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

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

#521

Post by spullara » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

zazaalaza wrote: post #506

DubiousPusher wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

UBI would reorient the idea of work in the sense that new generations won't think about work the way we do, for them it will be something that you can do, not something you have to do. Similarly how sport is today, you can do sports but you don't have to. Also with UBI you are guaranteed a certain amount of income for the duration of your life. You can go to a bank and take a loan against your UBI. A big portion of t…

I think they would have to make it illegal to borrow against your UBI to create a true safety net.

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

#522

Post by spullara » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #474

CydeWeys wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The required tax rates would still be unbelievably high though. Way higher than any other developed nation (some of whom already have >50% tax rates).

Canada has a tax rate that tops out at 50% (mostly), the US caps out at 37%[1]. I think we'd all be better off if the tax brackets went a lot higher. Rich folks tend to have a lot of inactive money that's just sitting around doing nothing - we can put it to more productive uses. 1. Please note, these numbers are off of raw income tax - both Canada and the US have other employment related taxes that I'm not counting h…

You aren't including state taxes.

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

#523

Post by 76543210 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

take_a_breath wrote: post #511

76543210 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using identical twins, they find outcomes are basically identical. And really this only applies to 0-5. After that, kids go to school.

What outcomes are basically identical? Could you share the study you seem to be citing? Kids go to school around age 5, but I'm not sure that is the end of child rearing.

There are lots of studies/stories. Google "identical twins separated at birth"

Once a kid is in school, a parent can work. Removing the need for UBI.

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

#524

Post by airstrike » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #507

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…

UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality and economic insecurity, not a solution on its own. People will be incentivized to work despite UBI because they still want better things, and will work to pay for things that provide social signalling value. A UBI shouldn't be designed to try to cover all desires and eliminate all reason to work, but rather should be tailored to give people more flexibility in choosin…

> UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality

Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising.

See e.g. the evolution of the distribution in wealth per wealth group per region based on data from table 3.2 of Credit Suisse's 2014 and 2019 Global Wealth Databooks.

Compare "Percentage of region (in %)" from

2014 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png

2019 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png

--------

Link to full PDFs are here:

https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

(I picked 2014 and 2019 because those were the oldest / newest PDFs I could find by changing the year in the URL...)

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

#525

Post by biggestdecision » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #503

graeme wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth isn’t fungible like that. A lot of recent wealth inequality was stocks rising. That doesn’t mean that food production went up, or that more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are cloned, or anything of the sort. It just means stocks went up. Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other people, or working to import stuff. If people don’t work, you don’t get the stuff they provide. To a cert…

Oh, so maybe we should fund UBI by just stripping out the capital gains exemptions that allow insanely rich people to get insanely richer. Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is tr…

How do you transfer it though? If some businessman has all his wealth tied up in stock in his business, how do you convert that to money? Some other person has to buy the stock. All this does is move the wealth around.

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

#526

Post by xyzzyz » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #105

whatshisface wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with this argument is that it proves too much. It's true of anything that causes the poor to have more money. Lower unemployment would be associated with a greater availability of goods and services, so that would get it out of the trap. Higher wages would also be associated with a supply increase if they came with increased productivity, but if you raised the minimum wage then prices of low-end product…

Employment cannot solve poverty problems for the disabled, the sick, the people taking care of their children/parents/siblings/etc, or the people who are better served spending the time in getting a degree.

Employment cannot solve poverty problems for the disabled

Of course it can. Why, in the US, almost a million of disabled people stopped being disabled and entered employment in recent few years, because of good economy:

https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1230489362883678210

The truth is that millions of people on disability in the US aren't actually so disabled that they cannot work: as the above shows, they will work if they consider the employment conditions good enough. Yes, there are plenty of disabled people who really cannot work, but majority of disability in the US is created, not alleviated by Social Security. One needs to remember that by creating programs to help poor and disabled, along with helping poor and disabled, one also creates more poor and disabled.

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

#527

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

So the problem is in a highly unequal society, "what the market will bare" can leave these things out of reach of most people. With basic income, yes some things can cost more, but also yes the spread of what people can pay is less.

Basically, income goes up, and prices go up, but income goes up more, and eventually one reaches a fixed point. For basic goods, this should happen sooner; e.g. the rich aren't going to just buy more flour.

Housing is interesting in that currently being in a decent job market makes the housing luxurious. This is absurd. Basic income doesn't address the cost disease of luxury good, but by breaking "employed surviving", it will make the other housing more attractive. Combine that with carbon tax so we don't just get endless sprawl, and then we should be set.

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

#528

Post by Proziam » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #455

Proziam wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote incoming. I work double full time and have done so for approaching a decade. It's definitely proven to be a significant competitive advantage in my case. I don't know too many folks who could have comfortably retired in their 20s (that didn't grow up with generational wealth). Still, I've seen many folks in esports do crazy workloads and get nowhere fast. So there's more to the formula than just pouring in m…

I mean, congrats, but if you retired comfortably in your 20s you got crazy lucky - that kind of rapid wealth acquisition isn't skill based. I used to work in the game industry getting peanuts for the same hours, we made amazing things in crunch that I am proud of, but when we started to scale back hours our product got even better because we lowered the stress and increased the healthiness of our workplace.

If you could have worked twice as many hours and made twice as much money - would you? That was the position I found myself in, and that's how I got where I am. I never claimed to have a secret skill.

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

#529

Post by munk-a » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

biggestdecision wrote: post #525

munk-a wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so maybe we should fund UBI by just stripping out the capital gains exemptions that allow insanely rich people to get insanely richer. Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is tr…

How do you transfer it though? If some businessman has all his wealth tied up in stock in his business, how do you convert that to money? Some other person has to buy the stock. All this does is move the wealth around.

Wealth taxes have been discussed in the modern political stage - but I'm a bit :shrug: about them - I think it'd be fine to continue to only tax capital gains when they're realized - so as long as that businessman can't effectively use any of his wealth he doesn't pay taxes on it - as soon as he benefits from his wealth he pays taxes on the accrued gains.

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

#530

Post by hinkley » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

diffeomorphism wrote: post #226

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and services they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate. > What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway? People dropping out of the workforce doesn't reduce the dem…

> The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate. Historical counterpoint: Shorter hours like 40/week were introduced to increase productivity. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day So it may very well be that the exact opposite of what you think is true and that you currently have to compensate for people working badly with long hours. > In fact, giving people free…

I think some people imagine that people like me calling for 32 hour work weeks are part of some slippery slope to everyone working an hour a day.

I trust the research that suggests that humans may only be built for ~30 hours of detail oriented work per week. That's also a nice number where I have time to work on other things, rather than just loafing about. If my boss offered me 30hrs/w plus insurance, I'd spend an extra 5+ hours a week working on my side projects and volunteer work.