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Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

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Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#11

Post by bryanlarsen »

lbriner wrote: post #4

"a quora member answered when asked about the UBI" And at that moment, any semblence of legitimacy disappeared... The main question about UBI is who pays for it and how. In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K, way below anything that most people would consider enough to live on.

So to get a BI of £12K, average taxes would have to go up by £8K per person. And since about 2/3 of the adult population are taxpayers, that gives £12K per taxpayer, which balances the payout they'd receive from BI. People with above average incomes would pay into BI, and those with below average incomes would net from BI.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#13

Post by aidos »

s3r3nity wrote: post #2

I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...

I don’t know anything about the program but it doesn’t sound like it was really UBI at all from this description in the article. If it was a) only available to unemployed and b) only a pilot with 2,000 people then I guess it’s easy to ignore it as a data point. Though maybe that paragraph is poorly worded and it was actually more extensive?

>>> “Finland was considered the first European country to pay a monthly check of $685 to its unemployed between ages 25 and 58. It was considered a pilot program — serving 2,000 randomly selected jobless people — that its founders hoped to expand.”

Edit Additionally Googling for Finland UBI experiment yields countless articles claiming it was neither a failure, nor proper UBI

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#14

Post by curtis »

There ought to be a name for a minimal UBI that can allow people who are normally just scraping by to bridge short periods of unemployment, unexpected expenses etc. £4K wouldn't be much for the average Hacker News reader, but for people on minimum wage it could make a real difference. You can't really call this "Basic Income" though, because that term comes with the build in assumption that it's enough for a person to live pretty comfortably. I've been thinking of this as a "Really Basic Basic Income" ("RBBI"?), but nobody seems to be talking about such a thing.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#15

Post by dragontamer »

devoply wrote: post #5

Ontario recently cancelled their experiment with universal income. Which points me to the fact that even if UBI becomes reality at some point, it's only one government away at any time from being cancelled or adjusted. So your livelihood at any given time is dependent upon government balancing its books. Considering how bad many modern developed governments are at doing this, it gives me little hope of UBI being any…

What's wrong with having UBI for 2 years and then suddenly having it cut off?

Jack London, the famous homeless / hobo writer of "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang", was only able to write his first book because of the support of community libraries and random strangers who gave him a bed occasionally. Eventually, he was able to pull himself out of poverty and become one of the most famous writers ever.

If you can help those homeless people for a few years, that's all that's needed to permanently change some of their lives for the better. It will suck when the program ends, but some-help is better than none at all.

-----------

These programs aren't supposed to be sustainable living forever-and-ever. They are parachutes to help people who are in tough times. They provide a pathway out of poverty.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

snarf21 wrote: post #9

I find this mostly click bait. We should expect results like this or frankly better. Results from one small African village are not globally applicable. The issue is where does the money come from and is it truly universal. All the experiments to date have been of the "we gave free money with no restrictions to X thousand people for Y months and it was great". This is necessary but not sufficient research. We could h…

[deleted]

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#17

Post by ghaff »

snarf21 wrote: post #9

I find this mostly click bait. We should expect results like this or frankly better. Results from one small African village are not globally applicable. The issue is where does the money come from and is it truly universal. All the experiments to date have been of the "we gave free money with no restrictions to X thousand people for Y months and it was great". This is necessary but not sufficient research. We could h…

Furthermore, while there is some overhead associated with administration/policing eligibility/etc., a lot of the social safety net people costs are also roles like social workers, etc., the need of which doesn't go away just because you are now just giving everyone a no strings attached check.

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#18

Post by brightball »

curtis wrote: post #14

There ought to be a name for a minimal UBI that can allow people who are normally just scraping by to bridge short periods of unemployment, unexpected expenses etc. £4K wouldn't be much for the average Hacker News reader, but for people on minimum wage it could make a real difference. You can't really call this "Basic Income" though, because that term comes with the build in assumption that it's enough for a person t…

Survival Income?

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#19

Post by doubletgl »

s3r3nity wrote: post #2

I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...

From a guardian article: "Olli Kangas, an expert involved in the trial, told the Finnish public broadcaster YLE: “Two years is too short a period to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a big experiment. We should have had extra time and more money to achieve reliable results.”" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/23/finland-to-end...

Further: "The scheme – ... – is strictly speaking not a universal basic income (UBI) trial, because the payments are made to a restricted group and are not enough to live on."

I'm still hopeful. Also, what other plan is there to deal with wealth distribution and automation dissolving jobs?

Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?

#20

Post by influx »

s3r3nity wrote: post #2

I'm curious to hear how folks, who are more knowledgeable than I and have done more research, reconcile data points like these with the data showing lack of success in places like Finland.[1] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/finlands-universal-basic-incom...

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