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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

#201

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…

> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work.

Having worked in a factory, there's no way I'd do that for free. Heck, even at my current salary, which is multiple times higher, I wouldn't want to do that again.

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

#202
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what you're basically saying is that your spouse had a job that was a net negative for her: compensation for the abuse was not sufficiently priced into her pay grade. To me, your argument says that UBI will cause a re-evaluation of the income market, where undesirable jobs will have to be priced higher so that employers still can find the employees they need (and the services will have to be priced accordingly).…

Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.

I’m dealing with this infinite loop chatbot with Verizon right now haha. My number port to become a Verizon customer was supposed to take 4-24 hours. Ten days later still nothing. Chatbot asks me for topics to help with, put in my number but it’s not a Verizon number (it’s mid port) so they recommend I register, I try to register and I cannot because my number isn’t a Verizon number, so back to the chatbot about my problem, they need me to login for further help, but I can’t login without a Verizon number… ad infinitum. It’s maddening and have tried several times to get on the phone with a customer service human being, but after 90 minutes on hold several times nothing.

So I’m in this weird limbo that I think could be solved by a customer rep chat in minutes.

Just an example of automated chatbots being only programmed for a couple common situations and not things like, “I’m a pseudo Verizon customer who is receiving bills but has no phone number with Verizon.”

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

#203

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.

Good thing there would be UBI then?

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

#205

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.

Speaking as someone who has worked in a factory, you couldn't pay me a six figure salary to go back. And most of the things were automated already, at least as much as reasonably could be.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.

this has already happened in the food service industry. McDonalds used to hire a lot of teenagers; for many it was their first job. When minimum wage went up sufficiently high enough they replaced human labour with self-serve kiosks and reduced staff to a single register and kitchen staff. Tim Hortons switched to centralized bakeries and terminated all store-level bakers. I'm not arguing either side of this, just tha…

Turning your example around: if those teens were to receive UBI and McDonalds could hire them for only $3/hour instead of having to pay them full wage, some of the self-service kiosks might not have appeared, and the customers might have encountered better motivated workers?

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

#208

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.

Is it a truth though? Or is it merely a stubbornly persistent instilled cultural belief? The whole point of experiments is to separate the two.

[deleted]

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI might cover your food and rent, but it won't cover much past that. So if you want some beer money or a new videogame or whatever, you'll need to work. And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.

What if the landlord and food companies just raise the prices now that they know people have at least X dollars a month to spend on rent and food. Then people start advocating for universal housing and universal food.

They can only do that if they collude, which is illegal. On the other hand, if food and rent are paid for mostly with UBI money, and supply was more elastic than demand, then prices would surely increase.

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

#210
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI makes it a lot easier to move someplace cheaper rather than being forced to live where the jobs are.

Wouldn't those prices spike with supply/demand though?

No, UBI does not spawn new people to life.
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