UBI has all the makings of an abusive relationship. One party supports the other, while there is no reciprocation. You don’t have to contribute to the society - the society will support all your basic needs.
Without a strong incentive for reciprocation we are solving half of the problem, while ignoring the negative consequences.
In a way it’s similar to how large mental institutions were closed in the US (the idea that had some merits), and now just ignore people with severe mental problems until they either injure themselves or someone else.
Isn’t the reciprocation that you keep voting for the people that want to send you checks? I’ve yet to see anyone explain how UBI isn’t eventually just buying future votes.
If I see them stand on a stage and tell grandmas they are going to end social security and Medicare - but will send everyone a check for $1000 instead, and I’ll think they are serious about UBI as an economic solution, but “we’ll also end other programs someday” isn’t the leading bullet point.
I think it would change how long people are willing to work and what people are willing to do for work.
For example, I could imagine less desirable jobs would see a drastic increase in market wages because there would be less people in the position of needing to take any job they can get to scrape by. Undoubtedly a good thing!
However, if it costs more money to get basic things done like cleaning and stocking grocery stores prices would inevitably increase to compensate for the added labor costs. How long before the basic income is not enough to cover basics and then it is increased? The whole process then repeats.
So sure, people still work and occupy their time but are they doing things that are valuable? Am I missing something?
They're billionaires because of the work ethic, not necessarily their work ethic. Bezos isn't optimizing his own productivity, he optimizes his employees productivity and spends his time as he pleases. He keeps the gains from the productivity regardless.
EDIT: Actually I don't know if Bezos optimizes his own productivity or not. Nevertheless, his own productivity is a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands who work for his companies.
One of the touted benefits of UBI is that individuals are better able to allocate money to meet their needs than some outside entity. However some results from Canada showed that some people continued to spend "irresponsibly". Rather than spending money on food, shelter, medicine and clothing, some continued to spend on maintaining addictions and/or entertainment, then still required assistance from the system. Can a society rely solely on UBI to help the down-trodden? I don't think so, in some cases you have to directly give food, medicine and shelter.
Anecdotally it reduced my willingness to work. I just watch youtube, use blender, program random things, play video games, etc with all of my free time. There are plenty of fun ways I can spend my time.
I would like to see more about work-fare, where people are given jobs if they are unemployed. I think it is very important people have work to do, and not all people are as self motivated as the hacker news crowd. Secondly, this would hopefully help productivity.
Previously job programs were giant public works projects, like building the Hoover dam. Today, with computers it would be easy to give any person a job, right out of their own house.
I do like allowing self motivated people to create their own jobs, and that should be factored into this kind of program.
I may be misguided on this, but I don't believe a critique of UBI is the reduction in an individuals willingness to work, but rather the act of working. Individuals who don't want to work but do so as an understanding of a means to provide for themselves still have an unwillingness to work that wouldn't change if provided UBI, but their likelihood of quitting their job and not filling that time with a productive replacement is what is being questioned by opponents.
If everyone received basic income, at what point would the majority of voters not see it in their interest to vote for legislators who promise to increase it?
> who saw no indications of such a behavioural effect.
One wonders what he was seeing.
I used to know a fellow who would get himself laid off as soon as he'd worked long enough to qualify for unemployment. Then he would fail to get a job until the unemployment ran out, then he'd get a job. He lived for many years like this.
He had no interest in working. He was quite open about what he was doing.
I believe the Canadian term "newfie", for Newfoundlanders, came from such behavior. When US and Canadian troops arrived on the island during WW2, they found that male civilian employees they hired for construction would work long enough to save up some money, quit and return to their home villages around the island, loaf until the money ran out, then get another job.
I do wonder whether UBI will be feasible once the US loses its ability to print trillions of dollars.
Whether it’s China or Crypto, it seems like the reign of the PetroDollar is coming to an end, and with it the easy access to money printing.
Also any debates on UBI typically start with a country-centric view (US in this case), but what will be the implications for the rest of Earth citizens who live in countries without UBI?
If I were a leader of a country that engaged economically with the US, I would be less concerned with the use of the dollar for UBI than it's current use, which is too enrich a small financial elite. A group that not only had outsized power in the US, butt also around the world, since the power of the dollar is so generalized.
It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.
If I were a trading partner of the US, would I want to continue to accept the US dollar as the currency became less and less valuable as a result of excessive money printing?
Eventually austerity measures will come, and it's unlikely it will be the boomers who pay for it but the younger generations.
The study aside, it would reduce MY willingness to work and I have to imagine there are a lot of people, working a lot shittier jobs, out there who feel the same. In the end, the jobs still need to be done, so wages will need to go up, and the cost of the thing these jobs produce will go up, and then, inflation. Isn't that obvious?
These names don't sound real. They are to 'on point' in dutch. Poletiek is one letter off the dutch world for politics. And "de Kwaadsteniet" literrally means "not the worst" or more like "a decent dude".
I get the feeling this is an experiment, though I would expect better of a university like Leiden.
More importantly: it would not reduce the NEED to work. Giving everybody free money would just cause prices of everything to skyrocket, and you would still need to work your ass off all the same, to make the ends meet.
You don't see that effect in the small-scale experiments, because they are too small to affect economy as whole.
I don't like either sides of the argument. It really depends on the people. People that are doing well will want to work, poor people and people that just have a hard time getting a job will eventually give up. Proof? How people stop looking for work already and give up and stop getting counted as unemployed.
Owners of capital think people aren't happy unless they are working making money, because capital owners are made happy by having money. It's hard for them to understand that there are other, better sources of happiness. There are tons of examples of people forgoing money for something more satisfying.
No one says you have to work even harder. If you reduce your consumption and live according to your most basic needs, you can achieve a level of self-suffiency that allows you to actually support yourself with your hobbies. Live simply, plant a garden, buy your clothes at thrift stores and shop at discount grocery stores. What ever it takes to follow your passion. Live like a starving artist and make something great. But if you're just a worker drone with no inner life and need to be a corporate servant, I can understand your frustration.
I was replying in the context of implementing UBI, but to take the broader view:
If I recall correctly, the per-capita share of the US budget individuals are responsible for, if we split it evenly between every US resident of age, is (very) roughly $10k a year.
I currently pay above $100k/year in federal taxes; about 10x my share.
How much does the person “following their passion” pay? Are you really self-sufficient if you rely almost entirely on the largesse of others to fund your society?
You're assuming that people following their passions add no value and such people are getting a free ride. Take roads: corporations need them to move their products around, workers need them to get to their jobs. Yes, I get to use them for free, but say I keep bees and harvest organic honey. It's not a money making business (say a net neutral), but people who work at corporations are happy I have produced organic honey for their enjoyment. Or I'm a muscician who likes to play at restaurants at night. I get paid the very little, just the cost of gas basically, but I enjoy it. Am I mooching off your 100K?
Income subsidies for people in need is a nice thought, but isn't the bigger problem that we keep buying shit made with slave labor in China? We live in a global market, and as long as we keep supporting hucksters abroad it's no surprise things are stagnating at home.
I would like to see "negative income tax" (a la Milton Friedman) make a comeback in these experiments.
It's like minimum wage except the government funds the difference, and unlike UBI you still have to work to earn it, which seems to be a prevailing concern ITT.
No the difference is not simply semantics. The main difference between NIT and UBI is that your check is conditional on working.
From the article:
> De Kwaadsteniet: ‘In the condition without social security, the test participants didn’t receive a basic sum. In the benefits condition they received a basic sum, which they lost as soon as they started working. In the basic income condition they received the same basic sum but didn’t lose this when they started work.’
They test for 3 scenarios, but they miss the 4th NIT scenario, in which the "basic sum" would only be granted _after_ they get a job.
Unfortunately without the paper or details this thread is going to turn in to a shit show of opinions (including my own, doh) and little concrete information. Gotta flag it. It'd be more interesting to see the actual paper and reasoned replies.
It doesn’t reduce willingness to work, it just reduces peoples willingness to do the cheap shitty jobs that society depends on for us to live comfortably. Like it or not, if you enjoy your current standard of living that is a problem.
The problem with these social experiments is that these payments are not guaranteed for life. Being out of work is bad for your career, but if you receive passive income for rest of your life, I think that would change the calculus.
These studies don't tell us much, because participants always know they will get the basic income for a limited time only. So any behavior changes that occur or don't occur are not representative.
This study and the discussion here reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-... - basically whenever you have a financial or politically motivated topic of study, you'll get numerous serious seeming studies supporting position X, then a thorough debunking of X, then a resounding rebuttal, then more studies taking other positions, those getting debunked & rebutted, meta studies trying to aggregate & tease out who's actually correct, those getting debunked & rebutted, and the fight goes on.
My concern with UBI is more that we're unlikely to be able to fix it if it's actually terrible - once in place, handouts tend to become sacrosanct regardless of efficacy (I'm sure that are exceptions that prove the rule ;) - and it is stupendously expensive.
How about Universal Basic Assistance instead?
We tend to make government assistance be "hard shell, soft center", i.e. hard to qualify for, but once you're in, it's all gravy, unless you do something silly like get back on your feet (see unemployment & disability).
What if we instead switched to a "soft shell, firm center" approach and made it really easy to access assistance funds, but they e.g. got gradually reduced over time as you tap into them? And perhaps you have some skin in the game with a required personal emergency fund? And perhaps you owe some of the assistance $$ back, so that the average person "pays for themselves" over the course of their life?
Just spit-balling. I'm sure there are tons of problems with such an approach as well. But maybe it would still be quite useful for the recipients, and a lot more palatable for the tax payers = more reasonable to actually implement?
We just lived through a basic income experiment in the US during 2021 (American rescue plan, rent moratoriums, ...), and it showed indeed that willingness to work greatly decreased.
There should exist an incentive to do the dirty and hard jobs in the society.
If there is a UBI, those jobs should offer a significant economic reward.
UBI is some entitled bullshit. In practically all developed countries, there are already people that are payed less and that don't get the same social benefits as the rest of us. We have all seen them: legal and illegal immigrants. Those are the folks picking your vegetables, building your houses, butchering your meat and cleaning your airports. Not to mention the folks still in China, Bangladesh and Vietnam producing your clothes and putting together your iPhones...
1) There were some confounding factors, obviously, and 2) Though also polluted by unusual circumstances, didn't we get a bit of a test with this when some states pulled support before others did, and didn't that show little to no effect on employment and job-seeking rates?
Look: we just went through a massive worker shortage caused by overly generous stimulus benefits and rent subsidies. Have we forgotten already?
What am I supposed to believe? A microfoundations paper from a field with infamous replication problems on one hand, or, on the other hand, common sense and my own lying eyes?
Of course UBI would reduce propensity to work. Only people with an axe to grind can seriously believe otherwise.
> we just went through a massive worker shortage caused by overly generous stimulus benefits and rent subsidies. Have we forgotten already?
Nope we haven't. We just paid attention to the facts:
Some states turned down additional unemployment benefits. Those states continued to have same employment issues as the states that maintained benefits.
So clearly the issue was not the unemployment benefits.
I am sick and tired of the mentality embedded in the sentence I quoted. Do you think the rich are rich for no reason at all? That their rewards are unfair?
Success is not the universe sprinkling good fortune on mankind at random: success comes from hard work and the courage to take advantage of the opportunities that time presents to everyone from time to time.
Let's be honest with ourselves for one and acknowledge the connection between teachable personal qualities and desirable outcomes.
Probably the hardest working people that I've seen are recent immigrants, doing literally the shittiest work in the shittiest conditions for people who probably had a lot of advantages set up for them and never worked remotely as much or with as much abuse, and who are genuine monsters.
The prime minister of Canada is not rich and powerful because he worked hard enough as a teacher. He became a teacher because his former prime minister dad set him up very well, with nothing else to do but fuck around doing dumb peasant things. Ya, he worked hard, but never had to worry about anything from day 1. His former prime minister dad only did the exact same thing after his dad made a ton of money in oil and gas.
Elon Musk's dad was a literal explorer who made his money in... mining.
I make six figures and hardly work at all. As a dishwasher I used to bust my ass and make 7 dollars per hour. In my experience, the less you work, the more money you make. Everyone I've talked to in real life, who has worked both shitty jobs and high paying jobs, has the exact same experience.
I agree. I am paid more now than I ever have been in my life and I work less than I ever have. One of my roomates has worked in kitchens all his life and I assure you he works a hell of a lot harder than I ever did, yet makes a pittance.
> Success is not the universe sprinkling good fortune on mankind at random.
Yes. Yes it is. For every successful person in the world, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people with just as much courage, work ethic and intelligence who didn’t get the same opportunities presented to them.
Do not mistake this position as “it’s unfair that everyone isn’t successful”. The world does not distribute potential equally. What I’m saying is that there are further barriers, completely out of one’s control, that can keep worthy people from success.
> and the courage to take advantage of the opportunities that time presents to everyone from time to time.
It's very easy to take risks when you can fall back on mommy and daddy's wealth if something goes wrong. It's easy to grab opportunities when mommy or daddy can co-sign your loan or put up the downpayment.
Those things are true even moderate amounts of stability or wealth.
I think it's sort of unfair to reduce the whole argument to a one-liner like that. Sure, many people do take advantage of generational wealth, setting your children up for success is a basic human impulse. There are also a ton of data supporting the case that actually a huge percentage of successful/wealthy people did not get that way through generational wealth but in fact, just worked hard (also luck plays a factor).
Also, yes the rewards are unfair, life is extremely unfair pretty much all of the time.
>muh generational wealth
Gone in two or three generations - irrelevant to policy decisions. Handing out these (false) mental crutches is unproductive and just creates resentment in the wrong places. Some people take a risk and are rewarded for it. Some people just work hard. Some people got a shit hand. You come across as one of those load voices clamoring for some policy without any appreciation for nuance.
I’ll tell you a secret: rich people don’t work. Most rich people just work enough to maintain their wealth. You just don’t see them because there are not CEOs or celebrities.
I have relatively poor parents. They work extremely hard, but for some reason they choose to work super hard on all the wrong things. It's almost like they are obsessed with busy work. I try to help them but it often falls on deaf ears.
I don't believe poor people are lazy. I think it's just very hard to make the mental shift needed to pull yourself out of that situation (which they are likely not even capable of doing on their own without help - very few are).
This is just my personal opinion, but people need more than money thrown at them. They need help. If we are going to help the poor in society it's going to take time investment and personal relationships. That's what so few in America (even myself, I'll admit it) want to hear.
Progressive socialist ideologies like this are not working out well! For example the recent social Justice laws passed in progressive cities where we are now seeing once unseen massive smash n grabs and rail cargo trains being ransacked.
Also give ppl free money the a good majority will not work ... I'm sure there's a lot of ppl who got free money from the govt during covid and have yet to go back to work when there's lots of jobs as well wage increases. We can argue that $15 an hour to work at a convenience store isn't great but every human if not mistaken can go to school and educate themselves ...work hard to better themselves. Some it's harder then others and that's where social ideologies need to be most focused on! Not giving free money or ignoring criminal activity... some images of the US as of late are starting to look like Venezuela.
I'd like to believe this is true, but it's both counter-intuitive and counter to my actual lived experience the last couple of years.
I'm not sure how it's going down in other countries, but in Canada we've had an unintentional experiment with this due to the pandemic. Our economic relief package allows people to collect government insurance if they're out of work due to Covid. But unlike traditional employment insurance, everyone gets the same amount, and that amount turns out to be more than you could make working full-time at minimum wage.
Now, full disclosure, I'm unabashedly socialist in my leanings. I want UBI to work. I also don't believe that a person's value should be determined by their output. So I'm the last person to be against Basic Income.
However, we have to look at the results. And the results in Canada are that it's almost impossible to hire enough people to work those entry-level roles anymore:
- In my home city of Sudbury, the school bus companies are now offering a $2k signing bonus plus several dollars above minimum wage to attract drivers. They still can't get enough drivers and we're dealing with rolling daily bus cancellations as a result.
- As a hiring manager myself, I've found that jobs that used to get an abundance of high-quality applicants are now getting almost no qualified applicants at all. We're offering starting wages that are, in many cases, $20k more per year than they were a decade ago, and $10k more than they were 2 years ago. This is in a market where the average household income is well under $50k.
- Unemployment rates are higher than they've been in a long time despite the fact that job vacancies are higher than they've ever been.
Now, we can argue back and forth about whether the above is an acceptable trade-off for all the benefits of UBI. But my experience very much suggests that basic income does indeed reduce people's willingness to work.
For me the u-turn from support of UBI to rejection was driven by realization that UBI is a perfect control tool for any government. When they needed a big stick to push vaccinations the initial pass of locking people out of restaurants, pubs and entertainment venues ended up looking pathetic. Once they realized how lame it is, they had no choice beyond going after people's livelihoods, the right to work and earn living. Imagine how easier it would be for governments to enact whatever they want if majority are scared of losing the access to the biggest trough?
It would be ok, if UBI was also Unconditional, but I'm confident no one will dare to make it so after the recent global event.
I want UBI to be proven workable, I am actively rooting for it. Philosophically, I believe that any market in which people are coerced into participation through threat of homelessness/poverty is not, at its absolute core, a free market.
Philosophically, I believe that UBI is at some level a question of whether or not free markets actually totally work, because a truly free market is one where people are not forced to choose between bad options -- where they're not being coerced by wage slavery, where they have a choice whether or not to participate in the market itself. So I have personal stake in this, because if UBI gets proven not to work, it then leads me to ask uncomfortable questions like, "is a truly free market actually possible?" Which I don't want to think about. I want UBI to succeed.
But having said that, this is one study undertaken by a small group of psychologists, and it should be viewed through that lens. I understand it's simpler to just say their conclusion in the title, and it doesn't break any site rules, but it misses that every study on UBI is an approximation of what UBI large-scale implementations would be. I feel like people look at isolated experiments with a lot more confidence than they should. I don't like when individual studies get framed as, "this proves X".
It's extremely difficult to reason about what the long-term impacts of UBI will be using short-term studies because people's long-term patterns often differ from their short-term patterns. I do think we should be experimenting more with UBI, I think it's good that this study was done. I'd like to see more studies like this, more real-world tests, and in instances where UBI doesn't work I think we should keep trying different strategies to make it work, because a world where people have universal stability is preferable to a world where they don't.
But it's important to keep in mind that this study doesn't really prove anything, it's just another data point. We don't actually know whether or not basic income would reduce people's willingness to work long-term, this is one data point that suggests it might not.
This pops up in a lot of areas (UBI, inflation, etc) -- basically anything involving the economy. People get very confident about things based on a few data points, and then we get threads talking about how people are 100% certain that stimulus checks caused the chip shortages or some crud. Just make sure you're taking a step back and thinking about these things like a Bayesian, economics is heckin complicated, and I think complicated systems like economics are particularly susceptible to the falacy of, "I've done several hours of research on this, maybe even a full day, and therefore I have a complete, fully formed theory about the entire system works that I will treat as fact."
I personally know several people who received sizable pandemic aid and have said, explicitly, that they are not bothering to look for work until their savings from the received aid runs low.
This is just very basic common sense. Work is often not fun or easy. So, if you’ve got free, no strings attached money coming in, why bother working?
I was, and mostly still am, in favor of basic income, but the effects of the COVID stimulus/PPA on my city (Philadelphia) have thrown some cold water on my idealism.
I lurk on the 'hood'/gang subreddit for the city, and the general consensus there is that the stimulus checks are the reason for the upswing in homicides, which shattered the all-time record this year to over 550, meaning that the murder rate in a city of 1.5 million is now 1/3000 per annum, and far higher if you're of a certain age group in certain neighborhoods.
The reasoning is that cliques which were previously only able to afford one gun for the whole squad can now afford lots more guns, enough for everybody to have their own, and those guns are being used as tools for acquiring even more money.
I think the lesson is strong rebuttal the libertarian argument that basic income can replace a functioning social state - a functioning society requires a lot more hard work than overnight helicopter money.
This makes me remember working in a grocery store as a kid where people would buy steak with their WIC and food stamps that might fill one or two meals. Could it go much farther by buying different things? Of course, but that wasn't as enjoyable, so consequences fall where they must. My worry with UBI is that unless people's choices are removed through a tangled web of attached strings and reporting, the UBI is going to be spent on non-essentials shortly after funds are made available each period and then the story will turn to needing more money as the first UBI isn't enough. The cynic in me says that UBI will just give more money to people without the capacity for managing their money, which is not going to lead to any improvement in their station, only more consuming. Removing the choices just further destroys a free society, but enables waste on a massive scale. I like a good safety net with job training programs should people fall down, but I have about as much hope in being able to dunk as I do that people will suddenly start making good choices when unearned money appears in their wallets each month.
We did a type of UBI experiment in the United States with the universal Covid payments. Low income workers got 80% of the salary. Many chose not to work. Why work 40 hours to make 20% more money than the dole? I’m acquaintances with two local business owners, a roofer and a general contractor, and they told me plainly that they were understaffed because their workers were taking a vacation until the Covid payments ended.
You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic, at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap (i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/18/amazon-wh..., though I can't remember which warehouse had no soap). That is not applicable to UBI.
Also keep in mind that during this time period many schools were closed, so some of these people were staying home to monitor their children, not just "deciding not to work". Parenting is labor.
> You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic, at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap
We need roofs fixed and structures to be made safe to live in. We are still in a pandemic - should we keep paying people not to work? Eventually nature ruins our structures and people are homeless. I just don’t see how your logic is sound.
If you're saying you think rooftops are more important than lives, I don't know what to tell you. If roofers are refusing to show up to work because they'd rather accept fairly small checks from the government, maybe you need to offer them better pay or better health safeguards? We've had lots of people die during all this.
One reason the pandemic has lasted so long is that we've refused to take difficult measures, so instead we drag it out and people keep getting exposed. There are countries on this planet that have gone back to normal without these issues, because they took more difficult measures early on.
Instead of "middle of the pack" you could be at the bottom of the pack like New Zealand - ~15k total cases, 50 deaths reported, vs Florida's 5 million reported cases and 63k deaths. The population ratio is ~1/4, so it's slightly less bad for Florida than it looks. Of course, that's an unreasonable target, but it's an example of a real western nation managing COVID at scale. Your only choice isn't to just let everyone get the disease and hope herd immunity kicks in fast enough while praying that Long COVID doesn't cause problems later.
The actual UBI element in Covid payments was minimal. Most of the money went into traditional unemployment benefits, which make low-income jobs unattractive by increasing the effective tax rate to something like 80% or 90%. That's one of the key issues UBI is supposed to fix.
UBI would require complete restructuring of income taxes and benefits. Everyone would receive a fixed sum every month, standard deductions and other common deductions/tax credits would go away, and you would pay something like 40-50% combined income/payroll tax for every dollar you earn.
It's not basic income if it goes away when you get a job.
A large part of the problem that UBI was envisioned to solve is that means-tested welfare systems can find a steady-state equilibrium as poverty traps (as you noted, if you lose your welfare upon getting a job, the welfare support itself becomes a disincentive to working).
The question is whether UBI reduces willingness to work, not whether small business owners struggling agrees with your politics, i.e. it is not “fine”.
It is "fine" actually, because if your UBI competes favourably with the wages you'd otherwise pay, those tiny wages are in some sense risk mitigation. You bank margin so you can ride out when the work or workers evaporate temporarily, then someone sinks the expense when you eventually need to pay or charge more, and it's probably not them because they can't afford roofs in the first place.
My politics have nothing to do with it. I know roofers, roofing company owners, general contractors, construction workers, and others. I am a contractor, and I'm struggling. It's fine
Everyone enjoying the lowering of standards? Higher food prices, and just general decline. Should we keep going until people are waiting in lines to buy food. Because this is how we get there.
The idea that UBI alone solves anything is silly and not a realistic policy proposal.
UBI is the government distributing money to people. Normally the government spends money on behalf of people who are expected to contribute toward repaying it. A simple way to reduce the cost of UBI is to have it reduced by the cost of ALL government services you elect to use.
Assuming such a UBI covers basic needs, eliminate minimum wages. Wages no longer need a lower bound as everyone has sufficient income.
The root problem is an unfavorable distribution of wealth and income toward asset holders. Stop taxing labor.
Companies need to broaden the distribution of wealth gains- the plumbing for this is still uncertain.
The government already distributes money to people in the form of subsidies. UBI is just a different form of subsidy. In the case of UBI, its the profits from automation subsidizing the poor.
"The root problem is an unfavorable distribution of wealth and income toward asset holders. Stop taxing labor."
The problem UBI is trying to solve is one where more and more people will become unemployed because of automation. It is not trying to level the playing field.
Then the problem is that we've overdone it, relative to our current automation level. The amount of free money you can get is high enough that more people are choosing not to work than jobs have been automated away so far.
In this experiment, what amount was given to the treatment group that received basic income? How often? How does that amount compare to the cost of living in their city?
> ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’
I’m not an academic, so take this with a grain of salt.
If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.
My spouse worked for the state government as part of a benefits/disbursement program. She took phone calls from benefits recipients. Some who are disabled, on unemployment, or generally within the states bar to qualify for tax payer aid.
The pay was slightly above minimum wage. My spouse quit after about a year, during which my souse constantly suffered from verbal abuse and even callers who didn’t qualify threatening to murder my spouse unless they received cash from the state.
My point is - there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit and not work if the basic income can provide a sufficient substitute.
I’m not making an argument against basic income. I suppose it’s sad that we as a society treat a significant number of people, even in developed countries, without a shred of dignity.