People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report • Hacker News Board

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#381

Post by BlackCherry » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

wtdo wrote: post #328

loa_in_ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lack of personnel to do jobs would bump the wages due to demand and that would quickly find people ready to fill them in

And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.

You're assuming the bump in costs due to higher wages would by default outpace that of UBI's tax revenue. This is a ridiculous assumption.

The wage earners would be paying more taxes due to their higher wages.

The wage earners would have more spending power in our real economy, which both means more businesses earning money, and more tax revenue collected.

Is there a threshold we could hit where wage increases, increase cost to the point of outpacing tax revenues, sure. Is this even close to a default outcome. Absolutely not, and it's absurd to suggest it.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#382

Post by 76543210 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

rocmcd wrote: post #370

76543210 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Child rearing seems like a waste of talent. Our high cost of education should be teaching people to create more value than the 15k/yr of value it is raising a child before the age of 5.(daycare costs, 4 children per 1 adult) As an ancedote, it seems part time mothers are significantly happier than stay at home moms.

Trying to distill 'child rearing' to $15k/year and calling it a 'waste of talent' is absurd. Not everything can (and should) be broken down into a monetary amount and optimized for. You can classify anything as a 'waste of talent' when looking through this lens. Are you a software engineer? If so, then doing literally anything apart from developing software is a 'waste of talent'. Cleaning dishes? Gardening? Exercisi…

Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a restaurant is a waste of talent.

Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home.

I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#383

Post by take_a_breath » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #219

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate. For which the market should correct by increasing their compensation, thus incentivising people to return to working, no?

> For which the market should correct by increasing their compensation, thus incentivising people to return to working, no? Partially, but some of those increased compensation costs will translate to increased prices for everyone. That reduces the real value of a fixed UBI amount. It's a given that a significant amount of UBI will be absorbed by inflation, particularly in housing prices in competitive cities. If ever…

==If everyone in a city is already competing for a limited housing supply and suddenly everyone has an extra $1000 per month, I wouldn't be surprised if the cheapest housing costs suddenly increased by nearly $1000 per month.==

If we accept this logic as true, wouldn't it incentivize builders to increase housing supply? They would want to capture those higher rents and prices, right?

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#384

Post by shadofx » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #194

thedance wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine he's talking about the response to the Yang campaign, where liberals quite rightly derided his plan to replace all "entitlement" programs with the dramatically smaller $1000/mo UBI. If someone who has been a life-long libertarian looks like he's trying to drive a wedge into social welfare programs, that's probably what is happening.

>I imagine he's talking about the response to the Yang campaign, This predates Yang. Yang like all libertarian-UBI advocates, typically side-steps this issue.

Yang specifically addressed it in allowing people to choose one or the other.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#385

Post by eanzenberg » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #342

luckylion wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Somebody has to do the work though, until robots do everything (and then declare war on us), you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets. Disincentivizing work doesn't make that go away, it just means you'll put that load on fewer shoulders.

> you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs? If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.

No one (in US or CA) is dying of starvation.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#386

Post by take_a_breath » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

76543210 wrote: post #326

daemonk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the demographics of those that dropped out of the work force? Didn't some UBI studies observe that while there are people that dropped out of the workforce, these people consisted of mothers that can now go back to child rearing or younger people that can now pursue an education?

Child rearing seems like a waste of talent. Our high cost of education should be teaching people to create more value than the 15k/yr of value it is raising a child before the age of 5.(daycare costs, 4 children per 1 adult) As an ancedote, it seems part time mothers are significantly happier than stay at home moms.

==Child rearing seems like a waste of talent.==

Based on what metric?

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#387

Post by anoncake » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #329

hinkley wrote: post #129

I want UBI and a 30-32 hour work week, so I guess I’m proposing a 20% “disincentivization”. Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway? At this point, more robots don’t mean more of the stuff we need. they mean more stuff we don't need.

Everyone working 20% less will have very different effects compared to 20% fewer people working (while the rest continue to work as before). The former, which is what you are describing, seems positive. However it sounds like this study observed the latter happening.

That depends on what the 20% do instead.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#388

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

simonsarris wrote: post #88

This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion: > Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor mar…

[deleted]

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#389

Post by DubiousPusher » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #170

From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more children, getting married and buyi…

I agree. Letting workers leave abusive employment situations is a benefit of UBI. UBI might even totally reorient the idea of work in that now an employer has the incentive to keep workers happy that must be balanced with the profit incentive.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#390

Post by santiagogo » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #364

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #170

From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more children, getting married and buyi…

> basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc Less work means less is produced, so society as a whole becomes poorer. There's simply less goods. Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them also to work less. Now there's mo…

Number of hours worked is not equal to production or richness of a society.

Productivity equals production.

A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.

To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.