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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

#151

Post by BoumTAC »

lbj wrote: post #33

Well, in Denmark we have the equivalent of Basic income and I'd say we have a major problem with peoples willingness to work. Some families are on welfare for generations now.

I do agree with this. Here in France I'm currently unemployed and I have a lot of compensation from government welfare.

I'm looking for a job and every time I apply to a job, I have a little voice in my head saying : are you sure you want to work there ? You currently have the opportunity to do what you want and learn whatever you want for free, but if you work there it will be boring af and you will not be able to do what you want.

So currently I'm reading a lot of books, doing coursera course I'm interested in and doing a lot of sport which is impossible when I have a job because reading takes hours just to read one book.

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

#152

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #12

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others. I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need…

> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected"

The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant.

> And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money.

Yes: If you give everyone extra money and theoretically nobody quits working, it's hard to argue that the extra money wouldn't just go to rising prices.

We're already seeing this with supply-constrained resources like housing: In hot cities, people will pay whatever they have to in order to outbid their competitors for houses or apartments. Pouring more money into the situation would only make the numbers go up, but the root problem still exists.

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

#153

Post by tremon »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #92
bryanlarsen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI might cover your food and rent, but it won't cover much past that. So if you want some beer money or a new videogame or whatever, you'll need to work. And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.

What if the landlord and food companies just raise the prices now that they know people have at least X dollars a month to spend on rent and food. Then people start advocating for universal housing and universal food.

Exactly. You can't determine a baseline UBI amount without knowing the baseline cost of food and rent. And I'm perfectly ok with rent control. Housing is a basic necessity, after all -- at least in humane societies.

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

#154

Post by meatsauce »

_-david-_ wrote: post #144
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…

>And the pay would obviously go up. Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.

I wonder where people get this idea that you should be paid like a rockstar without knowing how to play the guitar.

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

#156

Post by bryanlarsen »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #92
bryanlarsen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI might cover your food and rent, but it won't cover much past that. So if you want some beer money or a new videogame or whatever, you'll need to work. And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.

What if the landlord and food companies just raise the prices now that they know people have at least X dollars a month to spend on rent and food. Then people start advocating for universal housing and universal food.

Housing: UBI lets you move somewhere cheap, eliminating the leverage that landlords hold, letting housing prices go down.

Food: Foods are commodities, meaning that the price is the marginal cost. The price of a bushel of rice is set by the buyer, not the seller.

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

#157

Post by jyounker »

quotemstr wrote: post #7

Yes it would. Look: we just went through a massive worker shortage caused by overly generous stimulus benefits and rent subsidies. Have we forgotten already? What am I supposed to believe? A microfoundations paper from a field with infamous replication problems on one hand, or, on the other hand, common sense and my own lying eyes? Of course UBI would reduce propensity to work. Only people with an axe to grind can se…

> we just went through a massive worker shortage caused by overly generous stimulus benefits and rent subsidies. Have we forgotten already?

Nope we haven't. We just paid attention to the facts:

Some states turned down additional unemployment benefits. Those states continued to have same employment issues as the states that maintained benefits.

So clearly the issue was not the unemployment benefits.

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

#158

Post by roamerz »

pc86 wrote: post #75
jacobn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who work and thereby pay for the UBI may feel that freeriding is actually unjust, and not the hallmark of a glorious new post-scarcity society?

I'm sure some will. Some won't. So what? I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.

So what? Sounds like you should be part or a dictatorship rather than a democracy. If you support this idea then feel free to donate to the cause.

Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.

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

#159

Post by ashtonkem »

klyrs wrote: post #140
quotemstr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident. This isn't suggestive, valid science. It's the equivalent of setting up a "scientific" contraption that purports to be a perpetual motion machine. You can create a pretty convincing fake perpetual motion machine, but because we have a broader theory of mechanics, we know perpetual motion is impossible, that the purported machine must be cheating somehow (even…

> We've done that experiment. The results are self-evident. Do you mean the Alaska Permanent Fund, or something else?

That’s exactly what I assumed. I think it would be a pretty hard argument to say that Alaskans are lazy because of their permanent fund.

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

#160

Post by ClumsyPilot »

caskstrength wrote: post #129
rwmj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.

Not for the other group who will have products of their labor "redistributed" to pay for other's leisure time?

Gettting rid of serfdom, debt prisons and endentured servitude all reduced work and caused products of labour to be redistributed. Who said that current distribution of products of labour between Amazok and their workers is optimal?
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