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Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

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

#171

Post by systemvoltage »

otherme123 wrote: post #139
systemvoltage wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that inflation would go through the roof resetting it back where the UBI wouldn't be enough to sustain basic life. Increasing UBI would further lead to runaway inflation. We literally just did this with COVID checks. I would vote for the complete opposite of basic income - invest heavily in education, trade schools, colleges and free access to tools for learning, apprenticeships, etc. Give tools to people…

Inflation would rise if UBI is paid with newly printed money and deficit (e.g. covid checks). If it's paid with taxes, nothing should change in terms of inflation. Surely, prices close to the consumption should rise, and price of capital goods should fall, but overall it stay the same.

We don't have a balanced budget. Programs like UBI would most likely not be paid by taxes (which would be better used for education/trade programs that I mentioned) but by increasing the deficit. There is no undo button. Millions of people would be dependent on it. You will have no choice but to print money.

I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.

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

#172

Post by log4shelled »

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…

No. No no no.

I make six figures and hardly work at all. As a dishwasher I used to bust my ass and make 7 dollars per hour. In my experience, the less you work, the more money you make. Everyone I've talked to in real life, who has worked both shitty jobs and high paying jobs, has the exact same experience.

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

#173

Post by nopenopenopeno »

systemvoltage wrote: post #84
ozzythecat wrote: post #4

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…

My guess is that inflation would go through the roof resetting it back where the UBI wouldn't be enough to sustain basic life. Increasing UBI would further lead to runaway inflation. We literally just did this with COVID checks. I would vote for the complete opposite of basic income - invest heavily in education, trade schools, colleges and free access to tools for learning, apprenticeships, etc. Give tools to people…

Yeah, anyone trying to live on basic income would be resigned to rural squalor with no opportunity to speak of. Rent prices in those areas would be saran wrapped to basic income levels, making them impossible to get out of.

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

#174

Post by Mizza »

I was, and mostly still am, in favor of basic income, but the effects of the COVID stimulus/PPA on my city (Philadelphia) have thrown some cold water on my idealism.

I lurk on the 'hood'/gang subreddit for the city, and the general consensus there is that the stimulus checks are the reason for the upswing in homicides, which shattered the all-time record this year to over 550, meaning that the murder rate in a city of 1.5 million is now 1/3000 per annum, and far higher if you're of a certain age group in certain neighborhoods.

The reasoning is that cliques which were previously only able to afford one gun for the whole squad can now afford lots more guns, enough for everybody to have their own, and those guns are being used as tools for acquiring even more money.

I think the lesson is strong rebuttal the libertarian argument that basic income can replace a functioning social state - a functioning society requires a lot more hard work than overnight helicopter money.

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

#175

Post by goodpoint »

mjburgess wrote: post #72
pc86 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends if you just end up paying people not to work. Money doesnt just have some "value" you can share like a pie. The value in money is just the productive capacity of an economy. If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve. Recall: 50% of the country make less than the median wage... UBI is going to have to be way below this to preserve the very wealth w…

> If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve

Absolutely not. Having a large fraction of population being unemployed is not good but this is not the point of UBI. Also, this is completely disconnected from inflation/deflation.

Furthermore, deflation and "people will starve" are very much disconnected. Many countries devalued their money on purpose to be more competitive on international markets.

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

#176

Post by agumonkey »

ozzythecat wrote: post #4

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…

i have two main thoughts about work

- if we had guaranteed roof, we'd do different jobs, fill desire, aim at useful. A lot of people go to work with zero benefits being ability to pay rent. They dread it but they have no choice. It's a weird balance

- any task can be done, even being berated or doing petty tasks, you just dont have to do it from 9 to 5, all year long. You can do 2h if that pleases you. And those jobs now being recognized as nasty would be distributed differently or at least valued as such and workers doing it would feel appreciated

ps: our current system makes us angry at each others. very ironic.

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

#177

Post by mathraki »

ozzythecat wrote: post #4

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…

Agreed. So people will either drop out of the workforce for such jobs, or will require more money to do those jobs.

As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.

I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.

And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.

A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.

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

#178

Post by lordnacho »

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.

The Danish system has the same problem as all other means-tested systems: massive effective tax rate once you start working.

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

#180

Post by ido »

_-david-_ wrote: post #144
staticassertion wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work. Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot. And the pay would obviously go up. People would be…

>And the pay would obviously go up. Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.

That's a good thing, right? What used to require a human toiling will then be made by a machine!
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