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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

#771

Post by chinesempire »

crystaln wrote: post #733
asjw wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or could put them out of business forever because they are less keen to work hard than those not living on UBI (for different reasons, it doesn't really make a difference) I think UBI is a good redistribution strategy if it's truly universal and with not requirements, but work wise I doubt it will change much...

UBI has to be universal to work, or at least phased out slowly to avoid an income trap where working doesn't lead to an increase in income. We have to accept that some people will accept free subsistence income and not work.

> We have to accept that some people will accept free subsistence income and not work.

It is already like this in many countries.

In Italy it has always been like that at least since the end of WW2.

It has produced one of the largest youth unemployment rate in the west.

Unemployed parents that never worked, grew up disadvantaged kids with no other alternative than become NEETs

In my opinion balancing it out without creating first as many jobs as possible is a really hard task, doomed to fail given the current state of the world politics

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

#772

Post by ChrisLomont »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #606
ChrisLomont wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the basic income, so there is no "more people wanting" ????? Less time worked correlates with less things made. Less things made means less sales. Less sales means less sales tax. Less people working means less income. Less income means less income tax.... Sure this doesn't shrink the tax base? After all, when a few percent of people are put out of work during a…

> ????? Everyone gets the UBI, not just people who don't work. If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way. > Less time worked correlates with less things made. In general this goes the other way. The history of progress is to make more stuff in less time. If people had more "disincentive to work" then companies would have to pay them more…

>If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.

That money comes from taxpayers. If less people work, less pay into it.

>In general this goes the other way.

If less people work today, less will get made today. When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.

The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.

>Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP

Because people are working. Drop 10% of workers, you lose a massive amount of tax base. Expenses are still fixed for many items, which is why when less people work deficit spending increases.

>And it was back to where it was at the height after one year

Because people were getting back to work.

I also never mentioned the stock market as the indicator to measure - that is a strawman you brought up.

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

#773

Post by SamReidHughes »

godelski wrote: post #752
redis_mlc wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was obviously a good faith response, and if you look at what people do versus what their degree is in, it's obvious that college education for many students might as well be studying the Kardashians. I think literally none of my relatives use their post-secondary education, except for a lawyer (who doesn't use his undergrad degree) and a guy who presumably went to culinary school. And a retired college professor, I guess.

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

#774

Post by ctdonath »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #762
ctdonath wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I implicitly suggest no such thing. At some point it's up to a competent adult to do with their lives what they see fit under the circumstances dealt them by life. They are not automatically the charge of others just because they don't achieve some nebulous whim of strangers. Each has their own dependents to prioritize.

So now they are poor either because they are "incompetent" or because they "saw fit" to be poor. Okay, there is nothing implicit or suggesting about this, you are explicit about it.

No. I'm saying: if they meet an objective baseline of essentials, they're not poor.

And that's the core problem: everyone is tossing around the word "poor" to fit their ulterior motives (yours currently being to demean me for no apparent reason) without any agreed-on definition thereof. You're beating me up for suggesting there be an objective common definition, which happens to not be what you want it to mean (which, apparently, is whatever implication you see fit to win an unprompted argument with a stranger).

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

#775

Post by ctdonath »

baddox wrote: post #366
ctdonath wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're bolstering my case. "Malnutrition" is, obviously, below the line I'm trying to draw. Meet the line, and you fundamentally want for nothing, no "reduced lifespan and health problems". Humans have a natural lifespan; what is the minimum necessary to support that (aside from externalities brought on by personal choice or random $#!^)?

I’m not being clear. I mean that as your nutrition gets worse, your expected lifespan decreases and you are at greater risk of health problems. Again there is no clean dividing line between malnutrition and good nutrition. In fact, in the future we might know so much more about nutrition that many common human diets in 2020 will seem like malnutrition.

Then let's err in favor of what we can deem "good nutrition" now, and objectively adjust it later if appropriate. "You'll never meet my whimsical specification of sufficient, so your earnest objective suggestion is wrong" doesn't work.

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

#777

Post by barry-cotter »

dahart wrote: post #759
barry-cotter wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

US GDP per capita is going up at the same time as education for the same reason the size of the v average dwelling has gone up; Richer people consume more. Education doesn’t make people more productive. More productive people buy more stuff.

If you give everyone a Bachelor’s degree they will not become 2x as productive. The people are different. The education is less important than the difference in the people. Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive.

The evidence for the economic effects of evidence is really weak. Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way round. Ghana is a lot more educated now than 1950’s France, and a lot poorer. China’s massive economic growth from the 1980’s to the 2000s was based on a populace that mostly hadn’t finished primary school.

Regarding other first world countries the US is far, far richer than them[1] and has a better education system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

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

#778

Post by hitpointdrew »

r-w wrote: post #671
hitpointdrew wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> enable even more shrinking of government. Nothing wrong with that. The government is severely bloated. Also nothing wrong with reducing or replacing horrid, administratively wasteful, degrading, stigmatized, means-tested social safety nets with UBI.

I’m confused. Is “means-tested” supposed to be a degrading adjective? Because I think the fact our existing social safety nets are “means-tested” is exactly why people have doubts about UBI.

> Is “means-tested” supposed to be a degrading adjective?

Yes. People who are on means-tested social safety nets are subject to these test which often make you feel degraded. They often make people fear they will lose their benefit. And in many cases they encourage people not to improve their lives (e.g. I better not take that part-time job, because then I will lose unemployment benefits.) It also creates an incentive to falsify information so that you can continue to receive said benefit.

UBI solves all that because it isn't means-tested, you just get it no matter what (Oh you improved your situation? You got a job, got healthy, etc. That's great! You will continue to get UBI.)

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

#779

Post by jpttsn »

nybble41 wrote: post #654
EthanHeilman wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lotteries do this all the time, so there’s plenty of data.

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

#780

Post by hitpointdrew »

Loughla wrote: post #623
hitpointdrew wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. That is YOUR OPINION of what UBI should be. It happens to be wrong. What people do with the money isn't the point of UBI at all. The point is to improve their lives, and boost the economy. Who cares what specific the money is spent on if it is making people healthier, less stressed, and happier?

>Who cares what specific the money is spent on if it is making people healthier, less stressed, and happier? And here, in one sentence, is why we will NEVER see UBI in the United States of America. There is no ability to be the moral whip and maintain control over someone else's choices to make sure they don't 'waste my money'. Therefore, it will never happen. In the US, at least, it's not about doing what's right. I…

> And here, in one sentence, is why we will NEVER see UBI.

OK sure pal. UBI will happen without question in the USA. Probably in 2024.

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