If you give people basic incomes it would follow a Pareto 80/20 rule just like everything else. Duhhhhh
Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
191–200 of 786 posts
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#192A link to the actual research paper would be helpful. In this experiment, what amount was given to the treatment group that received basic income? How often? How does that amount compare to the cost of living in their city? > ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’ I’m not an academic, so take this with a grain of salt. If my job requires menial labor or involves g…
If someone’s job involves receiving verbal abuse, perhaps they should be paid extra to compensate for the fact that it’s a very difficult job. If a job like that paid enough, people will still take it. Basic income would just mean that employees couldn’t pay poverty wages for shit jobs. In addition to being fairer, total utility could even rise because companies would be financially motivated to remove the need for the most unpleasant jobs.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#193I want UBI to be proven workable, I am actively rooting for it. Philosophically, I believe that any market in which people are coerced into participation through threat of homelessness/poverty is not, at its absolute core, a free market.
Philosophically, I believe that UBI is at some level a question of whether or not free markets actually totally work, because a truly free market is one where people are not forced to choose between bad options -- where they're not being coerced by wage slavery, where they have a choice whether or not to participate in the market itself. So I have personal stake in this, because if UBI gets proven not to work, it then leads me to ask uncomfortable questions like, "is a truly free market actually possible?" Which I don't want to think about. I want UBI to succeed.
But having said that, this is one study undertaken by a small group of psychologists, and it should be viewed through that lens. I understand it's simpler to just say their conclusion in the title, and it doesn't break any site rules, but it misses that every study on UBI is an approximation of what UBI large-scale implementations would be. I feel like people look at isolated experiments with a lot more confidence than they should. I don't like when individual studies get framed as, "this proves X".
It's extremely difficult to reason about what the long-term impacts of UBI will be using short-term studies because people's long-term patterns often differ from their short-term patterns. I do think we should be experimenting more with UBI, I think it's good that this study was done. I'd like to see more studies like this, more real-world tests, and in instances where UBI doesn't work I think we should keep trying different strategies to make it work, because a world where people have universal stability is preferable to a world where they don't.
But it's important to keep in mind that this study doesn't really prove anything, it's just another data point. We don't actually know whether or not basic income would reduce people's willingness to work long-term, this is one data point that suggests it might not.
This pops up in a lot of areas (UBI, inflation, etc) -- basically anything involving the economy. People get very confident about things based on a few data points, and then we get threads talking about how people are 100% certain that stimulus checks caused the chip shortages or some crud. Just make sure you're taking a step back and thinking about these things like a Bayesian, economics is heckin complicated, and I think complicated systems like economics are particularly susceptible to the falacy of, "I've done several hours of research on this, maybe even a full day, and therefore I have a complete, fully formed theory about the entire system works that I will treat as fact."
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So poor people are lazy and the rich aren't? Honestly, yes --- not always, but frequently. I am sick and tired of the mentality embedded in the sentence I quoted. Do you think the rich are rich for no reason at all? That their rewards are unfair? Success is not the universe sprinkling good fortune on mankind at random: success comes from hard work and the courage to take advantage of the opportunities that time pre…
> Do you think the rich are rich for no reason at all? No, social immobility and generational wealth transfer. > That their rewards are unfair? Often, yes.
I think it's sort of unfair to reduce the whole argument to a one-liner like that. Sure, many people do take advantage of generational wealth, setting your children up for success is a basic human impulse. There are also a ton of data supporting the case that actually a huge percentage of successful/wealthy people did not get that way through generational wealth but in fact, just worked hard (also luck plays a factor).
Also, yes the rewards are unfair, life is extremely unfair pretty much all of the time.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#195A link to the actual research paper would be helpful. In this experiment, what amount was given to the treatment group that received basic income? How often? How does that amount compare to the cost of living in their city? > ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’ I’m not an academic, so take this with a grain of salt. If my job requires menial labor or involves g…
> 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…
Agreed, isnt this exactly whats been observed from pandemic financial aid? Increased pressure on employers to pay more and give workers a better work environment? Maybe someone has a better link to back that up but heres one at least.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/10/14/employ...
Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#196Would it really be so bad if some people stopped working altogether? One of the proposed justifications for UBI is that automation creates wealth that could (or in some arguments, should) go to everyone rather than the ultra wealthy. That automation is taking up a larger and larger slice of the workforce, reducing the need for people to work. Many people will choose to do work that gives them meaning. Some people wil…
Fewer people working reduces the size of the pie, making ourselves poorer. So yes. I would say it's a bad thing if we tax society in order to pay able bodied people not to be productive.
But the systems I’m referring to do not suggest taxing the hard work of people. They propose taxing the work of automation.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#197Multiple 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…
If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.…
>If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation
It cannot, unless you're ok with screwing those already on such programs. Do the math, and you'll find it is not even close. Welfare programs (unless you include SS) are given to a tiny amount of people - spreading that across a large group of people simply screws those who need it most.
If you include SS, now again you're screwing old people who many times need the money to give it to people capable of work.
>The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.
This common claim is not true. There are ample people moving out of such program regularly, and many of them have limited lifetime benefits.
>would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs,
No. I've been down this set of math lots of times. Do it - all welfare budgets are public, population is public, it's easy to estimate.
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You've learned nothing the past two years
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#199If everyone received basic income, at what point would the majority of voters not see it in their interest to vote for legislators who promise to increase it?
A majority of people are duped into voting against their own interests all the time now, why would UBI change it?
Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Then roll on automation. Not even the Luddites had a problem with automation; just with the quality of the result and with who reaped the rewards.
Automation is good. Automation in a capitalist society with unlimited IP laws results in dystopia.