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Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

universiteitleiden.nl

431–440 of 786 posts

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

#431
I would like to see "negative income tax" (a la Milton Friedman) make a comeback in these experiments.

It's like minimum wage except the government funds the difference, and unlike UBI you still have to work to earn it, which seems to be a prevailing concern ITT.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.

this has already happened in the food service industry. McDonalds used to hire a lot of teenagers; for many it was their first job. When minimum wage went up sufficiently high enough they replaced human labour with self-serve kiosks and reduced staff to a single register and kitchen staff. Tim Hortons switched to centralized bakeries and terminated all store-level bakers. I'm not arguing either side of this, just tha…

As a Canadian - I can comment that Tim Hortons has notoriously terrible baked goods. You might grab a breakfast sandwich there (and a lot of people are weirdly enamored with their coffee) but they can't even compete when it comes to baked goods in most metro areas - they're a coffee shop and we have much better alternatives for baked goods. The cost to them for cutting bakers was to gradually lose their position as a purveyor of donuts in Canada.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.

I’m dealing with this infinite loop chatbot with Verizon right now haha. My number port to become a Verizon customer was supposed to take 4-24 hours. Ten days later still nothing. Chatbot asks me for topics to help with, put in my number but it’s not a Verizon number (it’s mid port) so they recommend I register, I try to register and I cannot because my number isn’t a Verizon number, so back to the chatbot about my p…

So funny, off topic story with Verizon. I ported my number from them years ago. Which ended me up in the same exact situation. I couldn’t log in or anything. So I sent them $800 just to make sure I covered my early termination fees since I couldn’t log in to see a bill and I had paperless billing on. Fast forward 6 months later and I get a call from their debt collections for $600. I asked where the $800 went. They didn’t know but I owed them money. I disputed it on my credit report and it vanished. Another six months and I get a call again, almost same conversation but at the end of it, they sent me a check for almost $200. It was great. I’m never doing business with them again though.

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

#434

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…

> involves getting berated by customers

One reason retail workers passively endure being berated by customers is that they are fearful of losing their job. UBI would reduce that fear and increase worker power.

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

#435
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.

>It is just going a bit slow right now.

Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also make higher-quality products that require less support, and then have a smaller number of high-quality well-paid support for the fewer customers who still need it.

... for a higher price. And we may have a long discussion about "how to engineer software so that it doesn't need as much support". Theoretically, it can be done; practically, we have all been astonished by Ways of the Common User that no one anticipated, plus you always hit the problem with diversity of hardware. Apple seems to be pretty user friendly, but Apple products are expensive to boot and Apple does not supp…

Pretty much no one today builds software with the intention that it doesn't need support. In fact, the entire hybrid-FOSS ecosystem is perversely incentivised towards exactly the opposite. It won't be as hard as people think it will be when we stop cramming features and GUI changes in to appease some manufactured need to sell the new version.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, which is why UBI would have to be combined with housing reform. Both are doable and needed. One of my favourites is to encourage cooperative housing and to have the government become a landlord itself, but with rents capped to a share of income. This way, the government would have an incentive to make the system more efficient and to make more and better public housing, as the money would go back to the…

>but with rents capped to a share of income. This way, the government would have an incentive to make the system more efficient and to make more and better public housing, as the money would go back to the government budget and they would be able to lower taxes as a result. Can you explain this a bit more? What would be their sources of income other than rents? I am not able to follow your efficiency argument.

The more efficient these rentals are run, the higher the profit the government makes. The more money the government makes, the less they need to tax and the more services they can provide, and the more votes you get. If they don't run these well, people will leave to the private sector, reducing government income, which would then have to cut services and raise taxes, losing them votes. So there is a strong incentive to run the service efficiently.

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

#438
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…

>~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.

Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.

The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those jobs will be eliminated altogether. Need to speak to a live human to solve some issue? Bad luck, here is our AI chatbot programmed for six common situations and wishing you a good day.

this has already happened in the food service industry. McDonalds used to hire a lot of teenagers; for many it was their first job. When minimum wage went up sufficiently high enough they replaced human labour with self-serve kiosks and reduced staff to a single register and kitchen staff. Tim Hortons switched to centralized bakeries and terminated all store-level bakers. I'm not arguing either side of this, just tha…

Can we blame that on minimum wages going up, or can we blame it on McDonald's find a cost-effective way to automate that? Do we find no kiosk in those states who haven't had a minimum wage hike?

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

#440
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI." I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system…

Assuming we don’t want to MMT / money printer this, to keep a balanced budget, any UBI system would have to be accompanied by an increase in taxes. These taxes would presumably be very progressive. This effectively would end up more than negating the effect of UBI on the richer people, thus turning it into a directed welfare program. UBI and directed welfare are essentially same same.

In US, these taxes wouldn’t be particularly progressive. US taxes are already very progressive, much more so than in Europe. In US, the wealthy already pay overwhelming majority of the tax. If US was to embark on European level governmental spending, it would have to introduce more European-like taxation system, where bulk of the revenue is collected from middle and working class.
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