5 ms·

"The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically

"The whole article is based on the assumption that once basic necessities are covered, huge numbers of people are going to call it a day and cease economically profitable activity." Is there some reason to think otherwise? This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states.

clavalle 9y ago
Such as?
kinos 9y ago
Did you know that if you make too much income you will lose your welfare? You can lose disability just for holding onto $2000 for someone. There are a lot of ways to lose welfare, and a lot of disincentives to get off of it. Being on welfare also gives you a large amount of disincentives towards finding a job.
- DonaldFisk 9y ago
  Or that if you don't have any paid work you still might not get welfare? Edit: added "still"
  - kinos 9y ago
    Thats a new one for me. I know you have to prove you're constantly looking for work to continue getting unemployment. I didn't know that some welfare requires having a job. Do you have more information about that?
    - DonaldFisk 9y ago
      I wasn't sufficiently clear. In the UK, many people don't get any benefit, even though they're out of work (or working for free), because they're unfamiliar with the rules, which are based on the fiction that paid work is easy to find. Some welfare (aka workfare) does indeed require the unemployed person taking a full-time job, for which they are paid their jobseeker's allowance and no more, and if they refuse they get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom
DonaldFisk 9y ago
Would you give up your job to just subsist on Basic Income? I thought not. So why do you assume that huge numbers of other people would?
- syshum 9y ago
  Would I, no but in my experiance I have a much greater work ethic than the average person, and I have a job that I love doing something that I also enjoy as a hobby. I am not working in a menial job I hate or at a company that treats me like a human drone. Further is not really about giving up your job, basic income is for people that will simply be phased out of the employment system due to automation, and other factors that simply will make them unemployable. They have no skills, not education, and often times will be unable to trained to do other more high skilled jobs It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots
  - DonaldFisk 9y ago
    Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers. The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits -- not to leave a small elite in work while the rest are reduced to idleness.
    - syshum 9y ago
      >>>Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers. I am aware, my comment on retraining is that most times when I am involved in a conversation about Job Displacement enviably people respond by claiming everyone can just be retrained as a programmer. As a programmer and sysadmin myself I am fully aware of the current state of the Job market for IT workers both on the operations side and the development side. I also know right now if a programmer can not find work it is often because they are unwilling to relocate to a market where the jobs are, and I am not just talking Silicon Valley which IMO is about the worst place to look for a job as a Dev right now. >>>The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits The purpose of Basic Income is to provide people a basic income to cover the necessities of life including Food, Shelter, etc. Allowing them freedom to persue other economic opportunities that will provide them with a higher standard of living,and to take some economic risk including possible starting small business or working for higher risk employers with out having to worry about their rent or if they will eat that day.
dahdum 9y ago
I wonder this too...having grown up in a rural area I can easily envision UBI creating a near permanent class of people who live off it alone. Why bother to go to college or a trade school if you can hang with your friends spending your days in recreation at 18? I use to be a proponent of UBI, but now I genuinely fear what it would do to society at large.
- danenania 9y ago
  The problem is that opportunities for the type of people who would make that choice are largely disappearing anyway. So it's not UBI vs. trade school and a job. It's UBI vs. a massive underclass of angry, desperate unemployed people.
- clavalle 9y ago
  Because living a basic existence isn't very attractive to the vast majority of people. Spending your days in recreation isn't very fun when you don't have a lot of money to spend.
  - echaozh 9y ago
    How arrogant. There are 2 points: 1. If people can get a lot of money just by working hard, why don't they already have a lot of money, but rely on the UBI? 2. For people that's really poor and can only live on UBI, well, more money is never a bad thing, but they can live without the money. That's what they had been doing all this time after all.
    - clavalle 9y ago
      Great questions poorly framed. 1) Because, right now, there is a huge market distortion that is difficult to see because we've been living with it since we've invented agriculture and specialization -- people must earn money to live. This is a market singularity with a rapid drop off. If you need water within the next hour or you will die, you will pay anything to get it from whomever has it. If you will be homeless in three weeks unless you come up with rent it loses a bit of urgency but you might find yourself selling your time for less than it is worth under conditions that aren't so existentially dire. If that horizon is pushed out to three months then it might be remote enough that it only occurs to you every once in a while how important it is to keep a steady income. Those that are continually on the brink of disaster constantly have to worry about a very short time horizon until their existence, or, at the very least, living without pain, is threatened. It is like a weight on the other side of the scale for them. And worse, the people and entities negotiating on that side of the scale know it. So, they offer just enough to keep them alive and struggling. It is not in their best interest to offer more. So these people on the brink remain on the brink, selling what little they have (time , usually) for less than it would be worth without that distorting weight on the other side of the scale. This is very difficult for people who have not been in that situation or who have not been in that situation or who have outside support structures to keep them from that state to understand. If they don't think about the full context of the decision and the invisible but very real cost of the alternative to a negotiated agreement then it is very easy to think that everyone is making the same choices with the same freedoms. Most need to work to eat, after all, right? But they discount the time horizon, the urgency, and the expectations of future income that they might enjoy compared to someone else. 2: Anyone can live without money much money as long as basic needs are met. Some might enjoy their free time so much that no matter how much they can make if they give some up they would refuse. But, for the reason of the distortion I described above, a huge swath of the poor and working poor aren't being offered enough to get ahead, just enough to keep afloat. So now the choice is 'work your ass off and barely stay afloat or have lots of free time and barely stay afloat'. I know which I'd choose.
jpindar 9y ago
Women prefer men who do something with their lives.
- walterstucco 9y ago
  They still prefer men that can hunt and chop logs But you can't if you have to go to work in the city
  - jpindar 9y ago
    I think people are misinterpreting my comment. By 'doing something with their lives', I didn't mean working at a job. I meant something other than what it is often predicted that people will do on UBI, sitting around and watching TV. In general, women already prefer even amateur musicians, athletes, etc. over couch potatoes.
dagw 9y ago
This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states. If you're going to make that argument you have to correct for the fact that many welfare state programs implicitly encourage people to slack off. If you're 'caught' going to school or taking courses, working part time or trying start your own business you can, in many cases, end up kicked off of welfare. Earning an extra dollar while on UBI will leave you with an extra dollar to spend. Earning an extra dollar while on welfare can in many cases leave you a lot worse off. Also many welfare programs require you to jump through regular bureaucratic hoops that will eat up a lot of your time and energy. We don't really know what will happen if we remove those restrictions.

clavalle 9y ago

Such as?

kinos 9y ago

Did you know that if you make too much income you will lose your welfare? You can lose disability just for holding onto $2000 for someone. There are a lot of ways to lose welfare, and a lot of disincentives to get off of it. Being on welfare also gives you a large amount of disincentives towards finding a job.

DonaldFisk 9y ago
Or that if you don't have any paid work you still might not get welfare? Edit: added "still"
- kinos 9y ago
  Thats a new one for me. I know you have to prove you're constantly looking for work to continue getting unemployment. I didn't know that some welfare requires having a job. Do you have more information about that?
  - DonaldFisk 9y ago
    I wasn't sufficiently clear. In the UK, many people don't get any benefit, even though they're out of work (or working for free), because they're unfamiliar with the rules, which are based on the fiction that paid work is easy to find. Some welfare (aka workfare) does indeed require the unemployed person taking a full-time job, for which they are paid their jobseeker's allowance and no more, and if they refuse they get nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom

DonaldFisk 9y ago

Would you give up your job to just subsist on Basic Income? I thought not. So why do you assume that huge numbers of other people would?

syshum 9y ago
Would I, no but in my experiance I have a much greater work ethic than the average person, and I have a job that I love doing something that I also enjoy as a hobby. I am not working in a menial job I hate or at a company that treats me like a human drone. Further is not really about giving up your job, basic income is for people that will simply be phased out of the employment system due to automation, and other factors that simply will make them unemployable. They have no skills, not education, and often times will be unable to trained to do other more high skilled jobs It is a complete fallacy that everyone can simply be retrained as a computer programmer when all the Driving Jobs, Fast Food Jobs, and Retail jobs are replaced by Robots
- DonaldFisk 9y ago
  Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers. The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits -- not to leave a small elite in work while the rest are reduced to idleness.
  - syshum 9y ago
    >>>Then your experience is limited. There are people with skills and a good education who can't find work, because employers don't want them. Some of them are computer programmers. I am aware, my comment on retraining is that most times when I am involved in a conversation about Job Displacement enviably people respond by claiming everyone can just be retrained as a programmer. As a programmer and sysadmin myself I am fully aware of the current state of the Job market for IT workers both on the operations side and the development side. I also know right now if a programmer can not find work it is often because they are unwilling to relocate to a market where the jobs are, and I am not just talking Silicon Valley which IMO is about the worst place to look for a job as a Dev right now. >>>The purpose of Basic Income is to allow people to survive while they don't have work, and to increase their incentive to find work or at least do something productive, without having to worry about losing their benefits The purpose of Basic Income is to provide people a basic income to cover the necessities of life including Food, Shelter, etc. Allowing them freedom to persue other economic opportunities that will provide them with a higher standard of living,and to take some economic risk including possible starting small business or working for higher risk employers with out having to worry about their rent or if they will eat that day.

dahdum 9y ago

I wonder this too...having grown up in a rural area I can easily envision UBI creating a near permanent class of people who live off it alone. Why bother to go to college or a trade school if you can hang with your friends spending your days in recreation at 18? I use to be a proponent of UBI, but now I genuinely fear what it would do to society at large.

danenania 9y ago
The problem is that opportunities for the type of people who would make that choice are largely disappearing anyway. So it's not UBI vs. trade school and a job. It's UBI vs. a massive underclass of angry, desperate unemployed people.
clavalle 9y ago
Because living a basic existence isn't very attractive to the vast majority of people. Spending your days in recreation isn't very fun when you don't have a lot of money to spend.
- echaozh 9y ago
  How arrogant. There are 2 points: 1. If people can get a lot of money just by working hard, why don't they already have a lot of money, but rely on the UBI? 2. For people that's really poor and can only live on UBI, well, more money is never a bad thing, but they can live without the money. That's what they had been doing all this time after all.
  - clavalle 9y ago
    Great questions poorly framed. 1) Because, right now, there is a huge market distortion that is difficult to see because we've been living with it since we've invented agriculture and specialization -- people must earn money to live. This is a market singularity with a rapid drop off. If you need water within the next hour or you will die, you will pay anything to get it from whomever has it. If you will be homeless in three weeks unless you come up with rent it loses a bit of urgency but you might find yourself selling your time for less than it is worth under conditions that aren't so existentially dire. If that horizon is pushed out to three months then it might be remote enough that it only occurs to you every once in a while how important it is to keep a steady income. Those that are continually on the brink of disaster constantly have to worry about a very short time horizon until their existence, or, at the very least, living without pain, is threatened. It is like a weight on the other side of the scale for them. And worse, the people and entities negotiating on that side of the scale know it. So, they offer just enough to keep them alive and struggling. It is not in their best interest to offer more. So these people on the brink remain on the brink, selling what little they have (time , usually) for less than it would be worth without that distorting weight on the other side of the scale. This is very difficult for people who have not been in that situation or who have not been in that situation or who have outside support structures to keep them from that state to understand. If they don't think about the full context of the decision and the invisible but very real cost of the alternative to a negotiated agreement then it is very easy to think that everyone is making the same choices with the same freedoms. Most need to work to eat, after all, right? But they discount the time horizon, the urgency, and the expectations of future income that they might enjoy compared to someone else. 2: Anyone can live without money much money as long as basic needs are met. Some might enjoy their free time so much that no matter how much they can make if they give some up they would refuse. But, for the reason of the distortion I described above, a huge swath of the poor and working poor aren't being offered enough to get ahead, just enough to keep afloat. So now the choice is 'work your ass off and barely stay afloat or have lots of free time and barely stay afloat'. I know which I'd choose.

jpindar 9y ago

Women prefer men who do something with their lives.

walterstucco 9y ago
They still prefer men that can hunt and chop logs But you can't if you have to go to work in the city
- jpindar 9y ago
  I think people are misinterpreting my comment. By 'doing something with their lives', I didn't mean working at a job. I meant something other than what it is often predicted that people will do on UBI, sitting around and watching TV. In general, women already prefer even amateur musicians, athletes, etc. over couch potatoes.

dagw 9y ago

This is already a prevalent phenomenon in generous welfare states. If you're going to make that argument you have to correct for the fact that many welfare state programs implicitly encourage people to slack off. If you're 'caught' going to school or taking courses, working part time or trying start your own business you can, in many cases, end up kicked off of welfare. Earning an extra dollar while on UBI will leave you with an extra dollar to spend. Earning an extra dollar while on welfare can in many cases leave you a lot worse off. Also many welfare programs require you to jump through regular bureaucratic hoops that will eat up a lot of your time and energy. We don't really know what will happen if we remove those restrictions.