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Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

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Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#641

Post by ashtonkem »

josephcsible wrote: post #639
ashtonkem wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and a lot of people have a lot less savings than the median, and those who had to count on enhanced UI during the pandemic likely had less still, since more of those were in low to minimum wage service jobs. The second quintile had only $2,100 in savings, and the bottom a mere $800. I sincerely doubt many of them were able to save up enough to last more than a few months. The issue is that the story of enhance…

> once they turned off the benefits people decided not to work and spend down their savings because ... erm, why would people do that? And doesn't this undermine the premise that people stopped working because it was cheaper to not work, if they're deciding to go broke not working for funsies? Once you get used to 100% of your time being leisure time for months to years, it's hard to overcome that inertia and start l…

> People changing careers wouldn't contribute to the total number of unfilled jobs being higher, though

Are there actually any evidence that there are more unfilled jobs though? Unemployment is actually at 3.9%, which is down to pre-pandemic levels. That's better than 2017 and most of 2018, actually.

Heck, now that I'm pulling up real numbers (should've done this earlier), unemployment spiked up to 14.7% in April of 2020, and was on a continuous downward slide after that, including before any state cut its enhanced UI. Nationwide unemployment was at 5.9% when states began cutting UI. This is more consistent with "crisis over, we don't need to keep this" than "oh god we have to cut UI or they won't go back to work. My state had an unemployment rate of 3% when they turned off enhanced UI, no need for a stick there!

For comparison the official unemployment rate was above 5.9% between August 2008 and October of 2014.

I think that the best argument for here "UI lets people be lazy and not work" is not that people stopped working during the pandemic because of it. I think the best argument is that people knew that this system was temporary and that they had to get a new job and start working when they felt it was safe, because it was temporary. One might expect different results if the system was more generous permanently, I don't know.

> And if "general re-evaluation of life choices" leads to quitting your job, aren't the only two possibilities that you either get a new job, or you don't work anymore?

Either possibility is incompatible with the general thesis that UI was why people stopped working, and we had to cancel UI in order to get people back into work. Either they didn't need the job and no amount of UI tweaking will bring them back, or they decided to get a different job and no amount of UI tweaking will fill their old one.

> But what about the rest of the states? And the federal government left their money faucet on until September.

I could be wrong here, but UI is administered through the states. The federal government had the money tap on to the states who then gave it out through their system.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#642

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #228
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it" A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5% How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing…

>How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? That is part of it. Fortunately there are plenty of other examples in US and other country history where money handouts are clearly a driver, so it's not a question of whether or not easy money adds to inflation. As mot economists put it, all long term inflation is ultimately the result of more money in the system. >…

> Not a rebuttal

Just like you don't need to rebutt a flat earther theory that ignores basic laws of gravity, no-one needs to rebut an argument that ignores basics of economics.

You are conflating consumer good and assets, you are conflating creation of money and redistribution, you are totally ignoring the three most important factors - velosity of money, productivity and interest rates.

Firstly prices of houses and other assets depend on interest rates, not wages.

Secondly UBI does not do 'rescaling', whatever that means, nor does it create new money, it does redistribution. Redistribution does not cause inflation.

You could have presented an argument that velosity of money would increase so much it could trigger inflation, or that productivity would collapse, but you have provided no such argument, let alone evidence

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#643

Post by aakresearch »

For me the u-turn from support of UBI to rejection was driven by realization that UBI is a perfect control tool for any government. When they needed a big stick to push vaccinations the initial pass of locking people out of restaurants, pubs and entertainment venues ended up looking pathetic. Once they realized how lame it is, they had no choice beyond going after people's livelihoods, the right to work and earn living. Imagine how easier it would be for governments to enact whatever they want if majority are scared of losing the access to the biggest trough?

It would be ok, if UBI was also Unconditional, but I'm confident no one will dare to make it so after the recent global event.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#644

Post by mlyle »

greedo wrote: post #533
mlyle wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that pandemic financial aid has often been conditional on hardship and has been intermittent. This makes it not a great model for basic income. I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despit…

Minor correction; pandemic financial aid for individuals has been conditional on hardship. The PPP on the other hand just required businesses to pinky swear that they'd retain or bring back employees. Then the "loans" were completely forgiven.

"often been conditional" was what I wrote. And PPP isn't really relevant to a discussion of basic income, anyways!

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#645

Post by travisb »

greatpostman wrote: post #6

Pay me enough to live without working and I will quit my job and work on a moonshot startup/interesting tech all day. Most likely nothing will come of it, but I won’t be working

I'd also stop working, though instead of working on a moonshot I'd go camping, work on my garden, and spend long days playing games with friends and family.

There is a qualitative difference between needing to spend 40+ hours a week to sustain yourself versus spending 0 hours. If one need to spend those hours anyways it makes sense to maximize the income from doing so.

It may take a generation, but I think most people would eventually come to the conclusion that the rat race isn't worth it when zero hours is an option.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#646

Post by Aunche »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #635
Aunche wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to find good sources but Kuwait had a median household income of $40k. Meanwhile, almost 1 million workers make less than $300 a month, so Kuwait citizen families likely make a lot more than $40k. https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/kuwait/almost-1m-foreigners-... The purpose of money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Giving money for the sake of nothing defeats the entire purpose of money, because you…

> Hard to find good sources but Kuwait had a median household income of $40k. Meanwhile, almost 1 million workers make less than $300 a month, so Kuwait citizen families likely make a lot more than $40k. Yeah that sounds pretty unbalanced. > The purpose of money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Giving money for the sake of nothing defeats the entire purpose of money, because you're giving everyone mone…

>Yeah that sounds pretty unbalanced.

So how would that be different from Americans getting ~$12000 and buying goods from developing countries where workers also make $300 a month.

>People get lots of things for "free", like infrastructure

Infrastructure serves a specific purpose. Why should we give money to people for free when we can instead use it to build infrastructure?

>What conditions do you think are important for food stamps and welfare?

Welfare targets people who cannot provide for themselves, such as children and the disabled. We don't lose much productivity by giving these people money. Every able bodied adult should be expected to give back to society.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#647

Post by chii »

rightbyte wrote: post #449
Fernicia wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So labour costs would go up, things get more expensive, and there are still no incentives to be civil because that cost is spread amongst all customers.

Why would labour costs not go down? If the worker gets X from the state, they employer can pay them X less for status quo, which obviously was an amount of money that worked out earlier. I.e. the cost of living in cities is what prevent workers from undercutting each other in cities.

If $X was enough to live (even if meagerly), then why would a worker put up with a new wage that is $X less than previously?

The worker would only continue a "shitty" job, if they get a better deal than before. So it makes sense to conclude that wages would cost more to entice a worker if said worker was able to obtain a UBI.

Jobs that would be popular and enjoyable, would be sought after - and those wages would drop.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#648

Post by chii »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #623
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a one-sentence policy proposal, that sounds almost perfect… but how do you quantify “efficiency gains from automation”?

Revenue per employee, usually. (There are many measures of labor productivity, though.) Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their r…

> makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it.

why would the remaining employees, who have no invested capital into the business (with which the automation is driven by), receive any of the gains from said automation?

The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit. In this case, it's often the shareholders in the end.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#649

Post by chii »

andi999 wrote: post #302
meatsauce wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where people get this idea that you should be paid like a rockstar without knowing how to play the guitar.

That would bei URI, universal rockstar income.

which, ironically, would be a pittance since most musicians are starving artists.

Re: Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

#650

Post by chii »

noogle wrote: post #615
ipaddr wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices inflate like they have recently and will continue until prices absorbs any increases and the lack of production will put a greater strain.

Yet that did not deter us from creating trillions of dollars and giving them to financial institutes. What if we printed the same amount and gave it directly to people? the $6T/year could yield ~$40K to each of the ~150M working-age Americans. The biggest impact is to give employees more power in the negotiation with employers: currently, employees are far more pressed to find work than the employer needs to fill in…

> creating trillions of dollars and giving them to financial institutes.

those trillions were swapped, not given, to the financial institutes, in return for the bonds and treasuries they held.

It isn't the same sort of printing that you hear about in Zimbabwe or Venezuela.

If the gov't really printed trillions and gave them to people like you described, you'd get major inflation. Oh wait, that's already happening...and it's only a couple thousand for some people, and it's not printed, it's borrowed. Imagine the effects, if it was truly printed like you described!

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