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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

#411

Post by augustuspolius »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #295
augustuspolius wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Right - even more potential for abuse.

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

#412

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

respondo2134 wrote: post #150
pc86 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure some will. Some won't. So what? I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.

then why are so many UBI proponents surprised when those who would bankroll this experiement fight it so hard?

It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.

And for the record, I would appear to be in the group bankrolling it rather than receiving from it, and I'm completely cool with it.

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

#413

Post by faet »

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...

>Even in Cherokee country, where the additional income is quite sizable, the payments are not enough to live on

>The Alaska Permanent Fund has been giving $1,000 to $2,000 a year to its citizens for decades

Neither of these are amounts to not work on. Many people quit working after reaching a specific "UBI". Either through social security or retirement/investment accounts. This is also the goal for many folks such as FIRE.

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

#414

Post by mlyle »

pkdpic wrote: post #195
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…

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…

Note that pandemic financial aid has often been conditional on hardship and has been intermittent. This makes it not a great model for basic income.

I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.

A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?

We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.

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

#415

Post by kuratkull »

goodpoint wrote: post #175
mjburgess wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

Currency exchange rates are bidirectional. You are arguing for people to produce less, so export plummets, which will bring down the value of the $, which means it is harder to import stuff you need.

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

#418

Post by PragmaticPulp »

loceng wrote: post #379
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began?

> Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began?

What do you mean? Labor force participation has been trending upward over the last 100 years, not downward.

For an extreme example, fewer than 10% of married women were in the workforce around 1900. Now it's closer to 3 out of 4 married women in the workforce.

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

#419

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

inglor_cz wrote: post #127
sidibe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their choice to work. Might take a generation or two to not be outraged based on how we were raised, but that would seem to make it not unjust.

Depends. If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.) If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point y…

I don't see why they shouldn't be free to. Yet, weirdly, we don't see a lot of people renouncing their rich-socialist-nation citizenship to run off to some other libertarian paradise.

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

#420

Post by convolvatron »

missedthecue wrote: post #331
jjk166 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are opposed to people not working, and you're opposed to people working?

I'm opposed to paying people not to work. Humans and automation coexist. It's not as if all the engineers that used slide-rules and graphing paper went homeless when AutoCAD was invented. Same with farmers and the tractor. Society gets richer as automation makes our labor more efficient.

and why do you assume that somehow in this equation there will be enough jobs with a living wage to accomidate the entire population?
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