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

>If enough people are on free money with no incentive to work, there isn’t enough wealth generated to pay for the people living on free money.

Is not an issue because one of the main reason for basic income in the first place is the increasing prevalence and advancement of AI and automation. Means we are needing less and less people to work.

>Conventional welfare also provides for a person’s “basic needs”, usually with the condition that that person is actively searching for an opportunity to add value.

What often happen is welfare incentives discourage work. Because entering the labor force or working more hours can lead to a loss in benefits.

>Who gets to decide what a basic need is, anyway?

Government. Of course it's based on research to determine the actual dollar amount.

>It really is though. There’s no other way to put it. It’s the consumption of wealth on the back of someone else’s labour.

Sure, but the thing is no once is forcing you to work, if you think its unfair or you think its better for you not to do work then fine don't work then. Other people will.

Nope. Human nature is to do what is possible within the confines of actual and perceived external and internal limitations to increase our partner value in order to procreate and propagate our genes. The increase in partner value as a motivation is often not conscious, and is evaluated via our emotional system based on proxy variables like social status among our peers, and appreciation and attention from others. There are different ways to increase status and attention, and in optimal conditions, people tend to learn early on what they are naturally better at, for example sports (signals physical health), music, art, poetry (signals intelligence), administrative work (signals intelligence and reliability) etc. People are naturally inclined to be productive, not for money, but to be valued and appreciated in their social context for the reaons above. Our society is not a natural or optimal (in evolutionary terms) environment for humans, and many of the incentives that drive our behaviors in it are set up with the goal of maximizing economic productivity of the system (or a subset of it with more political and ideological influence), but have a negative impact on the wellbeing and functioning of the people in it. When someone becomes trapped in a situation where they are unhappy – unemployment, or a terrible job that they can’t realistically leave – he or she is likely to sink into depression and a state of learned helplessness. When you’ve learned that nothing you do has any effect on your situation, you give up, do what you have to do to survive and no more, and self-medicate through food, alcohol, drugs, media consumption or whatever else gives you some relief from feelings of hopelessness, shame and guilt. From outside, this may look like: Laziness

> If enough people are on free money with no incentive to work

A central point of UBI as a replacement for means-tested welfare is that people without employment always have a financial incentive to work, because they keep the additional income from work rather than having sharp, sometimes more than 100% when aggregated across multiple programs, offsetting reduction in benefits.

It's true that UBI at a poverty support levels can be said to remove economic coercion that can exist to work without welfare (e.g., due to time limited benefits or qualifications besides means testing), but it does not result in people having no incentive to work.

> Conventional welfare also provides for a person’s “basic needs”, usually with the condition that that person is actively searching for an opportunity to add value.

Conventional means-tested welfare has massive inefficient bureaucracy because it works at cross purposes with itself, with means-testing creating a financial disincentive to added work (and duplicating bureaucratic functions already present in the tax system), which it then tries to counteract with behavior testing (which adds another set of layers of bureaucratic functions whose entire purpose is to provide coercion to counteract the work disincentives created by means testing.)0

> I guess my point of disagreement is that since the low interest subsidy is basically turning any mildly dense area into a rent treadmill, then why isn't the goal to directly address that as the problem?

Because nobody wants to touch it with a ten foot pole.

There are basically two ways to get interest rates back up. The first is that you just do it, and nothing else. We've discovered that doing this at anything faster than glacially slow when people are as leveraged as they currently are causes the world to burn. If interest rates doubled over a short period of time, the thousands of dollars people are already paying in interest would also double, and eat all of their disposable income and then some, requiring them to borrow even more at the now-higher rates in order to make rent. Bankruptcies would follow. The higher interest rates would make it harder to get a huge mortgage at current housing prices, so housing prices would crash. People have borrowed money to invest in stocks because the return on stocks has been higher than the interest on money, and raising interest rates tends to be deflationary in general, so you raise interest rates fast and the stock market crashes. At the same time as the housing market. Nobody really wants this version. It's terrible.

The alternative is that you raise interest rates against a backdrop of a series of pro-inflationary policies, that allow wages and the price of everything other than housing/healthcare/education to catch up and rebalance. And you need for people to pay down their debts so that interest rates can rise without bankrupting everyone, which means they need money to pay them with. But money comes from two places. One is debt -- banks create money when they make loans. But we can't use this one because the whole point is we need less of that.

The other is the government creates it. They need to create enough money for people to pay off their debts with, which destroys it again. That would be trillions of dollars. And then enough on top of that for wages to catch up to housing prices. (A UBI would actually be a great way to deliver the money to people.)

The banks would hate this with the fire of a thousand suns, because it would mean that the total amount of outstanding loans would fall significantly. In other words, their industry would shrink, by a lot.

So those are your options. Lots and lots of bankruptcies and a huge economic crash, or printing trillions of dollars for people to pay their debts with. Either way the banks are stuffed -- and they're the ones with the largest influence on this kind of policy, so they're firmly in the "kick the can down the road" camp of leaving interest rates low.

I am not surprised at all with this result. Why would anyone expect that conditional assistance would lead to people finding jobs. A good number of people might just be comfortable with the assistance and might decide to just stick with it.