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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

#351

Post by bryanlarsen »

tippytippytango wrote: post #301

You are earning $4000/month after taxes and begin to receive $1000/month. What do you do? Some fraction of people will reduce their workload so their earnings are $3000/month, bringing their total income back to $4000. Some fraction of people will not reduce their workload at all and inflate their lifestyle to depend on $5000/month. The overwhelming majority of people will choose the latter; we already know this, it'…

That's a great example, but you need to use smaller numbers. If UBI is put into place, the only thing somebody making $4K/mo after taxes is going to do is complain about his increased taxes.

In a balanced UBI, the UBI is paid for with taxes. So if you make the average income, you get $X from UBI and your taxes go up by $X. If you make more than average, like your example, then you pay out more than you receive in UBI.

Because average income is considerably higher than median income, most people benefit from UBI.

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

#352

Post by josephcsible »

kcplate wrote: post #339

I personally used to be a proponent of UBI, but after 2020 and watching some of the impact of Covid and what increasing government financial payouts has done to employment malaise and to the economy, my skepticism has increased. I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs like I once did.

This is exactly where I am too. I thought replacing all of our existing safety net programs with UBI would be perfect until the COVID money happened. I knew some people would choose to just live off of it forever and never contribute to society again, but I didn't realize just how many people it would be.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by alkonaut »

HPsquared wrote: post #52
kevingadd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have the same problem: the participants know it's only an experiment. They know it's temporary.

If someone seriously wanted to run an experiment/trial it would need to be on the scale of a medium sized city and a decade before I’d be willing to draw any conclusions at all.

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

#355

Post by toast0 »

jjk166 wrote: post #232
_-david-_ wrote: post #144

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.

> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.

Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.

All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.

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

#356

Post by godelski »

dghughes wrote: post #320
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…

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 hour…

> 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.

This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be able to live until they find another job. Being able to do that should prevent a fair amount of abuse in the first place.

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

#357

Post by yurishimo »

Natsu wrote: post #205
_-david-_ wrote: post #144

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.

Speaking as someone who has worked in a factory, you couldn't pay me a six figure salary to go back. And most of the things were automated already, at least as much as reasonably could be.

I think that is more a testament to the lives we now live as Software Developers more than anything else. It's not uncommon to find anecdotes of others on HN talking about how they maybe work 2-3 hours a day and take home 150k+ a year.

I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)

I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.

Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.

The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.

If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.

I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).

The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.

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

#358

Post by srcreigh »

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…

In Ontario,Canada you can pre pay for repairs, but you aren't allowed to deduct those amounts from rent. Here, you would need to front $500+ or whatever to have the work done, and then pay $50 for a Landlord and Tenant Board hearing booking (which have been delayed months). Then you need to show up, prove the work was needed, that the landlord had enough time to do it and didn't, and that you minimized the costs.

(A joint tenant advice, contracting and paralegal brokerage might be a good business in this area. But do I really want to make myself a major enemy of all the scummy landowners? Noooope.)

Municipal offices will intervene on their own to ensure things like heating are taken care of. In Waterloo the minimum allowed temp is 21C or 70F. In my experience with this city's offices, they will take care of this almost immediately (immediately respond to form on website via email asking for evidence of sub 21C settings, then call the landlord and request the temp be increased etc.)

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

#359

Post by josephcsible »

nouveaux wrote: post #346
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. I…

Then the problem is that we've overdone it, relative to our current automation level. The amount of free money you can get is high enough that more people are choosing not to work than jobs have been automated away so far.

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

#360

Post by bryanlarsen »

augustuspolius wrote: post #350
asdff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The majority won't engage in productive tasks, but the output from the minority can be massive. Einstein wrote his papers as a side gig from his patent office job. It doesn't take many Einstein's to make up for a large number of slackers.
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