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Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

demoshelsinki.fi

131–140 of 182 posts

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#131
Medicare for All (or equiv) is enabler for widespread UBI.

The combo of M4A, UBI, and affordable childcare will lead to an explosion of entrepreneurial spirit, small businesses, and startups.

If I had had health insurance, I would have taken a lot more risks. But I average a major health crisis every two years, so whenever I ran out of savings and COBRA, I had to take jobs just to get insured. (ACA helped by prohibiting exclusion based on preexisting conditions.)

I did manage to work solo twice, with modest success. But the uncertainty freaked my partner out and we needed guaranteed insurance for our family.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#132

Medicare for All (or equiv) is enabler for widespread UBI. The combo of M4A, UBI, and affordable childcare will lead to an explosion of entrepreneurial spirit, small businesses, and startups. If I had had health insurance, I would have taken a lot more risks. But I average a major health crisis every two years, so whenever I ran out of savings and COBRA, I had to take jobs just to get insured. (ACA helped by prohibit…

>The combo of M4A, UBI, and affordable childcare will lead to an explosion of entrepreneurial spirit, small businesses, and startups.

Unequivocally. Which is why it won't happen until citizen united is overturned. It would be a major threat to the monopoly powers that exist.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#133
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problems with such UBI experiments is the limited time of the experiment. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOR 2 YEARS, i'd be happier than before, and use that money to pay off loans, buy a new car, go for a vacation, etc., and keep my curent job. If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck…

> If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. While I do think this might be what some people will do,…

This program has to work for the least common denominator. I think a common pitfall is intelligent people designing systems in a bubble of intelligent friends then wondering why it fails spectacularly in public.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#134

Where's the money for the UBI experiment coming from? There's no free lunch, folks...

Are you asking how it happened in Finland, or how it would happen in a theoretical future world? Start my taxing the rich. Also consider the money saved from reduced bureaucracy around unemployment benefits. The money spent on corporate bailouts the past few months would probably be enough to provide UBI for quite a long time.

> Start my [sic] taxing the rich.

I don't think it's clear that this is anywhere near enough.

Say you want to pay $1,200 per month to all Americans over 18. There're about 210mm of them. That's just over $3tn per year.

In 2017, the latest year with detailed data, Americans paid about $1.6tn in Federal income taxes.

So the scale of the spending we're talking about is "imagine income taxes increased to about 300% of the current amount". Of course, it's more nuanced than that, because the theory is you make some savings on other programs and fund from sources other than just income tax - but it still gives a sense of the scale.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#135
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine for most people, and I’m talking about the ones that would continue keep at their their existing job , if there was an extra $2000/month spare cash coming in or $4000 for a couple, it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch of imagination to say they would spend the money on the two most immediately obvious things: 1) upgrade their car 2) upgrade their shelter. If everyone is now affording a new $1000/month car pay…

First of all, if ~50% of people work in a country (from age 0 to pensioners), they continued to work, and got 2k extra 'free money', they'd have to pay more than those 2k back in taxes, to cover the 2k for people who don't work at all. If we somehow took 2k/person/month from some nonexisting trillionaire, who has the money to finance it for everyone, then probably yes, prices would go up, because everybody has now 2k…

Not if the extra “free” money are covered by increased productivity due to automation, as it happened over the past decades. Typically the main beneficiaries from increased productivity are shareholders or company founders, and that is why money gets clogged in a few hands. Workers should also benefit more from from it as it is also their productivity that grew 10x along with that of the company. So we are not really talking about free money, we are talking about money you are entitled to anyway. Sure it is your company that invested in new tech to grow productivity, but it is the society as a whole that enabled it - try making robots or new tech in a society ridden by unemployment, inequality, civil unrest and so on. Furthermore, UBI would reduce corporate socialism and get us back to a free flow of capital, as the wealth would be fairly spread across society.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#136
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. While I do think this might be what some people will do,…

> I've had periods of years in my life where I didn't have to think about money. After a short period of faffing off, I started doing all sorts of stuff. Some of it of direct value to society (volunteering) and some of it perhaps indirectly so (teaching myself new skills, working on 'products' that could be useful). I mean, even just spending time with others who themselves had it in short supply and valued my compan…

> If you're capable of doing stuff you like, being creative, liking that work, and creating that much income, why are you not doing it now?

Because it’s a huge risk with no safety net - even if I’m 95% confident that I could support myself as a freelancer, that’s 5% odds of ending up without health insurance / homeless / unable to support my family / dead / etc; so I stick with my FacelessMegaCorp(tm) job for now, and maybe I’ll freelance for entertainment after I retire :P

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#137
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I had a shitty, dead-end job, and someone offered me (eg.) 80% of an average paycheck in my country, FOREVER(!), i'd probably quit, and live off UBI, and do other stuff (fun for me, but litle of value to to wider society, and with probably zero tax money to feed the UBI system). ...or, probably move somewhere, where I can get more for that amount of money. While I do think this might be what some people will do,…

> I've had periods of years in my life where I didn't have to think about money. After a short period of faffing off, I started doing all sorts of stuff. Some of it of direct value to society (volunteering) and some of it perhaps indirectly so (teaching myself new skills, working on 'products' that could be useful). I mean, even just spending time with others who themselves had it in short supply and valued my compan…

> Problem with this society is, that it also requires people who are working, to cover the cost of the poeple who are not working. Curretnly most countries do that for a very small percentage of unemployed (welfare), and most people in those countries are already complaining about the high taxes.

You seem hung up on the idea that "working" is equivalent to "producing value".

We live in a society where the system is frequently optimized to employ as many people as possible. This creates incentives to encourage a lot of work being done to win zero-sum games rather than producing value for the economy as a whole. I would argue that we are already in a situation where the majority of the population can be supported by a minority of the workers. We have long been living in a world where the limits on economic growth is consumption, not production.

If we instead have the need to encourage people to find what motivates them and provide tools to the motivated to maximize that productivity I think you will see very different social structures arise.

Beyond that, I think the removal of the lazy from the work force is actually a net positive. Employers can spend less time filtering the mostly useless to find good workers. The 10x producers among us don't have to spend as much working around the lazy coworkers and managers. Even the "lazy" among us have the freedom to discover their passions and find ways to contribute more to society than they would as a low end wage slave.

> Yes, non-workers will create music, art, will travel, write blogs, etc., but none of that generates enough income to cover even their own cost.

I think you are selling people short here, or perhaps projecting your dreams on others. There is also a great deal of work that people want to do but the value of which is not easily captureable by an employer.

> If you raise the taxes on the people left working, and let others live relatively normal lives without working, you'll get less and less of the former and more of the later.

This is actually a good thing as long as you maintain sufficient production. As production declines, the standard of living provided by basic income declines which increases the incentives of the semi-lazy to work, which then leads to increased production. As long as UBI is carefully phased in, the system should equilibrilize.

Most of these dynamics aren't possible to explore in limited studies like this one. All these types of studies can do is dispell common myths about individual bevaior and the only way to really find out what will happen is to gradually phase in a UBI.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#138
You think UBI can work? Show me the numbers for some western country. Can be a small country like Luxembourg.

First show me the numbers if all people that are working now keep their job. Show me the extra cost and how you will get that money.

After that, give me a prediction of how many people will stop working. I can't imagine moms (or dads), that now have only 3 months of parental leave, will keep on working when they can have a nice income every month without doing anything, and not paying for daycare. Your unemployment rate will not go down, I hope we all agree on this.

And then finally, show me that this has 0 effect on all prices. Show me for example how rent will not go up, when all of us have 1-5k extra to spend on a bigger appartement or house.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#139
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine for most people, and I’m talking about the ones that would continue keep at their their existing job , if there was an extra $2000/month spare cash coming in or $4000 for a couple, it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch of imagination to say they would spend the money on the two most immediately obvious things: 1) upgrade their car 2) upgrade their shelter. If everyone is now affording a new $1000/month car pay…

First of all, if ~50% of people work in a country (from age 0 to pensioners), they continued to work, and got 2k extra 'free money', they'd have to pay more than those 2k back in taxes, to cover the 2k for people who don't work at all. If we somehow took 2k/person/month from some nonexisting trillionaire, who has the money to finance it for everyone, then probably yes, prices would go up, because everybody has now 2k…

If the average worker had to pay for those that didn’t via increased taxes of $1000 a month (to balance that budget), I cannot see that happening without a revolt. Would you even agree to pay an extra $500 per month in taxes to pay for someone else’s living expenses? Most workers are living almost paycheck to paycheck as is.

Re: Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

#140
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, if you have some essential resource where supply is constrained then you might expect inflation. On the other hand goods that are readily available like food or oil shouldn't see any significant difference.

I can't argue for oil, but for food, unless everyone agrees to eat only processed food or cook by themselves, it's still going to see some inflation.

Why? What mechanism would drive that? In the West we already have more food available than we can reasonably eat. Margins in agriculture are wafer thin driven down by competition.

Compare that to property where there is a limited supply and people are constrained in what they can buy by their salary and ability to get a mortgage.

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