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

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

#421

Post by mola »

santiagogo wrote: post #390
ChrisLomont wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

What makes the people in Singapore New York and silicone valley more productive? The fact that they work in successful businesses and earn lots of money? So what? Tobacco is a successful business. How can you even define more economic output? You can't, you just use a very flawed proxy for economic value, money exchange.

I believe a good teacher is 100 times more productive than a software engineer. But that guy that wrote some tracking code earns a boat load more money. So you consider him more productive. That's just a huge fallacy. Value cannot be fully quantified, we use proxies for that reason, but we should always remember that.

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

#422

Post by free652 »

minitoar wrote: post #406
free652 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you wouldn't pay for basic income from your taxes. Where did you get that? It's an extra tax that you are currently not paying.

My understanding of UBI was it’s a replacement for many existing social programs.

Where did you get that? UBI won't help people that get free housing in NYC UBI doesn't work with HCOL areas.

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

#423

Post by munk-a »

sabarn01 wrote: post #216
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…

People should fear being destitute its the natural human condition. Learning skills is the only way to make wealth.

Sorry, can you clarify what lesson people who never were given a chance at an education should be learning?

Maybe, instead of getting all social darwinist, we could actually take stock in the fact that we have enough that we can afford to share with those less well off than ourselves.

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

#424

Post by munk-a »

csa wrote: post #404
hooande wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid destitution. And poverty isn't the natural condition for humans any more than it is for cats, or any other animal.

I’m guessing you don’t know many people who were born into wealth. The skill that they must learn is how not to lose the money. This skill is difficult to sustain over more than a generation or two — grandparent earns it, parent might keep it, child usually ends up destitute both in terms of financial capital and social capital. If the “child” in this scenario is lucky, they have some social capital that will save th…

That skill is so trivial to learn compared with the skill of surviving and building up income from nothing.

Rich people literally just need to not be complete idiots - if you've got 300 million in the bank put it in some low interest stable investment and you'd be able to live off the investment earnings alone. There, I just explained all the life skills you need as a rich person - there is no equivalence between the road the rich and the poor need to walk to survive.

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

#426

Post by joshlemer »

The problem I have with all of these studies is that they only look at the receiving side of the equation. In other words, their experiment is not a closed system where their subjects have to also provide the free money to each other, which is what UBI proposes.

The results therefor are completely uninteresting -- do people's quality of life go up when you just give them free money, no strings attached? I would certainly expect so! I don't think this is news to anybody. But what about the people paying for the UBI? If their taxes have to go up 3%.. 5%.. 10%.. whatever it is, then any respectable study of the affects of UBI has to at the very least take into account the negative affects on the paying population, if there are any. Otherwise, the conclusions we draw are probably going to be disastrously wrong.

An other way of thinking about it is with a thought experiment. If scientists didn't consider the full affects of their experiments on the entire system as a whole, then they could easily show that entropy decreases over time, or that momentum or energy or mass are not conserved.

So, I'd like to see a study where participants are divided into payers and recipients. Perhaps, 90% are payers and 10% are recipients, and we track not only the benefits in lifestyle that the receiving 10% enjoy, but also look for any drops in quality of life suffered by the 90%.

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

#428

Post by 76543210 »

take_a_breath wrote: post #386
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.

==Child rearing seems like a waste of talent.== Based on what metric?

Using identical twins, they find outcomes are basically identical.

And really this only applies to 0-5. After that, kids go to school.

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

#429

Post by bob33212 »

danenania wrote: post #396
Aunche wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufac…

Yeah, so now instead of barely getting by on subsistence farming, they barely get by working 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions with no rights. While the workers may be mostly better off than they were before, they still have to spend almost all their time and energy on meeting the basic needs of survival. The people who benefitted by far the most from all that investment were the owners, executives, and sharehol…

The book Sapiens has a similar message. The children of farmers who move to textile manufacturing were worse off than their parents in the 1800s. But the great great grandchildren of those people have material wealth greater than upperclass people in the 1800s when comparing clothes, entertainment, transportation, health care. And none of them would prefer to live as an 1800s farmer today.

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

#430

Post by munk-a »

tenpies wrote: post #320
hooande wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid destitution. And poverty isn't the natural condition for humans any more than it is for cats, or any other animal.

> No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid destitution. I can only speak for the Western tradition, but for most of history, the wealthy took great pride in making sure their male children were at least trained in soldiering, knew the family business, and were well-educated. It was the bare minimum to be considered a gentleman.

And, if that child flubbed all those skills, then they'd skill live a comfortable and rich life, there just might not be much left for the next generation.

Also, how is learning how to fence a good skill to avoid destitution? The rich had leisure time and invested that time in cultural skills, this isn't actually a bad thing either - it's my hope that everyone can afford to develop a hobby and be creative in their life... but that has nothing to do with avoiding destitution.

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