121–130 of 786 posts
A link to the actual research paper would be helpful. In this experiment, what amount was given to the treatment group that received basic income? How often? How does that amount compare to the cost of living in their city? > ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’ I’m not an academic, so take this with a grain of salt. If my job requires menial labor or involves g…
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.
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.
Things that I typically read:
- the lower class struggle even to sustain themselves for days/weeks in between jobs
- in the middle class there is people who fear not having health insurance in between jobs
How can one survive in US without any job at all? US's welfare is radically different from Denmark's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's their choice to work. Might take a generation or two to not be outraged based on how we were raised, but that would seem to make it not unjust.
If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.)
If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point you lose their tax money, unless you impose draconic measures on emigration.
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…
> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…