Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

universiteitleiden.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 786 posts

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

#501

Post by convolvatron »

beardedman wrote: post #170

For me these studies are utterly meaningless without real world long-term data. > would not reduce people’s willingness to work > The psychologists also found an indication that people with a basic income look for work that suits them better. Note how the authors use the word *willingness" to work. 0 people want to clean toilets or public restrooms for a living. Or be waiting staff at a restaurant. Yet those "grunt w…

if the 'hard stuff'means earning a pittance so the investor class can sent their children to a decent school and I can't even afford to get treatment for my shot back. or to understand how clueless and narcissistic low level managers can sometimes psychologically abuse their employees. or that no matter how much time and energy I put in I'm never going anywhere.

some of these are lesson we can maybe stop teaching.

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

#502

Post by kingkawn »

bwb wrote: post #448
godelski wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't get it... why not raise minimum wages to reflect local cost of living? IE, why tax all of us instead of the businesses not paying enough for their employees?

We all get taxed either way, might as well be to the benefit of people rather than abstract organizations like businesses.

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

#503

Post by lukebuehler »

rottencupcakes wrote: post #164
pc86 wrote: 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.

Exactly, I came to say the same thing. You could pay for UBI with some MMT trick, but you‘d just end up inflating/rescaling all the prices. It would only work as a massive wealth redistribution program where the rich and middle class get heavily taxed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to implement than the former, but technically both would be UBI.

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

#504

Post by ChrisLomont »

hooande wrote: post #429
ChrisLomont wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up and demonstrate this "ton of bureaucratic overhead". All US programs have efficiency ratings you can find. There is not the overhead you (and UBI people in general) claim. Pick the system you think is most inefficient, then look up to find admin budget versus money paid out. I've done all this, under the same initial belief you have, and it's simply not true. And UBI will also require the same overhead to col…

You've made claims up and down this thread that amount to "trust me" or "look it up". None of these are simple factual matters like "What is the capital of Egypt?". There are numerous studies about basic income, all driven by different assumptions and biases. No one knows exactly which one you're referring to when you say "look it up". It's impossible to have a detailed discussion when everyone isn't evaluating the s…

There's others that have posted the % overhead for various programs in this thread.

There is so much nonsense repeated here that for me to look up everything, which I have done in the past, would not be worth the time. Take a moment to pick one thing I claimed, check it carefully.

> None of these are simple factual matters

How much is spent by any welfare program is a simple fact. The budget spent to administer that is a simple fact. Thus the overhead is a simple fact.

And I have never looked into one and found this massive overhead UBI people claim.

Edit: from the first term I searched for

https://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-feder...

And even with throwing all that small overhead into UBI for free, and assuming UBI has zero overhead.... The number are still not going to work, or, as I started with, will screw those already needing assistance.

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

#505

Post by Siecje »

BoumTAC wrote: post #213
jeremyjh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it also make a difference that you lose welfare benefits when you start working? Maybe you could just work part time if all earned income was supplemental with no welfare gap.

currently I'm on welfare. (enough to not have to use money put aside) If I work (even part time, I will loose all welfare). If I find a job I will earn only 400-800E more than I earn with welfare.

E is Euro? 400-800 Euro is a significant amount of money.

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

#506

Post by [deleted] »

nouveaux wrote: post #363
missedthecue wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a luddite. I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant. The human skill set is too diverse. Automation should be encouraged, not taxed, because it makes society wealthier and more productive.

"I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant." Technology has already made people permanently redundant in many places and will continue to do so. There is a near zero percent chance that technology will stop advancing to replace people's jobs. As we march forward with new automation, there will be a net loss in jobs. UBI is an attempt to solve that problem.

[deleted]

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

#507

Post by teucris »

nouveaux wrote: post #348
oneoff786 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Because the people most likely to quit are the people at the bottom. We need a lot of bottom tier workers to run society. See how much stuff falls apart right now with the labor shortage.

GP is framing his argument based on a world where the lower tier jobs do not exist through automation. So the assumption is that bottom tier work will be replaced by automation, and society will continue to run.

Automation, or the pay is really good because it’s bottom tier (implying unpleasant) and can’t be automated (yet).

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

#508

Post by gpsx »

I would like to see more about work-fare, where people are given jobs if they are unemployed. I think it is very important people have work to do, and not all people are as self motivated as the hacker news crowd. Secondly, this would hopefully help productivity.

Previously job programs were giant public works projects, like building the Hoover dam. Today, with computers it would be easy to give any person a job, right out of their own house.

I do like allowing self motivated people to create their own jobs, and that should be factored into this kind of program.

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

#509

Post by Natsu »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #381
Natsu wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the factory and what you're doing there. Last time I worked in a factory I was debugging printer-eating robots, shooting high powered lasers at things, and blowing stuff around with blasts of compressed air. (And I got to program all those things). You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)

I wish, this was more about working several summers near a large, hot furnace with no AC.

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

#510

Post by teucris »

missedthecue wrote: post #490
nouveaux wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant." Technology has already made people permanently redundant in many places and will continue to do so. There is a near zero percent chance that technology will stop advancing to replace people's jobs. As we march forward with new automation, there will be a net loss in jobs. UBI is an attempt to solve that problem.

Can you give me one such example of someone made permanently redundant by automation?

Examples of permanent redundancy are tricky to see, because even when people don’t really do a job anymore at a large scale, there are still humans involved, just way, way fewer. Examples are: Computers - not microprocessors but “computers” which were people who did the work of calculating stuff before calculators were invented. Lumberjacks - we have logging equipment now. Musicians - we have DJs and radio to provide us music.
Post reply on HN