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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

#311

Post by emteycz »

kube-system wrote: post #259
emteycz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that, and how do you explain that more people get on welfare as it gets available to them, even though they have good employment options? Moreover, why does that matter at all - how is it fair to those still working, who are forced to pay for those who don't want to? I'm all for welfare - helping people in need. But I'm not going to fund someone's lifestyle.

To take a market perspective to this: I think there are some costs that people fail to accommodate for when comparing employment vs welfare. We used to consider homemaking an actual profession, because... it really is. Now that we are expecting households to have dual incomes, we are recognizing that income on paper, when in reality it always was there, it just was not formally recognized. With the cost of childcare…

Good point about the child care.

But I disagree with your comment on the second point. As I said, I'm all for welfare/assistance given generously to those in need, but that's different from funding non-working lifestyle of those who have good working options and simply don't want to work.

Some part of UBI might overlap with the welfare part, but it's going to significantly increase the number of people who don't work just because - and it's not fair to fund that from the money made by those who work, and especially not fair to take it from those who must work because UBI is not enough in their situation.

UBI could be funded from sources like sovereign funds - why not. But let's not take money from people who need it just so a group of people can quit their job. Classic welfare at least says that those who receive it need it more that the person that pays.

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

#312

Post by 16012022 »

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…

Ah, so you are saying we shouldn’t offer UBI because then we would have no excuse to keep degrading conditions in the workplace. So people should have to go through with bad experiences (see retail, “menial” jobs) in order to be worthy of their lives. Ok, got it.

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

#313

Post by nouveaux »

missedthecue wrote: post #227
teucris wrote: post #196

Earlier 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?

On one hand, you say that fewer people working reduces the pie. On the other hand, you say we should encourage automation. What situation would enable full automation and enable 100% workforce participation?

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

#314

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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.

Doesn't Denmark have a normal European style "Conditional" welfare system? That has very different dynamics from an UnConditional basic income.

Often the way that welfare is implemented is that if you can't work, you get welfare. This seems like a really obvious, logical, good idea. But there's a trap (a welfare trap!). Because on the other side, when you start working again, you stop getting welfare. And your net income might actually go down.

A rational actor might therefore end up stuck in this local optimum where they stay on welfare and never start working.

One argument for UBI is that it eliminates the drop in income associated with the return to work (because you get it unconditionally: whether you are working or not) . A theoretical prediction might therefore be that more people would work if UBI is available.

In practical tests so far this doesn't seem to have quite panned out. This is due to UBI having multiple effects simultaneously. However, I would be most amused to see if in some situations this does became the dominant effect, and the number of working people went up.

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

#315

Post by kwhitefoot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #253
jhauris wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.…

> If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. UBI is, by definition, Universal (e.g. given to everyone). Welfare programs are highly selective and only apply to a small number of people. The only way to make them cost the same is to massively reduce the benefits given to the small number of welfare recipients, then give the bal…

UBI is taxable income. You just adjust tax rates slightly to claw it back from those with higher incomes. No extra bureaucracy required, no means testing needed.

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

#317

Post by rocqua »

These names don't sound real. They are to 'on point' in dutch. Poletiek is one letter off the dutch world for politics. And "de Kwaadsteniet" literrally means "not the worst" or more like "a decent dude".

I get the feeling this is an experiment, though I would expect better of a university like Leiden.

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

#318

Post by qwytw »

mongol wrote: post #285
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As more jobs become automated, UBI will become a necessity to prevent the collapse of civilization. Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job. There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.

Go back all the way back to the industrial revolution and you will find that automation creates new jobs, just other kinds.

The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs. This time it seems that it's the other way around.

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

#319

Post by MisterBastahrd »

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…

If the market is as intelligent as the gravitationally wealthy sitting at the top want to make it out to be, then we should be able to solve that no problem through hard work, bootstraps, ingenuity, and whatever marketing term Volkswagen has decided to pimp.

If you think that people who are sitting at the bottom wouldn't take a job to ensure that their basic needs are met and they can have something nice for themselves every once in a while, then I don't know what to tell you. People didn't just start working degrading jobs in the 2010s.

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

#320

Post by dghughes »

staticassertion wrote: post #69
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…

> 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…

I've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated.

For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming.

Then they cut their hours to part-time for all but two workers. At minimum wage it was barely livable on 40 hours per week.

They also ask the night worker to come in the next day with less than a seven hour gap from the previous shift.

Even at the punch clock they were scolded for punching in or out a mere 1 minute off from the time to work or end.

I could tell when talking to the staff many of them felt defeated and this was the only job they could do. They just had to sit there and take it.

Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.

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