9 ms·

I wonder if UBI actually allows the economy to become more efficient. It could be the case that an abusive employer would be more severely punished by the labor

• bryondowd 9y ago
  This seems like the biggest win, to me. When your employer represents your important but nonessential income, while your basic survival is guaranteed, it becomes far easier to tell an asshole boss to stuff it while you go looking for new work. It becomes easier to move to a new location without getting a job in advance. It becomes easier to start your own enterprise. It even makes more sense to work part time while developing more in-demand skills or just taking a partial vacation. It opens up so many freedoms of choice that are currently only afforded to people who can make lots of excess money and stash it away as savings.
  • lxmorj 9y ago
    As shitty as working for Uber might be, this is a huge benefit that they currently present. You can get by driving for Uber for a bit, allowing you to hold off on accepting an okay outcome and find better employment opportunities than otherwise.
    • Drdrdrq 9y ago
      Except - you are not searching for opportunities, you are working. It takes your focus and time. I agree that it helps you get by, but the cost is much higher than it would be with basic income.
  • corford 9y ago
    >It becomes easier to start your own enterprise. I lived in France for a few years and noticed something that validates this a little. French unemployment pay is quite generous (can't remember the exact figures but it's close to or 100% of your last salary for 12 months) - effectively quasi UBI for a year. I knew a lot of 'twenty somethings' that used this cushion to give them 12 months runway to try their hand at a startup.
    • ttoinou 9y ago
      ... or going abroad travelling & woofing. Which is also a rationale behavior. Did your friends keep the unemployment allowance while creating a new company ?
      • corford 9y ago
        No idea how it worked in detail (they were mainly acquaintances I met at meetups/co-working spaces). It just seemed like a right of passage - virtually everyone I met had bootstrapped their 2-5 person teams with guys & gals that were living off their unemployment allowances for a year (and so were fine taking equity and no salary for a while).
      • Jacqued 9y ago
        Yes. You even get a better replacement rate when you create a company than when you're unemployed and looking for work. If you held salaried work for long enough before, it will last for two whole years. We often joke in France that the unemployment agency is the #1 startup investor in the country
  • folli 9y ago
    If this is the main feature of UBI (guaranteed basic survival), then what's the difference to the current social systems as applied in several western european countries (e.g. scandinavian, french, german, swiss...). A "basic income" is in so far guaranteed that you will always have enough money for a roof over your head and enough food on the table. If your employer truly abuses your workforce, you are able to quit without the fear of becoming homeless and go hungry.
    • treerock 9y ago
      Not an expert, but in the UK the benefits system isn't 'universal', you have to meet certain qualification criteria. So if you quit your job because your boss is an arsehole or to start up your own business, you don't receive those benefits.
    • bryondowd 9y ago
      I think the main benefit over most welfare systems is that your save overhead by giving it unconditionally to everyone rather than having to evaluate every case, while at the same time it prevents people from falling through the cracks on technicalities.
• tryitnow 9y ago
  The flip side of this is abusive workers who will refuse to put in good effort because the cost of getting fired is lower. Of course, we could argue that workers should be more motivated by the promise of a good reward, but it looks like evidence from behavioral economics suggests that fear of loss is approximately twice as powerful as the hope of gain. So let's not underestimate the power of fear to generate productivity. By the way, I am generally supportive of the UBI, just wanted to point out a potential cost. Over the long run I think the UBI's benefits would exceed its costs, but I can't deny that there are real costs to an UBI (beyond the simple direct costs).
  • zimzam 9y ago
    That's not an abusive worker, that's just a bad worker. In the current system bosses are sometimes hesitant to fire people if they know they have a family to support. Knowing people have UBI to lean on there's much less guilt about letting people go.
    • jlebrech 9y ago
      and people can leave when they have a shitty boss and they know they could be their own boss. It'll also kill of a load of businesses where there's a bulk of minimum wage staff that could work for themselves.
  • nkrisc 9y ago
    How is that any different from lazy and bad workers today? Asking for references won't go away just because of UBI. Heck, there are lazy people who are already like this even without UBI.
    • beat 9y ago
      Yeah. Think about just what kind of workers we might be losing to UBI + laziness. Will we really miss them?
      • nkrisc 9y ago
• greglindahl 9y ago
  Both of those effects exist at a higher income level in the Silicon Valley -- it's called "F you money".
  • iamatworknow 9y ago
    Very few people have high paying SV jobs that allow for "F you money". UBI would give that opportunity to many more people.
• makerofthings 9y ago
  I would suspect that for a lot of people their debts (particularly mortgage debt) would grow with their income leaving them unable to just quit and fall back on UBI.
  • bryondowd 9y ago
    Only around 40% of Americans have a mortgage, with a large chunk of those being people who earn upper middle class money and are therefore probably more stable in their career with more leverage against employer abuse. Most other common debts (credit cards) don't have the kind of consequences that would prevent you from missing a few months of payments if necessary. So, while this might be a concern for a subset of the population, it probably still stands that this would benefit most of the people most often preyed upon by shady employment practices.
    • closeparen 9y ago
      Replace mortgage with rent. If leaving your job isn't well timed with lease expiration (giving you the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper) then UBI lower than rent isn't going to help much.
      • stickfigure 9y ago
        On the other hand, if UBI is constant across geography, it provides an incentive for the underemployed to move somewhere cheaper. It might take some of the pressure off housing in popular cities.
        • closeparen 9y ago
          Many would call this "the destruction of marginalized communities" and try to stop it.
          • bryondowd 9y ago
            I'm pretty sure that if you replace what's in quotes there, you could make that statement for literally any proposal to do something ever made.
• zeteo 9y ago
  > an abusive employer would be more severely punished by the labor market if the economic cost to the worker is diminished > workers would also be more likely to create new businesses entirely if the personal financial risks associated with doing so were diminished What kind of UBI are we talking about? If it's the one funded by dismantling the social safety net then no - you won't get more income when losing your job, because the same money is now spread among more people (most of whom still have a job). If it's in addition to the existing safety net, you'd get more of the same advantages by expanding unemployment benefits instead (make them higher / longer lasting / easier to obtain).
  • rconti 9y ago
    maybe it falls under "Easier to obtain" but you're not going to collect uninsurance in the US today if you quit your job.
  • darawk 9y ago
    > you won't get more income when losing your job, because the same money is now spread among more people He didn't say that. The things he said: > an abusive employer would be more severely punished by the labor market if the economic cost to the worker is diminished > workers would also be more likely to create new businesses entirely if the personal financial risks associated with doing so were diminished Are absolutely correct for either type of UBI.
  • cassowary 9y ago
    I've always assumed a UBI would involve reducing (or removing) the tax free threshold, so a person on an average or greater income would actually have no net change in their position, or may even be worse off. Perhaps I'm wrong on this? The advantage of the UBI comes from reduced administrative costs — at the moment, governments spend huge amounts of money on welfare departments to make sure welfare recipients are members of the worthy poor. By giving the UBI to everyone these costs get cut back. It also smooths the transition from jobless welfare payments to employment with a tax free threshold, so that we don't have to worry about whether or not a particular person would be worse off if they picked up another five hours. They would always be better off (because they'll pick up e.g. 87c of every extra dollar they earn, instead of having welfare payments worth e.g $500/month cut but being able to keep $1 of every extra dollar). I fear the advantages of a UBI go to the right-wing (neo-)liberal elites. They can get the government out of morality, cut costs, and pretend to be doing something for the poor. Whether it actually does something for the poor or not compared to welfare is, as you say, conditional. And in the absence of widespread community organisations (like churches in the olden days) throughout much of the west, it's not clear that taking the government out of morality is safe at this point. The article here wants me to believe that my concerns are illegitimate, but Iran is no secular western country.
• e40 9y ago
  This is a feature not a bug. I think it would have a positive effect on the workforce.
• jaggi1 9y ago
  It is generally opposite. For example USA does not have government mandated paternity leave and hence a lot of people value that 3 month salary over staying at home without pay. This means the McDonald on corner is able to have necessary staff and the Comcast technician is able to come to your house on a Saturday. People leaving jerk boss is not always a good thing because Jerk is a value between 0 to 1. UBI simply tilts it in employees favor which is exactly same as against society's benefit.
  • beat 9y ago
    God forbid we should help ordinary working people. That's totally against society's needs, society consisting of ordinary working people...
    • jaggi1 9y ago
      I am only explaining the facts. Forced paternity leave takes out some amount of labor from market increasing prices for everyone else for those services.
      • beat 9y ago
        You're not thinking very deeply. There's more to society than absolute economic efficiency. Giving fathers time to engage properly with their newborn children helps those children succeed throughout life, and makes happier and more effective workers. Besides, I've been a father of newborns who also had to work full-time. It was beyond exhausting, and I sure wasn't working anywhere near 100%.
• roryisok 9y ago
  The thing that always concerns me about UBI is that the government controls your salary. This is sort of true already on that they have the power to raise our lower taxes, but lowering UBI would affect far more people
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > The thing that always concerns me about UBI is that the government controls your salary UBI is not salary, and doesn't prevent you (or punish you) from earning a salary alongside it. That said, I'd prefer a universal income to be fundamentally (e.g., Constitutionally) tied to a dedicated funding stream, equally divided, and not subject to regular legislative control.
  • lazaroclapp 9y ago
    You could eventually make UBI a constitutional right. At that point the government controls it in the way they 'control' your right to free speech or to life. In material terms government coercion could deprive you of either, but it would be considered extremely illegitimate for the government to do it. If you want a 'positive right' example, in most countries the government would be considered to be failing its duties if it failed to provide free elementary public education for all citizens, and the logistics of that are more complicated to both provide and verify than a simple cash transfer. I see it going in much the same way current governments in stable countries don't suddenly show up at your door saying you owe them 95% in tax. Refusing or delaying to pay your UBI would amount to that, an illegal tax.
• darawk 9y ago
  Ya, I think these are the most important arguments for UBI. It incentivizes risk taking. We want to socialize risk-taking by entrepreneurs. We want to socialize investment in your own skills, and your own development. The only real question, IMO, is if we can afford it. We may or may not be able to today, but one day, we will be able to provide the basic necessities for all citizens as a human right. And on that day, we will reap enormous productivity gains, for exactly these reasons. For these exact same reasons, you also don't need a minimum wage. And you don't need laws about hiring/firing people. If you get fired, it's a hit, but not an existential crisis that requires government intervention. If, as an employer, you offer too low a salary, people simply won't take it. We don't need to ensure that the minimum wage meets some basic standard of living, because you're already guaranteed that by virtue of your humanity. A UBI raises the minimum to a level where government intervention in the workplace is no longer required to ensure decent treatment of human beings. In so doing, it eliminates deadweight loss of all kinds, from every corner of the market.
  • alaaibrahim 9y ago
    And if you don't have minimum wage/hiring/firing laws, that would help with the illegal immigrants problem, as there would be no incentive to hire an illegal immigrant (it's only the headache of in case you are caught).
    • flukus 9y ago
      The incentive is still there, they'll work for peanuts while citizens don't have to work at all.
      • Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        If anything, it increases the incentive.
  • pmurT 9y ago
    It incentivizes all activity productive risk taking or just sitting on the couch and playing Call of Duty - which if you've delt with most humans lately means it'll likely be Call of Duty unless there's some sort of familial pressure to do otherwise
• branchless 9y ago
  What stops rent rising to absorb the surplus, as it currently does?
  • dfabulich 9y ago
    New home construction, hopefully subsidized-affordable home construction.
    • closeparen 9y ago
      Enough subsidized housing to serve more than a tiny handful of lucky applicants would be a foundational societal shift even more dramatic, and more difficult to pull off, than UBI.
    • branchless 9y ago
      But that's not what ubi is. Why not just assault the causes of high land costs if so?
  • Retra 9y ago
    The amount of freedom and mobility granted by UBI might be enough to incentivize people to move if the rents started rising, increasing competition. Then landlords would either have to bear the extra cost of finding new tenants or lowering rent to competitive rates. Outside of price fixing, rent gouging at least partially relies on people being unable to afford to move.
    • branchless 9y ago
      Surely ubi has to be regionalised in some way. I think ubi without land value tax makes no sense.
• solatic 9y ago
  If workers quit working for abusive employers, then you end up having more job-seekers, which makes it more difficult to find a job. That only becomes irrelevant if you have a parallel increase in entrepreneurship. One of the reasons why UBI appeals to the HN crowd is because the HN audience leans towards entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs. But for the economy at large, far more people would rather try to keep their heads down and get home to their families. Most people are not responsible financial stewards. They don't take their excess income and put it into investments, they take their excess income and put it into improving their standard of living. That means using the extra income generated from a day-job goes to higher rent, car payments, and other liabilities not easily released. Most middle-income people will end up in the same place - unable to leave their jobs due to the difficulty of finding a new one. Upper-income people will pay more in taxes essentially to end financial insecurity among lower-income people living paycheck-to-paycheck.
  • Endama 9y ago
    I think the only issue I take with your assumption is that you will end up having more job-seekers. It could just be the case that the abusive employer's business will fail and thus create an opportunity in the market for another company to take over. If you rinse and repeat, you could assume that it would provide a force to push abusive employers out of the marketplace and replace them with more productive employees and employers. I'll also argue that "improving their standard of living" does not have to be separate from an expansion in the economy. Often the means these irresponsible financial stewards take in "improving their standard of living" is in spending on goods and services, which continues to contribute to liquidity in the market. Not to mention that improving the standard of living for consumers is generally an overall win for society as a whole (lower crime, lower healthcare costs, higher productivity, etc.)
    • jrumbut 9y ago
      This identifies why I tend to think social spending is a good idea even if there is some uncertainty about the benefits. If everyone gets a few thousand dollars and runs out and spends it on beer and pizza, at least they got some beer and pizza. And then the money ends up back in the hands of the people who had it originally. There are worse ways for a project to fail, and of course all the benefits discussed elsewhere could happen.
• Certhas 9y ago
  Further, if you are no longer forced to sell your work, a liberalized labour market might produce fairer results.