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Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

universiteitleiden.nl

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

#51

Post by brailsafe »

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…

Which is fine, because general contractor business owners and roofing company owners do the least arduous work and make quite a lot of money.

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

#52

Post by HPsquared »

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

They have the same problem: the participants know it's only an experiment. They know it's temporary.

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

#53

Post by CaptainNegative »

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

If you're referring to longer-term experiments, do they show actual statistical significance? One of the two I've read through, the UBC experiment, showed a similar outcome but was only significant at the p≈0.13 or p≈0.24 level, depending on the precise statement of the null hypothesis, which is not particularly enthralling. The Stockton one I recall showing something similar but don't have the precise numbers for.

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

#54

Post by seibelj »

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…

We need roofs fixed and structures to be made safe to live in. We are still in a pandemic - should we keep paying people not to work? Eventually nature ruins our structures and people are homeless. I just don’t see how your logic is sound.

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

#55

Post by jacobn »

pc86 wrote: post #34
tda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And if we can't, we should value them more

Which is exactly what will happen. The pay for those jobs will increase, until such a point where it becomes cheaper/easier to just not have the job in the first place. I don't honestly know why whether or not people will work even factors into one's support for UBI. Some people will keep working, some people won't. Nobody will starve so that seems like something in the "pro" column at least.

Those who work and thereby pay for the UBI may feel that freeriding is actually unjust, and not the hallmark of a glorious new post-scarcity society?

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

#59

Post by throwawayffffas »

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.

One could argue that welfare is the symptom not the cause.

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

#60

Post by pc86 »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #12

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others. I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need…

UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI."

I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.

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