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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

#691

Post by akvadrako »

disambiguation wrote: post #678
akvadrako wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't how NIT works. Mathematically it is identical to UBI, it's just phrased differently.

No the difference is not simply semantics. The main difference between NIT and UBI is that your check is conditional on working. From the article: > De Kwaadsteniet: ‘In the condition without social security, the test participants didn’t receive a basic sum. In the benefits condition they received a basic sum, which they lost as soon as they started working. In the basic income condition they received the same basic…

That isn't how the term is normally used. This is a good intro: https://www.scottsantens.com/negative-income-tax-nit-and-unc...

And you can even see on wikipedia that:

> Therefore, a family with $0 income would be entitled to receive $1500 in subsidy.

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

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

#692

Post by rocqua »

lbj wrote: post #33

Well, in Denmark we have the equivalent of Basic income and I'd say we have a major problem with peoples willingness to work. Some families are on welfare for generations now.

I think a significant difference between the Danish system and UBI is that working people do _not_ get Danish welfare. In the Netherlands we have a very similar system, except with a legal obligation to apply for jobs or do volunteer work in order to keep the welfare.

If I guessed correct, then the Danish is significantly different from UBI, because that system discourages working. Starting work means losing your welfare. Or at best every euro you earn from working is subtracted from your welfare. Besides that, in such systems you need a complicated bureaucracy to figure out who should and should not get welfare. This bureaucracy needs to contend with fraud, and is probably rewarded for giving as few people welfare as possible. This leads to a bureaucracy that is somewhat hostile to those it is meant to serve.

With Universal basic income, you lose the discouragement to work. You lose the very complicated and hostile bureaucracy (with exceptions for emigrants and immigrants probably). And you lose some of the political pressure to cut welfare, because everyone gets UBI so there is less jealousy.

In the Netherlands there have been cases of people on welfare needing to pay back thousands of euros because sometimes their mother did groceries for them. That was officially 'income' they failed to declare, and therefore their welfare was retroactively cut. That is just inhumane, and stupid. It means anyone on welfare who cannot make ends meet cannot ask anyone for financial help, because that would cost them their welfare.

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

#693

Post by beardedman »

smallcrustacean wrote: post #244
beardedman wrote: post #170

For me these studies are utterly meaningless without real world long-term data. > would not reduce people’s willingness to work > The psychologists also found an indication that people with a basic income look for work that suits them better. Note how the authors use the word *willingness" to work. 0 people want to clean toilets or public restrooms for a living. Or be waiting staff at a restaurant. Yet those "grunt w…

Is the only "hard stuff" in life found in employment? What about losing a friend? Learning who you are in relation to your parents? Attempting to cooperate with a partner? Sacrificing your goals for your children? Life is much richer than the lessons learned by doing menial labor.

My comment was specific to employment & "menial labor", as is the issue of universal basic income.

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

#694

Post by Dylan16807 »

caskstrength wrote: post #677
Dylan16807 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically a normal tax question at that point.

Well, yeah, this is exactly what I've been saying in this thread: Any realistic UBI program will be payed by taxes on middle class.

So go use those arguments you already mentioned, about redistribution and buying houses, against current taxes. You can even use the same complaints about freeloaders.

You made it sound like this caused new objections, rather than being one more bout of business as usual tax griping.

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

#695

Post by otherme123 »

Orou wrote: post #343
otherme123 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or other improductive things. The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus. That's pretty much doing nothing at a productive level. One of the problems of those studies are that they are temporal, and everyone involved know it. If I enrole you for two years in an UBI experiment, you'll probably not leave your job, even if you hate it. But if I guarantee you the…

> The more hardcore UBI defenders talk about paying Malibu surfers to surf all day, or to write haikus I've been following the UBI space for a long time and I've never seen anyone use this as an example - that's just a strawman. What people discuss is the work that is valuable to society but is unpaid such as raising children, caretaking for the elderly, community support, and so on. A few hundred dollars a month isn…

Well, the "Malibu surfer" is a recurrent theme. E.g. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-37908-... or https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265291. Van Parijs (author of the last text) is very well known in the field of UBI (some sources even list him as the founder of the idea). The haiku theme often arises in discussions, but I cannot find a source. Anyway, is the same idea: being paid for doing whatever you want or nothing at all.

What you talk about is not UBI, but other schema of basic income conditioned (thus not fulfilling the U).

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

#696

Post by Tarsul »

piva00 wrote: post #349
mushufasa wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~50 years ago Keynes predicted by now no-one would have to work menial jobs because everything would be automated, freeing up people to work a few days a week and pursue creative endeavors. While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions. Having higher cost of labo…

Bertrand Russell predicted the same in the 1920s .

i just read his essay "in praise of idleness"[1] (1932) and what sticks out is how nothing has changed wrt how capitalism works:

"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

[1]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

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

#697

Post by Sammi »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #281
0xfaded wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another take is that if workers are able to say no to a shit job, then the burden is placed on the employer to either eliminate the job or make it less shit. In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, yet life goes on. Economically it doesn't make sense because of the high labor costs, and realistically it is a menial job that can be for the most part automated. If you want to live in a world where you can have…

> In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, This is simply not true, at least in the more densely populated parts of Norway. They are simply very expensive.

Downvoted because you know OP meant "no _affordable_ manual car washes", so why did you have to make a bad faith interpretation?

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

#698

Post by otherme123 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #627
systemvoltage wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a balanced budget. Programs like UBI would most likely not be paid by taxes (which would be better used for education/trade programs that I mentioned) but by increasing the deficit. There is no undo button. Millions of people would be dependent on it. You will have no choice but to print money. I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.

There are basic income schemes (such as Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend proposal) where UBI also involves slashing existing programs. > I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine. We've already discussed Richmond, CA before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420296

Weird that you got downvotes by saying what's widely know in the field of UBI. Almost any UBI proposal includes the slash of all other programs.

The main strenght of the UBI is that it simplifies the bureaucracy: in theory, you just give everyone an income that should cover health insurance, education when needed, food, housing... so if anyone prefers to spend the money on drugs and hookers is up to him: the society already provided with everything he needed. The key is that you can live with the UBI, and if you want recreational drugs you have to find a job for the extra money or sacrifice some of the basics.

UBI + lots of other welfare programs makes little sense.

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

#699

Post by rocqua »

augustuspolius wrote: post #220
lordnacho wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Danish system has the same problem as all other means-tested systems: massive effective tax rate once you start working.

So do you want to have both UBI and a low effective tax?

I would want UBI combined with a marginal tax rate that is much more constant as a function of income.

Current welfare systems, if you plot the effective marginal tax rate as a function of gross income (i.e. if you earn one more dollar, what percentage of that dollar does your net income increase including all government systems), have by far the highest marginal rates for the lower incomes. With the marginal tax-rate actually generally decreasing as your income increases. Notably in some broken systems (like the Dutch one) there can be cases where your marginal tax rate is above 100%.

Note that the tax burden ratio [(gross income - net income) / gross income] as well as the actual tax burden [gross income - net income] still increases with as gross income increases. If you graph the tax burden as a function of gross income, then the marginal tax rate is essentially the slope of this plot.

Importantly, it is the marginal tax-rate that affects a rational actor looking to weigh whether it is worth it work harder to earn more money. Hence very high marginal tax rates are very discouraging to working more / harder / trying to become more productive.

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

#700

Post by HowTheStoryEnds »

staticassertion wrote: post #629
HowTheStoryEnds wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it takes a strict authoritarian governmental control because you need to regulate the prizes of everything that's deemed necessary to prevent subsidizing controlling third parties. Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any pos…

I don't think rent control is the policy of a "strict authoritarian government". Regardless, I don't agree with you that rent would rise considerably or that it would negate any benefit.

Why would rent not rise? Landlords know you have X more to spend now. Why would they not raise prices, altruism? You think that's their reason behind renting out property?

Same with the telecommunications pseudo-monopolies: you really think they won't try and tap into that resource even if a little? Communications has become almost as vital as housing the last decade.

Companies will do everything they can and the public is capable of paying to increase their revenue.

Also: depends on how you define 'rent control'

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