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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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by jacobn »

This study and the discussion here reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-... - basically whenever you have a financial or politically motivated topic of study, you'll get numerous serious seeming studies supporting position X, then a thorough debunking of X, then a resounding rebuttal, then more studies taking other positions, those getting debunked & rebutted, meta studies trying to aggregate & tease out who's actually correct, those getting debunked & rebutted, and the fight goes on.

My concern with UBI is more that we're unlikely to be able to fix it if it's actually terrible - once in place, handouts tend to become sacrosanct regardless of efficacy (I'm sure that are exceptions that prove the rule ;) - and it is stupendously expensive.

How about Universal Basic Assistance instead?

We tend to make government assistance be "hard shell, soft center", i.e. hard to qualify for, but once you're in, it's all gravy, unless you do something silly like get back on your feet (see unemployment & disability).

What if we instead switched to a "soft shell, firm center" approach and made it really easy to access assistance funds, but they e.g. got gradually reduced over time as you tap into them? And perhaps you have some skin in the game with a required personal emergency fund? And perhaps you owe some of the assistance $$ back, so that the average person "pays for themselves" over the course of their life?

Just spit-balling. I'm sure there are tons of problems with such an approach as well. But maybe it would still be quite useful for the recipients, and a lot more palatable for the tax payers = more reasonable to actually implement?

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

#224

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

Somehow, if those jobs are so bad no one wants to do it but the purpose of the job must still to be done/accomplished then maybe people will try other solutions, some that don't let those kind of behaviors emerge.

Also, if basic income is good enough then their wouldn't be a need for that kind of job :).

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

#225

Post by avereveard »

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 think basic income is a great incentive for workplaces to be better.

it does need balances tho, to prevent abuse, especially against undeclared workers double dipping the state (not paying labour taxes and getting the income)

basic incomes tho has a series of drawback that current experiment cannot easily handle.

the first one is of principle: it doesn't solve what caused poverty in the population, and unilaterally ties recipient survival to the benevolence of the ruling class - without a strong economy to zero involuntary unemployment, it begins to look a lot like vassalage.

the second one is of application: punctual welfare is inherently less efficient than aggregated action - living universal income + private school and private healthcare is just a way to bleed state resources into private coffers. public school and public healthcare are much more efficient, and then the supplementary income should just cover the remaining quota of needs (housing, food etc)

there's also second order effects tied to basic income inelasticity - if housing or schooling or whatever price raises, it can displace all the recipient from an area. it's not unrealistic to expect basic income city quarters, at which point state provided housing seem a better alternative to prevent basic-slums.

and there's a question about what the long term goal of the society are - given that there will always be premium goods/service out of reach of people living off basic income, I'd wager that while basic income is sure helpful to bring people out of poverty and placing them into the same bucket of the working class, it rarely help bringing such people into middle class, as that would require the saving necessary to bootstrap a private action, which I rarely hear to be the goal of basic income.

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

#226

Post by agumonkey »

tda wrote: post #27
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…

> 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

Even if shitty jobs still exist, at least nobody is "forced" to. We can redistribute or change the way it's done.

I can clean the walkway, or toilets.. granted i don't spend my whole month on it with shoddy equipement.

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

#227

Post by missedthecue »

teucris wrote: post #196
missedthecue wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fewer people working reduces the size of the pie, making ourselves poorer. So yes. I would say it's a bad thing if we tax society in order to pay able bodied people not to be productive.

But the systems I’m referring to do not suggest taxing the hard work of people. They propose taxing the work of automation.

Why would we want to create tax policy that discourages automation investment in favor of human labor?

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

#228

Post by ChrisLomont »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #132
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…

"shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it" A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5% How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing…

>How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible?

That is part of it. Fortunately there are plenty of other examples in US and other country history where money handouts are clearly a driver, so it's not a question of whether or not easy money adds to inflation.

As mot economists put it, all long term inflation is ultimately the result of more money in the system.

>This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.

Not a rebuttal. If Bob willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z, simply rescaling the value of money (inflation) will not change that Bob is willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z.

Do you think this is not true? That he gets 37 yotobucks or 19 fishcoins or 39801892 bubblenotes is irrelevant. He is willing to trade time and effort for goods. If the value of the currency moves he is still willing to do this.

Free money will not, and historically has not, come without costs.

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

#229

Post by fma »

missedthecue wrote: post #119
kevingadd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I'm receiving $1000 a month for a six month program run by a university research group, which states very clearly that the program will end after six months, I'm not going to go quit my job. That's the problem with these "studies". They are completely different from a permanent government program. They can't tell you the impact on inflation, the impact on the labor market, or if it is affordable over the long term…

20+ year year old permanent program

https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...

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

#230

Post by european321 »

kevingadd wrote: post #16
greatpostman wrote: post #6

Pay me enough to live without working and I will quit my job and work on a moonshot startup/interesting tech all day. Most likely nothing will come of it, but I won’t be working

Is that a typo? You just said you'll be working, then said you won't be working

No, I think they said that they think that "working" towards an idea, a moonshot, wouldn't feel like working
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