171–180 of 345 posts
> Finland basic income trial improved happiness but not employment
It’s unfortunate the BBC chose that quote, as it misrepresents the outcome of the trial as _creating_ joblessness, rather than failing to _alter_ joblessness.
> The aim was to see if a guaranteed safety net would help people find jobs I'm confused, was that ever the expected goal of basic income?
But a lot of the UBI movement likes to think that if given a long-term guarantee on a society-wide basis after a "vacation" period where people adjust to having the bottom rung of the hierarchy of needs guaranteed they would pursue higher actualization and often greater economic benefit to the society by doing so.
Its the difference between why a lottery winner will splurge it all in excess and vice and wind up bankrupt again while a hereditary millionaire can live a productive managerial life on top of a corporate hierarchy. The former lived without, had fortunes rain upon them, and treated it like evaporating water to be drowned in. The later had from birth, never went without, and thus never had to fear being without. They didn't know the scarcity or struggle and thus didn't overdose on excess since they always had it.
The opposites also happen. Lottery winners sometimes stay responsible with the money. Rich kids blow their family fortunes and end up destitute. But the disparity between them is the divide between the fleeting sensation of plenty and being immersed in it in perpetuity.
So for UBI advocates, the idea is that immersion in a basic standard of living would enable the masses to behave much like how the billionaire playboy philanthropist does on a smaller scale - learn more, expand your horizons, take more risks, and pursue your passions. If you don't feel like you could ever lose the basics, and everyone has them likewise, nobody is in a struggle to survive that breeds animal instinct anti-rational behavior like payday loans or buying lottery tickets. If you are instead struggling for splendor and prestige rather than food and shelter you have a lot more room to grow as a person, and for those that do they will be much more valuable to society as innovators than burger flippers.
Did they not have an identical cohort serving as a control to compare employment rates at the end of the trial?
no they did not.
so the group who received the subsidy was already skewed by a previous selection process.
I don't see any mention of a control group in the experiment web site:
[0] https://www.kela.fi/web/en/basic-income-objectives-and-imple...
Handing out free money will most likely just cause inflation and defeat itself. The inflation will make the amount paid out in basic income insufficient to live on. The alternate to basic income for the purpose of housing, health and food, is to provide a basic version of those resources at zero cost.
I don’t know why you were downvoted because you’re right. A simple thought experiment can prove it: give everyone $1 million every year starting today. Is everyone suddenly rich? Just for a few days. Eventually milk will cost $500/gallon. The effects of Supply and demand can’t be legislated out of existence.
I just envision people buying all sorts of things without understanding what they're signing up for.
And from a U.S. perspective, I don't trust a system filled with rent-to-owns, payday lenders, and car dealer/financers stopping anyone from making bad choices.
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Scarcity is beyond just stuff. Land for example is a finite resource.
It is and it isn't. Land in Manhattan is scarce. Land in the non-coastal western US or most of Canada or Australia is theoretically scarce too, but not so much in practice.
So if we're talking about material post-scarcity, land is more than plentiful.
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I always think of Star Trek. It isn't really explored in depth but there isn't money and people don't have to work, transporter rationing is alluded to though. I guess in a world where everything can be made in a replicator, 'employment' becomes untenable. You still need some way of rationing scarce resources, and allowing people to 'vote' for what they want more of though.
Scarcity is beyond just stuff. Land for example is a finite resource.
I suppose lots of people enjoy owning their own land-- large tracts of it in fact, and not sharing it with anyone. That's a little tougher to conceptualize as post-scarcity as there's a limit to making land enjoyment more efficient with advanced technology. But in a world where other resources are less scarce perhaps we can think about colonizing other planets and terraforming as ways to increase supply.
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Never-mind the money, I fear that even if we can implement it and pay for it, there will still be a host of social problems that UBI advocates do not want to grapple with. There's still no answer to questions like "what if it starts to entrench a permanent underclass and make inter-generational wealth worse, as people who stop working bear a generation of people who have never worked, and they bear children, etc". ht…
> There's still no answer to questions like "what if it starts to entrench a permanent underclass and make inter-generational wealth worse, as people who stop working bear a generation of people who have never worked, and they bear children, etc". Why would reducing disincentives to work, as compared to means-tested welfare, rationally be expected to have anything like that effect?
It's a general misunderstanding that Basic Income is some sort of job program, it's not. It's a job replacement program for a society where there aren't enough jobs for everyone because technology have taken over most. Basic Income should provide fundamental living cost support in a society that has no jobs so there is no "but" in there. Edit: Keep in mind we already have Basic Income it's just conditional. UBI is di…
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Lately, I’ve been in the mood to read recently-published business self-help books. One thing that surprised me was that three of the books had a common premise. They began by describing the habits of some of the most notable people in history (scientists, artists, business people, etc). Then, they went on to say how these habits would be necessary to maintain a job in the new globalized marketplace. Wait, what? So, a…
Wait, what? So, anyone who wants to have a job must emulate the habits of some of the most impressive people in history? Wow. Isn't that how a lot of human progress works? The scientific viewpoint was once a pastime of educated elites. Now the world model derived from it is very much mainstream. (Though it isn't 100% universal) Reading, writing, and arithmetic were once elite and esoteric specialist skills, now they…
But habits ? depending on what habits are we talking about, some are highly related to personality, to willpower, to interpersonal skills,etc and those are really hard to change, or maybe impossible, for some.
And if aim so high in changing human beings, is this the best we can do ? to create better money making machines ? And what will that do to our old values - stuff like kindness, family values, creativity for it's own sake ?
And will it even work ? Or is being an Elon Musk copy will just become a requirement for working as a barista ?