People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report • Hacker News Board

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#351

Post by hinkley » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

rmah wrote: post #161

hinkley wrote: post #129

I want UBI and a 30-32 hour work week, so I guess I’m proposing a 20% “disincentivization”. Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway? At this point, more robots don’t mean more of the stuff we need. they mean more stuff we don't need.

To use different phrasing, what you're saying is that you want people to be poorer. Please understand that I don't mean this as a personal attack on you, your beliefs or philosophy. But from a different perspective, that really is what you're saying. Do you really want to say that? Perhaps a better alternative is: a good goal would be to allow people to have more while using less natural resources and polluting the e…

I want people to figure out that materialism doesn't actually make them happy. And to stop cutting down forests while they haven't figured it out.

I don't want poor people to have nothing. I want the middle class to look elsewhere for status besides carbon footprint.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#352

Post by wccrawford » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

hooande wrote: post #239

sabarn01 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should fear being destitute its the natural human condition. Learning skills is the only way to make wealth.

No person who was born rich has to learn skills to avoid destitution. And poverty isn't the natural condition for humans any more than it is for cats, or any other animal.

Rich people have other reasons to learn skills.

And I think the hope with UBI is that people in general will find enough reasons that they continue to learn skills, and not just live off society as purposeful freeloaders.

I used to think that there are some types of people that would freeload whenever they possibly could.

Then a young family member proved that they will basically do whatever they can to avoid even finishing school, let alone getting a job and keeping it.

I would like to think that people would learn hobbies and create art and science for the sheer joy of it if they didn't have to put food on the table... But the truth seems to be that there are many people who would just consume the massive amount of entertainment that we now produce and no contribute anything of their own, ever.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#353

Post by fenwick67 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #271

winstonewert wrote: post #91

I don't think this fits the definition of basic income. > Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their basic income at 50 per cent That is equivalent to a massive 50% tax rate on every dollar earned. It seems to me the whole point of UBI is that its universal and not conditional on how much you earn otherwise.

This would further disincentivize work.

UBI proponents would say that having welfare taper is bad for work incentive, since you get less welfare money if you work.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#354

Post by Matumio » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

timwaagh wrote: post #109

"nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income." So can we infer that 25% of those working chose to actually quit full time? I think it's safe to say this much reduction in labor availability is not the result the government was hoping for. The state is right, maybe not to call it off prematurely but if these figures would have been the sa…

I really don't like using employment as the only valid measure of success. See also David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" essay.

Government could always create jobs, directly or indirectly, and force the unemployed into them, producing something for which there isn't really a demand.

Why were those people quitting their jobs? What were they doing instead? Were they better off? How much did it cost to get those improvements, compared to other ways to get them?

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#355

Post by Aunche » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

BigBubbleButt wrote: post #341

Aunche wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.

Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for government contracts - just look at almost any military contract where literally billions of dollars go unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the US that are regularly overbudget, late, an…

I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#356

Post by strgcmc » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #323

avanderveen wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-productive for society Why? I feel like a lot of people want to do things that are productive for society, that we have too little of right now. Things like producing art of all forms, building things, increasing their level of communication with those around them, participating in community events and activities, etc. Sure, these things aren't economically productive, but they're still productive for society,…

>Why? I feel like a lot of people want to do things that are productive for society Most of the things that are productive for society require study and practice of skills that aren't particularly interesting to the vast majority of people. >Sure, these things aren't economically productive The vast majority of things that are productive for society are economically productive. That's why people pay for things. We do…

As a slightly different kind of counter-example, see this recent post about "hard problems": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425745

IMO, UBI can actually encourage innovation and productive work, on "hard problems" that are not economically viable in a short-enough time-frame or lucrative enough for VCs, but for which society would certainly benefit from.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#357

Post by read_if_gay_ » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

Seenso wrote: post #250

exabrial wrote: post #133

The end does not justify the means. Forcibly removing someone's money and transferring it to another person can never be justified. Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion. However, if a billionaire wishes to privately sponsor UBI, this is a completely different story in charity and example that should be regarded. It's important to differentiate between the two, but unfortunately most UBI schemes refer to ex…

> Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion. Our law creates both property rights and taxes. Taxes aren't theft because, by law, that money is actually the government's property. If you want individualistically overrule our law to make taxes theft, I might as well do the same to make your property mine.

The notion of property rights is not created by the law, but a law of nature, a concept intuitively understood by human beings. The same goes for theft. The law only adopted these concepts, but it created taxes. It is not intuitively obvious that some entity is entitled to a percentage of the money you're earning.

You can change the law any way you want, but you're not changing the underlying laws of nature, and they allow you to make a case that taxes are theft. Whether that's actually true is then of course debatable and depends on a lot of variables, but saying that someone else's property should arbitrarily be yours immediately contradicts those fundamental laws.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#358

Post by bluGill » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #311

commandlinefan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't prepare them to do anything Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents work doesn’t “prepare” you for work any more than watching TV does, but that’s because it’s completely unrelated. Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does. My father was a police officer (they don’t make much money) and my mother sta…

"they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did" And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school, or start a business, or travel outside the country once in awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important skill like music or math or programming because the i…

The only folks I saw working minimum wage to support the family didn't have those worries. Now I'll grant that health insurance was a lot cheaper 20 years ago, but still they didn't worry about payday loans - they weren't dumb enough to take them out. (I don't know who does - my personal experience doesn't show anyone doing it, but again that was 20 years ago when they weren't a thing)

The ones I knew working minimum wage lived cheaply. They didn't worry about losing their jobs because they were hard workers who could be counted on - the type of person who gets the maximum raise until they top out the pay scale. They were also the type of person to be offered job in management and have the potential to make as much as anyone with an engineering degree (we haven't kept in touch - typically the requirement to move for the job every few years catches up and they decide the next promotion isn't worth it and so stagnate at nice wage that is better than average)

I knew people who sit around drinking bear and working part time. Everybody knew they were losers. It wasn't lack of opportunity that is keeping them down it is lack of following up on it. They would abandon their kids even if you paid the a million dollars a year (even assuming they don't overdose on some drug)

I also know mentally ill people. Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on some other scam. (I know someone who lost money to the Nigerian prince scam, and a dozen others - the family is careful to lock down his money now so he can't do that)

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#359

Post by danenania » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

easytiger wrote: post #343

danenania wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster." Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential. A kid watching…

> A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives. I'm sorry but you don't have the first clue. Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational jobs and careers.

Some do, but it's a small percentage. Many more struggle their whole lives to survive without being able to make any significant improvement to their family's economic status.

Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

#360

Post by mikepurvis » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

wtdo wrote: post #328

loa_in_ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lack of personnel to do jobs would bump the wages due to demand and that would quickly find people ready to fill them in

And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.

Maybe. These kinds of system-level effects are extremely hard to forecast with any kind of certainty. At best, the evidence we have is from studying the effects of things like raising minimum wage or giving away money to more niche groups such as families with children (eg Canada's CCTB), or people living in specific areas (Alaska Permanent Fund).

As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum wage increase back in 2016?

Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments that have been undertaken by other political ideologies with little to no opposition—where is the economic growth that was supposed to have happened as a consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?