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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

#751

Post by Kim_Bruning »

thegrimmest wrote: post #622
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often cheap labor is the thing holding back the automation of particular tasks. The greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation, but they simply never had the incentives. Imagine what would have happened if they had voted to outlaw slavery? If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage…

> greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity. > quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate What about the rest of it?

I'm not sure that chemistry or metallurgy are strict requirements for industrialization. My impression is that any form of mechanization is very helpful.

For example, the Netherlands started out industrializing on wind power using wood and rope and cloth, ...actually they still use a lot of wind power today, though now with exotic composites. (At some point in between there were traditional windmills that were still being updated with odd things like aviation leading edge slats made of aluminium up to something like the 1950s! )

So -while speculative and certainly open to discussion- in some alternate history Romans could have had some sort of industrial system, though it might not look like something we would immediately recognize.

I'm trying to convey the intuition that if you have a perfectly workable society based on slavery (the cheapest form of labor), you don't have as strong an incentive to start using machines instead. Conversely, I have the impression that the abolition of slavery in the 19th century is one of the big contributors to our modern industrial society.

I'm just being cautious wrt saying that most low wage work wouldn't cost 10x to automate. One can never be sure one hasn't missed an example somewhere.

Of course, if we find some examples of low wage work that really do cost more than 10X the cost of the work needed to automate it, possibly we've been under-valuing those tasks all along.

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

#752

Post by Kim_Bruning »

thegrimmest wrote: post #728
danaris wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who will suffer most from continuing the way we're going are also the poorest people. If the industry is dying out because we introduce universal basic income , then the poorest people will still be at least as well off as they are now, and in many cases much better, because they are guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills, no matter what happens with their employment status.

If an industry dies out/becomes more expensive due to UBI, then the first people to lose access to the goods/services provided by that industry are the most economically constrained people. > guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills This all depends on how well your UBI keeps up with inflation. If you trigger runaway inflation, then you won't be able to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Fundament…

So the conclusion of this study was that UBI would not reduce amount of work done overall in the economy.

Another study discussed here showed only a mild net reduction in amount of paid work being done on the short term; and arguably the unpaid work being done instead was also beneficial to society.

Interestingly, in general, UBI studies don't show really alarming reductions in amount of work done. Sadly they also don't show hoped for amazing increases in productivity either. It seems like the advantages and disadvantages of UBI for stimulating work seem to balance each other out. I think people's arguments don't need to be about the work aspect so much.

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

#753

Post by dghughes »

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?

You could bundle welfare, food stamps, other social programs, medicare, etc. add a tax break/no tax for anyone making less than $20K. Put it all into one system and call it UBI. You the tax payer are still paying the same thing.

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

#754

Post by marcusverus »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #634
marcusverus wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

This isn't jobs data... This is an estimate, by an unknown source, as to what the employment numbers might be be at the end of 2022. From your site:

> In 2019, around 157.54 million people were employed in the United States. For 2022, an increase by almost 2 million employed people is expected.

Also, do we think this estimate is recent? The US economy has not been adding jobs as expected, and has undershot recent projections by a lot. New hires were 300K short of projections in November[0] and 200K short in December!

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/03/jobs-report-november-2021.ht...

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/hiring-falters-in-december-a...

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

#755

Post by JoshuaDavid »

laserlight wrote: post #686
JoshuaDavid wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We don't do the same for non-wage slavery, do we?

We do ask the general question of "what costs are we willing to bear to reduce the amount and human toll of actual slavery". Actual slavery is illegal, certainly, but there are still instances of it happening, even today[1,2,3]. We could spend more resources to further reduce the number of cases where this happens, and there are plenty of people saying we should. In theory, a complete enough surveillance state, where the movements of all people and all monetary transactions are tracked and analyzed, might even be able to get the number of such instances all the way down to zero, but that seems a lot less likely to be a good tradeoff.

So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/migrant-worker-lured-to-...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/usadom0501-04.htm#P3...

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

#756

Post by noogle »

tekknik wrote: post #657
noogle wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money doesnt just have some "value" you can share like a pie. The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve in the past two years beg to differ. Honestly, if the country is going into deficit, you might as well give it directly to people instead of injecting it via financial institutes. Society in general may greatly benefit from having people not HAVING to work.

> The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve in the past two years beg to differ. The inflation we’re experiencing now wants to have a word with you.

From another comment: > Seems to be worth the inflation IMO.

Some things will become expensive. Some might be balanced. Construction cost will increase, but land value may decrease (since there is no necessity to crowd in job hubs).

Taxis and Uber will probably increase as people are not forced to work at all costs, but people might find this trade-off favorable: unemployment is far more painful than having to take the bus.

And everyone could still work to afford expensive things, if they chose so. They will also have much better working conditions, since they will have much more negotiation power.

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

#757

Post by thegrimmest »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #752
thegrimmest wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an industry dies out/becomes more expensive due to UBI, then the first people to lose access to the goods/services provided by that industry are the most economically constrained people. > guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills This all depends on how well your UBI keeps up with inflation. If you trigger runaway inflation, then you won't be able to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Fundament…

So the conclusion of this study was that UBI would not reduce amount of work done overall in the economy. Another study discussed here showed only a mild net reduction in amount of paid work being done on the short term; and arguably the unpaid work being done instead was also beneficial to society. Interestingly, in general, UBI studies don't show really alarming reductions in amount of work done. Sadly they also do…

As it has been pointed out, the studies are fundamentally flawed in that the participants know they are of a limited duration. Getting a stipend for a few months isn't enough to quit your job. Being promised one for the rest of your life certainly can be.

UBI is basically communism lite - with all its flaws. People who are provided for tend to behave just like animals who are provided for - after all, people are animals - they mainly lounge around and try to amuse themselves. This isn't a moral judgement, just an observation. I've not seen any study that has conclusively refuted this.

It is the rare, exceptional, person that will spend their free time on something truly productive and constructive. We can see examples of this already - we've made it very easy to get a loan and go to college, partially socializing college education. As a result, we have a surplus of college graduates and a shortage of labourers and trades. Introducing UBI would simply magnify this effect. When people have alternatives, they don't tend to want to go work on farms, construction sites, or in restaurants or shops. People work these jobs primarily because they would otherwise be destitute. I know that's why I did.

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

#758

Post by thegrimmest »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #751
thegrimmest wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity. > quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate What about the rest of it?

I'm not sure that chemistry or metallurgy are strict requirements for industrialization. My impression is that any form of mechanization is very helpful. For example, the Netherlands started out industrializing on wind power using wood and rope and cloth, ...actually they still use a lot of wind power today, though now with exotic composites. (At some point in between there were traditional windmills that were still…

I'm not sure I would count Dutch windmills, impressive as they are, as industrialization. People have been building windmills and watermills for a very long time. Industrialization started in Great Britain in the 1700s. Advancements in chemistry and metallurgical process had enabled the production of iron with coke, which can be mined much more cheaply than charcoal can be produced.

Emerging global trade networks incentivized producers to scale up indefinitely. The resulting innovations transformed the textile industry. Textiles are always in demand, and their non-mechanized production is extremely labour intensive. The lessons learned from mechanizing this industry were applied everywhere else. It's true that competition with cheap Indian labour was a major factor in textile automation in the UK, but these global trade networks could not have been sustained without massive advancements in stellar navigation provided by the invention of the telescope. This in turn was only made possible by advancements in chemistry that enabled the production of clear glass.

All of these processes were well underway before the abolition of slavery in the US. It should be noted that innovations such as the cotton gin were eagerly adopted by the slave-powered US cotton industry. There's nothing like efficiency for an industrialist.

With regards to automation, I think all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We're left with things that seem simple, but are in fact horribly difficult, and require near-human levels of dexterity and situational awareness, such as driving or construction work or food handling. That however doesn't mean that our society would be just fine if we provided workers in these industries an alternative to their jobs.

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

#759

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mongol wrote: post #308
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they collude to raise rents 10% this year? People will bid up apartments because they have more money.

Good point. Inflation will make UBI kind of pointless.

Not if it is indexed to inflation...eventually a steady state will be reached.

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

#760

Post by skinnymuch »

fartcannon wrote: post #98
ozzythecat wrote: post #4

A 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…

So, this is anecdotal of course, but my high school was a terrible experience and university was incredible. Why? I think it was because the people who didn't want to be there didn't have to be. That's one benefit of UBI. As for the jobs people won't do, those jobs will be higher valued and eventually, when the price is right, people will do them. The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't ha…

Tens of millions of people aren’t at university because they lack the privilege to be able to realistically attend too.

> The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).

No need to bring up points like this when the effect on the overall system is small. It’s a great way to continue to demonize poorer people and let the 1% or .1% off the hook.

—-

overall I agree with your comment. Nice ending.

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