261–270 of 786 posts
I strongly suspect that the lion's share of UBI would go directly to landlords or existing property owners.
Why stop at 'Basic income'? Why not 'Basic Housing', 'Basic Food' and others?
Income Basic Allowance for Housing Basic Allowance for Sustenance
Just look at the billionaires. They are all still working even after reaching retirement age.
You’re mixing cause and effect. They became billionaires in large part because of their work ethic.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American. :)
Thomas Piketty wrote a book on this topic (which I highly recommend) called "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
For me these studies are utterly meaningless without real world long-term data. > would not reduce people’s willingness to work > The psychologists also found an indication that people with a basic income look for work that suits them better. Note how the authors use the word *willingness" to work. 0 people want to clean toilets or public restrooms for a living. Or be waiting staff at a restaurant. Yet those "grunt w…
Without a strong incentive for reciprocation we are solving half of the problem, while ignoring the negative consequences.
In a way it’s similar to how large mental institutions were closed in the US (the idea that had some merits), and now just ignore people with severe mental problems until they either injure themselves or someone else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think in general all the research around basic income misses an incredibly important piece that is being proposed in policy changes. Basic income experiments usually game it like this: We will give you x years of payments monthly for just being alive. Then they see what happens. The problem is, policy has one huge difference. It doesn't end. The difference between, I'll give you 2 years of payments monthly and…
"It doesn't end." To be more precise, it has no specific end date, but in a democracy, it can be repealed again with every new parliament. Or possibly via a ballot initiative. At which moment the net recipients are in for a major shock.
Because in the job market, wage signals work like price signals in other markets: they incentivize people to move in the direction most valued by the economy. Like IT right now.
So we may be doomed to a society of grasshoppers with nobody willing to be the ant - like in the old fable.
>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…
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.
I'd prefer a comment that simply and politely argues for a particular interpretation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
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…
In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, yet life goes on. Economically it doesn't make sense because of the high labor costs, and realistically it is a menial job that can be for the most part automated.
If you want to live in a world where you can have a cheap hand wash in your back yard, then you have to also admit to wanting structural inequalities to keep people trapped in those carwash jobs. It's delusional to believe that the people washing your car have a path out through hard work alone; my observation is that they already work pretty hard.
UBI is much more about giving workers power than giving them free money. And yes, there will be dole bludgers. Unfortunately any system is going to have inefficiencies, you just have to pick which ones and live with it. Alternatively, you can get tough on crime and house a prison population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/
Looks like it's a work in progress.