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Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

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Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#171

Post by renewiltord »

mandmandam wrote: post #156
renewiltord wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Have you forgotten the context of the conversation? (Reminder: "in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working") If you think that full employment is the barrier we're facing to society A then you're living in a logical wasteland.

In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than everyone.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#172

Post by s1artibartfast »

kamarg wrote: post #160
s1artibartfast wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.

Value isnt the same thing as labor/work. This would change where the value goes, not the amount of work done.

A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.

You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.

Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.

The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#173

Post by ahahahahah »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #134
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…

> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks…

That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend:

(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").

(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#174

Post by blooalien »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #61
rbanffy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in a functioning society still have to work Why?

What's my incentive for subsidizing non-work in others?

What's your incentive for continuing to eat, drink, and breathe once your overlords have fulfilled their greatest dream and replaced their need for human labor with robots and machines and other forms of automation? Your purpose will have been fulfilled and your existence now meaningless. That is the ultimate goal we're all working for, right? Being freed from working for our overlords so that we can all just lay down and die and leave the world to the worst of humanity?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#175

Post by s1artibartfast »

ilya_m wrote: post #166
s1artibartfast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is alternatively referred to as the welfare cliff [1] Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits. https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the... edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...

What is the link to the Chicago study?

oops, Added

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#176

Post by theLiminator »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #121
theLiminator wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

If you make student loans dischargeable and private, wouldn't lenders would tighten up and only give loans to people with good odds of repaying the loans? IE, people from middle class+ could still get loans, but how about the smart kid from a very poor family? Wouldn't they be too risky to give a massive loan to?

There might need to be some regulations made so that lenders should discount family background, but only consider grades/earnings potential/etc.

But on the plus side, this should theoretically bring tuition costs down as there won't be effectively unlimited capital for tuition. It also encourages potential students to consider more carefully whether getting a degree makes sense.

Perhaps Pell Grants should also be expanded in eligibility (to make it so that more poor, but motivated kids can get access to higher education).

The goal of these changes would be to: - Reduce the market distortions that are created by giving out federally backed student loans (reducing or at the minimum slowing the pace of growth of tuition costs) - Reduce the burden on taxpayers by eliminating public student loans - Makes it so that kids don't get stuck with student loans that are a drag on them for life, at worst, they'll have to deal with bankruptcy

Potential downsides: - Reduces number of people studying potentially useful/valuable to society degrees that don't have much expected monetary return - Potentially reduces average level of education in the population (could be untrue if it also sufficiently reduces tuition costs)

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#177

Post by itronitron »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #61
rbanffy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in a functioning society still have to work Why?

What's my incentive for subsidizing non-work in others?

You are already subsidizing non-work in others, however currently their non-work is at a 'job' that they commute to every day.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#178

Post by CTDOCodebases »

steelframe wrote: post #128

If you were to hand out $1k a month to everyone in my area an immediate result would likely be that rents would increase by somewhere close to $1k a month. Everyone needs somewhere to live. Everyone wants to live closer to where they work and where there friends and family are. Housing is in limited supply. If everyone had more purchasing power, then everyone's going to collectively bid up what they're willing to pay…

All the studies on UBI are flawed.

The whole point of UBI is that everyone gets the money.

When you give a select few extra money they can do things that they otherwise wouldn't. When you give everyone money the value of the money just decreases.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#179

Post by elamje »

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…

$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#180

Post by Majromax »

ixwt wrote: post #92
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…

There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves. This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing s…

> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).

That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.

In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.

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