Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

openresearchlab.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 669 posts

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#111

Post by 8note »

marcusverus wrote: post #87
altruios wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES!!!! Not every job is moral, essential or needed, the idea that 'everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone' needs to die.

> everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone Working a job you don't like is a leaser evil than mooching off of your neighbors. The level of entitlement required to argue the opposite is absolutely mind boggling. How many people have to work full time to support one able-bodied layabout? UBI may make sense in the event of technology-induced mass unemployment, but folks won't tolerate it…

> new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely),

This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens, and their time spent not working is instead spent on improving their communities. I think that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making a billionaire slightly richer

Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do open source projects instead.

The second order effect of putting everyone in the workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no community support for people on the edge of homelessness, or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#112

Post by bee_rider »

jimt1234 wrote: post #79
bko wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts? And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in thi…

Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US mili…

I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#113

Post by nine_k »

ilaksh wrote: post #22

$1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment. They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute. It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work. I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal. I suspect that you need to get international cooperation…

$1000 is enough to not be very afraid to lose a job, or to fall seriously ill. It would allow to look for a job for a longer time, or to take a lower-paying but nicer job (as in less strain, easier commute, better growth prospects, etc). It may allow to start saving some money.

It's more of a safety net than a comfortable sofa: maybe it's not as nice, but it keeps you from hitting the floor nevertheless.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#114

Post by bee_rider »

david38 wrote: post #99
jimt1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US mili…

To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare. The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work. Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they…

This isn’t a problem really with welfare, but a problem with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible.

In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#115

Post by edoceo »

tomr75 wrote: post #24
ilaksh wrote: post #22

$1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment. They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute. It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work. I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal. I suspect that you need to get international cooperation…

At those levels you just get inflation

But even w/o these levels we get inflation? How could we compare it to the recent inflation which has been labelled as "greed-flation" and "shrink-flation" ?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#116

Post by fellowniusmonk »

wnc3141 wrote: post #39
beejiu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.

I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people to make more long term decisions for their well being.

Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after contingency before I could even drive.

This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years.

I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.

I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.

The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.

Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing.

Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#117

Post by s1artibartfast »

nehal3m wrote: post #106
s1artibartfast wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives. > Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice? This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working. I admit it may be possible to reallocate comp…

> Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives. I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone in…

I agree with everything you said except the shareholder value part.

people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.

In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.

The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#118

Post by ericjmorey »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #57
mey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we gave everyone $20/mo. No strings, tax free, not qualifed by income. That obviously isn't enough to live on, let alone buy food. But imagine the infrastructure that would be universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society. We could find the balance. Maybe it's $1000, maybe it's $5000. Maybe another global pandemic happens and we need to dump an infusion into people's lives for a time. Just h…

As a society, do we need to worry about where this money will come from? Or will there always be an inexhaustible supply that also scales up? Or could taking that money away from other parts of the economy possibly cause harm, to the point where the ubi would become unsustainable?

Do we as a society know where money comes from now? Could the current distribution of money be denying ourselves greater value? Is the current system sustainable?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#119

Post by reillys »

reillys wrote: post #8

It's such a small amount of money per person that it is hard to see what effects one would expect. I think for the majority of people reading hacker news $1000 per month would be barely noticeable in their bank account (obviously some people out there would notice it, but for say a lowly software dev making $150k it's not going to change much about their lifestyle). So to think it would fundamentally change someones…

not sure why this is downvoted? It's basically the exact same comment as the top comment

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#120

Post by settsu »

ilaksh wrote: post #22

$1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment. They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute. It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work. I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal. I suspect that you need to get international cooperation…

Certainly not "universal" (targeted to the unhoused) but maybe more towards the "basic" issue you pose: https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research
Post reply on HN