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Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

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Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#141

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

bee_rider wrote: post #114
david38 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone holding an elected or decisive office these days. The will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper, freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS AFTER ALL!!1!

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#142

Post by jrmg »

willcipriano wrote: post #124
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…

Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

Could have worked under the table.

This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#143

Post by superfrank »

aeturnum wrote: post #125
superfrank wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may now be in the 10th or 15th percentile…

> Someone who's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the 5th percentile. Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature. That said, this is basically inflationary…

> Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.

Absolutely, but I guess I don't see how just giving everyone money brings that floor up. Maybe I'm looking at this naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor is unchanged. I realize it's not that simple and that type of inflation wouldn't happen over night, but it seems like that's the direction it would head. Just looking at the housing aspect of it, it actually seems like the people who would benefit the most from UBI would be the people at the middle to upper end of the wage scale since they are more likely to own a house which means their housing costs are more fixed than someone renting.

To me it seems like we need some way to control the cost of basic needs otherwise it's just a constant race between the government raising UBI and the market raising prices (although, admittedly, it seems like the same argument could be made about minimum wage).

This is definitely not something I'm super well versed in though, so I might be looking at it wrong and am very open to people showing me what I'm missing.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#144

Post by margalabargala »

willcipriano wrote: post #124
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…

Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#145

Post by superfrank »

theLiminator wrote: post #47
superfrank wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may now be in the 10th or 15th percentile…

> I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount. Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the crazy rise in college tuition. student loans should be private (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy)…

> Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the crazy rise in college tuition

I'm think it's pretty widely accepted that this is at least partially true.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#146

Post by genrilz »

willcipriano wrote: post #124
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…

Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#147

Post by legitster »

heylook wrote: post #131
legitster wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stimulus checks kicked off inflation. But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy. We ended up seeing inflation exceeding the amount of money injected. Hidden in Covid was a massive decline in labor force productivity and participation - the lion's share coming from baby boomers retiring during this time. So it's no longer about the amount of money, but the shrinking pile…

> But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy. I'm curious to hear more about why that would be the case. Money swaps hands constantly and we have explicit ways that a single dollar can become many multiples of itself (aka you get a dollar, you put it in a bank, the bank lends me 90 cents, I put it in a different bank, they lend you 81 cents, one of us gets another loan secur…

It's a bit ramshackle, but we have a pretty consistent way we measure money supply in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

What you are describing is referred to as the "velocity of money" - how many times the same dollar changes hands, which there is a rough approximation baked into the monetary supply analysis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#148

Post by skeledrew »

brotchie wrote: post #48

UBI really makes me think of AI-safety-world i-risk. i.e. Ikigai risk (feeling like you have a meaningful purpose in life). Ikigai, or purpose, is a Japanese concept dating back to the Heian period in Japan. The Japanese word “iki” translates to life. Additionally, the “gai” portion of the word comes from the word “kai” meaning shell. Beyond basic needs, Homo Sapiens in their current incarnation need some kind of mea…

This would necessarily[0] be a cultural thing, and particularly any mention of Japan means an implicit strong work culture stemming from their geographic situation[1]. And if it does turn out that there are enough people needing some externally imposed structure, something can always be simulated for them.

[0] Necessarily because there was a time when this wasn't a thing at all, before the birth of wage labor. Everyone had the opportunity to contribute as they saw fit.

[1] Japan is very poor in natural resources (oil, ores, etc), and so in order to participate in the global economy, the only thing they have to rely on is their human labor pool. And so they needed a society of extra hard workers to have a competitive edge in something.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#149

Post by superfrank »

thesz wrote: post #17
superfrank wrote: post #14

I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may now be in the 10th or 15th percentile…

With a progressive taxation, the gap between high and low income narrows. Low income people may not even notice a change in tax bracket, if any such thing happen, high income people will give back a substantial part of that additional income. I believe, up to 50+% in some US states. This may slightly change median, I think.

Is UBI a necessary part of progressive taxation? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like that same thing can be accomplished without UBI. Am I thinking about that wrong?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#150

Post by RHSeeger »

ilaksh wrote: post #76
warkdarrior wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because until we have unlimited robots with AGI, stuff needs to get done for the society to function. Growing food, building stuff, delivering stuff, fixing/maintaining stuff, etc.

Which of those jobs do the people in this thread have? Are they doing anything for the society to function? Does the income level reflect that?

That's a loaded question. Presumably you have a person that needs food. On order for that person to get food in our society, you need (lets focus on grown food for now)

- People that plant things

- People that harvest things (may be the same people, but maybe not)

- People that a order things to be planted (seeds)

- People that order/plan short term things to facilitate planting (fertilizer)

- People that make those short term things (who other industry, lots of people)

- People that order/plan long term things to facilitate planting (tractor)

- People that maintain long term things to facilitate planting (repair men)

- People that build systems to allow ordering of short term things

- People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use of long term things

- People that build systems to allow finding people that maintain long term things

- People that handle making sure those ^ people have the infrastrucure they need (government + industry)

- People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired and paid

We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people participating in this thread are in the set of people that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole, have access to food.

And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society to function

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