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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

#391

Post by zozbot234 »

thegrimmest wrote: post #333
CraigJPerry wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would pay the multi-million dollar salary of the top footballers if that came to pass? If people were suddenly paying a LOT more for strawberries and garbage collection, would they have disposable left over for footballers? There’d still be footballers - the person who was picking fruit left that role to follow their UBI funded dream of being a footballer. They’re just not going to make the same amount of money.…

Believe it or not, poor people generally don't buy football tickets. If their TVs were made by UBI workers, then they wouldn't be able to afford those either. Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour. You're basically rewinding all of the gains in productivity we've made by imposing a high floor. CEOs aren't paid a lot because the assume risk, they're paid a lot becaus…

> Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour.

A UBI would be more efficient than the extensive patch-work of policies and regulations that we use today to artificially redistribute income. There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less - especially when adjusted for productivity. Minimum wage work today is some of the least productive.

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

#392

Post by snek_case »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #152
ChrisLomont wrote: post #12

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others. I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need…

> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant. > And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows w…

> The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant.

I agree that seems very significant. Unemployment is considered to be quite high when it's at 8% for instance.

During the pandemic, we've had to pay people monthly cheques because we forced businesses to shut down, and it's been difficult to get people to return to work. Granted, this isn't the same as UBI, and there are conflating factors, but currently, we're in a situation where we have high inflation and a labor shortage. That's not very encouraging.

In my mind, if we want to implement something like UBI, we need a way to control the inflation it might generate. It might also not be realistic to do this until we have something like general purpose robots to counter the labor shortage. Another problem is just how we finance something like this. Increasing taxes on the general population seems like a pretty bad idea. We'd have to fund it through money printing, but again, how do we control the resulting inflation? High sales taxes? Increasing income taxes in the higher brackets would create a situation where it's less worthwhile to work hard.

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

#393

Post by labrador »

Owners of capital think people aren't happy unless they are working making money, because capital owners are made happy by having money. It's hard for them to understand that there are other, better sources of happiness. There are tons of examples of people forgoing money for something more satisfying.

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

#394

Post by loceng »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #260
caskstrength wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the other group who will have products of their labor "redistributed" to pay for other's leisure time?

If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too. If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.

And I'm not totally sure my visualization in my head is correct, but if everyone is getting $1,000 per month with a high quality of life provided with that, an additional $1,000 per month is weighted much more purchase power wise than in today's model.

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

#395

Post by samstave »

Basic income provides people the basics needed to be able to look for and apply and interview for work without having to worry about how are they going to pay for food, transportation to/from interviews etc...

Its crippling knowing that you only have a little bit of money and you need to determine how much a sunk-cost-opportunity is worth -- meaning:

"I have $100, and I do have expenses - but in order to interview for [JOBS] - I need to be able to get to and from, put gas in car/pay for transport, and know that I can still feed myself/dependents && be able to absorb the cost of the interview if I dont get it -- AND have money to make it to the next interviews"

---

Everyone focuses on the lowest bar "these ghetto people wont work if we give them money"

FUCK YOU i you think that the only people who NEED such assistance are ghetto poor people who want to milk the system.

---

What about having employers cover the costs of actually interviewing with your company? If it costs one $50+ just to get-to-and-from an interview inclusive of time -- then some people will struggle to do so.

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

#397

Post by raffraffraff »

I think it depends on what level of devotion is expected from me, under the terms of "work". After spending 20+ years working like a trouper and genuinely enjoying the crazy pressure, I quit my job last year and took 6 months to do very little. I'm amazed at how much I've enjoyed not working. I'm about to return to work, but what I've taken away from my break is:

1. I want to work on interesting problems

2. I will not give my life to a company, ever again.

In other words, I'm waiting for companies to start offering 30-hour weeks, 4 day weeks, 60 days unpaid time off per year etc.

For now, I'm returning to "regular" work. However, whereas in the past I worked through months of stressful bullshit caused by bad management, toxic colleagues and unpaid technical debt, my future willingness to work will be based on job satisfaction. If my job isn't making me happy, I'll try to fix things for a while, but if things don't get better quickly, I'm gone.

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

#398

Post by ErikVandeWater »

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 probably end up disproportionately filtering out non-troublesome workers. Non-troublesome workers are more rational than troublesome workers and would take a small reduction in pay in exchange for less headache. The troublesome workers that actually enjoy conflict would stay in the workforce because they can't find the same opportunities for conflict elsewhere.

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

#399

Post by withinboredom »

_-david-_ wrote: post #252
jjk166 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are rolling out computer tellers all around my area. If they haven't done it in your area it is coming. There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out. It is just going a bit slow right now.

I love this in other countries. I don’t always speak the local language well enough but I can tap on pictures and wait for my number to come up.

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

#400

Post by tremon »

rhino369 wrote: post #265
inglor_cz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The bigger danger is its just a path to the end of democracy. If the 50.1% can just vote themselves a bigger piece of the pie, how long before the morlocks decide they don't like supporting a bunch of eloi. If the morlocks decide eloi votes don't count, what are they going to do? Go on strike?

Democracy is not the same as time-limited dictatorship. A well-working democracy has constitutional safeguards against policies that are hostile against parts of the population.

If you're living in a country where 50.1% of the population can impose their will on the other 49.9% unopposed, you're not living in a healthy democracy. Regardless of what the media says.

(And yes, the Brexit referendum is a good example of that. All the issues the British government now has in living up to the results of that binary decision are problems of their own making -- on the other hand, one might say that these current problems show that the British democracy is in a healthier state than that referendum made it out to be)

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