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

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

#691

Post by sixstringtheory »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #638
godelski wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education does correlate with a more successful job and it also correlates with a better functioning society. I believe that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is some causal relationship (note: this does not say that higher education leads to a successful job, but rather says that higher education increases the chances of you getting a more successful job).

No, because you can be educated in any topic up to and including the history of the Kardashians. This in no way contributes to a better functioning society. Your entire premise that education = more intelligence is completely wrong. Would you argue a person educated by extremists correlates with a better functioning society? The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating some…

> Education does not equate to a successful job

> The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge

To apply knowledge, you have to first acquire it. How do you propose to do so without education?

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

#692

Post by DubiousPusher »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #645
spullara wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they would have to make it illegal to borrow against your UBI to create a true safety net.

Hmm, like dual of bank minimum reserve.

Wouldn't it just work to make it illegal to attach UBI for non-payment of loans. Then UBI would cease to work as collateral.

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

#693

Post by keithnz »

I'd be interested to see what would happen in the tech world if there was a UBI. How many more startups would there be if people could survive on a UBI.... it's essentially like having an unlimited runway to get startups off the ground. Not the "we are going to disrupt entire industries and make billions" type of startups most likely, but still, worthy startups creating chunks of software for smaller markets that take longer to monetize

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

#694

Post by DubiousPusher »

zazaalaza wrote: post #633
DubiousPusher wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. Work ethic is not derived only from the notion that people need to work. It is derived from an ethical imperative and from a sense of achievement people get from work. Also, any UBI would likely be well under the amount of money necessary to live a middle class life. I myself was on SSI and could have found a way to subsist on it but really did not want to live that way. I got to know a l…

The proposed monthly amount was €2,300 in Switzerland when they had a referendum on the issue in 2016. That is enough to have a more than decent living. Work ethic might be engrained into our culture, but someone who is brought up in a society where UBI is normal and they are just a few years away from becoming "rich", I think not-working-ever is a very enticing idea and many teens will fall into that trap.

#1 You're citing the highest possible individual example I know of. Most tests I've seen range from $300-$1,200 per month in wealthy countries.

#2 Switzerland has a very high cost of living so I'm not sure 2,300 Swiss Francs is that high.

#3 Your second paragraph is 100% begging the question. I'm open to the idea that UBI might be good or bad for work ethic but there simply is not enough data for you to have the confidence you do in your conclusion.

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

#695

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

zazaalaza wrote: post #636
learnstats2 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no such thing as "permanent UBI", though. UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government. The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it makes sense to up-skill. Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how t…

"UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government" If this is true than implementing UBI will be more problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call for all other financial safety nets to be removed in order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something similar to how the pension…

Hmm, Yangs proposal did not eliminate all other safety nets. His program simply made people opt out of one or the other, and encouraged people to stick with whatever paid them more.

The knock on effect is that it'd likely reduce funding for other safety nets because they have an inherent safety net in UBI. But the existing welfare programs are either highly prohibitive or extremely difficult to qualify for and maintain even if you should be using them. UBI eliminates that barrier of entry if you only need 1k a month (using Yangs plan here).

So, yeah, less people would likely use food stamps because they can get more from 1k a month than from 1.2k in food stamps. Most people do not qualify for that much in food stamps as it is. With fewer people using that program, the government would funnel less money to that program, reducing net costs and allowing more money to go elsewhere. Eventually this would likely lead to the end of that program.

This could allow us to create new social programs that are more focused. With fewer people requiring other social safety nets, the new ones that are created would require less funding and can address root cause issues vs symptoms which are what we address today.

Most people just need money. A minority of people using a social welfare programs need something significantly more than just money. We should not leave those people on the street, but Yang never planned on that happening. He proposed a VAT tax to cover the costs. Whether that would actually work or not is debatable, but that was his plan.

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

#696

Post by eru »

falcolas wrote: post #391
eru wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you factor in the opportunity cost of a rich persons time, the cost of the burger itself matter proportionally less.

Well, the rich almost always make most of their day-to-day income from investments. The opportunity cost calculations change pretty dramatically when a person's labor provides little to no monetary value (especially given the context of going out for a burger). After all, there's a practical limit on the value of a person's labor - let's postulate that it's around $7,000 a day - there's no such limit on what investme…

I don't think you can figure out the practical limit like that.

First: musicians and athletes in their prime can make more, and that's definitely labour income. Second: if a bus were to hit Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett, their companies would lose lots of value. So even though their day-to-day income looks like it's coming from investments, a big part of it is actually labour income.

(I'm taking 'hit by a bus' here as an exogenous event that would make the CEOs unable to work, but wouldn't touch the companies at all and crucially wouldn't imply to investors any other information about the companies.)

Similar for running a hedge fund: as far as the tax man is concerned, a lot of the income they generate for the people running the fund is some kind of capital returns. But in an economic sense, it's mostly labour income: if you want to estimate the capital side, just see how well the hedge fund's customers are doing out of their investment; any returns insiders make above that are labour income.

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

#697

Post by eru »

ceejayoz wrote: post #76
eru wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so privately? (And if they don't want to save, why should the government force them? Isn't a democracy supposed to reflect what the people want?) Btw, the Norwegian model is partial about avoiding 'Dutch disease'. That's why they invest the money abroad. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

> If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so privately? The "why" is complicated, but the "they generally don't" is not. > Isn't a democracy supposed to reflect what the people want? People wanted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. There aren't many pure democracies out there as pure mob rule isn't super awesome in the long run. Alaska's dividend is particularly odd given they were proposing 40% budget cuts…

In general, just giving people money should be the null hypothesis for how to spend, and any government spending programme should be measured against this 'placebo'. Instead of against the weaker standard of 'does the spending do any good at all?'

I have no clue whether those programs he wants to slash are any good or bad.

Higher education is mostly a signalling game. So very useful for individuals to spend on; but a zero sum game at the level of society.

> People wanted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. There aren't many pure democracies out there as pure mob rule isn't super awesome in the long run.

I'm not a fan of democracy either. But lots of people are. And it beats some of the alternatives.

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

#698

Post by empath75 »

simonsarris wrote: post #88

This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion: > Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor mar…

Why does everyone assume that people working is a good in and of itself?

Why does nobody complain about the deleterious effects of inherited wealth on the children of billionaires?

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

#699

Post by BrainInAJar »

simonsarris wrote: post #88

This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion: > Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor mar…

> it disincentivizes work

"work" is a funny term. Accepting for the sake of argument that it disincentivizes economically beneficial work, what if it frees up eg, artists and other culturally important activities? Or family care? Is that a bad thing? It makes /society/ better, even if it makes /the economy/ slightly worse

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

#700

Post by crooked-v »

jonathankoren wrote: post #685
refurb wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is #1, Sweden is #9. https://thegedi.org/global-entrepreneurship-and-development-...

So your gotcha is comparing the relative ranking of two countries in the top 10? A top 10 that has multiple European counties with robust safety nets in it? I don’t think this data is saying what you think. There’s no evidence of disincentivization. This reminds me of the people that complain that UBI causes people to work less, and when you dig into it, they stopped working overtime, or went back to school, retired,…

Also, I would be really surprised if one couldn't make the US drop in those rankings by subtracting San Francisco and the bizarro-world VC tech economy that centers on it.
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