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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

#651

Post by KorematsuFred »

None of these empirical studies are useful for broad policy decisions. This is a bit like linear regression, there are to many dimensions each matters differently and the same classifier will not hold true if you add more dimensions randomly or remove few.

There is no "core human trend" to all this that will get revealed only by empirical studies but not by logic. (Empirical studies are useful to judge say whether vaping actually makes us more healthy on average. Smoking is so irrational at some level that no amount of logic can help us predict how people behave.)

The economics logic is pretty clear. People will react to incentives. But there is no hard formula that we can apply. Raising minimum wage by few cents will not cause job loss but increasing it by few dollars will. But if you make minimum wage around $100 then whole industry might go underground and no effective jobless but for in government record keeping.

I think effectiveness of UBI will be useful only if we perform far too many experience under far too variable circumstances and then understand the broader trends.

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

#652

Post by ctdonath »

BlackCherry wrote: post #627
Balgair wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great number of people have a vested interest in covering a consistent, if not growing, population. Nearly all Kings and Emperors were 'poorer' than most Westerners under the poverty line of today. They had no refrigeration, antibiotics, electricity, etc. But we still agree that there are 'poor' people today, and I think we're correct to say so. Yes, it is a movin…

I find this trope of Kings/Emperors being "poorer" than most people today, to be an extremely annoying trope. This trope is purely a rhetorical device used to justify inequalities, because "look you have a cell phone and infinite McDonald's deliveries on Seamless, you're richer than a King of old!" Meanwhile you're shackled to your job, shackled to your location, shackled to your apartment/mortgage, shackled to your…

I find the annoyance annoying, overlooking how "poor" has been lifted to heights unthinkable not long ago - and prompting my earlier comment. Those who have had cellphones for all adulthood don't grasp how limited much was not long ago; methinks many need a reality check on what basic living entails (I grew up with wood heat, no A/C, significant homegrown food, walk 2 miles in a blizzard for help when car slid into a ditch, hand-typed individual copies of resume, etc). Most "shackling" is for want of imagination to do, not resources/opportunities. I'm deeply concerned that so many think they're "poor" when they do in fact have far more resources & opportunities than "rich" (or at least "middle class") did not long ago.

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

#653

Post by ctdonath »

heavyset_go wrote: post #481
ctdonath wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is the lack of colloquial objective definition of "poor". The US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes. The US's vast welfare/entitlement system ensures few indeed net less than that line, shoring up their shortfall with trillions of $. What constitutes "poor" keeps shifting. There will always be a bottom 10%. There is ongoing increase to the standard of living, instilling a sense of "nobody s…

> “A linen shirt is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall…

The aforementioned day-laborer's shirt took hundreds of hours to make.

The aforementioned Greeks & Romans had to go hunt & kill & skin & dry a good-sized animal to make a shirt.

You can buy an entirely respectable modern shirt for $5 today, 42 minutes of mundane commodity labor in a comfortable environment.

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

#654

Post by nybble41 »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #562
zazaalaza wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. With a permanent UBI in place you can throw all these studies out the window.

You can argue that the only way to perform a completely accurate UBI experiment would be to run it for at least 60-80 years for everyone. Social experiments are very hard to do and have many flaws, but it seems unreasonable to say that the information gained by doing such studies should be "thrown out the window".

> You can argue that the only way to perform a completely accurate UBI experiment would be to run it for at least 60-80 years for everyone.

You could get decent results in less than 60-80 years by granting each participant a fully-funded fixed annuity guaranteeing them a specific income for the remainder of their lives independent of the continuation of the study. Of course, that would raise the cost of the study to something approaching a real (non-universal) BI program.

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

#655

Post by airstrike »

danans wrote: post #644
airstrike wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising. My comment specifically referred to UBI in the context of the US, so I'm not sure what the relevance of global inequality is to whether or not an individual country does UBI. If anything, the globalization that is driving global inequality down (a good thing), when coupled with domestic policies in the developed world that massively favor own…

> so I'm not sure what the relevance of global inequality is to whether or not an individual country does UBI.

Because UBI is a misguided effort. It aims to fix inequality in any given country without addressing the root cause for increased domestic inequality: that low-skilled workers in developed nations are more expensive than low-skilled workers in developing nations in an age of cheap global logistics and telecommunications.

More sustainable solutions would arguably revolve around improving the educational system and revisiting {fiscal, educational, cultural, ...} incentives broadly across society to get the population trained to a a higher average skill level so that they may compete (and hopefully outcompete) for jobs currently performed by equivalent workers abroad.

Such an effort would presumably lead, in the long term, to a higher skilled global population who is equipped to bring about visions of the future. UBI, meanwhile, is tantamount to subsidizing low-skilled workers so they may continue to create little value (in terms of technological advancement and economic progress) and perpetuate the societal imbalances that preclude them from realizing their true potential.

It seems like an easy choice to make, at least if you buy into the assumption that we indeed want to maximize technological advancement and economic progress, and that those are bona fide proxies for improving standards of living and diminishing poverty.

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

#656

Post by m463 »

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…

I think the work disincentive is the big deal.

I lived in a city near an native-american reservation. There were groups of able-bodied men that would just cash their checks and buy alcohol.

I can imagine the same thing with folks with reversible drug problems, or in areas with declining employment.

A stipend would basically prevent a "reckoning" and allow able people to avoid personal responsibility or necessary changes indefinitely.

And that's what people do. They keep on plugging on in a bad situation avoiding necessary changes.

Maybe I'm wrong. I've never been in such low situations, so I don't think I can have an opinion based on personal experience.

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

#657

Post by bsder »

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…

> then the work disincentive could be a disaster

We need to get past "Your worth is your work". People don't deserve to be neglected simply because they produce nothing that society currently values. We all reach that point with age.

And multi-generational problems are generally solved with your educational system.

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

#658

Post by cbhl »

zazaalaza wrote: post #636
learnstats2 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no such thing as "permanent UBI", though. UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government. The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it makes sense to up-skill. Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how t…

"UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government" If this is true than implementing UBI will be more problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call for all other financial safety nets to be removed in order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something similar to how the pension…

Apparently, Ontario used to have a much large welfare program prior to 1995: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/august-2018/ontario...

So I guess that suggests that even if a UBI is implemented that it could be cut or repealed in a future government.

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

#659

Post by CompBrogrammer »

godelski wrote: post #650
blackflame7000 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you can be educated in any topic up to and including the history of the Kardashians. This in no way contributes to a better functioning society. Your entire premise that education = more intelligence is completely wrong. Would you argue a person educated by extremists correlates with a better functioning society? The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating some…

It is unclear to me if you are being obtuse on purpose or on accident. But I want to reiterate that trolling is not allowed on HN and it is presumed that you are going to take arguments on good faith. So I will answer as if you aren't being needlessly obtuse. We're talking about institutional education, not gaining more information. So in this discussion we're not talking about people spending their money to become m…

This hardly seems like responding in good faith.

At any rate, I believe the poster you responded to was using hyperbole to equate "history of the Kardashians" with some degree that he or she deems "equally as useless."

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

#660

Post by bavell »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #635
bavell wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, part of the allure of UBI to me is that it is a social safety net except it benefits everyone. Because it's universal and not means-tested, it removes the stigma of being 'on welfare' which IMO is incredibly discouraging and makes it harder to rise out of your unfortunate situation. So yes, I would love if UBI replaced some programs while augments others. At the end of the day it's the most direct and effecti…

> At the end of the day it's the most direct and effective way of combating poverty and goes a long way towards closing the wealth gap. Where do you think all this Income is going to come from? The middle class will shoulder the bulk of it which will widen the wealth gap. You will end up with 1k in UBI and 1500 in taxes to pay for it.

> Where do you think all this Income is going to come from?

As I mentioned:

> divert those funds from corporations into the hands of the people

To be fair, it's true that won't cover the entire bill. However, between reducing spending in other welfare programs, the increase in economic output and implementing a VAT, the gap closes pretty quickly.

As a sibling comment mentions, the math is pretty straightforward. Let's also not forget the second- and third-order benefits to society and the economy that will result from most of the population having more purchasing power and economic freedom.

Do you think it's fine that Amazon and friends pay next to nothing in taxes by exploiting the tax code? Why are we (taxpayers) subsidizing mega corps who are making money hand over fist?

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