Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by thegrimmest » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #544

thegrimmest wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "So what" is that if pay for waiters and labourers has to compete with UBI, the cost of service, food, and housing increases significantly, putting it out of reach of more people, and contracting the entire economy as a result. You can postulate about how much we should value these jobs, but the reality is that most people wouldn't be able to afford a meal at a restaurant where all the staff make 50k, or a packet…

There's no competing with UBI. People with jobs still get UBI. That's what the "U" part means: Universal. Pay for waiters and labourers, like pay for everyone else, is on top of UBI. There's no particular reason it would have to rise by 2x or 3x—unless the industry is categorically unwilling or unable to ensure that their workers are treated well enough that they just don't see it as being worthwhile for less.

I'm arguing that there are many industries that would not survive workers having an alternative that provides for their basic needs, or would be transformed into niche, artisanal goods/services that would be out of reach of ordinary people.

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

#592

Post by Kim_Bruning » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #12

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. 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" [1]. There are plenty of others. I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need…

From your source:

"However, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling"

Note that 13% is likely the net value, so if this group slowed down, possibly other groups actually started working harder at the same time, compensating for some of the loss.

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

#593

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #572

CraigJPerry wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So less strawberries but you get to bin US healthcare and replace it with Japanese style healthcare instead? That’s an easy yes.

Not just less strawberries, but less everything that involves domestic/UBI-competing labour, which is a lot. If we did this worldwide, it would be everything .

Again, this is exactly what happens in high-productivity locations. Local, labor-intensive services like haircuts, waiting tables at restaurants etc. are paid more, because the workers have alternative opportunities in high-paying sectors. The flip side is that quality tends to improve as well due to efficiency-wage effects. It's hardly a disaster.

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

#594

Post by JoshuaDavid » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

laserlight wrote: post #557

kukx wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their income will grow on trees. It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.

Do you think that inflation is worse than wage slavery?

I don't think this is a coherent question unless you specify how much inflation, and how much wage slavery, we are talking about.

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

#595

Post by thegrimmest » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #581

thegrimmest wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less Who will do all the hard, unpleasant work then? Who will pick strawberries, work retail, or do hard labour, for anything less than a fortune? What substitute to the current "don't starve/end up homeless" incentive structure will motivate people to do these jobs? Productivity improvements aren't universal, they're specific. We've not improved prod…

If you make human labor more expensive, those jobs get replaced by machines. (see in broad lines eg. US North (machines) vs South (slavery) in first half of 19th century)

Or they just cease to be done, and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.

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

#596

Post by godelski » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #571

kukx wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Printing money inflates its supply. And increasing the demand for products (by providing easy money) without increasing the supply of products (and actually decreasing it by restricting work) will lead to higher prices. It is economics 101 and it was tested by many countries eg Germany before the WW or more recently Venezuela.

Sorry, yes, printing money leads to inflation. I was asking for evidence that "We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working." is the source of a large portion of inflation instead of the multitude of other reasons that money is printed. Of the recent $4 trillion coronavirus payout, only about a fifth of that went to workers or their families[1], and…

I'm not an economist, but I do listen to a bunch of them. My understanding is that printing money doesn't necessarily create inflation, and the real story is far more complicated than that. That it also depends on things like: the overall economy, how that money is being spent, demand pull, cost push, public fear of inflation (which causes ->), how much money is circulating vs how much is being pooled (investments/into banks/under the mattress), and more.

ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.

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

#597

Post by Kim_Bruning » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #494

kwhitefoot wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is taxable income. You just adjust tax rates slightly to claw it back from those with higher incomes. No extra bureaucracy required, no means testing needed.

> just adjust tax rates slightly Show us some napkin math. Once you start doing estimates you will realize how untenable these proposals are. Until you actually write down numbers, it's all pie-in-the sky unicorn dreams.

You can refactor it to net 0. Take n tax brackets. For each tax bracket estimate how much x% income is raised by UBI, then raise the taxes in that bracket to that same x%.

In the $0 income bracket this would be tax_rate:=100% , in the >$100K bracket it might be tax_rate:=1%.

So now your UBI is paid for but it's not doing anything useful.

However, you can now tune your tax brackets "as per usual" to get a more desirable outcome; lowering taxes in the lowest bracket and raising them in the highest.

The new ability you get is that while previously your progressive tax brackets only allowed you to control the upper limit of the income band , you now also have the ability to control the lower limit of the income band.

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

#598

Post by josephcsible » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #576

josephcsible wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once their meager savings are exhausted Doesn't the fact that they have savings explain why it's a slow trickle?

The issue is that the median American doesn’t have enough savings to not work for a long time. The median American had $5,300 in 2019, and the median rent was a bit over $1,000. These numbers are just not consistent with huge swaths of the economy deciding to hold on for months and months of unemployment once benefits were cut. Since the numbers don’t add up, something else has to be going on.

But not everyone has the same amount of savings, or the same cost of rent, so there's a trickle as each individual runs out. And didn't unemployment bonuses only end 4 months ago?

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

#599

Post by seibelj » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #550

seibelj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need roofs fixed and structures to be made safe to live in. We are still in a pandemic - should we keep paying people not to work? Eventually nature ruins our structures and people are homeless. I just don’t see how your logic is sound.

If you're saying you think rooftops are more important than lives, I don't know what to tell you. If roofers are refusing to show up to work because they'd rather accept fairly small checks from the government, maybe you need to offer them better pay or better health safeguards? We've had lots of people die during all this. One reason the pandemic has lasted so long is that we've refused to take difficult measures, s…

It’s called Florida - no one wears masks anywhere there. Death rates are middle of the pack.

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

#600

Post by marcusverus » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #364

josephcsible wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly where I am too. I thought replacing all of our existing safety net programs with UBI would be perfect until the COVID money happened. I knew some people would choose to just live off of it forever and never contribute to society again, but I didn't realize just how many people it would be.

Total employment in the US is higher today than it was in 2019.

I'd like to see some data to support that claim. Fed data shows the opposite--the employment ratio is down 1.5% from its 2020 peak. That's at least a million people who've stopped working.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO