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Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

nytimes.com

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Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#241

Post by rorykoehler »

aninhumer wrote: post #185
rorykoehler wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all people working are benefitting society. Many are actively leeching from it.

Perhaps, but if so that should be solved directly, by creating laws limiting the leeching behaviour, not by generally disincentivising work.

I'm curious if UBI could have this effect long term. One possibility could be that as people have reduced existential pressures they begin to explore the things that actually interest them and reduce the activities they do to solely generate income. This could have two positive effects. The first is an explosion of long tail creativity and innovation. The second, a correlation of sorts, could be that people reduce their society (environment etc) harming but income generating activities.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#242

Post by DonaldFisk »

dmurray wrote: post #63
sqrt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in hearing why it's a bad thing to disincentivize working more. Is it so bad for someone to not be working should they have enough money to live on? (I'm not sure if the benefits in this specific case are enough to live on, but I guess I'm thinking about the general principle.)

People working X hours a week are guaranteed to be spending those X hours producing something useful to society, or at least to their employer. People not working are not. Sure, some people who are not employed may be raising children or volunteering or doing something else beneficial to society,and encouraging them to work instead would be society's loss. But if we trust in the market economy, those people don't exi…

> People working X hours a week are guaranteed to be spending those X hours producing something useful to society

I recommend you read http://www.occupy.com/article/graeber-phenomenon-bullshit-jo...

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#243

Post by aninhumer »

oceante wrote: post #217
jnordwick wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under your interpretation there is no possible way taxation, waste, or even fraud is ever a losing proposition. You fall into one of those holes Keynes said you could dig and fill up to help the economy. Unfortunately taxation itself reduces the incentive to produce and distorts the economy, and the Broken Window Fallacy is still a fallacy.

Taxation doesn't distort the economy. This is such a nonsense statement that it's difficult to say it's even "wrong" -- it's simply meaningless. Taxation and the fundamental ability of the sovereign to create demand for its money tokens is the very basis of any modern, capitalized economy. There is a strong argument to be made that taxes drive money and make economic exchange possible [1]. (BTW, Hacker News is simply…

>the question is, as always, what to do about unproductive assets.

If we consider the goal of society to be increasing overall utility, then someone enjoying their free time is not unproductive because they are producing utility (for themselves). There may be more productive things they could be doing, but we shouldn't ignore that baseline. If the work offered by a Job Guarantee scheme is not producing as much utility for society, then it would be more efficient to just give them the money.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#244

Post by EGreg »

ScottBurson wrote: post #5

Jobless people generally cannot earn additional income while collecting unemployment benefits or they risk losing that assistance. Worst. Idea. Ever. I know -- it's a common feature of income support systems, including here in the US. I don't know whether UBI is going to prove workable or not. But even if it doesn't, if we could just redesign the systems we do have so they never give recipients a disincentive to work…

Why should we care about a disincentive to work more? It's like that trope about welfare recipients all being drug addicts. Or that taxing the rich will make them not want to work.

What motivates people to work is MASTERY, AUTONOMY and PURPOSE. This is very different from the profit motive, and is why people contribute to open source and science.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And anyway, why in the 21st century does everyone need to work? Why should wages be the primary mechanism by which living wages trickle down to the plebes?

McDonalds will soon cut its workforce. So will Uber. Thanks to automation.

If you are jealous that someone somewhere is receiving free stuff, realize how much free stuff you have just by being alive in the 21st century!

If you are upset that you'd be taxed for the free stuff -- then make sure that we develop systems to tax machines. Yes you heard me, start taxing the machines.

If people were more free to choose what to do with their time, they'd probably spend more time with their family and study more and contribute more knowledge to society. Instead of working a dead-end job at McDonalds.

If you want to read more about the economics of this, I wrote an article:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=185

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#245

Post by weaksauce »

lkbm wrote: post #132
weaksauce wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to not having an unstable society with high crime: 1. Poor people on welfare wouldn't be dis-incentivized to work more. 2. It reduces the cost of those programs like welfare that cost a lot in bureaucracy for no gain. 3. Lower income people have money velocity that stimulates the rest of the economy. > Democrats seem to have no problem with illegal immigration which reduces the ability for those poor and…

> Charity has been shown to be less efficient than just giving money directly to poor people. Can you provide sources for this? Also, what do you mean "efficient"? If you mean there's no overhead, sure, so long as you don't spend any time trying to determine where the need is and just hand cash to the homeless guy you see on the street, but I care about effectiveness , and that's very likely not going to be "give mon…

GiveDirectly is precisely the model I was talking about. I don't think of that model as a traditional charity. The overhead on charities is absurd a lot of the time and there are quite a few scams out there. I have a hunch that a government based BI would be better than what we have right now. Though, to make that happen we would need universal health care for all and eliminate all the social safety nets other than BI and health care.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#246

Post by caspianm »

kahrkunne wrote: post #188

I hate being "that guy" but am I the only one who expects this particular brand of communism to not be any better than previous attempts? Somebody's going to have to pay for this...

Compared to a regular welfare system where they stop paying if the recipient has the ability to support themselves / doesn't need it (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) UBI is the opposite of communism. This one where people have to be jobless at the start isn't ideal though.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#247

Post by stretchwithme »

jganetsk wrote: post #182

I agree with basic income, but most analyses of it are backwards. For most of history, governments addressed unemployment by starting wars. By shipping off to war, the unemployed temporarily get a job. They either come back dead or ready to take a new job in an economy revitalized by the stimulus of government war spending. John Maynard Keynes noticed this pattern, especially during the Great Depression and WW2, and…

Keynesianism is like making waves in a pond and pointing out how much higher the water has risen.

It ignores where the resources come from and the jobs being performed in other parts of the global economy that must be cut, often in some other country, because the resources are being used for something else.

If a country is going into debt to stimulate, its pulling resources from other countries where jobs have to decline. But perhaps those declines are more spread out and harder to measure and understand. So we can make the mistake of thinking they don't happen.

But what if a country stimulates by printing money, not borrowing? Money is only a medium of exchange, not an actual resource. Creating more of it just means more it has to be used to get the same result, if you look at what really happens over time, as opposed to comparing prices the day before you print with prices the day after.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#248

Post by insickness »

anotherarray wrote: post #168
ScottBurson wrote: post #5

Jobless people generally cannot earn additional income while collecting unemployment benefits or they risk losing that assistance. Worst. Idea. Ever. I know -- it's a common feature of income support systems, including here in the US. I don't know whether UBI is going to prove workable or not. But even if it doesn't, if we could just redesign the systems we do have so they never give recipients a disincentive to work…

Isn't that the whole point of the experiment? You need to understand how people react to the idea of "not doing anything and still get paid". Do they give up? Do they get depressed? Do they create things? Does entrepreneurship increase? Violence rate?... These are all interesting questions

> Do they get depressed?

I think this is a huge factor that isn't getting enough focus. When people's jobs are replaced by automation and they are on UBI, how do they achieve self-worth? A lot of people get their self-worth from their work, even if their job is monotonous and relatively low-skill. We may be able to replace a low-skilled worker's wages with UBI, but we can't replace their feeling of self-worth. Not everyone can become an artist and even if they could, that may not be enough to give them a sense of purpose. In the long run, this may be a much bigger question than whether or not we implement UBI.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#249

Post by coredog64 »

ScottBurson wrote: post #61
TillE wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means-tested programs are the epitome of wasteful government bureaucracy. It's never the right way to "compromise". If we can't sell straight UBI, then something like universal food stamps would be a good first step: https://web.archive.org/web/20160321083817/http://mattbrueni...

I'm not necessarily opposed to means-testing; for example, progressive income tax rates can be seen as a form of means-testing, and I think they're a good thing. What I care about is that the function from income earned to income (including subsidy) received be monotonic . Again, the income tax system (at least in the US) is carefully designed to have this property: when you make enough more money to move into a high…

There are some corner cases in the US system. AMT is a big one, but there are more than a few deductions that get phased out based on income.

Re: Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income

#250

Post by austinjp »

What's to stop UBI from "cancelling itself out" due to inflationary effects?

Prior to UBI, the lowest possible income is zero. After UBI, the lowest income is X. The poorest people in the nation will have an income of X, so X becomes the new relative zero, the new baseline. Prices of everything (food, housing, whatever) will reset relative to X. So uni will become worthless shortly after it's introduced.... but only if it is truly universal.

Someone feel free to tell me if I'm missing something.

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