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Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

theguardian.com

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Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#171

Post by hellotomyrars »

radu_floricica wrote: post #140
hellotomyrars wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot strongly stress how amused and annoyed I am by you defending the interests of people with more money than you and your entire family have ever made or ever will make. You're right. Our current system requires us to use money to represent limited resources and those resources are not infinite. Congratulations. However the idea here that some people just have to suffer and be catastrophically disadvantaged so…

I was born in communist Romania. Thank you very much, but I had one socialist system in my life, I really don't want another. Every single one that humanity tried was either suboptimal, dystopian or straight up humanitarian catastrophe. But sure, I guess they weren't "real" socialism, so let's try and try and try again. sigh . Somebody in my country once said something like: "If you're not communist at 20, you have n…

It's disingenuous to suggest that the thing I am advocating for is the system as it existed in communist Romania. I am not.

Just as I do not advocate for the current economic system in the way it exists. However I know that our current system's goal isn't to provide for the people, and the failings of our current system are extreme.

My biggest point is that I'm not saying everyone should be provided a luxury yacht by the state. It's impractical and nobody needs a luxury yacht to be happy or live.

But I know that people do need things like a place to sleep, food to eat, and access to healthcare to be happy and live. And if you slip in to a situation where you lack any one of those things, getting out of it can be that much more difficult.

I think we have an obligation to each other as humans to try and provide for each other. I guess that it's an unpopular belief.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#172

Post by jostylr »

nocitrek wrote: post #2

Important thing to keep in mind regarding UBI is that goverment does not generate any money. In order for goverment to give money, it needs to take it from someone. So UBI is just proxy for wealth redistribution. Sure, wellbeing has improved for small group of people, but the question is how scalable UBI is? Remember, road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It is explicitly about wealth redistribution, one in which there is no skewing of paying people to be in a certain state other than alive (which welfare systems are doing). Of course, no money needs to be taken; inflation can do that for us if we prefer uncontrolled recapture.

Under a basic, reasonable fair model, random economic flows in a free market will tend to have all the wealth accumulated by a few: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine... Depending on the redistribution amounts (not specifically UBI, just aggregate), differing levels of oligarchy will or will not form.

UBI allows for a very gentle way of avoiding all the wealth captured by a few. You could think of it as economic transfers tend to create blackholes and UBI pumps some of the accumulated matter back into the universe to keep activity flowing.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#173

Post by lonelappde »

Non24Throw wrote: post #161
nicbou wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can gladly talk about financials. - I have health insurance. It's pretty far from free, and it's mandatory. I wrote a very detailed guide about how German health insurance works [1]. It's not comparable to the US system, and I want to write a separate guide to explain this more accurately. - My take-home is slightly above what a full time minimum wage worker would make. My expenses are around 1400€ a month. It coul…

> I'm happy to answer more questions. How much are you willing to tell us about the income source? I’m finding it difficult to think of anything that generates a small but consistent revenue stream with no babysitting, that is also completely unresponsive to low-effort attempts at scaling it. Usually if there’s no babysitting, that means low-effort scale. Or if it is hands-free but still can’t scale, it’s because you…

It could be something as simple as a tool that costs a dollar and automatically checks out a popular book from the local library. And it's only in German and works with one library system.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#174

Post by lonelappde »

qmmmur wrote: post #170
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So far, I haven't seen the explosion in creativity, entrepreneurship, volunteering etc that's usually promised. That's because most people don't have the ambition and discipline of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and if given the chance would rather bum around their whole life instead of work. I see the same thing in Austria and so do my friends living in other wealthy European countries with strong social nets. Most people…

Shocking. People would rather enjoy life not working as hard as hustling (code for taking big risk without much payoff) to get more money to buy more stuff.

Problem is, we'll never cure cancer if no one is motivated to solve hard problems.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#175

Post by lonelappde »

ohmaigad wrote: post #134
jusssi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's tax progression, everyone's net income does not go up. That UBI money has to come from somewhere, and it comes from taxes. To fund the UBI, taxes will need to increase. So at some threshold level of income, flicking the UBI switch doesn't affect your net income. You get a same size of increase to your tax bill as you gain from the UBI benefit. Below the threshold you get a net increase, above it you get ne…

Unless this is applied only to the richest 1%, majority won't support UBI. I think that true UBI is something that is given to everyone (even the 1%) and everything else is abolished (unemployment, paid sick leave, pensions and all other social security benefits).

UBI instead of welfare is a libertarian theoretical that isn't gorunded is people's real life concerns or particularly relevant to realpolitik.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#176

Post by lonelappde »

nicbou wrote: post #101
zpeti wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You built a passive income business. You were living off your own entrepreneurship. You chose to live off your previous work, and not work as much. It was your achievement and you should be proud that you achieved it. In the back of your mind you also knew that you’re the one who did it and you could possibly do it again. This is not UBI and it’s certainly not the long term mental state of someone on UBI.

I got massively lucky. It's a personal project that grew bigger. If I could do it again, I'd already have another website up and running. I've been thinking about it, but I'm coming to terms with being a one-hit wonder. I get paid a living wage for very little work. The reasons are irrelevant. The most important aspect here is the outcome, which was quite similar to UBI. Give anyone the humble monthly income I'm give…

Why would you expect UBI to survive covid-19? Who would go to work with a virus if they had free money? And what would they do with all that money when nobody wanted to work at a grocery store meat packing plant? At best, inflation would destroy the UBI value.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#177

Post by lonelappde »

hpoe wrote: post #113
tehjoker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could always make renting above cost of construction and maintenance illegal and have the state build public housing, but this is unpopular with landlords and aspiring landlords.

The worked out super well in the Soviet Bloc and with section 8 housing.

Housing was one of the successes of Soviet system. Tall apartment buildings surrounded by parks.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#178

Post by qmmmur »

lonelappde wrote: post #174
qmmmur wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shocking. People would rather enjoy life not working as hard as hustling (code for taking big risk without much payoff) to get more money to buy more stuff.

Problem is, we'll never cure cancer if no one is motivated to solve hard problems.

I'm not sure what your experience is but research is vastly different to commercial enterprise and there is a massive motivational difference between curing cancer and making CRUD apps to get your 'side hustle' on.

In my experience in highly funded research groups that run outside out of traditional management (translation annoying and wasteful tertiary education administration) researchers that make an impact get on just fine and produce excellent results on a liveable wage and being given the space to do their jobs. In my mind, the highly masculine and overly aggressive capitalist mindset that competition == results is either untrue or false and discounts a wide range of motivations, personalities and skill sets which do things of interest or worth in intellectual jobs.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#179

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

jusssi wrote: post #123
SilasX wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be really careful about generalizing from "personally getting regular free money" to everyone getting it. Under a UBI, everyone , unconditionally[1], gets the free money. That has significantly different dynamics than you alone getting it. What happens to rents, for example? If everyone's income goes up, so does the rent. If everyone wanted to live in the same places, for the same reasons, and suddenly ha…

If there's tax progression, everyone's net income does not go up. That UBI money has to come from somewhere, and it comes from taxes. To fund the UBI, taxes will need to increase. So at some threshold level of income, flicking the UBI switch doesn't affect your net income. You get a same size of increase to your tax bill as you gain from the UBI benefit. Below the threshold you get a net increase, above it you get ne…

This, and the other comment about rents going up, is why you should tax rent and not income.

Re: Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds

#180

Post by benibela »

onion2k wrote: post #24
notkaiho wrote: post #3

> "Aimed primarily at seeing whether a guaranteed income might encourage people to take up often low-paid or temporary work without fear of losing benefits" Turns out people do not, in fact, generally want to take precarious or otherwise unattractive jobs unless forced to economically. Who'd a thunk?

"low paid" work doesn't automatically mean things people will only do given no alternative. Plenty of people want to work in jobs like childcare, nursing, writing, farming, gardening, etc because they actually enjoy the work and find it rewarding but they can't because it doesn't pay well enough to live.

or open-source development
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