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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

#741

Post by dimitry12 »

zazaalaza wrote: post #512
jpttsn wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the participants knew the study was temporary and invested the money in a job they knew they’d need after the study.

Exactly. With a permanent UBI in place you can throw all these studies out the window.

Or keep the studies and make UBI non-permanent: much like cold-war brinkmanship - incentivizing recipients to always keep in mind the possibility of future work.

I understand it's much more stressful than permanent guaranteed UBI, but it's truer to the real intent of UBI (which I believe is reducing the friction when deciding to try new job or state or whatever in a pursuit of self-actualization).

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

#743

Post by econcon »

sfkdjf9j3j wrote: post #346
sabarn01 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should fear being destitute its the natural human condition. Learning skills is the only way to make wealth.

Does that mean you would support a 100% inheritance tax and say, confiscating all of someone's wealth every few years?

There will be workaround:

You can't confiscate social capital or favours someone's parent did to someone as "young adult" then that young adult did it to these parents kid and barter continues.

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

#744

Post by winstonewert »

syrrim wrote: post #713
winstonewert wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI would be funded by taxes, duh. But the funding mechanism isn't at issue here. The point is that for every dollar earned the participants lost 50 cents due to a decrease in support from the basic income. That's a massive disincentive to work.

Any practical UBI will require a large increase in taxes. If this isn't an income tax, it will be a payroll or sales tax, which both have a similar effect. A UBI pilot needs to model that tax just as much as the actual money transfer. If a practical UBI system contains a "massive disincentive to work", a model of such a system should contain this as well.

You make a good point, a good UBI pilot would incorporate the necessary tax increases.

But that's not what this study did. Crucially, the disincentive to create only applies to low income earners. Under, UBI everyone pays the taxes and thus everyone gets that disincentive to work. If we want to see what UBI would do, we should actually do UBI.

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

#745

Post by barry-cotter »

dahart wrote: post #706
blackflame7000 wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education does not equate to a successful job. I know a few career students that acquire one useless degree after another because every time they try to get a job they find no one is hiring.

> Education does not equate to a successful job Yes it does, statistically speaking. Career academics are a tiny minority of the population. The median salary of a BS degree in the US is 2x over non-degree holders. The median salary of an advanced degree is 3x. Twice the salary for having a 4 year degree, that is enormous . These stats were published very recently by the St. Louis Fed: https://files.stlouisfed.org/fi…

How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? How much is selection effect and how much treatment effect?

The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt load of half of a college grad.

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

#747

Post by mbrameld »

tic_tac wrote: post #603
multiplegeorges wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is a very misleading summary of the results. Here are some actual quote from the study: > Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. Almost half…

The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job. Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity. And this completely ignored th…

> If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity.

What if it enables those same people to take the time off work they need to treat their depression? Getting help takes enormous energy that a depressed person likely doesn't have if they're spending all their energy just trying to survive.

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

#748

Post by jdkee »

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…

The effect on children who see their parents get up and go to work regularly is immense. Similarly, the effect on children whose parents encourage them to complete their education or go on to higher education is huge. Breaking the cycles of poverty rely upon these factors.

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

#749

Post by luckylion »

jonathankoren wrote: post #584
luckylion wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is: you don’t need everyone to work full time everyday for a society to maintain a healthy standard of living. Maintaining isn't what people are aiming for though, they want improvement. People are not satisfied by objectively living much better lives than some king or pope 500 years ago.

First, peoples’ satisfaction is primarily influenced by the visibility of the inequities immediately around them. Second, who said anything about the rate of change going to zero? Even if productivity suddenly dropped to 1948 levels, it’s not like we’d be living in 1948. It’s not a time machine.

> First, peoples’ satisfaction is primarily influenced by the visibility of the inequities immediately around them.

I agree. What follows from that? Do we let some people live in the 21st century but hide their life style from the rest so we can keep them happy at a level that we can more easily automate?

And sure, it's not going to reverse necessarily (though it will to some degree, because we can't "automate" the 2020 economy). My point is that people aren't satisfied with no progress. Wanting to change things for the better seems to be a very natural part of humanity, making plans that don't account for that drive doesn't seem wise.

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

#750

Post by DuskStar »

thereare5lights wrote: post #728
Thorentis wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong again. You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. "Disincentivizing work" can be interpreted to mean more likely to study than work. This doesn't mean lazy. Nothing in the parent comment called people lazy for leaving the workforce, just that it disincetivized participating in the workforce.

Wrong wrong wrong. > You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. " No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself. Your interpretation indicates that you have not been steeped in debates about UBI, otherwise you would know this already. Interpreting the parent's re…

> > You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. "

> No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself.

"If you've read enough comments, you can predict the arguments people use. So I wasn't assuming anything."

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