Income subsidies for people in need is a nice thought, but isn't the bigger problem that we keep buying shit made with slave labor in China? We live in a global market, and as long as we keep supporting hucksters abroad it's no surprise things are stagnating at home.
Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
461–470 of 786 posts
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#462Earlier 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…
I just went through an absolute debacle with my phone number being in limbo and no customer reps being able to access the account. Submit a complaint to the better business bureau within a day or two executive services will contact you via email. They resolved my issue, it still took a few more days but it worked without spending even more time chatting to bots and reps who simply do not have the power to resolve the issue.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#463The very first sentence says this work was fudned by "FNV union"but I don't know what that means; the closest I could get was a Dutch trade union? The fact that they don't define this (apparently) biased conflict, nor link to the actual study makes me immediately question the impartiality of any research. We also just ran a real world experiment where many of the jobs in question here where impacted by covid and indi…
FNV is the largest federation of unions in the Netherlands. (It's name translates to Federation of Netherlands Unions.)
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident. This isn't suggestive, valid science. It's the equivalent of setting up a "scientific" contraption that purports to be a perpetual motion machine. You can create a pretty convincing fake perpetual motion machine, but because we have a broader theory of mechanics, we know perpetual motion is impossible, that the purported machine must be cheating somehow (even…
>We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident I think the real experiment is perpetual consumerism and unchecked global free market capitalism. Some places that could be considered a UBI welfare state would be Scandinavian countries or parts of Canada, hardly examples of self-evident failures.
>Some places that could be considered a UBI welfare state would be Scandinavian countries or parts of Canada
Canada does not have any UBI. What are you referring to?
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would take a job for significantly less than they receive from the government?
The U in UBI stands for universal: everyone gets the same amount, regardless of whether they have a job. Taking a job is additive with UBI, there is no "significantly less money". Under UBI, a government could do away with minimum wage completely because there is no coercion by necessity. The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.
That only follows with a theoretically perfect UBI which either matches everyone at the highest COL or matches everyone with their local COL and reacts instantaneously with increases due to changes in the market.
If there is a delay in UBI increases, or if the UBI is not properly matched to the COL, there will still be pockets of people who must work by necessity.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#466I do wonder whether UBI will be feasible once the US loses its ability to print trillions of dollars. Whether it’s China or Crypto, it seems like the reign of the PetroDollar is coming to an end, and with it the easy access to money printing. Also any debates on UBI typically start with a country-centric view (US in this case), but what will be the implications for the rest of Earth citizens who live in countries wit…
If I were a leader of a country that engaged economically with the US, I would be less concerned with the use of the dollar for UBI than it's current use, which is too enrich a small financial elite. A group that not only had outsized power in the US, butt also around the world, since the power of the dollar is so generalized. It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadersh…
If I were a trading partner of the US, would I want to continue to accept the US dollar as the currency became less and less valuable as a result of excessive money printing?
Eventually austerity measures will come, and it's unlikely it will be the boomers who pay for it but the younger generations.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about them? Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more. Want to “work” as a golfer? Cool, enjoy living on UBI because no one will be topping up your salary for that. The person who cuts the greens earns wayyyy more than you though. Want to play lots of golf? You’re going to run out of UBI to pay for all those greens fees. Maybe you need to think about taking on a side gig in a comfor…
> Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more. Why? Golfing is a poor example because you can already lose money trying to be a pro. Or, you could become world famous and make millions. What's more is that you don't need to be "hired" to become a golfer. When we talk about jobs that firms pay salaries to fill, then I don't see why the supply of those jobs would change, whether they're enjo…
Golfing is an expensive passtime for 99.9% of the people who play it. It's not something that should ever be viewed as a "dream job" and if you do have aspirations to be a pro and didn't start working on it before age 10, you never will be one.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
Yes you're right, now that I read it doesn't make sense.. I guess what I wanted to say is that is that at least initially it replaced a huge number of medium paying jobs with a large number of low paying and a small number of extremely well paying jobs.
Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875.
Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#469A 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…
> My point is - there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit and not work if the basic income can provide a sufficient su
I'm neither arguing for nor against UBI here, but from my understanding, you description is not of UBI. Here you are saying income as a substitute for work. Where as UBI as I understand it is provided independent of work. Meaning that by your spouse quitting she would be losing half of her income.
Maybe she still makes that trade off and quits and the program needs to raise wages to keep people. Or maybe she stays in place for the pay (with abuse). Or maybe the programs doesn't raise wages and has worse/fewer employees as a result.
But it doesn't sounds like the situation you describe is UBI.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#470You 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…
There are other taxes than income taxes. My idealistic view of UBI is a way to share the increasing benefit of automation. So if a factory owner fires all his employees and replaces them with robots, his increased profits are rather heavily taxed and go to UBI. I am aware of how logistically difficult it would be to have a fair "automation tax" though. But the point is: income tax is not the only tax, and probably not even the best tax, to fund UBI.