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It is called 'bijstand', is about € 1k a month and you are eligible for all kinds of other discounts and support.
Just request it at your municipality and make sure not to find work.
In The Netherlands there has been a form of UBI for decades, for anyone who wants it or needs it. It is called 'bijstand', is about € 1k a month and you are eligible for all kinds of other discounts and support. Just request it at your municipality and make sure not to find work.
That's just welfare, not UBI. The U stands for Universal, which means it goes to everyone. Not just the poor or unemployed.
true it was not a test of "universal basic income" as such as it targeted only part of the population. Some results are, however, relevant when assessing them from the world of (post-pandemic) 2020: the participants of the experiment reported 1) less economic troubles and financial stress; 2) Higher confidence in future possibilities; 3) More self-determination and autonomy.
Do we really need to test that though? It seems obvious that giving someone money without affecting their taxes, the price of goods etc would do this.
The issue is that once you roll it out on the society level, it's not the same any more. It will affect their taxes and inflation. Will they still report less economic troubles and financial stress when they receive $500 a month but their rent has gone up by $500?
In The Netherlands there has been a form of UBI for decades, for anyone who wants it or needs it. It is called 'bijstand', is about € 1k a month and you are eligible for all kinds of other discounts and support. Just request it at your municipality and make sure not to find work.
true it was not a test of "universal basic income" as such as it targeted only part of the population. Some results are, however, relevant when assessing them from the world of (post-pandemic) 2020: the participants of the experiment reported 1) less economic troubles and financial stress; 2) Higher confidence in future possibilities; 3) More self-determination and autonomy.
but did UBI encourage more productivity from those participants? Is it more than the cost of such a program? I want to know if UBI is a net benefit or not.
Given that it significantly improved mental health, it seems reasonable to expect that this UBI model would lead to some savings in public health expenditure. Arguably there should also be some savings compared to the administration of the current unemployment benefits that require the person to provide evidence of activity and other such things.
How well it compares in practice to the cash cost nobody knows as the experiments are all too short to really tell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can’t we ever design one such experiment right? It’s as if we were giving ammunition to those opposed to it by conducting trials that have flaws! Would it really be so hard to run a proper test that follows all the best practices and isn’t biased/flawed so that we could once and for all point at it and say “we can conclusively say UBI is/isn’t viable based on this experiment”? I mean if a country goes all the way…
A "real" test would be much harder, and to be actually useful, it would also have to contain a way to finance itself, i.e. by testing it not on a selected group of people, but on a region and adding additional taxes for everyone in the region large enough to offset the payments. If you're only testing the outcome, but not the income, you're essentially allowing "free energy" people to plug their magic machines into a…
In The Netherlands there has been a form of UBI for decades, for anyone who wants it or needs it. It is called 'bijstand', is about € 1k a month and you are eligible for all kinds of other discounts and support. Just request it at your municipality and make sure not to find work.
>and make sure not to find work That's just welfare, not UBI. The U stands for Universal, which means it goes to everyone. Not just the poor or unemployed.
The U is better understood as Unconditional. It doesn't go to everybody or everything, but it doesn't get taken away if you stop working.
These were used pretty much equally until about 2011, when the less accurate one started taking hold:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-04-11%202...
The experiment was terribly flawed in that it only addressed the unemployed, and it didn't affect the existing unemployment system for them, making incentives perverse for all taking part. The UBI was offered tax-free on top. It represents nothing like real life UBI and needs to be redesigned as a test.
Why can’t we ever design one such experiment right? It’s as if we were giving ammunition to those opposed to it by conducting trials that have flaws! Would it really be so hard to run a proper test that follows all the best practices and isn’t biased/flawed so that we could once and for all point at it and say “we can conclusively say UBI is/isn’t viable based on this experiment”? I mean if a country goes all the way…
If the results of an experiment support your views, then it was a great experiment and proof that you were right all along.
If the results of an experiment contradict your views, then you can fully scrutinize every aspect of the test to come up with reasons why it got such a wrong result.
The experiment was terribly flawed in that it only addressed the unemployed, and it didn't affect the existing unemployment system for them, making incentives perverse for all taking part. The UBI was offered tax-free on top. It represents nothing like real life UBI and needs to be redesigned as a test.
Why can’t we ever design one such experiment right? It’s as if we were giving ammunition to those opposed to it by conducting trials that have flaws! Would it really be so hard to run a proper test that follows all the best practices and isn’t biased/flawed so that we could once and for all point at it and say “we can conclusively say UBI is/isn’t viable based on this experiment”? I mean if a country goes all the way…
For obvious reasons, this is politically different to achieve.
In The Netherlands there has been a form of UBI for decades, for anyone who wants it or needs it. It is called 'bijstand', is about € 1k a month and you are eligible for all kinds of other discounts and support. Just request it at your municipality and make sure not to find work.
The special feature of schemes like UBI and NIT (Negative Income Tax) is that they remove the high effective marginal tax rate from poor people who work.
The problem with conditional welfare payments is that they increase effective marginal tax rate for poor household. The rates are really high 70-100% depending on country and situation.
For example, in Finland effective marginal tax rate for poor person is somewhere between 80-101%. (That 101% is for single parent for low income job). According to Greg Mankiv and others the effective marginal tax rate for the poor can be 70-90 percent in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.h...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/10/gr...