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Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

hippich wrote: post #229
Qwertystop wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI doesn't prevent you from looking for work on top of it - that's what "unconditional" means here.

Indeed. People who want to achieve something - they will be quite happy about it. But seeing retired parents not knowing what to do about their lives (because they dedicated whole life to getting their children ahead and working their ass off to do that, and now they done with it - what next?) - suggests that there is more to it, than just covering basic needs.

It seems to me that the problem many retiring people run into is that they have been compelled to labor for the entire life by economic necessity and so viewed retirement as an escape into self-fulfillment, without ever having time to consider what self-fulfillment means, and first really are able to even consider the question in their senior years, burdened by mental habits of decades of servile labor.

In a system where people don't usually feel an economic compulsion to work if they are at all able (which is probably not a UBI at the poverty-support level usually suggested as a near-term goal, though that might have a shadow of the same effect) you'd have a lot fewer people running into that problem; they'd learn and organize their life around it when they were much younger.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#232

Post by notahacker »

dahfizz wrote: post #223
ThomPete wrote: post #76

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…

> It's a general misunderstanding that Basic Income is some sort of job program, it's not. The problem is that I've heard many proponents of UBI sell it as exactly that, a way for people to get better jobs. And I can't really blame them, framing UBI as a way to make unemployment more comfortable is not going to be very successfully politically.

> framing UBI as a way to make unemployment more comfortable is not going to be very successfully politically.

Not least because in developed countries alternative redistribution systems exist to make unemployment more comfortable (much more comfortable than UBI, potentially, since fewer people will be net recipients), but on the assumption that people will actually take a job if offered it. Arguing it's worth redistributing funds from those who need or want to work to those who prefer leisure is a much harder sell...

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#233

Post by kardos »

antris wrote: post #187
kardos wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Even if we triple land use efficiency, population growth will increase the demand to compensate

Population growth has been steadily slowing down since 1960s.

Broadly speaking, that is because we're approaching something like a carrying capacity, estimated to be somewhere around 10B.

If we increase land use efficiency dramatically, that effectively raises the carrying capacity and population growth can continue much longer

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#234

Post by jeffbax »

mactrey wrote: post #62
mises wrote: post #48

I still see some big issues with universal basic income, and would appreciate one of its supporters responding to some of them: Cost. $3.8 trillion by many estimates. That's nearly 20% of America's GDP. How is it possible to pull this much money out of the American economy without crashing it? Scope. I am of the opinion that one of the beauties of federalism is that policies can be tested first at the state level bef…

> How is it possible to pull this much money out of the American economy without crashing it? The money isn't pulled out, though. It is redistributed to people, many of whom will immediately spend it, and others will invest it in various (hopefully efficient) ways. > Why would a national government do this? The problem of entry and exit. Say one state like Massachusetts implemented a UBI. Then we could expect many pe…

Yup, a negative income tax is a much better policy avenue to deal with this. It's much better to subsidize people doing things of varying degrees of productivity in an otherwise open employment market, than to discourage work entirely.

Work is how you learn and often have some kind of basic dignity and meaning, not to mention how you eventually move up to better positions.

This is essentially what the Earned Income Tax Credit is, and what should be expanded rather than something that would dis-incentivize working at all.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#235

Post by kwhitefoot »

There is a basic misunderstanding here. A basic income is unconditional. The Finnish study was not basic income because it was not unconditional. It was instead an experiment to find out if giving specifically unemployed people money would help them find a job.

It sounds like perfectly ordinary social security from my perspective in Norway, perhaps with some of the requirements relaxed.

If people want to find out if basic income works it has to be given to a representative slice of the population. This has been done several times in North America (once in Canada, and twice in the US), as far as I can tell it was successful.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#236

Post by Frondo »

njarboe wrote: post #142
LarryDarrell wrote: post #111

Which would be a fine outcome. We're entering a real messy period where dignified, decent paying jobs are becoming scarce. All of our philosophies about work and welfare are rooted in a post WWII era where we were essentially rebuilding the world and there was more work than competent people. If we are going to insist that all productivity gains must now go directly to the capital class, we're going to need a UBI, un…

Do people really want to have all of their support depend on the government? As an American I know people that don't and even reject government paid food stamps and healthcare, although they are poor enough to qualify for them. I don't think it is very psychologically healthy to be so dependent on things out of your control. A better system would be some system where people can earn a large chunk of capital that basi…

We're all entirely dependent one things outside our control, and it's a worldview that's romanticized to the point of silliness to say anything else.

As for the land grant you're talking about, that's a huge, huge give-away right there; and, I'd note, in your hypothetical, you already inverted the sequence of events (be given land => you keep it, work hard => you get $250k).

All UBI does is recognize that, given how technological progress puts people out of jobs, we'd better find alternatives to distributing resources than what we do now, because we're going to end up with a lot of heads on spikes if we don't.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#237

Post by nickelcitymario »

In other news:

Vegetarianism did not lead an increase in animal population.

Policing did not lead to an increase civic engagement.

Prophylactics did not lead to an increase in birth rates.

...I wonder what other goals I could retroactively apply to social programs to show how they failed to achieve things they were never meant to address.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#238

Post by nostrademons »

michaelchisari wrote: post #176
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If humanity lived at the density of Paris (21,438/km^2), we could all live in an area half the size of Texas (695,663 km^2). So if we're talking about material post-scarcity, land is more than plentiful.

If humanity lived at the density of Wyoming (5.97/mi^2), we would have to get rid of 50% of the U.S. population or 98% of the world population, because only 147M people could fit on the habitable land on earth.

So yes, it is and it isn't. The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities, given the elimination of any cost constraints.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#239

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mindslight wrote: post #219
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I may start calling this the "it is impossible to reduce inequality" fallacy. If you gave everyone money, would things cost more? Maybe some things. Not everything, and not by 100.0% of the amount of money provided. Because some of the money gets saved…

Saying that inflation is low is referring to a broken metric. Inflation in housing, healthcare, and education have significantly contributed to the current problem in the US. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106964 I would say the root problem is all that debt , specifically the ongoing costs of servicing the debt. Staying alive does intrinsically require ongoing expenses for food, energy, shelter upkeep, perso…

There is a very specific reason housing, healthcare and education costs are so high -- the government keeps subsidizing them in particular. Mortgage interest tax deduction, exclusion from capital gains tax, employer health insurance deduction, ACA subsidies, federal student loan interest deduction and subsidies, etc.

The problem with all of this is that it doesn't cause general inflation, it only raises the cost of those specific things. Which means in particular that it doesn't raise general wages, so the cost of those things increase relative to wages. On top of that most of those subsidies are to loan interest rather than principal, so the incentive is to take out a huge loan, which multiplies the effect on overall price. They really are very poorly designed policies. Unless you're a bank or an insurance company or an existing landlord.

A UBI is the opposite of that. It doesn't require you to do anything in particular, so it doesn't raise the price of anything in particular relative to everything else.

It also helps you out of the megopolis treadmill. The job in Pittsburgh pays $50,000, but the job in SF pays $150,000, so you take that one. Then you learn it costs $100,000 more to live in SF at the same quality of life, so you're really only just breaking even.

Add $12,000 worth of UBI and it becomes more advantageous to live in the median city than the huge megopolis, because the extra $12,000 goes further there and unlike the salary it's the same amount in both places. So more people do, and prices fall everywhere, because that's also more efficient. You increase economies of scale by increasing population in the smaller cities while reducing resource contention in the huge cities where economies of scale are already maxed out.

And likewise if you replace student loans and healthcare subsidies with the UBI, the cost of education and healthcare comes down, because then people don't lose any part of the subsidy if they choose a less expensive school or a higher deductible insurance policy, they just get to use it for something else. Like for patronizing service workers, which increases their wages relative to housing/healthcare/education.

Re: Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said

#240

Post by hippich »

romwell wrote: post #230
hippich wrote: post #221

I used to be all-in UBI supporter. To my "hacker" mind it appeared like a wonderful hack around issues society is facing. But lately, as I saw our parents retire, I was thinking about what really keep people happy - and as soon as basics are covered, it appears that "being useful" is what jobs are really about. UBI, as a result, may lock people forever in a jobless situation. UBI will not provide enough capital to bo…

Counterpoint: receiving UBI would not be any more of a "not useful" mark than simply being unemployed. Technically, we all are receiving a UBI of $0 right now. The idea is just to increase that amount to cover rent and food. If everyone's getting it, there is no stigma. (Same disclaimer on random philosophical thoughts and no real answers)

Not really talking about stigma here since, as you correctly pointed out, UBI assumes everyone gets it. It is more of an existential question for the person themselves - "what is exactly is my purpose"?
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