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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

#241

Post by matz1 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #211
matz1 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can u clarify, How is it not have any basis in reality ?

I mean I would expect you to back up your claim with some kind of scientific study that humans in general opt to produce value for society purely altruistically. I highly doubt that’s the case, but I have an open mind and I’d be delighted to be proven wrong. As I understand it, most societal benefit and technological advancement has come from humans acting selfishly. You develop an idea while seeking profit — not nec…

>I mean I would expect you to back up your claim with some kind of scientific study that humans in general opt to produce value for society purely altruistically.

That's not what I claiming at all.

What I'm saying is if you want to produce value then go ahead keep producing value for whatever reason, it could be purely for selfish reason for all i care.

But You still have to pay tax for your income though, thats for allowing you to do business.

Of course if you produce value you will be a lot more richer than people who don't produce value, thats an advantage for you.

And for people who can't or won't produce value, fine, here is basic income for you so that you can still fulfil your basic needs.

So its not one happy person at the expense of someone else.

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

#242

Post by notahacker »

yason wrote: post #121

The experiment was probably staked with an agenda to show that UBI doesn't work, given the parties in the government and the massive bias in selecting the participants. The sample of 2000 people were chosen from a group of unemployed people . I think the criteria for being randomly chosen was having been paid unemployment benefits during some range of dates. So it's not representative of a real UBI at all: the point…

If the experiment was committed by people with an agenda to show UBI doesn't work (or even by people who were neutral on the idea and genuinely interested in its net impact) they'd have picked a random sample of people to pay $8K per year to whilst increasing their personal taxes by a substantially larger amount, in order to make transfer payments across the whole programme net to zero. Suspect that cohort's impressions of the programme would have been less positive...

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

#243

Post by JAlexoid »

psadri wrote: post #129

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'll take empirical evidence, over your hypothesis.

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

#244

Post by dragonwriter »

freedomben wrote: post #132
yason wrote: post #121

The experiment was probably staked with an agenda to show that UBI doesn't work, given the parties in the government and the massive bias in selecting the participants. The sample of 2000 people were chosen from a group of unemployed people . I think the criteria for being randomly chosen was having been paid unemployment benefits during some range of dates. So it's not representative of a real UBI at all: the point…

I agree, but I do think it's important to specify that this is only one UBI proposal (it's the UBI proposal that I favor, that Milton Friedman supported as an alternative to bureaucracy heavy welfare programs). There are plenty of UBI proposals out there that are not universal (you don't get it once you hit a certain income threshold) and that don't replace other welfare programs. These are nontrivial differences tha…

> There are plenty of UBI proposals out there that are not universal (you don't get it once you hit a certain income threshold)

Means-tested programs like that are, by definition, not unconditional basic income. So there are no UBI proposals that do that, since a proposal that does that is not UBI.

> and that don't replace other welfare programs.

It's unusual for a UBI proposal not to replace other means-tested benefit programs (though it may not do so immediately absolutely; my preferred implementation would, e.g., merely count as income against other programs qualifications and only shutter each of them completely when the UBI floor had reached above the point where it was possible to qualify for the one of the other programs.)

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

#245

Post by keymone »

jrs95 wrote: post #201
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…

We shouldn't just accept a future of joblessness. It's a terrible waste of human capital. Rather than simply paying people to be unemployed, we should find work for them to do that benefits society in some way. To an extent we need to be investing more in our people, especially in the U.S., but there are also things we could do like large scale infrastructure projects that could help fill the gap for people that don'…

> we should find work for them to do that benefits society in some way

introduce basic income and people will make themselves useful.

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

#246

Post by dragonwriter »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #166
lusmd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most likely taxed away Yes, most UBI proposals (as designed by economists) tax earnings with little to know exemption. That is, we give you $15k per year, but start taxing you the very first dollar you earn rather than only taxing income about , say, $20k.

But what a waste of effort. Why do they suggest this instead of starting at UBI+$1, at least?

UBI itself isn't usually considered taxable income in the proposals, so effectively that's what happens.

Personally, I wouldn't increase pre-UBI marginal tax rates for taxable incomes below (pre-UBI median minus UBI), but I'm not a right-wing UBI proponent, and I favor focusing first on taxing capital income equally to labor income as a revenue source.

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

#247

Post by bryondowd »

lusmd wrote: post #152
baronswindle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U6 unemployment numbers include workers who are employed part time but would prefer to be full time, and U6 is near all time lows.

But labor force participation rates are still very, very low. If you'd like a job but don't have one, you don't get counted in any unemployment stats except the aggregate labor force participation.

This caught my attention so I looked for a source. Looks like this rate is the number of people who are Employed (60.7%) or have been actively seeking work in the last week (4%) out of the total population of people who are 16 years or older, not institutionalized, and not active military.

The source I found doesn't break down the remaining 35.3% of the population much, except to pull out about 2% as marginally attached or discouraged. Basically, people who have given up looking for work. I tried figuring out the makeup of the remaining 33%, but without much luck. How many 16 and older students are out there not working because they are full time committed to schooling? Hard to figure out, because so many students have part time jobs or are at least actively looking for part time jobs. Then, how many people are retired by choice, versus retired because there's no more work for them? How many homemakers are staying home with kids because they can't earn enough to significantly exceed childcare expenses versus those who stay home because they don't need or want to work?

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

#248

Post by fucking_tragedy »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #34

I always thought the point of basic income was so that you didn’t necessarily need every member of society employed in the traditional sense

UBI serves two purposes.

The first is stopgap rhetoric to prevent socialist-inspired rhetoric from making popular gains as traditional employment is eroded away.

The second is to point at UBI and go "See, if you give money to people who were made redundant in the labor market, they probably still won't be able to sell their labor" while doing everything to ignore the fact that the market has moved past certain people.

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

#249

Post by JAlexoid »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #157
stcredzero wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With few exceptions, all societies have Pareto distributions. All societies (of any decent size) are also subject to unrest from relative inequality. All successful societies also managed to engage in some form of distribution of power and some form of redistribution of wealth. Distribution of power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Perception of relative wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE…

Regarding activity in the US... Do you think it's because we have no cultural knowledge/history of peasants vs the aristocracy? I find that Americans are very confused when discussing class issues and any discussion usually devolves into racism or simple consumerist preferences.

America is a anti-culture society(Americans have little culture that is shared among the absolute majority). At best there are 7-10 major cultural regions in USA. Who's values change as much as you going through Europe... It also broadly matches European cultural differences.

So it's hardly surprising that Americans can't define certain things, to span the whole country. It's an ongoing project of Enlightenment, that I'd like to succeed.

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

#250

Post by notahacker »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #174
DougN7 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, a massive influx of newly minted money will cause inflation. That's a given. But it's not sustainable and clearly not a sensible way to implement this policy. If we instead took this money from other taxes most likely there'd be some inflation, but not enough to make the money useless. Finally, I know 1m was a hyperbole but basic income doesn't need to guarantee you can live comfortably anywhere without working…

I think the problem is less overall inflation, which can be stabilised, and more distributional impact. Sure, the costs of slum housing won't rise 1 to 1 so people living in it will still feel slightly better off, but slum landlords in many areas with limited housing availability will still capture much/most of those gains (which are difficult to tax away without also affecting productive businesses) in the form of massive price increases of limited-supply budget housing. Meanwhile, someone on the other end is losing out by paying for the UBI, and that probably includes people in middle class incomes facing higher taxes and cost pressures on their own taxes.

Of course, any redistribution programme has undesirable distributional impacts as well as desired ones, but they're likely to be worse if your programme is as unsophisticated as "let's just give everybody exactly the same entitlements irrespective of need and put gross taxes up to pay for any difference"

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