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Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

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

#671

Post by tekknik »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #610
zozbot234 wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He paid high wages because he was in fact offering highly-skilled work for his time, a bit like Elon Musk is doing today. The "our workers should be able to afford the product" thing was a clever meme/bit of marketing. (In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)

This is why I don't feel bad about replacing people doing boring work by robots. They now get the somewhat more interesting work of operating the robots.

Only if they have interest in operating the robots, and the intelligence. If they don’t have either one of those, nope, they just lost a job because of your decision.

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

#672

Post by nec4b »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #529
nec4b wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> rich-socialist-nation Which nation is that?

All of the ones providing single payer healthcare, if you need a more precise target.

Could you be more specific? Single payer healthcare does not make a country socialistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

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

#673

Post by tekknik »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #668
tekknik wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, people that worked and earned what they have and are compensated accordingly don’t deserve it?

Do such people even exist? Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fract…

> Do such people even exist?

You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better while working side projects to improve my skill. I just recently caught up to what I should be making.

It’s common for those that took the standard path to think nobody works for what they got.

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

#674

Post by lenkite »

dghughes wrote: post #320
staticassertion wrote: post #69

Earlier 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've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated. For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming. Then they cut their hour…

Damn. In our office (well before Covid), we were explicitly given training on how to behave with janitorial workers - to be polite and clear the workspace if we are working late hours and not make a mess of things for them and increase their workload. Well, this was an EU company not an American one, so far more respect for blue-collar workers.

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

#675

Post by seba_dos1 »

tekknik wrote: post #673
seba_dos1 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do such people even exist? Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fract…

> Do such people even exist? You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better whi…

I'm not. You were able to read open source code and learn from it, taking advantage of a lot of effort its authors put into it (who knows, maybe you even stumbled on some of my work out there?). You had access to computers and to the Internet, and had time to use it, most likely thanks to your parents, which isn't a given. You admitted yourself that you turned into publicly funded military for it to invest into your education. You also had ability to do side projects while working a low paying job, instead of, say, taking care of an ill relative your whole spare time - not everyone is so lucky. And perhaps most importantly of it all, you turned your attention into software engineering during time when software engineering is extremely lucrative - it doesn't have to stay this way at all.

I don't even have a degree, by the way; I'm mostly self-taught too.

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

#676

Post by seba_dos1 »

tekknik wrote: post #659
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #412

Earlier 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.

> It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in. What it too to get mine, required very hard work and literally signing my life away for 4 years. Then, when I started gaining, I got fined for not having health insurance. Now that I can comfortably afford my health insurance and am starting to look at buying a house, here’s the lef…

I never understood how twisted someone's mind has to be in order to say "I suffered, so I'll fight to make others suffer too".

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

#677

Post by caskstrength »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #482
caskstrength wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They'll still make plenty of money. How much is "plenty" and who gets to decide? What if they live in high CoL area? You propose they should sponsor someone else's leisure time instead of buying a house for their family, for example?

That's basically a normal tax question at that point.

Well, yeah, this is exactly what I've been saying in this thread: Any realistic UBI program will be payed by taxes on middle class.

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

#678

Post by disambiguation »

akvadrako wrote: post #570
disambiguation wrote: post #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.

That isn't how NIT works. Mathematically it is identical to UBI, it's just phrased differently.

No the difference is not simply semantics. The main difference between NIT and UBI is that your check is conditional on working.

From the article:

> De Kwaadsteniet: ‘In the condition without social security, the test participants didn’t receive a basic sum. In the benefits condition they received a basic sum, which they lost as soon as they started working. In the basic income condition they received the same basic sum but didn’t lose this when they started work.’

They test for 3 scenarios, but they miss the 4th NIT scenario, in which the "basic sum" would only be granted _after_ they get a job.

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

#679

Post by kevingadd »

seibelj wrote: post #599
kevingadd wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of "middle of the pack" you could be at the bottom of the pack like New Zealand - ~15k total cases, 50 deaths reported, vs Florida's 5 million reported cases and 63k deaths. The population ratio is ~1/4, so it's slightly less bad for Florida than it looks. Of course, that's an unreasonable target, but it's an example of a real western nation managing COVID at scale. Your only choice isn't to just let everyone get the disease and hope herd immunity kicks in fast enough while praying that Long COVID doesn't cause problems later.

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

#680

Post by raxxorrax »

dghughes wrote: post #320
staticassertion wrote: post #69

Earlier 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've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated. For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming. Then they cut their hour…

It isn't just organisations that put pressure on people, it is mostly customers.

One example is delivery workers. Everyone expects their packages to be tracked which resulted in total surveillance of delivery workers with extremely tight time slots. Competitors that didn't expand here were soon left behind because the profit margin of that industry is extremely low.

Janitors are similar. People will take the cheapest option and the companies that exploit the best with prevail.

This is a selfishness that cannot be denied and in my opinion would make a basic income impossible. Prices would just soar to a level where this income is of little consequence.

Sensible laws for worker protection to restrict selfishness can better the situation more efficiently.

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