We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. Sure, they may volunteer a few hours a month here and there, but their productivity plummets compared to the previous year when they didn't collect that pension. I don't blame them one bit -- it's exactly the same thing I did once I retired.
So what happens as we lower the age at which they receive a pension? Different countries and companies have sometimes offered pensions to some of their senior workers to reduce their workforce -- the results were the same. Most people stop working as soon as they have a lifetime guaranteed income that allows them to afford life's essentials, even if they are in their forties.
A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.
In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
> But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
I’d like to emphasize “grinding” here. For many it’s a grind in the truest sense, involving decades of backbreaking physical work. For others it’s immense stress to keep a roof over their family’s head no matter what. By the time retirement rolls around practically everybody has been burned out to some degree but had to power through regardless simply because quitting wasn’t an option.
Yeah, under conditions like that, people are indeed going to stop working the very second they’re no longer required to in order to survive. Things like UBI, 4-day work weeks, remote work, and fair compensation would all improve that situation measurably.
I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
> Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.
War bonds, rationing and other measures long since abandoned were introduced then too. How weird would it be if everyone were still limited to 8oz of sugar per month in 2025 due to the exigencies of WW2? It's no less weird when it comes to healthcare being linked to remuneration. Heck, there are better free market approaches not adopted by the US, since its usually horny for that sort of thing, right up until it's pro-labor I guess.
Healthcare wouldn't be nearly as much of the issue it is if it weren't for healthcare administration and the cap on MDs. The private vs public debate becomes way less interesting when the cost drops 90%. Getting rid of that problem should really be everyone's focus.
I stopped when I was 55 (didn't have a choice, actually). Fortunately, I had saved wisely, and lived frugally, so I was able to stop working (which was good, because no one wanted me, anyway).
I actually get more done, every day (like, seven days a week), than I did when getting paid.
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
> That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
It feels like everyone that has an anti-UBI position has access to a lot of research that no one else can see - or they're just unwilling to read or accept the results of every study / bit of research actually done on the topic.
Either it is never universal, and / or participants know that it isn't going to last long (limited duration study) so they have different motivations than someone who will actually receive UBI.
Every study basically has the same (obvious and not useful) conclusion: people like getting money. Any conclusion beyond that (specific to UBI) isn't supported.
Every person’s story is different. People are resourceful.
If $150 a month can make people’s lives better, in a state that doen’t issue its own currency, imagine what phasing in a UBI for everyone in USA can do, gradually and increasing. And that’s the point.
USA will have to print money anyway to service their sovereign debt. So may as well give it out as a UBI over 40 years first, then tax it and pay the treasury holders. Think about it!
I think the issue is that it'd be really hard to test experimentally. Basically you'd have to give a select group of people UBI for life and do a 40+ year long longitudinal study.
So just so I'm clear: because some people, somewhere, will take UBI and blow it on college beer parties, which definitely won't happen otherwise, but because of that, every person who doesn't grow up at least semi-privileged gets the on-ramp directly onto the lifetime debt treadmill?
The current proposals and tests are not about that kind of money. It is in the word 'basic': you can buy food and and a small room, not 'travel and adventure'.
> Some of them can't even figure out how to spend SNAP, because there's no refrigator or pantry in the stairwell they sleep in! I had a friend who insisted on spending 100% SNAP on 100% fresh beef. He literally wouldn't eat anything else. Jeez.
Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.
Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.
If you can buy food and a small room, you can buy food and petrol for your van. If you already own a bike, a biking holiday can now be your permanent lifestyle.
Sure, those people exist, that is fine. Some people do that now and far beyond their 20s: just hitch/bike/van around and do the odd job for a few days and live off that the rest of the time. There are communities where I live who allow anyone to come in and clean and cook together so you can stay and eat for $0. That is without basic income so it will happen with too. Thats a tiny minority. Most will get bored, loney, fed up etc if they even 'dare' to start such a life.
Also, how is it bad to have such people? These are the people who go on to write interesting books or bring a different perspective to society than the one in which everyone lives the same life.
Not UBI but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI) shows (claims) rent always rises to suck up available money. Why? Not because landlords are evil, no, because once people have more money many of them want a nicer place. There are a limited number of nicer places so the prices rise since all these new people with a little more money bid up what they're willing to pay.
The same will be true of UBI and anything you think it enables. There are limited number of planes, boats, hotels, hostels so the moment everyone can do it is the moment there's more demand than supply and prices will go up.
The larger point is that it's not about if you get UBI. It's about if everyone gets UBI
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences.
I think it is really common for retiree risk takers to swing for the fences in their 60's.
Their time is freed up and often lump sums become available: retirees often feel they need to make money to live well in retirement. I'm sure you can think of cliched coffee shop entrepreneurs, restaurant owners, franchise purchasers and investment property purchasers.
The reason it's such a well known cliche is because of how often they get burnt (due to poor understanding of risks) and many lose their homes.
I really notice it because I'm nearer retirement than 20 (they're not my peers but my acquaintances span a wide range of age and money demographics).
>> There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.
No, it's the difference between getting a pension (a guaranteed income for the rest of your life) and a second job's salary without working it. Basically the "basic income" experiments create Reddit r/overemployed participants without even having to work the additional job.
> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ...
This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.
That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.
Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.
The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).
> Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire.
Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
Most my friends and myself could retire after the 90s Internet boom: we all sold. Most before 30. No one did as its boring. Travelling gets boring: everything I see rich people typically do I still find boring now in my 50s and I could've done all of that for the past 25+ years. I am quite sure I will never stop working and this seems the same for my friend group. I am not saying life satisfaction comes from work necessarily, but at least the people I call friends have a drive to produce things and feel validation and satisfaction from that: in the west that validation is usually money and recognition from peers and large groups of strangers.
But yeah, I guess many people dont want to work because their options for work suck. It is not that many of those their contribution is not basically 0 or negative now as it is and with robots/ai coming in the coming 50 years, I rather have them living a human life with social housing, free playstations and basic income instead of slaving away at something useless just because of some weird idea that any work is better than no work to spend their short life on.
> Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same.
You do get that's anecdotal, right?
And that a basic income will mean you don't die from starvation, but won't give you the kind of comfortable lifestyle that you and a few of your ex-coworkers presumably scored from some happenstance in your employment arc, right?
And that there's lots of research about how 'most people' do not in fact stop working, at least within the confines of the trials done, right?
People usually voluntarily retire when they have the resources to maintain their lifestyle. Basic income wouldn’t be nearly as much as a pension, so that wouldn’t really apply. And taking a pension means you have to quit, whereas a basic income pays you even if you keep working. The comparison really doesn’t seem to work.
If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.
Elderly population not working is _hardly_ the equivalent of UBI. Besides; in most developed countries you are actually _penalized_ for working while retired; and furthermore most elderly people on pension tend to still do work such as handling childcare for grand kids.
> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions.
These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.
Maybe they can stop working because of cultural allowance.
Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it.
Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.
The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.
Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death.
Gee why would they stop working, you think?
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread
thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely
shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the
problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the
old Adam in most of us!
Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
> Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67
Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.
> Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.
They're being paid because of the principal-agent problem, the inefficiency of large bureaucracies and the Red Queen's race created by the attention economy.
Work expands to fill all available time. Make less time available and there will be more pressure to stop doing useless work.
Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.
Nurses deserve more money than we can give them but their salaries are around $100K and Hospital Margins are 5%. So yea, UBI-style, the government pretty much just has to print the money to hand to the nurses to get them more money.
I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly.
It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of.
But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset.
In fact, pension funds invest in businesses.
Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund.
Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation.
What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for.
At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned.
When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary.
For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"?
Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"?
We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule.
Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves.
Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair.
In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions.
"Productivity". Give us a break.
Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own.
Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes?
>And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum.
Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle.
Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing?
Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system?
The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will.
Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles.
If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is.
And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners.
If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business.
When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job.
I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool.
But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable.
The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work".
If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system".
Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split.
When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism.
When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.
> I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
What causes you to believe that a transfer payment would be inflationary? Some high-paid partner at a law firm has less money, some low-paid teacher has more money, net amount of money everybody has in total hasn't changed.
The teacher is likely to spend a higher proportion of the money given to them on consumption than the law partner who paid for it.
This is the positive intention of UBI, but I cannot understand how people think “some people are so low paid that they don’t save or invest while others are able to accumulate large nest eggs” doesn’t imply that it we shift money from the latter to the former that we won’t see an increase in the consumption that will exceed the increase in production.
Here's a fun example: Suppose the investor was buying condos and speculating on real estate prices without renting them out. If you transfer money from the investor to the spender, the spender uses it to buy a condo for consumption because they want to live in it. The amount of production hasn't changed at all and the amount of consumption has increased by converting waste (a vacancy) into use/consumption.
Or suppose if you give someone more money they'll use it to buy a new phone. Then more phones have to be produced -- but the vast majority of the production cost of a phone is from amortizing the fixed costs of the R&D and buying the manufacturing equipment etc. The incremental cost of making another phone when those are all sunk costs is tiny. Meanwhile the gross profit from those additional purchases goes to the seller which they can use in lieu of investment to cover the incremental increase in the cost of production. It can even make the average price of the phone go down by allowing the fixed costs to be amortized over more units.
There are a lot of brainstormable scenarios about how an increase in spending on consumption would make society more productive without causing inflation. I think a lot of those fall into fanciful or wishful thinking, but the way to know what happens is to craft and execute experiments to learn about people's actual behavior and extrapolate only as we must rather than positing scenarios and arguing without data.
// most people as soon as they are eligible...stop working...//
Is that true?
I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-)
Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.
I realize UBI has been a popular topic on HN, answer me this...
UBI, if implemented, would move O($10T/year) around the economy.
We've seen a lot of small scale studies, which basically boil down to giving people money == life improvements. However, I do not see how a small scale study could possibly answer the open macro questions, like inflationary collapse (e.g. increased velocity without direct economic output), even if the whole "will people work anymore" question is moot.
Without answering those questions, it would be a USSR scale experiment, which is incredibly dangerous. Improving peoples lives would be great, but I cannot see how one could be an advocate for UBI without having solid answers to those questions.
(1) You are correct that you cannot test UBI in a petri dish. It has to be all or nothing to see the REAL effects.
(2) If you rework UBI to be a negative income tax and remove all of government subsidies and handouts then it would have much less potential for disastrous economic impact (see Milton Friedman[0])
I see being an advocate for UBI as advocating for solid answers to those questions.
I would also point out that there's a difference between a full UBI, a modest partial UBI, and the kind of "basic income" that's not universal and goes away at a rate of 50c on the dollar when you earn more, like in this study. You can't slowly roll out a full UBI, but that's definitely possible for a partial UBI or a means-tested cash payment. You can dial the amount down as far as you want and still study the impact.
> (e.g. increased velocity without direct economic output)
Transfer payments don't really increase the velocity of money because they're not associated with any direct economic output.
If Alice has $100,000 to spend and Carol has $25,000 to spend, there is $125,000 in actual spending, i.e. demand for something that has to be produced. If you then do a transfer payment of $10,000 from Alice to Carol then Alice is spending $90,000 and Carol is spending $35,000, it's still the same $125,000.
Maybe they'll buy different stuff, maybe one would be more likely to buy business investments and the other would be more likely to buy college tuition, but that has no more likelihood to cause problems than if Carol got a raise and Alice had to pay for it.
What do you expect to happen to money which is "saved"? They're not stuffing it in a mattress. Some business gets it and then spends it to buy inventory or do construction or whatever it is their business does. If it was actually stuffed in a mattress forever at scale then the government would have to contemporaneously print that amount of new money to prevent deflation from the contraction of the circulating money supply, and then somebody would be spending that.
How about... greater benefits to people who are unemployed? I mean, UBI is inherently a poor policy for "mass unemployment scenarios", because there is no feasible scenario in which the majority of people are unemployed. To give UBI to people making around the median wage or higher because there is mass unemployment due to automation that doesn't affect them doesn't seem like a good use of money at all.
"there is no feasible scenario in which the majority of people are unemployed"
Try not to ever forget you said this, you'll find it hilarious in the future.
The value of typical human labor never stops falling, while the costs of employment never stop rising. Something's going to give, and it's not going to be the profits.
We already have UBI....as long as you are over 65 :-) In addition, I suppose you would agree that children should be guaranteed to have a home and 3 square meals.
So already something like half of our lives are covered by some kind of UBI. 20 years to mature, 20 years of retirement, sandwiching a 30-40 year career.
Don't forget, UBI would replace everything else. Food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, etc etc. And literally SQUARE MILES of office building staffing bureaucrats who do means testing, fraud prevention, etc etc for government benefits would also not be required.
If you put together all of the money we spend for all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if 90%, or even 100% of the cost of a UBI could be covered.
You're measuring the cost to the government, not the cost to the public. How much time do people waste filling out eligibility forms? What's the economic cost of wastefully converting fungible money into non-fungible requirements to buy specific goods and services?
Meanwhile the "extra spending" isn't real because the benefits, being universal, are going to many of the same people paying for them, and therefore simply cancel out. The purpose of making them universal is the simplification: It's simpler -- and therefore harder to cheat -- to have a UBI and a uniform tax rate than to have a benefits phase out that effectively cancels out the lower rates on lower income people in the existing tax code. Or worse, creates marginal rate cliffs and highly irregular rates because overlapping benefits phase outs interact with each other in random and perverse ways.
You are quite correct that the overhead of most government programs is relatively very small.
But look at your numbers....12% of the population on SNAP, 20% of the population on Medicaid, etc etc.
What would it really cost us to just pay the equivalent cash to everybody, and then raise the taxes to offset the costs on people who don't need it?
We are already paying for--piecemeal and very inconveniently to be sure--much of what we'd want a UBI to give us. It probably would cost us more in taxes than what we are paying for now, but it wouldn't be an apocalyptic increase. The delta of spending is not as big as what one would initially think.
I have a hard time seeing how UBI would be fundamentally different than what exists on American Indian reservations. Is that the model that people are envisioning?
Are you serious? Reservations are employment deserts with little to no opportunity to do much. That, paired with generations of societal genocide, means reservations are not a good test for what can be done elsewhere.
I heavily edited my comment (a sibling to your comment) to tone down the snark. But I agree - this may land in my top 10 most insane hacker news comments that I've ever read.
There was quite a bit of displacement, subjugation and genocide of entire peoples that precipitated any handouts they did receive. It is possible that that influenced outcomes.
>The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.
1/4 of the people stopped working?? That is a huge effect, particularly since it was a short duration experiment. Unfortunately this is also seen in other experiments with basic income. The economist Noah Smith blogged about a large randomized basic income study done in the US where participants received about $1,000 a month for three years:
>...Just $1000 a month made 2% of people stop working! That’s a very large negative effect. It contradicts the results of earlier studies showing little or no effect of unconditional cash benefits on employment. And worst of all, the basic income recipients didn’t seem to transfer to better jobs or go back to school — two of the most powerful arguments for basic income. Instead, people just sat around at home.
> Acting like this is UBI's fault is kind of weird.
As Noah Smith wrote:
>...Now, increased leisure time isn’t zero benefit — obviously it’s nice to be able to sit around and do nothing and live off of government cash for a little while. But it represents a steep tradeoff — programs like this are already very expensive in fiscal terms, and if they make people work less, that only adds to the total economic cost. If leisure time is all we’re getting for all of that money and lost output, it’s highly questionable whether the intervention is worth it.
Not to butt in, but 2% sounds like a good trade to me. You gotta think about every possible cumulative benefit everyone experiences by having 1k more a month. Imagine the lost stress, the increased nutrition, the increased education, the skills explored and practiced that couldn’t be before, etc. If the trade is that 2% of people sit around and economic output drops as much, why shouldn’t that be a net positive for society?
What exactly is the trade here? In a trade, both sides are supposed to be better off.
As the link says:
>...But if it’s confirmed that basic income discourages work and provides little long-term career benefits, I think interest in the idea will wane rapidly.
For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it. You kept making for whole different reasons. You kept making, kept doing.
The only thing that stops is tolerance of actual garbage bosses, abusive companies and saying “yes” to decisions that require you to be immoral.
> For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it.
I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.
Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.
You quit working in the conventional, modern, hierarchical contract employment system - a very tight and specific definition of "work".
But I'd be very surprised if you didn't still spend a goodly proportion of your time beavering away at endeavours that were productive to yourself or others in your family and community.
The discussion is around sustainability: when people quit paid work they no longer contribute to the very tax base that is necessary to sustain a basic income.
Most UBI proposals I've heard of are the equivalent of $5.00-7.50 per hour wage. If what you imply were true - that upon achieving that level, people simply said "goal reached" and ceased to be further productive - then the USA median hourly wage would not be $22.
Aside from half of those who stopped working going back to school, there is a simple reason why a lot of people will stop for a while when universal income or a similar scheme first starts:
People are burned out. They are overworked. Over-stressed. Most of them were just hurled into careers by the system without much choice because they had to make a living. Most of them didnt even have time to think about their choices. A majority has spent decades struggling for survival amidst financial insecurity. When universal income starts for the first time, all of these people will stop for a while and start revising their lives. Something which they needed to do way before, but were not allowed by the system. Its natural.
When they get over the burnout and do their reflection, they will go active again. We see this in the case of the privileged minority who are able to retire early or take sabbaticals. They rest and do random stuff for a while, then they go back to doing something they want to do. Especially in tech, that has been the case.
> Well, 25% stopped apparently. Which is somewhat telling.
The report also says that half of those who stopped working went back to school! So that's no more than 13% who really became "idle". And there are also questions we should ask about that group, like their age composition, for instance. If of the 13% that quit working without returning to education or training, many of them were older people, wouldn't that meaningfully change the picture as well?
I bet you wouldn't, at least not until your 70s. Here's my anecdote-based argument to the contrary: every single recent retiree I know (having $basicIncome as a pension) has taken 6-12 months off work and then started working again (where they are physically capable of doing so). The reasons vary from necessity, boredom or wanting to feel "useful". This seems to drop off sharply the mid-70s. I'm not saying that working is hardwired in humans, but it seems to be a strong part of our sense of self-worth.
There are plenty of ways to volunteer or do art that are indistinguishable from loafing. Even if you work hard at volunteering or art, if the result isn't useful to others, at some point we will start wondering who is going to grow food and do plumbing while everyone is volunteering & arting.
do you have some kind of evidence that enacting a ubi, which comes with absolutely no condition of "not working," will stop a majority of people from taking paid work and making more money? Do we need 100% of the population to work in order to fill vital positions? I don't think so.
The article said 3/4 of people kept working, a significant portion of the 1/4 went back to school, and a hell of a a lot of people are in this comment section saying they would never stop working even with UBI.
Exactly. Instead of a floor of $0 and you earn more than that by working, you have a floor of $1,000/month or whatever, and you earn more than that by working. The idea is to provide a cushion, not replace wages.
That's because the kinds of people who make those huge amounts of money usually have that ambition and lack of satisfaction. But what about the parts of society that aren't go-getting yuppie strivers? There is a vast majority of people who never consider grinding leetcode to get a job at Jane Street so that they can later pivot to B2B SAAS for timeseries data.
Honestly, I think you think too little of people. A *lot* of people love to invent, create, explore, dream, participate and so on. I would argue the vast, vast majority.
People I know grow crops, make food, paint, draw, build worlds, write stories, create programs and so on. And these are people from every area in life.
I don't deny that people love to do creative things like that. But society can't survive off creatives and gardeners and the other fun things. Those activities are nice for the people who do them but they don't help support the rest of the population - we need truckers, aged care workers, farmers, cashiers.
Just picking out this one out of curiosity, not arguing the broader point.
In a world where people have more freedom on what to spend their energy and time on I would expect some things to return to the realm of unpaid labour. Child care, mentoring, care for the elder, local community contributions. Probably not replacing the demand entirely, but surely some shifts in supply and demand would be observed.
There's a segment of the population who are vehemently against the idea of undeserving/lazy/the wrong people receiving any kind of welfare benefit, and the concept of UBI really, really triggers that segment. To the point where rational analysis goes straight out the window.
I'm quite certain that all the same arguments were had about every kind of retirement or disability pension everywhere. Many of our societies are producing an enormous amount of resources surplus to our basic needs, often distributed very unevenly. Putting some of that surplus towards ensuring all members are at least housed and fed would not be a bad thing.
Time-boxed UBI experiments don't represent how people would behave if they had the benefits for life. That's not throwing rational analysis out the window. If anything, trying to extrapolate the results of a UBI pilot that didn't last 3 years is playing fast and loose with rationality.
Disabled people receive benefits because their ability to work is impeded by their disability and thus those programs don't have the same potential to disincentive work among the disabled population.
Retirement benefits do diminish older people's labor participation rates. That's the intended purpose of retirement programs. Society agrees that at a certain age people should ideally be able to relax and not work if they don't want to. Why do people protest when countries raise their retirement age? Because people don't want to have to work in their 70s or late 60s. Some do (my dad kept consulting for the fun of it), but they're probably in the minority.
You're talking about the "welfare queen" myth. The idea that given any sort of welfare, a large percentage of the population will exploit that welfare and quit being productive.
I dunno this seems like a not great program and a not great study.
> Its findings are the result of a 70-question, anonymous online survey made available to basic income recipients in Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. A total of 217 former recipients participated, according to the report.
> Forty in-depth interviews with participants were also completed in July 2019.
> The project worked by recruiting low-income people and couples, offering them a fixed payment with no strings attached that worked out to approximately $17,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples.
Earlier it mentions the program had 4k participants. So 4k participants -> 217 survey respondents -> 40 interviews. We don't know to what degree there was a selection bias in who decided to respond or was available to interview. Not great in terms of the data the study generated.
> Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their basic income at 50 per cent, meaning once someone hit $34,000 they wouldn't receive a payment anymore, Lewchuk explained while speaking with As It Happens.
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
And the program told people up front that it was temporary, and that the marginal benefit of their own work or income would be substantially reduced. If your earning power already wasn't great (which qualifies you for the program) and now your effective wage per hour worked is functionally reduced ... it's kinda shocking that most of them kept working! If the program wanted to keep people working, it wouldn't take away funds from them as they earn.
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
I believe previous UBI experiments have shown the same results: most people keep working, some people stop, but they usually have decent reasons. Education, extending parental leave, or being a caregiver aren't necessarily things we want to discourage if they result in a greater return.
Greater return for the government paying for a UBI, compared to not paying for a UBI.
> We already have existing labor markets that are very capable of determining returns.
I'm not sure I understand how "existing labour markets" are going to solve the three things I listed: education, caregiving, and parents taking time off to look after their kids.
The issue of parents being absent is that it results in negative externalities: crime rate, an alienated society, low literacy rates. The existing labour market is great at placing parents into a job efficiently, but it has absolutely nothing to do with keeping their kids out of prison. Nor should it, really, because externalities are a government-level coordination problem.
When it comes to education, the issue is again a coordination problem. Companies might do some training, but they generally prefer to foist the risk off onto employees, other companies, and governments by hiring people who are already educated. Again, this is a coordination problem, because any individual company that skips training and just hires educated workers directly will be more efficient, but those educated workers have to come from somewhere.
I will concede that it's more efficient not to take care of the elderly. I question whether it is desirable, however.
This is a 2020 news article and should have the (2020) tag added.
The study has also been picked apart for the methodology issues and the enormous amount of spin applied to the results. From what I recall, the link to the results didn’t lead to an academic paper, it led to something more like a pamphlet or advertisement with a lot of graphic design, dozens of pages, and lots of spin.
Even this news article shows the amount of spin happening. Read this section and think about what it really means:
> The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income
In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.
The better studies have included a control group that gets a nominal payment but much less than the basic income checks. Something like $50 or $100 per month to fill out the same questionnaire. Giving a single group some checks for a short period of time without any control group doesn’t tell you much.
The entire world of UBI studies is wild. Every time I read the actual data I come away with a completely different interpretation than the news articles and graphic design heavy reports that are produced by the UBI proponents.
> In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.
Half of those people stopped working so that they could go to school.
I'd also expect an even better result if working did not cancel out the UBI.
Are you counting this study in that world, given that it wasn't a UBI study? It was intended to be a continuation of the Manitoban study from the 1970s, which wasn't modelled as UBI either.
It’s one measure of the impact of UBI and is particularly important if you want to support the “UBI makes society more productive and prosperous” argument that some proponents make.
I'm sure there is already much discussion about this, but I feel like basic income pilots will never show the true impact. Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years. Especially when this pilot is cancelled and now people won't trust that future ones will last even for the few years specified.
Sure, but let’s remember that “working” is not the end-all, be-all of human existence. Some will stop working and care for an aging parent. Some will stop working and raise children. Some will stop working and make art. We have the opportunity to maximize human flourishing. Let’s not mistake where we’ve been for where we’re going.
Assuming both people are obtaining the same level of enjoyment, why is goofing around online considered "rotting" compared with streaming and doing art at home? I'm not trying to knock hobbies, but I think being alive and content is its own reward, even if the person is lacking a résumé of daily achievements to rattle off at dinner parties.
It isn't just about having something to talk about at a dinner party. It is about doing something productive and worth-while. There is a massive feeling of accomplishment from doing some that is productive. Having something interesting to talk about is an additional benefit. A good portion of those people that were pro-active and learned to stream, turned it into a side income. I wish I had done that. I was desperately trying to find a job after being laid off.
You get none of these benefits from watching Netflix on the sofa. In fact it is likely to make you miserable. A lot of people were negatively affected over COVID. A lot of people regressed into a shell and had a form of depression. I spoke to people mid lockdowns who were working from home and were saying "If I can't go out and enjoy myself, there is no point in earning this money".
I don't consider myself shy, but I find interacting in person now a lot more stressful than I did before COVID lockdowns.
There were other problems during COVID. A lot of people increased intake of booze. I am glad I had given up drinking the year before (I was an alcoholic) because I worry about what I would have been like. There was an increase in domestic violence in the UK (probably related to the increase in alcohol consumption). I am sure there are other issues I had forgotten about.
Productive, as defined by... the people who compile labor statistics, or what? Worthwhile, as defined by... the people who dominate the current cultural narrative?
Everyone who ever invented or discovered anything was engaged in "unproductive" activity.
For one, during Covid, most people were encouraged, if not required by law, to limit their interactions, and some were literally not allowed to leave the house. For years.
Secondly, just because UBI gives people leave to sit around at home, doesn't mean that binging Netflix or alcohol is somehow the fault of "not working."
I know many people whose life consists of working extremely hard, then going home and binging Netflix or alcohol or mairjuana until they pass out. Is that somehow better?
I didn't say it was a UBI problem. I was specifically replying about the effect that it had on people at the time.
> For one, during Covid, most people were encouraged, if not required by law, to limit their interactions, and some were literally not allowed to leave the house. For years.
Yes I know. I was one of those people. I ended up just ignoring the laws BTW and doing what I wanted when I worked out that they couldn't effectively enforce them.
> Secondly, just because UBI gives people leave to sit around at home, doesn't mean that binging Netflix or alcohol is somehow the fault of "not working."
I never said it was. I was specifically talking about what happened during COVID.
> I know many people who's life consists of working extremely hard, then going home and binging Netflix or alcohol or mairjuana until they pass out. Is that somehow better?
Yes, it is.
1) While working you are productive (or at least perceived to be). So at least in theory, you are benefit on society.
2) When you have a substance abuse problem like I did. Your life revolves around it. If you don't have to go to work, I would typically start drinking after lunchtime. Work gave me a break from drinking. As I alluded to in my previous reply in this thread, I am glad gave up drinking at the start of 2019, as I would have had 9 months to drink all day.
Sounds like you have a substance abuse problem and you're afraid that others will make the same mistake you did.
Saying that people's lives are better because they benefit society through their labour, while suffering from untreated addiction (a truly horrible thing), is quite fatalistic, to me. The substance abuse is a totally different issue from "not working." There are a million things to do other than go to the office.
> Sounds like you have a substance abuse problem and you're afraid that others will make the same mistake you did.
I had a substance abuse problem. I have been sober now 7 years.
As for whether I am afraid others will do the same? Yes I am afraid others will make the same mistake that I did. That is why I am warning against it.
> Saying that people's lives are better because they benefit society through their labour, while suffering from untreated addiction (a truly horrible thing), is quite fatalistic, to me.
You asked me whether I thought it was better and I gave you two reasons why I believed it was better. I believe it is be a completely honest assessment based on my own experiences. If you have a critique that is objective of my position I am willing to listen to it, but moralising about how my assessment I am not interested in.
> The substance abuse is a totally different issue from "not working."
In theory yes, in reality no. One will exacerbates the other.
> There are a million things to do other than go to the office.
Sure there are. But unfortunately I have a mortgage and bills that need paying.
>Sure there are. But unfortunately I have a mortgage and bills that need paying.
Hence the UBI.
>In theory yes, in reality no. One will exacerbates the other.
Big big big assumption that doesn't match my reality very well. People who keep active, have a social life and are happy are at less risk for addiction. Not people who "have a job." Those are not the same things.
>You asked me whether I thought it was better and I gave you two reasons why I believed it was better. I believe it is be a completely honest assessment based on my own experiences. If you have a critique that is objective of my position I am willing to listen to it, but moralising about how my assessment I am not interested in.
It is not "better" for people to go to work day in and day out as a way of paying back society while slowly killing themselves with addiction. The better thing is to treat the addiction, not get them working.
Which requires someone else to work to pay for those things. I don't believe other people should pay my mortgage and bills. Those are my responsibility.
I chose to buy a house. I chose to buy a car. I chose the 1 gigabyte virgin media broadband package. Nobody forced me to choose them. Therefore it would be irresponsible and immoral to expect someone else to pay the bill.
> The better thing is to treat the addiction
This assumes that addiction is a disease and a not a choice. I firmly believe it is a choice. I choose to drink excessively in the first place. I made the choice to stop drinking. I chose to stay sober.
As for the rest of what you wrote. You really need to go back an re-read what I said. You asked me which is better between two scenarios. I stated that one was better than the other with a rationale.
You seem to be arguing something else entirely now. I am not sure really what you are arguing against. Certainly not statements I've made in this thread.
>Which requires someone else to work to pay for those things. I don't believe other people should pay my mortgage and bills. Those are my responsibility.
Then you've made the choice to not pursue other things that will make you happier than "working." Yet my point initially was that working is not anywhere close to the only way that people can stay active and away from "rotting."
No one is saying a UBI needs to pay for a 3 story house and 1 GB internet. If you want more than the basics, you know what to do...work!
>This assumes that addiction is a disease and a not a choice.
No, this assumes that many people will need help quitting an addiction.
>You asked me which is better between two scenarios.
Both scenarios are grim and best avoided. The better solution is to help solve the problem, not to act like work is a cure-all, or that a marginal improvement in the form of societal contribution (or "max time away from drink") is sufficient. For many people, work is the reason they drink, or do drugs, or have anger issues. A proper UBI helps people maintain a healthy lifestyle without having to put themselves in a position where they are stressed and powerless for the rest of their working life.
> Then you've made the choice to not pursue other things that will make you happier than "working".
It not about being happier. You didn't read what I said. I said they were my responsibility. You fundamentally don't understand what I am trying to tell you.
> Yet my point initially was that working is not anywhere close to the only way that people can stay active and away from "rotting."
I never said it was. Like many replies of the replies I've had on my initial reply in this thread they have conflated doing something productive, with going to work. Going for a cycle is more productive than Netflix, learning crotchet is more productive than Netflix.
> No, this assumes that people will need help quitting an addiction.
If you don't wish people to misunderstand you, then you shouldn't use language that implies that you believe it to be a disease.
> Both scenarios are grim and best avoided. The better solution is to help solve the problem, not to act like work is a cure-all.
I never said work was a cure-all. You keep on adding things I never said.
You asked me what is better between two scenarios was. I gave you an answer which I thought was better between the two with a rationale.
> For many people, work is the reason they drink, or do drugs, or have anger issues.
No. That is one of the excuses they use to justify their poor choices. I know because I used the same justification.
The reason they have drink, drugs or anger issues is because they choose to.
> A proper UBI helps people maintain a healthy lifestyle without having to put themselves in a position where they are stressed and powerless for the rest of their working life.
So you proclaim. I believe the opposite is likely to happen in the long run. I know what the (negative) affects of welfare are in the UK and UBI IMO will make things worse.
Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive.
First off, a heck of a lot of those things that you are calling productive, are really just physical activity. Going for a bike ride is good for you, literally. The sense of achievement is just a side effect. If you had a pill that could replicate the effects of a 30 min bike ride, people would sit around eating those pills. And they'd be extremely healthy and happy.
Secondly, Covid was a time when people were culturally and legally obligated to stay inside and keep away from other people.
UBI does not come with those constraints. So no, it's not the same. People will not sit around watching Netflix at the rate they did during Covid. Because they are not compelled to stay inside the house at the risk of being deemed a menace to society.
I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.
Saying addiction requires treatment for many people does not imply it is a disease. Addiction treatment existed before the disease model and I don't think of it as a disease in the same way as cancer etc. So that's your own conflict that you're projecting onto me. Much of addiction treatment is treating emotions and rationales that addicts may not even be aware of anymore, sometimes purposefully, sometimes not.
>No. That is one of the excuses they use to justify their poor choices. I know because I used the same justification.
That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.
>which I thought was better between the two with a rationale.
I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.
> Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive
No it wasn't. I suggest you re-read it. I was talking about people generally. I actually didn't speak that much about my own experience. I actually talked about what generally happened over COVID in my original reply.
> I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.
Again you inserted things that I did not say. I never said I can't do other things. I don't live an expensive lifestyle. The only thing I said I need to go to work to pay the bills.
> That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.
No it isn't naive. It is literally what every recovered addict says. "You have to want to quit". Whether people should get help or not has nothing to do with the justifications of why they abuse substances.
> I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.
I don't think you do. You didn't even bother reading what I said properly. So I think we will leave it there.
> It is about doing something productive and worth-while.
Uh-huh. What percentage of software engineers jobs are "worthwhile"? Working on Amazon's nth hosted OSS SaaS? Making better DRM? Revamping your bank website to the latest javascript framework?
From reading your comments, it appears you value physical activity over sedentary activity and disagree with the disease model of addiction because of your own experience and belief system. Frankly, individualized belief systems that don’t exhibit generalizable or interrogatable attributes aren’t very interesting. You’re absolutely free to put up walls around your beliefs and experiences and tell us to keep out, but don’t be surprised when the intellectually curious start knocking on other doors.
It's all rotting if you're simply consuming and not part of goods & services production. The cash creation resulted in more money chasing less goods & services, and inflation lagged behind but steadily resulted.
Being alive and content is orthogonal to what's rightly predicted - GDP falling off a cliff, with standards of living plummeting and inflation exploding as everyone does more consumption to talk about at dinner parties while even less than ever is being produced.
The human body is simultaneously decaying and regenerating constantly, but calling it "rotting" mischaracterizes the process. About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells.
There is nothing particular to labor that changes this, people age at about the same rate whether they are engaged in "working" or not.
Huh? Everyone I knew either worked during that time or was looking for work after getting laid off. (And the vast majority were still working.)
> had basic income and such taken care of
Huh? The COVID checks weren't that regular and didn't cover that much. You mean collecting unemployment, which also requires proving that you're looking for work?
You are writing in the comments section of a website devoted to the discussion of companies and technologies that have changed the entire world. Technologies that, many suppose, will change the entire nature of labor, specifically.
And yet you ask, "but how will we maintain the world as it is today?"
Invent a better tomorrow. That's what you're here for.
We could call the better tomorrow a great leap forward.
I jest, but smartphones and web apps have not changed that people need ever-more food, clothing, housing, energy on an ongoing basis while the brave new world is being designed and implemented.
no, its better to complain that people don't want to work anymore.
I wonder what all these "hackers" tradespersons relatives thought of them in 1999. Probably that they were useless computer geeks who would never amount to anything, because they hate "work."
I think it’s totally fair to ask who is supposed to pay for that. I don’t want the guy who grows the food I eat to stop and go paint, I like eating more than I like him painting. There are plenty of jobs that aren’t fulfilling in the slightest, they are just a means to a paycheck, but are absolutely vital to society. And if those people quit to go make art, we’re all screwed. I don’t think that’s an unfair ask to have a comprehensive answer to.
If those jobs are really absolutely vital, in a basic income regime they would be well paying enough to entice people to earn the extra disposable income.
Relative to goods with elastic demand, food prices will rise faster because we have to eat. Food prices are also sensitive to its input prices, which also have inelastic demand.
Precisely. There’d likely be a large wealth transfer back towards boring and less skilled jobs if we couldn’t rely on large numbers of people literally having no choice but to take any job they can get.
I struggle to understand how anyone could consider that a bad thing other than for completely selfish reasons.
Is it best for society that everyone works a job with high enough income to contribute to taxes and that can accrue a 401k? We aren't there under current policy, there are many people left behind and experiencing negative income tax rates. But I feel this hypothetical world is the ideal posited in your example.
I think it's a fair question, and as an economist the topic fascinates me far beyond the typical econ 101 perfect world hand waving.
> Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years.
Is that true - or is that your belief?
I feel like if UBI guaranteed that I wouldn't be homeless and starve to death - but did not guarantee me avocado for my toast - I wouldn't stop working.
I can't say that for sure, but a lot of the subjective concerns expressed by people about UBI seem to think that it provides the proverbial four-bedroom-house-in-suburbia-with-two-cars-and-an-overseas-holiday-each-year, which might in fact reduce the eagerness for someone to travel two hours a day to sit in a small box and bang away at a keyboard for a third their waking life.
If I was offered basic income for 3 years, I wouldn't change my life in the slightest (maybe I'd make frivolous purchases slightly more often).
If I was offered trustworthy basic income for the rest of my life, depending on the amount I would retire at some point within 3 years. If it was the same amount as in this study and was adjusted for inflation, I'd consider retiring on the spot.
I wouldn't quit either, but I assume you have wealth and are interested in continuing building it.
My anecdote that shaped my opinion was that I work closely with the bottom half to bottom quintile - who hold about 2% of the wealth in the US. During COVID, when unemployment was increased greatly and matched or even greatly exceeded weekly wages for frontline staff, they evaporated from the ranks. My interpersonal and social media experience (being friends or followers) interviewing people out of curiosity was basically that the yoke was off, and they're going to relax as long as the checks come in.
Professional career staff (finance, it, marketing, engineering, etc) had virtually no defections and returned like nothing happened as soon as work reopened.
My conclusion was that wealth holders have a long view that includes a future 'them', while non-wealth holding segments exist in the moment, and 5 years or 20 years from now might as well be someone else's problem. I think that means the bottom half of the systems we depend on crumble the moment we resume wages without work, and I don't see markets stepping in to raise unskilled wages to match skilled wages to compete for them, it simply wouldn't be permitted.
You’d retire on $12,000/year? I feel like all the people saying basic income wouldn’t make everybody retire is missing the actual amount involved. It doesn’t give you a fancy lifestyle. It gives you a shot at not starving.
Adjusted for inflation and exchange rate, it would be $18,000/yr. That plus my savings and investments is enough that I'd value marginal time over marginal money.
That's equivalent to $9/hour at a full time job. I doubt many people would be satisfied enough with that level of to retire. Sounds like you're just on the edge of doing it without any additional resources, and this would just tip you over the edge.
The question is, what happened to the people who they took the money from or inflated away the value of their savings? The second question is, how much money was "lost in translation".
UBI might be fine in a post scarcity world. Let's maybe think about it once governments eliminate all debt and have run surpluses for a decade.
"Them thar's CoMmUnIsM" Can't have that because Murica despises people beneath them getting any support or help of any kind. That's why universal healthcare won't happen without an FDR 2.0. Mamdani is kind of like that but can't become POTUS. Maybe Ro Khanna and AOC, but too many America voters are hostile towards them because the corporate news and podcasters told them so.
Ironically, the Trump stimulus checks provide fantastic and unexpected relief for millions.
Everything universal... that everyone needs to purchase (rent, food, power, etc.) will raise in price to eat up the UBI. It will reach an equilibrium where, to make ends meet, you will need UBI and at least a minimum wage job.
Any attempt to stop that from happening, such as price controls, raising UBI, etc., will cause shortages, abuse, or other issues.
Yeah that's called Neoclassical economics, I don't doubt it's true.
The question is whether the "shortages, abuse, or other issues" are worse than very-high unemployment scenarios in futures where the value of human labor has dipped below labor costs. It's probably going to get ugly no matter how the government tries to intervene, but it would be great if we knew ahead of time which interventions are better than others.
The problem with UBI is that not only does it give people an incentive to not work (as 25% of people in the study stopped working, even when they presume that the money would stop coming at some point) but, at a national level, it also requires a massive tax hike on the people who do work, which disincentivises work.
It would have an inflationary effect on basic goods and services. If you're renting and everybody is getting an extra few thousand a month then landlords know that they can charge a bit more since everyone has that money. Same with staple foods.
The cost savings don't make sense. An argument is that it will actually save money because the government will be able to abolish disability support and welfare, get rid of free healthcare, etc. But this ignores the fact that a lot of that stuff has unequal demand. You crash your car, your leg gets cut off, go to the hospital, they spend $100k on making sure you survive (specialised machines, a team of doctors and nurses, medicines, recovery and physiotherapy). How's that work under UBI if the government isn't paying for it anymore, who is? Or say you have a child with a disability, it's still going to cost more than the UBI.
Also, regardless of the economic system - could be feudalism, communism, the bronze age palace economy - redistributing income away from producers towards people who don't work (or even work less) is going to have negative effects. There is lot more demand for garbagemen than there are people who really love being garbagemen and wouldn't mind the high taxes. Take a look at the UK: the percentage of the population that are pensioners keeps on rising and the government keeps giving them more money - it's gone from 2% in the 50s to more like 10% now - all money that could be spent on other things that could grow the economy.
> requires a massive tax hike on the people who do work
Net of the benefit they would be receiving, it doesn't. The average person would be paying $10,000 in taxes to fund the UBI and then receiving a $10,000 UBI.
> It would have an inflationary effect on basic goods and services. If you're renting and everybody is getting an extra few thousand a month then landlords know that they can charge a bit more since everyone has that money. Same with staple foods.
There is no extra money. It isn't being printed. There are net transfers for people making more or less than average, but then Alice has a little more money than before and Bob has a little less and it's still the same total.
Also, that's not how prices work anyway. If people have more money, prices only change if the cost of production is non-linear. If it costs $5 each to make a million sandwiches and $5 each to make two million sandwiches, increasing the number of sandwiches people want just increases the number of sandwiches produced instead of increasing the price of each sandwich. Sometimes an increase in demand causes the unit price to go down because of economies of scale.
> But this ignores the fact that a lot of that stuff has unequal demand. You crash your car, your leg gets cut off, go to the hospital, they spend $100k on making sure you survive (specialised machines, a team of doctors and nurses, medicines, recovery and physiotherapy). How's that work under UBI if the government isn't paying for it anymore, who is?
That's the purpose of insurance.
> redistributing income away from producers towards people who don't work (or even work less) is going to have negative effects.
Your premise here is that being paid to do what someone else wants you to do is more productive than doing what you want to do.
Most modern jobs are not "productive" in the sense that they actually produce anything of importance. People waste untold hours in corporate meetings or making things the world would be better off without. Would assigning agency to the individuals instead of the institutional bureaucracies reduce productivity or increase it?
That's not that much better - 12.5% stopped working and didn't do anything at all.
I think that would also massively increase if the money was guaranteed to keep coming in for the rest of their lives. And even if the percentage stayed flat it would be an economic disaster - an increase of 12.5% of the population unemployed would be worse, in the US, than peak COVID. Another 12.5% going off to school still gets them out of the workforce, and would worsen elite overproduction.
Yeah how many of these have we had now? Literally every test and study about UBI comes back with similar data: it improves lives, reduces stress, and nobody becomes a drain on the system. It doesn’t matter. The people who oppose it aren’t looking at the data, they just don’t want "my tax dollars" going to support people struggling to get by.
That’s a generous interpretation of the results. This was a short term pilot and over one quarter of respondents stopped working, despite knowing it was a temporary program.
Did you read the article? Because it says that about half of the ones that stopped working stopped working because they were going back to school. That doesn't seem like a drain on the system...
It’s funny because it’s such a small amount for those who oppose it. I mean, capital gains doesn’t kick in until $48,350 in the US and you can survive off of that if you needed to. The issue is pulling that consistently for an income requires a bit of capital the average American doesn’t have.
We already have the EITC, which is frankly a better version of UBI (it incentivizes working more and literally goes up as you increase your earnings). Expand the EITC and tax capital gains as regular, inflation-adjusted income to pay for it and we've basically done it - a single Democratic administration could.
In fact, during COVID, an increase to the child tax portion of the EITC reduced childhood poverty by _70%_ at a relatively low cost. Guess why we don't do that anymore?
A large EITC is trivially converted into a UBI. Otherwise-unemployed people pay each other a salary to do whatever they were each going to do anyway and then the salaries cancel but they both get the EITC. Attempts to prevent this largely don't work against people who want to do the scam and just find a different way to structure it, but tend to be used as an excuse to e.g. screw legitimate self-employed workers out of the credit.
The only reason this doesn't happen at scale right now is that the existing EITC is smaller than the amount of payroll tax you'd pay by making a given amount of money, i.e. it's not a negative income tax at all. If you're going to make it larger than that you might as well make it a UBI.
I think the issue is there are a lot of welfare programs that haven't seen the same success. If you subscribe to the "taxes are to solve public goods problems" model, then welfare that doesn't come back around to help you isn't taxation, it's theft! When people talk about UBI, they're wary it's just a relabelling of the same-old "steal from the rich, give to the poor" Robinhood scheme. I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic (or, worst of all, "what would Jesus do?"). That's the wrong way of framing it (and this holds for most welfare initiatives too).
People are always going to care about different things. Some really care that everyone has clean water, others a good education, others freedom of expression. Some care more about their families, while others apply equal empathy to every stranger, cow, and tree. When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy. The proper way to fund your projects is to get everyone on board. Frame it so they see how it helps them achieve their goals, not just yours.
(Now, I know I'm ignoring that some people are just incredibly selfish; more accurately, some people's hearts are bleeding out on the floor, some are calcified into stone, and most are somewhere in between. I'm ignoring this discrepancy because 1. even very selfish people can get on board with welfare (like primary/secondary education), as long as it's framed properly, and 2. if a system relies on self-sacrifice, it's too easy to hijack that sacrifice into someone else's pet project.)
For example, with education, you can point out how much more economic activity is available when everyone knows how to read and write. I think the argument that actually worked, though, was "how can we avoid roving bands of teenagers in our city once we enact some child-labor laws?" (that's probably the reason highschool is compulsory, not just free to enroll in). For a universal basic income, you probably need to approach it from an entropy argument. The capitalist system tries to maximize GDP, but physical systems actually maximize the free energy (GDP - temperature * Theil index [entropy]). The capitalist system avoids this by artificially restricting free trade: for example, your boss makes a dollar, while you make a dime. There's fewer trades that could happen than if, say, you both made 55 cents (unless your boss is just reallly good at doing things with money). Or, more fundamental, your boss needs you much less than you need a salary. You have less freedom of movement than he has to remove you. A universal basic income fixes this entropy problem, which makes trades more frequent and the market more competitive. In the end, it can come around to help even a seflish centimillionaire.
You are of course right, and it is sad to see that the idea of "building consensus," now has to be explained in a long 4 paragraph post when it used to be just a normal way of doing things.
> When people talk about UBI, they're wary it's just a relabelling of the same-old "steal from the rich, give to the poor" Robinhood scheme.
You mean the scheme responsible for the greatest period of economic boom in American history, not JUST for the (unfortunately, primarily white) people, but the rest of the country as well? When we got the Hoover Dam, and the highway system, and wall to wall telephone coverage, and stable power grids in every state that isn't Texas? That scheme?
Yeah no I vastly prefer the modern one where like ten people get all of the money and our bridges collapse now. Makes the morning commute far more thrilling that way.
> I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic (or, worst of all, "what would Jesus do?"). That's the wrong way of framing it (and this holds for most welfare initiatives too).
I mean it's less an accusation of being unempathetic and more just an observation of the facts on the ground, isn't it?
> When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy. The proper way to fund your projects is to get everyone on board. Frame it so they see how it helps them achieve their goals, not just yours.
Yeah but that's just not scalable for society? Since I have been working, my taxes have funded wars in the Middle East that I certainly didn't give two shits about, and in fact opposed. My taxes support all manner of corporate welfare, some which is decent, a lot of which is horrendous and counterproductive to global health and climate change. Why is it we only start clutching our purse strings when it's about helping people, but there's always money for more fucking war and more oil subsidies?
Edit to respond to your reply:
> You talk about things not being scalable for society; well guess what, your version of empathy is one of them.
Not only is empathy scalable, it is the utter FOUNDATION of society. If we didn't give a shit what happened to everyone else who was in our tribe, we never would've progressed from the caves in the first place. Every moral code throughout history has been based on empathy. Every legal code is based in part on empathy. "I don't want to die, so we should recognize it's bad to kill people." It's the emotional bedrock of a social species; to see an individual that is like you, and to treat that individual as you would want to be treated.
> Like if I said, "everyone deserves chocolate ice cream", and you said "wow, how unempathetic, don't you care about everyone getting vanilla?"
That is just... flagrantly wrong. I'm not arguing for people to have a given flavor of ice cream, or a category of food. I'm saying people should have food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life, because they're people, and by virtue of being people in a world with so much more than it needs, that they should be provided for. Why? Because we can. Because it hurts no one. Because it helps immense quantities of people who are in dire need.
And, additionally, if you are indeed not moved by the notion of "people should live, that's better than if they die" then I can give you an absolute TROVE of selfish reasons too!
* Reduced need and therefore cost of emergency services; houseless people make a disproportionate use of ambulances and ER services, and are uniquely unable to pay for them (not that anyone should pay for healthcare either but that's our world currently)
* Substantially lower costs for the penal and legal systems: houseless people commit a lot of crime, since their very existence in many places is a crime, and alongside that they suffer from chronic lack of resources. Giving them resources keeps them out of jails and lets police solve actual problems, not just harass people who have no options.
* Higher workforce participation: A whole ton of unhoused folks would love NOTHING MORE than to get jobs and improve their situation, something that is borne out by many UBI studies, because, plot twist, being houseless also makes it quite a lot harder to find work, even if you're skilled in an in-demand profession. And, in the odd event you do get work, it's harder to attend to that job to earn money because it's very hard to get ready for work on the corner of Sixth and Delton Ave.
* And, greater economic activity. Houseless people naturally consume far, far less goods and services than housed people and even if they do want them, they lack the ability to buy them. Giving them an even temporary living situation lets them establish themselves and become productive members of society.
And all of these points will also apply in varying degrees to everyone from destitute street-bound folks up through everyone who is living check to check. The fact of the matter is that poor people cost our society money, and a LOT of it at that, but currently that money doesn't go to those people to help them; it goes to the poverty industrial complex and makes a handful of people a LOT of money. I am merely proposing instead of doing that, we just give it to the fucking people who need it and then call it a day.
1. Keyword: "your". Your version of empathy is not scalable. It's literally, "my way or the highway," and a bunch of grandstanding on things pretty much everyone agrees on, but you must be evil and not if you don't agree with my more radical proposals.
2. I consider "I don't want to die, thus I shouldn't kill others," to have more of a Kantian/evolutionary genesis than an empathetic one. For the most part, all the people that failed to recognize this were killed off and weren't allowed to enter into the Kingdom of Ends. Unless you're talking about emotivism, I don't see how empathy has anything to do with morality/society, except as a quick symmetry trick to help you make smarter decisions (while you could logically deduce that the rational response to a member of your group being killed is to punish the killer to prevent more killings, if you just assume symmetry, then things that are bad for you are bad for others, and taking those actions will get you punished).
3. 5% as many people die from starvation or exposure as suicide in the United States (that's 1–2,000/year). If people want food, or want shelter, they can find it (99.8% of homeless people do), even if it's not the particular food or shelter they want. What do you actually want? "Food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life" are available. Almost no one is arguing that we should let people just die. It really sounds like you're arguing for a flavor of ice cream, but you don't even know what flavor that is.
I feel like you're quoting me, but not reading what I said.
> > I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic
> I mean it's less an accusation of being unempathetic and more just an observation of the facts on the ground, isn't it?
> > When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy
Are these "facts" actually grounded, or are you just doing a POV play? Like if I said, "everyone deserves chocolate ice cream", and you said "wow, how unempathetic, don't you care about everyone getting vanilla?" You talk about things not being scalable for society; well guess what, your version of empathy is one of them. Not everyone is going to care about the same causes as you, and attacking people for that will not convince them you actually care about them. What will is if you tell them why they're better off funding your pet project.
Please cut out swipes and fulmination like this in comments. It's clearly against the guidelines, and we've asked you before to avoid using HN for ideological battle.
If we could get rid of social security, Medicaid, food stamps, and all forms of welfare, and replace them all with a UBI equally given to every citizen, the trade off might make something as inherently idiotic as UBI worth it.
You can’t replace Medicaid with UBI unless you also change the entire health care system to be single-payer, because people will still have random medical problems which need a million dollars (or whatever) worth of treatment. For the rest of it I agree, but I think you’re overestimating how much we spend on all those programs— they don’t even come close to what a reasonable UBI would cost. UBI would require a huge change to how taxation/spending works no matter how it’s implemented.
Honestly I think UBI would be awful. And what I really mean is take the sum amount of all welfare we spend today divide by the number of citizens and give every citizen that much. Would hardly be enough still. The only people who should be in favor of it though is the billionaire aristocrats.
It would effectively take the entire middle class and make them serfs.
It would be the quickest way to bring back a feudal type system with a few people at the top and everyone else pretty much poor.
Sure they’d make sure we have enough to eat and clothe ourselves, but even the slave owners of old did that.
Just look at the experiment in 2020-2021 where we gave everyone even more free money, the result we saw companies go from less than a trillion market cap to over three trillion while wages went up maybe 25%
Why not guaranteed employment, not UBI. Subsidize minimum wage jobs that produce social good without being soul-crushing. (Raise the minimum wage while you’re at it).
How do you provide minimum wage jobs that are not soul-crushing, without destroying the private sector soul-crushing minimum wage jobs?
How do you even find productive jobs people would want to do (or at least find tolerable) that no-one in the private sector was willing to pay minimum wage to get done?
How do you provide jobs to a wide range of contextual needs, from ages 16 to 65, office workers to labourers, physical and mental impairment, neurodivergence, ability to travel, etc? How do you fund the administrative burden of matching jobs to people?
What do you do for the people who still cannot work for various reasons - total disability, caring for another, etc. You still need provide a wide gamut of social welfare programs for different needs and circumstances, with its concomitant bureaucratic cost and inefficiency - or let people starve, or give them "jobs" that have no productive output, just performative burdens.
What's the actual upside of guaranteed employment programs over a UBI?
Why not strengthen need based assistance? Why give everyone $X/mo when you could give just those who need it the money? Why not strengthen programs like SNAP or affordable housing programs? UBI solves the issue of changing requirements and confusing/embarrassing applications, but I'm not sure it's better overall.
> Why not strengthen need based assistance? Why give everyone $X/mo when you could give just those who need it the money? Why not strengthen programs like SNAP or affordable housing programs?
Because those are vastly less efficient, create traps where people can't afford to increase their income, and ultimately divide the population and tend to get dismantled.
ubi is inherently cheaper because it's significantly simpler, means testing programs are expensive to operate and are often slow and needlessly bureaucratic
I have serious trouble believing UBI provides enough to solve the poorest peoples problems without needlessly costing a huge amount funding well off peoples hobbies.
You'll still need affordable housing, you'll still need food programs, etc. I don't see how you save on cutting those programs.
it would be nice if people had this same level of concern for the people already hoarding wealth, the guy buying more warhammer minis with ubi isn't the problem
We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. Sure, they may volunteer a few hours a month here and there, but their productivity plummets compared to the previous year when they didn't collect that pension. I don't blame them one bit -- it's exactly the same thing I did once I retired.
So what happens as we lower the age at which they receive a pension? Different countries and companies have sometimes offered pensions to some of their senior workers to reduce their workforce -- the results were the same. Most people stop working as soon as they have a lifetime guaranteed income that allows them to afford life's essentials, even if they are in their forties.
A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.
In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
> But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
I’d like to emphasize “grinding” here. For many it’s a grind in the truest sense, involving decades of backbreaking physical work. For others it’s immense stress to keep a roof over their family’s head no matter what. By the time retirement rolls around practically everybody has been burned out to some degree but had to power through regardless simply because quitting wasn’t an option.
Yeah, under conditions like that, people are indeed going to stop working the very second they’re no longer required to in order to survive. Things like UBI, 4-day work weeks, remote work, and fair compensation would all improve that situation measurably.
I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
> Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.
So so so disheartening...
This is by design. The USA pairing healthcare to your job was on purpose.
Technically it was because businesses were banned from raising wages during WW2 but benefits were exempt.
War bonds, rationing and other measures long since abandoned were introduced then too. How weird would it be if everyone were still limited to 8oz of sugar per month in 2025 due to the exigencies of WW2? It's no less weird when it comes to healthcare being linked to remuneration. Heck, there are better free market approaches not adopted by the US, since its usually horny for that sort of thing, right up until it's pro-labor I guess.
Healthcare wouldn't be nearly as much of the issue it is if it weren't for healthcare administration and the cap on MDs. The private vs public debate becomes way less interesting when the cost drops 90%. Getting rid of that problem should really be everyone's focus.
Boom!
Just anecdata.
I stopped when I was 55 (didn't have a choice, actually). Fortunately, I had saved wisely, and lived frugally, so I was able to stop working (which was good, because no one wanted me, anyway).
I actually get more done, every day (like, seven days a week), than I did when getting paid.
ToMAYto, ToMAHto...
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
> That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
It feels like everyone that has an anti-UBI position has access to a lot of research that no one else can see - or they're just unwilling to read or accept the results of every study / bit of research actually done on the topic.
There isn't research done on UBI.
Either it is never universal, and / or participants know that it isn't going to last long (limited duration study) so they have different motivations than someone who will actually receive UBI.
Every study basically has the same (obvious and not useful) conclusion: people like getting money. Any conclusion beyond that (specific to UBI) isn't supported.
I know a universal one.
One is Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Look at their gini index among all 50 states since the fund launched.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pop4.398
And the conclusions are similar. Better health. Lower inequality
The other is Manitoba’s MINCOME experiment, they randomly selected people — it was doing very well but somehow the powers that be pulled the plug: https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment
Alaska's Permanent Fund dividend paid $1,702 last year (for the whole year, not monthly). How is that small amount changing people's lives?
It certainly qualifies for a rather interesting definition of "basic"
Every person’s story is different. People are resourceful.
If $150 a month can make people’s lives better, in a state that doen’t issue its own currency, imagine what phasing in a UBI for everyone in USA can do, gradually and increasing. And that’s the point.
USA will have to print money anyway to service their sovereign debt. So may as well give it out as a UBI over 40 years first, then tax it and pay the treasury holders. Think about it!
I think the issue is that it'd be really hard to test experimentally. Basically you'd have to give a select group of people UBI for life and do a 40+ year long longitudinal study.
You are underestimating the human desire to be useful.
Do you have data to back this up?
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I agree with your viewpoint, but this response is dismissive and doesn’t sincerely engage in the discussion. It does a disservice to your argument.
The answer to the question you asked is the article these comments are attached to.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I didn’t ask a question on this topic
So just so I'm clear: because some people, somewhere, will take UBI and blow it on college beer parties, which definitely won't happen otherwise, but because of that, every person who doesn't grow up at least semi-privileged gets the on-ramp directly onto the lifetime debt treadmill?
they're just parroting the "welfare queen" myth.
>In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences.
In your 20s it might also unlock travel and adventure.
The current proposals and tests are not about that kind of money. It is in the word 'basic': you can buy food and and a small room, not 'travel and adventure'.
> Some of them can't even figure out how to spend SNAP, because there's no refrigator or pantry in the stairwell they sleep in! I had a friend who insisted on spending 100% SNAP on 100% fresh beef. He literally wouldn't eat anything else. Jeez.
Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.
Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.
If you can buy food and a small room, you can buy food and petrol for your van. If you already own a bike, a biking holiday can now be your permanent lifestyle.
Sure, those people exist, that is fine. Some people do that now and far beyond their 20s: just hitch/bike/van around and do the odd job for a few days and live off that the rest of the time. There are communities where I live who allow anyone to come in and clean and cook together so you can stay and eat for $0. That is without basic income so it will happen with too. Thats a tiny minority. Most will get bored, loney, fed up etc if they even 'dare' to start such a life.
Also, how is it bad to have such people? These are the people who go on to write interesting books or bring a different perspective to society than the one in which everyone lives the same life.
Indeed. No problem.
Ok, but thats "travel and adventure". Travel and adventure are demonstrably available to people who arent rich.
"Tiny Minority" until you no longer need a job to maintain the lifestyle. A non zero amount of people will go from not traveling, to traveling.
This is neither a criticism nor endorsement of UBI. Its just an observation.
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Or prices will just rise.
Not UBI but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI) shows (claims) rent always rises to suck up available money. Why? Not because landlords are evil, no, because once people have more money many of them want a nicer place. There are a limited number of nicer places so the prices rise since all these new people with a little more money bid up what they're willing to pay.
The same will be true of UBI and anything you think it enables. There are limited number of planes, boats, hotels, hostels so the moment everyone can do it is the moment there's more demand than supply and prices will go up.
The larger point is that it's not about if you get UBI. It's about if everyone gets UBI
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences.
I think it is really common for retiree risk takers to swing for the fences in their 60's.
Their time is freed up and often lump sums become available: retirees often feel they need to make money to live well in retirement. I'm sure you can think of cliched coffee shop entrepreneurs, restaurant owners, franchise purchasers and investment property purchasers.
The reason it's such a well known cliche is because of how often they get burnt (due to poor understanding of risks) and many lose their homes.
I really notice it because I'm nearer retirement than 20 (they're not my peers but my acquaintances span a wide range of age and money demographics).
>> There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.
No, it's the difference between getting a pension (a guaranteed income for the rest of your life) and a second job's salary without working it. Basically the "basic income" experiments create Reddit r/overemployed participants without even having to work the additional job.
> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ...
This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.
That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.
Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.
The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).
> Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire.
Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
Most my friends and myself could retire after the 90s Internet boom: we all sold. Most before 30. No one did as its boring. Travelling gets boring: everything I see rich people typically do I still find boring now in my 50s and I could've done all of that for the past 25+ years. I am quite sure I will never stop working and this seems the same for my friend group. I am not saying life satisfaction comes from work necessarily, but at least the people I call friends have a drive to produce things and feel validation and satisfaction from that: in the west that validation is usually money and recognition from peers and large groups of strangers.
But yeah, I guess many people dont want to work because their options for work suck. It is not that many of those their contribution is not basically 0 or negative now as it is and with robots/ai coming in the coming 50 years, I rather have them living a human life with social housing, free playstations and basic income instead of slaving away at something useless just because of some weird idea that any work is better than no work to spend their short life on.
> Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same.
You do get that's anecdotal, right?
And that a basic income will mean you don't die from starvation, but won't give you the kind of comfortable lifestyle that you and a few of your ex-coworkers presumably scored from some happenstance in your employment arc, right?
And that there's lots of research about how 'most people' do not in fact stop working, at least within the confines of the trials done, right?
> I basically retired at 40.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess your monthly spending exceeds $10-20k and is probably well north of $100k.
Wrong by a large factor. We have a very modest lifestyle.
People usually voluntarily retire when they have the resources to maintain their lifestyle. Basic income wouldn’t be nearly as much as a pension, so that wouldn’t really apply. And taking a pension means you have to quit, whereas a basic income pays you even if you keep working. The comparison really doesn’t seem to work.
Pascal's scam! Oh no, what if the world explodes! We can't risk it!
If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.
15: GTS 8800 25: GTX 1080 35: RTX 8090
I suspect when I'm 45, $10,000 won't get nvidias flagship card, so I'll let you know about that one when I get there
Elderly population not working is _hardly_ the equivalent of UBI. Besides; in most developed countries you are actually _penalized_ for working while retired; and furthermore most elderly people on pension tend to still do work such as handling childcare for grand kids.
> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions.
These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.
Except…people retire so they can stop working? Or they retire because they can no longer physically or mentally work.
> And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working.
oh well that's cuz they're retired.
False equivalence. People stop working during retirement because it is the very cultural expectation to not work.
There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate
Maybe they can stop working because of cultural allowance.
Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it.
Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.
The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.
Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death.
Gee why would they stop working, you think?
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
> Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67
Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.
"We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators."
Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?
> Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.
Someone is paying scrum master and social media coordinators now. I doubt that they’re being paid because their employers hate money.
They're being paid because of the principal-agent problem, the inefficiency of large bureaucracies and the Red Queen's race created by the attention economy.
Work expands to fill all available time. Make less time available and there will be more pressure to stop doing useless work.
Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.
Nurses deserve more money than we can give them but their salaries are around $100K and Hospital Margins are 5%. So yea, UBI-style, the government pretty much just has to print the money to hand to the nurses to get them more money.
I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly.
It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of.
But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset.
In fact, pension funds invest in businesses.
Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund.
Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation.
What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for.
At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned.
When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary.
For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"?
Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"?
We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule.
Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves.
Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair.
In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions.
"Productivity". Give us a break.
Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own.
Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes?
>And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum.
Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle.
Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing?
Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system?
The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will.
Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles.
If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is.
And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners.
If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business.
When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job.
I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool.
But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable.
The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work".
If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system".
Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split.
When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism.
When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.
> I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
What causes you to believe that a transfer payment would be inflationary? Some high-paid partner at a law firm has less money, some low-paid teacher has more money, net amount of money everybody has in total hasn't changed.
The teacher is likely to spend a higher proportion of the money given to them on consumption than the law partner who paid for it.
This is the positive intention of UBI, but I cannot understand how people think “some people are so low paid that they don’t save or invest while others are able to accumulate large nest eggs” doesn’t imply that it we shift money from the latter to the former that we won’t see an increase in the consumption that will exceed the increase in production.
That's conflating investment with production.
Here's a fun example: Suppose the investor was buying condos and speculating on real estate prices without renting them out. If you transfer money from the investor to the spender, the spender uses it to buy a condo for consumption because they want to live in it. The amount of production hasn't changed at all and the amount of consumption has increased by converting waste (a vacancy) into use/consumption.
Or suppose if you give someone more money they'll use it to buy a new phone. Then more phones have to be produced -- but the vast majority of the production cost of a phone is from amortizing the fixed costs of the R&D and buying the manufacturing equipment etc. The incremental cost of making another phone when those are all sunk costs is tiny. Meanwhile the gross profit from those additional purchases goes to the seller which they can use in lieu of investment to cover the incremental increase in the cost of production. It can even make the average price of the phone go down by allowing the fixed costs to be amortized over more units.
There are a lot of brainstormable scenarios about how an increase in spending on consumption would make society more productive without causing inflation. I think a lot of those fall into fanciful or wishful thinking, but the way to know what happens is to craft and execute experiments to learn about people's actual behavior and extrapolate only as we must rather than positing scenarios and arguing without data.
// most people as soon as they are eligible...stop working...//
Is that true?
I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-)
Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.
I realize UBI has been a popular topic on HN, answer me this...
UBI, if implemented, would move O($10T/year) around the economy.
We've seen a lot of small scale studies, which basically boil down to giving people money == life improvements. However, I do not see how a small scale study could possibly answer the open macro questions, like inflationary collapse (e.g. increased velocity without direct economic output), even if the whole "will people work anymore" question is moot.
Without answering those questions, it would be a USSR scale experiment, which is incredibly dangerous. Improving peoples lives would be great, but I cannot see how one could be an advocate for UBI without having solid answers to those questions.
Two points:
(1) You are correct that you cannot test UBI in a petri dish. It has to be all or nothing to see the REAL effects.
(2) If you rework UBI to be a negative income tax and remove all of government subsidies and handouts then it would have much less potential for disastrous economic impact (see Milton Friedman[0])
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
I see being an advocate for UBI as advocating for solid answers to those questions.
I would also point out that there's a difference between a full UBI, a modest partial UBI, and the kind of "basic income" that's not universal and goes away at a rate of 50c on the dollar when you earn more, like in this study. You can't slowly roll out a full UBI, but that's definitely possible for a partial UBI or a means-tested cash payment. You can dial the amount down as far as you want and still study the impact.
"inflationary collapse" seems contradictory. I think hyperinflation is a more correct term.
> (e.g. increased velocity without direct economic output)
Transfer payments don't really increase the velocity of money because they're not associated with any direct economic output.
If Alice has $100,000 to spend and Carol has $25,000 to spend, there is $125,000 in actual spending, i.e. demand for something that has to be produced. If you then do a transfer payment of $10,000 from Alice to Carol then Alice is spending $90,000 and Carol is spending $35,000, it's still the same $125,000.
Maybe they'll buy different stuff, maybe one would be more likely to buy business investments and the other would be more likely to buy college tuition, but that has no more likelihood to cause problems than if Carol got a raise and Alice had to pay for it.
If Alice has $100,000 to spend and Carol has $25,000 to spend it's much more likely that Alice will save a bunch of money instead of spending it.
Giving poor people money is much more likely to be spent at all than when you let overly rich people keep it.
What do you expect to happen to money which is "saved"? They're not stuffing it in a mattress. Some business gets it and then spends it to buy inventory or do construction or whatever it is their business does. If it was actually stuffed in a mattress forever at scale then the government would have to contemporaneously print that amount of new money to prevent deflation from the contraction of the circulating money supply, and then somebody would be spending that.
It's a proposed solution to mass unemployment scenarios.
If the government wanted to give people money right now, it would just lower income taxes.
If you have a better solution to mass unemployment, feel free to share it with the rest of us.
How about... greater benefits to people who are unemployed? I mean, UBI is inherently a poor policy for "mass unemployment scenarios", because there is no feasible scenario in which the majority of people are unemployed. To give UBI to people making around the median wage or higher because there is mass unemployment due to automation that doesn't affect them doesn't seem like a good use of money at all.
"there is no feasible scenario in which the majority of people are unemployed"
Try not to ever forget you said this, you'll find it hilarious in the future.
The value of typical human labor never stops falling, while the costs of employment never stop rising. Something's going to give, and it's not going to be the profits.
why not do it gradually by expanding regional pilot programs, you can't answer these questions without doing it
We already have UBI....as long as you are over 65 :-) In addition, I suppose you would agree that children should be guaranteed to have a home and 3 square meals.
So already something like half of our lives are covered by some kind of UBI. 20 years to mature, 20 years of retirement, sandwiching a 30-40 year career.
Don't forget, UBI would replace everything else. Food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, etc etc. And literally SQUARE MILES of office building staffing bureaucrats who do means testing, fraud prevention, etc etc for government benefits would also not be required.
If you put together all of the money we spend for all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if 90%, or even 100% of the cost of a UBI could be covered.
> If you put together all of the money we spend for all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if 90%, or even 100% of the cost of a UBI could be covered.
Administrative overhead is nowhere near as high as you estimate.
SNAP covers ~12% of the population with 5% overhead costs.
Medicaid covers ~20% of the population with 5-10% overhead.
Social security covers ~20% of the population with <1% overhead.
The extra spending to make benefits universal is an order of magnitude higher than any savings from eliminating bureaucracy.
You're measuring the cost to the government, not the cost to the public. How much time do people waste filling out eligibility forms? What's the economic cost of wastefully converting fungible money into non-fungible requirements to buy specific goods and services?
Meanwhile the "extra spending" isn't real because the benefits, being universal, are going to many of the same people paying for them, and therefore simply cancel out. The purpose of making them universal is the simplification: It's simpler -- and therefore harder to cheat -- to have a UBI and a uniform tax rate than to have a benefits phase out that effectively cancels out the lower rates on lower income people in the existing tax code. Or worse, creates marginal rate cliffs and highly irregular rates because overlapping benefits phase outs interact with each other in random and perverse ways.
You are quite correct that the overhead of most government programs is relatively very small.
But look at your numbers....12% of the population on SNAP, 20% of the population on Medicaid, etc etc.
What would it really cost us to just pay the equivalent cash to everybody, and then raise the taxes to offset the costs on people who don't need it?
We are already paying for--piecemeal and very inconveniently to be sure--much of what we'd want a UBI to give us. It probably would cost us more in taxes than what we are paying for now, but it wouldn't be an apocalyptic increase. The delta of spending is not as big as what one would initially think.
Well, many people are on all the programs, and 2/3rds of Americans get no government assistance.
Thus, any UBI that doesn't cut the poorest people's benefits would cost 3x the current amount.
I don't think a 200% tax hike would be very popular.
I'd trade a 200% tax hike for a guaranteed $3k a month.
I have a hard time seeing how UBI would be fundamentally different than what exists on American Indian reservations. Is that the model that people are envisioning?
Are you serious? Reservations are employment deserts with little to no opportunity to do much. That, paired with generations of societal genocide, means reservations are not a good test for what can be done elsewhere.
That comparison is absolutely wild.
I heavily edited my comment (a sibling to your comment) to tone down the snark. But I agree - this may land in my top 10 most insane hacker news comments that I've ever read.
There was quite a bit of displacement, subjugation and genocide of entire peoples that precipitated any handouts they did receive. It is possible that that influenced outcomes.
>The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.
1/4 of the people stopped working?? That is a huge effect, particularly since it was a short duration experiment. Unfortunately this is also seen in other experiments with basic income. The economist Noah Smith blogged about a large randomized basic income study done in the US where participants received about $1,000 a month for three years:
>...Just $1000 a month made 2% of people stop working! That’s a very large negative effect. It contradicts the results of earlier studies showing little or no effect of unconditional cash benefits on employment. And worst of all, the basic income recipients didn’t seem to transfer to better jobs or go back to school — two of the most powerful arguments for basic income. Instead, people just sat around at home.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-thin...
Don't forget to compare that to the number of people who exit the job market without UBI.
Given the chance, many people will quit working. That isn't surprising. Acting like this is UBI's fault is kind of weird.
> Acting like this is UBI's fault is kind of weird.
As Noah Smith wrote:
>...Now, increased leisure time isn’t zero benefit — obviously it’s nice to be able to sit around and do nothing and live off of government cash for a little while. But it represents a steep tradeoff — programs like this are already very expensive in fiscal terms, and if they make people work less, that only adds to the total economic cost. If leisure time is all we’re getting for all of that money and lost output, it’s highly questionable whether the intervention is worth it.
Not to butt in, but 2% sounds like a good trade to me. You gotta think about every possible cumulative benefit everyone experiences by having 1k more a month. Imagine the lost stress, the increased nutrition, the increased education, the skills explored and practiced that couldn’t be before, etc. If the trade is that 2% of people sit around and economic output drops as much, why shouldn’t that be a net positive for society?
>...2% sounds like a good trade to me.
What exactly is the trade here? In a trade, both sides are supposed to be better off.
As the link says:
>...But if it’s confirmed that basic income discourages work and provides little long-term career benefits, I think interest in the idea will wane rapidly.
For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it. You kept making for whole different reasons. You kept making, kept doing.
The only thing that stops is tolerance of actual garbage bosses, abusive companies and saying “yes” to decisions that require you to be immoral.
> For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it.
I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.
Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.
You quit working in the conventional, modern, hierarchical contract employment system - a very tight and specific definition of "work".
But I'd be very surprised if you didn't still spend a goodly proportion of your time beavering away at endeavours that were productive to yourself or others in your family and community.
The discussion is around sustainability: when people quit paid work they no longer contribute to the very tax base that is necessary to sustain a basic income.
Most UBI proposals I've heard of are the equivalent of $5.00-7.50 per hour wage. If what you imply were true - that upon achieving that level, people simply said "goal reached" and ceased to be further productive - then the USA median hourly wage would not be $22.
UBI could be funded in other ways than taxes. Instead we could collect rent from all commons added to the economy as private assets.
I retired when I thought I (barely) could financially. 57 years old is by no means young, but I have done better than my parents did in that regard.
(Although I might start substitute teaching this Fall ... maybe I didn't retire after all.)
Well, 25% stopped apparently. Which is somewhat telling.
If you gave me a $basicIncome raise I’d keep working; but I’d appreciate the cash.
If you guaranteed $basicIncome for life I’d restructure my life around that, and likely FIRE.
Aside from half of those who stopped working going back to school, there is a simple reason why a lot of people will stop for a while when universal income or a similar scheme first starts:
People are burned out. They are overworked. Over-stressed. Most of them were just hurled into careers by the system without much choice because they had to make a living. Most of them didnt even have time to think about their choices. A majority has spent decades struggling for survival amidst financial insecurity. When universal income starts for the first time, all of these people will stop for a while and start revising their lives. Something which they needed to do way before, but were not allowed by the system. Its natural.
When they get over the burnout and do their reflection, they will go active again. We see this in the case of the privileged minority who are able to retire early or take sabbaticals. They rest and do random stuff for a while, then they go back to doing something they want to do. Especially in tech, that has been the case.
People dont like staying idle for long.
> Well, 25% stopped apparently. Which is somewhat telling.
The report also says that half of those who stopped working went back to school! So that's no more than 13% who really became "idle". And there are also questions we should ask about that group, like their age composition, for instance. If of the 13% that quit working without returning to education or training, many of them were older people, wouldn't that meaningfully change the picture as well?
I bet you wouldn't, at least not until your 70s. Here's my anecdote-based argument to the contrary: every single recent retiree I know (having $basicIncome as a pension) has taken 6-12 months off work and then started working again (where they are physically capable of doing so). The reasons vary from necessity, boredom or wanting to feel "useful". This seems to drop off sharply the mid-70s. I'm not saying that working is hardwired in humans, but it seems to be a strong part of our sense of self-worth.
What would you do in your retirement? Loaf? Volunteer? Make art?
Two of those are “work”
There are plenty of ways to volunteer or do art that are indistinguishable from loafing. Even if you work hard at volunteering or art, if the result isn't useful to others, at some point we will start wondering who is going to grow food and do plumbing while everyone is volunteering & arting.
presumably people who don't like volunteering and arting, and do like working with their hands on concrete problems that directly affect peoples lives
You think there would be lots of volunteer garbage collectors?
...pay them to do it? gp said "plumbing" not "the worst jobs we couldn't get people to do for free."
So basically we are going to pay people to not work, and then pay them even more to still work.
do you have some kind of evidence that enacting a ubi, which comes with absolutely no condition of "not working," will stop a majority of people from taking paid work and making more money? Do we need 100% of the population to work in order to fill vital positions? I don't think so.
Yeah, the article we are commenting on + most comments here are the evidence
The article said 3/4 of people kept working, a significant portion of the 1/4 went back to school, and a hell of a a lot of people are in this comment section saying they would never stop working even with UBI.
Exactly. Instead of a floor of $0 and you earn more than that by working, you have a floor of $1,000/month or whatever, and you earn more than that by working. The idea is to provide a cushion, not replace wages.
He's do the only thing we're definitely here to do. Live.
That's because the kinds of people who make those huge amounts of money usually have that ambition and lack of satisfaction. But what about the parts of society that aren't go-getting yuppie strivers? There is a vast majority of people who never consider grinding leetcode to get a job at Jane Street so that they can later pivot to B2B SAAS for timeseries data.
Honestly, I think you think too little of people. A *lot* of people love to invent, create, explore, dream, participate and so on. I would argue the vast, vast majority.
People I know grow crops, make food, paint, draw, build worlds, write stories, create programs and so on. And these are people from every area in life.
I don't deny that people love to do creative things like that. But society can't survive off creatives and gardeners and the other fun things. Those activities are nice for the people who do them but they don't help support the rest of the population - we need truckers, aged care workers, farmers, cashiers.
> aged care workers
Just picking out this one out of curiosity, not arguing the broader point.
In a world where people have more freedom on what to spend their energy and time on I would expect some things to return to the realm of unpaid labour. Child care, mentoring, care for the elder, local community contributions. Probably not replacing the demand entirely, but surely some shifts in supply and demand would be observed.
There's a segment of the population who are vehemently against the idea of undeserving/lazy/the wrong people receiving any kind of welfare benefit, and the concept of UBI really, really triggers that segment. To the point where rational analysis goes straight out the window.
I'm quite certain that all the same arguments were had about every kind of retirement or disability pension everywhere. Many of our societies are producing an enormous amount of resources surplus to our basic needs, often distributed very unevenly. Putting some of that surplus towards ensuring all members are at least housed and fed would not be a bad thing.
Time-boxed UBI experiments don't represent how people would behave if they had the benefits for life. That's not throwing rational analysis out the window. If anything, trying to extrapolate the results of a UBI pilot that didn't last 3 years is playing fast and loose with rationality.
Disabled people receive benefits because their ability to work is impeded by their disability and thus those programs don't have the same potential to disincentive work among the disabled population.
Retirement benefits do diminish older people's labor participation rates. That's the intended purpose of retirement programs. Society agrees that at a certain age people should ideally be able to relax and not work if they don't want to. Why do people protest when countries raise their retirement age? Because people don't want to have to work in their 70s or late 60s. Some do (my dad kept consulting for the fun of it), but they're probably in the minority.
You're talking about the "welfare queen" myth. The idea that given any sort of welfare, a large percentage of the population will exploit that welfare and quit being productive.
> ensuring all members are at least housed and fed would not be a bad thing.
Not sure about your country, but normally those cases are covered by social security and welfare, it doesn't require helicopter money.
I dunno this seems like a not great program and a not great study.
> Its findings are the result of a 70-question, anonymous online survey made available to basic income recipients in Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. A total of 217 former recipients participated, according to the report.
> Forty in-depth interviews with participants were also completed in July 2019.
> The project worked by recruiting low-income people and couples, offering them a fixed payment with no strings attached that worked out to approximately $17,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples.
Earlier it mentions the program had 4k participants. So 4k participants -> 217 survey respondents -> 40 interviews. We don't know to what degree there was a selection bias in who decided to respond or was available to interview. Not great in terms of the data the study generated.
> Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their basic income at 50 per cent, meaning once someone hit $34,000 they wouldn't receive a payment anymore, Lewchuk explained while speaking with As It Happens.
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
And the program told people up front that it was temporary, and that the marginal benefit of their own work or income would be substantially reduced. If your earning power already wasn't great (which qualifies you for the program) and now your effective wage per hour worked is functionally reduced ... it's kinda shocking that most of them kept working! If the program wanted to keep people working, it wouldn't take away funds from them as they earn.
Some thoughts:
- It says that 3/4 of people kept working; to me, that seems like a big drop.
- Data is based on a survey of people in the program; I distrust data from surveys on principle.
- There seems to have been a reduction in the payment as they earned money, so its not really UBI as typically advocated.
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
I believe previous UBI experiments have shown the same results: most people keep working, some people stop, but they usually have decent reasons. Education, extending parental leave, or being a caregiver aren't necessarily things we want to discourage if they result in a greater return.
> if they result in a greater return.
Greater return than what and to whom?
We already have existing labor markets that are very capable of determining returns.
> Greater return than what and to whom?
Greater return for the government paying for a UBI, compared to not paying for a UBI.
> We already have existing labor markets that are very capable of determining returns.
I'm not sure I understand how "existing labour markets" are going to solve the three things I listed: education, caregiving, and parents taking time off to look after their kids.
The issue of parents being absent is that it results in negative externalities: crime rate, an alienated society, low literacy rates. The existing labour market is great at placing parents into a job efficiently, but it has absolutely nothing to do with keeping their kids out of prison. Nor should it, really, because externalities are a government-level coordination problem.
When it comes to education, the issue is again a coordination problem. Companies might do some training, but they generally prefer to foist the risk off onto employees, other companies, and governments by hiring people who are already educated. Again, this is a coordination problem, because any individual company that skips training and just hires educated workers directly will be more efficient, but those educated workers have to come from somewhere.
I will concede that it's more efficient not to take care of the elderly. I question whether it is desirable, however.
those labour markets are in shambles atm for most people who aren't upper middle class
This is a 2020 news article and should have the (2020) tag added.
The study has also been picked apart for the methodology issues and the enormous amount of spin applied to the results. From what I recall, the link to the results didn’t lead to an academic paper, it led to something more like a pamphlet or advertisement with a lot of graphic design, dozens of pages, and lots of spin.
Even this news article shows the amount of spin happening. Read this section and think about what it really means:
> The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income
In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.
The better studies have included a control group that gets a nominal payment but much less than the basic income checks. Something like $50 or $100 per month to fill out the same questionnaire. Giving a single group some checks for a short period of time without any control group doesn’t tell you much.
The entire world of UBI studies is wild. Every time I read the actual data I come away with a completely different interpretation than the news articles and graphic design heavy reports that are produced by the UBI proponents.
> In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.
Half of those people stopped working so that they could go to school.
I'd also expect an even better result if working did not cancel out the UBI.
I tend to see:
"New UBI study is designed to demonstrate that productivity will increase with payments"
and then after the results are released.
"UBI study confirms that participants were happier and healthier on a UBI"
> The entire world of UBI studies is wild.
Are you counting this study in that world, given that it wasn't a UBI study? It was intended to be a continuation of the Manitoban study from the 1970s, which wasn't modelled as UBI either.
My bad, added the year to the title.
is "kept working" the point of ubi? is that how were measuring its success?
It’s one measure of the impact of UBI and is particularly important if you want to support the “UBI makes society more productive and prosperous” argument that some proponents make.
I'm sure there is already much discussion about this, but I feel like basic income pilots will never show the true impact. Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years. Especially when this pilot is cancelled and now people won't trust that future ones will last even for the few years specified.
Sure, but let’s remember that “working” is not the end-all, be-all of human existence. Some will stop working and care for an aging parent. Some will stop working and raise children. Some will stop working and make art. We have the opportunity to maximize human flourishing. Let’s not mistake where we’ve been for where we’re going.
Many will simply stop working and simply rot
We saw plenty of it during COVID, people were off work and had basic income and such taken care of. They chose to just sit and do nothing
Some people started streaming or content creating or doing art at home or whatever
Most people just rotted. They sat and watched shows and movies and goofed around online
Assuming both people are obtaining the same level of enjoyment, why is goofing around online considered "rotting" compared with streaming and doing art at home? I'm not trying to knock hobbies, but I think being alive and content is its own reward, even if the person is lacking a résumé of daily achievements to rattle off at dinner parties.
It isn't just about having something to talk about at a dinner party. It is about doing something productive and worth-while. There is a massive feeling of accomplishment from doing some that is productive. Having something interesting to talk about is an additional benefit. A good portion of those people that were pro-active and learned to stream, turned it into a side income. I wish I had done that. I was desperately trying to find a job after being laid off.
You get none of these benefits from watching Netflix on the sofa. In fact it is likely to make you miserable. A lot of people were negatively affected over COVID. A lot of people regressed into a shell and had a form of depression. I spoke to people mid lockdowns who were working from home and were saying "If I can't go out and enjoy myself, there is no point in earning this money".
I don't consider myself shy, but I find interacting in person now a lot more stressful than I did before COVID lockdowns.
There were other problems during COVID. A lot of people increased intake of booze. I am glad I had given up drinking the year before (I was an alcoholic) because I worry about what I would have been like. There was an increase in domestic violence in the UK (probably related to the increase in alcohol consumption). I am sure there are other issues I had forgotten about.
> productive and worth-while.
Productive, as defined by... the people who compile labor statistics, or what? Worthwhile, as defined by... the people who dominate the current cultural narrative?
Everyone who ever invented or discovered anything was engaged in "unproductive" activity.
Any normal adult understands the difference.
> Everyone who ever invented or discovered anything was engaged in "unproductive" activity.
Actually no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference
The main drawback to binging Netflix isn't anything silly like a lack of production...it's the lack of activity. That's what makes people sick.
this doesn't sound like a ubi problem to me.
For one, during Covid, most people were encouraged, if not required by law, to limit their interactions, and some were literally not allowed to leave the house. For years.
Secondly, just because UBI gives people leave to sit around at home, doesn't mean that binging Netflix or alcohol is somehow the fault of "not working."
I know many people whose life consists of working extremely hard, then going home and binging Netflix or alcohol or mairjuana until they pass out. Is that somehow better?
> this doesn't sound like a ubi problem to me.
I didn't say it was a UBI problem. I was specifically replying about the effect that it had on people at the time.
> For one, during Covid, most people were encouraged, if not required by law, to limit their interactions, and some were literally not allowed to leave the house. For years.
Yes I know. I was one of those people. I ended up just ignoring the laws BTW and doing what I wanted when I worked out that they couldn't effectively enforce them.
> Secondly, just because UBI gives people leave to sit around at home, doesn't mean that binging Netflix or alcohol is somehow the fault of "not working."
I never said it was. I was specifically talking about what happened during COVID.
> I know many people who's life consists of working extremely hard, then going home and binging Netflix or alcohol or mairjuana until they pass out. Is that somehow better?
Yes, it is.
1) While working you are productive (or at least perceived to be). So at least in theory, you are benefit on society.
2) When you have a substance abuse problem like I did. Your life revolves around it. If you don't have to go to work, I would typically start drinking after lunchtime. Work gave me a break from drinking. As I alluded to in my previous reply in this thread, I am glad gave up drinking at the start of 2019, as I would have had 9 months to drink all day.
Sounds like you have a substance abuse problem and you're afraid that others will make the same mistake you did.
Saying that people's lives are better because they benefit society through their labour, while suffering from untreated addiction (a truly horrible thing), is quite fatalistic, to me. The substance abuse is a totally different issue from "not working." There are a million things to do other than go to the office.
> Sounds like you have a substance abuse problem and you're afraid that others will make the same mistake you did.
I had a substance abuse problem. I have been sober now 7 years.
As for whether I am afraid others will do the same? Yes I am afraid others will make the same mistake that I did. That is why I am warning against it.
> Saying that people's lives are better because they benefit society through their labour, while suffering from untreated addiction (a truly horrible thing), is quite fatalistic, to me.
You asked me whether I thought it was better and I gave you two reasons why I believed it was better. I believe it is be a completely honest assessment based on my own experiences. If you have a critique that is objective of my position I am willing to listen to it, but moralising about how my assessment I am not interested in.
> The substance abuse is a totally different issue from "not working."
In theory yes, in reality no. One will exacerbates the other.
> There are a million things to do other than go to the office.
Sure there are. But unfortunately I have a mortgage and bills that need paying.
>Sure there are. But unfortunately I have a mortgage and bills that need paying.
Hence the UBI.
>In theory yes, in reality no. One will exacerbates the other.
Big big big assumption that doesn't match my reality very well. People who keep active, have a social life and are happy are at less risk for addiction. Not people who "have a job." Those are not the same things.
>You asked me whether I thought it was better and I gave you two reasons why I believed it was better. I believe it is be a completely honest assessment based on my own experiences. If you have a critique that is objective of my position I am willing to listen to it, but moralising about how my assessment I am not interested in.
It is not "better" for people to go to work day in and day out as a way of paying back society while slowly killing themselves with addiction. The better thing is to treat the addiction, not get them working.
> Hence the UBI.
Which requires someone else to work to pay for those things. I don't believe other people should pay my mortgage and bills. Those are my responsibility.
I chose to buy a house. I chose to buy a car. I chose the 1 gigabyte virgin media broadband package. Nobody forced me to choose them. Therefore it would be irresponsible and immoral to expect someone else to pay the bill.
> The better thing is to treat the addiction
This assumes that addiction is a disease and a not a choice. I firmly believe it is a choice. I choose to drink excessively in the first place. I made the choice to stop drinking. I chose to stay sober.
As for the rest of what you wrote. You really need to go back an re-read what I said. You asked me which is better between two scenarios. I stated that one was better than the other with a rationale.
You seem to be arguing something else entirely now. I am not sure really what you are arguing against. Certainly not statements I've made in this thread.
>Which requires someone else to work to pay for those things. I don't believe other people should pay my mortgage and bills. Those are my responsibility.
Then you've made the choice to not pursue other things that will make you happier than "working." Yet my point initially was that working is not anywhere close to the only way that people can stay active and away from "rotting."
No one is saying a UBI needs to pay for a 3 story house and 1 GB internet. If you want more than the basics, you know what to do...work!
>This assumes that addiction is a disease and a not a choice.
No, this assumes that many people will need help quitting an addiction.
>You asked me which is better between two scenarios.
Both scenarios are grim and best avoided. The better solution is to help solve the problem, not to act like work is a cure-all, or that a marginal improvement in the form of societal contribution (or "max time away from drink") is sufficient. For many people, work is the reason they drink, or do drugs, or have anger issues. A proper UBI helps people maintain a healthy lifestyle without having to put themselves in a position where they are stressed and powerless for the rest of their working life.
> Then you've made the choice to not pursue other things that will make you happier than "working".
It not about being happier. You didn't read what I said. I said they were my responsibility. You fundamentally don't understand what I am trying to tell you.
> Yet my point initially was that working is not anywhere close to the only way that people can stay active and away from "rotting."
I never said it was. Like many replies of the replies I've had on my initial reply in this thread they have conflated doing something productive, with going to work. Going for a cycle is more productive than Netflix, learning crotchet is more productive than Netflix.
> No, this assumes that people will need help quitting an addiction.
If you don't wish people to misunderstand you, then you shouldn't use language that implies that you believe it to be a disease.
> Both scenarios are grim and best avoided. The better solution is to help solve the problem, not to act like work is a cure-all.
I never said work was a cure-all. You keep on adding things I never said.
You asked me what is better between two scenarios was. I gave you an answer which I thought was better between the two with a rationale.
> For many people, work is the reason they drink, or do drugs, or have anger issues.
No. That is one of the excuses they use to justify their poor choices. I know because I used the same justification.
The reason they have drink, drugs or anger issues is because they choose to.
> A proper UBI helps people maintain a healthy lifestyle without having to put themselves in a position where they are stressed and powerless for the rest of their working life.
So you proclaim. I believe the opposite is likely to happen in the long run. I know what the (negative) affects of welfare are in the UK and UBI IMO will make things worse.
Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive.
First off, a heck of a lot of those things that you are calling productive, are really just physical activity. Going for a bike ride is good for you, literally. The sense of achievement is just a side effect. If you had a pill that could replicate the effects of a 30 min bike ride, people would sit around eating those pills. And they'd be extremely healthy and happy.
Secondly, Covid was a time when people were culturally and legally obligated to stay inside and keep away from other people.
UBI does not come with those constraints. So no, it's not the same. People will not sit around watching Netflix at the rate they did during Covid. Because they are not compelled to stay inside the house at the risk of being deemed a menace to society.
I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.
Saying addiction requires treatment for many people does not imply it is a disease. Addiction treatment existed before the disease model and I don't think of it as a disease in the same way as cancer etc. So that's your own conflict that you're projecting onto me. Much of addiction treatment is treating emotions and rationales that addicts may not even be aware of anymore, sometimes purposefully, sometimes not.
>No. That is one of the excuses they use to justify their poor choices. I know because I used the same justification.
That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.
>which I thought was better between the two with a rationale.
I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.
> Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive
No it wasn't. I suggest you re-read it. I was talking about people generally. I actually didn't speak that much about my own experience. I actually talked about what generally happened over COVID in my original reply.
> I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.
Again you inserted things that I did not say. I never said I can't do other things. I don't live an expensive lifestyle. The only thing I said I need to go to work to pay the bills.
> That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.
No it isn't naive. It is literally what every recovered addict says. "You have to want to quit". Whether people should get help or not has nothing to do with the justifications of why they abuse substances.
> I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.
I don't think you do. You didn't even bother reading what I said properly. So I think we will leave it there.
> and some were literally not allowed to leave the house. For years.
Where did that happen?
> It is about doing something productive and worth-while.
Uh-huh. What percentage of software engineers jobs are "worthwhile"? Working on Amazon's nth hosted OSS SaaS? Making better DRM? Revamping your bank website to the latest javascript framework?
I suggest you re-read my comment. Who said I was talking just paid work? I am talking about doing anything productive even if it is unpaid.
But you haven't offered any measurable definition of productive, so we have no means by which to self-measure whether we agree with you or not.
Please re-read my comment and come back when you can discuss things like an adult.
From reading your comments, it appears you value physical activity over sedentary activity and disagree with the disease model of addiction because of your own experience and belief system. Frankly, individualized belief systems that don’t exhibit generalizable or interrogatable attributes aren’t very interesting. You’re absolutely free to put up walls around your beliefs and experiences and tell us to keep out, but don’t be surprised when the intellectually curious start knocking on other doors.
making the rich richer in the name of wealth creation? What will we consume without that?
It's all rotting if you're simply consuming and not part of goods & services production. The cash creation resulted in more money chasing less goods & services, and inflation lagged behind but steadily resulted.
Being alive and content is orthogonal to what's rightly predicted - GDP falling off a cliff, with standards of living plummeting and inflation exploding as everyone does more consumption to talk about at dinner parties while even less than ever is being produced.
Life is the gift, work is just a game.
> They chose to just sit and do nothing
Well, there was some bias in the fact that it was a global pandemic with most in-person things not being available or significantly worsened.
The human body is simultaneously decaying and regenerating constantly, but calling it "rotting" mischaracterizes the process. About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells.
There is nothing particular to labor that changes this, people age at about the same rate whether they are engaged in "working" or not.
You are surprised that people stayed at home during a pandemic?
Huh? Everyone I knew either worked during that time or was looking for work after getting laid off. (And the vast majority were still working.)
> had basic income and such taken care of
Huh? The COVID checks weren't that regular and didn't cover that much. You mean collecting unemployment, which also requires proving that you're looking for work?
Who picks up the garbage, who works all day in the solar panel factory, and works in the fields while you are making art?
Ofc it's possible for our world to be much better than today for all of us, but it's also possible for it to be much, much worse.
You are writing in the comments section of a website devoted to the discussion of companies and technologies that have changed the entire world. Technologies that, many suppose, will change the entire nature of labor, specifically.
And yet you ask, "but how will we maintain the world as it is today?"
Invent a better tomorrow. That's what you're here for.
We could call the better tomorrow a great leap forward.
I jest, but smartphones and web apps have not changed that people need ever-more food, clothing, housing, energy on an ongoing basis while the brave new world is being designed and implemented.
no, its better to complain that people don't want to work anymore.
I wonder what all these "hackers" tradespersons relatives thought of them in 1999. Probably that they were useless computer geeks who would never amount to anything, because they hate "work."
>> Some will stop working and make art
Why do some people get to decide they're going to do this? Why do I have to pay for it?
I think it’s totally fair to ask who is supposed to pay for that. I don’t want the guy who grows the food I eat to stop and go paint, I like eating more than I like him painting. There are plenty of jobs that aren’t fulfilling in the slightest, they are just a means to a paycheck, but are absolutely vital to society. And if those people quit to go make art, we’re all screwed. I don’t think that’s an unfair ask to have a comprehensive answer to.
If those jobs are really absolutely vital, in a basic income regime they would be well paying enough to entice people to earn the extra disposable income.
So food will be more expensive?
More expensive relative to what? In nominal terms, everything gets more expensive because of inflation eventually.
Relative to goods with elastic demand, food prices will rise faster because we have to eat. Food prices are also sensitive to its input prices, which also have inelastic demand.
Labor is a tiny fraction of the cost of food. Last time I did the math only 1% of the cost of flour goes towards a farmer's labor.
Precisely. There’d likely be a large wealth transfer back towards boring and less skilled jobs if we couldn’t rely on large numbers of people literally having no choice but to take any job they can get.
I struggle to understand how anyone could consider that a bad thing other than for completely selfish reasons.
>if we couldn’t rely on large numbers of people literally having no choice but to take any job they can get.
Having a massive quasi-legal underclass is a choice and it doesn't require UBI to solve it.
Is it best for society that everyone works a job with high enough income to contribute to taxes and that can accrue a 401k? We aren't there under current policy, there are many people left behind and experiencing negative income tax rates. But I feel this hypothetical world is the ideal posited in your example.
I think it's a fair question, and as an economist the topic fascinates me far beyond the typical econ 101 perfect world hand waving.
> Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years.
Is that true - or is that your belief?
I feel like if UBI guaranteed that I wouldn't be homeless and starve to death - but did not guarantee me avocado for my toast - I wouldn't stop working.
I can't say that for sure, but a lot of the subjective concerns expressed by people about UBI seem to think that it provides the proverbial four-bedroom-house-in-suburbia-with-two-cars-and-an-overseas-holiday-each-year, which might in fact reduce the eagerness for someone to travel two hours a day to sit in a small box and bang away at a keyboard for a third their waking life.
The B in UBI stands for Basic.
> Is that true - or is that your belief?
If I was offered basic income for 3 years, I wouldn't change my life in the slightest (maybe I'd make frivolous purchases slightly more often).
If I was offered trustworthy basic income for the rest of my life, depending on the amount I would retire at some point within 3 years. If it was the same amount as in this study and was adjusted for inflation, I'd consider retiring on the spot.
Maybe I'm just a weird outlier?
>Maybe I'm just a weird outlier?
I wouldn't quit either, but I assume you have wealth and are interested in continuing building it.
My anecdote that shaped my opinion was that I work closely with the bottom half to bottom quintile - who hold about 2% of the wealth in the US. During COVID, when unemployment was increased greatly and matched or even greatly exceeded weekly wages for frontline staff, they evaporated from the ranks. My interpersonal and social media experience (being friends or followers) interviewing people out of curiosity was basically that the yoke was off, and they're going to relax as long as the checks come in.
Professional career staff (finance, it, marketing, engineering, etc) had virtually no defections and returned like nothing happened as soon as work reopened.
My conclusion was that wealth holders have a long view that includes a future 'them', while non-wealth holding segments exist in the moment, and 5 years or 20 years from now might as well be someone else's problem. I think that means the bottom half of the systems we depend on crumble the moment we resume wages without work, and I don't see markets stepping in to raise unskilled wages to match skilled wages to compete for them, it simply wouldn't be permitted.
You’d retire on $12,000/year? I feel like all the people saying basic income wouldn’t make everybody retire is missing the actual amount involved. It doesn’t give you a fancy lifestyle. It gives you a shot at not starving.
Adjusted for inflation and exchange rate, it would be $18,000/yr. That plus my savings and investments is enough that I'd value marginal time over marginal money.
That's equivalent to $9/hour at a full time job. I doubt many people would be satisfied enough with that level of to retire. Sounds like you're just on the edge of doing it without any additional resources, and this would just tip you over the edge.
The question is, what happened to the people who they took the money from or inflated away the value of their savings? The second question is, how much money was "lost in translation".
UBI might be fine in a post scarcity world. Let's maybe think about it once governments eliminate all debt and have run surpluses for a decade.
"Them thar's CoMmUnIsM" Can't have that because Murica despises people beneath them getting any support or help of any kind. That's why universal healthcare won't happen without an FDR 2.0. Mamdani is kind of like that but can't become POTUS. Maybe Ro Khanna and AOC, but too many America voters are hostile towards them because the corporate news and podcasters told them so.
Ironically, the Trump stimulus checks provide fantastic and unexpected relief for millions.
They haven't solved the biggest question: "Would landlords raise rents to take the UBI for themselves?"
This study was always way too small for that. We'll probably only find out for sure the hard way.
We pretty much know the answer to that question.
Everything universal... that everyone needs to purchase (rent, food, power, etc.) will raise in price to eat up the UBI. It will reach an equilibrium where, to make ends meet, you will need UBI and at least a minimum wage job.
Any attempt to stop that from happening, such as price controls, raising UBI, etc., will cause shortages, abuse, or other issues.
That's my prediction, at least.
Yeah that's called Neoclassical economics, I don't doubt it's true.
The question is whether the "shortages, abuse, or other issues" are worse than very-high unemployment scenarios in futures where the value of human labor has dipped below labor costs. It's probably going to get ugly no matter how the government tries to intervene, but it would be great if we knew ahead of time which interventions are better than others.
The minute the asset owners sense more cash availability they will just hike the rent and housing prices.
Congrats you just made inflation!
If this result is from 2020, there have been others since. With less rosy results, I think I recall.
The problem with UBI is that not only does it give people an incentive to not work (as 25% of people in the study stopped working, even when they presume that the money would stop coming at some point) but, at a national level, it also requires a massive tax hike on the people who do work, which disincentivises work.
It would have an inflationary effect on basic goods and services. If you're renting and everybody is getting an extra few thousand a month then landlords know that they can charge a bit more since everyone has that money. Same with staple foods.
The cost savings don't make sense. An argument is that it will actually save money because the government will be able to abolish disability support and welfare, get rid of free healthcare, etc. But this ignores the fact that a lot of that stuff has unequal demand. You crash your car, your leg gets cut off, go to the hospital, they spend $100k on making sure you survive (specialised machines, a team of doctors and nurses, medicines, recovery and physiotherapy). How's that work under UBI if the government isn't paying for it anymore, who is? Or say you have a child with a disability, it's still going to cost more than the UBI.
Also, regardless of the economic system - could be feudalism, communism, the bronze age palace economy - redistributing income away from producers towards people who don't work (or even work less) is going to have negative effects. There is lot more demand for garbagemen than there are people who really love being garbagemen and wouldn't mind the high taxes. Take a look at the UK: the percentage of the population that are pensioners keeps on rising and the government keeps giving them more money - it's gone from 2% in the 50s to more like 10% now - all money that could be spent on other things that could grow the economy.
> requires a massive tax hike on the people who do work
Net of the benefit they would be receiving, it doesn't. The average person would be paying $10,000 in taxes to fund the UBI and then receiving a $10,000 UBI.
> It would have an inflationary effect on basic goods and services. If you're renting and everybody is getting an extra few thousand a month then landlords know that they can charge a bit more since everyone has that money. Same with staple foods.
There is no extra money. It isn't being printed. There are net transfers for people making more or less than average, but then Alice has a little more money than before and Bob has a little less and it's still the same total.
Also, that's not how prices work anyway. If people have more money, prices only change if the cost of production is non-linear. If it costs $5 each to make a million sandwiches and $5 each to make two million sandwiches, increasing the number of sandwiches people want just increases the number of sandwiches produced instead of increasing the price of each sandwich. Sometimes an increase in demand causes the unit price to go down because of economies of scale.
> But this ignores the fact that a lot of that stuff has unequal demand. You crash your car, your leg gets cut off, go to the hospital, they spend $100k on making sure you survive (specialised machines, a team of doctors and nurses, medicines, recovery and physiotherapy). How's that work under UBI if the government isn't paying for it anymore, who is?
That's the purpose of insurance.
> redistributing income away from producers towards people who don't work (or even work less) is going to have negative effects.
Your premise here is that being paid to do what someone else wants you to do is more productive than doing what you want to do.
Most modern jobs are not "productive" in the sense that they actually produce anything of importance. People waste untold hours in corporate meetings or making things the world would be better off without. Would assigning agency to the individuals instead of the institutional bureaucracies reduce productivity or increase it?
So not sure if you read this part
> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
But they didn't just stop working, they went back to school
That's not that much better - 12.5% stopped working and didn't do anything at all.
I think that would also massively increase if the money was guaranteed to keep coming in for the rest of their lives. And even if the percentage stayed flat it would be an economic disaster - an increase of 12.5% of the population unemployed would be worse, in the US, than peak COVID. Another 12.5% going off to school still gets them out of the workforce, and would worsen elite overproduction.
I'm not convinced taxes disincentivize work. Do other purchases?
> He acknowledged the report's findings are only based on short-term effects but, given the project has been shut down, it's all they have.
OK, yeah. They kept working because everyone expected that it would go away
no duh
Yeah how many of these have we had now? Literally every test and study about UBI comes back with similar data: it improves lives, reduces stress, and nobody becomes a drain on the system. It doesn’t matter. The people who oppose it aren’t looking at the data, they just don’t want "my tax dollars" going to support people struggling to get by.
> and nobody becomes a drain on the system
That’s a generous interpretation of the results. This was a short term pilot and over one quarter of respondents stopped working, despite knowing it was a temporary program.
Did you read the article? Because it says that about half of the ones that stopped working stopped working because they were going back to school. That doesn't seem like a drain on the system...
It’s funny because it’s such a small amount for those who oppose it. I mean, capital gains doesn’t kick in until $48,350 in the US and you can survive off of that if you needed to. The issue is pulling that consistently for an income requires a bit of capital the average American doesn’t have.
> … people struggling to get by.
Rather, people who “didn’t earn it.”
Is this \s?
Probably portraying the attitude of the people complaining about "my tax dollars" as referenced in the preceding post.
that's the attitude. "You need to work, even if it's at McDonalds!" "You can't ask other people to carry your weight!"
You can certainly ask other people to carry your weight.
The problem is when you start to force other people to.
In a world with so much surplus, the fact that we still demand people earn a living under penalty of death is the most psychotic shit I've ever seen.
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We already have the EITC, which is frankly a better version of UBI (it incentivizes working more and literally goes up as you increase your earnings). Expand the EITC and tax capital gains as regular, inflation-adjusted income to pay for it and we've basically done it - a single Democratic administration could.
In fact, during COVID, an increase to the child tax portion of the EITC reduced childhood poverty by _70%_ at a relatively low cost. Guess why we don't do that anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#/medi...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expirat...
(US focused even though the article is Canada lol)
A large EITC is trivially converted into a UBI. Otherwise-unemployed people pay each other a salary to do whatever they were each going to do anyway and then the salaries cancel but they both get the EITC. Attempts to prevent this largely don't work against people who want to do the scam and just find a different way to structure it, but tend to be used as an excuse to e.g. screw legitimate self-employed workers out of the credit.
The only reason this doesn't happen at scale right now is that the existing EITC is smaller than the amount of payroll tax you'd pay by making a given amount of money, i.e. it's not a negative income tax at all. If you're going to make it larger than that you might as well make it a UBI.
I think the issue is there are a lot of welfare programs that haven't seen the same success. If you subscribe to the "taxes are to solve public goods problems" model, then welfare that doesn't come back around to help you isn't taxation, it's theft! When people talk about UBI, they're wary it's just a relabelling of the same-old "steal from the rich, give to the poor" Robinhood scheme. I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic (or, worst of all, "what would Jesus do?"). That's the wrong way of framing it (and this holds for most welfare initiatives too).
People are always going to care about different things. Some really care that everyone has clean water, others a good education, others freedom of expression. Some care more about their families, while others apply equal empathy to every stranger, cow, and tree. When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy. The proper way to fund your projects is to get everyone on board. Frame it so they see how it helps them achieve their goals, not just yours.
(Now, I know I'm ignoring that some people are just incredibly selfish; more accurately, some people's hearts are bleeding out on the floor, some are calcified into stone, and most are somewhere in between. I'm ignoring this discrepancy because 1. even very selfish people can get on board with welfare (like primary/secondary education), as long as it's framed properly, and 2. if a system relies on self-sacrifice, it's too easy to hijack that sacrifice into someone else's pet project.)
For example, with education, you can point out how much more economic activity is available when everyone knows how to read and write. I think the argument that actually worked, though, was "how can we avoid roving bands of teenagers in our city once we enact some child-labor laws?" (that's probably the reason highschool is compulsory, not just free to enroll in). For a universal basic income, you probably need to approach it from an entropy argument. The capitalist system tries to maximize GDP, but physical systems actually maximize the free energy (GDP - temperature * Theil index [entropy]). The capitalist system avoids this by artificially restricting free trade: for example, your boss makes a dollar, while you make a dime. There's fewer trades that could happen than if, say, you both made 55 cents (unless your boss is just reallly good at doing things with money). Or, more fundamental, your boss needs you much less than you need a salary. You have less freedom of movement than he has to remove you. A universal basic income fixes this entropy problem, which makes trades more frequent and the market more competitive. In the end, it can come around to help even a seflish centimillionaire.
You are of course right, and it is sad to see that the idea of "building consensus," now has to be explained in a long 4 paragraph post when it used to be just a normal way of doing things.
> When people talk about UBI, they're wary it's just a relabelling of the same-old "steal from the rich, give to the poor" Robinhood scheme.
You mean the scheme responsible for the greatest period of economic boom in American history, not JUST for the (unfortunately, primarily white) people, but the rest of the country as well? When we got the Hoover Dam, and the highway system, and wall to wall telephone coverage, and stable power grids in every state that isn't Texas? That scheme?
Yeah no I vastly prefer the modern one where like ten people get all of the money and our bridges collapse now. Makes the morning commute far more thrilling that way.
> I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic (or, worst of all, "what would Jesus do?"). That's the wrong way of framing it (and this holds for most welfare initiatives too).
I mean it's less an accusation of being unempathetic and more just an observation of the facts on the ground, isn't it?
> When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy. The proper way to fund your projects is to get everyone on board. Frame it so they see how it helps them achieve their goals, not just yours.
Yeah but that's just not scalable for society? Since I have been working, my taxes have funded wars in the Middle East that I certainly didn't give two shits about, and in fact opposed. My taxes support all manner of corporate welfare, some which is decent, a lot of which is horrendous and counterproductive to global health and climate change. Why is it we only start clutching our purse strings when it's about helping people, but there's always money for more fucking war and more oil subsidies?
Edit to respond to your reply:
> You talk about things not being scalable for society; well guess what, your version of empathy is one of them.
Not only is empathy scalable, it is the utter FOUNDATION of society. If we didn't give a shit what happened to everyone else who was in our tribe, we never would've progressed from the caves in the first place. Every moral code throughout history has been based on empathy. Every legal code is based in part on empathy. "I don't want to die, so we should recognize it's bad to kill people." It's the emotional bedrock of a social species; to see an individual that is like you, and to treat that individual as you would want to be treated.
> Like if I said, "everyone deserves chocolate ice cream", and you said "wow, how unempathetic, don't you care about everyone getting vanilla?"
That is just... flagrantly wrong. I'm not arguing for people to have a given flavor of ice cream, or a category of food. I'm saying people should have food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life, because they're people, and by virtue of being people in a world with so much more than it needs, that they should be provided for. Why? Because we can. Because it hurts no one. Because it helps immense quantities of people who are in dire need.
And, additionally, if you are indeed not moved by the notion of "people should live, that's better than if they die" then I can give you an absolute TROVE of selfish reasons too!
* Reduced need and therefore cost of emergency services; houseless people make a disproportionate use of ambulances and ER services, and are uniquely unable to pay for them (not that anyone should pay for healthcare either but that's our world currently)
* Substantially lower costs for the penal and legal systems: houseless people commit a lot of crime, since their very existence in many places is a crime, and alongside that they suffer from chronic lack of resources. Giving them resources keeps them out of jails and lets police solve actual problems, not just harass people who have no options.
* Higher workforce participation: A whole ton of unhoused folks would love NOTHING MORE than to get jobs and improve their situation, something that is borne out by many UBI studies, because, plot twist, being houseless also makes it quite a lot harder to find work, even if you're skilled in an in-demand profession. And, in the odd event you do get work, it's harder to attend to that job to earn money because it's very hard to get ready for work on the corner of Sixth and Delton Ave.
* And, greater economic activity. Houseless people naturally consume far, far less goods and services than housed people and even if they do want them, they lack the ability to buy them. Giving them an even temporary living situation lets them establish themselves and become productive members of society.
And all of these points will also apply in varying degrees to everyone from destitute street-bound folks up through everyone who is living check to check. The fact of the matter is that poor people cost our society money, and a LOT of it at that, but currently that money doesn't go to those people to help them; it goes to the poverty industrial complex and makes a handful of people a LOT of money. I am merely proposing instead of doing that, we just give it to the fucking people who need it and then call it a day.
Reply to your edit:
1. Keyword: "your". Your version of empathy is not scalable. It's literally, "my way or the highway," and a bunch of grandstanding on things pretty much everyone agrees on, but you must be evil and not if you don't agree with my more radical proposals.
2. I consider "I don't want to die, thus I shouldn't kill others," to have more of a Kantian/evolutionary genesis than an empathetic one. For the most part, all the people that failed to recognize this were killed off and weren't allowed to enter into the Kingdom of Ends. Unless you're talking about emotivism, I don't see how empathy has anything to do with morality/society, except as a quick symmetry trick to help you make smarter decisions (while you could logically deduce that the rational response to a member of your group being killed is to punish the killer to prevent more killings, if you just assume symmetry, then things that are bad for you are bad for others, and taking those actions will get you punished).
3. 5% as many people die from starvation or exposure as suicide in the United States (that's 1–2,000/year). If people want food, or want shelter, they can find it (99.8% of homeless people do), even if it's not the particular food or shelter they want. What do you actually want? "Food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life" are available. Almost no one is arguing that we should let people just die. It really sounds like you're arguing for a flavor of ice cream, but you don't even know what flavor that is.
I feel like you're quoting me, but not reading what I said.
> > I think the left has also really shot themselves in the foot by talking about UBI as "helping struggling people get by" or accusing opposers of being unempathetic
> I mean it's less an accusation of being unempathetic and more just an observation of the facts on the ground, isn't it?
> > When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy
Are these "facts" actually grounded, or are you just doing a POV play? Like if I said, "everyone deserves chocolate ice cream", and you said "wow, how unempathetic, don't you care about everyone getting vanilla?" You talk about things not being scalable for society; well guess what, your version of empathy is one of them. Not everyone is going to care about the same causes as you, and attacking people for that will not convince them you actually care about them. What will is if you tell them why they're better off funding your pet project.
> MUH TAX DOLERS
Please don't use regional accents as an epithet.
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Please cut out swipes and fulmination like this in comments. It's clearly against the guidelines, and we've asked you before to avoid using HN for ideological battle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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If we could get rid of social security, Medicaid, food stamps, and all forms of welfare, and replace them all with a UBI equally given to every citizen, the trade off might make something as inherently idiotic as UBI worth it.
You can’t replace Medicaid with UBI unless you also change the entire health care system to be single-payer, because people will still have random medical problems which need a million dollars (or whatever) worth of treatment. For the rest of it I agree, but I think you’re overestimating how much we spend on all those programs— they don’t even come close to what a reasonable UBI would cost. UBI would require a huge change to how taxation/spending works no matter how it’s implemented.
Honestly I think UBI would be awful. And what I really mean is take the sum amount of all welfare we spend today divide by the number of citizens and give every citizen that much. Would hardly be enough still. The only people who should be in favor of it though is the billionaire aristocrats.
It would effectively take the entire middle class and make them serfs.
It would be the quickest way to bring back a feudal type system with a few people at the top and everyone else pretty much poor.
Sure they’d make sure we have enough to eat and clothe ourselves, but even the slave owners of old did that.
Just look at the experiment in 2020-2021 where we gave everyone even more free money, the result we saw companies go from less than a trillion market cap to over three trillion while wages went up maybe 25%
Why not guaranteed employment, not UBI. Subsidize minimum wage jobs that produce social good without being soul-crushing. (Raise the minimum wage while you’re at it).
Guaranteed employment is tricky to get right.
How do you provide minimum wage jobs that are not soul-crushing, without destroying the private sector soul-crushing minimum wage jobs?
How do you even find productive jobs people would want to do (or at least find tolerable) that no-one in the private sector was willing to pay minimum wage to get done?
How do you provide jobs to a wide range of contextual needs, from ages 16 to 65, office workers to labourers, physical and mental impairment, neurodivergence, ability to travel, etc? How do you fund the administrative burden of matching jobs to people?
What do you do for the people who still cannot work for various reasons - total disability, caring for another, etc. You still need provide a wide gamut of social welfare programs for different needs and circumstances, with its concomitant bureaucratic cost and inefficiency - or let people starve, or give them "jobs" that have no productive output, just performative burdens.
What's the actual upside of guaranteed employment programs over a UBI?
Why not strengthen need based assistance? Why give everyone $X/mo when you could give just those who need it the money? Why not strengthen programs like SNAP or affordable housing programs? UBI solves the issue of changing requirements and confusing/embarrassing applications, but I'm not sure it's better overall.
> Why not strengthen need based assistance? Why give everyone $X/mo when you could give just those who need it the money? Why not strengthen programs like SNAP or affordable housing programs?
Because those are vastly less efficient, create traps where people can't afford to increase their income, and ultimately divide the population and tend to get dismantled.
one POV is that libertarians, who have a lot of beefs, are running the country right now, so what choice do you have? they keep winning elections.
another POV is, libertarians have empathy, it's quixotic, so how can it be harnessed to achieve your goals?
ubi is inherently cheaper because it's significantly simpler, means testing programs are expensive to operate and are often slow and needlessly bureaucratic
I have serious trouble believing UBI provides enough to solve the poorest peoples problems without needlessly costing a huge amount funding well off peoples hobbies.
You'll still need affordable housing, you'll still need food programs, etc. I don't see how you save on cutting those programs.
it would be nice if people had this same level of concern for the people already hoarding wealth, the guy buying more warhammer minis with ubi isn't the problem
Ballpark numbers: About 1/3 of Americans get government assistance, and typical administrative costs are 1-10% of the program.
Making these benefits universal would require spending 200% more, and save at most 10% in overhead.
Thus, optimistically, you'd be spending +190% more.