Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

universiteitleiden.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 786 posts

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#41

Post by vl »

sschueller wrote: post #21
quotemstr wrote: post #7

Yes it would. Look: we just went through a massive worker shortage caused by overly generous stimulus benefits and rent subsidies. Have we forgotten already? What am I supposed to believe? A microfoundations paper from a field with infamous replication problems on one hand, or, on the other hand, common sense and my own lying eyes? Of course UBI would reduce propensity to work. Only people with an axe to grind can se…

So poor people are lazy and the rich aren't? Maybe all these people don't want to work these kinda of jobs and are moving into other sectors. Maybe working conditions and pay need to be drastically improved in those jobs.

> So poor people are lazy and the rich aren't?

I’ll tell you a secret: rich people don’t work. Most rich people just work enough to maintain their wealth. You just don’t see them because there are not CEOs or celebrities.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#42

Post by onion2k »

the_real_me wrote: post #5

I strongly suspect that the lion's share of UBI would go directly to landlords or existing property owners.

Not if it was paid for by a tax on rental income. 100% tax on everything over the equivalent mortgage payment on the property would be a lovely cap on rent values.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#43

Post by quotemstr »

onion2k wrote: post #32
quotemstr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Meaningless. Yet the paper will be blasted from one end of the earth to the other by people who care more about their agenda than the universe's frequently unhappy truths. Probably the same people who said that increasing the money supply wouldn't cause inflation because MMT or some other tendentious garbage.

Meaningless. It's not meaningless. It's not enough to prove that basic income will have a long term positive impact, but it is enough to show further experimentation on a larger, more long term scale is worthwhile. It's decidedly unreasonable, not to mention unscientific, to dismiss something because you don't like it.

We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident.

This isn't suggestive, valid science. It's the equivalent of setting up a "scientific" contraption that purports to be a perpetual motion machine. You can create a pretty convincing fake perpetual motion machine, but because we have a broader theory of mechanics, we know perpetual motion is impossible, that the purported machine must be cheating somehow (even if it's not immediately obvious), and that to give funding for further study based on that machine's existence would be absolutely stupid.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#44

Post by pc86 »

kevingadd wrote: post #10
gruez wrote: post #9

>They simulated the reward structure of different forms of social security in an experiment. ‘We got people to do a task on a computer,’ says De Kwaadsteniet. ‘In multiple rounds, which represented the months they had to work, they did a boring task in which they had to put points on a bar. The more of these they did, the more money they earned.’ "short term experiments done in a lab" seems to be psychology's equival…

There have already been real world basic income experiments with similar outcomes

The fact that properly done experiments have the same outcome doesn't mean that these "let's go to the psych department from 1-4 this afternoon to get a $50 gift card" pseudo-experiments hold any real value.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#45

Post by swalsh »

Something not talked about often, but I wonder if basic income might lower the "applicability" of what people spend their time on. I know if money were not an issue I'd spend my time working on projects that sound fun, but might not have a path to profitability.

Money, besides being a motivator is also a signal to markets on what people want.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#46

Post by kube-system »

lbj wrote: post #33

Well, in Denmark we have the equivalent of Basic income and I'd say we have a major problem with peoples willingness to work. Some families are on welfare for generations now.

We don't have UBI in the US and many people here would say the same.

I think many are quick to conclude motivation is the cause without considering any less visible underlying reasons that cause people to be in those situations.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#47

Post by tengbretson »

kevingadd wrote: post #19
seibelj wrote: post #15

We did a type of UBI experiment in the United States with the universal Covid payments. Low income workers got 80% of the salary. Many chose not to work. Why work 40 hours to make 20% more money than the dole? I’m acquaintances with two local business owners, a roofer and a general contractor, and they told me plainly that they were understaffed because their workers were taking a vacation until the Covid payments en…

You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic , at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap (i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/18/amazon-wh... , though I can't remember which warehouse had no soap). That is not applicable to UBI. Also keep in mind that during this time period ma…

> You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic, at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap

Are you friends with any roofers?

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#48

Post by [deleted] »

seibelj wrote: post #15

We did a type of UBI experiment in the United States with the universal Covid payments. Low income workers got 80% of the salary. Many chose not to work. Why work 40 hours to make 20% more money than the dole? I’m acquaintances with two local business owners, a roofer and a general contractor, and they told me plainly that they were understaffed because their workers were taking a vacation until the Covid payments en…

[deleted]

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#50

Post by hhmc »

quotemstr wrote: post #29
sschueller wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So poor people are lazy and the rich aren't? Maybe all these people don't want to work these kinda of jobs and are moving into other sectors. Maybe working conditions and pay need to be drastically improved in those jobs.

> So poor people are lazy and the rich aren't? Honestly, yes --- not always, but frequently. I am sick and tired of the mentality embedded in the sentence I quoted. Do you think the rich are rich for no reason at all? That their rewards are unfair? Success is not the universe sprinkling good fortune on mankind at random: success comes from hard work and the courage to take advantage of the opportunities that time pre…

> Do you think the rich are rich for no reason at all?

No, social immobility and generational wealth transfer.

> That their rewards are unfair?

Often, yes.

Post reply on HN