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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

#341

Post by mech987 »

I imagine that the validity of this research is completely dependent on the particular monetary rewards and other incentives built into the experiment design.

Getting paid $5 to do a boring task for an hour is a totally different ballgame than getting paid $100 for the same. Even moreso after you've done it for 100 hours. And in the context of a a person who is visiting a research lab the incentives to keep participating in the potentially "interesting game" are different than real life.

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

#342

Post by [deleted] »

jeffbee wrote: post #340
srcreigh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they get any more than the status quo? I suspect the extra support may translate to decreased profits for landowners. Tenants would have more time and money to file maintenance issues and represent themselves in the legal system, which would cost landowners. In Ontario it costs $50 and takes a lot of time and energy to file a complaint to the LTB. Tenants would also have more ability to change their situation i…

In many U.S. states you need not even bother going to court, because of robust "implied warranty of habitability" statutes and precedents. A person who experiences real habitability issues such as no heat, no cooking fuel, doors or windows that don't close and lock, etc after notifying landlords and waiting a reasonable time (which is as short as 24 hours in the case of no heat) can simply hire someone to fix it and…

[deleted]

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

#343

Post by Orou »

otherme123 wrote: post #115
osrec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoiding a particular job is not the same as sitting around doing nothing. It's quite possible for you to get basic income, yet channel your energy to other productive things.

Or other improductive things. The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus. That's pretty much doing nothing at a productive level. One of the problems of those studies are that they are temporal, and everyone involved know it. If I enrole you for two years in an UBI experiment, you'll probably not leave your job, even if you hate it. But if I guarantee you the…

> The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus

I've been following the UBI space for a long time and I've never seen anyone use this as an example - that's just a strawman. What people discuss is the work that is valuable to society but is unpaid such as raising children, caretaking for the elderly, community support, and so on.

A few hundred dollars a month isn't enough to live on, but it moves the needle for those most at-risk for going hungry or becoming homeless. And for everyone else, it gives extra breathing room and negotiating power in the workplace.

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

#344

Post by munk-a »

kradroy wrote: post #297
staticassertion wrote: post #69

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…

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.

UBI would likely help most in this case by giving employees the power to comfortably seek new work. Bad bosses survive mostly on apathetic employees that empower them to get away with being awful while looking productive because of their team.

The more power you give to employees the faster people will jump ship from bad bosses to good ones - and the awful ones will have a harder time keeping their positions.

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

#345

Post by missedthecue »

fma wrote: post #229
missedthecue wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is functionally no different than dividends paid by a company to its shareholders (although this Casino enjoys a local state-sanctioned monopoly, and the shareholder is the tribe council, so it is slightly different, but economically similar).

UBI on the other hand is done by taxing ourselves to pay ourselves, or worse, printing to pay ourselves.

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

#346

Post by nouveaux »

thoughtstheseus wrote: post #280

The idea that UBI alone solves anything is silly and not a realistic policy proposal. UBI is the government distributing money to people. Normally the government spends money on behalf of people who are expected to contribute toward repaying it. A simple way to reduce the cost of UBI is to have it reduced by the cost of ALL government services you elect to use. Assuming such a UBI covers basic needs, eliminate minimu…

The government already distributes money to people in the form of subsidies. UBI is just a different form of subsidy. In the case of UBI, its the profits from automation subsidizing the poor.

"The root problem is an unfavorable distribution of wealth and income toward asset holders. Stop taxing labor."

The problem UBI is trying to solve is one where more and more people will become unemployed because of automation. It is not trying to level the playing field.

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

#347

Post by xyzzyz »

qwytw wrote: post #318
mongol wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs.

No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.

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

#348

Post by nouveaux »

oneoff786 wrote: post #323
teucris wrote: post #114

Would it really be so bad if some people stopped working altogether? One of the proposed justifications for UBI is that automation creates wealth that could (or in some arguments, should) go to everyone rather than the ultra wealthy. That automation is taking up a larger and larger slice of the workforce, reducing the need for people to work. Many people will choose to do work that gives them meaning. Some people wil…

Yes. Because the people most likely to quit are the people at the bottom. We need a lot of bottom tier workers to run society. See how much stuff falls apart right now with the labor shortage.

GP is framing his argument based on a world where the lower tier jobs do not exist through automation. So the assumption is that bottom tier work will be replaced by automation, and society will continue to run.

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

#349

Post by piva00 »

mushufasa wrote: post #284
pkdpic wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, isnt this exactly whats been observed from pandemic financial aid? Increased pressure on employers to pay more and give workers a better work environment? Maybe someone has a better link to back that up but heres one at least. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/10/14/employ... Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in respons…

~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors. While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions. Having higher cost of labo…

Bertrand Russell predicted the same in the 1920s.

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

#350

Post by augustuspolius »

asdff wrote: post #102
swalsh wrote: post #45

Something not talked about often, but I wonder if basic income might lower the "applicability" of what people spend their time on. I know if money were not an issue I'd spend my time working on projects that sound fun, but might not have a path to profitability. Money, besides being a motivator is also a signal to markets on what people want.

I've had a few landlords that just don't have any job at all and just ride off their cash flow. Boomer landlords of mine especially who got in on the property early before the market swelled in the last few decades just live like freespirited hippies. No other job, engaging in art or creative things, eating and drinking around town with their partner, and smoking a lot of weed. Even with this decadent living on their…

This argument doesn’t get enough attention. There is a large population right now that has enough money not to work and - perhaps surprisingly to some - they do not engage in creative side projects for fun. They choose not to work.
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