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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

#751

Post by dahart »

barry-cotter wrote: post #745
dahart wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Education does not equate to a successful job Yes it does, statistically speaking. Career academics are a tiny minority of the population. The median salary of a BS degree in the US is 2x over non-degree holders. The median salary of an advanced degree is 3x. Twice the salary for having a 4 year degree, that is enormous . These stats were published very recently by the St. Louis Fed: https://files.stlouisfed.org/fi…

How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? How much is selection effect and how much treatment effect? The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt loa…

That study I put a link to is attempting to answer that very question methodically, and the answer in this study and others is it’s both correlation and causation. Some of the “income premium” you get for having a bachelor’s degree is cultural bias toward education (causation), some of it is having more and broader skills (causation), some of it is the many jobs that require degrees or pay higher with more education (causation), and some portion of it is due to things like whether your parents got degrees or have money (correlation).

But, I’m curious, what does it actually matter in this context, if any non-zero portion of it is causation? This thread is discussing whether people are better off getting some education, whether they should spend their UBI income in search of opportunity via education, and whether going to school is a “work disincentive”. (Seem like the opposite to me.) They’re attempting to improve their lot via schooling, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more education will, statistically, improve their lot at least somewhat.

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

#752

Post by godelski »

redis_mlc wrote: post #738
godelski wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was suggesting that they weren't responding in good faith. Which in this instance was the creation of straw man.

Stop being a pedant. Instead of the usual "basket weaving" as an example of a useless field of study, he used "history of the Kardashians."

Yes, this is called a straw man argument. People don't like them on hacker news. Please stop defending people making arguments like this.

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

#753

Post by godelski »

rapind wrote: post #735
retpirato wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point is a degree in a subject where there is no money to be made is a WASTE of money. A degree is not inherently worth the time & money spent earning it if you can't make a career with it. You'll also have student loans to pay for. Don't bother saying "free college" is the issue either. There's no such thing. Somebody is paying for that "free" college in the form of higher taxes.

Education in my opinion would be a bargain compared to insane levels of military spending, gas and oil subsidies, bank bailouts, etc. This is selfish though. One, I have to pay for my kids education some day, and two, I think it's overall a good thing for our species (depending on the quality). Eventually we'll look back at college (including trades) education being free like we look now on elementary education being…

I don't have kids and I'm happy to pay for your kids to go to school. I don't want to live in a country full of idiots. It's also selfish though. Because smarter kids result in better medicine, better inventions, etc.

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

#754

Post by thereare5lights »

DuskStar wrote: post #750
thereare5lights wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong wrong wrong. > You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. " No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself. Your interpretation indicates that you have not been steeped in debates about UBI, otherwise you would know this already. Interpreting the parent's re…

> > You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. " > No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself. "If you've read enough comments, you can predict the arguments people use. So I wasn't assuming anything."

> "If you've read enough comments, you can predict the arguments people use. So I wasn't assuming anything."

"If in an argument, someone brings up the people that debate policy and write essays on it and they invoke them and the conclusion of their argument, a reader can choose to interpret that someone as having a different argument than those people that policy debaters they invoked and that's completely legitimate".

Yea OP totally was referring to internet comments instead of politicians or people in think tanks that debate policy, especially given that they quote statistics from studies, when they wrote "detractors" /s

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

#755

Post by lliamander »

arczyx wrote: post #740
lliamander wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yang's plan also involves one of the highest deficit spending proposals of any of the UBI plans listed on that calculator. It's all very well and good to say "look, virtually everyone would see a net income increase!" until you realize that's only possible by literally just printing money. The costs of such high deficit spending are pretty certain, but the benefits meant to offset those costs are only speculative (an…

Governments are already printing money for the rich though, it's called 'Quantitative Easing'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

I was waiting for this reply. The obvious answer to that being that it doesn't make printing money for a UBI any better of an idea. It's completely irrelevant.

Let's not try and justify bad ideas by pointing out that people currently do bad things.

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

#756

Post by diffeomorphism »

chillacy wrote: post #440
diffeomorphism wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those things. Why? Basic income does not just magically generate money out of thin air. Right now you earn $4000(salary) per month. With UBI you earn $3000(salary) + $1000 (UBI) per month. Why should any cost increase? "But then I would work less, since I can comfortably live on $1000 per month". Yeah, and why are you not doing that right now?

With basic income you make $4000 + $1000, which removes the discontinuities associated with means testing. Whether increased taxes used to pay for the UBI end up eating up your UBI depends on the plan and how much you make/spend. Some UBI proposals are paid for with a wealth tax, others with a consumption tax, others by cutting most of the existing programs). They usually end up being redistributive in the grand sche…

> With basic income you make $4000 + $1000, which removes the discontinuities associated with means testing.

No, you don't. It is completely unrealistic to assume that UBI won't effect salaries in any way. Of course this is hard to test in a small scale study, but "you introduce UBI and everything else stays exactly the same" make no sense.

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

#757

Post by barry-cotter »

dahart wrote: post #751
barry-cotter wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? How much is selection effect and how much treatment effect? The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt loa…

That study I put a link to is attempting to answer that very question methodically, and the answer in this study and others is it’s both correlation and causation. Some of the “income premium” you get for having a bachelor’s degree is cultural bias toward education (causation), some of it is having more and broader skills (causation), some of it is the many jobs that require degrees or pay higher with more education…

If you’re interested in this topic you should read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education. Getting more credentials can be individually rational but socially wasteful. So there are tons of people working as bank tellers now and there were tons of people working as bank tellers in the ‘70s. Now they all have college degrees. In the ‘70s they were high school graduates. Their degrees don’t make them more productive and they cost them four years of their lives but they couldn’t have gotten the job without them.

Some of education’s pay off is privately and socially useful, increases in human capital, some of it is privately useful but socially useless or counter productive, wasteful signaling in an arms race, like that which leads to people who would have stopped with a Bachelor’s a generation ago getting a Master’s now.

Insofar as education is socially wasteful we should discourage it, not encourage it, tax it, not subsidize it.

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

#758

Post by csa »

peterashford wrote: post #587
csa wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guessing that you do not know many people who were born into wealth. There are existential questions that gnaw at some of these people that hinder them from taking the seemingly simple path that you have presented. I would also argue that it is not as easy as you would think to park millions in some "low interest stable investment" that also does not have substantial (for generational wealth) counter-party risk.…

I literally cannot believe you are seriously making this argument.

I have seen too many people who were born into wealthy families, "have it made", and yet totally self-destruct in ways that I am not sure I would wish on my worst enemy.

I think another perspective on this issue is worth making.

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

#759

Post by dahart »

barry-cotter wrote: post #757
dahart wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study I put a link to is attempting to answer that very question methodically, and the answer in this study and others is it’s both correlation and causation. Some of the “income premium” you get for having a bachelor’s degree is cultural bias toward education (causation), some of it is having more and broader skills (causation), some of it is the many jobs that require degrees or pay higher with more education…

If you’re interested in this topic you should read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education . Getting more credentials can be individually rational but socially wasteful. So there are tons of people working as bank tellers now and there were tons of people working as bank tellers in the ‘70s. Now they all have college degrees. In the ‘70s they were high school graduates. Their degrees don’t make them more productive…

Lucky for us, social waste is not the criteria for taxation, or we’d be dead broke from sharing beliefs on the internet alone.

What is your metric of social waste, and why do you think education has enough to worry about compared all the millions of other socially wasteful things we do when not working?

Us GDP per capita is not going down, and education rates are going up. Both monotonically since the 70s, despite the supposed degree requirements of bank tellers. That alone — the economy — seems to squarely contradict the notion that school is somehow bad for us.

If you’re measuring social productivity in terms of capital, I think you’re failing to account for the increase in income tax the government receives from the average 2x higher salary of educated people. That extra income tax is so much money, it could fund education for every man, woman, and child in the US, and still have 90% of it left for the socially productive spending we do now on such things as maintaining the military industrial complex. We are being taxed for education already, and we are still better off.

It seems like you might also be ignoring the social evidence for education in countries where it is subsidized, like Norway, Finland and others.

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

#760

Post by godelski »

lliamander wrote: post #669
godelski wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under Yang's plan even if you made $100k/yr (single person household) you'd get an increase[0]. You'd be having to make roughly $140k+/yr to see a decrease in total income (140k results in -$66/yr). (If you were the norm of 2 adults and 2 children your household income would need to be north of $315k/yr to "shoulder" his UBI) So I'm not sure why you think the middle class will shoulder the bulk of the cost. Do you th…

Yang's plan also involves one of the highest deficit spending proposals of any of the UBI plans listed on that calculator. It's all very well and good to say "look, virtually everyone would see a net income increase!" until you realize that's only possible by literally just printing money. The costs of such high deficit spending are pretty certain, but the benefits meant to offset those costs are only speculative (an…

You're right and this is the criticism I have of Yang, though I supported him. I'd rather have a higher VAT and other methods to gather revenue than through deficit spending. Especially since it is inflation tied and deficit spending leads to inflation.

Though I'm also not an economist and lots of economists seem to like deficit spending. So I'm just going to say I'm naive here.

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