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"a quora member answered when asked about the UBI" And at that moment, any semblence of legitimacy disappeared... The main question about UBI is who pays for it and how. In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K, way below anything that most people would consider enough to live on.
I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...
If it showed worse health and/or employment outcomes for recipients, that'd be a data point. But the fact that a government cancelled it without any explanation really doesn't say much, except that it's subject to politics.
Ontario recently cancelled their experiment with universal income. Which points me to the fact that even if UBI becomes reality at some point, it's only one government away at any time from being cancelled or adjusted. So your livelihood at any given time is dependent upon government balancing its books. Considering how bad many modern developed governments are at doing this, it gives me little hope of UBI being any…
What's wrong with having UBI for 2 years and then suddenly having it cut off? Jack London, the famous homeless / hobo writer of "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang", was only able to write his first book because of the support of community libraries and random strangers who gave him a bed occasionally. Eventually, he was able to pull himself out of poverty and become one of the most famous writers ever. If you can hel…
I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...
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It might be politically unpopular, but maybe we should just raise taxes and index them for measures of inequality. The GDP per capita of most modern economies can easily handle a basic income sufficient for all but the most expensive cities.
I'm sure there are many theories, in both directions, of what would happen to the total tax revenues if you were to raise rates significantly, but it's surely far more complicated that your idea makes it sound.
It might be politically unpopular, but maybe we should just raise taxes and index them for measures of inequality. The GDP per capita of most modern economies can easily handle a basic income sufficient for all but the most expensive cities.
There ought to be a name for a minimal UBI that can allow people who are normally just scraping by to bridge short periods of unemployment, unexpected expenses etc. £4K wouldn't be much for the average Hacker News reader, but for people on minimum wage it could make a real difference. You can't really call this "Basic Income" though, because that term comes with the build in assumption that it's enough for a person t…
1. Are the results internally valid? That is, did the authors reasonably control for factors other than the treatment (in this case, UBI) that could affect the observed results? Turn out, that this is actually difficult to do outside of randomized control trials. Quasi-experiments and natural experiments all lack random treatment assignment. This leads to biased estimates and wrong conclusions.
2. Are the results externally valid? That is, to whom do the results apply? Most UBI experiments are done in contexts that are different than the US (if you are interested in what would happened if UBI becomes law in the US). Local factors could impact the way that people react to UBI. Because these factors do not apply to the US, the study results do not readily translate to the US.
For example, the article cites this NBER working paper[1] as proof that UBI has positive impacts on unemployment. The article uses a difference-in-differences model with a systemic control group to get to a causal estimate of receiving dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund. This boils down to compare changes in employment between Alaska and states that had similar employment trends during the pre-treatment period. Their analysis seem to be sound and they conduct multiple robustness checks.
As far as external validity, how similar is Alaska to the rest of the US? Would results from that setting translate to California, or Mississippi, or New York?
In other words, we have a bunch of different welfare standards for people in different situations because that is what succeeds politically, and there is no reason to believe the same impulses that got us our current welfare system won't influence UBI also.
I find this mostly click bait. We should expect results like this or frankly better. Results from one small African village are not globally applicable. The issue is where does the money come from and is it truly universal. All the experiments to date have been of the "we gave free money with no restrictions to X thousand people for Y months and it was great". This is necessary but not sufficient research. We could h…
That aspect never seems to get included for some reason.