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Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

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Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#61

Post by jaggederest »

clarkmoody wrote: post #55
bryanlarsen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving money from rich people to people much more likely to spend it rather than hoard it should result in a significant GDP boost.

You misunderstand the fundamental mechanism for improving standard of living: productivity gains. Consumer spending does not improve productivity. Rather, investment in capital goods (by those rich hoarders) leads to productivity growth.

If you're considering "investment" as included in GDP, it's not just "saving money", it's "business spending on depreciable assets", essentially. Owning a share of Apple doesn't make you "an investor" in the GDP sense, but Apple does a lot of investment.

I'm not sure that "rich hoarders" have an appreciable positive impact on business investment in depreciable assets. Most capital assets are purchased to produce goods and services to meet demand, which might be stimulated more by redistribution.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#62

Post by dota_fanatic »

vorpalhex wrote: post #45
twblalock wrote: post #29

The big problem with UBI, aside from how to pay for it, is that it will not survive as either universal or basic once the voters get their hands on it and decide that, say, UBI benefits should be cut for felons, increased for single mothers, indexed to the cost of rent, etc. In other words, we have a bunch of different welfare standards for people in different situations because that is what succeeds politically, and…

To be fair, I'm not entirely convinced that a truly universal system is the best. After all, a single parent has significant additional expenses - and should taxpayers be paying to give violent criminals a work-free existence? (Would you pay a living wage to someone who sexually assaulted your daughter?) In the US, this is especially a problem. The cost of living in Texas is low enough that my salary as an engineer g…

With money comes mobility, so people are free to move somewhere cheaper. Currently, those in the poverty cycle are trapped and chronically stressed, making it quite difficult to execute a plan that involves anything more than what's right in front them—moving out of city or out of state is out of the question.

One of the biggest problems facing humanity is sustainability towards the planet. Unbounded population growth eventually breaks everything we all need to survive. If we incentivize having children more than it already is, some people will spawn just to get at that extra money for themselves and do the bare minimum to "raise" their children. And the kind of person that does that does not raise stable, healthy children who will come into their own as productive, healthy members of society...

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#63

Post by privacypoller »

dragontamer wrote: post #15
devoply wrote: post #5

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…

>> What's wrong with having UBI for 2 years and then suddenly having it cut off?

re: Ontario's cancelled "experiment" - the recipient they talked to felt she had been "betrayed" and "wasn't going to be able to make ends meet"

So after less than 2 years it transformed from a narrow experiment into a entitlement, like many (most?) government programs. It was no longer treated as a "top-up" but a core component of survival.

It seems to make sense that a fixed-limit benefit would prevent this, but history shows that a non-trivial percentage of recipients just use it as a reprieve from the inevitable.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#64

Post by magduf »

lbriner wrote: post #4

"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.

>In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K,

Does that back-of-a-napkin calculation include the savings you'd get by shutting down most of the government bureaucracy involved in administration of current benefits and not paying salaries to all those government workers? In any country, a huge amount of the money spent on benefits are used just for administration. With UBI, you can get rid of all those workers and use the money for UBI instead.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#65

Post by TooBrokeToBeg »

zdragnar wrote: post #37
dragontamer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are trying to use a universal solution to a specific problem. Furthermore, visible homelessness is often a presenting symptom of other, non-homelessness problems. Look no further than San Fransisco or Seattle for how little throwing money at something will change the outcome. Or, look at the education system in Washington DC- highest expenditure per pupil, with sub-par results. Giving everyone for an undefined, b…

> You are trying to use a universal solution to a specific problem

Wat? It (UBI) is a self described universal solution. Inability to avoid becoming degenerate (where your daily situation will gradually worsen) in the western world is not a specific problem. The idea that leveraging UBI for 2 years (which is oddly specific) is beneficial, is laughable. Almost every degenerate (not a pejorative usage here) started from a stable lifestyle, belies the problem with that approach. You've staved off a few years, but not addressed the underlying issue. If you aren't adapted (intelligent, able bodied, whatever) to survive in modern western society, is sterilization (or lawful restriction on childbirths) for permanent UBI moral? This avoids the octomom welfare queen issues. It's worth thinking about, I believe.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#67

Post by epicureanideal »

dahdum wrote: post #35
curtis wrote: post #14

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…

I've always thought there should be an essential basics program, where you can always receive an adequate amount of flour, rice, beans, corn, and other basic foodstuffs to survive. I'd also add toothpaste, soap, and other sanitary items. We can still have food stamp programs that allow people to spend as they please, but the guaranteed floor ensures literally no one need go hungry. Sticking to basics keeps the costs…

Unfortunately the largest cost is rent, but I like your idea. I'd even be happy to donate to such a service.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#69

Post by jaggederest »

pacbard wrote: post #28

Every time you want to evaluate results from social research, you need to ask yourself two questions: 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 ran…

From an armchair perspective, there are significant ways in which Alaska is behind the mainland US, so it's encouraging to see that the APF distributions provide a positive impact.

I would suspect that the results would be broadly applicable to underdeveloped and rural areas, so of the three examples, there are certainly areas in rural north California, rural Mississippi, and New York (probably upstate) that would benefit.

I think extending it to apply to urban or highly developed areas would be pretty questionable, though, I'd guess Manhattan is not going to behave similarly enough to draw any conclusions.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#70

Post by MAXPOOL »

pacbard wrote: post #28

Every time you want to evaluate results from social research, you need to ask yourself two questions: 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 ran…

I'm not an economist, but when I once asked examples of good econometric methods to study especially related to synthetic control. I was given just that Marinescu's Alaska paper you are referring to.

They needed a counterfactual for exactly one state. They create "synthetic Alaska" elsewhere in in the United states to make the comparison valid. Even if the researchers did not intent it that way, the selection methodology selected areas in the continental US that have geographic featurs similar to Alaska. It's really fine paper and good methodology.

Another fine point about basic income in the paper is that it makes difference between tradeable businesses (can be are exported) and non-tradable businesses (stays local). Employment rates in non-tradeable business don't change. By contrast part-time work did increase, and employment fell in companies that sold goods outside Alaska (this has implications for wider applicability I guess).

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