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

theincomer.com

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

#101
post #90
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. It's really not that hard: if they have assets here and reside here, then you tax them, and seize them if necessary. The only reason this isn't done is because too many people vote for politicians who pass laws favorable to the very wealthy.

> The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. ... then they'll leave the country. I don't think you've thought this through.

At least in the USA, its very hard to expatriate to avoid taxes. IIRC it requires a one-time payment of ~40% of your net-worth and you to have citizenship somewhere else.

Other countries could follow suit, though the USA probably has the easiest time enforcing due to its global hegemony.

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

#102
post #90
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. It's really not that hard: if they have assets here and reside here, then you tax them, and seize them if necessary. The only reason this isn't done is because too many people vote for politicians who pass laws favorable to the very wealthy.

> The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. ... then they'll leave the country. I don't think you've thought this through.

America has a real problem with money in politics which has prevented strong penalties on top earners. But, the US does currently levy a minimum tax total for overseas personal income, it basically can be summarized as "If you earned X in the US you'd owe us Y, you payed the government of the country you're residing in Z which is less than Y, you owe the US government Y-Z", this law is extremely poorly enforced currently but even if they leave the country they still owe the taxes, legally speaking.

If they flee to other countries and illegally circumvent the law then that's where the US should start flexing it's muscles.

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

#103
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The additional complication is problematic, as is the additional control / disempowerment. Such as: - Who decides the list of goods? - Who provides them? - Who delivers them? Ex: Pizza as a vegetable. Sure, you'll have people make shit decisions - but part of the point (IMHO) of UBI is that a shit decision this month doesn't have to screw you next month. My brother also always points out that "shrinkage" (from retail…

Yes, it's a program that is at high risk of overexpansion like many others.

It would be constantly attacked for not providing "healthy" options like fresh fruit, organic flour, more variety and whatnot.

I just wish we could do stuff like this. Same with housing, provide budget accommodations in low cost areas and you'll be accused of creating ghettos and modern day internment camps. So we spend much more to subsidize housing in the highest cost, most desirable regions, leaving far too many without anything.

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

#104
post #99
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…

About point 1: Since we are dealing here with humans, this criteria is almost impossible to satisfy. You cannot enroll people in a control trial if you know this has a chance to make their lives worst. > This leads to biased estimates and wrong conclusions. It does not necessarily leads to 'wrong' conclusions. In social sciences, you have to deal with a truth level that will never yield 100% certainty.

The real issue is that the "true" confidence levels in the social sciences are nowhere near that. We can hack together models and fit them to make an argument look compelling, but most of the stuff we "know" to be objectively true is descriptive, not prescriptive.

I think any good social scientist regarding UBI will tell you that we honestly don't have any fucking clue what would happen because the differences between Namibia, Finland, etc are so vast and we have so little data. These studies are important parts of building up that dataset, but to make policy considerations (or even something like an assumption in social science) is much, much more likely to provide a "wrong" or "bad" choice, than after we've got better data.

If you really were to dig into any given study, you can in many cases find a lot of assumptions which we have to accept to even attempt a study.

We all tend to be pretty bad at measuring truth levels, that's why the criticism is necessary.

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

#105
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely what it is at the core. The problem with it's application has been proven over and over again; the very wealthy have the means and motivation to avoid it while the burden falls on the same segment of the population over and over again.

The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. It's really not that hard: if they have assets here and reside here, then you tax them, and seize them if necessary. The only reason this isn't done is because too many people vote for politicians who pass laws favorable to the very wealthy.

Legislation unfortunately involves legislators, people who really like the money those wealthy people give them. As long as we have legalized bribery I don't see it happening.

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

#107
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…

Universal Dividend, the idea being that we all are investors in the world around us, particularly in the act of creating the next generation and staying alive to be the workers, consumers, etc. So everyone gets a cut of the general profits.

If one is against this idea, then ask why any investor of money into a company should get money back from it when they did no explicit work for it? If you reject the universal dividend idea, then one, to be consistent, should really reject the idea of investment. Good luck with such an economy.

So instead of the demeaning UBI narrative that people need money to survive, it suggests an uplifting narrative that we are all valuable and that we all get a bit of something back to reflect our useful existence as well as a little something in order to "invest" it into the next act of creating something. It captures the idea that our society is built not just economically and bureaucratically, but also socially. That having neighbors, coworkers, customers is important for economies and governments. These are hard things to support with metrics, etc, so we just decide on a basic level and give it out.

What that level is would be debatable, just as how much an investor makes from dividends or buybacks, is debatable. Since I think the ability to walk away is the most important aspect of freedom and that freedom is an important value, I would want a higher amount than you suggest. But a lower amount would work as well with that label.

Spit ball: What is a mediocre growth return rate? Maybe 4%? So tax wealth at 4% and distribute it across all the citizens. Anyone who can use their wealth to generate more than 4% will see it grow (these are the successful people) while those who cannot will see their wealth dwindle and would be the typical case. This also addresses the wealth inequality issue. Incidentally, at 100 trillion dollars of wealth, this leads to 4 trillion to distribute across the population of say about 330 million leading to about 12,000 dollars a year or so.

This also suggests that the dividend should be applied equally to all people which includes, especially so, children. This is an investment in human existence and a celebration of all of us. Note that this also addresses the concern of a single mother of 3 who would get 12k for herself, 12k for each of her children leading to 48k to take care of her kids, keep them out of poverty, keep them nourished, loved, protected, not abused, etc. It also makes even an unemployed spouse economically useful to have around, but it also enables one to economically walk away from an abusive spouse. This would also lead to the ability to eliminate forced public schooling and much more organic growth of true individuals, free of labels, bullies, adult abuse, and indoctrination.

One might view it as almost a Universal Investment for the young, Universal Income for the middle aged, and a Universal Dividend for the old.

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

#108
post #70
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 methodo…

I think that the original synthetic control paper is this paper by Abadie and colleagues[1].

Figure 1 and 2 give you the intuition behind the need of using the a synthetic control rather than compare California to the rest of the US.

You can notice figure 1 that California’s sales of tobacco products was decreasing before the prop 99 and that this trend is different than the rest of the US. This violates the required parallel trends assumption that is required to have an unbiased estimate in a DD model.

Abadie et al. reweight the results from the other states to create a synthetic comparison group. This gives them a synthetic California sample that is similar to pre-prop 99 California. You can see that in figure 2.

They claim that any deviation from this synthetic group is due to the effects of prop 99 on tobacco sales (Do you believe them? This paper’s conclusion rests on your answer to this question.).

Bonus: Figure 3 shows the normalized results. I always appreciate Econ papers that put their results in a graph. Tables are hard to read sometimes.

[1]: https://economics.mit.edu/files/11859

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

#109

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…

People already remove the universal right to vote for felons so what would the difference be here? One can always talk about universal and then not actually do it.

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

#110
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.

Easy. You tax wealth by printing money.
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