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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

#441

Post by CydeWeys »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #420
CydeWeys wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply not true. Giving every person the oft-quoted $1k/month would cost over $4T/year, which is more than the entire current tax revenue of the United States. So we'd need to more than double tax revenue to continue doing everything we are now plus pay the UBI.

It removes a shit load of misc. other benefits and all the bureaucracy needed to maintain them. That might not cancel out but it's not purely extra costs.

Those other benefits combined don't come remotely close to $4T. I'd be curious to see which benefits you think could be eliminated or cut back and how much that would save.

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

#442

Post by refurb »

CydeWeys wrote: post #405
Dansvidania wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he meant was "we already have enough tax-funded government income for it, but it is squandered elsewhere".

This is simply not true. Giving every person the oft-quoted $1k/month would cost over $4T/year, which is more than the entire current tax revenue of the United States. So we'd need to more than double tax revenue to continue doing everything we are now plus pay the UBI.

The logic of it is that you could increase taxes to pay for it and above a certain income level, 100% (or more) of it would be clawed back in taxes.

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

#443

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #5

The issue I see with basic income is that most money is spent on housing and health care. These two things are supply constrained so it's more of an auction for who can afford them. With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those things. This problem wouldn't appear in a study that distributed to only some individuals. We need to solve the regulatory or otherwise organizational problems of these things to prov…

[deleted]

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

#444

Post by aylmao »

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…

There could be other factors involved too, like the short-termness of the study. One year isn't a lot of time, and it's definitely enough to coast on savings and take a break from a job you hated until you get bored and/or need to take on another one.

Also, more so than UBI (or perhaps as a compliment to one another), IMO reforms to labour policy are due. The 40 hour work-week has been standard for a long time, but if we have the productivity surplus to even consider UBI, why not consider a 4-day workweek, for example?

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

#445

Post by munk-a »

rstupek wrote: post #330
nennes wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we have equal opportunity? Can you point me towards evidence of this? I guess you're not arguing about the gender wage gap, as it's a well documented fact. What is the point you're trying to make?

And yet not everyone can agree on what the cause of said gender wage gap truly is. Is it because women take time off to raise children, thus setting back their wage advancement? Is it because women are less likely to be more vigorous in asking for wage increases than men? Or is just because men are keeping women down?

As an example... for my wife, her salary was depressed because her boss thought that I make good enough money that she doesn't really need it. I think a lot of women still receive extremely slanted peer reviews due to gender biases (she's really catty, while he tends to raise good arguments), relationship drama (I mean, she's a good worker, but she turned down a drink with me... I don't know how good her judgement is), straight up appearance judgements (Oh, don't give the raise to nancy, she'll have a cushy life with looks like that, barbara could use it more), and harassment (I don't know about that raise - hey what are you doing friday?).

I think that everyone feels like we've totally solved gender discrimination forever while it's still really deeply seated in our culture.

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

#446

Post by refurb »

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…

The people in Singapore, NY and SF usually represent a very small slice of a given industry.

NY for example has lots of high paying finance jobs, but without all the industries those bankers serve, those finance jobs wouldn’t exist.

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

#447

Post by tomp »

nennes wrote: post #307
isoskeles wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're using data that doesn't control for occupation, hours worked, etc.

So as a gender, women choose lower paid jobs and work less? If this is true and it is a choice, that would mean that women as a gender are either lazy or less qualified. If this is not true then it is evidence of inequality in the selection of employees. I don't see either of the above making your point.

So you're writing on HN instead of working more because you're lazy and less qualified? Or do you voluntarily choose to spend part of your life not working and doing other things that you find enjoyable?

TL;DR: go away troll.

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

#448

Post by chillacy »

pingyong wrote: post #95

I really, really like the idea of UBI. However, some napkin math: In the US, with ~250 million people being eligible, a $1000 UBI would cost ~$3 trillion. That's almost the entire budget of the US. How is this even remotely realistic right now? Even if you can cut other spending in half due to it, you'd need an additional $1.5 trillion in "income" essentially. Is that something that would even be possible? How many r…

You threw out $1000 a month, any reason?

Different proposals use different amounts, $1k a month happens to be in the Yang proposal (Freedom Dividend) which was funded largely from a consumption tax: https://freedom-dividend.com/

A conservative proposal ($6.5k-$10k a year, Charles Murray) might be largely funded on cuts to existing programs: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-a...

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

#449

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Aunche wrote: post #331
xzel wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing professions are useless and only exist because there is manufactured bureaucracy. Bullshit Jobs is a great book looking into to this. Also UBI shouldn't be disincentivizing work, it should be allowing people to explore more fulfilling pursuits.

I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.

One of the major sources of bullshit jobs are self-annihilating professions, like lawyers or advertising. Monsanto sues Exxon for a billion dollars, Exxon countersues, they spend ten years in court and then settle for 10% of what they each spent on lawyers. Coke and Pepsi each spend a billion dollars on advertising to cancel each other out.

If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.

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

#450

Post by saint_fiasco »

BurningFrog wrote: post #113
dx87 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there isn't much work if you live there. If you had UBI though, that wouldn't matter, so you could just live in a rural area for cheap.

This of course directly contradicts the claim that people will keep working with UBI.

If they like their current house they'll work hard to pay for it. If they can't find a job or don't like their current home that much they can use their UBI to move and make room for a more productive citizen to move into the city. This makes the allocation of housing more efficient.
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