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

As others have said this study doesn't have enough data to be conclusive. So most people, including me, comment based on which of the following we believe in:

1. People are inherently lazy. UBI will encourage them to do less. 2. People are inherently interested in maximizing their potential. UBI will enable them to do more.

I couldn't find any social science research on which of the above is more true. But if we could tell maybe that can help us guess at how many UBI recipients will abuse the system as that seems to be the main concern around UBI.

If you let the market respond, it will just price in the UBI, and you'll end up with pretty much the situation we have today, only with prices increased by some amount and some added bureaucracy.

> maybe [...] we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans

They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have you do complicated software things than mopping floors and emptying the trash can.

I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to survive.

I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't see any compelling argument that some (new or old) alternative system that you or I or some people that are way smarter than us could come up with would work more efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of it failing catastrophically are just too high to go "well, maybe it'll work this time".

I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude.

Controlling inflation will be a massive issue, and I don't haven't heard any convincing answers.

If you find a way to convince the super majority that "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them first and then change the system and not change the system and pray to any and all gods that they will become convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.

I said exactly the opposite. If I had watched my father sitting around doing nothing, I probably would have grown up to sit around doing nothing. I saw him working instead, and he set a positive example, even though his job wasn't a high-paying "powerful" one.

> Productivity equals production.

Yep, and when significant numbers of people simply stop working, as has been demonstrated in every experiment on basic income, production drops similarly. 0 work * any finite rate of production = 0 output.

Recessions/depressions are caused by smaller drops in production than those seen in basic income. Production includes food, medicine, services, and things that make life better for all.

>A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

Then let them do it. That they have not done so thus far is not because we didn't have basic income. Postulating this mythical event as a counter to the empirical evidence that production did drop significantly during actual basic income is not compelling.

>generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them

Then start such a company, and your better, happier, more efficient workers should beat out those other inefficient companies.

Again, this hasn't happened, despite many people trying to make such companies, only to realize that things don't work this way for valid reasons.

I think a good iterative solution is to keep pay the same but change all laws to pivot around a 32-hour work week instead of 40. This will force employers to hire more people or pay more over time for any work past 32 hours. I think UBI is an extreme solution to the problems that globalization and automation presents. It's better to spread the existing labor. After a certain point we could move down to 24 hour work week finally down to a UBI model when no labor is required.