I don't like either sides of the argument. It really depends on the people. People that are doing well will want to work, poor people and people that just have a hard time getting a job will eventually give up. Proof? How people stop looking for work already and give up and stop getting counted as unemployed.
Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
531–540 of 786 posts
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
~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,…
Used to be that everyone worked brutal hours six days a week, even children. The working class wasn’t called that for nothing. All this work yielded a very meagre and fragile existence.
Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.
Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.
If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#533Earlier 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…
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, despit…
Minor correction; pandemic financial aid for individuals has been conditional on hardship. The PPP on the other hand just required businesses to pinky swear that they'd retain or bring back employees. Then the "loans" were completely forgiven.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#534Earlier 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.
Not a particularly realistic view of automation. Real automation is productivity tooling that turns semi skilled labor into unskilled labor, at vastly fewer heads. Most tasks have some last mile task that still requires someone with a pulse to be there.
Like store clerks used to be fairly high skill jobs. If there’s truly no need for lower tier labor we will enter a never before seen economic inflection point, and a race to remove labor costs at every point in the system, because you’ve implicitly suggested we have achieved generally intelligent, physically present ai
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think that's the mindset. The mindset is, "I worked for what I have, you can do the same"
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Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#536Earlier 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…
I also wonder if we can't make some conclusions from real world data over the last two years. Yes, the pandemic is a bit of a confounding variable, but from what I've been reading we have at least strong reason to believe that the support payments from unemployment both substantially contributed to inflation, and also reduced marginal propensity to work. Fortunately or unfortunately, I think there's not much of a cha…
> we have at least strong reason to believe that the support payments from unemployment … substantially reduced marginal propensity to work.
I always see people blaming benefits for people not working, but nobody ever seems to offer an explanation why these same people didn’t return to work once the benefits were cut down to their pre-pandemic levels.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've done a long-term wide-scale UBI experiment? Where? I hope you don't mean any fickle systems tied to covid, and I especially hope you don't mean the unemployment boost the US did; unemployment pay is very different from basic income. And even if something fails, that doesn't prove it's some kind of impossibility like perpetual motion machines.
The closest analogue to true UBI goes on in the oil-rich Gulf nations. Citizens are basically guarenteed a job where they don't even need to show up, which is basically an inefficient form of UBI. Some, like Saudi Arabia are transitioning to true UBI. The result of this is that these nations are completely reliant on foreign labor. Both skilled on unskilled work is dominated by foreigners. The latter have enough leve…
How much does that job pay compared to other things, and compared to the poverty line? What's a specific country I should look at here?
It's definitely possible to give away too much, but that's not a good argument that $0 is optimal.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And if we can't, we should value them more
Customer facing jobs are precisely the ones that are shitty. Some people are really entitled and awful. But you can basically only get rid of them by automating the process and disconnecting human workers from complaintants. How well does it work? Ask anyone who lost a YouTube channel without learning the real reasons and has no path to appeal to a human. HN hates whenever this happens.
So you're basically arguing that abuse and exploitation is necessary.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen. Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the…
> Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.
How about in the drive through? Moving the pouring of dine in/take out to the customers happened mid 200x, and saved labor back then, too.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#540Earlier 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…
I think this is an honest perspective, but it directly contradicts the article which is saying "basic income would not reduce people's willingness to work." Menial labor or being berated by customers rather clear-cut example, but most jobs have moderate amounts of unpleasantness, and given the choice many people would opt out of working altogether. There's a lot of unpleasant work that needs to be done to keep civili…
There's a big difference between "I am willing to work, even though I can get enough money to survive without doing so" and "Under those conditions, I am still willing to work at a job that dehumanizes and degrades me constantly, for very little extra money."