It would reduce mine
Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
291–300 of 786 posts
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#292A 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 would think basic income would only cover the basic necessities, plus some extra. Not enough for one person to live without a roomate, or have the latest and greatest technology.
So... to pay for a private apartment maybe that crap retail job would be ok.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#293Original link: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2022/01/basic-inco...
Still no research paper found from this Google-Fu.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#294A 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…
Great point. People often try to measure "willingness to work" by looking at "willingness to harm yourself", often in service of making somebody else wealthy. Well, they do that for poor people. People of the right caste are instead, "funemployed", "taking a sabbatical", "looking for the right thing", or "a socialite".
One of the silver linings for me of the pandemic is how much the Great Resignation is revealing to the general public how much "essential workers" were poorly paid and miserable. Not even in a way that was necessitated by the work itself, but just because their bosses could get away with being jerks.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#295For 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…
Agreed. The way I see it is that UBI has all the makings of an abusive relationship. One party supports the other, while there is no reciprocation. You don’t have to contribute to the society - the society will support all your basic needs. 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 w…
Isn’t the reciprocation that you keep voting for the people that want to send you checks? I’ve yet to see anyone explain how UBI isn’t eventually just buying future votes.
If I see them stand on a stage and tell grandmas they are going to end social security and Medicare - but will send everyone a check for $1000 instead, and I’ll think they are serious about UBI as an economic solution, but “we’ll also end other programs someday” isn’t the leading bullet point.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Customer facing jobs are precisely the ones that are shitty. Some people are really entitled and awful. But you can basically only get rid of them by automating the process and disconnecting human workers from complaintants. How well does it work? Ask anyone who lost a YouTube channel without learning the real reasons and has no path to appeal to a human. HN hates whenever this happens.
You can also make higher-quality products that require less support, and then have a smaller number of high-quality well-paid support for the fewer customers who still need it.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#297A 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. 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…
On the other side of the coin, in my career I've had colleagues so bad that I would gladly pay them NOT to work. They created a toxic workplace and made everything worse. Unfortunately the majority of them would likely not take UBI (in two cases they were the owner/boss). However, if UBI kept just a portion of troublesome workers out of the workforce, then that would be beneficial as well.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#298Earlier 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…
Much as we might agree these workers overall have more money - from whatever source - it does not follow that the pay would go up for crap jobs. The pay need only be high enough above the post tax increase from the UBI baseline to fill the spots. Maybe it won't they populated by people who need to feed their family anymore, but perhaps by college grads who need to feed themselves because UBI is eaten up by their stud…
At low wages (effectively starvation wages in many cases) there is a huge incentive to show up for work.
With a UBI there is less incentive due to hunger but those same wages look much more attractive. There is still an incentive to work.
The money for the UBI does imply that profits go down, taxes go up (a mixture).
But importantly those workers, previously on the edge of starvation, will start consuming services initiating a virtuous cycle. That is the theory.
But a sensible housing policy (hello San Francisco) is very important or landlords will simply hover up all the surplus.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
So you are opposed to people not working, and you're opposed to people working?
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
I don't think deflation is an actual risk in this scenario ("value of that money plummets" = high inflation).
There are many stages between "people will starve" and having access to high quality food (and high QOL in general). For example if UBI is sufficiently high to allow most people currently employed in the food and service industries to not work (or to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.) I think a massive increase in food prices is unavoidable, at least in the short term until automation catches up. While basic foodstuffs would still remain affordable to all/most (the government would be forced to subsidize them if not), eating out and high quality, labor intensive products would likely become unaffordable to most people.