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Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

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Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#491

Post by jerf »

giantg2 wrote: post #472
nkmnz wrote: post #460

The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably les…

That's something that most programs don't even try to explain, and something ive wondered about - how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor? If you're affecting very small percentages of the population, the impacts seem minor. We've seen this with analysis on raising minimum wage to about $10/hr. Most people make over that amount (or work in excluded roles), so the impact is small. Rais…

UBI creates inflation. I think anyone trying to deny that amounts to denying it because they really want UBI, and so they need it to not have that bad effect, but it does. You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.

The theory is that productivity increases will in fact offset it. One way to prevent an increase in money causing inflation is to correspondingly increase the value generated by the economy. Some economic theories, including the current dominant mainstream one, would suggest that if you have that sort of productivity increase you need to increase the money supply to avoid negative impacts brought on by deflation.

One of my several major problems with the idea is I see almost no one trying to figure out how to actually bind the productivity increases together with UBI. Even if I stipulate for the sake of argument a perfectly functioning UBI system working exactly as the advocates propose, as gracious as I can possibly be, it is still a fragile system. Droughts, wars, asteroid strikes, volcanos, bad crop years, supply chain disruptions, normal economic variations including recessions, these things all happen. The productivity excess will shrink at times, but, no politician under any political governing scheme could reduce the payouts, and after long enough on UBI, the hypothetical paradise it produces full of wonderful artists and musicians and programmers creating text editors rather than CRUD apps and people just enjoying life also produces an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet when there is a disruption... but they're still there with their hands out.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#492

Post by jon_richards »

ajnin wrote: post #409
jon_richards wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia has a nice graph showing how UBI and NIT are effectively the same thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

It's the same only if the income tax is linear, which is almost never the case ? Most places have progressive income tax rates.

For a given progressive income tax rate with UBI, you can make an equivalent progressive tax rate with NIT.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#493

Post by maeil »

iamthirsty wrote: post #454
maeil wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). Just subsidize the minimum wage. It's dead simple. Raise the minimum wage by $x but have that extra $x be paid from taxes, not the employer. Big businesses will scream "But…

I'd like to see any reasonable math behind this idea.

Depends on what you're comparing it to. This thread is about unconditional cash. Giving everyone $1000 a month, unconditionally, is clearly many times more expensive than subsidizing the minimum wage by $1 an hour - it's rather difficult to work 1000 hours when a month has ~730 hours!

The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#494

Post by schroeding »

nkmnz wrote: post #460

The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably les…

While there are areas where the "Fachkräftemangel" (lack of skilled laborers) is actually real, the problem for gastronomy is the minimum wage, which is ~12 Euros. Why choose being a service worker or part of the kitchen brigade in (especially small) gastronomy (where, often, all you get is only slightly above minimum wage), if there are other, easier choices which pay basically the same?

As someone who was service staff as a student, I completely understand that, to be honest. It doesn't help that many restaurants just fired their whole service staff during COVID, even though there are other instruments like "Kurzarbeit" (where the state gives you welfare, and you temporarily only work few hours or not at all, if no work is available at your place of labor) - obviously people find new jobs in this case and aren't available anymore.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#495

Post by sdwr »

nkmnz wrote: post #460

The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably les…

This is the best critique of UBI I've ever seen (which is a little sad). I don't remember ever reading anything about the second-order effects before.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#496

Post by [deleted] »

jimt1234 wrote: post #79
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#497

Post by littlestymaar »

nkmnz wrote: post #460

The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably les…

I know you really want to believe it, but this is bs: look at inflation statistics in Europe and you'll see that the effect you're imaging doesn't exist. There's no excess inflation in Germany compared to everywhere else in the EU.

Also Bürgergeld is $500 a month for an adult, which is very far from "You can easily live from the Bürgergeld". Survive maybe but definitely not "easily live".

The labor market issues in Germany like in most Europe have a demographic origin, when there's not enough young people you cannot hire them.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#498

Post by laserlight »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #453
laserlight wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done. That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?

examples would be that people dont want to collect trash, work a the sewage treatment plant, or lumber mill.

I see, but I’m not sure if these wouldn’t get done in a “do what you want” policy. There’s even a chance that they get done better than how they are done today. People would put in resources to improve (automate, simplify, etc.) the tasks they don’t enjoy doing.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#499

Post by altruios »

creato wrote: post #310
altruios wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working a job you don't like isn't the issue. Working a job that makes the world a worse place because you need to survive is the issue. It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up arms in a factory that produces produces that people want, but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good thing.

A lot of people like cigarettes. The idea that no one would work in a cigarette factory because everyone would see it as morally objectionable and they could afford not to is preposterous.

Would you take a low paying factory job that creates an objectively addictive poison as a product willingly when you have other options? Do you REALLY know ANYONE that would? I'm not saying that number is in fact 0, there will always be outliers...

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#500

Post by rexpop »

jerf wrote: post #491
giantg2 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something that most programs don't even try to explain, and something ive wondered about - how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor? If you're affecting very small percentages of the population, the impacts seem minor. We've seen this with analysis on raising minimum wage to about $10/hr. Most people make over that amount (or work in excluded roles), so the impact is small. Rais…

UBI creates inflation. I think anyone trying to deny that amounts to denying it because they really want UBI, and so they need it to not have that bad effect, but it does. You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it. The theory is that productivity increases will in fact offset it. One way to prevent an increase in money causing inflation is to correspondingly increase the…

> an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet

Because they're infantile, used to picnicking and playing their guitars, and devoid of industrial skills like lathe operating or CRUD app development?

> You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.

Isn't this even more egregious in the case of bank bailouts? Shouldn't that money have evaporated?

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